I have seen a few Occultist-Battle Hosts in PFS since book/archetype came out and I was wondering- if you choose the armor panoply bond with Full Plate (as many do) the armor can never become the mithral variety or adamantine correct? Doesn't that limit your character when those options become available in the mid levels as you save money.
If you choose the weapon panoply bond then your weapon never becomes upgraded to Cold Iron or Adamantine. So why choose the archetype?
So it seems the Battle Host is a flash in the pan at levels 1-5 but starts to lose out towards the end of your PFS career when you can't improve your panoply armor or weapon. Is there a way to make your bond better as you advance in levels to keep pace with the fighter that saved his money and bough an adamantine 2 handed sword or Mithral full plate? Seems very limiting.
Why would you care about having your full plate be mithral?
That's far to expensive (10500) to really want to wait and save up for before upgrading it, and there's no way for a normal person to upgrade theirs to mithral other than selling what they have and buying a new one.
All that mithral full plate gives you is more Dex to AC, which if you're looking at full-plate is something you normally don't have anyways cause you have your 12 dex for your normal full plate, so there's really no loss at not having mithral cause nobody has mithral full anyways. Adamantine is 16500, WAY far out of reach for normal PFS play to really even ever considering it as something they're going for.
Also saving up for an adamantine main weapon isn't needed. I have 14 PFS characters, 9 of them barbarians, and none of them have an adamantine weapon. And cold iron isn't needed either, at lv6 your transmutation power alone can deal with cold iron DR by putting bane and +1 making it a +3 weapon which overcomes DR cold iron.
What Chess Pwn said.
You really don't need to worry about adamantine or cold iron weapons. The cold iron can be accomplished with a +3 weapon, and DR adamantine just isn't something that's very common.
As for armor, usually the reason you use mithral armor is to make medium armor act like light armor. It doesn't give enough of a bonus to heavy armor to make it worth it, as most heavy armor characters don't have high dex.
If your weapon is a gun (or other missile weapon, but ignoring the broken condition is the attraction) then you just need to change the ammo to get thru DR.