Viability of the Dervish PrC

[Darkwolf71]

Well, crap. I didn't have time last night so I was going to bring my heroforge sheet in to work today... I left the drive pluged into my home PC.

Well, I don't remember the exact numbers but it's something like this. (Note we are in an accension campaign so PCs are a bit more powerful than normal)


Anytime we have to ‘turtle up’ I can, while dancing, Fight Defensively and Combat Expertise to get my AC around 50 and still be at +’s to hit.

Offensively, the plus … I think it tops at 5 (We haven’t played this campaign in 7 or 8 months so it’s a little sketchy.) to hit and damage makes me a real blender. 7 attacks per round (8 hasted), all of which get used. Nearly every round. And as I said before, with Imp Crit or Keen scimitars, 25% of your attacks threaten. And the capstone ability? Thousand Cuts. Doubles your attacks for one round. That’s just plain FUN.

Dervish will never get the most damage in a single hit, but total damage per round? Thanks to mobility and his bonus’ to hit and damage, he’s the kid that blows the bell curve all to hell.


The funny thing is, I made this character as a throw-away. I planned on playing a barbarian base. Bear Warrior or Champion of Gueneryf (sp), and just wanted to use the Dervish as a way to get to know the new group and their style of play. Now? Gau Whirlwind, the thousand year old desert nomad, will be one of the most remembered of the UGT.

 

[Set]

IIRC, a level of Swashbuckler (for Weapon Finesse, sans prereqs), and then levels of Fighter and / or Ranger make for a nifty Dervish. A level of Barbarian, for the extra movement, also is nice, although those who use the Psionics races might like the Xeph for that.

If you could sneak enough Scout into the build to get Skirmish, that would be cool, but it would drop your BAB, and that might not be worth it. Plus, too many classes and the character starts to look pretty crazy. (I went Swashy/Fighter/Dervish, and skipped the rest entirely, which was hardly optimal, but four or five classes on the same character tend to look pretty tacky.)

 

[akbearfoot]

With the PhB2 feats like 2-weapon rend and bounding assault chain, I would think you could play a strong fighter/dervish/tempest. 4 levels of fighter for the bonus feats + access to melee weapon mastery, then max out dervish then go for 5 levels of tempest. It's pretty feat starved, but I think you could manage it if you plan feats out in advance.

High levels you'd have high mobility, lots of attacks with good +hit rolls, and a decent amount of damage added to your base rolls.

 

[Darkwolf71]

Actually, I don't remember the whys of my decision right now, but I thought Tempest would add very little to the build. I'm topping off with some Swordsage levels for the stances.

 

[moritheil]

Two drawbacks to the dervish that I've seen so far are the dependence on others for tactical control negation and the inability to wear a shield. Generally these aren't insurmountable but they are things to keep in mind. The usual way to become immune to sneak attacks, for instance, involves a shield, so glooms were able to take out my friend's epic dervish when most epic tanks would have laughed them off.