It depends on how good your Cleric is at forcing attacks of opportunity. If you had more buddies they could do things like Greater Drag and Greater Bullrush to basically throw baddies into the woodchipper, the woodchipper in this instance being you.
Your best bet is if your Cleric has any spells that can knock enemies prone over a large area, though I'm not familiar with anything that will accomplish that and a cursory glance at the SRD doesn't seem to offer any options. Altneratively, they can summon a batch of wolves (later dire wolves) to trip everything around you, in which case you can just can stand there daring enemies to try to stand back up.
Even then, it's hard for a two person party to corral enemies in such a way to make Combat Patrol worth it. Moving to hit one enemy will often take you out of range to hit another. I'd advise against it from an optimization perspective (there's just too many more useful feats out there to waste on this), but go for it if you feel like it fits your character concept and your Cleric buddy is game in helping you get the most out of it.
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When optimizing a character, it is key to identify what you will be spending most of your time doing.
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In this case, it seems like you want to make a melee character who fights in melee. The problem is, as a Magus, you will be combining spell use with melee attacks, and relying on spells to do your damage or to attach Saving Throw based effects. However, your melee attacks still need to hit to apply these spells. So we need to optimize two things - your to hit and your spell effects.
Why not rely more on melee damage? As a non-Fighter and non-Barbarian and non-Rogue, your melee damage is low. You can't easily use PA to increase your damage as your to-hit is key. Ergo, relying on pure melee damage is a bad idea with this build.
To-Hit
To Hit is made of three parts -
- Stat added to to-hit
- spell bonuses and gear bonuses to hit
- feat bonuses to hit
Spell and gear bonuses are simple - you select spells (such as Haste and Cat's Grace) that give you bonuses to hit and try to have them cast before combat goes up. Additionally, you buy or steal or barter or trade or select items (gloves of dexterity, magical swords, banners, duelist's gauntlets, sashes etc) that increase your to-hit. It's usually fairly binary, and choices between say, a great save or die to apply via sword hits or a spell that increases the chance of hitting, can be decided upon by comparing the great spell to your pre-existing spells, thinking about how often you hit currently, etc.
Stat added to hit is also fairly simple. You want more of the stat that adds itself to your to-hit, within reason, again, by comparing it to other things you might get with the same money.
Feat bonuses are slightly more complex, as some feat chains offer debuffs which can affect to-hit, and computing the result is non-trivial. However, as you aren't a Fighter, you can't afford enough feats to make the Improved Trip line worthwhile (Expertise, Trip 1, Trip 2, Fury's Fall), as you aren't a rogue the Shatter Defenses line isn't worth it, and most of the others aren't great shakes. Weapon Focus is an okay choice as it pays off immediately, doesn't require anything else, and is easy to use with your weapon choice of 'always scimitars'. The Two-Weapon Fighting chain is mandatory. That leaves you with very few feats, so the only real 'bang for buck' feat choice is Dazing Assault. Daze is a great status effect and worth applying.
Spell Effects
Here we start to run into problems. In the proposed build, you have 4 lost caster levels. In a partial casting class like the Magus, that's effectively suicide. Unless there are some vastly powerful low level spells in the Magus list that you are going to be able to rely on, and you're taking the levels in those classes later - which there is no sign that you are, as they appear to be low level dex and BAB boosting classes.
Unless you are going to dual-wield scimitars and take power attack/twf chain etc, I recommend you only take one level instead of four. Taking a second level later might be workable, but 4 levels of delayed casting as a Magus will suck.
If you have 3.5e backwards compatibility, things like the Abjurant Champion prestige class might help you out in getting a better BAB while maintaining your casting progression (although you still lose out on arcane pool and arcana - the only worthwhile things about advancing pure magus).
Now, as for advancing your spell effects, we have two main things to worry about - save DC and damage.
Save DC is increased by int and various feats, none of them amazingly good. Spell Specialization is a good choice, as is spell Focus in a school you have multiple good options in (like Conjuration or Transmutation).
Damage is increased by CL and metamagic feats. The Gifted Adept and Metamagic Master traits are key to increasing the power of a spell you'll use a lot, such as Shocking Grasp. Otherwise Spell Focus, Mage's Tattoo (Varisian Tattoo), Spell Specialization, can all increase your CL. At lower levels, an Empowered Shocking Grasp for 5d6 x 1.5 damage is crazy at level 4 or whatever. At higher levels, an Intensified Empowered Shocking Grasp out of a 2nd level spell slot for 10d6 x 1.5 damage is great in addition to a full attack.
Taking a level in Crossblooded Sorcerer (Draconic/Orc, or anything else that boosts damage) can greatly increase the damage of touch spells you use also.
Once you have all that handled, damage, status effects, how you are applying them, then you can think about ratios of int to dex.
And in this case, mathematically speaking, you want 2 more points of Int than Dex at any one time, but both are important.
Best Answer
A long-running Pathfinder campaign in which I was involved that ended when characters were level 14 included—at one point or another—a half-orc inquisitor, a human barbarian, a human cleric, and a vanara druid. The campaign had the PCs as police detectives in the Magic: The Gatering setting Innistrad. Adventures involved a great deal of investigation and mundane legwork plus plenty of we've-discovered-your-evil-plot-so-it's-over! sort-of reveals in addition to beating the crap out of a lot of evil outsiders and undead.
This list is in no way comprehensive and instead limited to items I've seen used in play in an 18-month-long campaign that had a significant combat encounter only about every other session. I've further limited the list to only the items a fighter could employ.
In retrospect, we weren't using several items that we probably should've been using. In addition to several ioun stones (cracked orange prism) (1,000 gp; 0 lbs.) each for the casters because more 0-level spells is incredible, I'd want now, for instance, the headband of intuition (7,000 gp; 1 lb.), at least one insistent doorknocker2 (5,000 gp; 2 lbs.), and the treasure hunter's goggles (6,400 gp; 0 lbs.).
1 The drinking horn supplemented his low-level purchase, the tengu drinking jug (1,000 gp; 2 lbs.). He'd tired of the one gallon of sake or plum liquor ("Tastes like pruno") the jug could create each day, even though it was sort of free.
2 Two doorknockers are better so that you can make a door then make another door on the other side to recover the first doorknocker, but even just one's great for a case of the lookarounds.