Min/Max Boards

I've played with the idea of giving my paladins a 'stable' of mount options as they progress. Primarily because a player of mine took a PrC that gave him access to a giant owl and asked if he could change his mount.

Trying to fluff it has been the hard part for me. Would the mount be mutable because it's just a spirit that's summoned to help him? Or are there multiple 'sweet rides' on lone from a deity?

So you could potentially fluff the Couatl form as less powerful because it's not, actually, a true form but a comfortable representation of ... mumble...mumble.

Basically yeah. Dig through the Monster Manuals for a creature with nice stats.

Become that creature. Done.

See that' where I think I'm not seeing the whole picture. Most medium animals wouldn't be competative  beyond about 9th level. Is there cheese to broaden your possible selection?

First, sorry about posting in the wrong section, Robby. D:

Is homebrew out of the picture? If not there are some awesome classes. If not then swordsage with shadow hand is probably your best bet.

I could probably pull off homebrew as long as it wasn't spell-heavy. I just find it difficult to sift through all the cheesey and/or bad homebrew. If you have suggestions, I'm all ears. xD

This DM is particularly story heavy (is accustom to running diceless), so combat in a dice game tends to be... chaotic and unfocused. Which is why a few of us that are more inclined to min/max are trying to do so within acceptable limits (we've found it keeps her games flowing more easily).

I know most of you are probably asking why we're bothering, and that's because our DM was super excited about the setting, and we're pretty much along with it until it's run its course. It's difficult to explain beyond that. xD

I was in fact thinking of taking a Swordsage dip for the stances and such, giving me some more utility. I just got home so I'm going to sit down and try to pen this out for critique in a few...

Thank you for the replies thus far.

The title says a lot, but I've until tomorrow night to actually create the stats for the character I... sort of... already introduced. >_>

Not normally a problem, I've seen a few decent Assassin builds, but this one needs to be a bit ...specific.
The game is heavily house ruled. Spells are all over the place... custom spell lists have been made.

So I'm hoping to avoid a build that uses a lot of spell support.
The characters are only level 5 or 6.
We're allowed to request *one* special item... I don't know how far 'special' goes though. xD It's GM fiat.

Long story short, I've been trying to make an optimized low level build for an out-of-combat stalker-type character, in-combat killifier.

The real problem I suppose is that I've never really liked the flavor of the assassin prc (which was turned into it's own class in a 3rd party supplement).

The race is treated like a human. Suggestions?