Heritor Puns

Ok so I have been thinking about this build for a long time, and I need a bit of confirmation as to whether it works or not, if it does, potentially you could greater vital strike on a pouncing full attack.

Key components of the build: Half Orc- lets me access the deathless featline, which is important because it allows me to keep the staggered condition on myself constantly (I will explain why later)

Titan Mauler: Use a weapon one size bigger (Butchering axe in this case) and gives me access to beast totem for Pounce and furious finish (Which as a free action I can toggle between full attacks)

https://roll20.net/compendium/pathfinder/Pounce#content

Rules for Charge

Under the charge rules on page 198 of the Core Rulebook, if you are limited to taking only a standard action on your turn (as you would be when staggered, like when you're below 0 hit points and have the Die Hard feat, or if you're acting in the surprise round), you can make what I refer to as a partial charge. It's the same as a normal charge attack, except you can only move up to your movement speed, and you can't draw a weapon during the charge unless you have Quick Draw.

The kicker here is the limited to standard action clause for charge, it allows a standard action charge if you are limited to standard actions only, and the deathless master feat line essentially keeps you staggered for as long as you are up

Heritor Knight: Has a 6th level ability that lets me Greater Vital Strike on any melee attack made as part of a standard action

Mighty Strike (Ex): At 6th level, a heritor knight gains Vital Strike and Improved Vital Strike as bonus feats. Whenever the heritor knight makes a melee attack as a standard action, she can apply the effects of Improved Vital Strike to that attack. If she has Greater Vital Strike, she can apply that feat’s effects instead.

Notably, Charge is actually explicitly a standard action, like the heritor knights other abilities, and not like other abilities that are just melee attacks that also happen to be standard actions so you would in theory be able to pounce and apply Mighty Strike to each attack (both clauses of needing the attack action to work specifically and one attack are taken away by mighty strike)

Edit: If your Dm is iffy with counting charge as a standard when staggered, Rhino charge allows charge to be readied, and readying something is a standard action

So my question is,

Pretty much the title question.

So, far I've tried (couple of times) to lean heavily into the heritor tech stuff but I'm struggling to see their strengths. The units seem mostly support and are super fragile, some of the special doctrines are ok, most early mods seem rather weak and I don't think I see the point of the whole essence charge thing.

Everything seems to be very gimmicky, link up your stuff for 1 more armor, oh you can heal a bit, but it will be slightly better if you had more essence. So, it's either more essence drain via attacking or the abilities are somewhat lackluster.

The visuals are great, tho.

Is it worth starting with a Vehicle in order to get Piloting for free in order to eventually put them in a High Lord “vehicle”?

To clarify, I'm not asking for a guide on how they work, but for combinations I might not have thought about.

For example, Acolyte Incantation seems to be surprisingly good on melee units like Oathbound Aspirants or Assembly Scavengers. It gives them a free action to debuff enemy damage while buffing their own. A bit of a more no-brainer is the same mod on Siphoners and Arks to help them gather Essence before transfering or buffing.

On the other hand I've never managed to get any milage out of Lord or Protector Incantation. Sure, Lord has some high regen capabilities, but it requires another mod to simply work for most units, and the few that does has such a low Energy Drain strength that the Confiscator is almost always needed anyway. On paper the Protector Inc sounds good and strong on units like the Paladin... Protector, however I've never found a situation where it isn't just preferable to advance and attack them instead.

The Es'Teq Gauntlet is sadly wasted on Aspirants (imo), since they're already unloading their full damage no matter the distance they've to run. Prefer replacing it with the Forgotten Essence Siphon when available.

Anyone have any good uses or combinations for the mods (Race doesn't matter)?

So one of my players is planning on leveling up into heritor knight next level

https://www.d20pfsrd.com/classes/prestige-classes/other-paizo/e-h/heritor-knight/

But we have a disagreement about the skyreaver ability she thinks that since no range is listed it gives her sword a temporary increase in range to hit whatever she is attacking (extendable laser sword) I’m under the assumption that since it is a melee attack it uses the natural reach of the sword and I’m just checking here to see who is right or if neither of us are correct. Thanks

And holy bejeezus this combination is so powerful. My hero, who ended up as a high lord, was tearing through T4 enemies in a single burst. Never even used the quintessence ark's sacrament of decay because I just didn't need the extra damage. If the enemy even got to my main units past the onslaught of drained that I kept sending their way. Speaking of drained, do you guys actually use their mind dominance? I tried to on a couple occasions, but it either didn't work or the unit died in that combat, with only one exception. And even then I think I'd rather have kept the drained.

this is why

Mega bettle

Has melee and range attack

Has hyper armor with gives your unit 2 armor becomes 25% harder to hit and cannot be flanked when in defence mode

Death rattle deals damage , destroys 1 armor and inflicts high impact to all adjacent units when the mega beetle dies

Stagger and Biochemical resistance

misfortune

again has melee and range attack

being able to teleport to target hex within 5 hexes and become immune for one turn

Aura of misfortune and Sadism

Many resistances

Those creatures have one in common they both have melee and range attack with most of the animal units dont have and only have the melee attack also those 2 units can be devastating on the battlefield when aquired and other animals that you can tame doesnt fell competitive enough to consider taming with these 2 however they are amazing units that any Amazon Heritor should have in their army or create an doomstack of mega beetles or/and misfortunes

My friend and I were talking about what we would do if we were trying our very hardest to win a 1v1 match on a small or medium map, and we both came to the conclusion that if you don't know what your opponent is using (since you could pick a counter if you did), Heritor is the best because the drained operation, siphoners are tied for best ST unit with echo walkers in both of our opinions (and siphoners scale better because they give high tier units more turns and more damage, and they are floating which is amazing all game), and their early mods are all amazing, and the drained especially can just snowball clearing super hard and eventually you can give them all resurgence and it feels like you just win the game before they fall off to me. Feels like you can just invest into 3 military techs (first 2 mods +drained op, siphoner, and protector incarnation) with heritor and ignore all their other military research to destroy earlygame compared to any other ST and transition into a super strong midgame that just beats anything else. I admit Heritor lategame units and mods all seem to be subpar to me, but racial units and mods typically fill in that gap if it comes to that and siphoners still scale amazingly as an energy dump with no need for cosmite investment- and that only matters if you don't kill your opponent early with your huge army of drained and units that didn't have to die because of all the drained helping in clearing. Even with just autocombat, the autocombat AI is very good about using your drained operation, it's not even necessary to manual.

Does anyone see any weaknesses in the Heritors besides their subpar lategame mods and units (which to me doesn't seem to matter much because of racial units and mods and the fact that siphoners are the best lategame energy dump units because they give real units more turns and damage)? Is there something I'm missing that makes their early and/or midgame worse than I feel like it is? Or do you all agree that it's OP in a 1v1 small to medium map?

I was recently gifted a heritor Stanley. The mainspring appears (to me) to be wound, but the watch doesn't tick in this state. If I give it a few shakes, it starts working normally. Is this something to be concerned about?

https://i.imgur.com/65hDRyR.jpg

So I've played some Heritor commanders when they were out, didn't really like it. Now playing them with Oathbound and is still confused. My issues with them are:

1. Support that turns good attacker into godlike - but once every 2+ turns and does very little outside of it.

2. Mods that are restricted to specific units, so little satisfaction in researching that if you don't actively use those units, just a research step.

3. I understand the allure of getting 1+ rather strong Drained unit after nearly each battle, but that kinda narrows down my options in combat to spamming Condemn. And if I don't try to get Drained, that further reduces reasons to use Heritors

4. It's weird to have a mod and doctrine fully dedicated to one particular unit while it's top ability makes you lose it

5. Ark is pretty nah without its' own mod, and klunky anyway. It buffs its' own attack but loses a turn for this. It heals laughably little. Why even take it at all?

6. All mods give charges that raise attack - but with a chance to not get them and also with abilities that seem worse than just keeping a bonus.

It all leads to strange situation where I feel it's better to just forgo everything and just run naked supports to give multiple turns to damage dealing heroes/racial Elites.

What am I missing? I'd like to understand other facets of Heritors

I am very new to this game, and I made an Oathbound Heritor commander because it sounded cool. What do I need to know about this game? Did I make a good decision?

but I love it, lets throw in some forgotten and just spread entropy and essence drain everywhere, because entropy cant be resisted 😂

the biggiest problem with this combo is arc and synthesis attacks, so watch those synthieses assembly

It’s just so beautiful ;(

After everyone believes the big threat has been put down, it's revealed that Heritor Asphodel (killed in the third fething book, but still casting a shadow) left more than one final gift behind...

As they watched, Kolea knelt down facing Dalin. He reached out and put his trembling hands on the young man’s shoulders.

‘Dal.’

‘Leave me alone,’ said Dalin.

‘I don’t know what to say, Dal,’ Kolea said. ‘I don’t think there’s anything anyone can say–’

‘She said plenty,’ said Dalin quietly. ‘All those weird things. She was always so strange. But she was my sister.’

He paused.

‘I thought she was,’ he added.

‘Dalin, let’s go up. Get out of here, eh?’ Kolea said.

‘She was always so strange,’ Dalin said, staring at Gol. ‘Growing up, all her games. All her stories. I used to love them. Now I remember every one of them and I see how creepy they were.’

‘Come on, now.’

‘Then the things she said tonight. When I found her. The things she said. They didn’t make any sense. But then her stories about bad shadows didn’t make any sense either, and they were true. She told me there was a woe machine. That was true. What if all the things she said were true?’

‘Like what?’ Kolea asked.

Dalin shook his head.

[...]

‘Dal? Dalin? What did she say to you?’

‘It was all true, wasn’t it?’ Dalin sobbed. ‘It was all true and I didn’t know.’

Kolea pulled him close and wrapped his arms around him. Dalin wept against his chest.

‘Easy, Dal, easy,’ he murmured. ‘What was it she said to you?’

Dalin whimpered a response that Kolea couldn’t hear with the boy’s face buried in his chest. He eased Dalin back, wiped the tears from his cheeks, and looked him in the eyes.

‘I’m here,’ he said. ‘You can tell me. I’ll protect you.’

‘You can’t,’ whispered Dalin.

‘Of course I can. I made that oath, remember? The Kolea oath? Walk into hell to protect you.’

‘You couldn’t protect Yonce.’

‘Well, I couldn’t. Because she wasn’t mine, was she? But you. You are. You’re my son.’

‘Not really. I’m not really.’

‘Ah, so our road through life’s been an odd one. So what? That’s all right. Blood is blood. So come on, what did she say that upset you so much?’

Dalin stared at him.

‘She said there were two of them, papa,’ said Dalin.

[...]

Light shuddered. Shadows twisted. Gol Kolea looked at his son in surprise. That scream he had uttered…

Dalin Criid looked back at him, blinking fast.

‘Dalin?’ said Gol.

*‘No. No. No no no–’ Dalin

this is an guide about with animals are good to tame and with are not. I'm not gonna include rpr or worms because they are good and any unit thats can only move on water .

swift beak - good flanker unit early game but its the worst version of the lancer . It can't attack units that are flying like lancer but still an good unit early on.

shrike - its the same argument as with swift beaks.

harrier - an unit that is the amazon unit but its more focus on melle than range attacks. i think that its your choice with this one if you want an a flying melee flyers or range flyers. Choose your poison i guess.

penguin- one of the best tier 2 units that you can tame their melee atteck can stagger and thier ability penguin leap can hit ground and air units also they can flank unit that their use their ability (ground only) and their are amphibious with means they can move on water . The only problem with them that their can only use this ability if their have an full action and this is the only damaging move that can hit the flying units.

bombardon- its an tier 3 unit that is faster but less about area attacks wild version of an amazon version . Like with harrier choose what you like an faster toad that have one attack or an slower toad but with single target attack and area attack.

voradon- an beast in the ground combat but only lacking in air combat with only one ability mighty roar that at beats cause panic to units and at worst stagger them . it can eat the unit and heal himself if the unit is not an robot and melle attacks can inflict bleeding and stagger on an unit.

beetle - very good unit that can evolve into an beast in later game . they have an range attack that can apply poison , an melle attack that staggers and if they die near enemy unit they explode and deal biochemical damage and melt 1 armor . Very good unit if you prefer biohemical damage tanks in late game than laser ones (arborian)

hooperhounds - if you want an early unit that is an battle focus early game and much more about support and ground attacks later in game this unit is for you . There are 3 evolution stages:

manhunter first stage with is about attacking and staggering ground and air units the weakest one

blademaw second stage with is red with improve stats that the manhunter same role

eviscerator final stage that is all about fighting ground unit (when evolves its loses ability to attack an air units) and an ability that can apply to himself and friendly units within 2 hexes mora