I never had a great concept for that archetype either. Two weapon fighting still conflicts with spell combat, which you will absolutely want to do more and more of as you advance in level. I feel that eventually you would be dissatisfied with having invested feats in something you hardly ever get to do.
In my opinion the force athame works better as an emergency weapon. It's great against incorporeal enemies or enemies that have DR. Otherwise, the spellblade magus would play much as a regular magus, just unconcerned with touch attacks and thus critical hits. Instead your spell combat will focus on regular combat spells, like color spray and fireball.
What just point blank fireball to the face?
Possibly, if you took the feats for it. But really the attack spells can be whatever you want them to be.
Personally, I prefer pure bladebound. Kensai is super popular, and while I don't care for it personally, I know that many love it.
I don't think bladebound technically stacks with skirnir, because both alter arcane pool.
Hexcrafter is also somewhat popular. I don't like it for the same reason I don't like many archetypes. Spell Recall is just too good to give up in my opinion. But for some reason, a lot of people don't seem to appreciate spell recall the way I do.
There are lots of balanced combos that aren’t allowed. The archetype stacking rules are overly cautious. So, just ask your GM about this combo. In my experience many GMs would be fine with this, but it isn’t technically allowed, which I like to add here so there are no confusions later.
“Arcane Pool: At 1st level, a skirnir can use his arcane pool to grant an enhancement bonus to a weapon as normal, as well as to his shield, paying the arcane pool cost separately for each. At 5th level and above, he can also add the following shield special abilities: animated, arrow catching, arrow deflection, bashing, blinding, fortification (any), reflecting, spell resistance (any). ”
The tricky thing is that the archetype doesn’t have to say it’s altering an ability for the ability to be altered anyway. And in this case, the arcane pool is being altered.
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So obviously the intent of this archetype was to go into two weapon fighting to compensate for the loss of spellstrike
Spellblade is one of the worst archetypes for the Magus, so I'm not sure why you're going with that. If you feel spellstrike is too complicated, you can ignore everything about it and just make it act like two-weapon fighting (via Arcane Mark or any touch attack cantrip), OR ignore everything about it and use spell combat (full attack + non-touch spell of your choice) as often as possible.
Yes, like Fireball to the face; or a defensive buff like Mirror Image; or at low level a Daze cantrip. Casting as often as possible is good tactics.
Here's a Magus guide to give you more suggestions.
Yeah I'm actually astonished how much people downplay spell recall,
That's because scrolls and Pearls of Power are pretty cheap and have largely the same effect. Spell recall is solid but getting Flight hex at level 5 is also solid.
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No its not that its complicated i'm just trying to see how many archtypes can work with bladebound. I considered staff magus with the arodenite sword training trait, but that takes way too long to come online and everything else aside from hexcrafter had diminished spellcasting.
Sure, but Spellblade effectively has diminished spellcasting because you need to use your top-level spells to get a level-appropriate force dagger.
I'd go with Elemental Knight, Hexbreaker, Spell Trapper, or Spire Defender (none of those are amazing, but they're all hands-down better than Spellblade).
And honestly hexcrafter works better with jistkan artificer since it works with runic charge
Sure, plus the Hex Strike feat. But really, many archetypes benefit from getting the Flight hex, or Ice Plant, or Gift of Consumption.
Also as far as I can tell, you can't use scrolls with spell combat or spellstrike.
Indeed you can't.
And using pearls of power are expensive purchases for the majority of your adventuring career and clumsy to use mid combat. Where spell recall can be spammed over and over in combat, for just the cost of a swift action and some points that you have plenty of anyway.
And flight hex at 5 is good for being early, but you can pick up regular fly at level 7, which is fairly close, and then use spell recall to recast that spell as much as reasonably needed. And at level 13 you will have overland flight, to really devalue the hex.
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And flight hex at 5 is good for being early, but you can pick up regular fly at level 7, which is fairly close, and then use spell recall to recast that spell as much as reasonably needed.
By level 7, you can use the Flight hex 7 times per day plus unlimited feather falls. How many pool points do you have again? :D
At level 13, yes, you retrain your flight hex to e.g. Ice Tomb (infinitely-spammable good-DC non-mind-affecting save-or-lose).
AGAIN, the point is NOT that "spell recall is bad" but that "hexes are also good". Who would have thought? Witch is a popular class, did you really think that all hexes suck all the time? Why?
There are some advantages to the hex, like being 2 levels earlier and being able to split your duration through multiple combats. I just don't feel like that benefit is worth giving up the power and flexibility of spell recall. And once you have overland flight, there is only a slight speed difference that you will rarely ever need.
The big thing about spell recall is how it changes which spells you can prepare. Without it, you would need to prepare duplicates of the same spells to have enough to make it through combats. With spell recall, you only need to prepare each spell once, meaning you can have a greater variety of spells prepared. And then spell recall can allow you to use that great variety as many times as you reasonably need. It's like having the best qualities of prepared and spontaneous spell casting. You can even repeatedly take a feat to get more points, which you can translate into more spells per day.
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Yeah I'm actually astonished how much people downplay spell recall,That's because scrolls and Pearls of Power are pretty cheap and have largely the same effect. Spell recall is solid but getting Flight hex at level 5 is also solid.
The action economy changes a lot.
Drawing a scroll is a move action, activating it a standard action, and it doesn't work with spell combat.Recharging a slot with a Pearl is a standard action.
Recharging a slot with Spell Recall is a swift action.