ashern's page

After talking to my friend he complained about how wizard cantrips are pretty worthless, and he couldn't see any reason why you would ever use 1d3 ray of frost instead of say, shooting a crossbow. I remember reading somewhere about making cantrips useful, but I can't come up with much of anything. Any help? The only thing that really jumped out at me was the intense spells evocation school power, but that seems like it would take a long time to add much.

Heal Check: 1d20 + 5 ⇒ (6) + 5 = 11

Carlson moves over to and kneels down besides Deel. He quickly rips a strip from his robes and begins to bandage the poor man's wounds.

Allow me to introduce Abid Xarin. A former court poet who has traveled far and wide and was gifted with a magical weapon of thunder after passing the challenges of the Goddess of the night in the east, or so the stories go. He accidentally caused the downfall of a prominent Satrap in Asia Minor through a web of intrigue and a mistaken poisoning of a rival.

Still working on stats, but that's the backstory I have in mind.

One time I was deep in my beer and getting a little hazy when I saw this fella from some place funny arguing about a revolution. He fought fer' the Brown side or sumpin, and the fella whoa was arguing made fun of his coat. He was a captain too, kinda like your weird guy!. He nods to the pretty brunette.

But his ship, it was some kinda special thing. Rode through the Void, anywhere in the 'Verse he said. Takes good care of his crew, so they told it. Though he kept getting into fights where he was outnumbered. Must have been from Alkenstar, because he carried a fancy boom stick. Said his name was Mal. Mal Reynolds. I'da bought him a drink myself if I'd had two silvers to rub together. Shame I haven't heard any new tales of him in a decade now.

Denlin looks around amiably at the others. Speaking of, anybody want a drink? I'm a bit thirsty and I'm flush after that last job with Jasto.. I mean, that last guard job!

Rogue, Alchemist, Bard (performance: mime), Ranger, add sorcerer/oracle if you need some full casting support. 4 man band that has a ludicrous number of skils, can cover all of rolls, and when combined with a little bit of gear (and with use of the spell Silence), should be able to Ninja it's way into most places.

Fun combo for bypassing/going through a castle the other way: silence + spiderclimb + shatter/demolition bombs = cliimb up the side of the castle and blow your way into the boss's chamber silently. Then dispatch them and fight your way down the tower, avoiding most of the traps and ambushes by virtue of coming from the other way.

Hope that is mostly in line with what you were looking for.

Alchemical cartridges. They reduce the reloading speed by another increment (so move goes to free action), at the cost of being a lot more expensive and a larger misfire chance (IIRC). Now you can reload as many times as you need to in a round to take all of your attacks.

In the game I'm playing in now, not having a map isn't a big deal, and the GM basically tells you which enemies you can target. I could see that sort of thing streamlining things well.

The best method of maximizing Vital Strike is a Monk of the Four Winds 15/Fighter 5 with a Monk's Robe and UMDing wands of Enlarge Person, Lead Blades, Animal Aspect (Gorilla Aspect) and Strong Jaw. This nets you a 16d8 punch with a Greater Vital Strike of 64d8. Since you are a Monk of the Four Winds, you can spend 6 Ki to take 3 standard actions in one round, netting your 3 Greater Vital Strikes, each dealing 64d8 on a punch.

Character Sheet and Notes.

Aww, come on Tels, you're supposed to make them use the search function to find the thread we hashed this out in. :P

Okay! With the belt of mighty hurling discovery, shuriken suddenly get a lot better on both the attack and damage front.

Human Ninja 10

Abilities(post racial) 18, 10, 14, 8, 12, 14

Ninja Tricks: Vanish, Flurry of Stars, Weapon Training (WF shuriken), Shadow Clone, Vanishing Blade

Feats: Point Blank Shot, Precise Shot, Two Weapon Fighting, ITWF, Deadly Aim.

KEY Equipment: Belt of Mighty hurling, sniper's goggles, and +1 shurikens.

Now all of a sudden things are looking much, much better.

Attack (7 BAB, +6 str, +1 WF, +1 PBS, +1 magic -2 FoS, -2 TWF -2 DA). So that gives +10/10/10/10/5/5 for 1d3+ 10(+6 str +1 magic + 4 DA) + 5d6. So that's 6 attacks at around 28 damage apiece, and thanks to hidden blade I'll be targeting flat footed AC. Hrm.

I'm going to kick this party off. The best party I have ever seen in pathfinder was a somewhat vanilla crew. Human paladin, half elf bard, dwarf cleric, human sorcerer, and human ranger. Individually these characters did melee, buffs, healing, BC/blasting, and ranged DPR respectively. Totally vanilla, the only archetype was guide.

However, each one specialized in their roles very, very well, and left holes that the other party members could fill. The paladin could save vs anything and hit like a Mac truck, but had mediocre AC and needed healing. The cleric stacked AC up past 30 at the higher levels so he rarely needed healing besides what he was channeling, he could also save vs. anything. The sorcerer was very weak in the defense department, but maxed out skills and ran around stealthed and invisible tossing control/debuffs/blasting. The ranger had cruddy saves but could pin cushion a dragon in almost a single round, and had a good AC.

However the real power player was the bard. The bard took the feats that increased the bonus from performance, and by level 11 had heroism on the two fighters every combat and in round 1 had haste and performance going(courage for +5). Let me tell you, that adds up to +8 to hit, I think 7 to damage, and an extra attack. I mean, seriously. Take any DPR build from the Olympics and look at the ludicrous amount more they do with that kind of buffing.

The final thing was that we knew each other's weak points and spent resources buffing them. The paladin buffs saves for the bard and ranger with his spells, the bard uses saving finale or other interventions on people, and the cleric tosses bull's strength/bear's endurance/enlarge person, etc. this led to a fight where we ate 9 save or die spells and the only one that stuck was flesh to stone, which was countered the next round.

Our GM routinely beefed up encounters by 2+ levels despite the fact that we were 15/20 point buy and had only mediocre gear. (This was a RotRL crew as well, and we wrecked stuff, a lot).

So... After reading the fourth or 5th iteration of the beast morph/vivisectionist silliness and hearing people talk about dex based damage, I thought of a build that maxes dex based damage with guns.

So, without further ado, gunslinging Shiva. Gnome gunslinger 5/ synthesist summoner 5. Really all you need is small quadruped form, and a whole bunch of extra arms. At summoner 5 you have eight evo points, so buy three pairs of arms, pounce, and reach for your bite (wait for it). Now you can wield 5 pistols with a free hand for reloading, and you can charge up to ten feet away from enemies, and broadside them with a volley of shots. Still working on crunching the numbers, but pounce means that you should be able to target touch AC all the time.

The big downsides I see with this build, are 1. Anything that has reach can AoO you a lot when you shoot it, 2. That's a lot of chances for exploding guns. 3. Seriously sucky will save (+2 base at level ten), however stacking wisdom and Synthesist bonus will start to help.

Feats necessary: -deadly aim, point blank, rapid reload, QuickDraw, iron will, precise shot
BAB is +9 at 10th level, eidolon form should have a dex of 22 with a belt, and a pouncing full attack you would have (+12/12/12/12/12/7)x2 for (1d6+12) plus your bite attack.. That attack string is unbuffed with +1 double barrel pistols, by the way.

This build only gets better as the levels move on, with the ability to afford reliable firearms, adding more arms, and getting better casting.

Thoughts?

Have to agree. It's not a huge amount of damage, but at high levels the two handed fighter pays off. Say 30 strength at level 20. That's +10 strength modifier, and you're getting twice, not 1.5 of it. You also get twice power attack damage, not 1.5, so that's 24 instead of 18. Combined that's 11 damage more than someone else swinging the same great sword with the same stats. (plus your normal weapon training bonuses).

Then consider the auto crit ability, with a scythe. All of that extra damage gets multiplied. It's pretty awesome.