I'm preparing for my first game of Pathfinder ever, and first DND-like in...10 years or something? One thing that caught my eye was the Alchemist, as I'm a big enthusiast of bombs, poisons and other dangerous substances like that.
My initial attempts at cooking a sword-wielding weapon poisoner ended up in frustration, mostly because simple weapons available to Alchemists do not please me aesthetically. Am I correct in thinking that going for elven ancestry feat that makes me trained in a bunch of weapons and make me gain proficiency in "elven weapons" whenever I upgrade simple weapon proficiency won't help me with any other weapon than Elven Curved Blade, correct? And Elven Curved Blade due to being two handed won't be mid-combat poisonable even with a bandoiler?
Then, I switched my gears to going for Mutagens, but they didn't look that promising for melee poisoner, since it doesn't seem like you can poison your claw due to it not being a weapon.
So, so far, it seems that my best bet to do melee poisoner alchemist is to
a) pre-poison a bunch of knives and other disposable weapons and consider them like 2-action melee touch spells that have rider effect on top of it? 2 action due to draw-attack routine
b) just use poison as a nice alpha strike once per combat
c) wait until I can grab Poison Weapon feat from rogue multiclass. It's a shame Alchemist doesn't share it with them.
Though to be fair, seems like a "flow" of poisoner alchemist is to do A or B for the first 2 levels, start carrying Cytillesh Oil in a bandoiler from level 3 onwards (is that a bug? it's the only Injury poison with 1 interact application, but also everything else since that level starts doing conditions on top of damage, so I guess its balanced?), and once you get enough room for Poison Weapon, grab it. Am I missing something?
That is for melee alchemist part of the rules questions.
Second part is ranged poisoners. This is pretty simple question: can I pre-poison individual ammo? The RAW seems to say nope, because you are poisoning "a weapon", so you would have to poison the entire bow ( :P ). In this case, it seems that the way to go would be using thrown weapons, as each thrown weapon is individual weapon, and thus can be poisoned in advance? Though this seems awkward due to need to magically enhance each thrown "ammo" separately.
Is this correct? Bombs&PoisonArrows or Bombs&ThrownWeapons alchemist focused on Dex doesn't sound bad, probably more practical for the poison oriented character than a melee alchemist. I'm just not sure what the best way to approach the concept is, especially since the game will be the Adventure-Path that goes from level 1 to 4, so I won't be able to reach Poison Weapon in time.
