Deebo the Tengu


Advice


Knocking people the f*** out. The moving parts:

Blade of Mercy Trait:
When striking to inflict nonlethal damage with any slashing weapon, you do not take the normal –4 penalty on your attack roll, and gain a +1 trait bonus to any nonlethal damage you inflict with a slashing weapon.

Sap Adept:
Whenever you use a bludgeoning weapon to deal nonlethal sneak attack damage, you gain a bonus on your damage roll equal to twice the number of sneak attack damage dice you rolled.

Sap Master:
Whenever you use a bludgeoning weapon to deal nonlethal sneak attack damage to a flat-footed opponent, roll your sneak attack dice twice, totaling the results as your nonlethal sneak attack damage for that attack.

A Tengu has a natural weapon bite attack that deals 1d3 damage. The alternate trait Claw attack gives two claw attacks as primary natural attacks that deal 1d3 points of damage, and are treated as having the Improved Unarmed Strike feat for the purpose of qualifying for other feats.

The natural attacks table tells us that bite attacks are Bludgeoning, Piercing, and Slashing while claw attacks are Bludgeoning and Slashing.

Putting all of this together, a Tengu rogue who gets a full round sneak attack will take three attacks with no penalties to hit. At fifth level each attack will do (1d3 + 1 + 6 + 6d6, average 30) nonlethal damage, not counting any bonus due to the rogue's attributes.

Am I missing anything? This seems like a pretty nice way to build a combat capable rogue for only two feats and a trait.


1. If I were your GM, I would force you to take Enforcer over Blade of Mercy. I wouldn't allow using something that benefits slashing attacks when using it as a bludgeoning weapon.

2. You still have a -5 penalty to hit with your claws if I'm not mistaken. They are automatically secondary weapons if you use any other weapon, which in this case would be your bite. I may be confused because natural attack rules are beyond my comprehension. You'd need Multiattack. And even then, that's a -2 penalty.

3. In addition to being very weak against elementals/oozes, you are now going to be very weak against undead too...

4. Could be a viable build if it works though.


Blade of Mercy applies to slashing weapons, not slashing attacks. According to the tables claws are slashing and bludgeoning weapons. I could see the argument either way but it doesn't seem fundamentally different from half-orcs counting as humans and as orcs.

My understanding of natural attacks is that the -5 applies with secondary attacks. With primary attacks you get one if you've moved, and all if it's a full round attack. I will admit that this understanding is based off of message board posts so I'd be happy to yield to somebody with a more complete understanding of natural attacks.

Multi-attack by its terms only applies to secondary attacks though. The tengu bite and claws are all called out as primary.

You definitely have some wasted feats if you run up against undead, but blade of mercy gives you a choice so you can just flip back to lethal at will. Bludgeoner is the same way.

The trick is keeping people flat-footed and vulnerable to sneak attacks. And packing alkali flasks.

Grand Lodge

Secret Wizard:

Claw and Bite are both primary weapons, thus they do not take the -5 penalty if the person is ONLY using natural weapons. If the tengu uses a club, dagger, or any other MANUFACTURED weapon, he does suffer this issue.

That said, constructs, undead, elementals and oozes are still going to love you OP. Love eating you that is. Yes, you can pack Holy Water and Alkali flasks, but that does get pricey after a while. I would dip 1 level of alchemist. Vivesectionist if you wanna improve sneak attack, regular if you want a construct option.


Rereading blade of mercy and bludgeoner I don't think blade of mercy works with sap master. Amulet of mighty fists set to merciful would be pretty uncontroversial though, right?

Undead and constructs aren't ideal but don't seem like that much of a problem. You can still just claw/claw/bite for lethal damage. You are dependent on a flank buddy to turn on sneak attack instead of using Enforcer -> Shatter defenses, but that's life.

I actually kind of like the Underground Chemist archetype here. You can take it together with Scout and Thug, and it lets you add your intelligence modifier and sneak attack with splash attacks (8th level scout -> walk 10ft and throw for SA damage). If they ever make the bomber talent PFS legal for Unchained things would get pretty fun.

Elementals and oozes are just bad news for any kind of rogue, really. I'm not sure there's a way around it other than turning yourself into a poorly optimized fighter. What do you see coming out of the alchemist dip? Most of their class features look fairly dependent on alchemist levels at first glance.

If I were going to do a dip I'd want to be in something that would give me a flanking buddy (i.e. cavalier -> pack flanking, or a fighter to clear out feats for Familiar Bond).

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