Any build advice for a TWF Debuffer Magus?

[kestral287]

-Magi care about crits for Spellstrike purposes and that's about it. Precise Strike is explicitly not multiplied on crits anyway. Unless your GM is including the spells as "additives", which is ignoring how touch spells work (they can crit on their own) and how Spellstrike works. If your GM is doing that, drop the Kukri for something else, because there's no point going crit-heavy.

-Standard roll, if my memory is correct, gives you an average of 13. 13 is your minimum to be effective. In, quite literally, every stat. A single below-average roll destroys your build. Even 13 Str cripples your damage and to-hit (the latter of which is particularly brutal to you). Low Dex prevents you from using Two-Weapon Fighting. Any low Con is lethal to a d8 character who wants to be in melee, especially a lightly armored one. You need Int to cast. You need Wis for Stunning Fist to do anything. You need 13 Cha to take Eldritch Heritage. The build is dependent on literally every attribute.

-Precise Strike is a damage augmenter and nothing more. The problem with TWF with the Magus is not in Precise Strike, it's in Spell Combat. Artanthos' build above provided a way to TWF by alternating turns, but consider that its objective is resource management, not power. As a Hexcrafter, you have very little issues with resource management. If you expend all of your spells, you simply fall back on Hexes. You have no reason not to Spell Combat as much as possible; in fact you want to.

-If you're asking for build help, it'd generally be wise to let us know about houserules up front. Especially ones that are fundamental to your build.

That said, if you want to break your GM and make this build really shine? I'd look at a Kasatha. Four arms all the time means you can take Multiweapon Fighting and break out a main hand attack sequence, two off-handed attacks, and Spell Combat all at once. Also +2 Dex/Wis with no negative eases up your MAD issues a bit.

Your next option would be to find a race with a bite attack built-in. A Tiefling with the Maw or Claw racial trait or a Half-Orc with Toothy would allow you some flexibility with attributes because you can ditch Cha and saves you a feat by dropping Eldritch Heritage. It'd also make taking Feral Weapon Training/Natural Spell Combat much more palatable since your bite is available more than a few times per day. Every feat slot is going to be critical for this build. I actually miscounted slightly and you're at 8 feats+1 arcana for your functionality, since Feral Combat Training has a pre-req.

Even then, I'm really not sure how you're going to slot Feral Combat Training, Weapon Focus (Bite), and Natural Spell Combat into that build and retain any real effectiveness.

Also can I ask why you're taking Martial Artist? For a one-level dip it's no different from a Monk so it seems odd to specify that.

[Iterman]

The DM can see that the spell crit is separate from the weapon crit so the kukri is fine. My rolls are usually pretty bad (think single digits) but I still like the idea that a crit can happen.

The ability scores are a bit wonky but with my rolls and the +2 from half elf it worked out okay (18 int, 15 dex, 14 con, 13 str, 13 cha, 10 or so wis); I was hoping between misfortune and the fact that the dc increases by 1 every 2 levels, stunning fist would be pretty good since it's doesn't take an action to use and you can make your attacks touch at level 9 (10 in my case).

The use of eldritch heritage was that, besides allowing a bite attack, it also made the enemy save against the poison as well, to hopefully lower their fort saves, and if I don't go half-elf I lose out on the 3 arcanas I'd get for the elf favored class bonus.

I'd probably take out TWF in lieu of feral combat, weapon focus, and natural spell combat if I wanted to go more hex strike oriented.

Good catch on the martial artist; the DM tends to enforce alignment rolls a bit too stringently so I prefer to be CN and do whatever I feel like doing.

Thanks for all the advice it really is stimulating. One of the things I really wanted to incorporate into the build was hex strike since it seemed to fit the archetype so well, almost too well. I also wanted to have the highest crit possible (which you can't do on an unarmed strike); thus, it seemed logical that two weapon fighting was my best bet at combining the 2; I can definitely see giving it up but its' replacements seem to mostly want to deal damage instead of debuffing the opponent, which I can pretty reliably do if I'm TWF.

[Skyler Malik]

With the multiclassing you decide to do, your magus is going to have really crappy DCs. They naturally tend to use spells that veer away from DC as is. I think you are trying to spread yourself way to thin and do too much. In the end it will hurt your character.

Look at my Frostbite Magus if you want to see a true debuffer, if that is infact your goal. It will do much more then your misfortune strike/stunning fist combo would ever hope to accomplish.

[kestral287]

Skyler Malik wrote:

With the multiclassing you decide to do, your magus is going to have really crappy DCs. They naturally tend to use spells that veer away from DC as is. I think you are trying to spread yourself way to thin and do too much. In the end it will hurt your character.

This is very, very true.

I think you can make an effective TWF Magus. I don't like the design, but it can be built (and an example was given earlier).

I think you can make an effective debuffing Magus. The thread Malik is referring to has a solid example.

I think you can make an effective natural weapon/unarmed strike Magus. There are a good number of ideas that you're tossing around that could work, and the combination of delivering a Hex, a spell, and a full attack all in one round is cool.

But I don't think you can do all of these things at once.