Hi everyone, original poster here. Thanks for all the fighter discussion and ideas that went on in this thread way back (going on 2 years ago now!). Our campaign has been progressing through this whole time, and I thought I would post a quick update now that our characters levels have gotten up into the teens. We are somewhere in book 5 of the Kingmaker adventure path atm.
The party composition shifted around a bit in the early days as some players left and others joined the group, but we seem to have stabilized with a group of 6 PCs:
Fighter (my character)
Paladin (Warrior of the Holy Light archetype)
Barbarian (splashing Oracle for rage cycling)
Ranger/Rogue (archer)
Summoner (Synthesist)
Wizard
As you can see, an extremely melee heavy group. 4/6 of the PCs end up mixing things up in melee combat most of the time, and the damage output can be pretty extreme. My fighter, the paladin, and the barbarian have all picked up
Outflank. Anytime we can set up flanks on an opponent they melt immediately. It actually feels pretty overpowered. I would highly recommend that teamwork feat to any group that has 2 or more melee characters in it.
So far I have been very happy with how the reach weapon tripping build has worked out for my fighter, but the ramp up time for it has been a bit slower than I expected. In the early levels both the barbarian and the synthesist were outclassing me pretty heavily both in survivability and in damage output. I think this has partly been due to my not taking
Weapon Specialization, and part due to the MAD of needing decent INT and good DEX in order to make my build work, which means less single-minded focus on str/con like the other melee characters in the party have. It takes a few levels to get enough bonus feats and weapon training ranks under your belt to start closing the gap on what barbarians get from raging and focusing all stat points into strength.
Trip has been effective often enough that I am glad to have it, and feel it has been well worth the investment of feats. There is nothing like rushing an opponent with our 4 melee characters and the fighter dropping it with a trip immediately triggering attacks of opportunity from all 4 of us.
Also, since our party has an abundance of PCs that can deal high hit point damage it is nice to have the option to focus more on disabling opponents rather than simply trying to compete with a barb/synth/smiting paladin in DPS numbers. That said, now that weapon training is up to +3 with my primary weapon (+5 with gloves of dueling) and the abundance of extra feats is becoming noticeable, I feel like recently my damage output has finally started catching up.
I'm not going to go over the full character sheet because we are running with some custom Advance Race Guide races, so my exact numbers aren't representative of what other characters would have at this level, but here is what I settled on for feats so far:
Trait:
Bastard
Trait:
Dangerously Curious
Racial Feat:
Combat Reflexes
01:
Exotic Weapon:
Fauchard
01:
Weapon Focus:
Fauchard
02:
Combat Expertise
03:
Improved Trip
04:
Outflank
05:
Fury's Fall
06:
Greater Trip
07:
Leadership
08:
Improved Critical:
Fauchard
09:
Iron Will
10:
Power Attack
11:
Pin Down
12:
Critical Focus
13:
Staggering Critical
