Tiers or rating of Path of War Archetypes?

[Vortling]

Recently I bought myself the Path of War books as I'm a big fan of Tome of Battle and may be getting into another Pathfinder game soon. I was reading through the archetypes for Pathfinder base classes in Path of War Expanded book and thought these would be a good way to introduce the maneuver system rather than jumping straight into the martial initiator classes. Below I've gone through the archetypes with my estimation of whether the archetype is an upgrade or a downgrade to the base class. I'm working on the assumption that feats, traits, etc from PoW are on the table for this and not just maneuvers.

Barbarian (Primal Disciple) - Loses pretty much all the rage powers for maneuvers. Based off what is available in rage powers and in PoW maneuvers this looks like an even trade or slight upgrade. Slight upgrade in that maneuvers grant mobility so the barbarian doesn't get stuck standing still full attacking to get the most out of their damage. Several maneuvers also allow them to apply status effects or buffs so they don't have to completely damage focus. Trading out for some of the more supernatural maneuver schools (*cough* Elemental Flux *cough*) can grant additional mobility.

Bard (Rubato) - Complete loss of spells and trades out several bard songs for different ones. This looks like the biggest loser of all the archetypes. Yes, maneuvers provide some excellent flexibility, but not as much as spells. Now the bard is mostly looking at skills for their out of combat utility. While the bard does gain access to the best buff discipline (Golden Lion) and arguably the best debuff/utility discipline (Elemental Flux) I don't see it as enough to make up for losing spell access.

Fighter (Myrmidon) - Loses 5 feats for maneuver access, grit, grit effects, and 2 more skill ranks per level. This looks like the big winner of the archetypes, possibly tied with the Rogue. Fighters are gaining access to the most disciplines and the largest list of disciplines to choose from. They're getting more maneuvers and stances than they would from spending those 5 feats on Martial Training and more on top of that. Even without trading out for a supernatural discipline it appears the fighter will have significantly improved mobility and utility without any sacrifice to damage.

Monk (Monk of the Silver Fist) - Odd set of trade outs to make the monk more of a protector than puncher. This one looks like a fairly even trade to me. Flurry still appears to have the same issue in Pathfinder as it did in 3.5 so trading it out isn't a huge deal. If you really want stunning fist back it's a feat. In trade your gauntlets are better at dealing damage. This is nice as gauntlets are easier to enchant than fists. Abundant Step and Quivering Palm weren't ever that good and while their trade outs are weaker they're significantly more consistent in use. If you want to go more punchy you can always trait for access to one of the unarmed strike disciplines.

Paladin (Knight Disciple) - Trade out spells, swap several class features for similar ones. This looks like the other big loser of the archetypes, but not as bad as the bard since paladins are less about spellcasting than the bard. Every single traded feature is a straight downgrade. The paladin does get some of their out of combat utility with being able to use spell completion items but it just doesn't make up for all that is lost. I'd argue that if you want the paladin feel without the suck you should play the fighter archetype instead and trait for one of the paladiny disciplines.

Ranger (Ambush Hunter) - Loses spells, favored enemy, locks you into having the animal companion. In trade you gain significant damage nova capabilities and access to a broad choice of disciplines to match your fighting style. I'm going to call this one even as it really depends on what you want out of the ranger. The ranger loses out on of combat utility from spells and favored enemy, but what you receive in return gives huge damage spikes from letting your animal companion use maneuvers and stances. Ranger also gets one of the most efficient recovery mechanics for maneuvers once they hit 4th level.

Rogue (Hidden Blade) - Lose half your rogue talents. Gain maneuvers, a few small features, INT as your initiation ability, and access to gambits for recovery. This is the other big winner from what I'm seeing. Gambits give you some nice self or team buffs. Looking through the rogue talents few of them are on par with what you receive from maneuvers and stances and the ones that are have a 1/day restriction. With access to PoW, the best rogue talents look to be the ones that give you a bonus combat feat and a bonus feat respectively. Overall a straight upgrade and with 4 disciplines you can easily trait out into another without losing flexibility.

Thoughts?

[Ramza00]

Rogue (via other archetypes), Empiricist, and Alchemist can be 6th level spellcasters while also have 6th level maneuvers, and 6th level spells.

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The Aegis one is also very good. Take the Warrior Soul (2 CP) + the Akashic Customization Points. Make one of your 3 disciplines Radiant Dawn and we are talking 3 (Radiant Dawn)+4 (Ectoplessence)=7 Essence at HD 8 before feats and items which can give you even more essence.

And here is the thing about Aegis is that it is multi class friendly with things like Student of the Astral Suit, and Awakened Blade.
3 level Aegis Dip+Student of the Astral Suit+Do a dip into psychic warrior and you got the 2 psionic powers you need, and one of the two bonus feats. Then take another dip into a full IL class with practiced initiator and you can have 15 levels of Aegis at level 15 (11 levels of power points), plus a full 15 IL in a second class that gets up to 8th level maneuvers.

Oh of those levels of Aegis with Ectoplessence + Radiant Dawn. Grab some Essence Focus Weapons, where you can get to swap out your essence on the fly, and you can have multiple Essence Focus Weapons so you can easily swap out different +5 Weapons that you need.

You can also do the Soulknife with Awakened Blade and Aegis instead of that Full IL class. 1 level of Soulknife with both the War Soul (gives soulknife 6th level maneuvers) and Augmented Blade Archetype and now you can take Fighter's Blade at HD 7 (but not prior to HD 7, since you need AB 2 to have a 3rd level Psicrystal Augment) and thus you now have at HD 15

15 IL in Aegis with 15 level Customizations at HD 15.
13 IL in Psychic Warrior with crappy psionic powers known
15 IL in Soulknife (you took practiced initiator)
15th level Mindblade due to 1+10+4 (Fighter's Blade.)
And you can still have a 2nd or 3rd weapon going with Essence Forged Weapons.

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Yadda, Yadda, Yadda Path of War rewards so many different combinations and unlike First Party Pathfinder it encourages multiclassing and prestige classes. (Yet your total number of classes are often 1 PRC and at most 3 levels of other classes in the first 5 levels.) I adore my hybrid characters which is almost as good as their single class brothers but has far more versatility at the cost of a feat or two and some careful planning.

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You mentioned Rubato stinks but it is actually incredible as a 1 level dip. What you do is you get the Pageant of the Peacock Masterpiece (have to give up a feat since you do not have spells known.) But wait Pageant of the Peacock needs bardic performance and how are you going to survive with so few bardic performances per round? Well Dreamscared press also has other books and one of them is called Steelforge vol 1 and it has Bracelet of Charms (1k, can have 2 for each hand), and necklace of charms (2k, only 1 for it is your neck) together these 3 items can allow you to wear 20 charms total. There is over 2 dozen charms each of the lesser ones (refinement charms) cost 500 gp each and they give you small abilities, well the Charm of Performance: Add one round of bardic performance per day and it stacks so together 500*20+2*1k+2k=14k gives you +20 additional rounds of bardic performance.

So Rubato works great as a bard.

Furthermore Full Class Rubato Bard also works great as a buffer with bardic masterpieces that take 1 standard action for they get speed up to move and later swift actions. Yes bardic masterpieces take feat but just grab a few of the best ones like Blazing Rondo. Do a move action party haste at HD 7 or use tempo to cast it as a free action while you do boosts and strikes via bard's new maneuvers from rubato. And that Blazing Rondo can stay up for pretty much the entire combat without using your bardic performances for you can use 2 tempo for a bardic performance round, you get a free tempo each round, and you get 1/2 Bard Level+Cha free Tempo at the start of combat. Once you can afford it a Tuned Bowstring allows you to use a bow as an indefinite haste machine as long as you fire one arrow per round.

You got "options!"

[Vortling]

Interesting stuff, I admit I am not familiar with the Aegis and only passingly familiar with the soulknife and psychic warrior from what I know of 3.5

[Ramza00]

(I added more to the above post. I was trying not to spam your thread so I did some editing, but I did not finish it prior to you responding.)


Interesting stuff, I admit I am not familiar with the Aegis and only passingly familiar with the soulknife and psychic warrior from what I know of 3.5

Aegis is a new class, pretty much you are Iron-Man, or you can be Venom, or you can be He-Man / Magical Girl with a transformation sequence. You are a squishy Full BAB / d10, good Fort and Will class, with 4+ skill points and almost no class features without your suit. But you can summon your suit all day and it gives you customization points with a feat being worth between 1 or 2 CPs. Thus you play as an adaptable fighter, what a fighter should have been.

And one of the option is to be a 6th level Path of War Class for 2 CP (only gives you 3 maneuvers, 3 ready, and 1 stance) but for each additional CP you get another maneuver 1/2 ready maneuver. Thus for 4 CP you can have 5/4/1 maneuvers. 1 Stance, 5 Known (of any level up to your IL), 4 Ready for 4 CP.

2 CP give you flight, and there are dozens of other great abilities for 1 or 2 CP.

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Aegis as an idea plays like a Summoner of the Synthesist type (the one who does not summon a separate Eidolon but instead improves himself with an Eidolon suit.) Except you are weaker than a Summoner Synthesist, yet you can be far more versatile.

The class is Tier 3, but it is a versatile Tier 3. And with multiclassing and awakened blade you can keep all of your goodies and also be a pseudo another Path of War class as I explained above.

[Vortling]

You mentioned Rubato stinks but it is actually incredible as a 1 level dip. What you do is you get the Pageant of the Peacock Masterpiece (have to give up a feat since you do not have spells known.) But wait Pageant of the Peacock needs bardic performance and how are you going to survive with so few bardic performances per round? Well Dreamscared press also has other books and one of them is called Steelforge vol 1 and it has Bracelet of Charms (1k, can have 2 for each hand), and necklace of charms (2k, only 1 for it is your neck) together these 3 items can allow you to wear 20 charms total. There is over 2 dozen charms each of the lesser ones (refinement charms) cost 500 gp each and they give you small abilities, well the Charm of Performance: Add one round of bardic performance per day and it stacks so together 500*20+2*1k+2k=14k gives you +20 additional rounds of bardic performance.

So Rubato works great as a bard.

Furthermore Full Class Rubato Bard also works great as a buffer with bardic masterpieces that take 1 standard action for they get speed up to move and later swift actions. Yes bardic masterpieces take feat but just grab a few of the best ones like Blazing Rondo. Do a move action party haste at HD 7 or use tempo to cast it as a free action while you do boosts and strikes via bard's new maneuvers from rubato. And that Blazing Rondo can stay up for pretty much the entire combat without using your bardic performances for you can use 2 tempo for a bardic performance round, you get a free tempo each round, and you get 1/2 Bard Level+Cha free Tempo at the start of combat. Once you can afford it a Tuned Bowstring allows you to use a bow as an indefinite haste machine as long as you fire one arrow per round.

You got "options!"

On the level 1 dip, that's a bit specific of an item to make the dip work. I'm not sure how that would fly in most games.

As far as the full build I admit I didn't see many of the masterpieces as particularly useful partly because I missed the section on being able to reduce their activation time. What other good masterpieces are out there? The other concern I would have is that using the feats for masterpieces is rather at odds with maneuvers which want you to be making attacks for most of them. Without the feat support (Weapon Finesse, Point Blank Shot line of feats) you may end up in a spot where most of your maneuvers don't hit very often.

[Elricaltovilla]

Just by the very nature of possessing maneuvers, any of these archetypes are going to be high tier 4 to mid tier 3. Especially once you account for discipline swaps via trait and/or tradition. As an example, any of these classes can take the feat Advanced Study (https://libraryofmetzofitz.fandom.com/wiki/Advanced_Study?mobile-app=false) to pick up the stance Unbroken Stride (https://libraryofmetzofitz.fandom.com/wiki/Unbroken_Stride) for access to flight, assuming they don't get a better version of flight from a different discipline. And with other disciplines like Veiled Moon, Elemental Flux, Riven Hourglass or Silver Crane on the table (not an inclusive list) you can easily build a highly versatile initiator with a variety of potent in and out of combat tricks. Which I guess was the point, after all.

On the other hand, seeing as an archetype is supposed to stay relatively comparable to the base class it modifies, I take it as a good thing that these archetypes turned out to not be too much better. Tier 3 is a good place to be in my opinion.

[Efrate]

Fighter, ranger, barbarian are quite good. Rogue and maybe monk if for whatever reason you do not use the unchained version.

Rage powers to maneuvers are more lateral move, some rage powers are quite good but they do kind of all do similar things, maneuvers give you more options but not necessarily better ones.

Rogue and monk if not unchained get a lot from maneuvers, because what they give up is pretty meh. Increases their combat effectiveness by quite a bit.

Rangers novaing with pets make a great boss fight out of no where.

Fighter is fantastic and there is almost no reason not to take it if it's on the table.

Rajahs are fun as well but that's going hard into 2 different subsystems (that work great together however) but are an awesome introduction into different esoteric methods of combat and such. A wandering rajah is a great NPC to get secret stuff from the far away place(tm) that can open up those subsystems to pcs.

[Ramza00]

As an example, any of these classes can take the feat Advanced Study (https://libraryofmetzofitz.fandom.com/wiki/Advanced_Study?mobile-app=false) to pick up the stance Unbroken Stride (https://libraryofmetzofitz.fandom.com/wiki/Unbroken_Stride) for access to flight, assuming they don't get a better version of flight from a different discipline.

Agrees and highlights some more.

The cool thing about Unbroken Stride is for the price of 2 feats you can get good flight and later perfect flight and actually earlier than you think due to how martial training works.

IL for Martial Training 1 and Martial Training 2 feats are 1/2 HD + Int or 1/2 HD + Wis or 1/2 HD + Cha.
Martial Training 2 requires 5 BAB (thus HD 7 for 3/4 BAB and HD 10 for 1/2 BAB)
IL 10 of Unbroken Stride gives you flight with good maneuverability but no hover. IL 15 gives you perfect maneuverability.

But you do not need 15 HD due to how martial training works. 10 HD + 20 Int or 20 Cha or 20 Wis give you that 15 IL for perfect flight. Thus some classes like cleric, psion, etc can get flight in a way that helps them even if their normal chassis does not.

So yeah Path of War is helpful even if you are not a full Path of War class or using one of those Archetypes that get 6th level Maneuvers at IL 13. It can be helpful even for those spellcasters who can't get flight easy, now for the price of 2 feats and the opportunity cost of not picking another stance.

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If your DM does custom monsters this also means your enemies can now get flight in far easier ways. Be scared when the Giant is flying at you at much lower levels with no magic for the giant racial HD work great for Path of War. Same thing for other monster types and subtypes not just giant.