More thoughts on the "Gish"

In my opinion, the key to building a gish in D&D 3.5/Pathfinder is to concentrate on creating a melee fighter. There are three basic approaches, creating a range combatant, a melee combatant or a balanced fighter-mage similar to the old elf class from Basic D&D. I think most people would agree the last option is the worst since it fails to generate any synergy between the two classes, in effect, creating a lousy fighter and an ineffective spellcaster in one character.

The ranged combatant approach is not bad, especially if the character concentrates on using ray spells. The fighter has several feats that can be applied to ray attacks, including weapon focus, improved critical and point blank shot. Also, the increased BAB is always handy even if most of the attacks are ranged touch. Having said that, the loss of a couple of caster levels to gain a modest increase in BAB and a couple of useful feats is not really that great of a trade-off. I would say the result would be quite inferior to a warmage.

So, how about the melee fighter? Well, obviously a gish is going to be less effective as a front-line combatant than a pure fighter or even a ranger or paladin. However, with the right choice of spells and feats, it can certainly hold its own. You really want to get rid of your arcane spell failure as much as possible, so arcane armour training and arcane armour mastery are essential, especially when combined with mithral armour. Oh, pretty, pretty mithral. Another sweet little feat is arcane strike, just an extra little bonus to your damage since you won't be able to dedicate as many points to Str as you might like.

On the spell side, the gish is going to want to stack up the buffing and defensive spells; bull's strength, bear's endurance, shield, heroism, alter self, rage and stoneskin are all great choices. A few offensive ranged spells are also a must, but since you will be down a couple of caster levels and also won't have many feat slots available for metamagic or spell penetration, you will want to take ones that either don't have saving throws or are not affected by spell resistance.

-Rognar-