Pathfinder: Kingmaker--Two Great Beginner Builds

greetings fellow adventurers and welcome to another guide for Pathfinder kingmaker today I'm going to go over a pretty simple video talking about two classes that you can play right out the gate that are very simple classes to play and understand and that are going to carry you not just in the early game but also into the late game as well pretty much regardless of how you build them and regardless of how well-built your companions are providing you're planning on it easier difficulty of course let's go ahead and look at those classes so I'm starting to game if you are new I do highly highly recommend if you've never played Pathfinder before that you do actually play on story or easy mode because these significantly reduce the amount of damage that you take from enemies if you're if you're familiar with RPGs but not the Pathfinder system playing on easy mode will help you get your feet and when you feel like the game is maybe getting too easy you can always turn the difficulty back up later through the options menu so this is I don't think this is anything to be ashamed of if you're still learning the game I did highly recommend that you turn this on but anyway so so we're go ahead and say that we're playing on easy mode this doesn't affect our character build at all I just thought I'd mention that so we are gonna create a new character of course we'll pick this portrait cuz I really like like this guy's portrait a lot anyway both of the bills that we use today use human there are a couple of other races that you could use in place of a human for this one but for the purposes of this video just to keep it simple we're gonna play a human for a couple of reasons number one we get a plus two to any ability score of our choice which helps us with our build we get a bonus feat which will allow us to get extra abilities and we also get these skilled feature allowing us to get additional skill points which is relevant because we're going to be dumping our intelligence on both of these characters so let's go ahead and look at our class so the two classes in particular that I recommend for Pathfinder kingmaker if you're new to the game completely and once this is it's simple to play and easy to understand the first class that I would recommend to you is the barbarian because the barbarian is very very simple all you do is you equip a two-handed weapon you walk up to things you smash them and you kill them and that's pretty much all there is to a barbarian it's really really easy and the feats that you can take for barbarian are simple to deal with as well and most of the abilities that you unlock things like rage powers for example are pretty intuitive and a lot of the things that barbarians have are passive bonuses meaning that you don't have to do a lot of active things other than actually activating your rage but I figured you know you can at least click on one button right it's not like a fighter where admittedly a fighter usually doesn't have to click on extra buttons but also barbarian doesn't really have to either so that makes them really easy to play very simple and also very effective barbarians are really great at dealing damage and taking damage especially depending on which archetype you pick in particular what I would recommend for new players is either the stock bog-standard barbarian works very well the mad dog barbarian works very well because you get an animal companion so you pick an animal that fights alongside you so you get that little bit of extra hit points you get automatic flanking because which will help you hit things because your animal companion will likely be flanking with you and it's just a lot of extra hit points and damage to add to your current build without losing out on all that much to be completely honest and with the same thing with the invulnerable Ranger you still get your full rage as a barbarian as an invulnerable Reacher but you get your damage reduction ability much faster and you'll also get elemental resistances as well with this archetype so all three of these barbarian builds function in different ways admittedly but the feats that we're gonna take early on are not going to be very different at all so if you look at these three archetypes and decide which one that you want to do pretty much all three of these are viable I don't I don't recommend doing the armored Hulk because I feel like you sacrificed too much for the benefits that you get for being that archetype in particular but for our intents and purposes we're just gonna build a standard barbarian but like I said Mad Dog and invulnerable rager are also both really good options so for our build we're gonna go ahead and distribute our stats as follows we're gonna have a 17 in strengths a 14 in dexterity a 16 in constitution we're gonna dump our intelligence and charisma to bump up our wisdom to 14 people we're gonna accuse me a min maxing here but as this is a Marshall class I don't really consider it to be maxing so much as optimizing your build to do what it's actually supposed to be able to do in the first place and we'll go in and we allocate our bonus +2 stat to our strength because barbarians are all about dealing physical damage and they're really really good at it this works in conjunction with our rage ability so we're gonna be able to do lots and lots and lots of damage as we play the game here as for our skills you can do pretty much any of these Laura nature's a good one perceptions a good one sometimes you can spot traps for your trap finder if they like fail their save you can take persuasion I don't recommend it since we dumped our charisma but you but if you want to be persuasive in to some capacity there's a feat called intimidating prowess which lets you add your strength bonus to your persuasion checks so you don't actually have to have charisma to make a intimidate checks specifically which is nice so you know this idea that like okay so you're not very charismatic you don't have much of a personality or you're not very you don't have a very strong personality which makes sense for a barbarian but you can still intimidate people because you're big and scary and strong so so if you want to be able to do persuasion in some capacity you can take the skill because we're a human even though we're at a - - intelligence we still get three skill points to work with which is really really nice I do recommend taking athletics mobility can be nice Laura nature is really nice pretty much all of our Burien skills are really really good for this one in particular but I'm gonna recommend you do is take athletics Laura nature and perception these are these three are going to be very useful abilities for a lot of the game and so I just highly recommend that you take these three but there's nothing wrong with the other two skills either okay so now for feats a very very simple feat selection here there are a few alternatives but what the to feats I'm gonna recommend for a human are gonna be power attack this lets you trade attack bonus for extra damage if you're using a two-handed weapon at first level if you activate the power attack ability it's it's a mode that stays on as long as you have it activated and you can turn it off whenever you want you add you get a +3 damage while power attacking at it for only a - 1 - your attack rolls and while you're raging this adds this leads up to have like incredible amounts of damage I mean you can be doing like plus 10 plus eleven damage at first level if you take this feat and have it activated while you're fighting and while you're also raging you can do lots and lots and lots of damage very easy to down enemies this way and while you're raging you also get extra hit points so it's really really difficult to take you down the other feat that I'm gonna recommend that you take at first level for any of the barbarians except for Mad Dog because mad dog doesn't get raged to start out with so for your second feat I recommend you take extra rage because starting out you only get like seven rounds of rage or something like that so at first level this effectively almost doubles the amount of raging that you can do which is really really important for barbarians that's where they activate you know their extra strength where they get most of their extra damage so this is a good feat to take if you don't want to take extra rage if you if you're not as much into that I recommend taking the toughness feat because this is going to give you extra hit points that make it harder for you to be taken down which can be very very useful another feat that you may consider taking is improved initiative instead because this is going to let you go first in combat which means that you can charge people before they're ready you can activate your rage before they can act you can charge spellcasters archers etc if you get around to the flank if you have a good initiative role so so this feed is also extremely useful but for the Intolerable ranger and the regular barbarian i recommend extra rage to start out with because rage is just really really really strong so that we've built this character it doesn't really matter what we sound like I guess we'll be and and the other cool thing about these two classes is that you can be any alignment that you want to be you are not restricted to being any particular alignment for example paladin's have to be lawful good druids have to be one of the neutral alignments monks have to be lawful of some description so you know you're not tied to any alignment so that when it comes to role-playing you can do pretty much whatever you want which is great for a first playthrough because that way you're not locked into options that you don't necessarily want to pursue alright so Joe barbarian here as well as well call him as you can see we start out with a very hefty +5 to hit to begin with which is very good at first level this is due to our strength stat and our base attack bonus of one that we get from being a barbarian as you can see our saves are relatively decent for this level especially our fortitude safe because that's a good safe for us our AC leaves a little bit to be desired and when we rage we actually lose to to our to our armor which makes this easier to hit which is unfortunate but at the same time we're gonna have extra hit points so it's not going to be you know as painful necessarily so that being said like I said this is a great class to start the game with in my opinion because it's very durable it deals a lot of damage it's very good at taking out enemies and it really benefits from having a spell caster that can cast armor spells on them health spells on them offensive spells other defensive spells it's a very good it's very buffa Balearic tur and this character is only going to improve as the game goes through rather than just kind of stagnating so yeah that's the barbarian that's the first class I recommend because it's not very complicated all you have to worry about managing is your power attack mode turning it on and off and your rage ability which if you take extra rage you should have plenty of and not feel too nervous about using it all up when you're when you're fighting battles so anyway that's the barbarian the thing is you could read into the stats of all these abilities but you don't necessarily have to to understand that rage gives you a bonus to attack and damage but a penalty to Armour it also gives you extra health that's all you need to know about rage if you don't feel like sitting here and crunching all the numbers powertech gives you extra damage but makes you less accurate that's all you really need to really need to know about it beyond like what the actual stats do if you care what the actual stats feel free to read all these but I still recommend playing this class because it is just so accessible it is so easy to get into and just so very very powerful and it'll scale so well even later into the game but anyway let's talk about the another class that I think is really really easy to get into is very accessible maybe for people who are more into the magical side of it and what I will say is also these are these are designed to be first level feet like characters you can build your character in a lot of different ways you won't have to worry about feats again until third level with either of these classes so really once you get your first level build off the ground the whole point of having these starting builds is that you have a character that statistically solid before you actually start playing the game and from there you can kind of decide what feats you want to take and it's not going to like impact you as much I would say but anyway let's go back to build let's go build our second class the the sorcerer so first things first we're gonna switch to a sorcerer now for sorcerer the archetypes aren't as immediately obvious I would say the Imperial sorcerer has some advantages the stage transfer has some advantages if you don't want to be a standard sorcerer I recommend being the Sylvan sorcerer because like the Mad Dog barbarian it gets an animal companion which is something that just automatically takes care of itself you don't have to worry about it so much and whether you're playing a support or damaging sorcerer or a crowd control sorcerer the animal companion is going to be useful basically no matter what now the regular sorcerer though I'm gonna recommend that you take and just because it's very very simple easy to understand and there's a specific cool thing about sorcerers that sorcerers get called a bloodline and there are tons and tons and tons of different bloodlines to pick from what I'm going to suggest to you that you take for your bloodline is gonna be the elemental bloodline any of them work earth specifically helps you in Act two around fifth and six level I won't spoil anything but suffice it to say that having acid damage is very useful and so picking this bloodline and also the fire bloodline to a lesser extent are both extremely useful for that section of the game and it won't trivialize it but it will make it a lot more accessible now so why are we picking the elemental bloodlines here why do I recommend these four over the other ones all of these bloodlines get what's called an elemental array that you can do a number of times per day equal to three plus your charisma modifier which is going to be a plus four so even at level one you have a Raya tack that you can do that does a decent amount of damage and you can do it seven times a day so it's basically seven free spells at level one now this ability doesn't scale that great but it doesn't need to because eventually sorcerers get crazy spells anyway at the time of this release spell casters are a little bit bugged in terms of when it actually comes to picking spells but I'm sure they'll patch that out soon so if you've read anything about that unlike the forums for example don't worry about it the dev team is very very active about trying to fix those sorts of things you get the mobility skill from the elemental bloodline as well and this is useful because you can use it to evade combat there's there's a button to use the mobility stat to essentially you tumble right so you like cartwheel out of combat and that gets you away from melee attackers who are trying to kill you so yeah sorcerer is a good class because it's a spell caster which you know could be complicated right but the thing that's really really good about sorcerers is you just pick your spell's and then you can use them you can use a certain number of spells per level of spell so first level second level etc a certain number of times per day but unlike things like wizards and clerics and druids you don't have to pick ahead of time before you rest what spells you want to memorize for the coming day so there's a lot less anxiety when it comes to actually like getting ready for the day with a sorcerer compared to a wizard and so that's why I recommend the sorcerer because it's actually really really easy it's almost kind of like a MOBA in the sense that like you just you pick abilities and then you just use those abilities and then when you're out of energy for the day you can take a rest you get all your abilities back and you can use a number you can use a spell any number of times that you want to just just infinitely basically I mean obviously you run out spells for the day but what I'm trying to say is that you don't have to worry about like do I want to cast one or two of this spell do I want to like if I if I cast two of this spell do I give up this spell you'll have fewer spells to use overall with a sorcerer like a smaller variety but the spells that you can use you can use a lot which is really really helpful because there's a lot of fighting in this game and so it's it's like carrying like extra ammunition into a fight right you're gonna be able to fight for longer then sometimes then like a wizard or a cleric could so that things have let's go ahead and do our stats we're gonna go ahead and fix what we did from the Barbarian almost that fighter which is not true so we're gonna go ahead and bump our charisma up we want to get that to a nineteen and the reasoning behind a nineteen by the way is that total across your total playthrough you will get five stat boosts so if you take a nineteen at the start of the game by 20th level you'll have it you'll have a solid 24 which is I believe a plus eight I think it's a plus eight to a given ability no it's a plus 7/2 plus seven sorry not a plus eight so by the end of the game you'll have a plus seven to the stat which is really really helpful for your spell casting to be able to because basically the higher our charisma you have as a sorcerer the more spells that you can cast every day and so you really you know want to have a good charisma if you're one of the other source or archetypes you might need wisdom or intelligence instead we're not one of those so we're going to go ahead and just a dump our intelligence because we don't need it and again the reason that we don't need intelligence is because having a low intelligence doesn't actually impact us that much in this game and again some people are gonna accuse me a min/max in here but I want to give you a good character to start the game with that you will feel comfortable playing that is going to be useful to you even if you make bad choices later down the line so we've got our 19 charisma we want to buff our strengths up to 10 so that it's not a negative and then specifically we want to get ourselves up to probably a sixteen and dexterity and a fourteen and constitution now there are a couple of other things that we can do here for example we could lower our decks down to 14 go ahead and give ourselves a 14 and wisdom this is a more well-rounded build I would say this is a bill that's gonna have as you can see much more reasonable saving throws while still being able to do everything that the sorcerer is supposed to do and having decent enough hip points to actually function so anyway that is the sorcerers these are the stats that I recommend for a sorcerer again you can have a little bit of a higher dexterity which is going to give you a better chance to hit with raise but for the most part this is this is gonna be a completely functional okay so the two abilities that I recommend for a sorcerer are actually tied to their charisma I'm gonna recommend that you go ahead and take persuasion and use magic device persuasion lets you pass conversation checks and you're very very good at it because your charisma is really really strong so this makes you just really really good at talking to people now use magic device this ability lets you use scrolls and potions etc we'll see Scrolls to cast spells that maybe you wouldn't normally be able to cast otherwise so if you make a really good use magic device check you can actually use like a cleric scrolls to heal people even though you're a sorcerer and another note about the sorcerer is compared to the wizard sorcerers can use the same kinds of scrolls so if they're arcane scrolls you can still use them as a sorcerer you just can't learn the spell permanently like the way a wizard can but that makes sorcerers again less complicated which is why we're picking them in the first place because we want a class that's less complicated so anyway that covers our our Sat spread covers our skills let's go ahead and move on to feats now I believe we get we get a bonus feat of first level I think this is a little bit different than what I was expecting but that's okay so depending on how you want to build your character I'm going to recommend a number of different feats here so if you want to be the I want to just annihilate everything with damaging magic type of sorcerer what I'm gonna recommend to you is take spell focus and vacation and then go ahead and take greater spell focus evocation hold on I need to need to change this real quick I said I don't think it recommends it off the bat no it doesn't okay let's see well it's trying it's trying to make me pick a feat here well we don't want that but see where is it I think it's hiding hold on a second okay so we've got two different ways that we can build this so in your bonus feat slot we've gone we've gone ahead and chosen the greater spell focus evocation feat and in this slot we we have a number of different things that we can pick point blank shot is gonna help us build towards feet called precise shot precise shot eliminates a negative for penalty that we take when we shoot at characters that are already engaged in melee combat this is useful for the main reason of being able to land specifically what are called range touch attacks which are specifically like rays shooting like a ray of lightning or array of acid as is the case in our class ability at somebody and precise shot allows us to effectively avoid that penalty making us much much more accurate public shot itself isn't shabby at all now the other one that we can build this is it is to have spell focus evocation and greater spell focus evocation and what this does is it adds to to what is called the difficulty class of a spell to resist so basically what this does is it makes it very very hard to resist your evocation spells so when you cast a fireball it's gonna be much harder to actually dodge it and again I won't get into the actual numbers because this is for people who just picked up the game don't want to don't care that much about building and if you want to know what these do you can look at them later but just trust me that these are things that are going to be useful so if you don't want to be a damaging character say you want to throw that by the wayside I'll go ahead and give you another option so this is very much what I would recommend for the the damaging bill and what I would actually suggest to take off the bat here I need to redo these just a little bit because you want to be able to take a precise shot off the bat and then you would just take regular spell focus evocation so this is actually what I recommend for the damage dealer point blank shot precise shot and spell focused evocation and then at third level when you get your first feet you take greater spell focus evocation you are the blaster master at that point and people are going to be very very scared of you because you do a lot of damage and you have a lot of like spell ammunition basically to do it and the further along you get the more and more like dangerous you're gonna get as you might expect but specifically because you've taken these feats so there are two other types of sorcerer that you could do I do recommend doing this just because damage is very very simple but another very very simple one if I may go ahead and clear some of these feeds is you take spell focus conjuration you take the civic-minded the augment summoning feat this enhances any creatures that you summon so this is obviously going to be a very very simple and easy build that you can do where you just you summon other things to fight for you which is very much like the easiest way of playing an RPG right is you just you just pop something down it fights for you you don't have to worry about it as much this feat is gonna be what you want to take in order to be able to actually use that necessarily now you can take greater spell hooks with conjuration there aren't as many conjuration spells that utilize this that utilize saving throws so it's it's kind of not as useful so there are a number of different things that you could take instead what I would suggest is to take the combat casting feet and the reason for this is if somebody gets up in your face and it's trying to attack you with a melee attack this is gonna make it so you can still cast spells because otherwise your your spell is going to fail I think they even get a free attack of opportunity on you if you fail your spell in this game if you don't make your concentration check so this is just a very important feat to have and in the first place so taking it is definitely a very good idea but if you if you want to go even simpler than that if you feel like well I'm not gonna be in the front line all that often with the summoner build I would recommend going ahead and taking the toughness feet toughness gives you extra hip points makes you harder to kill keeps you in the fight longer etc and last but not least is I won't build it because I don't really recommend it to begin with if you want to be a like mine domination type of sorcerer what you might do instead is take greater spell focus so that so spell focus and then greater spell focus with the enchantment school of magic simply because if you take them you get a +2 to the saving throw of enchantments which is going to make things like sleep spells and things of that nature anything that like dominates somebody's mind it's going to make them much harder to resist like why is mastering illusion magic is actually really good to do as well and again we're not really getting into too much of the minutiae here because we just want a bill that's functional that's gonna work that is then is the main thing I'm trying to give you here this is a bill that's going to work out the game well go ahead and roll with this summoner when we pick our spells here now if you want to just be survivable at first level when we when we take these abilities all you need to do is take summon monster and the mage armor feet are the major armor spell major armor lets you basically give yourself armor even though you're a mage and can't wear armor because it makes your spells fail and summon monster obviously we want because we took augment summoning to start with so both of these are just really so this will be like your bread and butter basically and because you're an elemental bloodline earth character because you took that bloodline you can still shoot rays that do damage at people so this is just a very very solid setup in the early game and for your second level because you get one more spell at second level I'm trying to think here what I would actually recommend that you take but shield could be another way of making yourself harder to kill the magic missle spell allows you to just do some damage there's a lot of different options here and to be completely honest there's plenty of things that work color spray works and large person is great for your physical fighters magic missle is just automatic guaranteed no attack roll damage which is just very very nice raven feeble man tray of sickening protection from alignment these are all solid spells and a lot of them translate well later into the game as well so this this is kind of the bill that I recommend for the sorcerer in terms of spells at least to begin with and as you again these are just supposed to carry you through the early game until you get your feet with the game you start to feel like you know maybe what you're doing you understand the stats a little bit better and then you can kind of pick more spells as you go and more feats as you go so know this is our character in total as we get ready to actually play the game and again we've got our elemental array that we can do seven times a day and that only improves with charisma and does one point extra damage for every two sorcerer levels we possess so for example at eighth level this is doing one D six plus four damage so I can do anywhere from four new yeah so like so like anywhere between five and nine dammit no five and ten damage so that's not bad that's really not bad at all for an ability that you can just do in addition to like your actual damaging spells and these things only get better as time passes you get the ability to summon elementals later on but this bloodline which synergizes perfectly with augment summoning now some feats I would recommend taking improved initiative later on is very very useful the saving throw feats especially will saves and fortitude saint is a great fortitude and iron will are both fantastic fates to take but apart from that you're pretty much free to build this character however you want and again like the with the barbarian we can be any alignment that we want we can be chaotic evil or lawful good as a elemental sorcerer it really doesn't matter in terms of alignment you can play this character however you want to play you can come up with your own backstory as to why he's able to innately cast these spells as a sorcerer and not feel bad or confined by like moral restrictions the way you would be with something like again a paladin a cleric or a druid but anyway I hope I have made a cogent argument here I hope these builds are useful to you in terms of actually building the character and if you want to see more guides in the future be sure to just comment like and subscribe and I'm gonna keep making these so stay tuned I'm gonna make all kinds of videos about this game because I know that people are having a hard time and I really enjoy making these guides but anyway thank you for joining me my fellow adventurers and I'll see you next time

Channel: darkfireslide

Views: 255,740

Keywords: pathfinder, kingmaker, build, builds, beginner, tutorial, guide, basics, help, barbarian, sorcerer, paladin

Id: tImKP6qaCCU

Length: 28min 54sec (1734 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 03 2018