Hi everyone,
Me and my group are going to start a new quest, and I've decided to build an arcanist.
I was thinking about a war-familiar empowered by some polymorph spell, but I don't know if the HP of the familiar will raise or not. Can someone aske me?
And then, can I build an arcanist with both brown-fur and occultist archetype?
If you take a mauler familiar and take an extra feat, mauler's endurance, then your familiar has an extra 2 hit points per level.
Personally, I prefer to go for a figment familiar, which has half as many hit points, but can come back to life everyday for free.
The feat wasp familiar gives a pretty nice combat type familiar but it probably can't take any archetypes since it's effectively an improved familiar.If you're ok taking a 2 level hit you could take levels in fighter(eldritch guardian), this lets you autoshare all of your combat feats with your familiar. You could also take a look at the valet archetype it autoshares all of your crafting and teamwork feats.
I think it all depends on how you want your familiar to contribute in combat. If it's getting into melee and trying to hold the front line mauler and figment are probably your best options. Figment has the added bonus that at higher levels it gets eidolon evolutions which can be used to add to its capabilities. You can take the feat evolved familiar to give it another evolution, but the way the abilities read you wouldn't be able to combine the point the feat gives you with the ones it gets from being a figment. So, you're locked out of any 4+ evolutions.
edit: I had another thought. Does it have to be a familiar? You could take a level in sorcerer to grab the sylvan bloodline and then take the exploit bloodline development. You end up with a druid's animal companion whose levels can be patched up with the feat boon companion. I only bring it up because animal companions are a little more naturally geared for front-line combat then familiars are.