Fighter/caster or magus build

To make a Magus style build, the keys are the following:
Arcane Casting (Elder, Eldritch, Psionic)
Armor Proficiency (Medium)
Weapon Training (Balanced Weapon)
Fighting Style: Arcimous Primus

The most efficient way to get there is:
Archetype: Arcane (Elder, Eldritch or Psionic depending on your flavor) – Elder or Eldritch would be the closest to a traditional Magus

Background: Something that gives a martial set of skills/talents and/or Medium Armor Proficiency (Veteran of the Altherian War, Elder Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Former Shining Patrol, Former Soldier, Mercenary [Upgrade Light Armor to Medium], Soldier of Retribution, Squire, Veteran of the Wall [Upgrade Light Armor to Medium]

Take Weapon Training in your Balanced Weapon and Battle Magi as Talents and then take the Fighting Style (Arcimous Primus). Then take various adaptations or maneuvers to allow you to stroke multiple targets, add elemental damage, etc. to flavor it how you want.

Path: Take something melee and ‘martial’ oriented to boost your combat abilities.

You can also come at this from a Martial Archetype, but getting Arcane Casting at character generation is tough and would require Psionics or a Path that gives access to Arcane Casting (Delaying your ability to get the Fighting Style potentially).

John

Thanks! I’m not too far off then. I was a bit concerned about keeping my melee ability up to par with arcane archetype after reading the character guide.

There are ways of mitigating it, but if you do not take the Marital (or Expert) Archetype you will start to fall behind in your melee skills.

For example:

If you take Arcane-Human-Former Legionnaire, you can gain a start of +3 to your Melee Skill at character creation, and advance it by an additional +2/tier using normal advancements. A Martial (or expert) can do +3/tier, which means by tier V you’d be about 6 ranks ‘behind’ a Martial build for your melee skill, but generally ‘on par’ with your casting skill. This can be countered a bit by taking Paths (basically prestige classes) like Centurion: Master Tactician, Myrmidon, or Grand Master (which grants you bonuses to your Melee/Combat skills). You can also take the Talent Sabbatical for a one-time boost to your skills.

Alternatively, you can take Martial and be really good at hitting things, but then your spell-casting will fall behind. You would have to acquire your casting through a Path (most directly) as well, which slows down the spell casting even further. That said, if all you want are buff’s from the spell casting rather than combat spells, this isn’t that much of a loss in the grand scheme of things.

Expert is about halfway between Martial and Arcane, allowing you to be pretty good at both things, but not as good at any one than the other two.

Oh i wouldn’t go so far as to say that… Read the Tier 3 Illusionary spell: Illusionary Doubles

The one downside to Expert archetype for a Magus-like character is that you can’t start with ASC at 1.1 (unless you go Primal or Psionic). If that doesn’t bother you then Expert may be a good option.

Basically, the tradeoffs are: