Pathfinder Brawler

[Nosta]

So I recently well in love with the brawler class as i noticed it got martial Flexibility.
I want to build a character that takes great advantage of that.
I plan To be An Arena champion in the game i'm

I want to be strong but fight smart.


Now for my questions
is there way other than half/giant to gain a large size like effect for CMB/CMD?

Secondly any tips or tricks to make decent brawler would be much appreciated

[comatthew6]

Well, with respect to getting to large size, you could always just ask your fellow wizard to hit you with Enlarge Person. Combat Expertise is a must, and you don't even need the 13 Int requirement. Other than that, you should be looking at Power Attack / Weapon Focus / Furious Focus early game in addition to Improved ___ (Disarm / Trip / Grapple).

[Geddy2112]

Here (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NHhkx9fkI00i2_p8WxtWlEGPRdK4L4qVlkJ-JrHxmy8/edit) is a handy guide that covers the basics of the brawler. Read it over and once you have your general build and then ask for help fine tuning.

With dirty fighting (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/feats/combat-feats/dirty-fighting-combat/) being a feat, there is the option to take that over combat expertise. Some builds still like combat expertise to get their AC stupidly high, but dirty fighting is often more useful.

Second having the party caster enlarge you. Being a large creature in a medium world can suck, but being a frontline martial you are first in priority to receive buffs. That said, there are a ton of other ways to increase your CMB/D, gain reach, and brawler unarmed damage scaling with level makes being enlarged less of a necessity and more icing on the cake. If you really want you can put ranks into UMD and get a wand to enlarge yourself-consider getting it as a class skill with a trait, maybe even pragmatic activator so you can use your INT instead of CHA(if you want a smart character, and you are almost certainly dumping charisma as a brawler).

[Psyren]

You can also just buy potions rather than relying on a caster or becoming one yourself.

For Dex-based Brawlers, Stamina + Agile Maneuvers lets you count as any size category you want.

[Stelio Kontos]

So I recently well in love with the brawler class as i noticed it got martial Flexibility.
I want to build a character that takes great advantage of that.
I plan To be An Arena champion in the game i'm

I want to be strong but fight smart.


Now for my questions
is there way other than half/giant to gain a large size like effect for CMB/CMD?

Secondly any tips or tricks to make decent brawler would be much appreciated

What do you want to be able to do? I think there's a couple ways to take advantage of Martial Flexibility (which is the whole point of the class IMO):

1) To extend feat trees beyond where you currently have them. This doesn't work great at low levels, because you still can't get too far up the trees because of prerequisite requirements -- and because you get plenty of feats anyway that you can pretty easily max out one tree and do decently well in a second. Some of the combat maneuvers can work here, some of the style feats can be very useful here. Which ones, again, depends on what you want to be able to do.

2) To branch out into certain specialty feats that you don't really want to blow a feat on but can come in handy on special occasions (here I think of stuff like Blind Fight, Deflect Arrows... that sort of thing).

At low levels, you probably want to make sure you open up a good number of feat options. That means taking feats like Power Attack, Dodge, Combat Expertise, and Combat Reflexes. Weapon Focus can work -- I don't really recommend it if fighting unarmed, because moving into for instance crit specialization with unarmed attacks is folly, and it's actually not a prereq for a ton of other things I've wanted in the past -- but is actually less necessary here.

The absolute best thing to do is get a list of feats handy that you might want to use at a given time (it'll be a fairly long list at mid levels if you're doing your job right). You don't want to be That Guy flipping through five books to see if there's anything nice you can pull out of your butt. Be prepared.