An oracle, witch, or paladin would all be good choices for a secondary healer, but a good archer? Paladin is the only one that stands out to me because of the full bab, divine bond, and smite evil.
If you choose paladin, take the hospitaler archetype. You can channel positive energy as a cleric without expending lay on hands uses, but you will always be 1d6 behind the standard ability. You also get mercies. Clerics usually have to learn spells for those kinds of effects. Seapking of spells, if you hate preparing them, the paladin doesn't get too many anyway. Just learn and prepare all cure spells if nothing else. If you go this route, a guided weapon won't mean much to you as wisdom won't help you much and you can focus on strength/dexterity and all of your abilities are charisma-based.
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An oracle, witch, or paladin would all be good choices for a secondary healer, but a good archer? Paladin is the only one that stands out to me because of the full bab, divine bond, and smite evil...Thanks for the input. I'm going to dwell on it some more. The DM isn't sure how much more healing we need in the party and thinks we'll need to just see how things play out once we get into the dungeon. That said, he thinks it's going to be bloody and that makes me second guess the Paladin though I really would like to have his BAB.
I'm now looking at an Inquisitor as an option. I'm thinking going that route would give more healing with an unfortunate tradeoff of combat power but I love the RP possibility with the class.
I'm waiting to hear back from the DM re: party composition, ie what everyone else will be playing.
When you count in the Paladin's Lay on Hands, you really aren't getting any more healing with an Inquisitor. Paladin also gets the ability to remove negative conditions once he starts picking up his mercies, while Inquisitors will be spending separate spells on both healing and dealing with negative conditions.
I have a player who is currently playing an elf wood oracle archer. He uses wood bond and spells to increase attack and damage, he suffers some without full BAB on attacks per round, but can put up decent damage and buff very well.
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I have a player who is currently playing an elf wood oracle archer. He uses wood bond and spells to increase attack and damage, he suffers some without full BAB on attacks per round, but can put up decent damage and buff very well.
Yeah, Full Caster Archers can be effective, but they have a hard time being "archers" without some pretty heavy investment towards it. Oracles are probably the best full caster to go the Archery route since they have a couple mysteries that complement it. I'd probably suggest the Battle mystery for the Weapon Mastery bonus feats, but I know there's a few more that work as well. Just don't pick the Clouded Vision curse!
The Divine Hunter archetype for the Paladin sounds like it may be up your alley.
Yeah, Full Caster Archers can be effective, but they have a hard time being "archers" without some pretty heavy investment towards it. Oracles are probably the best full caster to go the Archery route since they have a couple mysteries that complement it. I'd probably suggest the Battle mystery for the Weapon Mastery bonus feats, but I know there's a few more that work as well. Just don't pick the Clouded Vision curse!
Yeah about half his spells are devoted towards buffing for his archery and all of his feats, he does gain some versatility from revelations and bonus spells. If you want full caster go oracle otherwise use divine hunter paladin archetype.
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The Divine Hunter archetype for the Paladin sounds like it may be up your alley.
I'm not sure it's worth it, just throwing my opinion out there. You get Precise Shot as a bonus feat, which is nice, and can use your Lay on Hands at range (which is sweet) but you give up all of your awesome paladin auras and replace them with auras that grant ranged combat feats that dedicated ranged characters will already have, and non-ranged characters are unlikely to use. You also get locked into the weapon option for Divine Bond, and as a general rule of thumb, Archers > Melee, but Mounted Archers > Regular Archers. The ability to have a mount at full level to move for you while you sit on his back making full attacks is hard to pass up. Especially since he can also make attacks of his own.
The Divine Hunter archetype for the Paladin sounds like it may be up your alley.Unfortunately this campaign is restricted to the Core Rulebook and APG...
But Ultimate Combat has all the best goodies.
Well, you can still pull of a regular ol' Paladin just as easily, and you still get access to your original Aura's.
Really, your choice should depend on how hard you want to divine and how hard you want to archer. The Paladin will be better at the archery, but won't be as good at the other frills that Oracles and Clerics have.
I am running an inquisitor of Desna in our Serpent's Skull campaign as our primary battlefield healer. We've an NPC Cleric who's more backup, but being able to spontaneously cast has been a great boon. It does limit my combat boosting spells, but with a brawler-grappler and an insanely well statted barbarian-ranger, we are not hurting for damage output.
Inquisitor judgments give a good boost to offence, since they're swift actions to activate or switch, and last for a combat.
I had a halfing Paladin Archer in my RotRL campaign. Would completely outshine the party once he got to the 7 to 9th level range. Granted, against trash mobs he only did ok damage. But anytime a BIG BADDY stepped out he would destroy him from a safe distance in one or two rounds with smite evil and a bizillion arrows. He also casted things like Shield other on the tanks. He was an effective out of combat healer and had lots of utility with spells and auras.
Has anyone tried playing an arcane archer witch? That kind of character could do a bit of healing, and a bit of archery. You could probably start with eldritch knight at first, to get the BAB going.
From skimming the forums and player guides, I've seen this a few times. Can you go into a little more detail as to why in-combat healing is bad and how available wands are and what impact it would have on party funds?Wands can be much of your healing. Common wisdom is that in-combat healing is to be avoided in most cases.
A wand of cure light wounds is fairly cheap, and a paladin or an oracle can use it without UMD.
The gist of it is that the outgoing healing can't keep up with incoming damage until much later (when you can get heal going), but dealing your own damage and using battlefield control, buffs, and debuffs create a larger effect on preventing incoming damage (by either direct prevention, or prevention through killing the enemies before they can hurt you more). This isn't to say that an emergency heal can't be useful (it certainly can be), but it isn't an optimal general strategy.
Played with a well equipped Life Oracle once, best healer EVER. No time for archery, which is my point: you will always be challenged to the limit of your partys healing. A healer will almost never have time do deal damage. The cool thing about this is that with an uber healer, you get more XP (since you can hamdle more baddies :-))
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Wish I knew lol. How much do I have to be concerned about these other effects (haven't played PF or DnD 3.X)? I understand we'll be play Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil. I will not be going through the module to make my character but that may help you answer my question if you're familiar with it. I'm just not sure how troublesome those effects are in this version of the game. I guess I should go crack a few books lol.Wait a Min. BIG QUESTION: What KIND of healer do you want to be?
A HP only Healer? Or someone who can heal *other stuff like ability score damage, curses, poisons, use restorations... etc?
Cos there is a big difference between the 2.
Well.... given what I noticed of friends who played 3.5 and living Greyhawk... I will say you will have to be VERY concerned.
More so if this is a homebrewish type of game... and your GM wants to screw with the party.REMEMBER! There are MANY classes who can use a Wand of CLWs to heal the party, but only a FEW classes with access to status removal and ability-score damage repair spells. And even fewer with easy access to rise dead and such.
Personally, I will suggest playing a Cleric for a couple of reasons:
1) You will get some important spells like Lesser Restoration earlier.
2) ALL your spells can be turn into healing spells. There is no such thing as a wasted spell slot for a cleric.
3) You can focus on being a martial cleric, taking up archery feats and STILL be good at healing (channels, cure spells.)
Even a "battle cleric", with 18 Str and just 14+ Wis can cure people of poisons, ability score damage...etc given enough time.
4) Access to Breath of Live, Rise dead... spells earlier.
5) Access to ALL the Cleric spells of your level. Meaning that if a new source material is made available, you can access those spells straight away. No spell-known swapping needed.
6) You get channel as a source of mass free healing. Oracles for example NEEDS to be of the life mystery to get access.
Just my thoughts if you want to run a Archer/Healer.
Best of luck with your focused Archer! Go Zen Archer for pure imba-ness! ;P