What level?
A oracle of some kind would be my suggestion then. (If your favored dragon type is gold go with the flame mysteri) That will allow you to get full 9 level Spell casting with out any Real investment in feats or stats. You will be a melee monster with a powerfull backup plan.
if spells dosent Sound interesting( but if you plan to go high in level they should) be a primalist bloodrager and get the beast totem Line of rage powers. At level 12 you can have beast tootem Line and Come and get me and be very hard to impressed in melee.
I advice against the PC. parthfinder paladin have Lots of good reasons to stay in the class. So unless you are a 3.5 paladin dont get the PC.
Daring champion is a good pick too.
Yeah I was thinking on Oracle but am kinda worried it would force me into being the healer. The other 2 in the party are a warmage and a magus...and abusive looking to gestalt as a rogue...warmage is utterly lost...
No surprise about a warmage being lost;)
I dont know how you guys play but i dont see a problem in you burning a few Spell slots in between fights to heal your team if that is nessesary. Just make sure they undestand that you are a melee hero that also have powerfull magic and not a medic.And tell your magus friend that if he is a kensai then the wizard is a good addition.
Well with the gestalt rules I could advance as both at least as the party and DM understand them...
yes but they you would give up on the oracle or what ever other class you Pick. If you want a dragon sted a summoner is also a good option.
Primal Companion Hunter is a good choice, its an Archetype of the Hunter that will allow you to add summoner evolutions to your animal companion. The hunter will also add a load of teamwork feats to both you and your companion.
If you as a Paladin can gain Drakkensteed as your bonded mount and you do, then you take a class such as Ranger that also allows you to take Drakensteed as your Animal companion, then you stack your levels.
However If you as a Paladin can gain Drakkensteed as your bonded mount and do, then you take a class such as Ranger, if as a ranger you are not allowed to take the Drakkensteed, then you would gain a 2nd companion. So when using house rules that allow for un-usual companions its completely up to the Gm.
To keep down on paper work, and time spent on your turn you may talk to your gm about simply altering your single companion if you take a 2nd class that grants one. Perhaps increasing it to d10's, giving it 4 skill points per level, giving it hit dice equal to your character level, and a good BAB. If she goes for it then having all that on top of adding the eidolon's evolutions would make for one sweet steed.
A bard may be a good mix. Bards can cast in light armor so using medium mithral armor would eliminate spell failure.
An oracle of battle would also be a good combination. It would boost your combat abilities to an obscene level.
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Swashbuckler, oracle, mysterious stranger gunslinger, bard, bloodrager, slayer, ranger, brawler, or fighter.
You have many options. What is it you wish to achieve?
I really like the slayer myself. More skills and combat abilities is nice.
If you where a ranged paladin then the stranger would be a perfect fit.
How about Diva Bard? You're looking at good synergy as you should already have good charisma for Paladin and bard's are excellent buffers. Add Inspire Courage and Heroism onto your Paladin and you'll be even more dangerous. Diva also gets to cast spells in medium armor at 5th level and heavy armor at 11th.
Or if you could look into Sound Striker Bard... up to 10 attacks per round that you can apply Smite Evil damage to, adding cha + level to damage and bypassing DR. That's pretty brutal.
A oracle of some kind would be my suggestion then. (If your favored dragon type is gold go with the flame mysteri) That will allow you to get full 9 level Spell casting with out any Real investment in feats or stats. You will be a melee monster with a powerfull backup plan.
if spells dosent Sound interesting( but if you plan to go high in level they should) be a primalist bloodrager and get the beast totem Line of rage powers. At level 12 you can have beast tootem Line and Come and get me and be very hard to impressed in melee.
Instead of Beast Totem you could also chosse Celestial Totem to buff your Lay on Hands.
If you are playing with 3.X, the 3.5 Draconomicon and the 3.0 Paladin/Cleric splatbook -Faith and Honor?- have rules for getting dragons as mounts with your Paladin class features(without spending a feat)
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Celestial armor fixes the spell failure. But bards can cast in light armor. Celestial armor is medium armor that counts as light armor...also the spell failure rate is reduced to nothing.
You could roll with celestial plate and just gamble on the minor spell failure. The key of the bard is the performances that boost you and/or your team mates. If your worried about armor check out Arcane Duelist archetype as it adds more feats, up to heavy armor proficiency, and more weapon enchant options that run on a different resource pool then your paladin bonded weapon. So I assume they stack if you wanted to stack up enchantments.
Also if you do bard dont be worried about too much heavy armor. With mirror image you get miss chance added to your layered defense pile.
Do you have to wear full plate? A bard can cast in light armor with no chance of spell failure. Medium mithral armor counts as light so you could use a breast plate instead of full plate. If you have high enough DEX the AC will be the same.
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Why not skald?
In my experience, the best gestalt combinations are those that add passive effects. (E.g., an oracle/sorcerer sounds great until you realize you can still only cast one spell or use one power per round, so this really means you just have twice as many unused powers at the end of the day.) Paladins make great gestalt pairups because of their passive abilities, such as the ability to wear heavy armor, the ability to use any martial weapon, and their charisma bonus to saves, which makes a sword-wielding sorcerer with really high fortitude saves a possibility. Similarly, a monk/druid is a full druid who has all good saves, an absurdly high AC, and ridiculous movement rate.
Ideally, what I like to see from a gestalt character chassis is:
* Full BAB
* All good saves
* Proficiency with effective weapons
* Useful bonus feats or abilities.
* High skill points
The two sidecar classes I'd recommend for a paladin would therefore be a rogue or a monk. With a rogue, you get all good saves, the highest skill points in the game, rogue talents which double for feats, and sneak attack damage that can potentially add to every hit in combat. With a monk (esp. if you are willing to forego armor), you get all good saves, bonus feats, an absurdly high AC, a ridiculous movement rate, plus the various monk abilities.
And it still plays (and uses the action economy) like a normal paladin.
Bard is good, too -- you essentially get a rogue-with-spells, but you lose sneak attack unless you start playing archetype games.
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Sneak attack is good but id take slayer over rogue or vivisectionist alchemist.
On a side note my home group is so struck on p aladins that they are not allowed to take advantage of the flank. They can offer it to team mates but must forgo the +2 themselves. They would also rule against the combo as sneak attacks are dirty moves and not honorable combat. They have a very strick belief of what the code of conduct is for a paladin. I've tried to explain that alignment is not a straight jacket and code of conduct varies person to person and diety to diety but it has made 0 progress to make them move away from shining white knight who can't sneeze without falling.
If the OPs DM is a strict alignment Nazi then he might run into the same problem.
Well my character just has an absurdly low Dex so heavy armor became a necessity...monk could work but I would want to go unarmed if I did that and I enjoy the use of the flying blade a little too much to lose it...also with no deity favoring that weapon it can't be flurried...and oracle does look good just so I can buff myself up really quick but with us using the wordcasting system I don't know how that will work...
If what you want is "buff yourself up quick," wordcasters are great for that, because they can combine lots of words at once into a single action.
E.g., with a 5th level spell slot, you can put a third level spell and two first level spells into a single standard action. Wind wall/alignment shield/fortify all at once..... Or you could go 4/2 with the same slot and get Grave bane/energy resistance or enhance form.
My bad Oakbreaker didn't notice that Hunters were restricted to Neutral Alignment.
Oracle was suggested awhile back. You could take Oracle, with the Lunar Mystery which would allow you to pick up a tiger as your animal companion, pick up the ability to use your Cha instead of your Dex as a bonus to your AC & Reflex saves, which would make Celestial Plate that much more useful if you can get it eventually.
Also since you cannot normally have the drakensteed as your oracle companion, then you would gain another companion.
I think you'd be better off with 9th level spells than you would with anything the ranger would give you, so I'd suggest oracle.
The animal companions are gonna be a bit on the weak side compared to a normal game. Since the game most likely will have hard encounters to make up for the powerfull gestalt PCs. Unless you have a gentleman agreement about not attacking Companion creatures i think it is a bad bet.
Im a fan of primalist bloodrager for this personally.
On one side Rangers get those bonus combat style feats which can be helpful. Normally though its better if you are going to gestalt to not take both of your classes from those who have a good BAB.
The best route for a Gestalt character, in my opinion is for at least one of the classes to be a full progression spell caster. If you don't want your character to be using up his standard actions casting during combat pick up quicken spell feat and limit your in combat spells to those you can quicken. If you take the Warsighted Archetype of the Oracle it allows you to have a ton of variable combat feats. Doing this takes away all but the level 3 and 19 Revelations, but you can take the Feat: Extra Revelation. Or you can take Dual-Cursed Oracle as well as Warsighted to pick up two extra revelations.
Bloodrager(especially Steel Blooded if you use non-mithral heavy armor), Eldrich Scoin Magus, Bard(maybe Arcane Duelist if you want to cast in heavy armor), Oracle, Skald, Summoner, and if you don't have a bad intelligence an Investigator(especially Sleuth since it synergies with Charisma)
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I can't believe that no one has suggested sorceror yet! It uses the same stat that paladins already need. (Charisma)
Sure - it's going to cost a couple of extra feats to be able to case in armor (arcane armor mastery) but with that you can use a mithril breastplate with no spell failure.
Or you can ignore the arcane mastery feats, wear full plate, and just apply still spell to everything you cast in combat! (plus it means you don't need a free hand)
Take crossblooded dragon bloodline along with one of the bloodlines that eventually boosts your strength, or the arcane bloodline if you're going the still spell route.
I can't believe that no one has suggested sorceror yet! It uses the same stat that paladins already need. (Charisma)
Sure - it's going to cost a couple of extra feats to be able to case in armor (arcane armor mastery) but with that you can use a mithril breastplate with no spell failure.
I've been operating under the assumption that the paladin's player wants a character that plays like a paladin, which means an effective front-line fighter with high AC (among other things). A sorcadin, though very effective, is not that character. The spells will eat all his standard actions. Losing heavy armor without the monk's AC bonuses to back it up is very limiting, and a paladin's already a feat-starved character to begin with, so saying "it's going to cost a couple of extra feats" makes it even less paladin-like.
Anything you can get from a sorcerer you can probably get from an oracle at less cost and a more paladin-ly feel.
I'd go fighter for the feats. I've always wanted more feats as Paladin. There's some pretty cool stuff you pull with more feats. Like Eldrich Heritage Draconic. You Chr won't be low and you skill focus perception is always good. Weapon training stacks with smite, armor training mean you move full speed in armor and can have much higher dex bonus.
I'm also going to suggest Bloodrager, so many bloodlines seem they could fit thematically. Benefits would be: Rage, mercy rage cycling,
more spells, and some Bloodline development.
Also you can claim to be the wrath of your god and go berzerk when evil doesn't back down.
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Why not try Cavalier? Sure, you're stacking full-BAB classes, but several cavalier orders get bonuses for having high Charisma, such as Order of the Lion granting HUGE attack/damage bonuses based on Charisma, you can smite/challenge a single enemy for double your level in bonus damage, you get two mounts (or just an uber mount depending on how you think the abilities work together), and you could EVEN consider Order of the Star, because it states that 1/2 your Cavalier levels also apply as Paladin levels for the Purposes of Lay on Hands... which is NICE.
Order of the Blue Rose also helps with maintaining your Paladinhood and ideology by improving your subdual damage output. The two classes stack a bit much, but they can DEFINITELY share some love with each other.
Or just go Rogue, because a Sneak Smite is just a blast.
Freebooter ranger archetype might be worth considering, too, given the nature of the group.
Or....
You could go summoner, take "Summon Good Monster" feat, and barf out celestial critters as a conduit of the heavens.
Or go synthesist and become an angelic smite monster with amazing physical stats stacked on a sweet Charisma chassis.
P.S. Summoner gets haste at 4th (2nd level spell), can cast in armor, and give you the bazillion diversity choices of summoning which a Paladin lacks.
I would highly encourage the summoner...
are you allowed 3.5 prestige classes? It makes a ton of difference.
On the CHarOps boards at WoTC, there's a paladin/Bard combination using Sword of the Arcane ORder, and it's amazingly lethal.
But your combos with Paladin are:
Paladin/Oracle
Paladin/Bard
Paladin/Sorceror
Paladin/Cleric.
You want the spellcasting. Trust us. You want the spells.
==Aelryinth
Look on the Character Opts board over at WoTC for Tempest Stormwind's 'A-Game Paladin'. That should give you some inspiration, in more ways then one!
==Aelryinth