So I was thinking of putting together a sword and board fighter with a couple levels of monk for some of the feats and evasion, and was trying to figure out how to leverage the most out of that idea, and I noticed:
Vicious Stomp (Combat)
You take advantage of the moment to brutally kick an enemy when he is down.
Prerequisite: Combat Reflexes, Improved Unarmed Strike.
Benefit: Whenever an opponent falls prone adjacent to you, that opponent provokes an attack of opportunity from you. This attack must be an unarmed strike.
So I assume I can take this as a fighter combat bonus feat.
Can I also use this while armed with a scimitar and using a light shield then? Is this a good idea for a feat?
You can use it while armed with a weapon, but the attack must still be unarmed. Kicks count as unarmed strikes.
Even then, it wouldn't be worth taking for 1d6 damage. You'd be better off taking one more level of monk for still mind, then take the monastic legacy to increase unarmed damage by 1/2 your non-monk levels. But I don't know if it's worth it just to take that feat.
If you just like the idea of screwing over prone opponents, felling smash plus greater trip works pretty well.
It's only a good idea if you're devoting resources into being good at knocking people prone in adjacent squares by using the trip combat maneuver, the Punishing Kick feat, or some other means.
You're probably better sticking with pure fighter. A dip into monk will gain you a couple feats that don't particularly synchronize with most S&B builds, plus a dubiously useful evasion. Fighters usually have enough hp to absorb Ref save-based damage effects, and you'd be giving up wearing anything but light armor to have evasion work. S&B fighters are usually giving up damage and/or reach control in order to have better AC/defense than a two-handed fighter, so restricting the build to light armor seems self-defeating.
Dodge + combat reflexes seem like it synchronizes well with sword and board. Lots of good saves seems like it synchronizes well. Wearing a mithril breastplate isn't that bad compared to heavy armor.
I was thinking if I mixed it with maneuver master to do flurry of maneuvers to trip a bunch of things or the free knock prone from shield slam it wouldn't be bad.
Not sure what the rest of your build plan is, but the Brawler archetype provides a scaling +1 attack/+3 damage to weapons in the close weapon group, which includes unarmed strikes, heavy shields, and spiked shields. That would certainly add some "punch" to your Vicious Stomps, and would work with your shield as well. Picking up Dragon Style is a quick and easy way to add an additional 1/2 your Str to your first IUS, with Dragon Ferocity doing this once again.
At level 7, with 20 Str, that's +13 to your first IUS every round. Not bad for an extra attack, especially if you're also full-attacking with flurry of maneuvers.
I'm mostly playing around with different builds. I'm trying to figure out all the different sword and board builds and their comparative advantages and disadvantages. I like the fighter/close thing, but it just seems sorta strange to me to have a sword and board fighter hitting with his fist all the time. I can't stand the idea of some dual shield fighter, stinks of a molten velveta volcano incinerating cities to me.
I like the scimitar/shield idea for the bashing finish critical, but don't like the idea of using a kukri to use a large shield because that also sorta seems cheesy to me, where your main weapon is the shield and the kukri is some sort of afterthought.
A lot of the trip feat chain requires combat expertise, which sort of sucks up lots of int to qualify, and I'm not sure how well tripping works at higher levels when you're fighting all kinds of things that can't be tripped for some reason or another. Still, screwing over people that are prone and making them prone does have some appeal to me, but a feat that adds just one situational attack I'm concerned about unless I can make it reliably work regularly. Especially seeing how feat heavy the sword and board fighter is.