Eldritch Knight: Sorc or Wiz?

[Matt [Reckless Boi]]

Also do you get to cast in heavy armor without penalities?

[vrisbourque]

Eldritch Knight doesn't give you any capacities to cast arcane spells in heavy armor, better check magus (lvl 13 power) or hellknight signifier if that's what you're looking for.
There's also a feat that lowers spell casting failure in armor but it's not enough to reduce failure to 0% in heavy armor.

Eldritch knight will only conserve spell capacities, so with sorcerer, you'll loose on bloodline spells/powers, whereas with wizard you'll only loose some magic feats.

Plus sorcerer gets spells one level lower than wizard and Eldritch does lower spell casting capabilities by one. So not so good with sorcerer.

Unless you want to go to the dragon sorcerer/dragon disciple/eldritch knight build.

[jsaving]

Eldritch knight is a solid choice if you're looking to build a melee sorcerer. But you would virtually never want such a build to wear armor of any type, you'd simply splash scaled fist to leverage your super-high charisma and would then rely on defensive buffs to become one of the game's tankiest characters.

[Jalmari H.]

Unless you want heavy armor for roleplaying reasons there is very little if nothing to gain for wearing heavy armor. In my opinion if you are just roleplaying like cool kids, go for balanced stats like get some of both dex and str and go for medium armor then pick something that can make mithral armor whatever work with no failure.

Wizard is definetly better because 1 level faster progression which is very important at lower levels. Wizard can also get pretty much every spell in game where sorcerer would need to pick just few. Unless you go for some sort of cheesebuild.

In general game mechanics sense eldritch knight is useless because someone else is supposed to do the buffing anyway. BUT OK if you want to play for roleplaying reasons why not.

[Raistlin]

Originally posted by jsaving:

Eldritch knight is a solid choice if you're looking to build a melee sorcerer. But you would virtually never want such a build to wear armor of any type, you'd simply splash scaled fist to leverage your super-high charisma and would then rely on defensive buffs to become one of the game's tankiest characters.

100% this.

You could go 1 Scaled Fist / 5 Sorcerer / 4 DD / 10 EK / 1 Loremaster and choose the lich mythic path for one of the most powerful builds in the game. Archmage Armor, monk abilities, and crane style will mean extremely high AC. Since EK preserves spell level gains, you'll be able to cast 9th level spells by the time you hit Act 4. This means lots of very powerful buffs to HP, AB, AC, and damage. Not to mention life steal from Vampiric Blade. The single level in Loremaster is so you can take a trickster feat, but if they've changed that you could swap that out for another level of sorcerer or a level of Stigmatized Witch and get the Lizard or Hare familiar.

You will merge your sorcerer and lich spellbooks, and you want to focus on selecting feats which improve your combat ability. You won't be casting spells for offensive purposes the vast majority of the time. If you go lich, you'll use Siphon Life and Feast of Blood to gain temporary hit points. Other than that, the spells you cast will be buffs and Corrupt Magic for really difficult boss encounters. You'll also want Enduring Spells to make sure your buffs last a long time. Everything else is somewhat flexible.

If you don't want to go lich, I recommend not going EK. Unless you're playing on normal difficulty, and you like the idea of a melee caster. You could also take a look at Sword Saint (or any other Magus subclass).

[hannibal]

Sorcerer/DD/Eldritch Knight
Trickster Critical Spam/Critical Spell

Is OP late game outperforms melee builds in melee but starts average not weak.
You basically go sorcerer I choose seeker for extra feats so at start of game you are a magic missile sorcerer. Then you go DD for armor and Strength.
Now with mirror image you can melee. Pick a good critical weapon like Falchion.
Then you can go for DD levels until you get +4 strength and Natural armor.
Now you go Eldrich Knight 10
And pick all critcal feats
Also pick all required buff spells and archmage armor mythic ability.
Trickster also can fix your BAB and can paralyse enemies. So pick skills you want
Buff up your character and go to town.

Note: quickened true strike level 1 spell is OP.

[canuck250]

Originally posted by hannibal:

Sorcerer/DD/Eldritch Knight
Trickster Critical Spam/Critical Spell

Is OP late game outperforms melee builds in melee but starts average not weak.
You basically go sorcerer I choose seeker for extra feats so at start of game you are a magic missile sorcerer. Then you go DD for armor and Strength.
Now with mirror image you can melee. Pick a good critical weapon like Falchion.
Then you can go for DD levels until you get +4 strength and Natural armor.
Now you go Eldrich Knight 10
And pick all critcal feats
Also pick all required buff spells and archmage armor mythic ability.
Trickster also can fix your BAB and can paralyse enemies. So pick skills you want
Buff up your character and go to town.

Note: quickened true strike level 1 spell is OP.

In this scenario, completely normal spell from trickster would let you turn truestrike into a cantrip.