Arena tourney builds.

[LeonCross]

A friend of mines DM is running an arena tourney that sounds like fun. I won't be participating, but I thought it might make for some interesting discussion and provide grounds for people to stretch their creative muscles a bit.

The rules:

The Arena will be a 150x100x100 featureless box. The floor is made of dirt and is 20’ Deep before hitting a solid surface. Characters may be arranged in any way on this field, on their half.

You have 100 points to spend. You may have up to 10 participants in this arena fight. Each character may purchase up to a total of 10 levels. Level purchases:

1 point per level: NPC classes.
2 points per level: Melee PC classes.
3 points per level: Hybrid classes.
4 points per level: Full Casters.

Banned / Restricted materials:

Allowed Material: Only published Paizo sources designed for the Pathfinder Role Playing System may be used. Content written for D&D 3.5 Pathfinder material is not permitted.

Banned Feats: Animal Soul, Antagonize, Destroyer’s Blessing, Divine Protection, Evolved Companion, Eye of the Arclord, Familiar Spell, Feral Combat Training, all Item Creation Feats, Leadership, Pummeling Charge, Resilient Eidolon, Shade of the Uskwood (Shade of the Woodlands), Shaping Focus, Squire, and any feat in the Bestiaries meant for Animals/Monsters except on your companions. (Synthesists may select Multiattack.)

Banned Spells: Contingency, Invisibility, Greater Invisibility, Shrink Item

Banned Items/Enchantments: Black Sand, Candle of Invocation, Disciple Weapon Enhancement, Dust of Sneezing and Choking, Glyph Seals, and all potions, oils, scrolls, poisons, alchemical items, consumable ammunition, consumable wondrous magical items that provide a flat number of uses (such as a necklace of fireballs), staffs, wands, and pretty much any and all non-mundane consumables unless cleared with the event staff. This is a competition between your fighters, not your knowledge of the item pools. (Note: Items with a use-per-day system are allowed, such as a Quickrunner’s Shirt or a Metamagic Rod). All siege weapons are also banned, as are any related feats or archetypes.

You may not purchase any sort of other creature. (Golems, Animals, etc).


That's it, I think.

My initial idea for such a situation was pretty simple. 2 level 10 Master Summoners, picking up Superior Summon and dumping the rest of the feats into Evolved Summon Monster.

Figured that would let you bury your opponents under a neigh endless swarm of extremely flexible, brutal monsters.

On the other hand, seems entirely too simple to actually work.

[Baroknik]

Coming from 3.5, I find the list of banned spells hilarious. I think 2 Full casters (since you can only spend 40 points on one) will be the basis for any serious contender. By level 10, t1 is t1.

[LeonCross]

Which is another reason summoner came to mind. Their spell list is pretty good. Plus, with the evolution build, they can do things like, say, drop 1d3+1 8HD monsters each, which through the evolution points all have 8d6 line or cone breath weapons. 1/Day, but that's just round 1.

Round 2 could be something like 4 flying Alynkosaurases. Stun locks for days on flying beat sticks with something like 90hp each.... or do the above, again.

And the monsters last 10 minutes or until destroyed...muhahaha.

So yeah. Just tides and tides of monsters that can be customized with each wave through evolution points.

But again, like I said. It's a really "Simple" build. "I took 2 guys at level 10, same class, and both picked up this feat and then this other feat 4 times." seems like something that should that gets shut down by a proper optimized party.

[Baroknik]

Like I said, I don't have much PF background, but I would think 10 Wiz and 10 Druid would do well. Why Druid over cleric? Animal Companion is a free extra combatant. With that you have 20 points to play with, I'd pick up 2 adept 10s for the fun of it.

Focus on alternate avoidance methods -- if you can become incorporeal or ethereal you'll be much hardier. Look into ways to no save no SR lockdown and have the animal companion coup de grace.

Alternatively, find a spell combo that can hit everyone in the entire arena except friendlies that is guaranteed to wipe most anyone. Seems like a stretch, but I'm sure there's some kind of Limburger you can use for that -- basically the equivalent of a selective Locate City Bomb from 3.5.

Another idea would be to focus on a combination of avoidance and combat effectiveness. Think shadow-pocalypse, as your group may not work towards ability damage, and the shadows can hang out in walls to avoid LoE of clerics.

EDIT: the problem I see with 2 summonses relying on minions is that a character going nova on them still beats them. Surviving the first round should honestly be super important, as should bring able to nearly auto-win if you get initiative. It's called rocket tag for a reason.

[stack]

As a note, in PF a cleric with the animal domain can get an animal companion at level -3, fixable by taking boon companion.

At that level a Mavis's action economy could still make them a contender for rounding out a team.

[LeonCross]

So if your goal was to build a team that'd basically garunteed to go first in pathfinder and nuke your opponents to oblivion round 1 in pathfinder, what would be the best option? My friend was concidering investing a large chunk of the total wbl of muliple characters into an iten that summons a pit fiend x times a day and running wizards, but that strikes me as a summoner but worse. He would be doing divin focus for the initive bonus, though

[SamsDisciple]

I like the idea for the summoners because it is very powerful and very versatile. Use your remaining points to pick up a mage killer of some sort (monk/barb to cross whole field on turn one and lock down the enemy caster) or a designated counter/dispeller to protect from enemy spells.

[Yomega]

Have the summoners stand in mock armor while you have the 8 other (adepts probably) wear robes that look like summoners, even have 1 npc expert specialize in disguise and buy some makeup :belkar:

[SamsDisciple]

Of course you could use those adepts to throw in silent images of creatures so the enemy thinks you have 10 master summoners all summoning legions of monsters. In an optmized arena I don't think most people would be expecting illusions. Fairly easy to keep track of by numbering each caster and keeping track of who summoned what with numbered tokens and the DM knows that anything summoned by caster 2 and 7 are real while the rest are illusions.

[LeonCross]

Another idea he's kicking around is 5 level 4/6 cavalirs/evangilists, apparently for team work feat / animal companion abuse.