The obvious answer here is crafting. Your character and the underlings can earn a simple amount of money every week.
Note that you don't actually need to roll anything. Everyone can simply "take 10" and you get a static number for "gold per week".
But if you want to make big bucks in the Pathfinder world, you make magic items. A magic item crafter can create 1000gp worth of items each day. They have to provide 500gp in components, but that's still 500gp / profit / day of successful magical crafting. This isn't absolute, as scrolls seem to generate a little less per day.
But Craft wondrous item is available at 3rd level and many items can be "auto-crafted" with a simple "take 10".
Now, you have a lot of high level "minions" available via leadership. If you have not fleshed these out a little, now might be the time. Honestly, if I had a bunch of 4/5/6th level minions, they would all be Wizards and Clerics with magical item crafting feats. In fact, you're a Cleric, I would expect your highest-level followers to be other Clerics.
In any case, these followers can be outputting 500gp / day in net profits. And all of those lower level followers can be scribing scrolls of Cure Light Wounds for 10s of gold / day.
If this sounds a little absurd it kind of is. Pathfinder really breaks down when it comes to magic items and economics. On the other hand, crafting magic items is "where the money's at". Adventuring is fun, but it's high risk and it can have really crummy payoffs. Those who don't want to test their luck at adventuring are probably out there churning out magic items.
Constitution is everyoneâs second-most-important ability
Thatâs it, thatâs all it comes down to. There are elf subraces without a Constitution penalty; those are fine. But for âElfâ race, and most elven subraces, you get â2 Constitution, and thatâs just terrible. Even if Dexterity is your most-coveted ability score, you can get +2 Dexterity without taking a â2 penalty to Constitution, and since that is an option, you will want to do so because even if Dexterity is more important, Constitution still is important.
And it is really important. A +2 to Dexterity means you get +1 to some rolls. They can be some important rolls, initiative, attack, stealth, maybe damage if you work at it. But itâs still just +1.
But Constitution, unlike most other ability scores, has a multiplicative effect (Intelligence does too, with skill points, but that only matters to some characters; HP matters to everyone). You donât lose 1 life with a â2 to Constitution, you lose 1 life per level. And that winds up being a pretty big chunk of life.
Also, and this is admittedly very much secondary, Fortitude saves tend to be (much) more important than Reflex saves. Reflex saves tend to halve some HP damage, and direct-damage, particularly magical direct-damage, as in the sort of thing you can halve with a Reflex save, tend to be kind of mediocre. Fortitude saves often ward off very unpleasant things, like ability damage (disease, poison) or straight-up death. All else being equal, Fortitude tends to be the more important saving throw. Will tends to be even more important (because a failed Will save also often involves death or ability score damage, or worse can mean possession or mind-control).
The rest of the elf racial features are just... minor
The rest of the elf racial features are nice, but niche or minor. They just do not measure up to the sheer loss that the â2 Constitution represents.
The trance thing rather than sleeping is cool, but ultimately it doesnât represent a dramatic advantage; rotating guards are still a really good idea, as are alarm spells and the like. Outside of very-low levels, sleep is not a major danger. Note that trancing does not reduce the amount of sleep that arcane spellcasters need. If it did, that would be a really big deal (possibly too good but really, I doubt it), but it doesnât.
Automatic searching is cool, except if itâs really important youâre probably already searching for it (so the racial ability often just winds up being a minor thing the DM threw in to give the elf player a bone).
In most games, itâs the kind of thing that, if no one was playing an elf, somehow just magically wouldnât have been an issue in the first place. DM-time is a valuable thing to be spent wisely, which means itâs usually a bad thing for a DM to give much thought to a room the PCs are never going to find. If the players need to find the room and donât have an elf, the DM is going to find some other way to hint at it, or just move it somewhere that theyâll find it. DMs often do similar things for parties that lack trapfinders or trackers. The lack of these things may, in theory, reduce the partyâs effectiveness at a particular task, but the more important the thing to be found is, the more likely the DM is to make sure the party finds it.
In really sandboxy games, the DM might give some thought to random rooms, trying to imagine where those rooms would logically be from the perspective of the buildingâs designers. Or, if you are playing a pre-made module, itâs entirely possible that the authors of the module threw in random hidden rooms just because someone might be playing an elf.
In other words, this feature can, and possibly will, occasionally get you a nice little thing. It might provide a short-cut, an extra bit of treasure, whatever. Those are nice things. However, even when there is something to find with auto-search, the room still cannot be crucial if itâs unlikely to be found by parties without elves (or the party elf just doesnât have a lot of ranks in Search or just flubs the Search check). Because if the room is crucial and the party is unlikely to find it, thereâs a high risk of the game suddenly grinding to a halt while party has no idea what it is they need to progress. And no matter how you slice it, thatâs pretty bad for the game. So this feature will just about never make-or-break the campaign, or a characterâs success, unless the DM very artificially forced something in just to make the feature important (see This Looks Like a Job for Aquaman).
Weapon proficiencies are cheap and easy to come by for almost everyone who cares. After all, players donât play commoners. If you actively use weapons as an adventurer, you almost-definitely already have proficiency in the weapons you want to use. Very few classes swing weapons regularly, yet donât have proficiency in the weapons elves are automatically proficient in. And even when that does happen, they usually have something almost as good (a Simple variant of the same weapon, for example; the difference is a minor +1 to damage, on average, for having the Martial version).
The one sort-of major exception, wizards who cannot cast spells, still isnât really a great example, for a couple of reasons.
First, between all the methods wizards have to maintain their spell slots, the quantity of spell slots they have available, and their own ability to decide whether or not to put themselves at risk of needing spell slots they donât have, most cases of this are fairly contrived.
Second, a wizard spending any significant amount of time where he has nothing better to do than shoot a bow heâs crap at shooting is an indication that there is something seriously wrong with your campaign. In essence, a player who has chosen to play a wizard did so in order to cast spells, not to be a piss-poor archer. He is not good at shooting a bow, be it a crossbow or a longbow, and itâs not what heâs here to do. Which means that, if you as a DM are doing your job right, it should be very rare that the wizard is reduced to plinking things with a bow. The wizard should have better things to do be doing the overwhelming majority of the time, because otherwise youâre being fairly rude to the player in question, invalidating his choices and wasting the time he put into building the spellcasting abilities of the character. Having âbetter things to doâ might not be casting spells; throwing characters outside their fortĂ© can be interesting if done right. But having the player sit there going âwell, I guess Iâll take another pot-shot with my bow; canât really do anything else,â means you, as a DM, are failing that player for as long as that goes on. If itâs brief, fine: not everyone needs to have the spotlight at all times; thatâs impossible. But if this is going on a lot in your campaign, you are doing something very wrong.
Finally, if I as a wizard really care about this, I can always just be Human and take Martial Weapon Proficiency as my bonus feat, or swap Scribe Scroll for it using the Unearthed Arcana variant, or whatever. I donât get the +2 Dex, but I avoid the â2 Con, which is going to matter to me more and more often. Even if Iâm worried about being reduced to plinking away with a bow, I donât need four proficiencies, just one. I definitely donât want to get into melee with a d4 HD, a â2 Con, and a rapier, thatâs for damn sure.
So, ultimately, those racial features, while kind of nice, just arenât worth it for â2 Constitution.
There are exceptions, of course, particularly for elf subraces.
Several elf subraces have bonuses to Intelligence, which are otherwise very difficult to come by (though the same argument about Dexterity applies to Intelligence, with a limited set of books you might not be able to get +2 Intelligence without taking â2 Constitution).
There are a select few feats and prestige classes that require proficiency in particular weapons, and are designed for classes that wouldnât ordinarily have them. Sometimes being an elf can help with that and the â2 Constitution is a price worth paying if it means not wasting a level in an otherwise-worthless dip, or burning multiple feats, on those proficiencies. Though for the life of me, abjurant champion is literally the only case of this that I can think of.
A few elf-only options are quite good, like the Elven Generalist Wizard ACF, or the Eternal Blade prestige class. The existence of elf races without the â2 Con penalty usually means you should pick one of those, however.
So elves sometimes do have things to recommend them, but they are few, and playing an elf is literally a cost to entry. The thing you get might be worth it, but if you could do it as a not-elf you would.
Best Answer
Become a Diviner. They get a blanket +1 per 2 levels bonus to initiative. They also ALWAYS act in a surprise round so your biggest weakness of not going first (getting surprised) NEVER happens!!! You're already a wizard, and pride yourself in going first, so why don't you just start saying, "I saw that coming."
This might be what you're looking for. We have a diviner (foresight school) in our Jade Regent game, and he's saved the party NUMEROUS times by going first. Kinda aggravated the DM since he can never take us by surprise with his ninjas, and then he just glitterdusts them. True story, blind ninjas just aren't as scary as invisible ninjas.