I've been working on an exciter spiritualist build with some intention on making heavy use of the lashes granted to them by the spiritualist's bonded manifestation ability. After taking a closer look, though, I'm beginning to doubt my original plans will work out, meaning I'll need to rework a few things. Before I do though, I'm gonna need some clarifications, because so far the wording for the abilities seems incredibly vague. For reference, here's the text of the ectoplasmic variant of the ability, with the section I'm concerned with bolded:
When a spiritualist uses this ability and chooses ectoplasmic form, she gains an ectoplasmic shield that protects her without restricting her movement or actions. She gains a +4 shield bonus to Armor Class; this bonus applies to incorporeal touch attacks. The ectoplasmic shield has no armor check penalty or arcane spell failure chance. At 8th level, the spiritualist also sprouts a pair of ectoplasmic tendrils from her body. Once per round as either a swift or a standard action (spiritualist’s choice), the spiritualist can use one or both tendrils to attack creatures within her melee reach (using the attack bonus and damage dice of her ectoplasmic manifested phantom) or to manipulate objects. She can even use that action to have one tendril make an attack and the other manipulate an object, as long as that object can be manipulated with one hand. At 13th level, the phantom’s ectoplasm clings to the spiritualist like a suit of armor. This grants the spiritualist a +6 armor bonus to AC without imposing an armor check penalty, an arcane spell failure chance, or any reduction in speed. At 18th level, the spiritualist can take a full-round action to attack all creatures within her melee reach with her tendrils (using the attack bonus and damage dice of her ectoplasmic manifested phantom). When she does, she rolls the attack roll twice, takes the better of the two results, and uses that as her attack roll result against all creatures within her melee reach. If the better attack roll threatens a critical hit, the spiritualist chooses one target that she hit to confirm the critical hit against. The other attacks that hit are considered normal hits rather than critical threats.
1 - If I choose to have both tendrils attack, is that effectively one strike or two I'm allowed to make?
2 - Am I allowed to make my tendril strikes with Vital Strike?
3 - Can I use the tendril strikes for anything aside from the swift or standard attack issued by the ability (such as using a tendril to strike with the Hurtful feat)?
4 - If the phantom has Improved Natural Attack (slam) do my tendrils still use the normal damage or the damage after it's augmented by the feat?
5 - How about my attack rolls if the phantom possesses feats such as Weapon Focus? And do I add my Str/Dex bonus or theirs?
Sorry to bump so early but I had another idea in the very likely event that I can't Vital Strike with the tendrils, but I'm not sure if it'll work:
If I take a level in Ghost Rider Cavalier, how does that interact with Exciter Spiritualist? Will the phantom I already had gain the ability to become a mount? Will it do so, but lose that ability since it needs to be manifested? I presume that (similar to getting an animal companion or familiar through two different sources) I wouldn't gain a second phantom, correct?
1- I'm assuming it's two, but I agree it could have been clearer.
2- Vital Strike is it's own action so I guess no.
3- It seems the only things you can do with them is what's written under bonded manifestation. Otherwise they would have just called them natural attacks and solved all of their problems.
4-They use the damage of the ectoplasmic manifested phantom, whatever it may be, so it should work.
5- Again, I would just look at the attack part of the phantom sheet and use those numbers6- with how much he exciter changes the phantom I doubt they would stack.
1 - Gotcha. I'm running with the assumption that the fact that each tendril acts individually means each performs an individual attack, but it's probably best to leave that to the DM to determine.
2/3 - This means I can pull VS and IVS out of my feats. I was also going to go with Cornugon Smash and Hurtful, but all Hurtful does is guarantee I could use my weapon instead of my tendrils to make the swift-action attack.
4/5 - I've seen opinions go both ways, so it's another thing I'll need to figure out with the DM. Considering phantoms get feats anyway though, it seems like it'd be almost too easy to beef up your tendrils by giving them any feat you can that enhances their slams. *shrug* At worst, I'll just have wasted time plotting the phantom's feats out.
6 - I was figuring. Honestly it's more beneficial to go Gendarme anyway, so that's the direction I'll be taking this. It does mean an additional companion to plot out, but that's fine.