Pathfinder: WotR - Getting The Most Out Of Animal Companions (Tips)

[Music] what's going on everybody mortem here this time bringing you a guide to getting the most out of your animal companion in pathfinder wrath of the righteous so obviously the game launched very recently i had a lot of mythic past stuff i wanted to do but this is a video idea that i'd been kicking around for a while i kind of thought about ranking the animal companions but then honestly i haven't used every single one of them because there's a lot of options and i figured the best place to start and maybe eventually work my way to actually ranking all of them would be to start by breaking down again how to get the most out of your animal companion because there are a lot of things you need to understand even if you're coming from king maker in order to use them effectively so things like your animal companions abilities scores multiple attacks how do those multiple attacks work what is their base attack bonus what are the size modifiers how does that relate to mounted combat obviously a lot of stuff to talk about there so we're going to kind of break this down and get into it for starters what animal companions can we actually pick well the options are bear boar dog elk giant centipede horse leopard mastodon monitor lizard smilodon triceratops velociraptor and lastly wolf the first thing i would recommend doing before you even pick an animal companion is know exactly what you want to do with that animal companion because they are highly customizable in this game you can use animal companions in mounted combat they can actually take up several archetypes of sorts that we'll get into here in a little bit that will allow them to do different things such as be a better mount get combat maneuver feats and things for free depending on again the archetype you choose things that will affect their speed one of them death touched even makes your pet heal from negative energy which is basically making them undead but actually diving into this when you're picking your animal companion a few important things to look at for starters size size is important for two reasons one in order to use a animal companion as a mount your character has to be one size category smaller than your mount most characters in the game are medium that means typically speaking you're going to need a large size mount however if you're playing a halfling or something that is small you can then use a medium-sized mount so the size at the top there obviously very important speed is fairly important too this is how far they can move in one round there is an archetype that increases that a little bit as long as they're not wearing armor but while it's important to know i wouldn't let speed be the be-all end-all factor for you as most of them get roughly the same amount of movement i believe the raptor actually gets the most with 60 but most of them either have 40 or 50. now in addition to speed we get our ac where we see their plus whatever natural armor bonus everybody's base ac is 10 plus they get a natural armor bonus on top of that this is going to be plus whatever to your base 10. so for instance the bear has a plus 6 to natural armor that's actually going to make it a 16 base because it gets a 10 base then plus d6 and that gets a little further complicated by the barting in the game which we'll get into here in a little bit now in addition to this probably the single most important thing to consider when you are picking your animal companion is what kind of a tax it will get that said we will get into attacks and how they work for your animal companion here in just a little while down the road now we have our ability scores as well couple things to keep in mind here one those ability scores are going to change typically depending on either fourth or seventh level which is usually told to us right below this this is typically speaking the levels at which an animal companion will grow in size which will of course change its stats so it's important to know what those are going to be and also whether or not your animal companion uses dexterity instead of strength because some of them will actually use dexterity instead of strength just as a base for instance the leopard will that's important to know because of course our attributes for our animal companion are something we can mess with a little bit as they level up but again we'll talk about that soon but it's important to just know what your animal companions ability scores actually are strength and dex for the most part are the most important constitutions a little bit important intellect wisdom and charisma i wouldn't really care at all about at the base amount because obviously our animal companion is not going to be using those anyway now that brings us to the slightly more interesting stuff we've decided of those factors what's important to us we've picked our animal companion now when we get it we're actually going to have to give our companion an archetype and because of that when you first get your animal companion through whatever means it will have a level up symbol even if it's not actually leveling up it's just giving you the option to set its archetype as well as name the thing now the archetypes for the animal companion are aggressor bully bulwark daredevil death touched racer and wrecker now overall animal companion archetypes are fairly straightforward but it is the same for all of them and these will all do various things aggressors get extra damage bully gets some free combat maneuver defeats bulwark gets extra barting and stuff feats in exchange for the animal companion evasions they normally get daredevil loses multi-attack at level 9 which is a common thing for them to lose actually multi-attack in this particular game actually just reduces the penalty that you get to your extra attacks it doesn't actually give you more attacks death touched like i mentioned earlier gives you a negative plane stuff which lets your animal companion heal from negative energy again making it basically undead there's a racer which gets extra speed as long as it's unarmored and then wrecker gives you sunder armor in exchange for some stuff so some cool archetypes to choose from for our animal companion again the key thing here is knowing what you're going to be using your animal companion for for instance if you want a heavily armored mount for the sake of mounted combat you might want to pick bulwark because they get their barting feats for free which means you don't have to spend feet points on them and we'll get into feats and things and why that's important here shortly but next up on our slow animal companion creation we have our skills now skills are easy to mess up for an animal companion because you have to understand something an animal companion is not going to use most of these there are three that i would recommend and there are several that you should never give it for instance use magic device and persuasion you should never give to your animal companion because it's never going to do those things now class skill they're usually going to get athletics mobility stealth and perception now these are actually all pretty much the ones i would recommend and simply put this is because your animal companion can actually perform those skill checks for you out in the world so if your animal companion is the highest athletics mobility or stealth even for something you can in fact use it for those skill checks personally i like to go stealth and then something else that way you can use your animal companion as a scout forward and then perform either athletics or mobility checks on top of that i would tell you putting points into any other skills for an animal companion just wouldn't be worth it and would frankly be a waste of points because they'll never get the option to use them or they simply won't be very good at it now next up we have our feats it's important to understand with feats one thing in particular and then we'll talk about something else when your animal companion gets the chance to increase its attributes because it's leveling up the same as you so at the appropriate times you can increase and animal companions attributes by one point here and there while it's not 100 mandatory like you have to or anything you might want to consider giving your animal companion one point in intelligence from its base which is two because the move from intelligence ii to intelligence three actually opens up a lot of feed options for your animal companion things like for instance your teamwork feats actually require intelligence of three and then you can give those just as a base to your animal companion if you're not running a class that gives animal companions those feats anyway but in addition to that when it comes to feats there are very much so wrong choices for this because again we're talking an animal companion we're not talking a player character this is where also knowing exactly what your animal companion gets for attacks is very important because you can give your animal companion feats like weapon focus and things like that and other sort of feats that actually let them focus on one weapon however they're going to be using their natural weapons so you want to give them those feats for the weapons they can actually use which is their natural weapons which is things like bite hov that kind of thing now exactly what this is of course changes on our type of animal companion and what type of attacks they get alright so let's circle back and talk about the attacks now so when it comes to animal companion attacks you have to understand a few things and honestly just about how your character's attacks work as well so even though we know certain animal companions will get extra attacks it's important to understand that that only happens on a full round attack provided you have the base attack bonus to give you those extra attacks so what does this mean at level one basically every animal companion is only going to be able to make one attack per round until they get the base attack bonus to give them their extra attacks however just because you have a high enough base attack bonus to give you extra attacks which is like 6 11 and 16 i think not levels mind you base attack bonus of 6 11 and 16 but once you have that high enough base attack bonus you still might not necessarily be making all of those attacks per round because you're only going to be getting all of those attacks with that animal companion if you are making a full attack so if i have an animal companion that gets three attacks it has the base attack bonus to use those three attacks i still have to use a full attack round to actually get all of them now this works the same way for characters actually if you move and then attack something that's all you get to do that round you can only attack once and also move that's an important thing to understand and especially with animal companions because it shows these attacks that they'll get right when you pick the animal companion you need the base attack bonus to get all of them as well as a full round attack to actually use all of them so when an animal companion first moves to attack an enemy that first round it's only going to get one attack because they also moved that round now all that basic stuff out of the way i want to talk about a few other specific things one equipment this is new with wrath of the righteous you can actually equip your animal companions with items only certain slots though for instance they can all wear a belt they can all wear a back slot there are bardings you can find throughout the game which your animal companion has to have feats to use these are honestly the same as every other type of armor except they're for your animal companion which means they are subject to a dexterity limit or ac bonus what this means is that armor limits your dexterity which can limit your dex to ac bonus if you're unaware your dex modifier also gets added to your ac when you're unarmored armor actually limits that by a certain amount and barting works the same way so if you have a barting that say gave you four decks bonus that means the maximum bonus you could get to your ac from decks while wearing that armor is four whereas if it's zero that means you don't get a dex bonus at all so something important to understand there but lots of stuff with equipment i do want to mention one thing they can wear a necklace and that's actually pretty important because amulets of agile fists actually do also affect natural weapons which will give your pet a bonus so even if you're not using an unarmed character you might want to save those amulets of agile fist and then last but not least and honestly a pretty important part of this your animal's effective level so this is important because your animal companion doesn't level up on its own it is tied to the character that it belongs to some animal companions operate at a minus four to their level just due to where they came from and then in other cases it might be slightly different because you put points into a class that did not give you an animal companion what does that mean basically your animal companion will only be the level that is associated with the class that gave you the animal companion so if i'm say a druid and i took an animal companion and then i put a point in fighter and i might be a level two druid fighter however my animal companion is still only gonna be level one because my druid's level one so it's important to understand your effective level for your pet because this will show up as bonuses or minuses to their stats so if you're ever mousing over your stats and you see animal companion bonus animal level bonus or something like that that's because of the effective level of your pet now that can be offset a little bit if you get the boon companion feet on your main character that is you know associated with the pet of course because boon companion will actually give you up to i believe it's plus four levels on that animal companion to match whatever the class it is that gave it to you that's kind of fallen behind so it'll basically make your pet keep up a little better if you do choose from multi-class a little there you go guys there is basically everything on the basic level to know about the animal companions i certainly hope you enjoyed the video if you did please remember to like comment subscribe all that youtube jazz but regardless of any of that truly just thank you so much for watching may you wander in wisdom and have an amazing day [Music] you

Channel: Mortismal Gaming

Views: 52,647

Rating: 4.9095478 out of 5

Keywords: Mortym, Mortismal Gaming, Pathfinder, WotR, Wrath of the Righteous, Animals, Companions, Mounts, Guide, Ranked

Id: OxcK1kdG1c4

Length: 13min 11sec (791 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 03 2021