On Wednesdays I play a pathfinder game with a few people, where I've elected to play the martial guy, the fighter. But rather than go the typical "I like swords" route, I decided to focus him down the ways of dirty deeds done dirt cheap.
Therin DasherFirst a few questions about him -
Why did I not go cad or the new dirty fighter archetype for orcs in Advance race guide? Well, beyond the first most obvious thing, (That being the Martial Master Archetype is incompatable) the two archetypes do very little in all honesty.
Dirty fighter really just make it so you can do dirty tricks a little faster, and then impose an extra condition. Its.. okay. but due to Dirty Tactics, we've got a whole slew of new things for dirty tricks. Oh and speedy Tricks is easily replaced with Quick Dirty Trick.
Cad suffers from the same situation. At least they slowly get better at dirty trick maneuvers, along with disarm and Steal. But in reality, only dirty trick is useful for almost anything. If you're fighting a bear, it neither has something to disarm or steal.
Lore Warden on the other hand, is absolutely wonderful for
any combat maneuver. Even resisting combat maneuvers. I mean, +8 on all maneuvers?
Before my feats? Okay sure, its level 15 we get that full bonus. But still, We're talking 28 base CMB at level 20.
We get more skill points, resulting in more ability to do things, and all Int based skills are now class based skills. Oh did I mention that you can up that CMB even higher? With know thy enemy, we could add another +2 on the targets we need to take on.
The Skinny of the character
Martial Flexibility is just absolutely awesome to me. Being able to pick up any feat, at any time, for even just a minute, its perfect. That being said, the character's design started with the Dirty Tactics book and the Feat Dirty Fighting. Here we've got the ability to pretend we have 13 in, 13 wis, improved unarmed strike and combat expertise. Thats great stuff there, even If I'm not really taking advantage of it. What I am taking advantage of is the flanking aspect of the feat.
Getting this, practically gives you improved (combat maneuver), but only if you're getting flanking bonuses and decide to sacrifice that. It gets even better when you do have it, as the feat doubles the flanking bonus. Plus you get the +2 from the ICM feat. The madness just keeps getting better, as I've found a few other feats that really help you a lot.
Namely
Gang Up and
Press to the Wall And suddenly the amount of opportunities to fight enemies with a flanking bonus increase. Fighting in a 5 foot wide hallway? Well, with Gang up and Press to the Wall, you now are flanking anyone who comes into melee with you.
With a stamina pool as well, could make single square taking up immobile objects into a proper flank buddy when needed, even if I can't get that angle just right.
I'm looking for some more ways of fighting dirty too. I've got all kinds of gear on the guy, arrow tubes to shoot the enemy from surprise, eventually going to get boot blades and other surprise weapons too.