Ok, a while back when I was looking through the feats for Hulk, I made a note of a couple that looked useful for a speedster character: the Spring-Heeled line. It allows a character to attack while moving as well as doubling your speed. The final feat in the line allows you to attack two opponents similar to Improved Spring Attack but without the -5 BAB. There's also a feat called Circling Mongoose which is only useful when full attacking, but allows you to move in 5 foot steps around the opponent between attacks and basically flank with yourself.
Circling Mongoose has the same pre-reqs are the Spring-Heeled line, so the only problem is the total number of feats needed (7) and that the final feat requires BAB 11. Which is the feat that allows two attacks. Even if I ignore Circling Mongoose and stop at the feat that doubles the speed, it's still 5 feats. Improved Spring Attack only needs BAB 9, but it still adds 2 feats back to the total needed. So I won't be able to get this online before level 11 at the earliest even using a monk's bonus feats since they take them from a list. And Spring Attack isn't on the list until level 10.
So is this a feasible way of making the Flash, not so much replicating the sheer speed, but the ability to move while attacking multiple opponents?
The feats you're looking at as I understand it are
dodge
mobility
spring attack (BAB +4)
circling mongoose (BAB +6)
spring-heeled style (BAB +4)
spring-heeled sprint (BAB +7)
spring-heeled reaping (BAB +9)
You want a full BAB class or classes with at least some bonus feats. Spring-heeled wants you to at least have proficiency in light armor though it doesn't use it, so pure monk of any kind won't do. Slayer might work, or fighter, brawler, ranger, maybe swashbuckler, or a bunch of multiclasses.
Suppose you went with something like slayer 4 / master of many styles monk 2 / slayer +X. Your feats & talents might then be
Slayer talent 2: ranger combat style 1 (elemental: wind stance)
3: mobility
Slayer talent 4: rogue talent (slow reactions)
5: spring attack
Monk 1: spring-heeled style, improved unarmed strike, stunning fist
Monk 2: charging stag style
7: circling mongoose
Slayer talent 6: ranger combat style 2 (elemental: lightning stance)
9: spring heeled sprint
Slayer talent 8: combat trick (spring-heeled reaping)
11: accomplished sneak attacker
Slayer talent 10: ranger combat style 3 (elemental: whirlwind attack)
This wouldn't actually increase your speed (for that you'd need buffs or items or a race which gives extra speed) but you'd get to attack lots of enemies and get some bonuses for moving.
Charging Stag Style looks pretty helpful. I think I want to at least start with a level of Monk, since Flash never uses a weapon so the Improved Unarmed Strike would be a lot more helpful sooner.
And yeah, I gave up on just straight speed. Even using a Quickling as the race, speed doesn't really matter that much once you're actually fighting.
My original idea was using a gestalt of Monk and Stormborn Sorcerer. The bloodline powers are pretty on theme and there are some spells that can mimic Flash abilities like Phase Door.
Yeah, OK. Using unarmed (if this is a character you'd play in a normal game) you probably want TWF, the damage isn't otherwise impressive. Maybe go for the TWF ranger combat style and take appropriate feats from that rather than the elemental combat style. Taking one level of monk up front is certainly doable - spring heeled style wants to wait until you have spring attack.
Sounds like a plan.
I'll take a look at Warrior Poet. That's a samurai archetype, right?
I may also recommend Panther style feat chain, with high Dex and combat reflexes
Essentially, as you move, you provoke AoO, bit with Panther style, you get to strike them first, and if you hit, they get a penalty to attack.
Of course you could play a bloodrager, take Urban bloodrager, and your rage can boost Dex, while allowing you to still use skills and focus, stack that with the archtyoe that allows you to trade bloodline powers for rage powers, and grab
Come and get me
With both, Everytime someone tries to hit you, you get to strike them twice, once as a free action from Panther claw, and once as an AoO from come and get me.
If you take the fire elemental bloodline, you can get a +30ft boost to your speed, on top of +10 from fast movement. And if you play a half elf, you can add 1 ft to movement with their FCB, so every 5 levels you get a +5 boost to speed
Oh! And then bloodrager would net you spells like cheetah Sprint, for when you really need to haul tail, and the best part is, with the way this build works, you can still get all your attacks off of their AoO :D
Right, this build is more for fighting groups, or, if your big bad has combat reflexes, but nothing stops you from spring attacking, and then moving back in, and out of threatened range to provoke an AoO :D
Hm, could work.
I've played one before, it's actually a lot of fun :D especially if you combine battle dancer with outslug style
Someone mentioned the style strike Flying Kick. You need a minimum of level monk levels, but you can move up to the monk's movement bonus and then flurry. It could be useful when I need to move up to attack a guy, but still want to full attack.
Ok, since I'm thinking of using at least a few levels of Stormborn Sorcerer, that the Scaled Fist Monk would be better to use than vanilla Monk. Since that way I wouldn't have to worry about both Wis and Cha and the third level ability lets you do a little electricity damage, which is pretty on theme.
I'm still trying to figure out what to do here, and I'm starting to get the feeling that I need to use a tristalt. I'd use Sorcerer, Monk, and Fighter. Gets all the benefits I'd need to Sorcerer and Monk while getting all the extra feats from Fighter.
Pummeling Style seems pretty useful for when I don't need to move to attack.
If I do go with a tristalt, I should have enough bonus feats that I won't really need a bonus feat from being human. I can go with Slyph as the race, using the Stormsoul subrace and the Like The Wind alternate racial trait. That'll give me +5 base speed, +2 Cha, and Shocking Grasp as a SLA.
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I have been playing a character modeled after Kid Flash for quite some time and can give one possible path.
I took Master of Many Styles and Windstep Master from the regular monk. I currently have 9 levels in that. You grab a level of Kineticist and the archetype Elemental Adept to get your Flurry back. You can now make 3-4 attacks as a full round action with enough BaB.
I also took Fighter levels (Varisian Free-Style Fighter archetype) for shenanigans.
My main style feats are Panther Style, Jabbing Style, and Snake Style. I combined this with Weapon Trick: One-Handed and a high armor class. On the first round of combat I can activate Martial Flexibility and then move and greet every enemy and say ‘hello’ then dart off to do the same to the next enemy. This provokes an aoo. Depending on how far you took your styles and what you have used Martial Flexibility on, you can attack each enemy three times. With the proper gear, you can attack four times. If you have all of the feats set up right, you can attack each enemy 3 times, one 4, and have a standard action available to cast a spell or use an ability. Depending on how you entered your styles, you could still have a swift action available to Bull Rush a Target. If you have a useful and relevant combat maneuver and an available standard action, you could make two attacks as part of the standard action (one being a maneuver. It’s really rather flexible in terms of action use and total number of attacks. Typically, you will attack on your first turn, more than everyone else in the entire party will combined. Each successive hit will do increased die worth of damage as well.
I find that I act as a round-1 Fireball, in effect but with a lot more utility. Air Walk allows me to reach places others can’t and I use Spider Climb Slippers to give me a full 3d grid to navigate in. For the flash specific stuff, you can keep it to walls and liquids.
My full attack isn’t impressive and I am built as a scout so a lot of my remaining choices are shunned by pretty much all optimization standards and multiple players. But the character works excessively well and as the levels increase has been treated as the party tank more and more frequently, despite my dedication to the scout and Flash concepts and keeping my con at 10. I’m well into the double digits in levels now and can say that some key feats to consider would be Mobility and Weapon Focus if you emulate this build. You’re more accurate than a typical monk but you really need as much as you can get. Damage reduction is an issue since you don’t deal much damage on a single hit but you frequently do the same damage as dedicated damage dealers just over multiple hits. That competitive damage won’t happen with any amount of DR.
That said, Ki Strike comes in handy an awful lot, though.
Mobility will almost always force an enemy to need close to a 20 to hit you. Many things already will but later on enough enemies who aren’t bosses will land more blows than you would like and they’ll hurt with a low con. You can keep the monks healing ability which is very thematic but I traded immune away (but would love it back). It’s an easy way to represent Flashes high metabolic healing rate. Scrolls of Ablative Barrier cast on you by an ally will make lower levels a lot safer. Potions of blurred movement are nice, too.
There are several ways to multiclass or theme the character depending on how closely you want to emulate The Flash. Sticking with this build, you would want Elemental Fist and Djinni Style, possibly Dragon Style as well for more unarmed and elemental damage. You could choose fire instead of electricity to represent the speed of your punches and then you could purchase
Demonic Smith’s Gloves and go all out.
Access to the travel domain, or barbarian movement speed bonuses are an easy level dip, and some classes can provide significant movement speed boosts via spells of varying durations (Longstrider, Expeditious Retreat, Slipstream), and magical items can help as well. Unfortunately, magical options seem to give exclusively enhancement bonuses to movement speed and monks movement speed bonuses are also enhancements so they won’t stack. Buuuut, if you wanted to wear a suit (aka armor of some sort) you could use those tools and retain your movement speed anyway. It would create hurdles as well as alleviate some. But you can very much make the Flash without Multiclassing much or at all. I took 3 classes due to building for a specific level and wanting all of my bells and whistles by that level. I could probably rebuild for only one or two classes if I was not abiding by that. But you will find yourself desiring feats so that’s a thing.
Ok that note, if your build ever had room, Fleet once or twice will help but for pure combat purposes, once you have 50’ of movement you basically have enough. 60’+ is gravy and handy but really not necessary for anything. It helps me with my air walk a lot but for those without it or when I am on the ground, I always can reach all of my targets and navigate just fine through difficult terrain (acrobatics helps, too).
Hopefully you gleaned some use out of all of that.
PS. Spring Attack is a bit of a trap. It removes the aoo’s you provoke and thus the number of attacks you can make. It’s a decent tool for hitting a bunch of enemies if you go down the tree and it can keep you pretty obnoxiously safe with enough movement speed and/or various forms of movement (air walk, spider climb) but that’s mostly it, in and of itself.
I may have stated something wrong but it’s 4am and I haven’t touched my character in a few weeks. Most everything I said is pretty close to accurate based on memory though. The Come and Get Me Barbarian is another way to do it and comes online around the same level (level 9 vs level 12). I don’t think it’s as faithful to the concept or as inherently functional to it but you get more health, armor access, higher accuracy, damage and all the barbarian things and can boost your movement speed with magic and not need to gain levels to show off the speed early. Rage flexibility in stat modification is nice and rage powers can supplement some feats and abilities but I don’t think you’ll get the entire kit quite like you can with a monk and I don’t think you’ll get it all as soon. I researched for and built this character years ago so I am not sure if there are many new options that accelerate the concept or enhance it. Either way, there you go.
Hm... I will look at those.
Someone suggested using Magus with the Bladed Dash spell. Greater Bladed Dash takes 13 levels, but the base one only takes 4 levels. It looks pretty decent, and I think I can still use spellstrike and spell combat with an unarmed strike.
If I go with Eldritch Scion, I can still reduce MAD with Scaled Fist Monk putting the class features on CHA. Only thing is that I wouldn't be able to use Stormborn if I do add some Sorcerer levels as the Eldritch Scion doesn't have that bloodline available. The only one on both lists that still matches the theme is elemental.
I think I could make it work without using a tristalt, but I still think a gestalt would be best.