I'm trying to make an Eldritch knight character with a wizard base that doesn't lose any spellcasting levels but as far as I can tell the only way to gain proficiency with all martial weapons is through multiclassing with a class that gains those proficiency.
Is there another way aside from multiclassing to gain proficiency in all martial weapons as a wizard?
The Ganzi (from Planar Adventures) is a native outsider race (like tiefling and aasimars) with ties to the Maelstrom, the chaotic neutral plane, and one of their racial traits is called an Oddity. Players with Ganzi characters can pick, or roll a 1d20 to randomly determine (at GM discretion), what form their characters’ oddities take using the list.
Typically, a ganzi’s oddity is chosen from the most common manifestations of entropy listed below, but other, more unique oddities can certainly exist.
And one of those oddities are is the ability to be trained in all simple and martial weapons.
Weaponplay (Ex): Ganzis with lineages that link to the valkyries manifest their heritage in their skill in combat. Such ganzi are always proficient with all simple and martial weapons, and they can qualify for feats normally available only to fighters (such as Weapon Specialization) even if they don’t have any fighter class levels.
The ability to gain proficiency in all martial weapons is exclusive to certain classes and archetypes, none of which are available for wizards (or archetypes).
Though, if you require proficiency with a specific martial weapon, the Opalescent White Pyramid Ioun Stone can grant you that. But this will not help if you are trying to qualify for the Eldritch Knight prestige class.
A less desirable choice would be to qualify for another prestige class that does not reduce your spellcasting progression and still grants you all martial weapons proficiency.
However, I checked every prestige class published and none meet these criteria. The closest you get is a single weapon or armor proficiency and still keep your spellcasting progression. All available prestige classes that do increase your spellcasting progression and grant martial weapons proficiency, will not increase your spellcasting progression at first level, like the Arcane Archer or Skyseeker.
The Favoured Prestige Class and Prestigious Spellcaster feats will help you recover the missing spellcaster level if that is all you are worried about. But you will have to balance the cost of two feats against one spellcaster level, on top of the requirements for the new prestige class.
However, there are third-party solutions, like the Martial Weapon Group Proficiency from Flaming Crab Games's Forgotten Core Feats book, that grants exactly that, proficiency with all martial weapons.
Play as some outsider that doesn’t have any racial hit dice. Aasimar or tiefling or whatever. They get this:
Outsider racial traits
[...]
- Proficient with all simple and martial weapons and any weapons mentioned in its entry.
That gets you all the proficiency you want, and without taking up your only Favored Prestige Class choice, so you can use Prestigious Spellcaster on eldritch knight for full spellcasting. Eldritch knight isn’t really worth burning two feats and giving up your other base class features like that, but if you are dead-set on being an eldritch knight, getting your lost spellcasting level back is definitely worth two feats.
There is an issue: in the “race builder” rules in Advanced Race Guide, there is a claim that this doesn’t work. Unfortunately for the Advanced Race Guide, it is quite simply wrong—they do. Various arguments have been made, trying to back up the claim made in Advanced Race Guide, for example:
Claiming you need to have racial hit dice (RHD) for traits
Claiming that native outsiders don’t get the proficiency traits
But absolutely nothing is printed about that anywhere—and since the outsider type goes out of its way to mention how native outsiders are different, and doesn’t mention anything being different about proficiency, that seems really unlikely.
More damningly, it would make creatures like urdefhan be non-proficient with the weapons they’re listed with—and no non-proficiency penalty is included in the statblock.
Paizo has explicitly refused to issue any FAQ or errata clarifying the situation either way, despite numerous requests. Thus, we are left with choosing between Bestiary and Advanced Race Guide on this subject.
Bestiary is the primary source for this; Paizo doesn’t offer a conflict-resolution mechanic the way Wizards of the Coast did, but under Wizards of the Coast errata rules, that means that in the case of a contradiction, Bestiary wins. Personally, I consider it a good rule—the Bestiary is a core book that everyone should have, a random supplement like Advanced Race Guide shouldn’t be applying a stealth nerf that affects characters that already existed before the book was introduced. Aasimar are from Bestiary, and should behave the same regardless of whether or not Advanced Race Guide is in play.
As indicated above, Advanced Race Guide offers no basis explaining or justifying its claim, and the various claims made simply don’t hold water as described above.
The race builder and its racial points system is implicitly seen as a failed experiment anyway. Neither Paizo themselves, nor much of the broader third-party publishing community, uses it very much or seems to consider it a useful tool for designing balanced races.
While playing as a 0-RHD outsider is a relatively easy/painless way to get martial weapon proficiencies, martial weapon proficiency isn’t very valuable. Only characters looking to take a prestige class that requires it, but who don’t otherwise want to take a base class that offers it, benefit much from it. Everyone else either already has proficiency, or doesn’t care because they aren’t making many weapon attacks anyway. So this is basically a buff for eldritch knights... which as noted above, still aren’t worth it. So this entire headache is over an extremely minor balance point. The planetouched races are overpowered, but this is a really minor part of that.
So all-in-all, allowing this makes for a vastly superior game all-around. Ignore Advanced Race Guide... in this, and probably just about everything else.
Ganzi race get Weaponplay oddity which covers it.
Excerpt from the SRD:
Ganzi Oddity
...
19–20: Weaponplay (Ex) Ganzis with lineages that link to the valkyries manifest their heritage in their skill in combat. Such ganzis are always proficient with all simple and martial weapons, and they can qualify for feats normally available only to fighters (such as Weapon Specialization) even if they don’t have any fighter class levels.
