gg405's page

I found this thread because I'm pondering the same thing. Here's a couple thoughts I had:

1. Druid casters out of the box are pretty competitive (tho different) than Wizards in terms of Battlefield control role; so you shouldn't have much worry there.

2. Wild shape and archer don't mix for obvious reasons. While wild shaping into flying forms and casting from above are a great tactic, for an archer druid this will mostly be wasted. You'll want to cast a control spell, a summon, maybe a buff, and then help burn stuff down to save after-combat healing. There's no place in there that being wild shape really fits.

3. Looking at archetypes that eliminate wild shape, I came across Nature Fang. This trades out Wild Shape for, basically, slayer levels (and 1d6 sneak, for whatever that's worth, might mix well with your control spells). At 4th level, you get a Slayer Talent, which can get you a Ranger Combat Style Feat, and all its goodness. From that point on, your feats can go to Extra Slayer Talent-->Ranger Combat Style. So, every level you're taking a ranger combat feat. This is better than Ranger.

The drawback is your BAB, of course, but considering you have full Druid casting capabilities, the archery is just there for the burn down phase and lets you save your big spells for the starts of fights without having to stand around at the end doing nothing.

My initial pass at feat progression looks like this (I'm choosing Elf for the longbow proficiency):

1: Spell Focus (conjure)
3: Augment Summoning
4: Slayer Talent-->Ranger Combat: Precise Shot
5: Extra Slayer Talent-->Ranger Combat: Rapid Shot
6: Slayer Talent-->Ranger Combat: Imp. Precise Shot
7: Extra Slayer Talent-->Ranger Combat: Manyshot
8: Slayer Talent-->Rogue Trick-->Combat Feat-->Deadly Aim
9: Extra Summoning

Basically, 4-7 is where you take your bow feats, if you don't want to burn a feat on point blank. You won't want to be point blank, since you're a control character, and you need feats to get the summoning track.

Note that you get Improved Precise Shot when your BAB is +4. Sick.

At level 10, you get a swift action study target (one that kicks in automatically if you can sneak your target - use entangle to wipe our their dex bonus, then shoot them once and study is on automagically). This gives you roughly the following bonuses, assuming 18 Dex, 13 str start, 1 str at level 4, and +4 dex item:

+3/+3 studied target (switching to a new target costs only a swift action).
+6/+2 from stats
-2/+4 from deadly aim
+2/+2 from +2 comp bow (str 14)
-2/+0 from rapid shot
+7/+0 from BAB

Total:

+14/+14/+9, where first attack fires two arrows
Damage is 1d8+11 (and maybe +1d6 sneak if you're good with your controls)

What you're missing: Gravity bow, clustered shots. Getting clustered shots will cost you taking point-blank shot, there's no way around that. If you're hitting a lot of DR you can't penetrate, you might be in trouble. Depends on how your arrow selection is, I guess.

At levels 1-3, you're just a "regular" Druid. But that's still pretty strong. At levels 4-7 you start bringing the hammer. These arrows will do more for you in most cases than any direct damage spell, but basically they're for the end part of the fight when you're done casting. Instead of standing around watching the party finish things off, you can participate in burning down to end combats faster.

Pure theorycraft here, but it seems OK to me.

Also, I agree, Cleric Archer seems better because of better self-buffs, so does Wizard Archer/Arcane Archer. But if you want to do Druid Archer for flavor (like I was considering), I think this looks pretty good on paper.

(Agree with Eagle domain btw, that was my choice as well). The Hawk familiar is pretty cool, the bonuses are just OK. Aspect of the Falcon is at least a +1 to hit, and you get Fly at level 3 which is nice since you won't be wild shaping you can still fly above the battlefield and rain arrows.

I was looking at this for PFS, so 20-pt build went like this (pre-racial mods):

Str 13, Dex 16, Con 13, Int 8, Wiz 16, Cha 7.

Wis is a little low, but that's what you get for splitting focus and taking Elf for the bow prof.

Not sure I understand your point.

Did people stop playing Pathfinder? Did people stop wondering if/how Shift should interact with Dimensional Agility? Did it take you more than 10 minutes to notice I had added to the conversation?

RAW for PFS I would presume it doesn't work.

But a non-RAW-only DM who can't figure out that it should apply in *any* case where Dimension Door would normally axe your follow-up actions to restore them (the entire purpose of this feat) is a rules lawyer DM that I personally would never want to play with.

The concept behind Dimension Door is that you are disoriented when you arrive and cannot function for the rest of the round. Dimensional Agility implies that you are trained to re-orient quickly following a dimension door-like shunt (which is why it works for abundant steps, which functions "as if using the spell dimension door"). If Shift functions "as if using Dimension Door" and you incur the penalties of that spell when using it, why wouldn't the feat that specifically alleviates those penalties not also apply? Because your DM is a RAW rules lawyer, and you should find a new game with old-school RPG'ers who know that creativity, story and fun are more important than RAW. Furthermore, people who point to the difference between "as if using the spell" vs. "as if using" as the basis of disallowing are the same people who say Shift shouldn't be allowed because it's SU, not SLA. Only, Abundant Steps is also SU. So, uh, yeah.

I personally would even allow Shift to qualify you. It seems along the lines of the Fly skill, which you cannot take ranks in until you have some means of flying with which to practice it. Well, guess what, as a 1st level Teleportation wizard, you have a means to Dimension Door (a lot) and can therefore practice/learn the feat.

To start this up again, the wording actually makes *no sense* if you read it RAW:

At 1st level, as an immediate action, you can force a creature within 30 feet to reroll any one d20 roll that it has just made before the results of the roll are revealed. The creature must take the result of the reroll, even if it’s worse than the original roll.

The key here is: "force a creature to reroll... BEFORE THE RESULTS OF THE ROLL ARE REVEALED."

Now, if he *HAS* to take the 2nd roll, whether it's better or worse, then you haven't done anything. You just make the DM roll again and ignore the fact that he ever rolled the first time. Because you can't wait to see if the thing succeeded before you cast misfortune, you can't be sure you haven't just turned failure into a re-roll. In other words, the first roll doesn't factor in at all. The DM has the same chance of success on the 2nd roll as on the 1st, so this ability literally *has no effect*.

If, instead, it's like witch misfortune, then you have to roll twice and take the lowest roll, and there's a point to it.

Is it bad that I am disappointed that this conversation isn't about if the Levitate spell would work on a G.Cube?

That's why I came to this thread. 1) Levitate G. Cube; 2) drop on baddies; 3) profit.