SangoProduction
2022-10-27, 08:58 PM
Preamble: After failing to create a map for my campaign, I decided to cool down by looking at a random spheres archetype. The Brawler's Prescient Pugilist archetype was pretty cool. Added a couple of new options...pretty much entirely at level 1. I mean, over the next 14 levels, they get 5 more options / features. From the archetype. So I had a look at the Brawler class. It seemed to have more going on than a normal Paizo class. So, I'm going to give it an unironic shot.
I will lower my expectations down to "Paizo martial" levels. So I will probably be vastly inflating the ratings.
Post-Review Analysis: Well. The um... base class is perhaps a bit more of what I expected from a Paizo class than I... well, than I expected. It actually gets less appealing the more levels you put into it, and you want to get out of the class as soon as you have everything you came for.
(1) Superb: You always want this if it's relevant to you. And it probably is.
(1.5) Really Good: Particularly useful bits of kit, but aren't quite must-haves. (Kept it decimal, because spreading out Good so far from Superb felt unrepresentative. But I needed a step between)
(2) Good: These make useful additions to the right builds. Among your first picks.
(3) Meh: Doesn't hurt to have. Wouldn't go out of your way for it.
(4) No: It technically has a use, but the cost to take simply doesn't outweigh the benefit.
(5) Never: There’s no non-trivial reason to pick it up, from its mechanics.
(6+) Harmful: Taking/using this is actively detrimental to your character.
<Angle brackets> around a rating indicates situational usefulness, and how good it is in that favorable situation.
[Square brackets] indicate a reliance on the group (players or DM) or campaign you’re playing in, and how well it does in those select groups.
Special Ratings:
(C) Cheese: A talent so broken that it will be instantly banned if you use it as you could.
(?) Unrated: I choose not to rate it. Often because it is just so far out of my wheelhouse, or it’s far too ambiguous.
(F) Flavor: This indicates that the main draw to the talent is going to be its inherent fluff or flavor, rather than raw power or utility.
(D) D***bag: Used for when your character wants to be a D***bag.
Brawler's Cunning (?): Lets you basically ignore the int requirements on combat feats. Most tables homebrew the requirement away. You don't need to be particularly smart to know how to rush head-long into people and push them back. I mean many American Footballers have brain damage.
Martial Flexibility (1): Flexes a combat talent a few times a day. (And as an important note, Extra Martial Talent is a combat feat.) Even without access to Spheres talents, that still means.... um... Well, you can flex into the talents that allow you the bare minimum use of combat maneuvers. They should just not provoke by default. But it's even better if you are already using Elephant in the Room rules.
Outside of even that, which I rate fairly low... I mean, you can be instantaneously proficient in literally any weapon, including siege weaponry if I remember correctly. And only when it becomes useful to be so....up to a few minutes a day. So better be a damned good weapon.
Martial Training (1.5): There are some great fighter feats .... compared to regular combat feats, and qualifying as a monk simultaneously is nice. Especially with full BAB. (Unchained Monk is also full BAB)
Unarmed Strike (?): Scales at the same rate as the monk. Which is to say: not well. Unarmed strikes have literally one advantage to real weapons, and it's that they can't be disarmed, even if you lose your arms. Not particularly relevant in most games, let alone sessions. But actually that was a lie. You can still use Unarmed Strike as a weapon, even while wielding other weapons, letting you dual wield unarmed and a greatsword. And you only suffer the normal -2/-2 because it's the "size" of the "offhand" weapon (light, for unarmed) that determines the penalties. (And for anyone crying about not being able to dual wield Unarmed Strike, well look to Brawler's Flurry, and see that it is intended to do so, even if just for this class.) And you can, without penalty, use it nonlethally, letting you knock out die hards without killing them, in addition to other goodies.
And as a light weapon that cannot be disarmed, you always have access to it during combat maneuvers. (Although why you'd actually use it rather than advance your win condition through the CM is another question entirely. You don't even get to ignore armor and shield while grappling, which was historically most of the purpose of doing so.)
Oh, and as a class with an inbuilt Unarmed Strike damage, you can increase that by 1 size, by taking an unarmed talent in Spheres, rather than scaling off of talents taken.
Bonus Combat Feats (2): Not as good as a true flex, not gained as quickly as a fighter. But 1 feat per roughly 3 levels is not bad. And you get to reselect the feats every time you gain a new one. This makes it relatively flexible.
Brawler's Flurry (2): Two weapon fighting feat, so long as you are using some combination of unarmed, close fighter group, or monk weapons. Now, it does not specify that you can't combine anything else in there, just that you *must* combine at least one of the mentioned groups. See my paragraph on Unarmed Strike for details. Still relatively mediocre. But less so, when you have a two-handed weapon in the "main hand."
Maneuver Training (4): A positively tiny bonus to a singular combat maneuver, that scales at 1 per 4 levels. Average CMD scales at 2 per CR. And you can't flex this to best fit your opponent. And although you can pick more CMs later, they get stair-stepped improvements like the Ranger's Favored Enemy. But at least it means you only need to find +7 to CMB per 4 levels rather than the full +8. So it's at least...something. (As a DM, I would just say that the full bonus is applies to all selected CMs.)
AC Bonus (4): A +1 / 4.5 levels AC bonus. With no stat scaling (although people complain about that with monks). But allows for light armor. It's quite literally a rounding error. But hey. You have it, right? I would just suit up in heavy armor and dump dex as a brawler. You only equate to full plate, while in light armor, when you reach epic levels. (If you extrapolate the scaling.)
Knockout (4): Giving a martial a save-or-lose (well, potentially die, since Coup-de-Grace on the next turn)? Incredible. Once per day. Announced before you roll the attack. And if you still hit, and they still fail the save, and you actually roll decently on the duration, they can still attempt a save each round. Ah. Yes. That's the Paizo I know. Granted, Unconscious is the second most powerful condition in the game, next to Dead. But still.
Brawler's Strike (4): Yeah. I mean, if you don't already have some sort of magic arm band that gives your unarmed strikes magic weapon properties (or a nice Enhancement sphere user), you are going to quickly fall behind anyway. So this at least puts a floor there for you. At least as far as DR goes.
Closer Weapon Mastery (7): Yeah... No. This is bad. Straight up. And not only is this bad, almost every half-way decent archetype replaces this. Which means that this one, horrific class feature that you wouldn't even bother noting on your character sheet keeps you from taking many archetype combinations, all on its own. Wow.
Level 6-15 (4): Nothing new. Just previously established scaling. Well, you do get some more flex feats, and real feats. And more uses of the flex feats per day, and do it with lesser actions. Still very slowly and uninterestingly. If this chassis is all I got, I would hop out no later than level 6. And even staying on for up to level 3 is a tough sale. Even by Paizo standards.
Awesome Blow (6): Takes until level 16 to be able to knock an enemy back and prone by hitting them. But at least it doesn't ... oh. Wait. I read it wrong. It is a combat maneuver. So it's like a bad Trip + bull rush, that benefits from none of the feats and nonsense you've had up until now. And look at all those CR the enemy got to build up by the time you got to Awesome Blow? And it must be used as a standard action, rather than part of your attack routine, which would have at least given you multiple opportunities.
Improved Awesome Blow (5): Gets to use Awesome Blow (still a combat maneuver) as an attack. So at least as your cap stone, you actually have multiple attempts to do a crummy combat maneuver.
---Archetypes---
Replaces knockout and close weapon mastery. Drastically different function, if you actually roll with Poison accumulation increasing the DC rather than applying the effect multiple times. If that's the case, then it is suddenly pretty bad, and is a literally worse Bleed. But with some rider conditions that do become harder to deal with (per attack) starting at level 5. But the effects aren't particularly sticky. A reasonable DM, even using that rule, would probably say that you get the instantaneous damage, and maybe just refresh the duration.
Although now you get the opportunity to take some poison feats, such as Ability Focus (Neat, I guess), Powerful Poisoning (I mean, maybe around level 8 it is good). And... that's pretty much it for feats. But Poisonous Slayer gives you +1 to hit with poisoned weapons. And you literally have no choice but to have your unarmed attacks be poisoned. And you can perhaps use the Virulent or Toxic Enchantments, if you find a way to get those on your unarmed strikes.
...Yeah. There's not a lot of support for this sort of thing. Regardless...
Level 1 (1.5):
Reduces your "effective creature size" by 1 for the purpose of the unarmed strike damage. Up until you're at least Huge size, that's only a reduction of 1 average damage.
In exchange, your unarmed strikes force a fort save (based on your Con mod), or else take damage equal to your Con mod. So, you want to max your Constitution, to both amplify your damage and chance for them to fail the save. Max Con...after Strength. Because you don't even get the chance for them to fail the save if you don't hit. And Strength also increases damage (even for non-unarmed strikes).
So, you're netting like +3 damage off of this, in point buy. Which is almost like getting an extra 1d6 damage. Except that the extra damage also technically has an additional point of failure with the save.
Level 4 (1): Now, the damage can be dealt up to an additional (1/4 level) times, if they keep failing their save. Of course, they must be consecutive failures. But once you start going ham on the attacks per round, your DM's just going to stop even rolling to save. Because you are obnoxious to deal with. Either that, or he's going to burn out, or ask you to retire your character, because that's too much bookkeeping. You best be prepared to keep track of how many poisons you have going on your target.
Level 5 (1): Now you also fatigue, shaken, or sicken until the poison wears out. (Chosen once per day.) Although it becomes immune to this rider effect after the first successful save, which weirdly means you don't actually want to batter them down, once they've failed one save, so that you can maintain the condition as long as possible (since each attack invokes a new save for a new poison).
Level 10 (1+): Lets you replace the HP damage with ability damage. Including Con damage, reducing chance to save. Oh, and your venom can instead cause blinded. Which is an almost "save or lose" kind of condition. But they do get to save each round (and attack).
Level 16 (1): Must save two consecutive times to cure the poison. But saving just once still grants immunity to the rider effect of the poison.
MAY ADD DAZED AND STUNNED to the list of secondary effects. That's really incredibly potent. Fitting for a level 16 ability.
How interesting. This gives up the static feats (and a lot of them) in order to gain an animal companion. This is strictly worse than spending those feats on the Beast Mastery sphere. But, rated in the Paizo bubble, it's a damned good trade.
Oh, and it can flex the Skirmisher Ranger's tricks. There are a lot of them. I don't feel like going through them. Regardless, they are better than Close Weapon Mastery.
Replaces the most interesting thing about the class - the combat feat flexing - with the least interesting thing about alchemist - the mutagen. But in terms of raw stats? Pretty incredible upgrade. The Beastmorph? Well, it sure as heck is better than AC Bonus. But it does feel really weird, design-wise to be force fed completely random stats, rather than getting to pick what I want...coming from Spheres.
It's kind of like what you would want if you wanted to be an alchemist that focused only on the Mutagen....as utterly uninteresting as that may be.
Constructed Limb (1): Do note: This "prosthetic limb" does not say that it has to replace any other limb (although it can, simply because it's cool). And it can be explicitly enhanced/crafted as a real weapon, while counting as an "Unarmed Strike." Although, one would be wise to note that it also doesn't say that it has any capabilities other than those. A reasonable DM would allow it to be a functional hand, if you choose to replace a real one.... Or a functional leg... Or... know what? Let's not got there.
Replaces no features in and of itself.
Limb Mods (?): Replaces the flex feats (and thus flex talents), with different choices every roughly 4 levels. A generous DM would allow the pugilist to flex these by building new arms.
Flex Limb (2): Turns the limb into a whiplike append-... sigh. This grants +2 to disarm checks, which is nice. Disarm is nice. So is this arm. Anyway, although it does that, it also implies that you can't normally use the prosthesis to trip. Which is strange. I thought it was an unarmed attack. Just ignore that bit.
Grapnel Arm (1.5): Yippie Kye Ey, Cowboy. It's a tether that lets you safely grapple from range. Congratulations.
Limb Extender (1): There's virtually no other way to actually gain Reach on an unarmed strike. I mean, some things add flat range to it, and some talents let you treat improvised weapons as unarmed (letting you use unarmed strikes with a ladder, or cane people to death like to the good ol' days). But I can't think of anything that grants actual unarmed strike the Reach property.
Shield Limb (3): +2 to AC as a shield bonus isn't bad. Worth twice as much as Dodge... which isn't good. But now it gives you an excuse to chuck that shield you were wielding and just use a two handed weapon and this limb for your dual wield.
Tight Grip (3): Literally only a +1 to climb, grapple and disarm checks. No scaling. But it yet another potential bonus to disarm. I guess.
Vicious Blades/Spikes (5): You know my opinion on crit mods. They all suck, on average. The blades suck slightly less, because they qualify the limb for Keen, so you have 20% chance to deal x2 the (weapon + flat) damage. Only pick these up if you need the damage type on your unarmed strike. You probably don't since you also have 2 hands that can hold real weapons of other types.
Bonus Item Creation Feats (F): Pure flavor. You would never actually take those item creation feats on a martial character. A kind DM would rule that this alteration doesn't conflict with other archetypes, since they are only options granted.
I was going to rate it as detrimental, because it's just a more restrictive favored enemy/terrain. But... wow. It's actually an improvement. What?
As far as a grapple-specific class set, this does it pretty well. And by that, I mean it does it completely unobtrusively, and gives essentially irrelevant powers that make life ever so slightly easier. Oh, and can deal constant, passive damage to those already rendered helpless by the vines. While also forcing your choices to be about grappling, even if, later, you find out that grappling really doesn't work in this campaign. But you can just ask for a respec in that case.
Gives this Monk + Fighter a bit of Bard...by taking away the Monk. That's so funky. And I'm not sure it works. Definitely not as well as the Skald at any rate. Why would you want a Bard whose whole deal is martial feats? (Spheres of Might not withstanding.)
Can't really rate it much lower than a 4, simply because it really just doesn't change much. Sure, it changes your single most interesting ability - that of flexing combat feats - in order to give you a worse version of an already laughable class, Paizo's Shifter. Alright. I lie. It's substantially worse than flexing feats. So much so that it's laughable. Even without regarding Spheres of Might.
Wow. I'm impressed. The archetype literally does nothing but restrict your choices (which, perhaps you would have made anyway, who knows), up until level 11. You get literally no benefit from this until level 11. Unless you count the 1 DR compared with 1 AC a benefit.
Fine. Fine. It's not bad, because it replaces nothing of importance. (Save for proficiencies and brawler's strike, if you wanted to take SoM archetypes.) But it is instead bad because it's just trying to do the Captain America thing on an unarmed chassis. Spheres of Might has this role down pat. And it actually feels really good. This does not.
Gains a sneak attack that basically doesn't scale. At all. So what you're actually here for is the feinting stuff which... doesn't start things on the right foot.
But with Fencing Sphere's Fast Feint talent, and this third level feature, you do gain the ability to shoot off at incredible speed. Problem being that you must be melee to feint, unless you have ranged feint, so... eh. I mean you can do it.
And she gets marginally easier flanking. But less easy than some flanking-focused feats. (You gave up Martial Flexibility, which could have given you them.) But isn't that like... what feinting is for?
Wow this whole deal is a mess.
Unironically, it looks pretty decent, if you care about Disarm. You can take Constructed Pugilist as well.
Together, level 1, you have +2 to Disarm from Constructed's Flex Limb.
Level 5, you have +2 to attack (including disarm), at the cost of a Wisdom check as a swift action... which OK, is going to be pretty much impossible, and eat up your swift action. There is no way you're scaling your Wisdom bonus by +1 every level. Even if you maxed it instead of your main stats.
Level. And let's see. What's the hardness of steel, the most common type of weapon? 10? Cool, make a DC 20 wisdom check. Not a skill check. Wisdom. And if you do happen to succeed, it only persists for 1 bloody round. Even if you got it to +5, which no doubt came at some cost to you, then you still only get a benefit about 25% of the time when trying to sunder weapons (for some reason).
Then level 6, Constructed gets you +1 from Tight Grip
Then level 7, you have +2 to disarm from this... wait a minute. You could have gotten that disarm bonus by level 7 without this class.
This class actually adds nothing. It's worse than nothing even. At least without this, you would get the +1 Disarm at level 3, and wouldn't be fruitlessly spending your swift action.
Grants (basically non-scaling) sneak attack damage on grappling, removes penalties from grappling... and allows for the use of Knockout... against a pinned enemy. They are already pinned. What the hell? (Also they call it the "Sleeper Hold" which has absolutely nothing to do with strangulation. It's purely about cutting off blood flow. Breathing has nothing to do with it.)
Basically: It's a literally worse, more constrictive (hah), version of the Brawler.
Each of the paths cost 3 feats to gain 3 incredibly niche effects which you would never actually spend feats on. (Actually, I lie. If you take it to only level 2, then you can almost always make an argument for all of them. But then you have to make it to level 2. Past 1 level of some strange unarmed chassis. Barbarian at least gives you its fast movement by level 1.) The option to gain Evasion as a feat is neat. But you can also do that by just... taking a class with evasion, rather than taking this class for 4 levels to qualify to take evasion at the cost of a feat.
I will lower my expectations down to "Paizo martial" levels. So I will probably be vastly inflating the ratings.
Post-Review Analysis: Well. The um... base class is perhaps a bit more of what I expected from a Paizo class than I... well, than I expected. It actually gets less appealing the more levels you put into it, and you want to get out of the class as soon as you have everything you came for.
(1) Superb: You always want this if it's relevant to you. And it probably is.
(1.5) Really Good: Particularly useful bits of kit, but aren't quite must-haves. (Kept it decimal, because spreading out Good so far from Superb felt unrepresentative. But I needed a step between)
(2) Good: These make useful additions to the right builds. Among your first picks.
(3) Meh: Doesn't hurt to have. Wouldn't go out of your way for it.
(4) No: It technically has a use, but the cost to take simply doesn't outweigh the benefit.
(5) Never: There’s no non-trivial reason to pick it up, from its mechanics.
(6+) Harmful: Taking/using this is actively detrimental to your character.
<Angle brackets> around a rating indicates situational usefulness, and how good it is in that favorable situation.
[Square brackets] indicate a reliance on the group (players or DM) or campaign you’re playing in, and how well it does in those select groups.
Special Ratings:
(C) Cheese: A talent so broken that it will be instantly banned if you use it as you could.
(?) Unrated: I choose not to rate it. Often because it is just so far out of my wheelhouse, or it’s far too ambiguous.
(F) Flavor: This indicates that the main draw to the talent is going to be its inherent fluff or flavor, rather than raw power or utility.
(D) D***bag: Used for when your character wants to be a D***bag.
Brawler's Cunning (?): Lets you basically ignore the int requirements on combat feats. Most tables homebrew the requirement away. You don't need to be particularly smart to know how to rush head-long into people and push them back. I mean many American Footballers have brain damage.
Martial Flexibility (1): Flexes a combat talent a few times a day. (And as an important note, Extra Martial Talent is a combat feat.) Even without access to Spheres talents, that still means.... um... Well, you can flex into the talents that allow you the bare minimum use of combat maneuvers. They should just not provoke by default. But it's even better if you are already using Elephant in the Room rules.
Outside of even that, which I rate fairly low... I mean, you can be instantaneously proficient in literally any weapon, including siege weaponry if I remember correctly. And only when it becomes useful to be so....up to a few minutes a day. So better be a damned good weapon.
Martial Training (1.5): There are some great fighter feats .... compared to regular combat feats, and qualifying as a monk simultaneously is nice. Especially with full BAB. (Unchained Monk is also full BAB)
Unarmed Strike (?): Scales at the same rate as the monk. Which is to say: not well. Unarmed strikes have literally one advantage to real weapons, and it's that they can't be disarmed, even if you lose your arms. Not particularly relevant in most games, let alone sessions. But actually that was a lie. You can still use Unarmed Strike as a weapon, even while wielding other weapons, letting you dual wield unarmed and a greatsword. And you only suffer the normal -2/-2 because it's the "size" of the "offhand" weapon (light, for unarmed) that determines the penalties. (And for anyone crying about not being able to dual wield Unarmed Strike, well look to Brawler's Flurry, and see that it is intended to do so, even if just for this class.) And you can, without penalty, use it nonlethally, letting you knock out die hards without killing them, in addition to other goodies.
And as a light weapon that cannot be disarmed, you always have access to it during combat maneuvers. (Although why you'd actually use it rather than advance your win condition through the CM is another question entirely. You don't even get to ignore armor and shield while grappling, which was historically most of the purpose of doing so.)
Oh, and as a class with an inbuilt Unarmed Strike damage, you can increase that by 1 size, by taking an unarmed talent in Spheres, rather than scaling off of talents taken.
Bonus Combat Feats (2): Not as good as a true flex, not gained as quickly as a fighter. But 1 feat per roughly 3 levels is not bad. And you get to reselect the feats every time you gain a new one. This makes it relatively flexible.
Brawler's Flurry (2): Two weapon fighting feat, so long as you are using some combination of unarmed, close fighter group, or monk weapons. Now, it does not specify that you can't combine anything else in there, just that you *must* combine at least one of the mentioned groups. See my paragraph on Unarmed Strike for details. Still relatively mediocre. But less so, when you have a two-handed weapon in the "main hand."
Maneuver Training (4): A positively tiny bonus to a singular combat maneuver, that scales at 1 per 4 levels. Average CMD scales at 2 per CR. And you can't flex this to best fit your opponent. And although you can pick more CMs later, they get stair-stepped improvements like the Ranger's Favored Enemy. But at least it means you only need to find +7 to CMB per 4 levels rather than the full +8. So it's at least...something. (As a DM, I would just say that the full bonus is applies to all selected CMs.)
AC Bonus (4): A +1 / 4.5 levels AC bonus. With no stat scaling (although people complain about that with monks). But allows for light armor. It's quite literally a rounding error. But hey. You have it, right? I would just suit up in heavy armor and dump dex as a brawler. You only equate to full plate, while in light armor, when you reach epic levels. (If you extrapolate the scaling.)
Knockout (4): Giving a martial a save-or-lose (well, potentially die, since Coup-de-Grace on the next turn)? Incredible. Once per day. Announced before you roll the attack. And if you still hit, and they still fail the save, and you actually roll decently on the duration, they can still attempt a save each round. Ah. Yes. That's the Paizo I know. Granted, Unconscious is the second most powerful condition in the game, next to Dead. But still.
Brawler's Strike (4): Yeah. I mean, if you don't already have some sort of magic arm band that gives your unarmed strikes magic weapon properties (or a nice Enhancement sphere user), you are going to quickly fall behind anyway. So this at least puts a floor there for you. At least as far as DR goes.
Closer Weapon Mastery (7): Yeah... No. This is bad. Straight up. And not only is this bad, almost every half-way decent archetype replaces this. Which means that this one, horrific class feature that you wouldn't even bother noting on your character sheet keeps you from taking many archetype combinations, all on its own. Wow.
Level 6-15 (4): Nothing new. Just previously established scaling. Well, you do get some more flex feats, and real feats. And more uses of the flex feats per day, and do it with lesser actions. Still very slowly and uninterestingly. If this chassis is all I got, I would hop out no later than level 6. And even staying on for up to level 3 is a tough sale. Even by Paizo standards.
Awesome Blow (6): Takes until level 16 to be able to knock an enemy back and prone by hitting them. But at least it doesn't ... oh. Wait. I read it wrong. It is a combat maneuver. So it's like a bad Trip + bull rush, that benefits from none of the feats and nonsense you've had up until now. And look at all those CR the enemy got to build up by the time you got to Awesome Blow? And it must be used as a standard action, rather than part of your attack routine, which would have at least given you multiple opportunities.
Improved Awesome Blow (5): Gets to use Awesome Blow (still a combat maneuver) as an attack. So at least as your cap stone, you actually have multiple attempts to do a crummy combat maneuver.
---Archetypes---
Replaces knockout and close weapon mastery. Drastically different function, if you actually roll with Poison accumulation increasing the DC rather than applying the effect multiple times. If that's the case, then it is suddenly pretty bad, and is a literally worse Bleed. But with some rider conditions that do become harder to deal with (per attack) starting at level 5. But the effects aren't particularly sticky. A reasonable DM, even using that rule, would probably say that you get the instantaneous damage, and maybe just refresh the duration.
Although now you get the opportunity to take some poison feats, such as Ability Focus (Neat, I guess), Powerful Poisoning (I mean, maybe around level 8 it is good). And... that's pretty much it for feats. But Poisonous Slayer gives you +1 to hit with poisoned weapons. And you literally have no choice but to have your unarmed attacks be poisoned. And you can perhaps use the Virulent or Toxic Enchantments, if you find a way to get those on your unarmed strikes.
...Yeah. There's not a lot of support for this sort of thing. Regardless...
Level 1 (1.5):
Reduces your "effective creature size" by 1 for the purpose of the unarmed strike damage. Up until you're at least Huge size, that's only a reduction of 1 average damage.
In exchange, your unarmed strikes force a fort save (based on your Con mod), or else take damage equal to your Con mod. So, you want to max your Constitution, to both amplify your damage and chance for them to fail the save. Max Con...after Strength. Because you don't even get the chance for them to fail the save if you don't hit. And Strength also increases damage (even for non-unarmed strikes).
So, you're netting like +3 damage off of this, in point buy. Which is almost like getting an extra 1d6 damage. Except that the extra damage also technically has an additional point of failure with the save.
Level 4 (1): Now, the damage can be dealt up to an additional (1/4 level) times, if they keep failing their save. Of course, they must be consecutive failures. But once you start going ham on the attacks per round, your DM's just going to stop even rolling to save. Because you are obnoxious to deal with. Either that, or he's going to burn out, or ask you to retire your character, because that's too much bookkeeping. You best be prepared to keep track of how many poisons you have going on your target.
Level 5 (1): Now you also fatigue, shaken, or sicken until the poison wears out. (Chosen once per day.) Although it becomes immune to this rider effect after the first successful save, which weirdly means you don't actually want to batter them down, once they've failed one save, so that you can maintain the condition as long as possible (since each attack invokes a new save for a new poison).
Level 10 (1+): Lets you replace the HP damage with ability damage. Including Con damage, reducing chance to save. Oh, and your venom can instead cause blinded. Which is an almost "save or lose" kind of condition. But they do get to save each round (and attack).
Level 16 (1): Must save two consecutive times to cure the poison. But saving just once still grants immunity to the rider effect of the poison.
MAY ADD DAZED AND STUNNED to the list of secondary effects. That's really incredibly potent. Fitting for a level 16 ability.
How interesting. This gives up the static feats (and a lot of them) in order to gain an animal companion. This is strictly worse than spending those feats on the Beast Mastery sphere. But, rated in the Paizo bubble, it's a damned good trade.
Oh, and it can flex the Skirmisher Ranger's tricks. There are a lot of them. I don't feel like going through them. Regardless, they are better than Close Weapon Mastery.
Replaces the most interesting thing about the class - the combat feat flexing - with the least interesting thing about alchemist - the mutagen. But in terms of raw stats? Pretty incredible upgrade. The Beastmorph? Well, it sure as heck is better than AC Bonus. But it does feel really weird, design-wise to be force fed completely random stats, rather than getting to pick what I want...coming from Spheres.
It's kind of like what you would want if you wanted to be an alchemist that focused only on the Mutagen....as utterly uninteresting as that may be.
Constructed Limb (1): Do note: This "prosthetic limb" does not say that it has to replace any other limb (although it can, simply because it's cool). And it can be explicitly enhanced/crafted as a real weapon, while counting as an "Unarmed Strike." Although, one would be wise to note that it also doesn't say that it has any capabilities other than those. A reasonable DM would allow it to be a functional hand, if you choose to replace a real one.... Or a functional leg... Or... know what? Let's not got there.
Replaces no features in and of itself.
Limb Mods (?): Replaces the flex feats (and thus flex talents), with different choices every roughly 4 levels. A generous DM would allow the pugilist to flex these by building new arms.
Flex Limb (2): Turns the limb into a whiplike append-... sigh. This grants +2 to disarm checks, which is nice. Disarm is nice. So is this arm. Anyway, although it does that, it also implies that you can't normally use the prosthesis to trip. Which is strange. I thought it was an unarmed attack. Just ignore that bit.
Grapnel Arm (1.5): Yippie Kye Ey, Cowboy. It's a tether that lets you safely grapple from range. Congratulations.
Limb Extender (1): There's virtually no other way to actually gain Reach on an unarmed strike. I mean, some things add flat range to it, and some talents let you treat improvised weapons as unarmed (letting you use unarmed strikes with a ladder, or cane people to death like to the good ol' days). But I can't think of anything that grants actual unarmed strike the Reach property.
Shield Limb (3): +2 to AC as a shield bonus isn't bad. Worth twice as much as Dodge... which isn't good. But now it gives you an excuse to chuck that shield you were wielding and just use a two handed weapon and this limb for your dual wield.
Tight Grip (3): Literally only a +1 to climb, grapple and disarm checks. No scaling. But it yet another potential bonus to disarm. I guess.
Vicious Blades/Spikes (5): You know my opinion on crit mods. They all suck, on average. The blades suck slightly less, because they qualify the limb for Keen, so you have 20% chance to deal x2 the (weapon + flat) damage. Only pick these up if you need the damage type on your unarmed strike. You probably don't since you also have 2 hands that can hold real weapons of other types.
Bonus Item Creation Feats (F): Pure flavor. You would never actually take those item creation feats on a martial character. A kind DM would rule that this alteration doesn't conflict with other archetypes, since they are only options granted.
I was going to rate it as detrimental, because it's just a more restrictive favored enemy/terrain. But... wow. It's actually an improvement. What?
As far as a grapple-specific class set, this does it pretty well. And by that, I mean it does it completely unobtrusively, and gives essentially irrelevant powers that make life ever so slightly easier. Oh, and can deal constant, passive damage to those already rendered helpless by the vines. While also forcing your choices to be about grappling, even if, later, you find out that grappling really doesn't work in this campaign. But you can just ask for a respec in that case.
Gives this Monk + Fighter a bit of Bard...by taking away the Monk. That's so funky. And I'm not sure it works. Definitely not as well as the Skald at any rate. Why would you want a Bard whose whole deal is martial feats? (Spheres of Might not withstanding.)
Can't really rate it much lower than a 4, simply because it really just doesn't change much. Sure, it changes your single most interesting ability - that of flexing combat feats - in order to give you a worse version of an already laughable class, Paizo's Shifter. Alright. I lie. It's substantially worse than flexing feats. So much so that it's laughable. Even without regarding Spheres of Might.
Wow. I'm impressed. The archetype literally does nothing but restrict your choices (which, perhaps you would have made anyway, who knows), up until level 11. You get literally no benefit from this until level 11. Unless you count the 1 DR compared with 1 AC a benefit.
Fine. Fine. It's not bad, because it replaces nothing of importance. (Save for proficiencies and brawler's strike, if you wanted to take SoM archetypes.) But it is instead bad because it's just trying to do the Captain America thing on an unarmed chassis. Spheres of Might has this role down pat. And it actually feels really good. This does not.
Gains a sneak attack that basically doesn't scale. At all. So what you're actually here for is the feinting stuff which... doesn't start things on the right foot.
But with Fencing Sphere's Fast Feint talent, and this third level feature, you do gain the ability to shoot off at incredible speed. Problem being that you must be melee to feint, unless you have ranged feint, so... eh. I mean you can do it.
And she gets marginally easier flanking. But less easy than some flanking-focused feats. (You gave up Martial Flexibility, which could have given you them.) But isn't that like... what feinting is for?
Wow this whole deal is a mess.
Unironically, it looks pretty decent, if you care about Disarm. You can take Constructed Pugilist as well.
Together, level 1, you have +2 to Disarm from Constructed's Flex Limb.
Level 5, you have +2 to attack (including disarm), at the cost of a Wisdom check as a swift action... which OK, is going to be pretty much impossible, and eat up your swift action. There is no way you're scaling your Wisdom bonus by +1 every level. Even if you maxed it instead of your main stats.
Level. And let's see. What's the hardness of steel, the most common type of weapon? 10? Cool, make a DC 20 wisdom check. Not a skill check. Wisdom. And if you do happen to succeed, it only persists for 1 bloody round. Even if you got it to +5, which no doubt came at some cost to you, then you still only get a benefit about 25% of the time when trying to sunder weapons (for some reason).
Then level 6, Constructed gets you +1 from Tight Grip
Then level 7, you have +2 to disarm from this... wait a minute. You could have gotten that disarm bonus by level 7 without this class.
This class actually adds nothing. It's worse than nothing even. At least without this, you would get the +1 Disarm at level 3, and wouldn't be fruitlessly spending your swift action.
Grants (basically non-scaling) sneak attack damage on grappling, removes penalties from grappling... and allows for the use of Knockout... against a pinned enemy. They are already pinned. What the hell? (Also they call it the "Sleeper Hold" which has absolutely nothing to do with strangulation. It's purely about cutting off blood flow. Breathing has nothing to do with it.)
Basically: It's a literally worse, more constrictive (hah), version of the Brawler.
Each of the paths cost 3 feats to gain 3 incredibly niche effects which you would never actually spend feats on. (Actually, I lie. If you take it to only level 2, then you can almost always make an argument for all of them. But then you have to make it to level 2. Past 1 level of some strange unarmed chassis. Barbarian at least gives you its fast movement by level 1.) The option to gain Evasion as a feat is neat. But you can also do that by just... taking a class with evasion, rather than taking this class for 4 levels to qualify to take evasion at the cost of a feat.