Best Feats for Sword & Board?

[Palanan]

Starting out sword & board, if you only had a couple feats to begin with, what would be the best options?

Power Attack seems to be mentioned a lot, but is there anything else that would be useful? All official Paizo options are on the table, 3.5 on a case-by-case basis.

[Grod_The_Giant]

Generally, you'll want Improved Shield Bash and Two-Weapon Fighting. If you can access 3.5 stuff, Shield Slam and Shield Charge are pretty solid; both give you the ability to smack people in the face with your shield hard enough to daze them. Parrying Shield adds your shield bonus to your touch AC, which isn't shabby.

Looking briefly at PF stuff.. Shield Brace jumps out at me for letting you wield a two-handed weapon and a shield, thus getting full power attack returns. Doubly so for letting you bypass the prereqs with a Fighter level. Their version of Shield Slam looks much worse than the 3.5 version, but Shield Mastery is nice. Stumbling/Toppling Bash are nice touches.

[ottdmk]

I'm fond of Shield Ward from the 3.5 PHB II. You have Shield Specialization as a pre-req, but all that means is that you get to add +3 to your touch AC when using a heavy shield instead of +2.

[Darrin]

Could you be more specific on how many feats you have available?

If you want to use Power Attack, you can combine that with TWF and Oversized TWF (Complete Adventurer) to attack with a one-handed weapon and a heavy shield as your offhand. Since the heavy shield is also considered a one-handed weapon, you can add bonus damage to Power Attack on it. (Agile Shield Fighter from PHBII can also be used to do the same thing, but it costs an extra feat.)

Shield Charge and Shield Slam (both from Complete Warrior) turns your shield bash into an interesting debuff: trip attempt and Fort save vs. dazed. You can add Improved Trip and Knock-Down (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/divine/divineAbilitiesFeats.htm#knockDown) on top of that for an extra attack.

[tyckspoon]

(Agile Shield Fighter from PHBII can also be used to do the same thing, but it costs an extra feat.)


Agile Shield Fighter does carry the advantage of sharing pre-reqs with other feats that you're probably going to want as a shield fighter (Shield Slam, Shield Charge, Shield Ward), whereas the TWF feats don't really lead to anything else.

[Darrin]

Agile Shield Fighter does carry the advantage of sharing pre-reqs with other feats that you're probably going to want as a shield fighter (Shield Slam, Shield Charge, Shield Ward), whereas the TWF feats don't really lead to anything else.

Eh... I'm kinda lukewarm on Agile Shield Fighter. You have to spend an additional feat on Shield Specialization, and this doesn't really overlap with Shield Slam or Shield Charge. It is a prereq for Shield Ward, which I have often seen suggested as a good feat. However, most of my games don't spend much time at higher levels where touch AC becomes more important, so I don't tend to include it in my builds. The other problem I have with it is if you want to TWF with a shield, you still have to take the TWF/ITWF/GTWF feats on top of Agile Shield Fighter, which makes TWF a redundant feat tax.

On the other hand... if you read Agile Shield Fighter as replacing *ALL* TWF penalties with a flat -2 penalty, then it starts to wander over into *OMG TAKE IT NOW* territory. As in, if you take TWF/ITWF/GTWF, you get those offhand attacks not at -2/-7/-12 but -2/-2/-2, then that almost makes the TWF line worth taking.

Hmm. Now that I'm looking at it more closely... why haven't I noticed this before? The RAW on TWF is pretty darned sloppy.

The penalty for Improved TWF is -5. The penalty for Greater TWF is -10. At no point does the text say those penalties stack with the first -2 offhand penalty.

Anyway... yeah, if you stick to literal RAW here and Agile Shield Fighter replaces the -5 from ITWF and the -10 from GTWF, then... that's something of an improvement over standard TWF stuff.