| A while ago, I started trying to figure out how to combine dervish and tempest without losing (too much) BAB, among other things.
Then I noticed that according to our campaign's newly redesigned house rules, grey elves (the more gregarious and art-focused subrace of our campaign's elves) always get Perform as a class skill.
I used ranger 2 for the skill points, in particular to meet the Perform prerequisite of dervish (not to mention Two-Weapon Fighting for tempest). Barbarian 1 get a +10 ft. speed bonus, which helps a dervish's dance. (And they can rage as a back up ability.) Fighter 2 makes it pretty easy to quickly pick up the required feats.
Dervish 3 gets Spring Attack as a bonus feat, which helps to meet the tempest requirement.
I plan on maxing out Balance, Jump, Tumble, and Perform (dance), and putting all attribute enhancement in Dexterity.
1st Ranger 1 Dodge 2nd Fighter 1 Weapon Focus (scimitar) 3rd Barbarian 1 Mobility 4th Ranger 2 5th Fighter 2 Combat Expertise 6th Dervish 1 Improved Two-Weapon Fighting 7th Dervish 2 8th Dervish 3 9th Dervish 4 Weapon Finesse 10th Tempest 1 11th Tempest 2 12th Tempest 3 Improved Critical (scimitar) 13th Dervish 5 14th Dervish 6 15th Dervish 7 Two-Weapon Defense 16th Tempest 4 17th Tempest 5 18th Dervish 8 Greater Two-Weapon Fighting 19th Dervish 9 20th Dervish 10
The reason I alternated dervish and tempest is that they get certain critical abilities at certain levels, and I wanted my PC to take advantage of these as early as possible.
I think there are better combos for dervish (for example, using the thief-acrobat prestige class), but I really wanted a PC very focused on fighting. If I'm missing anything obvious here or have made a mistake in the build, go ahead and point it out, that's why I'm posting it here. |
But you aren't the first person to tell me it'd be better to pick Weapon Focus and Improved Critical for scimitar, and even if I fought with a longsword in the main hand, it'd end up the same. So I think I'll do that.
Frankly I'm not a big fan of scimitars, but I'll use one to take advantage of the class feature..
if your using complete warrior, try swashbuckler. good skills and HD, solid fighter progression for BAB and you get weapon finesses at 1st level. next, try samurai instead of ranger. i know you take a hit on skill points, but it gets you bastard sword proficiency, and nothing is quite as much fun as katana in one hand, scimitar in the other.
on another possibility is just chuck around the levels entirely. you have the first five to really work with since the next group is all full with tempest and dervish, so how about swashbuckler 3 fighter two? that gives you 4 optional feats, a bonus on light weapons from you INT which you can kick high since it will also build you skill points and I believe grey elves get a bonus to that, bonus weapon finesse and a small boost to reflex saves. go drizzt with dual scims?
or, try two of samurai two of fighter and level it out with one of swashbuckler. taking weapon finesse in mid to late level is kind of weird. Even if your starting the character at high levels, there logical survivability would be based on taking advantage of there best attributes early, it just seems fair to me.
Paladin did not fit my character concept. Ranger 3 and Fighter 3 don't add anything worthwhile. Barbarian has 4 skill points, and the speed enhancement stacks with the dervish's. Dervish dance, as great as it is, requires room to use, while rage doesn't.
We don't use swashbuckler. We don't use samurai. In which case, wasting a feat on an Exotic Weapon Proficiency for a weapon that can't be used with Weapon Finesse hardly seems worth it.