Besides the obvious, like moving, Take Cover, Bon Mot, and Raise Shield, what are your favourite things to do with your third action?
Whether it’s an option that can apply to a wide variety of characters or requires a very specific niche build.
Recall Knowledge is by far my favorite one. Getting to know some flavourful info about the enemy and some weakness or strength or stats is something I enjoy. But I’m very tactics focused in combat.
Other than that demoralize is nice. As are the 1 Action Plus 1 Bonus cantrips if no other bonuses of the same type are active.
Out of interest, do you find Recall Knowledge is very dependent on the GM to use it in a particular way for it to be effective?
Both GMs I had for Pathfinder so far love when players use recall Knowledge. It’s a great way to get some lore to the players that is immediately relevant too. So they try to reward it with many useful monster stats.
Most of the time I am the GM and I very much do the same thing.
Feinting or Demoralising as a first action are pretty good, you can only demorilise each enemy once per combat though. Also, you say moving is obvious, but you mean approaching the enemy? Because attacking twice and then moving away can be a good way to not get hit or making a boss waste an action (though beware attacks of opportunity, in which case step exists).
Also, you say moving is obvious, but you mean approaching the enemy?
Approach, move away, move into a flanking position; there are a lot of different ways to get an advantage by movement, and I intended to encompass all of them.
I like combining Athletics action (Trip, Shove, etc) with Assurance on low(er) level enemies.
Oh very interesting. Banking on reliably getting the success at the cost of never getting the crit success?
The trick is since Assurance ignores penalties, if you know it’ll succeed then it’ll always succeed, even if you’re at full MAP. You can also bump a higher level enemy down into the “success” zone by inflicting debuffs to their fort or reflex DCs. A fantastic combo is Intimidating Strike -> Quickened Strike -> Trip (Assurance) on a fighter, setting up your teammates and an AoO with fair reliability. It’s better to rely on your teammates to inflict greater status debuffs than Frightened 1 though.
@Zagorath
Quickened Synesthesia, Command Familiar-> Synesthesia, and Command Familiar->Silver Breath, in that order
