Hello everyone! Going to be playing in yet another campaign coming up, and I've been looking heavily at the Bladebound Kensai archetype fusion. Aside from general stuff, there are a few things that are driving my indecisive brain INSANE.
So, taking a look at ability score distribution, I was thinking to be an elf, and to go with (After racial ability adjustments):
Str 12
Dex 18
Con 10
Int 18
Wis 10
Cha 7
So, a couple of things are running through my head right now.
First Off: A thought about my weapon. I was contemplating taking the Aldori Dueling Sword, and weapon finesse, and just kinda stick with that, OR go into the Duelist Prestige class with it. Then again, I also looked at using a Scimitar with the Dervish Dance feat. That would take advantage of my high dex and keep my damage quite on par with that of a proper fighter. Though, the Aldori Dueling Sword COULD be used with the Dueling Mastery feat to allow me to use it as a Duelist (See below). However, I wouldn't add my Dex to damage, so my damage output would be a little lower (Though AC a little higher).
Second: Prestige Class Possibility. I was thinking, since I have such a high intelligence bonus, should I abuse that and go into Duelist to up my damage potential via precise strike with a scimitar?
As for the spellcasting and really using the potential of shocking grasp, I was thinking of doing what many people suggest. Take Magical Lineage (Shocking Grasp) and other ways of upping it's potential damage, as well as just use whatever gold I WOULD be spending on armor to instead supply myself with a huge amount of pearl's of power (Which my character might wear like prayer beads).
I really like the idea of being hard to hit while having a fairly high and constant damage output. This paired with being able to defend allies with parry and stuff as well is quite amusing. I was curious on other peoples' thoughts on all this, because I see a large amount of people going with katanas as the kensai's weapon choice.
It's been done to death, yep. The people going with katanas are mostly just going against the Dervish Dance grain (I know I can't stomach taking that feat) and want to build more of a "brute" magus. If you're going pure optimization the scimitar / dervish dance with the shocking grasp traits is definitely the way you wanna go.Going into a PrC, well, magus is really not a class you want to dip out of (my magus is STR based with a katana and DOES taka a one level dip into Wizard for the evocation (admixture) school power to make shocking grasp a more versatile tool)
Also, your Con score is going to get you murdered. You're going to want to take the Toughness feat somewhere in there.
That is very true. This is also what kind of drives my indecision to maddening levels. I WOULD make a brute one, but that involves kinda relying on too many ability scores at once, and this is a 20-point buy...
To be honest, I don't necessarily even have to be a magus for this campaign. My brain is just all aflood with ideas, and this one looked kinda cool... but then I seem to be able to do TOO many things with the class and become less focused to a point of being okay at a lot of things but not good at any one particular thing... Kind of why my Bard/Noble Scion idea didn't work either. On the whole, I lose at least 8 levels of spellcasting if I took the Dilettante Studies: Spellcasting thing, and at least 6 levels of bardic performance, so my bard would lose their effectiveness as a bard. Though I would gain wealth and be a party face specialist..
I dunno. I have just been going nuts trying to figure out what this character should be. I was playing a druid, but so far all my druid has done has gotten a party member killed and almost threatened the party with failing a quest. Mostly out of accidental memory crap. The prestige I was going to go with on that one, once again, kind of focuses in too many places at once. I seem to be having issues with that. By the looks of it, Paizo did a REALLY good job at making taking classes in a Prestige Class NOT worth it, if not completely detrimental.
If you're going into Duelist, your weapon is basically chosen for you: the rapier. Their entire kit revolves around light or one-handed piercing weapons, and the only piercing weapons that qualify for being a black blade are the sword cane and the rapier. Sword cane can't benefit from Weapon Finesse, so that's right out. A Dueling Sword could qualify for being a black blade, but only does slashing damage (which makes the Duelist prestige just not worth it).
Unless there's some supplement I'm missing which lets Duelists use a dueling sword as if it were a piercing weapon for the purpose of class abilities.
Dueling Swords count as piercing for the purposes of things like that with a specific feat (I think).
Scimitars also count for the Duelist stuff as long as I have Dervish Dance.
Though... as annoying as it is to suddenly switch my plans, especially after posting this... I think I might just be a straight-up cleric to fix my Druid conundrum. Because my Druid right now is effectively... well, a druid without an animal companion, worse spells than a cleric, despite focusing on spells, and only one domain... Long story short, a war-priest style cleric sounds awesome to me. And kind of acts like the magus with spell and melee potential, and blablabla. So I think I might be a two-domain cleric who works with melee.