But note that even in the list of things you provide, every item either involves or recommends some kind of buffing, spellcasting, or sacrifice of spellcasting ability.
-Brilliant energy: helps you hit against armored foes, but hitting by itself is not very significant unless you do an appreciable amount of damage. In order to do good damage, you want at least a mediocre strength and you probably want to put greater magic weapon on whatever weapon you are using. Considering the cost of brilliant energy (and its limited range of targets) you may want to get it via spell (brilliant blade or brilliant aura) as well. Power Attack helps a lot, but again, that precludes dumping strength and requires feats that are geared towards melee combat.
-Trip: is a very useful combat manuever and the Improved Trip feat works well for fighter/wizards since they aren't making a sacrifice to come up with the prerequisite Int. However, in order to be effective, you need a good strength and it helps a lot to use buffs like enlarge person. (Though debuffs like ray of enfeeblement and/or enervation can be substituted). Again, this precludes dumping strength and requires feats geared towards melee combat to be useful.
-True Strike+Power Attack: Especially with havoc mage, this is a very good option (though it suffers a lot if wraithstrike is available since wraithstrike gives most of the benefits of true strike, gives them for a full attack instead of a single attack, and doesn't require giving up a level of spellcasting or another point of base attack to pull off. However, this is buffing and it still requires a mediocre strength and feats geared toward melee combat in order to be effective.
And, of course, if buffing is out of the question entirely, the character is going to get smeared as soon as the enemy goes. Standing on the front lines without false life, displacement, greater blink, blink, greater invisibility, alter self, dragonskin, or even mage armor/shield is putting out a sign for your enemies saying: Hey, you don't need wraithstrike or true strike or anything else; just power attack me to death right now.
I'm not claiming that an eldritch knight can't be effective--or that he can't be effective with no rounds of prep (at least at mid-high levels--quickened spells, contingencies, and long-duration spells help a lot). But an eldritch knight who doesn't plan to use spells to help himself out in melee and does plan to rely upon spells for the vast majority of his offense is ignoring all of the strengths of the class and focussing on areas where the class actually makes him weaker.
brehobit said:
Actually, option B will let the OP do what he wants. You can attack with a weapon and cast a combat spell. While the weapon attack may miss, it is still nearly free (You give up more than one attack and have to take a full-round action). But if you have the right weapons (say brillant energy) or are going for a trip on the attack, the melee attack can be pretty nice. Worth doing? I doubt it. But it does let you do the "hit with weapon, hit with spell" thing which the OP wants. And while it may not be an optimal build, it really isn't that bad.
Just one level lets you toss in a true-strike melee attack in a round. If you've got power attack and a two-handed weapon (say staff) you could be doing some scary things...
