Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous – Enhanced Edition: Mercenary builds: Demon Dancer (Skald)

Portrait Artist: Marie Magny[www.artstation.com]

This build was made to accompany an evil main character and to follow the portrait idea. It’s a good addition to parties with at least 2 other melee characters for maximum benefit of the STR song and extra bite attack.

One thing to note is that, if you’re using this build, I highly recommend your frontliners to all be evil. Starting at level 9, any good or neutral character who accepts the rage effect or is close to the Demon Dancer gets 2d6 damage and the shaken effect (neutral characters take no damage, but are still shaken). So… it would be best if at least your melee characters were evil. Of course, there’s some workaround for that. Check the Tips section for details.

Ok, that being said, let’s be clear: this is a theme-focused build. As such, I avoided multiclassing and made flavour choices, to keep the theme of the character. Yes, I know X weapon is better, I know base Skald is “better”, I know this is not the best race…

Sometimes you just wanna play some cool, thematic character, you know? It’s a roleplaying game after all.

That being said, the build is optimized enough to be played and finish the game comfortably on Core or below.

Looking good 😉

For the previous acts, use Finnean or check with either the exotic weapons provider or Wilcer at Drezen. Gemersha at Wintersun sells a +4 version, provided she lives the quest.

Howling Doom location:

1: Use Rage;
2: Smack things;
3: Profit.

That’s all.

Remember that, during a rage, affected characters cannot cast spells. So, make sure you toggle the “Accept Effect” OFF on your spellcasters, and on any other character that might need to use spells. It’s not like your Wizard will care about a STR buff anyway. Bow users can still benefit from it if they’re using composite bows, since those can add the STR modifier to damage. They just won’t get the extra bite and claw attacks, but that’s fine. And, of course, make sure the character accepting the effect is evil… as explained further below.

When you get Vital Strike at level 9, and the improved version at 15, right click it to make it your base attack. This is what you’ll be using to attack from now on. It allows you to move, or use your move action for something else like activating Rage, and still attack. The idea here is that this ability sums up the damage from all of your attacks and deals it in a single blow, with a few bonuses on top, making it a good option for classes that don’t get full Base Attack Bonus progression and, because of this, might struggle to hit with all their iterative attacks.

Another important thing to mention at level 9: during your rage, any good/neutral character who accepts your rage or is too close to you will receive some damage and get shaken (neutral characters take no damage, but are still shaken). How close? This close:

As you can see here, our poor Nenio is too close, so she gets shaken, even if she’s not accepting the rage effect. Make sure your good/neutral characters are far enough away before activating your rage song.

This is why I’ve recommended this character for an evil party. Or for a party where at least all frontliners are evil. Believe me, you don’t want your melee team shaken.

Now, If you really need a good/neutral character to benefit from the effect, or want them to be safe even from afar, you’ll need to give that character immunity to fear, which will make them immune to shaken. The easiest way of doing this is with the Greater Heroism spell. However, that is a 5th level spell for Skalds (level 13), or 6th level for sorcerers and wizards (level 11). So yeah, not really easy to do for a long time.

Until you have someone to cast it, you can also buy these boots in Act 3 and give them to your good/neutral character so they are permanently immune to fear/shaken and can then accept the rage effect safely (or stand next to the Skald):