Elhanan wrote...
Personally, I do not care to have starting penalties in DEX and WIS, esp when a Ftr already has weakened REF & WILL.
Reverse this thinking.
Your will is already so terrible you're going to fail everything anyway, so keep wisdom low (and get mind immunity items/potions/spells). No point in investing a bunch of wisdom to change a 95% chance to fail to an 85% chance to fail.
Starting with 12+ Dex can be useful, though, since it allows several defense feats (13+ dex) and gives extra AC (you lose 1 AC per 2 dex score below 12).
Elhanan wrote...
Having such a dominant starting STR is not that important to me, so I generally trade for better ST bonuses.
In most cases, the AB alone is worth 5-10% more damage plus the strength bonus is another 5-10% damage. That's fairly significant compared to other stuff.
Elhanan wrote...
As far as Skills, I would trade Concentration for something else more utilized, even if it is Cross-Class; depends on Taunt usage perhaps.
Agreed. Concentration is only useful if enemies are Taunting -- and high Charisma taunters will suceed anyway.
Westan Willows wrote...
I keep forgetting to ask. Were would you put the abilities point you get at lv 4,8,etc?
Strength. Always strength.
Elhanan wrote...
Generally,
I choose WF in both melee and ranged weapons early, and then WS in both soon as I am able. Blind Fight is taken in the early stages, too. Then I try and obtain Imp Crit for both as soon as the prereqs are met.
My reasons for this is to maximize my killing distance; Then I am able to do some harm at distance, and even more when they close.
This is, unfortunately, poor advice. You're only possibly going to be attacking with a ranged weapons during the first few levels. The gap between your strength (melee AB) and dexterity (ranged AB) simply grows so large (and your dex stays so low) that you aren't going to hit anything with a ranged weapon with reasonable effectiveness. Swapping to a ranged weapon is likely going to be 25% or less (most likely much less) damage compared to simply meleeing. Simply not worth it...UNLESS you're making a dexterity fighter in which case you use your dexterity for both melee and ranged AB.
Empyre65 wrote...
If you start with 16 STR, you could have 12 DEX and 12 WIS, improving your saves and AC. After that, increase STR every chance you have, including 12 Great Strength feats in epic levels, and you would end up with 32 STR.
I usually go 17 str/13 dex/14 con/14 int/8 wis/8 con...but in most cases 18 str/12 con/13 int would actually be better (frees up an epic feat to get +10 skill or +4 saves or something else if that winds up being important) unless you really need that last skill point or that 7% more HP means something (less with con boosting items)
Empyre65 wrote...
For feats, Cleave is nice to have early on to give you an extra attack. If you also take Great Cleave and Improved Critical in late pre-epic, you are all set for Devastating Critical in epic levels. Also, if you are going to have Dev Crit, you might want to choose a scimitar instead of a longsword to have more critical hits.
Scimitar would be better assuming equal availability but it's not the end of the world either way. You'll also want Improved Critical as soon as you can get it, more or less, and the same for Great Cleave -- Great Cleave winds up being much less value once you're not going to kill enemies in one hit and/or you have more attacks per round.
Empyre65 wrote...
A pure Fighter has so many feats, you might be able to afford to spend some of them on saves, like Luck of Heroes (level 1 only), Lightning Reflexes, and Iron Will.
And Luck of Heroes/Strong Soul at level 1 (and are human for the latter) if you're really going crazy. Pure fighters have feats to burn.
Elhanan wrote...
I would exchange that scimitar for something with a bit more heft for a STR build; perhaps something with a higher Critical modifier instead of a wider range (eg; warhammer, greataxe). No math expert, but it seems in play that this will yield better results with STR.
It won't yield better results. A longsword and battleaxe are typically within 1% of each other for average damage done...and the scimitar is usually 10%ish better than either. And against a crit immune foe, you're only one damage per hit behind which means little if you're hitting for 30+ damage.
I happen to possess some expertise at math and literally wrote a program to calculate this exact question since I was trying to get precise answers. Give me an AB, AC, and the two types of weapons being compared and I'll tell you which is better versus crit vulnerable foes and by how much (I can throw in Imp Crit/Keen/WM feats as well as needed).
Modifié par MagicalMaster, 20 décembre 2013 - 08:14 .
