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Hey everyone,
Yesterday I reveived news that the divine bond I've been using for PFS for 5 or so levels, angel bond, is apparently the only illegal one to use. So... massive bummer, and I need to pick something else. I really liked being able to protect and buff allies through it and none of the immediate other options seem to offer this. I'm also not terribly impressed with any of the other standard divine bonds in general and would like to ask some advice on this from the community.
To give some information on the character, it is a level 9 melee human paladin (oath of vengeance)/level 1 Kindness id rager with a statline of 20 str, 12 dex, 14 con, 10 int, 7 wis and 24 cha (the latter only possible due to a boon I received yesterday that adds a +2 profane bonus for the duration of one year, and retraining an earlier picked ability score increase into charisma). He typically fights two handed with a nodachi with improved critical and power attack. He has the winged boots to cast fly 3x/day. His saving throws are godly but his ac is mediocre at best. His main defensive feature is now the 'targeted' mercy which grants a level and cha scaling version of sanctuary (dc 21 will save) when I heal someone with lay on hands.
Going through the immediate options, these are the problems I see:
-Weapon bond requires practically skipping your first turn in a combat since it has no direct impact before you can start attacking, and the buffs it can grant feel fairly weak to me at first glance. The best one, speed, can only be used on character level 12 (paladin 11/id rager 1, seeker tier) and does not stack with the fairly common haste or divine fervor buffs. Also, I can cast divine fervor on the entire party by myself at character level 11 (it's a level 3 oath of vengeance spell), making weapon bond seem a bit superfluous.
-Mount: My character currently has 0 invensted feats in mounted combat and mounted as a medium size character with a large mount leads to all kinds of wellknown logistical problems in narrow spaces. I was still toying around with the idea of taking a shissah mount (a statistically slightly better horse from Qadira which is apparently legal for PFS) and just using it as an animal companion (an additional melee prescense on it's own, fighting seprately). Does anyone have any experience with the effectiveness of this strategy?
-Agathion: I guess debuffing the enemy slightly is a way to somewhat mimic angel bond. Other than being fairly weak numberwise, the major downfall of this is that every enemy gets a willsave to completely avoid the effect forever. It thus feels extremely unrealiable to me.
-The fourth one which only adds charisma to LoH healing yet still requires your standard action to activate: haha, no.
I know there is a 'hidden' fifth divine bond from the 'sacred servant' archetype which grants additional lay on hands uses per day (and thus smites from oath of vengeance) and grants a cleric domain along with the cleric bonus spells at paladin level -3 in exchange for a few less smites per day. This seems really powerful, the problem here is that I can't access the level 8 cleric domain features until I reach character level 12 (unless someone knows of something to circumvent this). Ifd there is, I could take something like the heroism subdomain and buff the party that way, and I could add a couragious weapon enchant along with the current +2 furious weapon to milk the morale bonusses from rage and the heroism aura.
It does compete with both smite evil and LoH for the swift actions, which is a bit of a downside. Would anyone recommend a different domain for a melee paladin if I went this way? It seems like for instance liberation could situationally also be really powerful.
Or am i completely wrong and are there better options I'm overlooking? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Kind regards,
Trevor
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I think you're expecting too much from Divine Bond, really. It just isn't as powerful a class feature as some of the other stuff the paladin gets.
The weapon bond isn't bad, it just isn't great. Making your weapon Holy for example is still a good buff, but it's something you activate before opening the ominous door that looks like the Boss Room.
As you've noticed paladins have a lot of action-hunger. Other abilities have better economy, like Smite. But for a fight that you see coming, you can use the Holy property instead of a Smite, and save some smites/lay on hands for a later fight, when you don't see it coming.
I agree with Ascalaphus that you are expecting too much from Divine Bond. It is after all only one of the abilities a paladin gets. Personally I would go for weapon bond for a couple of reasons. One it helps in situations where you are facing a large number of weaker foes. Smite Evil is great vs the BBEG, but useless against a mob of lesser enemies. Adding holy to your already magic weapon is actually a pretty good option at this point. Second it can be useful when you need to attack with another weapon. For example if you are a melee focused paladin chances are you do not have a magic ranged weapon. You can use divine bond on any weapon so if you are carrying a bow it is now magic. Also a higher bonus on your magic weapon will allow you to overcome damage reduction. Since smite evil only works on evil creatures’ paladins often have difficulty dealing with neutral characters. Look at any thread where a GM is complaining about a paladin being too powerful and you will see the suggestion to simply avoid evil enemies.
I'd say weapon bond is the standard bond unless you have a particular theme you're trying to fit.
Ascalaphus is right, you can activate your bond before you go into combat, so you don't need to waste the first round buffing. It lasts minutes per level (8 minutes if I'm reading correctly). That means even if you buff way before a fight starts you should be able to use it. At 8 minutes I'd expect to get 2 combats at least out of it in the average adventuring day. When you next level up you'll be able to use it twice per day, which means you should be able to get 3 to 4 combats out of your bond without too much trouble.
Having said that, in keeping with the Angelic Protection theme I'd probably go with the Archon Bond. The save DC for you is 21, which is not terrible. Sure it's not as good as the Angelic Bond, but it's more or less keeping the same function.
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I find that pathfinder society is not completely predicatble in when exactly you're going to get attacked. There are also a lot of cases where you do know but that the scenario forces you into combat without giving you a chance to react (a la BBEG timestop evil speech powers). But sure, even outside of metagaming of activating someting when a map is drawn there are plenty of cases where this would work and for that reason I guess weapon bond is indeed the best choice out of the normal options. There's also some synergy possible with a courageous weapon and rage by just adding the flat +2 enhancement bonus, so I guess there's some added value there.
That aside, do any of you perhaps know of a way to increase a cleric domain level for a multiclassed chracter the way similar things exist for other feature, like the boon companion feat for animal companions or the magical knack trait for casting levels? If such a thing exists, I could just pick sacred servant and take a cleric domain as a substitute.