18 hours ago, Djacob91 said:And you can still pick up the Magemage Prestige Class to get the magic back for the gish part. After that, I'd double check what you want the other class part to be. Which is to say decide whether you want to pick a dedicated magic class, a martial class, or one of the mixed ones. The Magus's Arcane Weaponeer archetype might be a good place to look, either to compliment the Mageknight or just take its place.
As much as I like Knightknight, Magemage basically trades BAB for a rather poor casting progression (and Advanced Magical Training as a bonus feat, which you could just have taken). I'd almost rather dip Incanter. The ability at L4 to boost your CL with one sphere helps a lot, and you do get a decent talent progression, and more talents overall that most anybody else, but it feels like a bit of a build-around and a rather odd one (it also has some niche usefulness - it sets your casting modifier to your practitioner modifier, for example, rather than the other way around, which potentially lets you get Con for casting).
Most forms of Magus are pretty epic in Spheres and pretty much any high-level/gestalt/ish setting thanks to the power of Spell Combat.
5 hours ago, Azerian Kelimon said:What I'm eyeing right now is the Runesinger Fighter. It's an Expert Practitioner, so it gets a full set of 20 talents, but it also gets some very nice runes that effectively replicate (and with the right feats, outperform!) investing into setting up a Destructive Strike for that gish feeling, so that might be the play.
It's always worth comparing these sorts of archetypes with something like Conscript, which gets a better-than-full talent progression and Fighter-style bonus feats. However Runesinger is... kind of bonkers good, at least compared with the vanilla Fighter? Unless I'm reading this wrong, you only trade out Armour Training and Armour Mastery to get an Expert progression, which is a huge win, never mind the runes. It's perhaps telling of the Fighter that that's still only roughly on a par with the Conscript, though you keep Bravery (meh) and Weapon Training.
The runes themselves seem pretty uninspiring, honestly - the attack ones require a standard action so eh, and you can only use each 1/minute anyway. Still, they're just gravy at this point.
5 hours ago, Azerian Kelimon said:C) How does the Soul rune's strike effect interact with the Ancient Word feat? Dishing out a die per class level is kind of devastatingly broken and probably not how it's intended to be read (you have a non-zero chance to instantly kill a dragon by activating the rune against them if parsed that way), but it should probably get something from it.
It just says to get a die per class level, so I don't think it can be read any other way? That is most definitely not devastatingly broken - it's on a par with a Destructive Blast (that you spend a spell point on) and works out at +31.5 damage average at L9, assuming d6s. Considering that you're only making a single attack, that's hardly broken. It does count as a Spheres special attack action... but also this is only 1/minute! And you have to expend martial focus. It would be fine if this were a little better than making a regular attack or full-attack, since you're likely only to get one in each encounter.
(Most dragons, by the way, have quite a lot of hp... you have a non-zero chance to do +54 damage with this, but you'd need to (a) have a decent bit of base damage too, (b) roll all 6s, something which you have a ~0.00001% chance of doing (there's a 99% chance of getting 43 or below), and (c) be fighting a very weak dragon - CR9 dragons have ~100 health, but we're gestalt, so appropriate threats are likely several points of CR higher. I would expect to be fighting stuff more like Adult dragons, which have closer to 200 health. Oh, and you still have to hit it in the first place)
I would rather take Signature Technique, honestly, and spam the rune attack... assuming it's even worth spending your actions on at all.
Ah, sorry, missed the Soul Rune bit. Yeah, I suspect that's just the regular damage still, not the additional ability damage.