Ok, here's my newest idea:

Fighter/Weapon Master/Duelist. In a leveller mod, I got to 6/7/7 respectively. Any thoughts? I'm thinking with the amount of crit immune mobs in the late game that it might be better to go 6/4/10, to get the most out of the duelist levels. I could take this with rogue, and take some WM levels late in the build for ab purposes too, I suppose.

I have a build like that (the 6/7/7) and personally I've had a lot of fun with it. To be honest though, I find the duellist quite underpowered compared to its PnP counterpart though. The 'haste' per day really is a joke. But just as long as you have a good weapon, it doesn't really matter whether you crit or not, because eventually, you'll still beat the mobs. It's just irritating not to score crits.

I wonder how it work going rogue/duelist/weapon master. The crit thing is almost irrelevant in the last 1/3 of the game anyway, largely. However, the skill points in the first 6 levels or so would be of huge benefit, especially later in the game.

I'm not sure its even possible to get any significant number of weapon master levels without taking levels of fighter.
Dodge, Mobility, [weapon finesse - duellist], Spring Attack, Combat Expertise, Whirlwind, Weapon Focus - that's six feats. 1, 3, 6, 9, 12, 15, 18 - that gives you two levels at best.

Edit: or you could play a human, that'd put everything down to level 15 featwise.
Ideally, you should take a couple of levels of fighter just for the two bonus feats. Something like rogue/fighter/duellist/weapon master. Maybe 3/2/10/5 ?

[ 07-05-2007, 09:37 AM: Message edited by: Calaethis Dragonsbane ]

3/2/10/5 isn't going to work. It only gives a max of 5 feats before lvl 6 and you need 6 to get WM first.

After a bit of experimenting I come to the conclusion that it is impossible for any character to get whirlwind attack before lvl 6.

[ 07-05-2007, 10:34 AM: Message edited by: JrKASperov ]

The best I could get out of the rogue build, with no fighter levels was 2 WM, and those at the very end of the build. That was using an elf, though, for the dex push.

As to getting Whirlwind Attack, you have to have sufficient BAB to get Spring Attack first, and I'm pretty sure it's +5. That could be off a bit though. However, there's nothing saying you have to take WM first for the build to work. Except the original concept.

With the rogue variant, I did go with Duelist first, per force. If there were epic levels, then the rogue build would be ok, as the Duelist has high ab, and would help raise the ab. Problem is, I had 10 duelist levels before I could take WM, and I got duelist at level 8, which may or may not have been something I did wrong getting my feats together.

You need +4 BAB for spring attack. The problem is at level 4 you only get one feat: for SA. You don't get a feat at lvl 5 so whirlwind attack is delayed to lvl 6.

Yeah, WM at level 7. Assuming a fighter build. I did the build to level 15, and got 6/7/2, fighter/WM/Duelist. Granted I could have gone Duelist a bit sooner, but I was doing it the way I would do if I were playing the character.

In other words, duelist and WM both come at at least lvl 7 so you've got 14 levels of prestige classes to take. The only build worth noting imho is indeed the 7/7 du/wm. 10/4 is worthless (no crit bonus) and why take more than 7 lvls of WM if duelist gives more boni?

Actually, with the crit immune enemies at the end of the game, the better build may actually be 6/4/10. Set up WM levels for the expansion, and get everything you can out of the duelist. If PrC's are indeed cut off at 10 levels in the expansion, there is no benefit to 10 levels of WM, but if not, then the extra point of ab every 3 levels after 10 is a very good reason. The exception to this would be the rogue based character. Then, if I want to stay with just 3 classes, it makes sense to push WM out as far as possible for AB considerations.