Natural attacks without turning into an abomination?


Advice


I am rather confused about natural attacking builds because I get this sense like the only way to make them work any better than a sword is to get as many as possible, ending up as a winged 4 armed 2 headed monster.

I mean maybe I'm just salty because I want to make dragonblooded bloodragers and dragonblooded mortal hedge witches that use swords and such have no use for it, but I'm just really curious as to how natural attacks are supposed to work since...
1: when you have just 2 or 3 it's obviously better to use a weapon unless you're going to two weapon fight boot blades or something (maybe unarmed strikes technically)
2: it can be broken wide open by just getting as many of them as possible, essentially becoming a monster like mentioned above.

Sovereign Court

At lower levels they can work much better than a sword, because you are typically able to get 2-3 when you would normally only have 1 sword attack. They also do not require any feats compared to Two-Weapon Fighting beyond what you would normally take on any melee damage character. Primary natural attacks do get your full strength bonus unlike the half on the offhand (until you take double slice). At higher levels you do need to just stack on as many as possible to stay competitive, because natural attacks do not get iterative attacks unlike weapon attacks. But, since they do not have iterative attacks, they have higher accuracy on average. 4 sword attacks at full/-5/-10/-15 attack bonus compared to 4 natural attacks at full/full/full/full is pretty significant. But the sword attacks could be with a 2h weapon and have a higher crit range/multiplier.

You can pick up a significant number of natural attacks from equipment relatively cheap. Notably bite(Ring of Rat Fangs), gore(Helm of the Mammoth Lord), and claws/slam/etc(Beaststrike Club). You could also go with Amulet of the Blooded(Abyssal), but typically with a natural attack build you will want to pick up an Amulet of Mighty Fists instead. With the club, you can likely wield two (one in each hand) and treat them as natural weapons, thus no two-weapon fighting penalty.

Silver Crusade

Firebug wrote:
With the club, you can likely wield two (one in each hand) and treat them as natural weapons, thus no two-weapon fighting penalty.

That's not how the club works.

And to answer to the OP: yes, the strength of natural attack builds is the number. The more you gets, the more full-BAB attacks with full strength and full bonuses you have. Plus, with natural attacks you can move and full-attack via Pounce, while no such thing exists for melee weapons.

Shapeshifters get to choose a different route if they are so inclined, which is to get a single big attack. Size increasing spells and effects, coupled with Vital Strike feats, make them the only ones who can pull off a natural attack build which do not relies on multiple attacks, although they still need to turn into an abomination. Literally.


I guess I was just really curious about how the heck they are supposed to work because of that fact that they can either fall behind or break the game so easily, but... I still get somewhat of this sense like if you want to make your natural attacks be of any use (Especially claws) you need to just grab all of them..

Though again I guess I'm still just salty seeing how many chances at claws there are that I'm just like "I'm sure that I am paying something for this, but I don't want this". Which is something especially true for the Spheres classes (like the mentioned dragonblooded mortal) where I'd often combine martial hedgewitch and dragonblooded together so that I can be dragon knight, but with that the claws and bite hold no purpose to me... Sorry if this has kinda been me being salty at everything.

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