Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous – Brown fur Shaman Buff-bot (Hard / Unfair)

This is a mystic theurge build that combines as much utility as possible into a single character to free up slots for other build concepts. Not that useful when combat has started (I leave them by the area exist and turn off their AI most the time) but an invaluable font of pre-buffs. Works well in a party, and as a potential only companion, combining all the buffs your solo main character could possibly need into one package.

Unfortunately Cam can’t build into this due to her shaman archetype removing the hex at level 6.

Build Concept

This build revolves around investing enough into witch to unlock what I term “The holy trinity” of hexes along side the ability to share powerful transmutation spells with allies that no other build could. It enables a more diverse party by condensing the best pre-buffing power available into one character.

We do this by combining witch with brown fur transmuter. Witch will provide the holy trinity of hexes while brown fur arcanist will enable some truly broken buffing.

First we will discuss what this holy trinity of hexes is and why it is so important for someone in the party to have them and then we will move on to the brown fur arcanist. This is not a strict rigid build guide, it sticks only to what is needed to bring the goal of being your parties one size fits all buff-bot while leaving feat and mythic choices to personal taste. A table of exactly what to pick will be provided if you’d rather just copy it but this is by no means necessary.

The Holy Trinity Of Hexes

The holy trinity of hexes that we use are “protective luck”, “fortune” and “cackle”. Protective luck makes it so that whenever an ally is attacked the enemy must roll twice and take the worse result. Fortune is the opposite and allows an ally to roll twice and take the better result on all d20 dice rolls.

The power of these hexes cannot be understated. If your main is tanking such that the enemy must roll a 20 to get in a hit then with protective luck the enemy must now roll two 20’s in a row which means that they now get hit 20 times less often and will on average tank 400 attacks until a hit gets through. On it’s own this is enough to turn your tank from formidable to invincible.

Fortune is equally powerful with two rolls for every saving throw; two rolls for every attack; two rolls for every skill check; two rolls for every combat manoeuvre. This raises the mean dice roll from 10.5 to around 15 and furthermore doubles the amount of nat 20s you will score and is one of the strongest offensive and defensive buffs in the game.

These buffs are offset by the fact they only last for one round and that fortune only works once a day but this is offset by cackle. Cackle extends both of these hexes by a round and can be used twice a round. This means that when entering an area you can apply fortune and protective luck to the entire party and then start cackling where the amount of time you spend cackling will be how long the buffs last. If you are diligent and cackle long enough for the buffs to last the entire time you are in the area then you will have these potent buffs forever.

This is the holy trinity, just by having these hexes in the party you get two rolls on every dice, and in the best case scenario making your tank take 1/20th of the damage they were taking before.

You need 6 levels in shaman to get access to all these hexes, 4 would be better but as of now you can’t use a mythic ability to get a new shaman hex, only witch hexes.

The Stacking Bonuses Of The Brown Fur Arcanist

Brown fur arcanists can cast transmutation spells with range personal on their allies and can improve all of the attribute bonuses associated with spells by 2, this is huge. At level 4 this class truly starts to shine as you unlock all the direct attribute buffs like bulls strength, cats grace, eagles splendour etc. and can start giving all your companions +6 to their stats.

If you also use spells like reduce person, enlarge person, frightening aspect etc. then all those extra +2’s will add up in dramatic fashion leading to attributes up to 10 points higher than they otherwise would be.

With 9 levels in brown fur arcanist then you gain the ability to grant spells with range personal to companions. These spells are almost entirely polymorph spells or provide bonuses that don’t stack with other spells you can cast already however so its something that we can afford to miss out on. If you are in a party where turning your team mates into dragons is the aim of the game however then that 9th level milestone will be missed here and may make this build unviable for you.

Putting Them Together

Access to hexes and the buffs of brown fur arcanist are both important parts of high difficulty team composition but if you have them all on the same team as well as a cleric then you’re going to end up with 3 full casters on the team, with your main arcane caster shoe horned into being a buff reservoir and therefore not being as offensively powerful as a wizard or sorcerer. It would be prudent to combine them. We do this with mystic theurge which allows us to continue spell progression in our chosen classes as long as one is divine and the other is aracane which we satisfy.

Putting this all together you get the following class distribution:

Shaman 6 / Brown fur arcanist 4 / Mystic theurge 10

This provides us with level 8 shaman spells and level 6 arcane spells all the while combining our hex buffer and arcane buffer into a single character. A table is provided below for a skeleton of the build. You can also get this to work with whatever mythic abilities and mythic feats you like except for making sure you take ascendant casting for more buffs.

Build Skeleton