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Yet Another Magus Variant / Suggestions to improve Magus class

Lots of people making interesting suggestions, and seeing a lot of complaints about Magus low-level and it's capstone, along with combat survivability, gave me a few ideas.

Increase Hit Dice to d10
I know that part of PF was to associate HD with BAB, but sometimes it's more important to make a class fun to play than to stick to a guideline.

Move Arcane Weapon to 2nd level
This gives the class better melee at low levels to make up for mid BAB.

Change spellstrike
Obviously the ability seems to confuse people and has a lot of complaints centered around the 'two rounds' function.

Alternative:
A magus may channel touch spells on the magus spell list through a melee weapon. The magus casts the spell as normal, including needing at least one free hand if the spell has somatic components, but makes a melee attack instead of a touch attack, adding weapon damage as appropriate. When channeled in this way, the spell's critical threat range is the same as the weapon's, but it's damage multiplier is still x2.

This version still has it's downsides in that you need to be in melee to use it, thus risk AoOs, but gives the magus a definite advantage for touch spells.

Change spell combat
Lots of good suggestions on this one, the best of which involved removing the mandatory cast defensively.

Alternative:
Spell combat: Penalties changed to -2 atk, -2 concentration, granted at 4th level.
Improved spell combat: Grants an extra attack at highest BAB at 14th level.

Better capstone
Not a lot of comments on this, but I've seen a few people agree that it's sub-par.

Alternative:
When using spell combat, the Magus may either cast a spell that has a casting time of 1 round or less, or cast two spells with a casting time of 1 standard action or less.

Powerful, but the magus will still be limited by his spells per day, and it encourages even more use of their iconic ability. It also fits with the flavor of 'TWF with spells'.

Concentration
A few people have mentioned that when the Magus is actually in melee, his concentration will suffer because of the new pathfinder rules. The biggest draw I noticed was that a grappled magus, at level 10, would be completely unable to cast spells.

Suggestion:
Improved concentration: The magus gets a bonus on concentration checks equal to their class level. Granted at 1st level

The specific bonus or ratio isn't as important as getting one that's worth it.

Spell list
Some people wanting more touch spells on this for Spellstrike. I agree that there should be more of the PF base touch spells, since there are quite a few nice ones, even if Ultimate Magic will include more.

Spell slots
The magus' abilities are powered by his spells/spell slots. Because he has so many ways to use them, and should be - since his focus is on spell casting and combat - I would suggest either more spell slots, or, more preferably, changing abilities dependent on spell slots to limited use. They'll operate the same, but won't consume the same resource. There have been suggestions for a ki pool equivalent, but with spells, melee, and arcana pool, I suspect the magus would become a bloated mish-mash - classes work best by doing one thing very well, often with a secondary ability. Some classes (Alchemist, Summoner, and Magus) will take two equally important abilities and let the player mix them. Three abilities can turn into a confusing mess very quickly

A few other odds and ends thoughts I had:

  • Move fighter training to 8th level (gives 9th access to WS)
  • Give magus arcana at 3rd and every odd level afterwards (Will help people vary their magi)
  • And a few other arcana, but people had plenty of suggestions in other threads

Arcana suggestions: Migrate armor proficiencies and casting to arcana, allow not needing a free hand for somatic if wielding a weapon ("Somatic blade"), limited Int to attack rolls, ability to use spellstrike with ranged weapons.
Some of these may already exist, some of them wouldn't work without the altered spellstrike.

Edit: Forgot the spell list point. Added the point for spell slots.
Sorcerer Arcane Apotheosis broken?

I'm starting a 20th level PF game, and was talking with another player who wanted to be able to be a Dragon. Obviously just casting the 8th level spell would be enough for combats, but I realized that you could put the spell into a Staff (called "Staff of the Dragon", cost 96,000 GP, one ability: Form of the Dragon III for 1 charge). That way she could burn 3rd level spells (or 3 levels of spell slots) and cast Form of the Dragon III, using her very high Charisma score for the save DCs.

It was then that I realized that you could break the game by making a Staff with Wish in it. "Staff of the Gods", cost 274,480 GP, one ability: Wish for 5 charges. Since staves don't require material components, this lets her burn off 15 levels of spells for a free Wish. Without bonus spells this would give her Wish 18 times per day. Plenty to give everyone +5 Inherent bonuses to all their ability scores (normally 825,000 GP), along with the general 'niceness' of being able to cast wish without cost. This could potentially be applied to other costly spells, such as True Resurrection (using Use Magic Device), somewhat breaking the game.

Is there something I missed? Do 20th level sorcerers really have the ability to break all game balance?
Save or 'Hurt' Spells underpowered?

When I looked at the new rules for SoD spells, my first reaction was "aww, now it'll be harder to kill the PCs in one shot" quickly followed by "Wait a second... Why is this a good spell?"
Quite a few of the new SoDs do 10 dmg/level with a Fort save for no or less damage. If I were playing a cleric I would probably just prep Harm instead of them. Admittedly it has a damage cap and can't deal the final blow, but a Will half is a lot better than Fort negates. Less targets are resiliant to it - Fighters have poor Wills, while casters still have issues soaking the half damage. I would suggest upping the dmg/level on the new SoDs to make them more attractive than Harm.

As for the 'they add range' portion - upping a 6th level spell to 7th would let you Ray the target, and most clerics won't miss a ranged touch attack.