Hey, this is my first Pathfinder campaign. I'm just looking tricks and strategies to spice up my play style to give it an extra flare, especially in combat. My DM is giving us 14 days in-character downtime to run errands, retrain, et cetera. I feel like a healer battery, and while I don't mind healing, that wasn't what I wanted this character to be.
It is a homebrew campaign in which I am the cleric of a trickster god (true neutral) on a race of avian people. My domains are Travel and Luck. The party is level 4.
My two feats, at the advice of my GM, allow me to cast both positive and negative energy and exclude enemy/allies situationally.
My party composition is thus:
Goblin Two-handed Fighter (Chaotic Neutral)
Goblin Rogue (CN)
Avian Bard (CN)
Human Sorceror (CN)
My stats are as thus: STR 10 DEX 14 CON 14 INT 16 WIS 21 CHA 18. AC is 21.
My items look something like this: A heavy mace (1d8) that doubles as CLW wand. Cassock of the Clergy. A replenishing surgeon's kit. A shield with 10 frost resist. Bag of Holding 2.
I have ~4,000 gold which will end up being closer to 5,000 when vendoring is all said and done.
So, what should I do here? Sky's the limit. Should I retrain domains? Pick certain spells? Think about dipping into something else like fighter, or maybe prestige classing, retrain feats? Any special items or tactics? I have no clue where to go with this, just that I love the game, just don't like being harmless as a wet noodle. I was originally drawn to cleric for how versatile everyone said it was, but I'm not feeling versatile right now. Is it just the low levels? Even when I get high levels, where is the real beef at? I really enjoy the RP of my character, just can't adjust to the speed of it.
Alright, now what you really wanna do is start him up with a nice marinade.
Good point. The DM sort heavily suggested that the CHA be high when we were making the character. Should I drop my shield and heavy mace/wand for a spear, my deity's favoured weapon? DM suggested a bow. Also, should I retrain one of my feats for Combat Reflexes or just wait until the next available feat?
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I think you may have at least one of two problems:
1) you spend too many turns healing, which you find boring. If that's the problem, CLW wand and making your buddies invest in armor and other defenses is your best bet.
OR
2) on the turns you aren't healing, you have nothing useful to do. I suspect that is a bigger issue. Here, there are a couple options. Maybe summoning. Retrain a feat or two. Maybe take extra channel and do more negative channelling.
Or , if you can sell it to the GM, take one level of unchained monk and buy a guidance weapon. You would use Wis for attack and damage and get two attacks at full BAB. If you could convince someone in the party to cast mage armor, your AC would be a wash.
It sounds like the game is already in motion and he can't switch around ability scores. It might be worth asking the GM if you can though, since it's your first game. If you can, pump your strength.
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@OP: It sounds as if you want your character to be more capable in combat. The lead weight around your neck is that 10 Strength. Like posters above say, see if your GM will allow you to swap a higher ability score into Strength.
Consider making effective use of reach tactics. That's a powerful combat style, especially for a cleric. This approach can work well, even with no feats, so long as you have at least 14+ Strength. Note how you can sometimes BOTH attack in melee AND cast a spell. That's the key to making this approach shine.
You are set up well to be a very strong caster cleric. While clerics can be built for melee too, spells are actually more powerful, especially as you level, and your wisdom is good enough to have some very high DCs.
Hold Person, for example, is a very powerful second level spell that can take someone completely out. There are tons of other good ones as well. If you can remove an opponent, even for 1 turn, that is usually more effective than healing the damage they do.
If I were you I would get rid of both negative channel and selective channel. Negative channel really isn't that much damage, and is usually not the best use of your standard action. Selective channel, even without negative channel, can be usefull, but I would plan on keeping a spell or two in reserve for combat healing (and only use it if someone will die if you don't) and just plan on channeling energy to heal people after combat is done.
I would use the two feats to instead boost my casting. Spell Focus enchantment for example would make those dcs very hard to beat. Spell focus conjuration and augment summoning are also a strong choice.
So the character is 4th lvl in a Homebrew Game, with GM recommended feats to make him a combat healer, and the recommendations are to change his stats/feats and have him melee. May as well have said retire the character and start a new one. Having an 18 cha and 21 wis means it is not a points buy anyway, so I am betting stat swapping wouldn't be allowed. He only has two feats atm, so any feat swapping removes his ability to channel. Looking at the group mix, he can start focusing on things like channeling at lvl 5+ or even go the self buff/melee route. He is a cleric and can always use bulls' str and other buffs to fill another roll.
More information please, what is your deity's favored weapon? This will determine how effective guided hand would be, the second I would like to know is what domains and sub domains are available? This will tell me what options are available to you.
What feat allows you to channel both negative and positive energy?
Don't heal in combat unless it is critical. A bless or bane is likely to cause you to win sooner and take less total damage.
The luck and travel domains are pretty sweet. I probably wouldn't switch them.
I would switch to just positive channeling and move the other feat to something to help your spell casting. Most of the time you will use the channeling out of combat to heal the group, but it is a good emergency measure to prevent someone from bleeding out.
What spells do you normally carry?
Versatile Channel from Ultimate Magic.
Also what kind of enemies are you usually facing?
If you face humaniods prepare hold person and murderous command. Very effective low level spells. Also use your bit of luck if you don't know what to do. Use it on someone who hits hard, and it will help them hit more often.
As for feats well that depends on what you want to do long term. If you want to control the battle feild from up close by shutting down enemies take channel smite and spell focus necromancy, when you hit level 5 you prepare bestow curse as much as is possible and you are very effective. whenever you attack with a touch spell you can apply channel smite for some incidental damage (you want to channel negative energy).
Most of the time healing in combat is considered sub optimal, and for good reason, it does nothing to finnish the fight, and healing can always be done after combat with a wand of clw.
First off, what did you want the character to be. There are a lot of possible directions -- melee is one of them, high-powered caster is another (and there are several directions that could go). Clerics are great at supporting other characters (making them better attackers, tougher defenders, etc.)
Generally speaking your feats should probably all support the main thing you are trying to do -- everything else can be handled by spells -- though there are a couple of feats that will be Really Important at higher levels (notably Quicken Spell).
The Reach Cleric is really fun. You can start right away with a longspear. At 5th level, take Combat Reflexes. For now, you can channel negative energy as a standard action, then when the bad guys try to stop you, hit them with AoO. You can also cast murderous command, hold person, sonic burst, bless, summon monster[/I], etc., and still draw in enemies and use your reach to get AoOs. You can use your Travel domain speed increase to get in front of your more squishy allies, like the bard and sorcerer.
If you summon monsters, remember that your bard ally can use Inspire Courage, etc., on them too.
Demi-god
Huginn
The Darksighted
(Lvl 20 Oracle lvl 20 Rogue)
Domains:
Air
Darkness
Knowledge
Luck
Rune
Travel
Trickery
Favored Weapons: Longspear and Short Spear
The main antagonist is a demon and his cult including mostly antipaladins, but we have fought a lot of things, including a nerfed wendigo, blood magic constructs, chain golems... it just depends on the dungeon.
Honestly, I'm not sure what I want here - I wanted to go dangerous touch cleric type but because this was my first game, basically my DM made the character for me. Now, I just want to be effective at an active roll something other than keeping everyone else alive and being a flanking buddy. It seems all of my standard actions are healing, else I'm going to let someone (usually the rogue or the sorcerer, sometimes the fighter) die. That leads me to not be able to cast my spells. Should I make them pick better armor or something? I usually pick Bull's Strength (for the fighter), Murderous Command, and everything else is generally situational. What goes into summoning? Just have to pick the spell? I picked it one game and it seemed very lackluster.
To be clear, are most people suggesting that I drop my mace/wand and resistance shield to go longspear, even with my low strength, which I'm pretty sure my DM will not allow me to switch out? Should I just be patient for better spells?
Honestly, your mace and shield are pretty sweet.
Summoning kind of sucks at low levels, but now at 4th level, they can stick around for 4 rounds, and pretty much soak up other hits (negating the need to heal PCs), provide flank buddies for everyone else, and cause some damage and do some battle field control.
But you have a really high Wisdom, so you have really high save DCs for your Save or suck spells. Murderous command is one of my favorite spells, and clerics have a few great spells like that.