Introduction

The conceptual opposite of the Aasimar, the Tiefling is a creature born with fiendish influence. They feature prominent fiendish features like horns, tails, and skin in various shades of red.

Tiefling Traits

Like many Versatile Heritages, the Tiefling 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 option for Ancestries which normally have poor vision options.

Disclaimer

RPGBOT uses the color coding scheme which has become common among Pathfinder build handbooks.

  • Red: Bad, useless options, or options which are extremely situational. Nearly never useful.
  • Orange: OK options, or useful options that only apply in rare circumstances. Useful sometimes.
  • Green: Good options. Useful often.
  • Blue: Fantastic options, often essential to the function of your character. Useful very frequently.

Tiefling Feats

Level 1

  • Fiendish Eyes: If you don’t already get Darkvision between your Ancestry and the Changeling Heritage traits, this is an absolute must. The ability to see in darkness is simply too good to pass up.
  • Fiendish Lore: Training in two good skills and a lore skill.
  • Form of the Fiend: A number of excellent options which allow you to tailor your natural weapon to your tastes.
  • Grimspawn: Diehard is a niche feat for people who are guilding a character who they intend to spend a lot of time flirting with death.
  • Hellspawn: Deception and a decent Skill Feat to go with it. I would consider this for builds where Deception is a central feature, such as Feint builds, but otherwise I would skip it. You also get a lore skill.
  • Nimble Hooves: Notably this isn’t a bonus like the Swift feat, so it stacks with everything.
  • Pitborn: Trained in Athletics and a Skill Feat with Athletics as a prerequisite. You technically get less than something comparable like Fiendish Lore or Hellspawn, but the ability to pick a feat which you actually want means that this is potentially very powerful.

Level 5

  • Fiendish Resistance: 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.
  • Malicious Bane: Bane is a bad spell.
  • Skillful Tail: Almost useless and totally dependent on how permissive your GM is. Even if your GM is fairly permissive, it’s only useful in combat because any other time you’re not tracking the Actions to clasp/unclasp weapons or other items.

Level 9

  • Daemon Magic: Both spells provide a pool of temporary hit points. False Life’s 8-hour duration makes it a broadly useful and reliable spell, and after False Life’s temporary hit points have been depleted, you can use Death Knell on any random dying enemy to try to get another pile of temporary hit poibnts. However, remember that these are innate spells so the save DC for Death Knell is Charisma-based.
  • Demon Magic: Both spells are only situationally useful, and Paranoia is hard to use offensively unless you’re already proficient with Divine spells and have high Charisma.
  • Devil Magic: Invisibility is great, but Misdirection is very situational.
  • Fiendish Wings: 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.
  • Light From Darkness: +1 bonus against one in four spells, plus any other effect with the Divine trait.

Level 13

  • Fiend’s Door: Dimension Door is a great teleportation option, and for characters who can’t normally access teleportation this is a great way to get some.
  • Fiendish Strikes: 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 angels.
  • Summon Fiendish Kin: You get this four levels after spellcasters would get it, so it’s immediately obsolete for most purposes.

Level 17

  • Fiendish Word: Unless you’re in an evil party this may be unusable without nuking your party.
  • Relentless Wings: Permanent flight without relying on spellcasting or magic items. Excellent on any character.