I've been curious about the Cavalier class for a while now, and I'm thinking about making one for PFS. But looking at my options, I've been struck with how...let's say...."sub-optimal" they are.
Samurai are essentially the same class with better abilities and better orders. The only thing of worth that you lose out on is Tactician, and what you gain is far, far superior in most situations.
And if you want to be a Tactician, then the Strategist archetype is clearly better, giving up a nearly-useless "Expert Trainer" ability for a second Tactician-like ability. So what is the use of a baseline Cavalier, exactly? I'm leery of a class whose abilities seem oriented around animal training, since they only get one mount to train, and presumably you aren't constantly training your mount anyway. Challenge is...interesting, but Tactician seems extremely limited. The class doesn't seem very focused on doing anything particularly well, and it's not really focused on being a generalist either. Is there some potential here that I'm not seeing?
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Nobody knows.
Yeah...I built a Order of the Sword Cavalier Beast Totem Mounted Fury Barbarian (Cav 8/Barb 12). Mounted Fury lets your Mount Rage when you do. Order of the Sword lets you add your mounts strength to you mounted damage with charging. Beast Totem lets you make a full attack on a charge. Power attack and strength damage are treated as two handed even if you use the lance one handed. With Improved Critical(Lance), Spirited Charge, and some other feats thrown in for good measure you could charge and full attack with each attack dealing X3 damage on a normal hit, where you were dealing on the order of 50-60 points of damage. So....50points of damage X3 for charging with a lance on a Spritied charge X5 attacks (with haste) and suddenly everything in front of you turned into a fine pink mist.
However, removed from his mount the Cavalier is near worthless.
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Banner, Bonded Mount, better charging, Tactics feats, and combat feats. They are limited by mounts not fitting well into most dungeons, buildings, and caves.
This. It's a really big downside that your mount won't fit or do much good inside of tight areas.
Yeah...I built a Order of the Sword Cavalier Beast Totem Mounted Fury Barbarian (Cav 8/Barb 12). Mounted Fury lets your Mount Rage when you do. Order of the Sword lets you add your mounts strength to you mounted damage with charging. Beast Totem lets you make a full attack on a charge. Power attack and strength damage are treated as two handed even if you use the lance one handed. With Improved Critical(Lance), Spirited Charge, and some other feats thrown in for good measure you could charge and full attack with each attack dealing X3 damage on a normal hit, where you were dealing on the order of 50-60 points of damage. So....50points of damage X3 for charging with a lance on a Spritied charge X5 attacks (with haste) and suddenly everything in front of you turned into a fine pink mist.
However, removed from his mount the Cavalier is near worthless.
and This.
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Spoiler:Banner, Bonded Mount, better charging, Tactics feats, and combat feats. They are limited by mounts not fitting well into most dungeons, buildings, and caves.This. It's a really big downside that your mount won't fit or do much good inside of tight areas.
Spoiler:Yeah...I built a Order of the Sword Cavalier Beast Totem Mounted Fury Barbarian (Cav 8/Barb 12). Mounted Fury lets your Mount Rage when you do. Order of the Sword lets you add your mounts strength to you mounted damage with charging. Beast Totem lets you make a full attack on a charge. Power attack and strength damage are treated as two handed even if you use the lance one handed. With Improved Critical(Lance), Spirited Charge, and some other feats thrown in for good measure you could charge and full attack with each attack dealing X3 damage on a normal hit, where you were dealing on the order of 50-60 points of damage. So....50points of damage X3 for charging with a lance on a Spritied charge X5 attacks (with haste) and suddenly everything in front of you turned into a fine pink mist.
However, removed from his mount the Cavalier is near worthless.
and This.
If you play a small Cavalier, this is all but negated. The difference in weapon damage is nearly negligible, and you get some more interesting mounts (wolf/boar) to work with (without having to take the Beast Rider Archetype).
is the huntmaster archetype legal for PFS? I'm not a big fan of cavalier's due mount being as issue whenever you go inside an structure but since the huntmaster gives up the mount for a AC (dog or bird), I've gotten a new appreciation.
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To become mammoth rider!
Although I have defended the Cavalier in several other threads, the gist of your post seems to be that other archetypes, and the Samurai sub-class, improve the class by making it less dependent on being in the saddle. And I think I agree with that. The elements about the class I like are those that resemble 4E's Warlord, rather than those that resemble AD&D 2nd Ed's 'Cavalier' kit.
That was my conclusion as well - I dropped the cavalier and wrote up a class that is a conversion of the 3.0 Marshal and the 4e Warlord.
I think in Pathfinder now a days, Cavaliers is not too bad as you don't always stuck in a tight area. They can be very nice on most outdoor encounters and deadly fighting a war because you can charge in and challenge the enemy's leader.
When stuck indoor, it sucks.... But with the tactical feats, combat feats and banner, you can hope to help others as a off tank with two handed reach weapons. Reach weapons build is not too hard to build and does not require many feats so it should help Cavaliers survive indoors.
Banner, Bonded Mount, better charging, Tactics feats, and combat feats. They are limited by mounts not fitting well into most dungeons, buildings, and caves.This. It's a really big downside that your mount won't fit or do much good inside of tight areas.
and This.Yeah...I built a Order of the Sword Cavalier Beast Totem Mounted Fury Barbarian (Cav 8/Barb 12). Mounted Fury lets your Mount Rage when you do. Order of the Sword lets you add your mounts strength to you mounted damage with charging. Beast Totem lets you make a full attack on a charge. Power attack and strength damage are treated as two handed even if you use the lance one handed. With Improved Critical(Lance), Spirited Charge, and some other feats thrown in for good measure you could charge and full attack with each attack dealing X3 damage on a normal hit, where you were dealing on the order of 50-60 points of damage. So....50points of damage X3 for charging with a lance on a Spritied charge X5 attacks (with haste) and suddenly everything in front of you turned into a fine pink mist.
However, removed from his mount the Cavalier is near worthless.
Narrow Frame + Opa Dragon Style hey hey hey hey hey DRAGON STYLE :p
From what I've seen from playing one, they make a neat martial class for small characters. Me and my girlfriend made two married halfling cavaliers riding wolves. We were pretty effective but I had some problems.
Tactician sucks. If we're in a party with a lot of melee combatants, it gets super broken super fast, but that almost never happens outside of me and my girlfriend's characters (between us there are 4 creatures fighting) It wouldn't be so bad if you could do it more than once a day.
I have similar problems with Challenge. you want to save it up for a boss battle making it completely useless anywhere else.
If it weren't for those things I'd love The cavalier a lot more. Being tied to a mount doesn't bother me as much because it does give small PCs an advantage in a martial class but i think it's charging abilities could be replaced with more things like Tactician and Banner. Cavalier really could have been 'Battle Herald: the base class' and I think the limitations to challenge and tactician would have made things work out a lot better.
Samurai have all the fighter kit for 1 weapon , challenge, and resolve. Honestly pretty good all around imo.
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A good buddy of mine is playing a non-mounted Cavalier/Bard. Between the buffs, the standards, the tactician and such he is a beast at buffing the rest of the pary (mostly martial types, it works amazingly well) and then when he hits its nothing paltry either.
He is easily one of the best characters I've seen in a while, and totally unique.
And he has the added benefit of making the whole "but but but you NEED to be mounted to be effective!" argument completely invalid.
I like the class.
I wish there were more orders.
My musketeer is freaking awesome in the game we are playing. I believe that if you game heavy in a dungeon crawl AP or games, then you're going to want to pick a different class. If the AP or games are open area with some dungeon, you'll be just fine. Samurai is an archetype of Cavalier, just as Ninja is an archetype of Rogue. Samurai & Cavalier Orders are interchangeable.
Tactician sucks. If we're in a party with a lot of melee combatants, it gets super broken super fast, but that almost never happens outside of me and my girlfriend's characters (between us there are 4 creatures fighting) It wouldn't be so bad if you could do it more than once a day.
It never happens except that your regular party does include 4 melee combatants between the Cavs and their Wolf Mounts, so it happens all the time. What is your problem exactly?
And the limit per day applies to sharing the feat with all allies, but you still have the Teamwork Feats yourself, meaning that two Cavs can use their Teamwork Feats with each other ALL DAY, EVERY ROUND. Also note that plenty of Teamwork Feats don't benefit merely melee combatants, they can help plenty of classes, including Casters.
Tactician sucks. If we're in a party with a lot of melee combatants, it gets super broken super fast, but that almost never happens outside of me and my girlfriend's characters (between us there are 4 creatures fighting) It wouldn't be so bad if you could do it more than once a day.It never happens except that your regular party does include 4 melee combatants between the Cavs and their Wolf Mounts, so it happens all the time. What is your problem exactly?
And the limit per day applies to sharing the feat with all allies, but you still have the Teamwork Feats yourself, meaning that two Cavs can use their Teamwork Feats with each other ALL DAY, EVERY ROUND. Also note that plenty of Teamwork Feats don't benefit merely melee combatants, they can help plenty of classes, including Casters.
LAstly don't forget that it doesn't matter if your targets qualify for the feat or not. So you could have a druid spam a bunch of animals and now suddenly all those wolves have Outflank or PRecise Strike or Paired Opportunist if that's your fancy.
Basically Tactician is like Inspire courage in that the more people you ahve in the group that can fight the better.
Hell, if you have Lookout and find yourself in a position of being the only one able to act you can use tactician on your turn and suddenly everyone in the group just turned the Surprise round into a really really bad idea for your ambushing opponent.
Tactician sucks. If we're in a party with a lot of melee combatants, it gets super broken super fast, but that almost never happens outside of me and my girlfriend's characters (between us there are 4 creatures fighting) It wouldn't be so bad if you could do it more than once a day.It never happens except that your regular party does include 4 melee combatants between the Cavs and their Wolf Mounts, so it happens all the time. What is your problem exactly?
And the limit per day applies to sharing the feat with all allies, but you still have the Teamwork Feats yourself, meaning that two Cavs can use their Teamwork Feats with each other ALL DAY, EVERY ROUND. Also note that plenty of Teamwork Feats don't benefit merely melee combatants, they can help plenty of classes, including Casters.
My main point was that in that situation it was pretty good when it happened, but when my girlfriend was absent the teamwork feat was useless leaving me to wonder what the point would be if there aren't multiple cavaliers.
Which is the main reason I don't see too many teamwork feats. they help in specific situations and become useless when your teamwork buddy is gone. Also at best the teamwork sharing feature helps about two people at a time in a given situation if the party is diverse, and if you yourself want to get bonuses from the teamwork feat you're pretty limited to ones that help melee classes, otherwise you have the ability to buff something else once a day, so I think it would be more relevant if you could do it more often.
To reiterate; I think that Tactician's teamwork feat sharing ability should be able to be used more often. It's a good ability but I think once a day is way too small.
I also believe that with a lot of melee combatants or multiple cavaliers the ability is very very good. They are far better when players collaborate their builds like that and I think this is an inherent thing with teamwork feats; That they are double-edged swords where they are amazing but very build-collaboration specific, attendance specific and situation specific. This leads me to want to do it more often such as making it 2+Cha modifier a day or something like that.
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The real q is why a samurai over a ranger or pure fighter ?
Wakizashis. ....sweet, sweet wakizashis.... Best melee weapon in the game: they're light, unlike a scimitar; so be grappled or swallowed worry-free.
I-TWF a pair of those, and watch the crit-doubling challenge numerical bonuses pile up. Stir in urban barbarian and agile/furious w/Critical Focus = yikes.
And Order of the Warrior rocks.
Grappled or Swallowed Whole don't give a rat's ass whether a weapon is light or not, you're just barred from actions requiring 2 hands (if you're humanoid shape, not multi-limbed, yadayada). Pathfinder is not 3.5 :-).
They do benefit from 2WF, and anything specifically for Light Weapons such as Piranha Strike.
I like the class.I wish there were more orders.
I like the class too. Sure, there are other classes that can probably dish out the damage faster or better, but the cavalier is fun, and can hold his own in a melee.
Not to self-promote or anything... Ok maybe just a little... But there are 3rd party books available if you want more orders. "Knights of France", available here on Paizo's website, and other places, is a campaign sourcebook. However, it includes a decent amount of "crunch"... several cavalier orders based on historical real-world knightly orders (and 1 fantasy one), plus several other knightly options (traits, purebred mounts, jousting, etc).
I would be willing to bet some other publishers have also taken a shot at cavalier orders. A quick search for "cavalier" on this website shows one by Green Ronin, though I've never read it so I couldn't tell you if there are orders or not.
People need to look at Cavaliers/Samurai with more innovation.
Two alternative builds.
A Stratagist/Honor guard cavalier with who goes Scimitar/Shield TWF/Shieldmaster/Bashing Finish is a scary good tank who can dish out big damage and protect his squishy allies.
Best Orders:Order of the Shield (to hit bonus and free standstill)
Order of the dragon (buff allies to hit)
Order of the Lion (extra AC and buffs for allies)
Samurai. Katana favored weapon.
Going with Power Attack, Cornugan Smash, Shatter Defenses and Deadly Stroke!!
Work out the damage when you 2handed PA, Wpn Spc, Challenge AND Double it!
Hits damn hard with deadly stroke. Once you got that pile on crit feats!
People need to look at Cavaliers/Samurai with more innovation.
Two alternative builds.
A Stratagist/Honor guard cavalier with who goes Scimitar/Shield TWF/Shieldmaster/Bashing Finish is a scary good tank who can dish out big damage and protect his squishy allies.
Best Orders:Order of the Shield (to hit bonus and free standstill)
Order of the dragon (buff allies to hit)
Order of the Lion (extra AC and buffs for allies)Samurai. Katana favored weapon.
Going with Power Attack, Cornugan Smash, Shatter Defenses and Deadly Stroke!!Work out the damage when you 2handed PA, Wpn Spc, Challenge AND Double it!
Hits damn hard with deadly stroke. Once you got that pile on crit feats!
As for orders :
Worrier is great, especially with vital strike or deadly stroke , doing big hit with 3 rolls,
Skills suck.Dragon: best one I think, take swift aid and bud freely your friend or mount.
Also allow all free to hit, and great skill ( perception)Shield is nice, stand still is usefull the rest are not.
Swift Aid is a trap. Since it strictly limits your aid another action when used this way to +. Bodyguard is a better feat to consider in this case.
Bodyguard is a great feat, and Cavaliers have an archetype which makes it more effective. If you and your mount Bodyguard each other you should be pretty tough to hit. Combine that with Mounted Combat and the rider taking cover behind the mount (and maybe In Harm's Way) and you'll be a defensive genius.
Anyhow, the average dungeon seems to have 10 foot ceilings. That should allow plenty of room for riding your mount indoors. Wikipedia says a Clydesdale is 64 to 72 inches high at the withers. That would put the rider's head at around 8'4" to 9'2" since most folks generally sit on a horse they're riding rather than standing on its back. If you can't ride your horse in a dungeon (at least ducking a little) then ogres, giants, and other Large creatures probably shouldn't inhabit that dungeon either. The DM probably wants to use big monsters, so he should allow big mounts too.
Even if the ceiling height won't permit riding you can probably bring your mount along without riding it. The mount can be a capable combatant in its own right and might be able to help out in many combats, especially if it has the previously mentioned Bodyguard feat. With the Narrow Frame feat your horse shouldn't have to squeeze even in 5 foot corridors. Needing to squeeze wouldn't mean that the horse couldn't come along anyhow though. Chances also are that when you reach a big encounter it will be in a large room where you can hop on your mount and have some real fun.
The real problem is stairs. There are some magic items which can help with getting your horse in and out of places. There are also some, such as figurines of wondrous power, which can serve as a temporary mount.
Yeah, the reason to play cavelier is to like a mounted knight... Welcome to paladin!paladin are REALLY not that good...
most DM i know throw impossible situations at you (like holding a boy hostage and let you lose-lose situation.
so really fast you lose the paladinhood...
Have you considered that this translates to "Most Gms I know are possibly sadists or control freaks?" In the same vein that a paladin doesn't need to be an annoying holier-than-thou crusader, a GM doesn't need to punish players that choose to play a character with a conviction. It's immature, and serves no purpose.
Note, how I never said that the paladin didn't need to be Lawful Good. I am all in favour in people playing characters with moral restrictions, but it should not be a reason to be either a wimp with an excuse, or an intolerant prosetilyzer (with an excuse or not, depending on your point of view). A good player will limit him- or herself by their morality already, and a Gm should not need to go out of their way to rub it in.
Anyhow, the average dungeon seems to have 10 foot ceilings. That should allow plenty of room for riding your mount indoors. Wikipedia says a Clydesdale is 64 to 72 inches high at the withers. That would put the rider's head at around 8'4" to 9'2" since most folks generally sit on a horse they're riding rather than standing on its back. If you can't ride your horse in a dungeon (at least ducking a little) then ogres, giants, and other Large creatures probably shouldn't inhabit that dungeon either. The DM probably wants to use big monsters, so he should allow big mounts too.
Good point, though I'd say a Clydesdale would be pushing it. Don't forget the height of the saddle, the fact that your "bottom" is NOT at your center of gravity (so more than half your height will be above the saddle), and the natural up-down motion of riding. So, while it would be possible to ride a clydesdale in room with a 10ft ceiling, the rider would be hugging the neck of the mount to avoid striking his head. However, clydesdales are draft horses. This scenario is more plausable with another, more likely type of horse. So, in theory, riding inside a dungeon COULD work, with the right horse.
The real problem is stairs. There are some magic items which can help with getting your horse in and out of places. There are also some, such as figurines of wondrous power, which can serve as a temporary mount.
Stairs shouldn't be a problem. I'm not a great rider, and I've ridden a horse in some VERY rough terrain, up and down inclines, and across gaps in the rocks. I was nervous as heck, but I did it, and I would think the evenly spaced stairs would be much easier to ride up or down.
As far as stairs, watch game of thrones or other fantasy shows. Altho most is made up TV stuff a real horse can handle stairs with little issues unless the size of the horse does not fit in the stairwell. I know real world and fantasy don't mesh in a lot of things, but as far as difficult terrain I personally trust a horse to go places a human of superb grace wont due to the sure footed way they do use four legs.
Grappled or Swallowed Whole don't give a rat's ass whether a weapon is light or not, you're just barred from actions requiring 2 hands...
Ehrm... A swallowed creature can try to cut its way free with any light slashing or piercing weapon... (My emphasis.) Since a swallowed creature also has virtually no way of affecting anything besides the monster which did the swallowing, it does limit actions quite a bit more than being "barred from actions requiring 2 hands".
...(if you're humanoid shape, not multi-limbed, yadayada)
There are (sadly) no grapple rules dealing with multi-limbed creatures etc. According to RAW, a grappled creature with eight hands wielding four falchions cannot attack with any them, since those attacks require two hands.
Pathfinder is not 3.5 :-)
Exactly! ;-)