Ranged combat with a composite bow is one of the strongest fighting styles in the game. Ranged, Composite Longbow / Shortbow: ****
In both of these cases, scimitars and the Dervish Dance feat can give your character the unique ability to use your Dexterity for both attack and damage, something which the sneaks and the magi can both benefit greatly from having in spades. A magus must have an open off-hand for example, and a few rogues or ninjas may decide that their attack bonus suffers too much when they dual-wield.
Generally that’s true, but there are a few exceptions to that. One might say that there’s no reason to leave an off-hand open when you could be using it to good effect with a shield, second melee weapon, or for extra damage with a two-hander. One-hander (Einhander): * (Magus / Duelist ***) Benefits greatly from extra damage per hit.Quite effective against lightly armored enemies who lack DR.“Clustered Strikes” would go a long way towards fixing this issue. If you felt like trying to “fix” two weapon fighting, consider allowing Clustered Shots to work with this fighting style as a houserule. Dual-weapon rangers can do well enough against their favored enemies, but will be outclassed by an archer ranger in most cases.ĭual wielding may be a fun concept, but in practice, it fails to shine against anything but lightly armored enemies without any kind of damage reduction. While ninjas are probably better served using a two-handed weapon, a ninja or rogue who focuses on dexterity may want to take weapon finesse and a pair of agile weapons, grabbing the two weapon feint line of feats to ensure easy sneak attacks. Inquisitors gain access to the Smiting Judgment, which helps them deal with some of the more annoying types of damage reduction. An Alchemist who takes Master Chymist can do decent amounts of damage as a dual wielder of daggers or other light simple weapons, thanks to their Brutality ability. Alchemists who dual wield alchemist bombs with Rapid Shot are some of the most explosive (pun intended) damage-dealers in the game, though they do run out of resources extremely quickly. Paladins and Samurai are the best examples, your damage jumping to a daunting amount when smiting or challenging an opponent. There are a few cases where two weapon fighting can be somewhat effective, most of which involve temporary buffs that add damage to each strike you land. You could buy weapons composed of special materials, but that still only solves your problem for a single type of DR per weapon. Affording two weapons that can break through even the lowest amounts of enemy damage reduction is shockingly expensive, and since you’re not wielding a shield, you need to spend more of your coin on AC boosting items as well. Here’s the issue though: you’re spending twice as much on your weapons since you have two of them.
When weapons are enchanted to a high enough degree (+3 or better), they start breaking through damage reduction, which is a great thing for dual-wielders. This is the exact opposite of what you want because of the prevalence of damage reduction in Pathfinder. That means that you make a larger number of attacks, but at lower damage. Attacks with this fighting style do less damage than those of any other fighting style (usually including archery), due to an additional penalty to the damage of off-hand weapons and reduced power attack damage. The primary issue with dual-wielding is a fundamental problem with its interaction with its main weakness, damage reduction.
#TORCHLIGHT GAME ANY REASON FOR MAGE TO INCREASE AGILITY FULL#
So without further ado, let’s get started!ĭual-wielding is fun flavour and it can be exciting to roll fistfulls of dice when you make a full attack, but sadly, it is one of the worse fighting styles in the game. I will give each one a rating out of four, four stars being excellent, one star being very poor. That being the case, I thought it would be a good idea to explain the advantages and disadvantages of different fighting styles, and which choices are generally stronger than others. I have a decent number of character builds out now, and I found myself frequently referencing different fighting styles, and their relative quality.