Introduction
Aasimar are people descended from celestial beings: angels, archons, etc.. They gain access to celestial-themed abilities including stuff like a glowing halo and magical angelic wings.
While the theming is definitely good-aligned, very few of the options lock you into being good-aligned, so you can absolutely play against type. So long as you avoid a handful of the Aasimar Ancestry Feats, you could absolutely play an evil aasimar.
Disclaimer
RPGBOT uses the color coding scheme which has become common among Pathfinder build handbooks.
- : Bad, useless options, or options which are extremely situational. Nearly never useful.
- : OK options, or useful options that only apply in rare circumstances. Useful sometimes.
- : Good options. Useful often.
- : Fantastic options, often essential to the function of your character. Useful very frequently.
Aasimar Traits
Like many Versatile Heritages, the Aasimar grants low-light vision, or Darkvision if your Ancestry already has low-light vision. This on its own is a great option, and even if you don’t take any Heritage-specific Ancestry Feats it can still be an impactful Heritage benefit for Ancestries which normally have poor vision options.
Aasimar Feats
Level 1
- : A decent option for a Face build, especially if you can’t rely on magical solutions to language barriers.
- : If you don’t already get Darkvision between your Ancestry and the Aasimar Heritage traits, this is an absolute must. The ability to see in darkness is simply too good to pass up.
- : Two good skills and a lore skill.
- : Really cool thematically, but mechanically poor.
- : Situational, but emotion effects are common, and include many effects which target Will saves like fear effects.
- : Situational, but if you’re worried about grapples and don’t want to invest a ton of Skill Increases into Acrobatics this can be a big help.
Level 5
- : Too situational.
- : Choose fire. It’s one of the most common damage types. 5 points isn’t much, but it’s enough to ignore (or at least mostly ignore) many sources of persistent damage, as well as minor sources of energy damage like a Flaming Rune.
- : Bless is a fine spell, but it becomes less relevant as you gain levels because the Action cost to increase the radius becomes too costly to justify. If you’re desperate for this, buy a scroll or a wand.
Level 9
- : Too situational.
- : Continual Flame is situational, but Shield Other is a great option for durable characters with lots of hit points who typically don’t have access to it.
- : Remove Paralysis is very situational, but Glitterdust is great both as a countermeasure to invisible enemies and as a debuff if your save DC is high enough to be reasonably reliable.
- : 10 minutes of flight, and you don’t need to Sustain a spell to keep it going. If you don’t need to stop to Refocus or anything like that, you can stretch that 10-minute duration between several encounters to really capitalize on the effect.
- : +1 bonus against one in four spells, plus any other effect with the Divine trait.
Level 13
- : Three situational options. Good to have, but by this level hopefully you’ve solved those problems already.
- : Against most creatures this isn’t anywhere near an important amount of damage. But it’s exactly enough to trigger the bonus damage from damage weaknesses, which makes this extremely effective against some creatures like demons.
- : You get this four levels after spellcasters would get it, so it’s immediately obsolete for most purposes.
Level 17
- : A good AOE that can omit your allies (provided that they’re Good-aligned), and can Enfeeble and even Banish your enemies. Even if your DC isn’t spectacular, the AOE is large enough that you can hit numerous foes and at least a few of them should fail.
- : Permanent flight without relying on spellcasting or magic items. Excellent on any character.
