I'm looking for ways to optimize a 13th level character to best make use of two weapon fighting with a Tankard in each hand and able to consume as much alcohol as possible for the maximum amount of benefits possible. He obviously will worship Cayden. I'm thinking Human or Dwarf for race, and starting attributes before racial/level adjustment are 18, 16, 14, 14, 12, 12, placed as we see fit.
I see him as a sort of patron Saint of drunken fighting and ideally would like to mix Cleric(maybe Fighter would be better?), Drunken Barbarian and Drunken Master Monk if there is any way to do so. The Fighting Tankard seems like a good weapon choice, starting as a +1 Light Hammer with 6 potion slots in it(My thoughts are a Fighting Tankard in the offhand and a "regular" enchanted Tankard in the main hand since it counts as a Light Mace and does more damage). Accelerated Drinker seems a given. Divine Fighting Technique(Blade and Tankard) seems very useful but after these, I'm drawing a blank on how best I should build this character. I'm open to suggestions on how I should go about building and equipping this character and maximising his drunken efficiency.
One thing of note, hybrid classes are not allowed by my DM, so Swashbuckler is out unfortunately.
Well, levels in Drunken Master/Drunken Barbarian are an obvious choice. Make sure to optimize Constitution, so they can drink as much as possible without getting sickened. I would personally suggest Drunken Barbarian because they already need good Constitution for raging, so it ties together pretty well.
Here's my idea for a baseline:
Following Drunken Barbarian idea, the obvious direction to go (though I don't know if it's the best) is to take the whole of the Beast Totem line, and begin pouncing. I'd recommend Dragon Style to make the charging easier. Warpriest (Sacred Fist) was going to be my suggested 1 lvl. dip for this reason, but I guess that's not an option.
Str 16 (+2 Human +3 Adv) = 19, Rage to 27
Dex 14
Con 18, Rage to 24
Int 12
Wis 14
Cha 12
Feats:
--Monk, Martial Artist-- (Start 1st lvl.)
1 Divine Fighting Technique
1B Two-Weapon Fighting
1B Imp. Unarmed Strike
1B Combat Reflexes
--Barbarian, Drunken Brute, Invulnerable Rager- (Start 2nd lvl.)
3 RP Beast Totem, Lesser
3 Double Slice
5 RP Internal Fortitude
5 Dragon Style
7 RP Beast Totem
7 Imp. Two-Weapon Fighting
9 RP Good for What Ails You? or Strength Surge? or Superstition? or Staggering Drunk?
9 Critical Focus
10 RP Reckless Abandon (+3 Atk, -3 AC)
11 Imp. Critical (Rapier?)
12 RP Beast Totem, Greater
13 Staggering Critical
So, here we go: the way this set up works is you already have your tankard and (if not in a social situation) your rapier in hand at the start of combat, and spend your Swift activating Dragon Style. You then charge your opponent, uninhibited by allies or rough terrain. Full-Attack, counting on your Staggering Criticals and Damage Reduction to counter-balance the -7 total you have to your AC immediately following the charge. If your opponent doesn't have DR/Magic, and you plan on traditional two-weapon fight, I'd suggest leading your off-hand with your elbow (x1-1/2 Str dmg.)
There are two issues I forsee with fighting Tankard. First, you can't use your slots for a Dirty Trick. Second, your GM might not offer you the ability to refill those slots without magic. Nothing mechanically allows it.
I was preferring to use two Tankards instead of a rapier. Two fisting my drinks so-to-speak.
Is there any particular reason why you went with Monk over say, Cleric? I really would like to tie in the religious aspects of worshipping Cayden.
Drunken Barbarian and Drunken Master Monk if there is any way to do so.
You're in luck my friend.
The Enlightened Warrior Aasimar trait allows you progress as a Monk even when Neutral or Neutral Good, allowing you to take Barbarian and Monk levels AND Worship Cayden all at the same time (though you'd have to be NG).
If Aasimar isn't your thing you can always take Adopted into it.
If you want Domains and some Cayden stuff, you could always Variant Multiclass Cleric or Deific Obedience as well!
The trouble with clerics (or oracles, inquisitors etc.) is that casting is mostly incompatible with TWFing tankards. You don't have a free hand.
Anyway, my thought is that the tankard/style gives you two things. One is a way of quickly buffing without spells, which makes moderate amounts of casting redundant. The other is an advantage with the dirty trick combat maneuver. If you want to use the latter at 13th level you need a big bonus to work with, CMDs can be very high. The strength surge rage power is obvious - it's only 1/rage so you need to rage cycle. One level of oracle with the lame curse gives you the ability to be immune to fatigue. Barbarian 12/Oracle 1 should be a winner here.
At 13th level with those levels you get 6 rage powers, 7 feats (8 if human) and one revelation.
The minimum to make dirty trick work well is Dirty Fighting, Greater Dirty Trick and Dirty Trick Master. You'll want TWF and Improved TWF. Divine Fighting Technique is the point of the build and anyway you need it to not provoke AoOs with Dirty Trick when not flanking. That leaves you 1-2 feats - likely Power Attack and/or Raging Vitality.
For rage powers the beast totem line is good, charging up to a dragon, throwing your drink in its face and beating it to death with your mugs sounds good. 3 used. Strength Surge is needed as noted. That leaves you a couple to do what you like with, likely the boozier ones.
With your one revelation I'd go with the Battle mystery and choose Battlefield Clarity, but War Sight and Surprising Charge have their points.
Also, make sure you have a handy haversack stuffed full of potions, you're going to burn through a lot of Enlarge Persons etc.
One of the first things you're going to need to do is find out what inebriation rules your DM is going to use.
If they're going to use the default PF rules, you may as well give up on the idea, as drinking alcohol will straight up murder you since it - RAW - imposes moderate addiction and stacking, incurable Con damage with every individual drink. You'll die in a few rounds.
You may be interested in my Alternate Drinking Rules.
If your DM is going to be using less ludicrous drinking rules than the RAW, however, Drunken Monk is excellent and opens access to the Fast Drinker feat. The Cayden Cailean Fighting Tankard is an excellent weapon to look into (since RAW, tankards can't be enchanted as weapons.) Drunken Rager is a better drunken barbarian archetype than Drunken Brute, imo, and stacks interestingly with Drunken Master with the Enlightened Warrior trait listed above.
Blade & Tankard is a really interesting divine fighting technique as pointed out above.
There are some great alcohol-fueled rage powers available, with Good For What Ails You being the standout winner.
Also worth noting is that special ales are crafted with Craft (Alchemy) and provide alchemical bonuses, so an alcohol-themed Alchemist (or Alcoholemist) can be a very fun character concept (with mutagen acting as a real kick-in-the-pants rotgut.)
The special ales themselves, though, are sadly not worth using unless your DM is ditching the addiction rules, as again, they'll straight-up kill you (though strangely not as fast as rum will kill you.)
Just like drugs, alcohol can be abused and have significant negative effects. In general, a character can consume a number of alcoholic beverages equal to 1 plus double his Constitution modifier. Drinks consumed in excess of this total cause the character to become sickened for 1 hour per drink above this maximum. Particularly exotic or strong forms of alcohol might be treated as normal drugs. Those who regularly abuse alcohol might eventually develop a moderate addiction.
These are the base Drinking Rules, and they're awful. They "seem" reasonable on the surface, but they're extremely poorly-defined, and attempts to understand them start to show all the cracks.
For instance, "a character can consume a number of alcoholic beverages equal to 1 plus double his Constitution modifier". Okay, seems reasonable enough, right?
...
Is that per hour? Per day?
If it's per hour, that's clearly insane - that means a character with a 20 Con can consume 200 alcoholic beverages per day without any ill effects.
If it's per day, that's also clearly insane. That would mean that a dwarf with a 20 Con can only consume 11 drinks in an entire day before becoming sickened, regardless of whether he drinks all 11 in one minute or over the course of the entire day.
Then there are the lovely Moderate Addiction rules. Which will kill you.
I was preferring to use two Tankards instead of a rapier. Two fisting my drinks so-to-speak.
Is there any particular reason why you went with Monk over say, Cleric? I really would like to tie in the religious aspects of worshipping Cayden.
I was going with monk because a Cleric doesn't get you the necessary feats for the build I was suggesting: a character that can more or less charge his way through any tap to a nearby opponent, Rapier-Elbow-Rapier-Tankard them in the face, probably leaving them staggered immediately afterwards. The monk gives you Improved Unarmed Strike for free, granting an extra Feat slot for Dragon Style at level 5. While you could be a cleric, and you might prefer a smattering of 1st level spells and a 1d6 Channel Energy ability, my personal preference leaned toward picking up Combat Reflexes (upping attack opportunities significantly), a Hail Mary Stunning Fist ability, and a somewhat significant unarmed attack, plus a few odd skill points for Profession (Brewer) and Knowledge (Local). Neither option is truly optimal.
If you want a religious tie beyond something like the Fortified Drinker trait, then Inquisitor is not a terrible choice. But I'd give Cleric a miss.
I see your logic in there... I'll be building him as as your build then, as the more I think on it the more I like it though I'm still open to most suggestions, I have a couple ideas I wield really like to go with but some of them just seem unviable or mechanically unusable. One in particular is going Divine Fighting Technique for the offhand tankard but also taking Thunder and Fang and wielding an earthbreaker in his main hand to drive home the drunken brute sort of feel I'm going for with the character.
Concept-wise, he is sort of a mix between freedom fighter, drunkard, brewer and norse berserker and I really like the idea of him wielding a massive hammer along with his large tankard of ale and challenging giants to drinking contests.
Mechanically speaking, does Drunken Brute combine with Titan Mauler? If so then I could have him using Large weapons at little/no penalty because I've chosen Tiefling as his race with the #16 alternate racial trait. With their other alternate trait, they count as Humanoid and therefore benefit from Enlarge Person, meaning he'd effectively be wielding Huge sized weapons in combat. Nasty.
Alrighty, here are my thoughts.
First, minor change to my previous build: add the Human bonus and 4th level advancement to Dex to qualify for 2 weapon fighting.
Second, Divine Fighting Technique requires a light weapon and a tankard, or a Rapier and a tankard, but Titan Fighter calls for a Two-Handed Weapon. There is a work around for this. Effortless lace allows you to wield a two-handed weapon intended for you as a light weapon, but only for the purposes of "any feat, spell, or special weapon ability" but not for class abilities. Thus, an Earthbreaker can be wielded in one hand by a Titan Mauler (Two-Handed Weapon) and still count as a Light weapon for the Divine Fighting Technique. The only downside of all of this is that Effortless Lace requires that your size (not the size of the weapon you can use, I think) and the weapon size match, so the Tiefling option is out the window.
However, you can't take Drunken Brute and Titan Mauler, as they both replace fast movement. But if we aren't using an 18-20 weapon, then we don't need critical focus or staggering critical nearly as badly. Thus, we can take Extra Rage to offset the extra rounds of rage gained by Drunken Brute (and you are already drinking as part of your attack, so you can gain the other benefits anyway.)
Human (after +3 Dex, +2 Str)
Barbarian 13 (Drunken Brute)
Str 18, Rage to 24
Dex 17
Con 18, Rage to 24
Int 12
Wis 14
Cha 12
Traits:
Fortified Drinker
???
Feats:
--Monk, Martial Artist-- (Start 1st lvl.)
1 Divine Fighting Technique
1B Two-Weapon Fighting
1B Imp. Unarmed Strike
1B Combat Reflexes
--Barbarian, Drunken Brute, Invulnerable Rager- (Start 2nd lvl.)
3 RP Beast Totem, Lesser
3 Double Slice
5 RP Internal Fortitude
5 Dragon Style
7 RP Beast Totem
7 Imp. Two-Weapon Fighting
9 RP Good for What Ails You? or Strength Surge? or Superstition? or Staggering Drunk?
9 Extra Rage
10 RP Reckless Abandon (+3 Atk, -3 AC)?
11 Imp. Critical (Earthbreaker)
13 RP Beast Totem, Greater
13 Extra Rage Power: Deathless Frenzy
I added Deathless Frenzy as it gives you a round after you would be dead to try to save yourself. If you're already using a fighting tankard, you can store away a Cure Serious Wounds potions, and slam it back as part of a full-attack. (You could potentially do more, but I don't know if Divine Fighting let's you drink multiple times or just once in place of your off-hand attacks.)
EDIT:
Alternatively, you could keep Drunken Brute (or even see if your GM will allow Drunken Rager ability to work w/ Divine Fighting Technique). You would still need Effortless Lace.
1 Divine Fighting Technique
1B Two-Weapon Fighting
1B Imp. Unarmed Strike
1B Combat Reflexes
--Barbarian, Drunken Brute, Invulnerable Rager- (Start 2nd lvl.)
3 RP Beast Totem, Lesser
3 Weapon Focus (Klar)
5 RP Internal Fortitude
5 Weapon Focus (Earth Breaker)
7 RP Beast Totem
7 Imp. Two-Weapon Fighting
9 RP Good for What Ails You? or Strength Surge? or Superstition? or Staggering Drunk?
9 Double Slice
10 RP Reckless Abandon (+3 Atk, -3 AC)?
11 Dragon Style
13 RP Beast Totem, Greater
13 Thunder and Fang