[RPG] Which classes grant the Bonus Feats feature at level 1, letting me pick a feat of the choice

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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.

One, your stats are basically incapable of supporting any character who isn’t a pure spellcaster. For a pure spellcaster, those are pretty good stats, but for anyone else they’re painfully poor. An 8 in Constitution is putting your life in grave danger all the time. This is one of many reasons why I recommend against rolled ability scores. Have you spoken to your DM about this problem? Maybe you can convince him to allow a reroll or moving to an ability array or something.

Alternatively, you could maybe retrain as a spellcaster, but that’s not going to mesh well with your interest in archery. Bizarrely, 3.5 has very poor support for archery; basically all of the archery-related prestige classes are close to worthless, and archery requires a ton of really weak feats to get anything done (Point-Blank Shot is garbage but required for everything, Precise Shot is necessary but all it does is eliminate a painful penalty, Manyshot is incompatible with Rapid Shot, which is finally half-decent except you’ve burned four feats on a half-decent benefit!).

Finally, it’s conceivable that you might have more hope if your DM expanded that extremely-narrow field of available books. As is, all the best options I can think of for making use of that Dexterity (e.g. Crossbow Sniper, Dead Eye, Targeteer) are unavailable to you (examples are from Player’s Handbook II, Dragon Compendium, and Dragon vol. 310, respectively). And banning psionics means some very solid Wisdom-based magical-warrior options (ardent, psychic warrior, war mind) are unavailable to you. At the very least, Spell Compendium would mean that you actually have decent spells; as it is, you are literally weaker than a druid of half your level.

Anyway, taking what you’ve got as set in stone...

• Sword of the Arcane Order is worthless to you because your Intelligence is a mere 10. It’s a great feat, but your stats need to be different.

  • This becomes a different story if your Intelligence goes up; then it’s the best feat you can take. Must-have if your DM allows you to change your stats, for instance. Assuming you are the only elf in the party, getting a special elf-only headband of intelligence as a reward for something might also do the trick, if the bonus is large enough.

  • Alternatively, you might ask your DM for a Wisdom-based analogue to Sword of the Arcane Order. Under normal circumstances, the requirement for Intelligence is something of a balancing factor to SotAO, but you really could use all the help you can get.

  • Sword of the Arcane Order does very awkwardly just... stop at 11th level. Low Intelligence, particularly if all your Intelligence comes from an item (i.e. you can’t improve it through another item) exacerbates this. That’s probably fine as most campaigns don’t go that high, and frankly I’m not sure there’s anything you can do to maintain a decent power level much past there anyway.

• Order of the Bow Initiate is a complete waste of time.

• Depending on how many levels you’ve burned on ranger, multiclassing to cleric or druid might be an option. Your Wisdom is very low for such classes, but even so their spells offer far more than ranger ever will.

  • Cleric would allow you to take Divine feats; you’ll miss Complete Champion quite a bit, but Complete Divine still has some good ones. I would strongly consider going for the Planning and Undeath domains, even though those are probably difficult to justify for your character. If you can think of any reason your character might get those, though, they would help you: you would get Extra Turning and Extend Spell, and could take Persistent Spell and Divine Metamagic (Complete Divine) in it so at least one spell a day is active all day. Divine power is a common choice but not the only option.

    • If you cannot justify the Undeath domain (likely), consider taking the Elf domain and asking if, since both the domain and ranger are giving you the same bonus feat, you could get Extra Turning as a bonus feat. Giving alternate bonus feats to replace duplicate bonus feats is pretty common.

    • A cloak of charisma will help a bit. You might even consider bumping your Charisma to 10 with your 4th-level or 8th-level ability score bump, but only do that if you don’t think you’ll reach the next bump; Wisdom is still the higher priority. In other words, Wis 14/Cha 10 is better than Wis 15/Cha 9, but Wis 16/Cha 9 is way better than Wis 15/Cha 10.

  • Druid would be awkward, considering that most Wild Shape forms are going to nix your archery. Sticking to primate forms might work, however; you could talk to your DM. But even allowing that, Wild Shape replaces your physical ability scores, completely wasting your Dexterity. You’d still be stronger than you are, but it would be awkward. The advantage is that it’s much less of a leap than cleric, since ranger is basically half a druid.

• The divine crusader prestige class in Complete Divine also might be a solid option. It has full Base Attack Bonus, so it works out well enough for your archery, and it gets 9th-level spells in 10 levels. That’s great. The drawback is, the divine crusader’s spell list consists of exactly one domain. Choose wisely.

  • Unfortunately, without Spell Compendium you are quite limited here. War domain may end up being your best bet, and that’s kind of sad. Travel is another decent-ish option. You’ll also have to beg your DM to let you use Wisdom instead of Charisma.

  • The other class features of the divine crusader are pretty much garbage though; OK protection from electricity and acid damage, but that’s about it. It does get Weapon Specialization in its deity’s favored weapon, and requires Weapon Focus in the same, so hopefully you worship a deity that uses some kind of bow. Ask your DM if you can waive the Weapon Focus requirement if you choose the War domain; the domain grants that feat anyway, so it would be a complete waste to you.

  • A single level of cleric before divine crusader is also a decent idea. You could use the War domain to get into divine crusader in the first place, and Turn Undead remains very useful for Divine feats.

  • Sacred exorcist, also Complete Divine, can get you Turn Undead without having to dip cleric. Requires you be able to cast dismissal or dispel evil, though, which would put a harsh requirement on your domain choice.

  • At higher levels, dipping a single level of contemplative and/or divine oracle (both Complete Divine) can allow you to add more domains to divine crusader. That dramatically increases your spell list. Divine oracle 2 also has a very nice version of Evasion that works in all armor.

Unfortunately, those are all the options I can offer to you. If you do get additional supplements made available, Complete Champion, Player’s Handbook II, Spell Compendium, and Tome of Battle are probably your best bets. Expanded Psionics Handbook and Complete Psionic would also help. Unfortunately, it’s quite unlikely that you’ll get Dragon material, which is a shame, since it’d help.