Tiefling Magus

[offshoreguy]

I keep hearing that the best class for the tiefling race is the magus build. I have one last chance this upcoming Saturday to get one in before the deadline. What is the optimum build for PFS for the tiefling magus?

[Dragonflyer1243]

At lower levels, dervish dance combined with shocking grasp is probably your best bet.

[offshoreguy]

What would you recommend for stats and racial benefits?

[jalroy]

Depends on your concept and build, one trait I suggest is Pragmatic Activator, use magic device with INT instead of CHA which a tiefling usually has a minus to.

[Bigdaddyjug]

Standard tiefling works fine for a magus. You don't need Cha for anything, especially if you take Pragmatic Activator as Jalroy suggested.

1st level feat will need to be Weapon Finesse obviously. Traits are Pragmatic Activator and Magical Lineage (shocking grasp). Stat spread looks like 10/18/14/16/10/8. If you really want to min-max you can dump Cha to 5 and bump Str and Wis to 12.

Pick up a rapier which you will eventually want to put the agile enchantment on. You can put keen as well, but by level 5 you can add keen with your arcane pool. You may want so save the arcane pool for spell recall, though, so a +1 agile keen rapier is a very nice weapon to have at level 8+.

[lemeres]

Of course, all of this assumes that he wants to play a dervish dancer/dex build. Just because that is a favorite of the theorycrafters and just because the race has a bonus to dex does not mean you have to do a dex build. They actually work fine for a strength build

Tieflings give +2 to DEX (a secondary stat on a str build) and a +2 to INT (an important stat, but you usually don't go too high since you aren't a wizard; kind of a limbo between a primary stat and secondary stat, depending on how you like it), and its penalty is in a place that doesn't really matter too much. So overall, this means you could easily save a lot of points in a point buy and then put them into strength. Here are some examples stats (after racial adjustments):

STR: 16 DEX: 14 CON: 14 INT: 15 WIS: 10 CHA: 8

Fairly good spread. Anyway, before you make the choice between strength and dervish dance, check out Walter's Guide to the Magus to see some close comparisons to the two styles. That should help you decide which is right for you.

I will say though-either way, the 'optimal' weapon ends up being the scimitar. This is because it both works with dervish dance for DEX builds and it is one of the best 1 handed weapons around since it both has an 18-20/x2 crit range and it can be 2 handed for more damage due to str and power attack.

[Bigdaddyjug]

I'm not recommending dervish dance. I'm recommending a Dex build with an agile weapon. I think there are better things to spend feats on as a magus than increasing your weapon damage, especially when you can spend money to achieve the same thing. The Dex magus also ends up with higher AC, which is always nice on a front-liner.