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I would like my stats before Racials to be: 14, 14, 14, 13, 14, 7. As you can see that comes out to 19 points. The only way to fix it would be to lower a stat I don't want lowered, to raise a stat I don't want raised. I need the 13 for a feat prereq, so can't lower that, I'd have to lower a 14 and then the only thing I could raise would be the 7 to a 9. Do I have to make the math come out properly or can I just leave it with the extra point? This is for a PFS character.
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All points must be spent.
My 20 point buy often looks like this:
14, 14, 14, 13, 12, 10
And then are allocated where they need to go. Also, racial modifiers help in order to boost stats for feat prerequisites. You don't suffer too much with having the 12, and you don't have to deal with a 7 ability score. If you posted your class and what those stats are for, I could maybe help you more.
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Dump charisma. If you're not a diplomancer anyway you lose nothing by tanking it.I would do 16 str (racial), 12 Dex, 14 Con, 13 Int, 14 Wis, and 10 Cha.
Dipping brawler is also viable, but you would want boon companion in there somewhere.
I think that's what he's trying to do, but dumping to an 8 only gets him 2 points back, which isn't enough to take Dex to 14, and dumping Cha to a 7 gives him 4 points, which would let him take a 14 Dex, but with 1 point left over. There's nowhere he can put that 1 point, so it isn't a legal point buy. Leaving dumping Cha to 9 and raising Dex to 13 or keeping Cha at 10 and Dex at 12 as the two most likely options.
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I think that's what he's trying to do, but dumping to an 8 only gets him 2 points back, which isn't enough to take Dex to 14, and dumping Cha to a 7 gives him 4 points, which would let him take a 14 Dex, but with 1 point left over. There's nowhere he can put that 1 point, so it isn't a legal point buy. Leaving dumping Cha to 9 and raising Dex to 13 or keeping Cha at 10 and Dex at 12 as the two most likely options.Dump charisma. If you're not a diplomancer anyway you lose nothing by tanking it.I would do 16 str (racial), 12 Dex, 14 Con, 13 Int, 14 Wis, and 10 Cha.
Dipping brawler is also viable, but you would want boon companion in there somewhere.
Yep, which is why I just left it at 10 in my build suggestion. Unless he wants to deal with an odd stat until level 4, it's just more feasible to leave it at 10 and not worry about dumping.
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STR: 15+2 DEX: 12 CON: 14 INT: 14 WIS: 14 CHA: 7
If you're a melee based hunter you really only need dex for ac and that's the easiest thing in the game to boost Having an odd strength score you up later isn't a problem for melee (it is for archers because you want to buy your str bow asap)
if you need a 13 int in pfs you may as well go for 14: skills matter.
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I play a human melee hunter.
Try
Str: 14
Dex: 15 + 2
Con: 12
Int: 13
Wis: 14
Cha: 8
I play in PFS and have a boon to let me use an Elven Curve Blade with proficiency. Took Weapon Finesse. Level 4 stat bump to Dex. Working towards adding Agile and Keen to my blade.
I would also take Eye for Talent instead of my bonus feat then take Huntmaster at some point for a feat.
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STR: 15+2 DEX: 12 CON: 14 INT: 14 WIS: 14 CHA: 7
If you're a melee based hunter you really only need dex for ac and that's the easiest thing in the game to boost Having an odd strength score you up later isn't a problem for melee (it is for archers because you want to buy your str bow asap)
if you need a 13 int in pfs you may as well go for 14: skills matter.
This works too. I agree with the intelligence part.
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The Wild Child dip is great, martial flexibility works well with hunter tactics in addition to brawler's cunning allowing you to bypass the INT 13 requirement.
Alternatively, you do not need a wisdom of 14, 12 is plenty with a headband to give you access to your higher level spells (I suppose will saves are a thing... but I wouldn't worry about it).
Or both, and treat yourself to a starting strength of 18 (after mods) ;)
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Handle animal works off Charisma. I would not suggest dumping Charisma if you want to be able to have a reasonable shot at pushing your animal companion.
True, but does pushing an AC happen often enough to justify lowering another ability score?
At first level you're looking at a +8 (1 rank + 3 class skill + 4 link + 2 training harness - 2 charisma) so you're only failing to command your AC with known tricks on 1, or on a 1-3 if it has taken damage.
Once you've hit 4th level and have a +11, you arguably don't need to take any more ranks in handle animal as you'll always pass the DC 12. Yes you'll need a 14+ on the dice to push your companion, but you shouldn't be doing this in combat and have the time to make the check out of combat.
Of course, more ranks in handle animal is handy to have if you ever decide to retire an existing companion.
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True, but does pushing an AC happen often enough to justify lowering another ability score?That depends entirely on how familiar with the animal companion rules a GM is. I've seen a lot of issues with not fully understanding how tricks work, and the necessity of things like heel and stay.
QFT. A level 1 character with 7 CHA, class skill, and 1 rank will have a +2, +6 when it's their animal companion. That means a 19 to push, and you cannot successfully push if the animal is injured. Good luck with that. If you're in a situation where you can't take 10, there's a chance you'll fail to get it to respond to a known trick as it's a DC 10 check for that.
Player: "I tell my lion to attack. It's got the attack trick trained twice."
GM: "Roll that Handle Animal."
Player: Only a 3 on the die, total is 9."
GM: "Your cat is now compulsively grooming itself, though still following its last command of defend."
Imagine the party's reaction when you fail that check on Heel to get it to stop attacking a surrendering NPC.
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QFT. A level 1 character with 7 CHA, class skill, and 1 rank will have a +2, +6 when it's their animal companion. That means a 19 to push, and you cannot successfully push if the animal is injured. Good luck with that. If you're in a situation where you can't take 10, there's a chance you'll fail to get it to respond to a known trick as it's a DC 10 check for that.
Player: "I tell my lion to attack. It's got the attack trick trained twice."
GM: "Roll that Handle Animal."
Player: Only a 3 on the die, total is 9."
GM: "Your cat is now compulsively grooming itself, though still following its last command of defend."Imagine the party's reaction when you fail that check on Heel to get it to stop attacking a surrendering NPC.
+8 with a training harness. Calculating a lesser value to prove a point without acknowledging the original number quoted is pretty poor form. If you see an error in my calculation please inform me, or the bonus as 1st must be considered to be +8 and not +6.
Why are people pushing their animal companions in combat? DC 25 is high regardless of your charisma being 7 or 10. Allocating 4 points of your 20 point-but for a +2 to handle animal checks to increase your push chance percentage from 15% to 25% is not good.
The situation you mention seems pretty anecdotal, and isn't really a compelling argument for a higher charisma. Assuming your animal companion is injured, the chance of your AC failing to follow your command is 15% at 1st level. The loss of action economy is pretty bad here, but it's at 1st level and the benefits from a strong ability array show much better than at any other level. The character gets so much more from having +1 to hit & +2 to damage from a higher STR, or +1 INIT, REF & AC from a higher DEX than a +10% chance to handle your AC. Not only that, but this drawback is completely negated by 4th level, and extra points invested into charisma would now effectively be meaningless.
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Jack,
while it is true that:
The first time a character with levels in druid, ranger, or any other class that grants an animal companion gains an animal companion, the animal enters play knowing its maximum number of tricks as dictated by the animal companion's Intelligence and the character's effective druid level.
After this initial animal companion, you'll only be receiving one with its bonus tricks... all others need to be trained.
So, let's say, in your first adventure, your sadness ensues and your pet badger dies. Then, your hunter calls a new one. It has a single trick (we'll say, attack). Then, you want to train it in defend (you only have a single rank, so you can only train on trick).
You have to hit a DC20 skill check, which with only a +8 isn't guaranteed to happen. So, instead, since the skill check is the same, you think I'll just go for special training. You still have a 55% chance of failure, and even if you succeed, it will not attack undead, etc, since it cannot start with the attack anything trick (which has a prereq of attack).
It would be level 3, likely, before you can even take-10 on that training (as you need a +10 bonus to succeed with that).
Do purchased animals come fully trained or do I have to train them myself?
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GM is. I've seen a lot of issues with not fully understanding how tricks work, and the necessity of things like heel and stay.
No, that's not it.
Pushing a critter is either something you can take 20 on (you need a +5 , so +4 link -3 charisma +2 1 rank +3 trained= you're good) or something you're trying to do in combat (in which case +- 3 isn't really that much: it's not going to be reliable even for most of your PFS career even if you pump it.
a 5k circlet of persusion will get you the same benefits as a 36,000 gp item. If all you use charisma for is skills, it's very cheap to dump.
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Player: "I tell my lion to attack. It's got the attack trick trained twice."
GM: "Roll that Handle Animal."
Player: Only a 3 on the die, total is 9."
GM: "Your cat is now compulsively grooming itself, though still following its last command of defend."
"i set my animal to defend this morning, so now that i've been attacked it hops into the fight, because i'm HIS chew toy and the purple worm can't have it."
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Handle animal works off Charisma. I would not suggest dumping Charisma if you want to be able to have a reasonable shot at pushing your animal companion.True, but does pushing an AC happen often enough to justify lowering another ability score?
At first level you're looking at a +8 (1 rank + 3 class skill + 4 link + 2 training harness - 2 charisma) so you're only failing to command your AC with known tricks on 1, or on a 1-3 if it has taken damage.
Once you've hit 4th level and have a +11, you arguably don't need to take any more ranks in handle animal as you'll always pass the DC 12. Yes you'll need a 14+ on the dice to push your companion, but you shouldn't be doing this in combat and have the time to make the check out of combat.
Of course, more ranks in handle animal is handy to have if you ever decide to retire an existing companion.
On all 3 characters I have that have animal companions, I often find myself wanting to do something creative or otherwise not covered by the rules that requires a push.
So I'd say it happens fairly often for me. As a GM, I require pushing semi-frequently as players often want to try things that they don't have a truck for. So often enough that tanking on Charisma is an issue.
I also have never seen a training harness in use, so you can't add that to the check as SOP.
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+8 with a training harness. Calculating a lesser value to prove a point without acknowledging the original number quoted is pretty poor form. If you see an error in my calculation please inform me, or the bonus as 1st must be considered to be +8 and not +6.
Didn't see your numbers because I was responding to MisterSlanky's post, which didn't quote them. I forget about the training harness because it's in an obscure place (Human racial equipment in ARG) and mentioned literally nowhere else that I can find. There are a lot of players who will probably have the same issue.
Why are people pushing their animal companions in combat? DC 25 is high regardless of your charisma being 7 or 10. Allocating 4 points of your 20 point-but for a +2 to handle animal checks to increase your push chance percentage from 15% to 25% is not good.
Temporarily teaching your animal companion Exclusive when an enemy casts Charm Animal is pretty handy if you don't have the slots for it normally. Pushing it to Serve someone if it does have Exclusive is pretty helpful too. Using Flee on neutral animals can be pretty useful, as well. There are a lot of potential uses.
This ignores other skills you might want that are keyed off CHA and all the times where you come across CHA damage, drain, or penalties that could remove you from play. I can think of at least one scenario where there was the potential to permanently lose a character because of low CHA in a way that you could never recover, even with prestige.
The situation you mention seems pretty anecdotal, and isn't really a compelling argument for a higher charisma. Assuming your animal companion is injured, the chance of your AC failing to follow your command is 15% at 1st level. The loss of action economy is pretty bad here, but it's at 1st level and the benefits from a strong ability array show much better than at any other level. The character gets so much more from having +1 to hit & +2 to damage from a higher STR, or +1 INIT, REF & AC from a higher DEX than a +10% chance to handle your AC. Not only that, but this drawback is completely negated by 4th level, and extra points invested into charisma would now effectively be meaningless.
While it's true that the math plays out in favor of stronger arrays at this point, it also swings both ways - still-valid faction mission requires a Diplomacy check and you have a -2 mod? Good luck. As you've discussed the math here, it seems like you've singled out the benefits of CHA to just Handle Animal, while touting every possible benefit to other attributes. Yes, CHA is relatively weak in most builds of most classes that aren't dependent on it (and even some that are dependent on it), but in the context of "let's make a legal point buy," I think it's fair to say that turning a -2 into a +0 and a +2 to a +1 in return is not a bad trade.
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Temporarily teaching your animal companion Exclusive when an enemy casts Charm Animal is pretty handy if you don't have the slots for it normally.
get the slots.
don't treat your animal like equipment, and attacking you won't be something it's in its nature to do, and charm animal won't work.
and I don't know if exclusive and serve work like that.
Using Flee on neutral animals can be pretty useful, as well.
That absolutely does not work.
This ignores other skills you might want that are keyed off CHA
Which someone else can have. If you're not making the check with a -2 you're really not going to make it with a +2 either.
Charisma absolutely is a dump stat if your class isn't based off of it.
and all the times where you come across CHA damage, drain, or penalties that could remove you from play.
You can afford to get it fixed by the time you get to it.
but in the context of "let's make a legal point buy," I think it's fair to say that turning a -2 into a +0 and a +2 to a +1 in return is not a bad trade.
It absolutely is a terrible trade. +1 to something you do all day every day adds up to a LOT more than +2 to something you'll be doing ONLY if you're the best option. Chances are very good that if you're the party face as a hunter you're going to fail anyway. The most you can usually hope to amount to is a +2 aid another.
You're not looking at a meager +10% chance of success, you're looking at (+10% chance of success) IF the DC isn't over 22 AND if you're the one making the roll. Thats pretty unlikely and it gets less unlikey as a group grows and builds a stable of characters to draw from.
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That's funny, because I've had to push Lord Snappy around a lot over the last few years. He might be a pretty scorpion, but he can be dumb as a rock... which is probably why I have to keep my scorpion discipline tool ready
Still, as a vermin, he doesn't get too many tricks. So most of what he does, I have to force him to do, and that has included "Down" for a good while.
But I have heard of others that have had the same touble... including my good friend Sgt. Rikki Gunderson... that wolverine of hers used to go off in a rage, well, before he was killed crossing into Druma a while back. Her new companion, Crunch, well, he's still being trained, she tells me.
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That's funny, because I've had to push Lord Snappy around a lot over the last few years. He might be a pretty scorpion, but he can be dumb as a rock... which is probably why I have to keep my scorpion discipline tool ready [ooc](shows off a wooden club)
*whistles for a cyclops with a bigger club*
Definitely time for a union meeting...
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Temporarily teaching your animal companion Exclusive when an enemy casts Charm Animal is pretty handy if you don't have the slots for it normally.
get the slots.
don't treat your animal like equipment, and attacking you won't be something it's in its nature to do, and charm animal won't work.
and I don't know if exclusive and serve work like that.
"Go take a nap" probably is in its nature, though. Re: exclusive and serve, the biggest question would be duration and how it interacts with other tricks. My axebeak has Exclusive and Throw Rider, so I have to push Serve if I want to let someone else ride him.
Using Flee on neutral animals can be pretty useful, as well.That absolutely does not work.
I know you and I have clashed over uses of Handle Animal in the past. This example is unequivocally legal and used in scenarios, including a notable chase scene from Season 4 where my not-at-all-H.A.-trained fighter asked if he could just kill the horse instead. Not combat, but a domestic animal.
This ignores other skills you might want that are keyed off CHAWhich someone else can have. If you're not making the check with a -2 you're really not going to make it with a +2 either.
Charisma absolutely is a dump stat if your class isn't based off of it.
Who besides me has been at a table where the highest CHA party member is the spiritualist's phantom or druid's badger? Who besides me has GM'd or played content that includes mechanics where negative CHA means that your lead has a penalty or you have a problem participating in the scenario (a certain Season 5 scenario comes to mind)
and all the times where you come across CHA damage, drain, or penalties that could remove you from play.You can afford to get it fixed by the time you get to it.
Not always the case. I've knocked Seekers unconscious with attribute damage before while GMing. In the certain scenario I'm recalling, there is no way to remove the penalty until you complete the scenario and, if it stacks up enough, your character is permanently lost. It's possible to have that happen well before you actually get to the objective.
but in the context of "let's make a legal point buy," I think it's fair to say that turning a -2 into a +0 and a +2 to a +1 in return is not a bad trade.It absolutely is a terrible trade. +1 to something you do all day every day adds up to a LOT more than +2 to something you'll be doing ONLY if you're the best option. Chances are very good that if you're the party face as a hunter you're going to fail anyway. The most you can usually hope to amount to is a +2 aid another.
You're not looking at a meager +10% chance of success, you're looking at (+10% chance of success) IF the DC isn't over 22 AND if you're the one making the roll. Thats pretty unlikely and it gets less unlikey as a group grows and builds a stable of characters to draw from.
My hunter disagrees with a number of your assertions. (physical stats slightly borked due to In-Play adjustments for dual Animal Focus and buffs ongoing for a split-session module) He's one of the few characters I've played from first level with a bit of organic growth in choices - his beloved horse was murdered by Aspis when he was forced to leave her at a ruin's entrance and they came in from behind and it didn't make a ton of sense in-character to go for a new animal at the time...or any time after. At no point ever did I envision the character has a CHA-dump or failure when it came to interacting with people, including picking up a trait for Diplomacy. I've been scenario face before on this character. My starting array was 14 18 (16+2 racial) 12 8 14 10. Anecdotal, sure, but the character has been very successful throughout his career.
Yes, anything that you fail to invest in will not perform well as you progress. On a long enough time span, stats themselves provide relatively trivial bonuses or penalties, so investments can offset penalties. What people envision as their character, though, can be just as important as the mechanics by which it operates. Still, going back to the point of the OP, we're talking about a situation where the "desired" point-buy was illegal and one of the failure points was a secondary attribute. That is a solvable problem.
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"Go take a nap" probably is in its nature, though.
it doesn't really matter. it's charmed, its not attacking (what is probably the big bad) whether it has exclusuve or not.
Re: exclusive and serve, the biggest question would be duration and how it interacts with other tricks. My axebeak has Exclusive and Throw Rider, so I have to push Serve if I want to let someone else ride him.
Thats not it.
Its not clear if they're commands you can give the creature or something the creature learns how to do. The wording leans towards the latter, especially with regard to someone else using your ranks. It reads more like "if you teach your critter this trick it has this ability" rather than "if you teach your critter this trick it drops the dc to do the trick from 25 to 10"
I know you and I have clashed over uses of Handle Animal in the past. This example is unequivocally legal and used in scenarios, including a notable chase scene from Season 4 where my not-at-all-H.A.-trained fighter asked if he could just kill the horse instead. Not combat, but a domestic animal.
Special
Untrained If you have no ranks in Handle Animal, you can use a Charisma check to handle and push domestic animals, but you can’t teach, rear, or train animals.
That is NOT remotely the same as telling a wild animal, or someone's companion to go away. By that logic you can give a guard dog a DC 10 command to attack their owner, or a wild lion a DC 25 command as a full round action to attack their pridemates.
Wild empathy would not be a special ability, at all, if that's how this worked. that takes a full minute, is an actual class feature, and doesn't exert nearly that much control over the creature. Its unabashed, unadulterated, unexcused rules lawyering cheese. The introduction of the exclusive trick did not open up a glaring hole in the pet classes that had been sitting there for 15 years prior: note that even exclusive requires that the pet be charmed or wild empathied to be relevant.
Who besides me has been at a table where the highest CHA party member is the spiritualist's phantom or druid's badger? Who besides me has GM'd or played content that includes mechanics where negative CHA means that your lead has a penalty or you have a problem participating in the scenario (a certain Season 5 scenario comes to mind)
You're going to failboat anyway if most of those are the case (no reason the phantom can't pull it off though)
Compare that to the number of times you miss by 1 or the enemy has 5 hp left.
and all the times where you come across CHA damage, drain, or penalties that could remove you from play.You can afford to get it fixed by the time you get to it.
My hunter disagrees with a number of your assertions.
She proves the point. You could drop the charisma up the int and for the low low cost of -1 to diplomacy and handle animal have an entire +12/+11 to a different skill. Or buy a headband of they really like me instead of the pathfinder pouch and efficient quiver.
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Re: exclusive and serve, the biggest question would be duration and how it interacts with other tricks. My axebeak has Exclusive and Throw Rider, so I have to push Serve if I want to let someone else ride him.Thats not it.
Its not clear if they're commands you can give the creature or something the creature learns how to do. The wording leans towards the latter, especially with regard to someone else using your ranks. It reads more like "if you teach your critter this trick it has this ability" rather than "if you teach your critter this trick it drops the dc to do the trick from 25 to 10"
That's a fair distinction in terms of language parsing. I'm not sure how that's articulated in the rules, though.
I know you and I have clashed over uses of Handle Animal in the past. This example is unequivocally legal and used in scenarios, including a notable chase scene from Season 4 where my not-at-all-H.A.-trained fighter asked if he could just kill the horse instead. Not combat, but a domestic animal.That is NOT remotely the same as telling a wild animal, or someone's companion to go away. By that logic you can give a guard dog a DC 10 command to attack their owner, or a wild lion a DC 25 command as a full round action to attack their pridemates.
Wild empathy would not be a special ability, at all, if that's how this worked. that takes a full minute, is an actual class feature, and doesn't exert nearly that much control over the creature. Its unabashed, unadulterated, unexcused rules lawyering cheese. The introduction of the exclusive trick did not open up a glaring hole in the pet classes that had been sitting there for 15 years prior: note that even exclusive requires that the pet be charmed or wild empathied to be relevant.
You have chosen to read what I posted with a lot of assumptions that I didn't write, nor did I intend. I get that this is colored by the disagreements we have had in the past, but I am not making the types of assertions here that you seem to be assuming. What I'm saying is more akin to "there's a horse in the road and I'm telling it to "go on, git" so we can walk by." Domestic animal, not a combat situation, not an animal companion. Every example I gave in my prior posts in this thread was either "my animal companion" or "neutral animal" - places where the rules are less-grey than others.
Also, of course Wild Empathy doesn't give control over creatures. It's the "like me more" part of Diplomacy, but for animals. Diplomacy can also be used to request favors from indifferent attitude or better creatures, but that function is not covered by Wild Empathy. That would be covered by:
Handle Animal
(Cha; Trained Only)
You are trained at working with animals, and can teach them tricks, get them to follow your simple commands, or even domesticate them."Push" an Animal: To push an animal means to get it to perform a task or trick that it doesn't know but is physically capable of performing.
While we have historically disagreed on the scope of Handle Animal, I'm not looking to hash out those disagreements here. My point in bringing it up here with quotes is to point out that "requests" are handled through Handle Animal, but not Wild Empathy.
You're going to failboat anyway if most of those are the case (no reason the phantom can't pull it off though)
Compare that to the number of times you miss by 1 or the enemy has 5 hp left.
The number of times this has happened in just the last week, regardless of optimization levels, has been astounding. That is the nature of dice. Yes, more is better, but it is not always enough. The issue with singling out damage is that you can say the same thing for any die roll in the game.
She proves the point. You could drop the charisma up the int and for the low low cost of -1 to diplomacy and handle animal have an entire +12/+11 to a different skill. Or buy a headband of they really like me instead of the pathfinder pouch and efficient quiver.
He wouldn't have felt like the same character, but I certainly haven't felt saddled with failure for the design decisions. It may be a cop out from a pure optimization perspective, but I wouldn't have felt ok making the same in-game decisions with higher Int.
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** spoiler omitted **...
Handle animal stuff part 1
Its articulated by "an animal with this trick" vs "an animal commanded to do this trick"
You have chosen to read what I posted with a lot of assumptions that I didn't write, nor did I intend.
Okay, I'm honestly lost by your point then.
Yes. There are miscellaneous handle animal checks in the game and you will have a relative -2 less of them.. and? You'll get as many if not more and more important climb swim and strength checks.
To make up for most of the -2 penalty you need.. a 200gp ioun stone. To make up for +1 hit and damage you need an exponentially increasing amount of gold, 2,000, 8,000 etc.
He wouldn't have felt like the same character, but I certainly haven't felt saddled with failure for the design decisions. It may be a cop out from a pure optimization perspective, but I wouldn't have felt ok making the same in-game decisions with higher Int.
Object A is object A. Object A is the most objectyAyest object A can be.
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Having more then one hunter build in PFS and APs, I can say that dumping Cha is not a good idea as it has come up more then once where I needed to Push my AC in combat because things did not go as planned. Sometimes you are also the only one with Wild Empathy in the party and you need to use that. Also while a Circlet will get you that sweet +3, you can not buy one until you have a few levels as the fame requirement is not low for a 4500 gold item. you only get 3 stat boosts in most PFS characters lives, so just make one of your higher stats an odd number and pop your +1 at 4th into it, it will free a lot of points up.
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1) Expect VERY significant table variation in how animals work. By far your safest bet is to make sure that you have everything you really care about trained (raising the animals Int if necessary), that you have at least a +11 modifier on Handle Animal with your AC, and you don't stretch what an animal can logically do TOO much. But the rules are exceedingly unclear and GMs vary massively on what they think is reasonable for any particular animal to do. You just have to live with the variation. And some GMs REALLY hate Animal Companions and will basically just screw you over because they can.
2) I do live by the above rules, especially not trying to stretch what the animal can logically do TOO much. Partly as a result of that I've made VERY, VERY few in combat Pushes over the years with multiple characters with animal companions. I think probably less than 5 times in well over 100 total sessions.
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I do recommend investing ranks in handle animal even when you autopass the DC12 handle while injured requirement in case you lose your companion or want to change it.
I don't agree with this. As long as you have 3 or so ranks in handle animal (which you'll need if you dumped Charisma) you can train the tricks you REALLY need in the time before the session (Attack Twice, Down, and one of the choices to get it to accompany you).
So, for maybe one session your AC is slightly disadvantaged. No big deal and not (IMO) worth the investment in skill points to remove.
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I find it particularly important if you plan to ride your companion into battle. Combat Riding is 6 tricks, flanking and exclusive are another two.
Whether a mount that is being ridden actually needs Combat Riding is another area where the rules are remarkably unclear and there is a great deal of table Variation. But if your Animal Companion is a mount AND you have GMs who require Combat Riding to ride a mount then you're right, you need 4 ranks (together with the bonus tricks). You certainly don't NEED Combat Riding, Exclusive and Flanking.
As you know, I love skill monkeys a lot too. But there are SO many better places to put those skill points :-)
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Having more then one hunter build in PFS and APs, I can say that dumping Cha is not a good idea as it has come up more then once where I needed to Push my AC in combat because things did not go as planned.
if you need to hit a DC 25 you're on roughly the same level of hosed with or without a +2. A fifth of your build points you can mitigate with a 10 gp item is a terrible idea.
Sometimes you are also the only one with Wild Empathy in the party and you need to use that.
Again, unless you build for it its +2 to a pretty rare roll. I'm sure the incidents where it was relevant stand out, but compare that to the number of times you've attacked and damaged something. The difference is multiple orders of magnitute.
Also while a Circlet will get you that sweet +3, you can not buy one until you have a few levels as the fame requirement is not low for a 4500 gold item. you only get 3 stat boosts in most PFS characters lives, so just make one of your higher stats an odd number and pop your +1 at 4th into it, it will free a lot of points up.
Eyup. Agree here.