SangoProduction
2023-06-26, 12:17 AM
Why? I felt like making a build around Cloth Snake Puppetry for a while now. Well, not really. A full 15 ft reach at level with no dead zone one is pretty good. So much so that I couldn't really find a game to take it in. (Especially with how few games are actually going on nowadays.)
But there's nothing that gives such long reach with effectively full manipulation capabilities (as a martial), which I find fun.
I really want to make it a dirty trick thing, because it's the most fun and versatile CM... and then you actually read the dirty trick rules... and even if your DC never changed at all, you only gain 1 round of duration every 5 levels, at a base line. (And because CMD does scale - very quickly - you probably won't even get that.) Like that is so incredibly crabby, and in almost all instances you would prefer to just refluff magic.
But it's the build I'm going for! (Plus Kitsune Vengeance is a 3-feat-long chain that enables AoO dirty Tricks. Guess what 15 ft reach is good for.)
Cloth Snake Puppetry (stance) [Youxia HB]
While in this stance, you can use any long, flexible objects like strings, ropes, sashes, chains, etc. as an extension of your own body. As part of the action you use to enter this stance, you may draw or pick up an unattended object within reach capable of use with this talent. While holding such an object in your hand, you may use it to increase your natural reach for grabbing objects, manipulating objects, and performing the bull rush, dirty trick, disarm, drag, steal, and trip maneuvers. The increased reach is limited by the length of the object used, to a maximum of 10 feet.
For every 4 base attack bonus you possess, the maximum potential reach of the object increases by 5 feet and you gain a +1 bonus to CMB for combat maneuvers made with the object. These objects count as grappling hooks for the purposes of talents such as Get Over Here! and Rope Swing.
So, we have the base 5 ft reach, plus 20 ft rope reach.
Level: 8. Because 10 is a reasonable, aspirational level, but this talent only cares to level 8.
Race: Gnome. For the Prankster trait. +1 round of duration (while equivalent to 1 CL for casters) is fairly substantial, if you can get them reliably flat footed. Which I plan to. (And I plan to, because +1 round is the equivalent of +5 BAB to dirty trick.) And dirty trickster alt racial trait is a good bonus.
Class: Actually, we could have a Mercenary, Bounty Hunter Slayer, which gets full BAB and an additional ((1/3)+(1/5))*level to dirty tricks, and those dirty tricks proc off of attacks, rather than having to use an entire standard action... oh my god. It's not even an attack action. God, Dirty Trick just keeps looking worse and worse. But, we could even get multiple dirty tricks off in a single round with Dual Wield, even though this adds yet another point of failure (the original attack roll). But we can be proficient in
Well. Shucks. I realized that this isn't actually valid with the talent. So the class doesn't actually assist with the main talent.
So back to the original idea of using Blacksmith (Barista)... or not. Can still throw Acupuncture Needles... and it basically works the same, just getting more use out of your actual turn. And then keep cloth snake for casting the AoO field.
Talents: As a full practitioner / expert practitioner, we get 8 talents from levels. Plus a bonus scout sphere talent, and Studied Scout as a bonus feat.
Plus 2 free talents and 2 equipment talents from the martial tradition. One of which being Cloth Snake Puppetry
At level 8, we have 4 feats, two of which are used on Imp. / Greater Dirty Trick. The other two are used on Kitsune Style (trick on charge) and Kitsune Tricks.... and where it combat reflexes fitting in?
I guess from the level of Conscript for the bonus feat, and bonus talent. (Could also... just be a human. But I want a gnome.)
(We could take another level of Conscript or whatever, and grab Dirty Fighter, as well, for another +2 but exclusively while flanking. I would prefer the general +1 while they are denied dexterity. Which can happen if you are invisible because of a nice mage on your team. Or them being blind. Like from another dirty trick)
So, we have 11 talents and 1 equipment talent not already taken up.
Spheres of Interest: Scoundrel, for Dirty Trick, obviously. Fencing for the dreaded Feint, and tiny bit of chip damage. Duelist for disarm (if we have the talents)
Dual Wielding for bonus attack. (One talent, really.) Athletics (For Rope Swing, basically)
Guardian is viable, for its patrol package, if we want to go that route.
Now time for diving into what talents would we even want.
Base sphere: Swift Hands is just good. Explicitly allows for enhancement bonuses to apply to the maneuvers. Marked Target applies battered (-2 CMD) as a swift action.
Combat Hustle (if we have other melee): +2 to dirty trick per threatening ally (might be worth picking up Beast Mastery)
Clever Fox's Heist: Kitsune Vengeance, but better. AoO dirty tricks. So basically free swap in.
Cut and Run: Move half speed per dirty trick. Pretty neat, and useful given how action starved we are.
Notable NOT used.
Counter Theft: Acts as a disarm, so no need for duelist (except for its juicy stuff, I guess)... but only within natural reach, and only as an immediate action if they attack me.
Trick talents cannot be applied as part of free actions, which is fine, as the best thing is just Kitsune Tricks, but costing a martial focus. (But admittedly not needing the kitsune style tax. Which I think is a fair trade.)
(Actually, if we had the spare talents, aka, if we didn't take athletics sphere, we could make use of tricks on our AoOs.)
Base sphere: Once per attack action, or per AoO, add 1+(1/5 BAB) d6s sneak attack damage. Bounty Hunter makes this count as part of sneak attack damage for slayer purposes. Which means at level 8, we have +4d6 sneak attack damage, all together. (Improves to 6d6 at level 10). Which is an additional +4 to hit the dirty trick. Nearly an entire round of duration! But also improved chance to have any duration at all!
This... probably works, despite not being a damaging attack, because the condition isn't on dealing a damaging attack. It's on making an attack of opportunity, if they are flat footed. So you still maintain a +2 to the check.
If your DM says it doesn't (and fair, fine, whatever), just trade this off for another talent in the sphere.
Feint Strike: Gives you a free action attack if you feint (which you should try and do every round), which lets slayer give you a free action dirty trick.
Fast Feint: Absolutely necessary for move action feints.
Expert Feint: Flat footed until start of your next turn, rather than 1 attack. Pretty good, given that you primarily care about AoOs.
Pace Setter: If your DM says fencing works with cloth snake, then this also lets you move them 5 feet, whenever they provoke. And considering they provoke each 5 feet they try to move through your area, then you can truly mess with them (even if you don't choose to totally stymie that one person's attempt to run past). Especially if you get a Blind off before doing all your movement nonsense.
(We really could have used some of the Exploit talents, if we had the talents to spare.)
So that would use 9 talents so far. Gives us 2 talents to use for other spheres.
Base package: Climb. Eh.
Rope Swing: Goes all Indiana Jones, and hooks onto stuff and swings anywhere within the radius- oh. wait. No, it's capped at no more than 40 ft. Which is still pretty good. Magic does it better, but it's pretty good.
Oh, and for the last equipment feat... grab the Custom Weapon Training, and take some weapon proficiencies you like, and Acupuncture Needle (0 damage, targets touch - which is AC 10 when flat footed...barring magic... But while full BAB.)
Alright... and I think that'll do it for the build. So let's try and sum it up.
Let's assume we've got a +7 dex mod by now, between items and what have you. And probably a +3 unarmed enhancement (either actual magical items, or begging one of the party members to be able to enhance unarmed attacks). Not an outrageous assumption by this level. (It's been hours at this point. I am not actually digging through and buying items. Could probably find something that also gives CMB as well.)
So, the check dirty trick is 1d20 (10.5) + 10 + 4 (bounty hunter) + 1 (studied target) + 4 (imp / gre dirty trick) + 4 (with additional threatening ally + flanking) + 2 (net mod of being a gnome) and let's just assume we can reliably make the feint check. Masterwork tools and Deceptive Ranger combat style as a slayer talent, and so on. So... let's be generous, and pull numbers from complete random and say that's worth somewhere between 1 to 6 bonus ignored, normally. So average 3.5 CMD negated. Battered reduces CMD by another 2.
Total bonus of 30.5, with an average check of 41.
If my reference is correct... average CMD at CR 8 is 28. So this is, on average, going to afflict them for 1 (base) + 1 (gnome) + 2 (check) + 1d4 (gr dirty trick) = 6.5 average rounds of dirty trick debuff. Which, even individually, is somewhat impressive.
And, thanks to how horribly dirty trick scales, you can lose a bunch of those semi-situational bonuses, and though you'll miss more often, you won't substantially lose out on the rounds. (Of course, by this level, a death caster with 0 investment has 8 round duration debuffs. But so be it.)
But what truly makes this stand out is the reason why Cloth Snake is strong to begin with: The reach. You threaten out to a radius of 25 feet. You are guarding castle gate on your own (and then get peppered by arrows and die). And with combat reflexes, you have 8 attacks of opportunity per turn, each of which can literally blind someone for the duration of the fight, unless they spend their standard action (basically being unable to act offensively against you). And if they aren't affected by blind, you can still apply gold-standard debuffs like entangled, shaken and intimidate.
In conclusion: All in all, incredible at its singular job. And has nothing but that job. May get overwhelmed by swarms, but that's what the mage is for. If they aren't packing fireball, they probably ran out of spells already.
(And if you were actually try-harding and went full Conscript, you would have had the talents and feats left over to actually finish off your dirty trick kit, and actually have room for fluffy talents and feats, like Lancer sphere's Get Over Here!, or Beastmastery sphere, or what have you. Could have also simply taken Blacksmith and gotten some actual support capability as well. But no, we went for Slayer... so that we could have an actual turn that isn't reliant on the enemy provoking us... I think I hate martial characters.)
Mages get to just *do* cool stuff, without requiring literally all the build resources devoted to doing one cool thing... by not needing to be balanced around getting 9+ attacks a turn, as a potentiality.
But there's nothing that gives such long reach with effectively full manipulation capabilities (as a martial), which I find fun.
I really want to make it a dirty trick thing, because it's the most fun and versatile CM... and then you actually read the dirty trick rules... and even if your DC never changed at all, you only gain 1 round of duration every 5 levels, at a base line. (And because CMD does scale - very quickly - you probably won't even get that.) Like that is so incredibly crabby, and in almost all instances you would prefer to just refluff magic.
But it's the build I'm going for! (Plus Kitsune Vengeance is a 3-feat-long chain that enables AoO dirty Tricks. Guess what 15 ft reach is good for.)
Cloth Snake Puppetry (stance) [Youxia HB]
While in this stance, you can use any long, flexible objects like strings, ropes, sashes, chains, etc. as an extension of your own body. As part of the action you use to enter this stance, you may draw or pick up an unattended object within reach capable of use with this talent. While holding such an object in your hand, you may use it to increase your natural reach for grabbing objects, manipulating objects, and performing the bull rush, dirty trick, disarm, drag, steal, and trip maneuvers. The increased reach is limited by the length of the object used, to a maximum of 10 feet.
For every 4 base attack bonus you possess, the maximum potential reach of the object increases by 5 feet and you gain a +1 bonus to CMB for combat maneuvers made with the object. These objects count as grappling hooks for the purposes of talents such as Get Over Here! and Rope Swing.
So, we have the base 5 ft reach, plus 20 ft rope reach.
Level: 8. Because 10 is a reasonable, aspirational level, but this talent only cares to level 8.
Race: Gnome. For the Prankster trait. +1 round of duration (while equivalent to 1 CL for casters) is fairly substantial, if you can get them reliably flat footed. Which I plan to. (And I plan to, because +1 round is the equivalent of +5 BAB to dirty trick.) And dirty trickster alt racial trait is a good bonus.
Class: Actually, we could have a Mercenary, Bounty Hunter Slayer, which gets full BAB and an additional ((1/3)+(1/5))*level to dirty tricks, and those dirty tricks proc off of attacks, rather than having to use an entire standard action... oh my god. It's not even an attack action. God, Dirty Trick just keeps looking worse and worse. But, we could even get multiple dirty tricks off in a single round with Dual Wield, even though this adds yet another point of failure (the original attack roll). But we can be proficient in
Well. Shucks. I realized that this isn't actually valid with the talent. So the class doesn't actually assist with the main talent.
So back to the original idea of using Blacksmith (Barista)... or not. Can still throw Acupuncture Needles... and it basically works the same, just getting more use out of your actual turn. And then keep cloth snake for casting the AoO field.
Talents: As a full practitioner / expert practitioner, we get 8 talents from levels. Plus a bonus scout sphere talent, and Studied Scout as a bonus feat.
Plus 2 free talents and 2 equipment talents from the martial tradition. One of which being Cloth Snake Puppetry
At level 8, we have 4 feats, two of which are used on Imp. / Greater Dirty Trick. The other two are used on Kitsune Style (trick on charge) and Kitsune Tricks.... and where it combat reflexes fitting in?
I guess from the level of Conscript for the bonus feat, and bonus talent. (Could also... just be a human. But I want a gnome.)
(We could take another level of Conscript or whatever, and grab Dirty Fighter, as well, for another +2 but exclusively while flanking. I would prefer the general +1 while they are denied dexterity. Which can happen if you are invisible because of a nice mage on your team. Or them being blind. Like from another dirty trick)
So, we have 11 talents and 1 equipment talent not already taken up.
Spheres of Interest: Scoundrel, for Dirty Trick, obviously. Fencing for the dreaded Feint, and tiny bit of chip damage. Duelist for disarm (if we have the talents)
Dual Wielding for bonus attack. (One talent, really.) Athletics (For Rope Swing, basically)
Guardian is viable, for its patrol package, if we want to go that route.
Now time for diving into what talents would we even want.
Base sphere: Swift Hands is just good. Explicitly allows for enhancement bonuses to apply to the maneuvers. Marked Target applies battered (-2 CMD) as a swift action.
Combat Hustle (if we have other melee): +2 to dirty trick per threatening ally (might be worth picking up Beast Mastery)
Clever Fox's Heist: Kitsune Vengeance, but better. AoO dirty tricks. So basically free swap in.
Cut and Run: Move half speed per dirty trick. Pretty neat, and useful given how action starved we are.
Notable NOT used.
Counter Theft: Acts as a disarm, so no need for duelist (except for its juicy stuff, I guess)... but only within natural reach, and only as an immediate action if they attack me.
Trick talents cannot be applied as part of free actions, which is fine, as the best thing is just Kitsune Tricks, but costing a martial focus. (But admittedly not needing the kitsune style tax. Which I think is a fair trade.)
(Actually, if we had the spare talents, aka, if we didn't take athletics sphere, we could make use of tricks on our AoOs.)
Base sphere: Once per attack action, or per AoO, add 1+(1/5 BAB) d6s sneak attack damage. Bounty Hunter makes this count as part of sneak attack damage for slayer purposes. Which means at level 8, we have +4d6 sneak attack damage, all together. (Improves to 6d6 at level 10). Which is an additional +4 to hit the dirty trick. Nearly an entire round of duration! But also improved chance to have any duration at all!
This... probably works, despite not being a damaging attack, because the condition isn't on dealing a damaging attack. It's on making an attack of opportunity, if they are flat footed. So you still maintain a +2 to the check.
If your DM says it doesn't (and fair, fine, whatever), just trade this off for another talent in the sphere.
Feint Strike: Gives you a free action attack if you feint (which you should try and do every round), which lets slayer give you a free action dirty trick.
Fast Feint: Absolutely necessary for move action feints.
Expert Feint: Flat footed until start of your next turn, rather than 1 attack. Pretty good, given that you primarily care about AoOs.
Pace Setter: If your DM says fencing works with cloth snake, then this also lets you move them 5 feet, whenever they provoke. And considering they provoke each 5 feet they try to move through your area, then you can truly mess with them (even if you don't choose to totally stymie that one person's attempt to run past). Especially if you get a Blind off before doing all your movement nonsense.
(We really could have used some of the Exploit talents, if we had the talents to spare.)
So that would use 9 talents so far. Gives us 2 talents to use for other spheres.
Base package: Climb. Eh.
Rope Swing: Goes all Indiana Jones, and hooks onto stuff and swings anywhere within the radius- oh. wait. No, it's capped at no more than 40 ft. Which is still pretty good. Magic does it better, but it's pretty good.
Oh, and for the last equipment feat... grab the Custom Weapon Training, and take some weapon proficiencies you like, and Acupuncture Needle (0 damage, targets touch - which is AC 10 when flat footed...barring magic... But while full BAB.)
Alright... and I think that'll do it for the build. So let's try and sum it up.
Let's assume we've got a +7 dex mod by now, between items and what have you. And probably a +3 unarmed enhancement (either actual magical items, or begging one of the party members to be able to enhance unarmed attacks). Not an outrageous assumption by this level. (It's been hours at this point. I am not actually digging through and buying items. Could probably find something that also gives CMB as well.)
So, the check dirty trick is 1d20 (10.5) + 10 + 4 (bounty hunter) + 1 (studied target) + 4 (imp / gre dirty trick) + 4 (with additional threatening ally + flanking) + 2 (net mod of being a gnome) and let's just assume we can reliably make the feint check. Masterwork tools and Deceptive Ranger combat style as a slayer talent, and so on. So... let's be generous, and pull numbers from complete random and say that's worth somewhere between 1 to 6 bonus ignored, normally. So average 3.5 CMD negated. Battered reduces CMD by another 2.
Total bonus of 30.5, with an average check of 41.
If my reference is correct... average CMD at CR 8 is 28. So this is, on average, going to afflict them for 1 (base) + 1 (gnome) + 2 (check) + 1d4 (gr dirty trick) = 6.5 average rounds of dirty trick debuff. Which, even individually, is somewhat impressive.
And, thanks to how horribly dirty trick scales, you can lose a bunch of those semi-situational bonuses, and though you'll miss more often, you won't substantially lose out on the rounds. (Of course, by this level, a death caster with 0 investment has 8 round duration debuffs. But so be it.)
But what truly makes this stand out is the reason why Cloth Snake is strong to begin with: The reach. You threaten out to a radius of 25 feet. You are guarding castle gate on your own (and then get peppered by arrows and die). And with combat reflexes, you have 8 attacks of opportunity per turn, each of which can literally blind someone for the duration of the fight, unless they spend their standard action (basically being unable to act offensively against you). And if they aren't affected by blind, you can still apply gold-standard debuffs like entangled, shaken and intimidate.
In conclusion: All in all, incredible at its singular job. And has nothing but that job. May get overwhelmed by swarms, but that's what the mage is for. If they aren't packing fireball, they probably ran out of spells already.
(And if you were actually try-harding and went full Conscript, you would have had the talents and feats left over to actually finish off your dirty trick kit, and actually have room for fluffy talents and feats, like Lancer sphere's Get Over Here!, or Beastmastery sphere, or what have you. Could have also simply taken Blacksmith and gotten some actual support capability as well. But no, we went for Slayer... so that we could have an actual turn that isn't reliant on the enemy provoking us... I think I hate martial characters.)
Mages get to just *do* cool stuff, without requiring literally all the build resources devoted to doing one cool thing... by not needing to be balanced around getting 9+ attacks a turn, as a potentiality.