[3.P]Tripping

[Rhaegar14]

We all know the tripper build is one of the best, if not the best nonmagic control build in the game. But Pathfinder severely nerfs the Spiked Chain, taking away its reach. How do you execute a tripping build without the Spiked Chain?

[sonofzeal]

We all know the tripper build is one of the best, if not the best nonmagic control build in the game. But Pathfinder severely nerfs the Spiked Chain, taking away its reach. How do you execute a tripping build without the Spiked Chain?
Guisarme + Armor Spikes is the conventional way, I think.

Note that PF also nerfed tripping in splitting the feats. PF may also hand out more feats, but it only amounts to one full extra feat by lvl 9, and a lot of other feats got split too.

I've seen various analysis on whether CMB/CMD makes tripping easier or harder, and it seems to depend on your assumptions. I can't remember if there was ever a satisfactory resolution to that debate.

[StreamOfTheSky]

PF also nerfed trip weapons. As in, you can now trip with ANY weapon (and add its enhancement and other bonuses to your CMB). The only advantage a trip weapon confers is the option to drop it if you fail your trip attempt badly to avoid falling prone. Well, it also randomly gives bonuses to drag and reposition, iirc.... The whole debacle was pretty "wtf?"

The fundamentals of tripping are the same in PF as in 3E -- you want, size, strength, and reach -- the options are just more limited. And BAB matters now. Since size is a hard cap on what you can and can't trip, the best option is probably a summoner's eidolon (or the summoner himself, if doing Synthesist). It can grow eventually to size Huge, and is a valid target for Enlarge Person (which, yes, is on the summoner spell list). It can get the universal monster "Trip" special attack attached to its natural weapons, of which it gets a lot, it has an evolution to extend reach, and it can get stupidly ridiculously high strength (also can be bumped w/ an evolution).

[deuxhero]

SAKURAI!

Anyways...

One thread recently that was about optimizing a trip sorcerer, which from the looks of it is a better tripper than martial types (*sigh*)

The build was Tripping Spell Magic Missile with Magical Linage to reduce metamagic cost to 0 so you can do it at level 1. That alone is nice for the cost of 1 feat+1 trait compared to what a fighter had to do (again *sigh*), but it was followed with Slyivan bloodline (+boon companion and Tandem Trip) for an animal companion that took IAS, Combat Reflexes, Tandem Trip and Vicious Stomp.