Susano

With a combination of sword mastery, wind magic and teleporting, a Laughing Shadow Magus feels just right for Susano.

With this build, focusing on the few wind spells that the Arcane tradition gets, Susano can spend his

On the battlefield, Susano is a gifted assassin, a expert at both ambushing priority targets and winning one on one duels with bigger bruisers through master swordplay.

When ambushing, Susano uses teleportation skills like Dimensional Assault or Frigid Flurry to make his way directly to his target, unimpeded. There, he can channel his highest spell slot into brutal, fulminating Spellstrikes that chunk the target down.

When dueling, Susano focuses on his sword skills over his magic, deftly dodging enemy attacks with his Rogue Dedication feats while striking back in a flurry with Hasted Assault.

Outside of battle, Susano's athletics and stealth can get him into tight squeezes and other locations where the team needs some infiltration. Plus, his adeptness with nature can be useful as well.

Sylph Elf

Both of these choices are more for flavor than anything absolutely necessary to make the build work.

The Elf ancestry boosts Dex, which isn't the key ability of Susano, but it is still important for a medium armor wearer. It also gives a nice speed boost with Nimble Elf, which is unfortunately not cumulative with the similar Slyph feat.

And speaking of Sylph – this heritage isn't super impactful, but it adds a lot of nice roleplay elements to a god of storms. This starts right at level 1 with the Stormsoul feat and continues from there.

One notable feat is the Storm Form Slyph feat at level 17, which allows Susano to cast a 7th level elemental form – choosing the air elemental – once per day. Since this limits his attacks harshly, this will primarily be used for the 80ft fly speed more than anything else.

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Thrill-Seeker

It is as thrilling to chase storms and ride the wind as it is to ruin your sister's party with seven unspeakable acts. What can I say, Susano is the Johnny Knoxville of the Japanese pantheon.

This backgrounds gives a nifty Strength boost, which we want, plus Combat Climber and Athletics training for a bonus.

Laughing Shadow Magus

To me, the success of Pathfinder is in how many ways there are to bring a pop culture character to life, with all of them feeling right. If someone brought a Susano build to the table built around a Fighter class and Sorcerer dedication – for optimal swordplay with a splash of wind magic – it would fit right in among this one, a Magus core with Rogue dedication.

It's all about what parts of the fantasy we want to emphasize. For me, the Magus is a great start to a gish character who wants sword strikes to feel elemental, like the wind or rain could be delivered through them. We start there, and add additional feats from archetypes for the sword use.

Magus is an interesting class to build other archetypes on because of their tight action economy. Spellstrike is two actions, and recharging spellstrike is another action – either manually or through a Focus Spell use. This doesn't leave a ton of space for nifty sword arts like the Fighter provides, or even parries, which cost an action.

Instead, we need to find feats that add value, damage and survivability without requiring actions. For that, a Rogue dedication will work very well. The Rogue archetype gives Sneak Attacker, extra damage (even on spellstrikes) when the target is flatfooted. It also gives Nimble Dodge, which is a one-time use reaction per round at a higher AC bonus than a parry. It's greater risk, greater reward, and it doesn't affect Susano's goal of spellstriking a priority target every turn until they are vapor.

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With the wind in his steps, Susano is a stealthy character. Plus, whoever heard of a heavy god of storms? 

The combination means Susano is legendary in Acrobatics, with slightly lesser focus on Nature and Stealth.

Legendary: Acrobatics

Master: Nature, Stealth

Expert: Athletics

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