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I'm playing a factotum in a game, with the only change being that i get a new spell every other level, and end up with 10 total and lvl 20 instead of seven. i'm taking font of inspiration four times, to get ten extra inspiration points. and i'm str based. what are some good styles in pathfinder for fighting? in 3.5 trip was good, as tripping was a str check, which got int as a bonus. I've got power attack, and picked up arcane strike, as factotums have an arcane caster level. any advice?
If your DM doesn't update Brains Over Brawn to apply to CMB and CMD, AND you have to deal with the MAJOR stealth nerf that everyone can now buy skill ranks at 1:1 rate (previously a very sizeable feature of factotum being the only guy who has *everything* as a class skill), you're in for a world of hurt.
As for combat maneuvers...trip got nerfed a little, as it now eats up your AoOs for the bonus attack you get upon tripping (and the general nerf to combat maneuvers of needing an extra feat and BAB +6 just to do what you could do at 1st level in 3E -- that's level 9 for your medium BAB class!), but is still probably the most practical maneuver to specialize in. Oh, now instead of a blanket +4, things with many legs get a +2 per leg beyond the 2nd, so some things are much harder to trip than before and numerous enemies stat blocks outright state that they cannot be tripped.
Grapple now works against foes of any size, but other than that, has been TREMENDOUSLY INCREDIBLY nerfed.
Bull Rush is also heavily nerfed, now you need the +6 BAB 3-feat dealie just to make the motion provoke AoOs, something you got in 3E with no feats needed. Also, all combat maneuvers are much harder to pull off now, CMD for monsters scales much faster than CMB does for you. This is especially bad for bull rush, as just "winning" is only a 5 ft push; bull rush was always about "how much did I win by?" With the new CMB/CMD mechanic and how hard it is just to win, dont expect to win by 5+ much and winning by 10 or 15 is practicaly a pipe dream.
Disarm is mostly unchanged, but as usual is seldom going to be useful unless the DM uses an overabundance of humanoid enemies.
Sunder works about as well as before, and depending on who you ask, can be used in place of attacks in a full attack or is a standard action (in 3E, it was a standard attack action then Rules Compendium changed it to replace individual attacks, so...about the same clarity level). It's still destroying treasure, so specializing in it is a bad idea. PF added a 2-stage system where an item hits "broken" before reaching destroyed. Basically, instead of destroying treasure, you can just moderately disable it to not work as well, turning sunder into a sort of debuff. However, the debuff is so puny, it's not worth the effort and investment to go around debuffing people's weapons and armor. Destroying more creative things, like a readied action against the caster's material component, remain a decent use, but hardly require much investment to work.
The new maneuvers introduced in PF are largely far too niche and narrow to be worth specializing in. Dirty Trick, if you take all of its feats for Greater Dirty Trick (again, won't come online for you till level 9), it becomes sort of decent. Before then, though, you're basically taking a standard action to maybe (if you win vs. CMD) inflict a condition for on the foe for one measly round that he can 100% successfully remove with a move action. Really. So before Greater, the maneuver is basically completely worthless.
Sorry if my words make it sound bleak, but PF nerfed the hell out of combat maneuvers, it is much harder to reliably use them now.
In 3E, most combat maneuvers were str checks. If he doesn't want a straight CMB/CMD application, then only add it to trip, bull rush, over run (which were str checks) and maybe grapple (which was a "str-based check", its own wierd little mechanical concept). As well as Resposition, Drag, and Push (which totally would have been str checks if they existed back in 3E). Disarm and Sunder used attack rolls, so if he doesn't want BoB to apply to those, whatever.