| ZeR04U |
If you want to metagame and provide the best offensive support to your group with a battle oracle go for surefire abilities.
Skill at arms and weapon mastery should be the first two selected revelations out of the gate. You get weapon focus which is worth a feat in and of itself and can equip any martial weapon and heavy armor which you should immediately go for.
Warsight - useful EVERY combat encounter. Going first is HUGE, the fact you can act in the surprise round, and re-roll 3 times at a higher level is flat out hacks. Acting first is a BIG TIME game changing ability. A character constantly acting last is a liability in the group.
Battlefield Clarity - IMO one of the best abilities in game. The chance to re-roll on game changing status effects is huge. Stunned, blinded, paralyzed can easily kill your character. The fact you can re-roll AFTER you know it failed (specific words from the rules) is hax. Paizo f'd this up, because the text clearly meant to say "even if you don't know it failed" but wrote "if it fails then...." thus negating their entire wording around "must take the worse result." You've already failed if you're re-rolling. The worst you can do is FAIL again. Big deal. You can't critically fail a paralyze check, etc. Big fail by Paizo which is why imo this is a huge hax skill. Basically getting a free hero point every day and 2+ free ones at higher level.
Resiliency - This is probably the easiest blown feat in the world. Blow a feat for extra revelation and get diehard for FREE (no prereq and endurance is crap - it's just get to diehard) plus not losing a hit point at 11th when taking a standard action? This is about 2.5 feats in 1.
IMO the battle oracle can be either lol underpowered or lol overpowered. The folks that choose stupid abilities like maneuver mastery (conditional - it's not a sure thing), battlecry (better buffs elsewhere), combat healer (what if nobody needs healing?), and surprising charge (you're likely in heavy armor anyway... wtf is 20' going to do) are idiots. Those that choose CONSTANT in effect abilities are tanks and hard hitting op'd fighters. Battle oracles if built/played right are incredibly dominant and can change the entire game.