| Neal Litherland |
While the class that Hawkeye (of Avengers fame) belongs to is a fairly easy choice, there's more to a character conversion than just picking which class the character is in and calling it a day. This build comes with feats, equipment suggestions, and a slew of other information to help you realize the character as fully as possible.
Imbicatus
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Suggesting archer fighter is a serious disservice to anyone wanting to make Hawkeye. It's a terrible archetype that is not as good at archery as a core fighter. It also completely dismisses Hawkeye's hand to hand ability. Hawkeye should be a zen archer monk using alchemical ammunition from the alchemy manual.
If you really want to focus on trick arrows in higher levels, a dip of empyreal sorcerer leading into arcane archer works best, although I prefer pure ZA myself.
| Larkos |
Suggesting archer fighter is a serious disservice to anyone wanting to make Hawkeye. It's a terrible archetype that is not as good at archery as a core fighter.
It's worse at Archery than the Core fighter? It seems like the archetype is better to me. You get the same attack and damage bonuses and get new abilities like using arrows for combat maneuvers and an AOE attack. You also don't provoke attacks of opportunity without using a feat.
Imbicatus
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Imbicatus wrote:Suggesting archer fighter is a serious disservice to anyone wanting to make Hawkeye. It's a terrible archetype that is not as good at archery as a core fighter.It's worse at Archery than the Core fighter? It seems like the archetype is better to me. You get the same attack and damage bonuses and get new abilities like using arrows for combat maneuvers and an AOE attack. You also don't provoke attacks of opportunity without using a feat.
Sorry for the late reply, but yes it is worse at archery than the core fighter. You don't get weapon training, so no gloves of dueling. The ability to use maneuvers at range is not that useful. Fighters have more than enough feats to cover point blank master. An archer will need to spend the feat anyway for snap shot. Finally, as an archer fighter, you need to have a high dexterity. This means you will get maximum benefit from armor training. Archers give up armor training.
| Gwen Smith |
For Hawkeye, I would go Weapon Master fighter, then pick up every trick arrow available from Ultimate Equipment, Alchemy Manual, and Elves of Golarian. For me, Hawkeye's MO is a) Find a good spot and b) Rain down death. Weapon master is excellent at this (and it gets Weapon Training early, so it scales up faster). Personally, I'd consider getting Fly potions and showing the GM how annoying those erinyes devils really are.
Imbicatus is right: The archer fighter archetype trades away too much and gets too little in return. Here's why:
1) Extending the range of a bow is useless: the range increment is 110 ft, and you can fire up to 10 times that far. If you ever manage to encounter an enemy outside 110 ft, 2 different types of arrows will increase your range increment by at least 10 ft, and Far Shot reduces your ranged penalties anyway.
2) You have to really focus on combat maneuvers to be effective at all, which means burning feats on the Improved and Greater version of the maneuvers (assuming your GM lets you use those feats at range). Also, most maneuvers are situational anyway: you can't trip a foe that's two sizes larger that you or that's flying, can't disarm natural weapons, etc.
3) You don't get Safe Shot until level 9. You can get Point Blank Master at level 5 (level 3 if you go Zen Archer). You don't want to go 4 extra levels without it.
4) Fighters get tons and tons of feats: never trade out a useful class feature for something you can get with a feat unless you are getting it earlier than you normally would.
Really, the only useful thing you're getting for giving up Weapon Training and Armor Training is +5 to Perception. That's a poor trade.
Side note:
The Zen Archer Monk has all the "must have" feats front-loaded, so 3-6 levels of Zen Archer is really nice start to any archery build. To me, though, Zen Archer feels more like Legolas than Hawkeye: they can dance across battlefield at high speed, dodging blows and leaping over obstacles. Likewise, I'd build Robin Hood as a ranger and Kikio or Sagome (from Inuyasha) as an Inquisitor or Grenadier Alchemist.