prestige, Arcane Archer vs Soulbow

[Shin Okada]

I thought the Soulbow looked great, new concept, a archer with NO BOW. - dont have to buy arrows or bows ever, awesomeness!

I doubt if not using physical arrows is such an awesomeness. The most successful archer build I have ever seen is a Scout/Ranger (with Swift Hunter feat) who carries TONS of relatively cheap magical arrows (bane, holy, Greater Dispelling, etc., made of various special material).

 

[emoplato]

Yeah, another one for the soulbow, the arcane archer is one of the worst examples of a gish. An initial promise of increased power and durability but no way really to advance actual power. A soulbow also has base mechanical freedoms in which no other archer has at their disposal. You essentially have the ease and hands free use of a crossbow with the range and consistent fire of a composite bow as well as free ammo. They also have two of the arcane archer's abilities into one that isn't limited in its uses per day.

 

[Viktyr Gehrig]

Soulbow is hands-down better. I dip Soulknife 2/Soulbow 1 on most characters, especially if there's Wisdom synergy of any kind. If you want a dedicated psionic archer, Monk 3/Soulknife 2/Soulbow 1/Ardent 1/Slayer X is the sauce. More levels of Soulbow will get you bonus feats and enhancement bonuses, or you can boost your manifester level.

Soulknife 2/Soulbow 1 makes a great dip for an archer Cleric, who can then load up on greater magic weapon to replace the Soulknife's level-based enhancement bonus. Arguably, the mind arrow class ability is not a wielded weapon and might not violate the Sacred Fist's code of conduct.

 

[Empirate]

See if you can houserule in the Pathfinder Arcane Archer to use in 3.5. It actually boasts arcane abilities (i.e. spellcasting progression), which makes it automatically superior to the regular 3.5 AA. It also possesses better versions of the other class features, e.g. special abilities on arrows instead of linear plusses, so the GMW spell doesn't, in fact, emulate the whole class.

 

[StreamOfTheSky]

My problem with the PF Arcane Archer is the PF Eldritch Knight seems superior to it in almost every way, whether for melee OR ranged combat. And if you were porting the PF AA, the DM would probably be willing to port the PF EK as well.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

One of the things WotC did for psionics was reskin some arcane classes into psionic versions. Most were not exactly high profile and easy to find, so I listed some in my Psychonimicon thread...which was lost in The Great Kerfluffle a few years ago. (I have since partially reconstructed it- see my sig).

Which is just a long winded way of asking "Why not simply reskin the Soulbow into a new version of the Arcane Archer?"

 

[emanresu]

One of the things WotC did for psionics was reskin some arcane classes into psionic versions. Most were not exactly high profile and easy to find, so I listed some in my Psychonimicon thread...which was lost in The Great Kerfluffle a few years ago. (I have since partially reconstructed it- see my sig).

Which is just a long winded way of asking "Why not simply reskin the Soulbow into a new version of the Arcane Archer?"

the soulbow says he is treated as having a bow and arrows and they can be augmented just the same as a long bow and arrow could be. Sooooo if one was so inclined, I believe you would qualify for the Arcane Archer class if you were a sould bow and of course had the other prereqs; eg spell casting etc. Why you would want to do this, I dont know, but it would seem to me that you could.

 

[nijineko]

it is important to remember the soulknife prestige class from athas.org (official 3.x material per wotc) when making these builds. after the soulknife was converted to a base class in 3.5, athas decided that they did not like the execution and reconverted the 3.5 soulknife to a prestige class. very handy indeed, though you still need to cough up the autohypnosis ranks from somewhere.

to answer the op question, psychic strike works with mind arrows pretty much the same as it does with a mind blade. stacks even.

also, not likely to get past the dm, but there is a line in the soulbow description that indicates that soulknives (and soulbows) are supposed to add the mind blade/arrow's weapon's enhancement bonus to BAB, not just to attacks like normal.