Hi, i just posted asking for slayer advice but ive been thinking is that the best choice for my party? The party consists of a universalist Wizard, Barbarian, Archer Ranger, Swashbuckler, and Monk.
Cleric for full Divine Casting. Pick up the luck or travel domains with your deity selection to get sum decent powers/spells. The Strength Domain is good too.
This or you could build a Hedge Witch with the Healing Patron.
You have 2 excellent frontliners and a 3rd that is respectable, a full arcane caster, ranged combatant. What you need is a full divine caster and maybe a face.
I will make a full case for this in later post but for now that is the short of it. Problem will be how you want to go about it as I can think 4 optimal ways with minimal thought.
maybe some sort of combat focused oracle then? You do seem martial heavy, and if the wizard is a universalist, then you have your choice on what to specialize on, or even be a generalist divine caster.
You could be a straight combat cleric, there'd be some healing to do, but you can avoid it. But screw that, go bard. With this much melee the bard will be super useful, you can sling arcane spells, heal a little, be the party face. Fun to play and you can focus on either melee or ranged attacking; I'd suggest bow, but they can be very feat intensive.
Warpriest is another option. Decent healing, decent combat, decent spellcasting. We have a warpriest, he's good at what he does.
A druid is not a bad option. Less powerful healing than the cleric, but still not exactly a slouch.
Personally, I'd probably suggest going Hunter. You get the healing spells from medium divine spell progression, along with some really AWESOME combat class features. Skald likewise has decent healing and combat, and like the bard has good buffing which will exponentially improve the group's performance.
It'd be fine, but you have INT and damage pretty well covered in that party. Bard's are very versatile, way more than support, but I think you can make a magus work in that party, sure. Anything you really want will work pretty well with all that firepower. You mentioned slayer at the start, that'd work just as well as magus.
why cleric though? i seem to always play the healer and the DM has been quite liberal with healing pots.
Though healing is undeniably a major part of a cleric, I repsectfully didn't say be a bandaid I said be charisma based. allow me to show you how varied they can be...
1) Fighting evangelist. Even though an evangelist is more support than anything in a conventional sense it is not limited to support. insire courage boosts you and allies alike thus making it VERY possible for you to be a fighter as you see fit. Though I prefer reach cleric tactics with a longspear, demon subdomain, and a strength 18 post racial; you could easily go ranged or spells as well. the result is that you trade in weakened channels, one domain, loss of medium armor for best bard abilities. Keep in mind, inspire courage every 5 levels is granting you the equivilant of a +2 str. For this character you need not take anything beyond vanilla channeling and none of its feats for your 5 or 6 channels is enough heal you and party.
2)Summoning undead lord: You don't bring friends to a fight, you bring an army. Controlling undead that come to attack you, raising the dead you kill to serve you, and summoning massive numbers of beasts to do the rest. Whats not to love? No one in your party but the arcane caster can even dream of doing this.
3) Blaster: your group has very little control or area of effect abilities, and what you have lies almost entirely on the arcane caster. so a theologian or eccisitheurge cleric would add a lot of control on top of spells that you have as any normal cleric such as wall of stone. truly massed fireballs is always welcome.
4) daze or madness lock channel: Grab negative channel along with madness or rulership variants and you have a BRUTAL control method. step into a group of enemies and you have a very good chance of some o those foes not getting a turn :) madness is somewhat more risky I admit but its always great to watch whole groups of enemies attacking each other instead of your friends.
5) Boosting evangelist: standard support cleric of our age but lets face it, its the best cleric there is all around.
6) Human face: grab glory domain, focused study alternate racial trait, silver tongue alternate racial trait, and go to work. If your GM is one to allow players to be able to talk their way out of some problems this is how you do it and do it well. this can be combined with many of the above ideas as well.
I honestly feel this isn't even close to a complete list of what can be done but it is sufficient for you to respond and see where we go from there.
Warpriest. It's cleric with heavy armor, bonus feats, damage boosts, and enhancements to weapons and armor. Plus you can heal yourself as a swift action.
is there a decent melee heavy armour cleric build? i prefer clerics that are in the thick of things
crusader is the go to archetype for this. evangelist will not get the heavy without using feats or a dip but that also could work. here is a quick and dirty battle cleric that I use as reference...
Tielfing crusader cleric X/fighter 1 with demon subdomain
1) armor of the pit
1F) power attack
Crusader 1) weapon focus
3) improved initiative
5) toughness
crusader 5) shield focus
7) toughness
9)???
crusader 10) improved critical
11) ???
from here your already set as you have higher AC than a baseline fighter. your 3/4 BAB will not matter thx to demon subdomain now making up for the loss of the BAB while adding damage to all those attacks. Add spells into this and it gets fun fast. I would always keep around a few summon monster spells in case you need some flankers to help out. restore spells highly recommended since you will be on front line as well.
NOTE: you could take claw and maw alternate racial trait in addition to the traits "adopted" and "tusked" to get 3 natural attacks at level 1. those 3 natural attacks will remain relevant until you decide that the benefits of your tower shield OR offense from weapon focus and the fighter feats overtake them.
finally... heavy armor, armor of pit, DX 12, tower shield alone adds up to 26 AC. Stack spells, fighting defensive, the free crusader feats, and other possibilities and you may not be hit for a LONG time.
I'm aware of the warpriest and he seemed a bit lack luster, my dm houseruled that as warpriest you can take domains instead of blessings, as one of the other players was playing one rather ineffectively
I vote witch http://www.archivesofnethys.com/ArchetypeDisplay.aspx?FixedName=Witch%20Car tomancer
you can heal if you need to, but you can also debuff like mad.
At lv 3 you can use touch spells at a range, which opens up soo many choices.
Hexes too iguess.. but I don't know that much about those. I just know I like/love the witch spell list for a different character I was making (blade adept unfettered arcanist into EK or Dragon Disciple) for touch debuff guy. (that archtype stacking is debatable due to black blade's status as a familiar or not but gm allowed it.). They have some really amusing debuffs some of which don't have a DC.
So you can provide most of the magical support the wizard can not, and do your own unique thing. deadly dealer is pretty fun.
It is semi support which you didn't like but it doesn't have to be only support.
you could also go blade adept into EK, or magus if you wanna be stabby but also some other stuff..
Though it sounded like you liked slayer, Nothing really bad with doing that. As long as your group is aware to handle stuff. Granted you have 2-3 in their face guys, one archer and one caster. so in general either some more magic or something with tasty amounts of skills usually help. Slayers get decent skills if I remember right.
Cleric isn't for the cure line. It's for the remove and restore spells. Warpriest loses too much casting to get them in a timely manner. Oracle doesn't have enough spells known to get them in a timely manner.
Get 18 strength, 12 dex, 13 wisdom, and put the rest in con except enough int to make you content with your skills. Dump charisma down to 7 -- 5 if oreads are allowed.
You can take heavy armor proficiency at first level since you can't get power attack until third. And then you're pretty much done until you grab quicken spell metamagic at ninth. Furious focus is nice. Weapon focus doesn't hurt. Spell focus conjuration, augment summons, sacred summons, and superior summoning are also options if you're getting by adequately on just power attack and quicken.
Anyone recall Lord Verminaard of Dragonlance fame?
Sure, he was a villain, but… Make a dark brooding crunchy type cleric (could be done with an oracle too)
If you have the patience… a Rage Prophet might work as well.
A neutral type cleric that toys with negative energy because he sees the undead as pawns/tools to be used to increase his power, but has no interest in furthering evil agenda of dark gods.
IF you don't like the negative energy/control undead thing.
Go oracle of nature, Cha based, take weird icky stuff like telling the future with entrails, but take natures whispers too… which gives to Cha to ac.
PRC into rage profit for all sorts of spooky disturbing behavior in a beasty spell warrior.
Go rogue, Disable Device and trapspotting is useful, and use a little alchemy to make drugs. Drugs are poison-like but riskier since though they bypass any poison immunity or fort saves they are also not privy to poison abilities such as poison use and are almost always lethal when planning to use more than one dose in a day on either you or an enemy. Essentially they are poison+.
I would give another look at cleric. You don't have to be support.
Clerics are good at support, but they can be good at other things. Consider wisdom just high enough for self buffs. Channel negative energy with one of the nasty variant channel debuffs. Selective and quick channel. Start the fight with a channel debuff on the bad guys and a buff spell on yourself. Both in round 1. Then charge into the thick with a blade.
{{ It is just entirely coincidental that the other melee guys have already charged and absorbed the brunt of the response. }}
Since you are a negative channeler, no one should be expecting you to do much healing other than utilizing the click-stick that everyone has purchased. (They all have a click-stick right?!?)
If you don't want to go full divine casting - you could go bard. With all of those people taking attack rolls every round, inspire courage would be awesome.
The bard is also among the best faces & skill monkeys in the game.
Investigator looks cool. And he can make healing pots for himself in the form of elixirs. If the others don't have self healing shame on them.
There is a nice looking investigator guide here on the boards somewhere. I just read it today so it has to be new. With a race that gets a SLA and arcane strike combined with what the investigator gets you will not need a into to hit and damage feat. In fact I think it would be too much.
At level 4 I think you get +1/2 level to hit and damage for int bonus rounds per target. Add inspiration and alchemy and you should be golden.
It sounds like there's a mismatch between what the player wants to play and what will benefit the team. The player clearly wants to play a Slayer, and clearly does not want to play any sort of support character. The party already has the non-support roles well covered, and is totally lacking in anything like support. Also, this sounds like a party with the erroneous 'Clerics are healbots' prejudice, which explains why no one wants to play one.
The player is basically stuck either playing a character that would fit well with the party, or playing the PC desired. I suggest playing the desired PC, and %&^%^% the party.
Anvil = Battlefield Control
Hammer = Do HP damage
Arm = Support
Universalist Wizard is an Anvil
Barbarian, Archer Ranger, Swashbuckler, and Monk are all Hammers
No one plays an Arm
The Forge of Combat wrote:
Groups without Arms: Perhaps the most forgiving of the three major imbalances. These groups usually spend more resources than necessary to finish an encounter. When they don’t they exist on a razor’s edge where an enemies passed save or a characters failed save can mean the difference between failure and victory. This is much worse in groups that lack the means to magically heal themselves and are thus forced into shorter adventuring days or burning wealth on tons of cure light wound wands.
So, that's the basic problem this group faces. If the player chooses to play a Slayer (the stated preference) this is adding another Hammer. This is what the player wants, but it is not what the group needs.
Some possible solutions:
A. Play the desired character but mention the imbalance to the party! That way, when someone dies they know they should seriously consider a support character. Say something like, "Hey guys, it's obvious this group really needs a support character, like a Cleric or a Bard, but I don't want to play one. I'm going to play a Slayer instead. I suggest that the first PC to die (myself included) gets replaced by some type of Arm, or Support, character."
B. Play the above-mentioned Witch character, or any other class that knows Cure Light Wounds or Infernal Healing. This will greatly reduce the problems of not having an Arm character, as the group can at least heal out of combat without burning expensive magic items. The Wizard can theoretically know IH, but lacks enough spell slots to heal the party meaningfully.
C. Play the character the party needs, but do so in a way that is palatable. For example, play an utterly b@d@$$ Evangelist Cleric who, in addition to supporting the party, also crushes foes underfoot en masse. E.g. make 'support' the thing you do 'on the side', and mostly focus on crushing your enemies. There are lots of ways to do this.
Could I play a more skill orientated investigator and take the infusion discovery at level 5?
why couldn't you? Skills is what Investigators do the absolute best. Skills lots of extra rolls for skills. and not horrible at attacks due to studied combat
