Stalker Build Help

[Balmas]

Over the next few months, I'm going to be playing in a heavily homebrewed Pathfinder game. The essential gist of it is that each of us is plucked from our respective homes and times to do jobs for what are essentially the Discworld Auditors of Reality. In the world we've landed in, everyone is some kind of lycanthrope; the DM had us roll randomly to determine which kind of lycanthrope we become.

So far, the group consists of a foot-tall cleric who plans to heavily focus on his casting, and a fighter who's going to leverage his were-elephant status to become a melee terror. In order to fill missing roles in the party, I'm planning to play some manner of rogue character. When the DM showed me a third party book, Path of War, the Stalker class jumped out at me as being able to skill monkey, sneak, and still contribute to a fight in a pinch.

However, I've never actually played a non-magical class in Pathfinder before. As such, I'm looking for the forum's help in creating an effective Stalker to back up the other characters in the party.

The rules are as follows:
-Right now, we're level 1 characters. However, the DM is planning on having the campaign eventually reach level 30.
-We get a free natural lycanthrope template. Because I rolled stupidly well, I am a were-dragon. (Like I said, it's heavily homebrewed, but I'll roll with it.)
-Due to the way we rolled dice for stats, I have a stupidly good stat array: 24, 17, 16, 16, 15, 13. (4d6, reroll 1s, drop lowest, if you get 4 of a kind you add them all together.)
-Custom races are on the table, with 40 racial points to play with. Racial Points can be reserved for things I'd like to happen in the future, like saving 10RP to make my were-dragon also be a half-dragon.
-Source Materials: Anything published by Paizo, plus Path of War.


Ideally, I'd like to make a stalker that focuses on ranged combat. As such, I plan to build a race with high dexterity, invest in the Solar Wind martial school, and take as many feats to improve my archery as possible.

So far, the plan is to make a medium race (0RP) with the Advanced abilities trait (4RP) to get +4 to WIS, +2 to all physical stats, and -2 to CHA. From there, I could also toss 8 more RP to get STR and DEX each boosted by a further +2. That leaves me with 28 RP to flesh out my custom race; I'm thinking a race of forest dwelling kinda orc-apes who rely on speed and their climbing abilities to sort out predators. I might toss 4 RP to get a bonus feat at first level, because I know how valuable that can be.

Any other ideas? I anticipate that this build would be best against single large enemies, as most of the class features work best against one target at a time, and the best archery feat involves shooting many arrows and combining their damage into one big burst for the purposes of Damage resistance. Is Arcane archer any good in this case?

Thanks in advance!

[GrayDeath]

40 (!!) Race Points?

With 28 left and since you are in the mosntrous "everything goes" territory I`d opt for Spellikes myself.
Give your Weremonster 2-3 very useful at will spells and the 1-2 9th Level Spells of Choice as once/Day, invest the rest in Save bonuses and you should be OP enough. ;)


I dont know enough about Stalker to contribute, but for Attribute Tips I would like to know the exact effect of Were-Dragonnessiness...es...whatever. With your basic Rolls I`d probably forgo any RP in attributes aside from the advanced template for more spellikes, DR or similar things.

[Name1]

I second GrayDeath: You should totally get into SLAs. Spells in Pathfinder aren't as good as their 3.5 counterparts, but they still pull incredible weight.

I believe the maximum is... Level 4 IIRC.

First off, you might want to take Stoneseer, as it gives constant nondetection and 3 1/day spells, one of which is Stone Tell, which can provide some nice information depending on where you go for 2 RP.

Shadow Magic costs 2 RP too, which is 1 RP more than the 1/day Pass without Trace we want, but it doesn't count agaist the normal spell-like limit and adds 1/day Ventriloqism and Ghost Sound to the deal.

On the spell-like front, an obvious choice would be at-will Invisibility for 4 RP. Adding at-will Silence costs the same, so does Darkness. For another 2 RP, you can get Charm Person at-will.

If you choose Darkness, you may also like Shadow Resistance + Blending for 3 RP, which gives cold and electricity res 5 and increases the opponents miss chance in dim light from 20% to 50%. Another 1 RP give Low Light Vision, while another 2 RP give Darkvision 60 feet (120 feet if you spent an additional one).

If you don't want to get caught off-guard by magic, you can spent 3 RP to get detect magic constant.

[EldritchWeaver]

If your GM allows Path of War, maybe you can persuade him to use Spheres of Power as well. That way you could trade in spell-likes for magic talents, which are usable at will. But it depends on how many magic talents you could get and which spheres you choose, if the spells can be replicated close enough. On the other hand, you might be happy enough with the options provided. By chance, a player of mine goes Stalker as well and I proposed to look into the Dark, Warp and Telekinesis spheres for shadow creation, teleportation and ranged skill checks. The Dark sphere handbook is out for playtest (didn't read it yet), so there might be some juicy options hidden in there. Only problem is that so far there is no archetype which adds magic (leaving multiclassing or feats), but I'm willing to homebrew one.

[Balmas]

Right, so I've purchased an extra flexible feat, plus Stoneseer, Shadow magic, and three At-will SLAs: fly, invisibility, and haste. This is because in our game, haste is even more obscenely good than it normally is; instead of granting an extra attack in a full-attack, it gives the people affected an extra standard action.

Yeah. :smalltongue: I was playing a buff-debuff wizard, and didn't know that I could completely break the action economy with a third level spell in this game until everyone started to start slinging two spells per round.

That leaves me with four racial points, plus 8 that can be looted from the extra +2 STR, +2 DEX.

********

So from here, I need to decide several things: how do I want to deal my damage? Which stalker arts do I want to embrace? Which martial disciplines have the best things for me to use?

In order: the stalker's class features revolve around the stalker's martial disciplines, while the other half is taking advantage of and setting up the extra damage per attack. Normally, when I think extra damage per attacks, I think of archery and two-weapon fighting, and lots of full-round attacks. The munchkin in me also screams a lot about all the wasted feats you need to use just to achieve parity with a barbarian with a greataxe and Power Attack.

Fortunately, I understand that Thrashing Dragon makes two weapon fighting not just viable, but pretty darn good. What's more, Veiled Moon and Steel Serpent both share some weapon groups, most notably light blades. If I'm going for more than one discipline, TWF seems to be the way to go.

I definitely know that I want the Deadly Insight art, as one ki point seems like a fair trade for 5 rounds of +Xd6 to each attack. I'll also probably pick up Deadly Ambush at 3rd level, since Thrashing Dragon has an easy 1st level maneuver that knocks your opponents off balance. I know that eventually I'll want Phantom Reach, as if I go TWF I sacrifice nearly all of my ranged abilities.

And now we get to the fun part: picking maneuvers!