Quote Originally Posted by Firechanter View Post
I suppose you mean "optimization" in the "easy maintenance" sense.
Yes, but also in the sense of "most useful for the apparent purposes without stepping on PCs' toes". And AFAICT, "most useful" would in this context refer to something along the lines of "strong arcane spells and skills primarily for enabling/buffing the PCs and providing the party with nifty general adventuring utility".

Power wise, it's probably more of a challenge _not_ to have a single feat's worth make an entire party redundant. Just from looking at some cornerstones, it quickly becomes utterly obscene what a single wizard can do.
Yeah, that's the potential downside of T1 classes. However, as long as the majority of the wizard's spells intended for combat target allies and few/none of them have a primarily directly offensive use, there should be minimal risk of your cohort accidentally ending up stealing the show.

Just be careful with BFC stuff, especially as a conjurer, as quite a few conjuration spells indirectly hindering enemies' offense and/or reducing their number of viable actions can trivialize combat when used with just a modicum of tactical sense (notably AoE spells like pits, walls and clouds). IOW, generally speaking, you should prioritize spells like heroism, dimension door and fly, not spells like black tentacles, solid fog or wall of force, and stay far away from combat worthy summons/binding or personal polymorphs, and basically anything directly targeting enemies (with the possible exception of dispel magic).

We used to have a Wizard in the group in the early stages of the campaign, however the player wasn't very good at it. He basically spent the entire combat self-buffing (Mirror Image et al), and by the time he was done, we had cleared the encounter without him. Every single time. So there'd definitely need to be a quicker way to handle that, but then again, min/level duration should be plenty for pre-buffing by our current level.
Ah, seems like a textbook case of OCPPCD (Obsessive Compulsive Personal Protection Casting Disorder).

Thankfully, OCPPCD can be avoided just by adding a teeny bit of the most basic behavioral therapy methodology to the character generation/development process. For example by dedicating ten minutes or so to the creation of one or two default opening combat action sequences for your character. Helps ensure your build options actually jam together, and helps keep priorities straight and maintaining combat usefulness. Even when the monsters are really scary and you just feel like running back to mommy unless you get three more prep rounds...

(Seriously though, I really do recommend you plan a few default opening combat action sequences for your cohort; it'll greatly reduce their in-game maintenance.)

Quote Originally Posted by Firechanter View Post
Another question: I was thinking to just pick a Bonded Item for simplicity's sake, but: are there any familiars that can fill the Rogue role, including picking locks and trapfinding? Since we don't have one of those in the party either.
Many improved familiars and a few normal ones would be able to get very high Disable Device and Perception skill bonuses. In addition, they'd typically also need to have an ability to grasp items (which you definitely want them to have anyways), but that's all you need for finding traps and disabling non-magical ones). If the familiar also needs to be able to disable magical traps by itself instead of, say, your cohort dispelling the trap, simply give the familiar a wand or some scrolls of trapfinder's focus.

Of course, you probably also want the familiar to handle the usual rogue scouting/spying stuff. Fortunately, many familiars are fantastically sneaky thanks to size bonus to Stealth and often a high Dex, and many of the improved ones also have good senses aside from normal eyesight. And of course, many of them look - or can be made to look - like inconspicuous and pretty harmless animals. Overall, I think two of the most suitable "rogue familiars" for a typical non-evil cohort/party would be a lyrakien azata or a faerie dragon, both coming with fitting stats, skills, defensive spell/SLA, good fly speed, etc, and both having the speech and grasping appendices needed to use wands and other items. (IME, the faerie dragon is more popular thanks to having UMD (and being silly cute), but the Lyrakien has some nifty magical senses and a few other perks which may be more useful when going rogue.)