I've had a LOT of fun (at low level) with the cavalier/samurai. Nothing is more pleasant than having your halfing cavalier charge down a door (I actually did that, critted the door). It plays simply, with a little "boost" occasionally through the "challenge" mechanic.
Also, samurai are more durable thanks to "resolve", a mechanic that lets them re-roll certain saves.
So yeah, I reccomend cavalier/samurai!
It depends a lot on your play style. I have seen people have massive amounts of fun with each.
A ranger with some focus on acrobatics that uses two weapons can be incredibly, incredibly deadly in melee if the dice favor you.
Barbarian may be a simpler choice than Fighter. The problem with Fighter is optimizing with Feats and using those Feats to the greatest effect. Barbarians have fewer Feats and their abilities are often fixed.
Barbarians. Straight up, smash things in the face while scream yer fool head off.
After that, go with what williamoak said, and use a cavalier/samurai if you are a small sized. Get yer mount, and charge indoors. There is nothing as awesome as a mounted character during a bar fight/dungeon crawl.
Ok play a fighter. Put max ranks into intimidate. Grab intimidating prowess and power attack. Make sure the second weapon training you pick is bows. You probably want to pick heavy blades for your first weapon training.
And you're done! You have an effective character both in and out of combat. Now you just need to pick 19-20 more feats...
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What he said!
If your using 3.5 materials you might consider looking at Warblades for martials with options(Book of the 9 Swords). Dreamscarred Presses Psionics also has quiet a bit to offer if your allowed to use 3rd party. Martials in pathfinder don't get much in the way of options and don't look like their 4E cousins though, imo. If I had to pick a full BAB class out of core I'd go with barbarian personally, and ranger introduces you to most of the aspects of pathfinder(spellcasting, companion, feats/skills).
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If I were you, I would go with Ranger or Barbarian. Barbarian for pure smashy-smashy damage and sheer durability; Ranger if you want to identify, track down, and sneak up on your prey before you rip it to shreds and feed it to your animal companion.
Also, unless you have a really specific character concept in mind, I would strongly recommend simply two-handing a Greatsword or other such big weapon. The only must-have feat for that style is Power Attack, meaning the rest of your feats are free to do whatever you want with. For example, a popular choice for the Barbarian is Intimidating Prowess, which adds your Strength to your Intimidate check. (And really, every character should be able to do something in social situations.)
As to the other martial classes:
- Paladin is very hard to kill and smites for massive damage, but MUST be lawful good, which can be stifling.
- Fighter gets a metric ton of bonus feats, but gets nothing for out-of-combat stuff. Not worth it unless you're trying to do something like archery or whip fighting that takes a ton of feats.
- Cavalier and Samurai are solid choices, but you'll have to learn the rules (and take the feats) for mounted combat. Also, your horse cannot go everywhere you want to take it.
- Monks can be good, but it's much, much harder to make an effective Monk than to make an effective Barbarian. I would stay away for your first time.
This is not such a great idea. Intimidation makes most social problems worse not better and the game is heavily biased towards specialization for noncombat skills other than perception.
Unless you can get your social skills high enough to be the party face (or backup face if your primary face is flaky) you're fighting against the game trying to influence people.
Diplomacy, Sense Motive, and Bluff are the key skills. Paladins can do a limited job, but can't bluff because of the code. Cavaliers/Samurai and Urban Barbarians can do face work, but the Barbarian will have to distort his stat array since charisma is his usual dump stat.
Depends on your game. Sometimes intimidate can help, sometimes it never will. It also happens to be good for synergy with Cornugan Smash and/or Enforcer.
If you play an intelligence based character you can use clever wordplay or Student of Philosophy to assist in making up for social skills. As you level the characters who crank those skills likely will have them pretty high, but skills have effective soft and hard caps on them where they don't become much if any more effective. So while at level 1 your 7 charisma/12 intellegence barbarian isn't too hot, at level 10 he's got quiet a few skill pints to throw around and may have made up for it by quiet a bit, though he's not going to do nearly as well as the bard. This is not just because of your skill point growth, but access to magic items and how much of an investment you can make in those skills.
i think its safe to say that even though some might say one class is slightly better than barb for you..... i have not seen one person say a bad thing about the barbarian. I think the barbarian is the best choice all around.
1) Barbar's limited rounds of rage kind of sucks.
2) No heavy armor is another downside. (even with a feat you give up fast movement).
3) Superstition is a double edge sword and can get you killed if you aren't careful.
4) With how con rage works it behooves you to invest in diehard.
Ofcourse the trade-off is ridiculous with non core sources, but those are by no means a beginner builds that's more of "The opt boards wrote my character for me".
I would go with a Rnager
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Hello , I'm just starting out playing Pathfider. I need some advice on which is the best martial class to play. I have played mostly martial classes in other RPG 's , and its my favorite class type. So being new to the game I need some help deciding . I know it's mostly a personal preference , but any advice would be helpful, thanks.
Personally, I'd recommend a (insert weird race) Qinggong Monk. With all of their seriously unrelated and various abilities, I think they're one of the most fun to play as far as Martials go. Any ranged folk are generally pretty boring. Monks can use any part of their body as a weapon(as far as your GM permits it of course) and making them Qinggong gives you access to a lot of really weird odd-end abilities that you can have a lot of fun with. With my Vanara Monk, I tend to run up/off walls(as a vanara I also have a climb speed, so more shinanigans there) and pelvic thrust things in the head, sometimes crushing their skull. Go straight up YuYu Hakusho and spirit finger/shotgun things. I can just cartwheel around or roll in between opponents legs. I can also fling my poo equal to my con bonus(min 1) per day! Yes the DM ruled that one after my party members joked enough about it. I can use my Hair and wrap opponents up, etc. Outside of personality, and strictly just Class fun, I think this is one of the best. Monks are pretty socially weird anyways, so your conversations can be pretty ridiculous and it'll just make sense for the CHA you'll end up with. I do recommend a Dex/Wis monk though(for the sake of not dying, then weapon finesse and agile enchant on a weapon or guided if the gm allows it for the sake of your damage/hit), and the rest dumped into Str and/or Con. Skill-wise i went with Acrobatics and Stealth as the most important.
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i suggest that new players play fighters, sorcerers, or paladins as a first character. they are really fool proof and for the most part simplistic to play.
this is the fighter i would suggest for you to play, its very flexible and very effective at combat.
fighter 10 triats: defender of the society, eyes and ears of the city (perception as a class skill)
half elf
skill focus: perception
1 pointblank shot
f precise shot
f powerattack
3 rapid shot
f furious focus
5 iron will
6 many shot
7 improved iron will
f clustered shot
9 deadly aim
f combat reflexes
once you hit ten you start building caster hate using feats like disruptive and the later more powerful caster killers, and take the snap shot line for your bow making it harder for casters to cast spells.
basically this character is called a switch hitter. it is very similar to Legolas from lord of the rings, only he doesnt use two short swords he uses one big sword.
you would play this character by getting the best bow you can afford, a big weapon like a great sword, and full plate mithril armor.
your job is to kick doors down and fire arrows into people then drop your bow and charge into the thick of melee and go to town on the bad guys. very straight forward, very effective.
I think the barbarian is a good middel Ground when it comes to beginners in the game. You get once pr rage powers like strength surge, you get allways when you rage powers like supestisious and the middel beast totem and you get awesome fantastic powers like the big beast totem. On top of that you get solid offense and defense. It is not nessesary the Best, Best that will depending on items and build and all what kind of stuff the party fights but it is great and will stay relevant all the way.
I vote barbarian.
And welcome to pathfinder Joe.
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Personally, I'd recommend a (insert weird race) Qinggong Monk.
Ah, but here's the thing about the Qinggong: you need a decent degree of system mastery/play experience in order to tell which abilities are worth keeping, which SLAs are worth spending Ki on, etc.
1) Barbar's limited rounds of rage kind of sucks.
2) No heavy armor is another downside. (even with a feat you give up fast movement).
3) Superstition is a double edge sword and can get you killed if you aren't careful.
4) With how con rage works it behooves you to invest in diehard.
Ofcourse the trade-off is ridiculous with non core sources, but those are by no means a beginner builds that's more of "The opt boards wrote my character for me".
I wouldn't worry too much about 1 and 2. After the first few levels, you should have more than enough rounds of Rage per day... and of course, if you have a really long adventuring day, you can just keep your rage stored up for tough situations. Barbarians have enough hit points that they generally don't need heavy armor. And you don't have to pick Superstition as a rage power. Diehard is really, really good for Barbarians, but you can also just take Raging Vitality and be fine.
OP, here's why I would pick Barbarian if I were you: simply put, it's really, really hard to make an ineffective Barbarian. Just give yourself a high Strength and a high Con and take the feats Power Attack and Raging Vitality... and then you can do anything you want. Take feats and rage powers you find interesting and fun and just have a good time raging and beating the ever-loving sh*t out of any monsters foolish enough to stand in your way.
Unless you're playing a pretty high-powered campaign, you should be beefy enough to go toe-to-toe with most monsters. There's a tendency in Pathfinder for people to boost their AC as high as possible with armor, shields, etc... and then find monsters ignoring the tin-can fighter/paladin they can't scratch in order to rip a few hunks out of the lightly-armored Rogue or Wizard. Well, Barbarians don't have that problem - if the monster bites a chunk out of you, you just bite a bigger chunk back out of it. Repeat until one of you (read: the monster) dies. This makes for some pretty visceral, high-octane combat.
Barbarian is also pretty low-upkeep. You don't have to remember what bonuses you have against which creatures or which feats apply to which weapons - just keep one separate character sheet with your raging stats and a rage counter, and that's all the bookkeeping you'll have to do.
You also have a decent number of skill ranks to play around with, and remember that you can use your 2 traits to make almost any skill a class skill, which gives you great freedom in character creation. If you wanted, you could make your Barbarian a proper English gentleman with the World Traveler trait and a decent charisma to make him an excellent diplomat... who goes into a crazed bloodlust murder spree whenever anyone insults the queen. Anything goes!
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Why does everyone insist that new players always require "system mastery?"
It comes off as absurdly condescending.
OP: Pathfinder does an excellent job of giving each class a pile of stuff that works well together. Even the "notoriously bad" options like the rogue and monk have enough toys to make a character that is effective. The best idea I can suggest is to read up on each class. Then make your decision.
Or, tl;dr, Barbarian.
1. Barbarian. Fast Flexible, fun and powerful.
2. Ranger. Start as a warrior and get a pet and spells later.
3. Fighter. Very customizable armored Badass.I would recommend Martials in this order for these reasons. Enjoy!
Second this.
The barbarian is the best all-around pure melee, tough, strong, can take it, dish it out, withstand magic.
The ranger is the most versatile. He gets a pet, he gets spells, he gets favored enemies, he gets skill points. You can dabble in a lot of stuff and learn what you like with a ranger.
The fighter tends to...fall short in many areas. If you want to make an archer, however, it's the best choice.
The paladin, if you're okay with being LG, is the best tank character, with a broad spectrum of abilities that only get more daunting with levels.
===Aelryinth
Design Manager
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My favorite martial class has got to be the cavalier. Challenge is way more versatile than a Paladin's Smite, your mount gets full progression, and there's a lot of fun archetypes that let you explore different play and combat styles. Orders bring a lot of fun elements into play and give you some cool options for different bonuses, and I love playing around with Teamwork feats as well. Tactician really should have been opened up a bit to include all Teamwork feats the character knows instead of just the ones chosen at each tier of Tactician, but it isn't a terrible ability and it gets some leadershippy goodness in there.
The Samurai alternate class for the cavalier is also a fun way to go if you want to focus more on being an unstoppable badass and less on teamworky goodness.
I'm surprised nobody mentioned Gunslinger as that is also a martial class, though I guess it is one of the most controversial to add to a game.
As to which class is best its very situational, in a sandbox large opens spaces style game its hard to beat the maneuverability and shear damage output of a cavalier, however once you move into confined spaces he becomes far less useful.
Barbarian or cavalier.
Why does everyone insist that new players always require "system mastery?"
It comes off as absurdly condescending.
OP: Pathfinder does an excellent job of giving each class a pile of stuff that works well together. Even the "notoriously bad" options like the rogue and monk have enough toys to make a character that is effective. The best idea I can suggest is to read up on each class. Then make your decision.
Or, tl;dr, Barbarian.
Yep.
Play the game as I play the game, with my level of system knowledge, you scrub!
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Why does everyone insist that new players always require "system mastery?"
It comes off as absurdly condescending.
OP: Pathfinder does an excellent job of giving each class a pile of stuff that works well together. Even the "notoriously bad" options like the rogue and monk have enough toys to make a character that is effective. The best idea I can suggest is to read up on each class. Then make your decision.
Or, tl;dr, Barbarian.
Like it or not, some classes are harder to build effectively than others. My first character was a rogue, and as I had no idea what I was doing (gave him 10 con, 14 int, 14 cha, amongst other poor decisions) I had to retire him halfway through the campaign since he was completely failing to contribute to combat. Some classes are also distinctly more complex than others - for example, playing a Magus requires pretty developed knowledge of how touch spells work (holding a charge, etc.), the differences between regular attacks and full attacks, and more... in addition to requiring the player to keep a spellbook and track spells and arcane pool points.
It would be condescending if we were making fun of him for not knowing the rules, or for wanting to play a simple character. I think it's perfectly reasonable to advise someone who does not know the Pathfinder system to stay away from classes that demand knowledge of many parts of that system.
@Joe: Make sure you check out the "Guide to the Guides" sticky at the top of the Advice column. Don't start any frontliner with less than 12 Con (14 is better). And make sure you fit Iron Will in your Fighter builds - nobody likes failing a will save. Good luck!
I'm surprised nobody mentioned Gunslinger as that is also a martial class, though I guess it is one of the most controversial to add to a game.
As to which class is best its very situational, in a sandbox large opens spaces style game its hard to beat the maneuverability and shear damage output of a cavalier, however once you move into confined spaces he becomes far less useful.
I'm a growing fan of the gunslinger, but it is on my list of classes I actually wouldn't recommend to a beginner. Not because the class is bad, but because it requires a certain amount of tactical mastery that I cannot assume a beginner has.
Cavalier is also on that list. And, actually, so is the rogue.
None of those are bad classes. They're just not what I consider beginner classes.
i suggest that new players play fighters, sorcerers, or paladins as a first character. they are really fool proof and for the most part simplistic to play.
Heads up, but fighters are one of the easiest to screw up with bad feat decisions you can't make up for and not much else to give and sorcerers are pretty punishing if you choose the wrong spells.
4) With how con rage works it behooves you to invest in diehard.
This probably requires an explanation. When you rage as a barbarian you get effectively 2xHD(level) in temporary HP that goes away when you rage. When you hit 0 HP you go unconscious, and when you go unconscious you stop raging. This makes it pretty easy to die as a barbarian when you hit 0. The upside is that if you die from going out of rage, you were probably going to die anyway and you were only still fighting because you had extra rage and would already be dead. A lot of barbarians take Raging Vitality(which is like a tax), so that they can keep raging and not die. It also happens to boost your con by another 2, making you fight longer and slightly harder to kill.
Barbarians are pretty durable. Armor Class has diminishing returns and has a growing cost of investment that is not intuitive at all. This makes 3 other kinds of defense more viable, a bulk of HP, Damage Reduction, and concealment of some sort. Barbarians can easily amass a pretty big amount of HP, and they have plenty of abilities that are damage reduction or quasi-damage reduction. The go to barbarian build takes the beast totem line, which gives scaling natural armor, and superstitious, which cranks saves to what could be the highest in game for a character and leads into other nice abilities such as eater of magic, which allows you to reroll a save and gain HP for it, and ghost rager, which pumps your touch AC(which is usually low for just about everyone).
If archers fit your ideal of martials, you might want to look at the marksman, a psionic archer from dreamscarred press. In any case, archery is a pretty darn powerful. The ability to make full attacks is important to martials, and few if any get something to assist them in actually doing so. Archers and pounce chargers are among the two that can make them almost consistently.
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Design Manager
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Just my half-orcy two coppers if you do go Barbarian... my barbarian has a 14 WIS, Iron Will and Improved Iron Will... You will be the target of every Will Save out there, and its so darn funny when you easily succeed against the Dominate spell and put the stupid wizard in a head lock :-D
I had a player who never did learn to beef up his Will saves, and his half-orc barbarian was the #1 cause of party deaths over the course of a year and a half long campaign.
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i suggest that new players play fighters, sorcerers, or paladins as a first character. they are really fool proof and for the most part simplistic to play.Heads up, but fighters are one of the easiest to screw up with bad feat decisions you can't make up for and not much else to give and sorcerers are pretty punishing if you choose the wrong spells.
absolutly not, a fighter using core only feats will be an easier character to build and play then a barbarian for 3 reasons:
1. fighters only need 2 feats to be functional iron will and improved iron will, other then that play around with feats and use the retraining option available to players to redo feats you dont like. sorcerers are the same way, yes if you choose a bad spell it will suck, but play around with them to see which spells you like.
2. the book keeping is so low it lets new players focus on the 8 million rules for combat and not spend 90% of their focus on all the book keeping with barbarians, and every other class in the game.
3 fighters are very bland in flavor, due to the lack of class features, which allows them to be roleplayed as a favored character from an outside source from pathfinder. fighters can be anime characters, movie characters, videogame characters alot easier then a barbarian can, since barbarians main class feature is rage and that gives the class a spicific context.
and many people who play pathfinder for the first time have seen LOTR, which lets then visualize what a fighter can look like (legolas), i think gimly was a fighter also.
not to mention a crb barbarian is pathetic in comparison to a fighter in crb.
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I could disagree with you on every level, but let's just agree to disagree. No need to thread hijack for another fighter thread.
Barbarian is pretty fun. Just look out for some of the poor rage powers. Grab Power Attack and Raging Vitality. They're staples. Take Extra Rage Power unless you have something in mind for your feats. Superstition line, Beast Totem Line, Strength Surge are all amazing Rage Powers.