I am going to play a gestalt game in the near future, and I want to build a swashbuckler primarily. Anyone have ideas for what to do for the other class(es) throughout his career to make my character pretty crazy?
I was thinking of being an Aasimar with the alternative stuff for Dex and Cha, but I would love to hear other suggestions on race and all other things too. A few levels in enlightened paladin seem good, and I was thinking maybe inspired blade swashbuckler.
The 3rd party Psionics, and Path of War materials are open, but I personally don't know much about them.
I am a bit cautious about enlightened paladin, since it adds dex adn cha together for AC...and that runs up against the max dex of most armors fairly easily. There are options around... but are you sure you want to go monkish? I mean... between armor, buckler, scaling AC bonus, and a focus on dex, you can already become fairly tank-y.
Regular paladins also use your CHA bonus a lot better. Iroran paladins trade out smite for a fairly decent ability... but you can really leverage it for your attack bonus though.
An idea is to multiclass the other class while going full Swash. I'm open to suggestions for going all the way with both classes or multiclassing. I figured if I were to take levels for Divine grace, I might as well do that archetype to max out my dex mod on armor.
Still...you are most likely only going to get 1-2 AC out of the deal for a long while
The max dex on light armor..can pretty much be met with 18 dex (which, as your primary stat in a gestalt game...is most likely going to be 18). You get +2 to that with mithral on light armor... but the better choice is a mithral breast palte (for +6 armor and +5 max dex in the end, for a +11 vs the +10 of mithral light armor).
Confident defense works a lot better when you use it to supplement poor dex. Either a 'meh' 14 dex, or heck, eliminate dex entirely (since CHA can already add to your saves and AC). This would open up more room for str on a more traditional single class build.
I might just go with smite if that is all you are getting.
I just realized that you can't use a shield if you want to add your CHA bonus. I don't think that archetype is worth it anymore.
I just realized that you can't use a shield if you want to add your CHA bonus. I don't think that archetype is worth it anymore.
True, the shield is a nice bit of AC, and another item slot to enhance AC with. +3 armor costs more than a +2 armor and +2 shield.
A oracle // swashbuckler with high str & cha, using one of the revelations which replaces dex with cha for AC, should be effective.
Or a path of war warlord // swashbuckler using scarlet throne or primal fury maneuvers to kill things, and golden lion maneuvers to buff your friends.
Generally in gestalt you'd want one side to be a half-decent spellcaster or path of war initiator to be fully effective. A paladin is a bit iffy in that regard.
What I like about the paladin dip is having divine grace providing crazy saves. I'm not too familiar with investigator or Oracle.
A friend of mine suggested blade adept, but I've never played a spell caster, so it's outside of my comfort zone.
Zwordsman, what are you referring to with the free spell with a crit?
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Inspired Blade Swashbuckler//Emp Investigator or Vivisectionist alchemist.
The alchemist has the saves to give you better fortitude Saves. It also gives you sneak attack to go with your Swashbuckler abilities. You will have a great amount of skills.
The Investigator gives you better will saves. Superior skills with this build. Studied strike and sickening offensive will add a lot to your combat abilities.
Both builds have extracts to provide awesome buffs. Both can get mutagens to boost your dex and natural armor. You can easily reach +10 to dex by level 5. Grabbing fencing grace lvl 1 with inspired blade you can be a real terror on the battle field.
Inspired Blade Swashbuckler//Emp Investigator or Vivisectionist alchemist.
The alchemist has the saves to give you better fortitude Saves. It also gives you sneak attack to go with your Swashbuckler abilities. You will have a great amount of skills.
The Investigator gives you better will saves. Superior skills with this build. Studied strike and sickening offensive will add a lot to your combat abilities.
Both builds have extracts to provide awesome buffs. Both can get mutagens to boost your dex and natural armor. You can easily reach +10 to dex by level 5. Grabbing fencing grace lvl 1 with inspired blade you can be a real terror on the battle field.
Going off that idea for the swashbuckler side... how about ahve a magus as the other side?
It has perfect save (fort and will to go with your reflex). This removes a lot of the need for charmed life (which would still run off of CHA).
The combination of spellcombat and spellstrike has already been proven to be over powered enough that they had to errata it out of existence. Lets admit it- the fact that arcane deed could give precise strike was most likely the main reason it was nerfed into uselessness. And for good reason- spell strike and spell combat gives you an extra hit in a fake TWF style. And that is the exact thing swashbuckler tries to avoid- it gives such large static bonuses to each hit so that it matches 2 handing...and tries hard to make using it with TWF hard because it would give way more damage than intended (especially combined with other extra attacks like with haste)
Of course...this is GESTALT! So over powered is the order of the day. So take the stable DPR of the swashbuckler and add on the nova that is the magus. You might want to grab a mithral buckler (due to arcane spell failure), but that is a relatively minor concern (just an extra +1000 to the cost)
(Sidenote there is of course also the concern that magus was basically stealing all of the swashbuckler's signature abilities with just two deeds, and arcane deed/precise strike removed the need for power attack and basically made magus into a fake full BAB class that also had great saves, 6 spell levels, and fantastic nova power.)
Yeah... Magus/Swashbuckler is pretty much the canonical Magus gestalt, at least. You can go with Eldritch Scion Magus if you want cha-based casting; otherwise, Kensai lets you hit pretty insane AC (higher than you'd ever hit with a shield, anyway, if you can get your hands on Mage Armor; though if you want a shield, you can go Skirnir). Magus lets you make extra attacks/round, and Precise Strike + Arcane Pool pumps up the damage of those hits to barbarian+ levels.
I am surprised no one has suggested bard, specifically an Archeologist Bard. Play a half elf or other race that gets extra rounds of performance per day and take lingering performance. Make sure you take fates favored as one of your traits and pick up heroism as a second level spell. If you focus on spells that affect yourself you only need a CHA high enough to cast your spells. Take 13 STR so you can pick up power attack.
This is going to give you 6th level casting in armor. Heroism and Archeologist luck stack to give you huge bonuses on just about everything. Heroism lasts a long time so you should be able have it up for most combats. Your skills will also be the best in the game. A single point in a class skill will get you a good roll. You also get bardic knowledge and lore master so you can almost guarantee to be able to make any knowledge roll you need. Your saves will also be incredible. Archeologist luck scales up as you level up so it just keeps getting better.
Dance of a hundred cuts and latter Dance of a thousand cuts also works well and can replace heroism at latter levels. This allows you to use heroism for other things while getting an even higher bonus to attack, damage and AC.
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If you're not sold on the archetypical image of a rapier-wielding Swashbuckler, you could gestalt with a Geokineticist. Stacking the Swashbuckler damage bonus on the Kinetic Blade damage should be awesome. You also get an Invulnerable Rager's DR and other nice utilities out of the deal.
It might be worthwhile to go Overwhelming Soul so as better to synergize with your Swashbuckler's Cha demands. OS is generally less powerful than the default Kineticist, but if you have a high Cha to begin with, it's going to do just fine.
If I ever got to play in a gestalt game, this is what I'd pick.
Dawnflower Dervish Bard works great as well. And there's always Synthesist Summoner, the new Avian base form would work best.
Swash//ninja sounds amazing!!! Especially if you're not very comfortable with spellcasters.
Alternatively, a gestalt campaign might be a chance to learn about spellcasters, while relying on a martial class build for the majority of what you're doing.
A Swash//inquisitor might be fun, since you can use the judgments to boost attacks or damage or AC or saves.
Paladin//ninja or Swashbuckler//inquisitor or cleric or druid or paladin would give you all good saves.
I would suggest going swash//mesmerist with the mesmeric dodger archetype (or whatever its called)
Another vote for magus. Alternately, unchanged rogue may work well.
Another vote for magus. Alternately, unchanged rogue may work well.
An unchanged rogue is horrible. An unchained rogue is a lot better, but since he already can get DEX to damage as a swashbuckler it does not offer much. A Ninja would be a much better option. But as others have pointed out there is a lot of overlap between them. The idea of a gestalt character is to get as pick two classes that gives you the most options.
The Ideal gestalt has full BAB, all good saves, can cast spells, and has decent skills. They should also use the same, or at least similar stats. Each class should also have a decent amount of class abilities to give the character a wide variety of options.
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If you really don't want spells, Swash//Paladin is OK. You do get all good saves plus nice immunities, Cha synergy, strong combat abilities, and some healing. However you don't have much to do out of combat thanks to a lack of skills and utility spells. You're not even that much more versatile in combat than a straight paladin - the swash adds some tricks, but mostly you're just stronger in a particular style of melee combat.
On the other hand, while Magus//Inspired Blade Swashbuckler is pretty much the strongest gestalt for swash, the Magus can be tricky to handle for people who don't have a good grasp on how casting works. So that might not be for you.
Inspired Blade//Investigator and Swash//Bard (possibly Archaeologist) are good middle routes. While they do leave a weak Fort save, you end up with similar offensive power to Swash//Paladin as well as really strong skills and a selection of spells/extracts which can easily be used out of combat or before combat in order to simplify things for you in combat.
Then again, it depends on what the rest of the group is doing. If your party is for example Wizard//Investigator, Bard//Lore Oracle, and Archery Ranger//Inquisitor, then you may very well want to go for Swash//Paladin.
A spontaneous magus or some sort of paladin or antipaladin is best unless there's some way to move panache to another stat. You need the saves and if your primary goal is to be a swashbuckler you need to not be adding a need for another mental stat so you can have a large enough panache pool to actually be a swashbuckler.
That's where Inspired Blade comes in - it gives you both Int and Cha to panache.
I am currently playing an Aasimar Inspired blade swashbuckler/Steel hound investigator gestalt.
He's a skill monkey that can fight very well.
