The Orc bloodline arcana is amazing for blasters, and probably justifies the Blood Arcanist archetype by itself. It comes with a bunch of strength increase, though; is there any good way to actually leverage those top good effect?
As an arcanist blaster you probably want to have a good int and a decent cha. I don't think you'd normally be able to afford enough physical stats to make good use of the strength boost. But if you could - rolling stats and some luck perhaps? - arcanists have an exploit to allow casting while polymorphed into stuff that can't usually perform the spellcasting components.
Otherwise, you can at least pose and flex with your half-decent strength and nice cha I guess.
My group uses a kind of ridiculous array of [18, 16, 14, 12, 12, 10] so getting a decent base strength isn't impossible. I guess the issue is, what do I actually get out of polymorphing before casting blasts?
Unfortunately, Blade Adept and Blood Arcanist don't stack; that was actually my initial thought. Probably not an awful build with Eldritch Heritage, but that's a pretty different character.
A dip into Sorcerer directly would get the bloodline, then I could use the exploit to get full progression, but that seems like it would lose too much for not enough of a gain.
There's touch attack spells which you could deliver via natural attacks which would benefit from the orc damage bonus and from the strength bonus to nake the natural attacks better, or occasionally it might be useful to polymorph into something tiny to deliver ranged touch spells (no benefit from the orc strength bonus with the latter, obviously).
Ridiculous as that stat array may be it's still marginal for the purpose though. You might go str 16, dex 12, con 12, int 18, wis 10, cha 14; with a human or half-orc +2 int you've got everything you need for the blaster side and just enough maybe to rip things up in melee. Wizards & similar need better stats than more martial types to do so, to make up for their poorer class abilities at such.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
At the very least, having enough Strength to carry your own equipment should be useful.