Melee Oracle

[igor140]

After literally four days of deliberation, theory crafting, and experimenting, I've decided my MC is going to be the classic goody two-shoes LG Angel type. I'd like to do a melee oracle, but i'm kind of stuck with specifically how to build it:

OPTION 1) First Mystery is Battle, steer into the Heavy Armor and free weapon feats. If I'm going to get martial proficiency for free, there's no need to spend a separate feat on it... except that I'd rather have Bastard Sword, for the theme of it ("but bastard swords are sub-optimal!" ...ok.) Several other revelations seems better than bad... but not amazing.

Ancestor seems like a really good second mystery EXCEPT that it's main draw-- the armor ability-- is useless if I'm going to be using heavy armor. The other Revelations seem pretty good, but not great. Most of that stuff will be handled by permanent buffs, so I'd basically be taking an entire mystery for 10 rounds of full BAB and a really good capstone... 40 hours into the game.

OPTION 2) Take Ancestor as the first Mystery, and prioritize the armor ability. While this DOES mean I have to manually take a weapon feat, it might as well be bastard sword. Theory crafting says I should have enough feats for all the melee stuff I want, but not for the Spell Penetration : /

The advantage/ disadvantage of this is that it leaves the second Mystery open. To make the best use of the Ancestor armor ability, Nature+ Scaled Fist dip will boost my AC by a HUGE amount. When I tested this build, my fully buffed AC was close to 70. But that a) delays the final revelations*, and b) most of the Nature Revelations are actively bad or wildly inconsistent with my build idea...

*I'm using the ToyBox feature that allows me to progress past lvl 20, but not to crazy levels.

OPTION 3) Battle + Ancestors, and just use the magic armor ability anyway. I would still need to dip Scaled Fist, but that's not the end of the world. The problem is that I'm really only using the free weapon feats from Battle at that point... but the Final Revelation is also nice.

So yeah... I'm open to ideas.

[igor140]

Oh, and I tested it: the Mythic feat to increase the AC from Mage Armor does NOT work with the Ancestor's magic armor ability. Based upon the description, that makes sense... but I had hoped : /

[HopeJesus4evs]

If you're playing on Normal or Core you can do whatever you want. It will do, whatever it is.

On hard/unfair, you wanna go with nature + mystery, scale fist dip and animal companion.

With angel mythic you won't need spell penetration. The best spells don't care about it either way, while others (if you will want to use them for some weird reason) will use your CL reliably enough.

Dipping a level or two into paladin & 1 into hellknight is also a good idea, since smites stack.

For 1st mythic, you'll wanna take either "close to the abyss" (extra attack) or the trickster one, if you're too lazy to craft/buy mirror image scrolls.

Mage armor only works with mage armor spell AND only if the characters that has the feat casts it on themselves, not others. So drinking a potion or using scroll is pretty common when you wanna go that route

Also, I'm not sure if you've got through the game already, but you will spend a decent amount of time at level 20 & mythic 7-9. And can get level 20 in the middle of chapter 4 if you're going with 4-man party, or by the end of Chapter 3 if you're going solo. So you won't have to wait THAT much to get to max level.

[igor140]

Thanks for the reply!

So I played around with the unarmored/ nature/ ancestor build on normal difficulty with the DLC (so that i could fully build out the character to test it)... and i struggled against that first demon.

With 68ish AC, he didn't do much damage to me, but even 40 attack (which I only had for 10 rounds, due to that Revelation) wasn't enough to hit him reliably; he was listed as having 57 AC. I saw that he had a bunch of buffs on (including shield, etc), so i tried Greater Dispel... and that didn't get past his spell resistance (which was ~35, iirc).

i did eventually take him down, but it took a WHILE.

So I don't really know how to stack more attack on this character, but I kind of think that's necessary. Or maybe I just shouldn't solo the DLC >_>

I guess I'm going to go pure oracle with Battle + Ancestor, and use heavy armor. I think I will have enough feats to boost it some.

[Immortal Reaver]

Originally posted by HopeJesus4evs:

Mage armor only works with mage armor spell AND only if the characters that has the feat casts it on themselves, not others. So drinking a potion or using scroll is pretty common when you wanna go that route

Drinking Mage Armor potion working with Archmage was patched out few months ago.

[igor140]

Does that apply for scrolls as well?

[Immortal Reaver]

Originally posted by igor140:

Does that apply for scrolls as well?

When Isles DLC released it did work with scrolls. I did not play from that point on though.

[HopeJesus4evs]

Originally posted by igor140:

i did eventually take him down, but it took a WHILE.

So I don't really know how to stack more attack on this character, but I kind of think that's necessary. Or maybe I just shouldn't solo the DLC >_>

DLC is a bit more difficult than the main game, but yes, having companions helps a lot:
Cleric with Guarded Hearth will help you AB skyrocket;
Bard helps as well;
Having haste and greater heroism on is also pretty useful.

You can use things like +stat spells/items, frightful aspects, bane weapons (crusader's edge spell), eagle soul and ect to boot your AB.

Not sure about normal, but most of the time buffing before combat was mandatory on hard.
If you choose your buffs right, though, you simply steamroll through most encounters

[ppaladin123]

I played a battle oracle (took ancestors as my second mystery) and then went angel. By the end even with pounce and all the melee goodies it was hard not to become a caster.....storm of justice is so ridiculously powerful (no spell resistance, nothing can resist holy damage) that quickening it and maximizing/intensifying it so that you "unleash heaven " each round is the obvious choice. Between that and Nenio doing the same for hellfire ray I don't think any fight (except for the Enigma fight which has set stages) ever lasted more than 2 rounds.

[jsaving]

Originally posted by igor140:

So yeah... I'm open to ideas.

Ordinarily on a melee oracle you'd go nature/battle with scaled fist, paladin and hellknight splashes. You're right that the nature revelations aren't the greatest but you'd solve that by choosing the seeker archetype, which essentially lets you trade revelations you don't need for feats you do.

I'd also say you are correctly sensing that the best ancestor and battle revelations work at cross-purposes to some degree. The way to solve that is to not take both on the same character, though nature/ancestors is fine if for some reason you're not a fan of the battle mystery.

[gmwaddington]

I'm playing an angel halfling nature oracle, mounted on a wolf. I took Second Mystery (battle) as my first mythic ability, which allowed me to take Weapon Mastery (scimitar) at 7th lvl (backround: Shackles Corsair). That's worth 3 bonus feats (Weapon Focus, Improved Critical and Greater Weapon Focus). Then I took Slashing Grace at 9th lvl (just in time for the Scimitar of Wind at Drezen). Getting Greater Enduring Spells seems to be the way to go, to extend the excellent Angel spell buffs to 24 hours.