Myrrh, Frankincense, and Steel: Kurald Galain's Guide to the Magus

[punchbeard]

I know this has been discussed in the context of polymorph, but any help/ideas/advice on a non-polymorphed natural attack build would be welcome.

Also, I think you might have been a little harsh on the Fiend Flayer archetype. You don't lose any options outside of race selection and an emergency source of arcane pool points could be nice, even if you'd only ever want to use it out of combat. Also, "Fiendblade" (the arcana that gives you the conjured magical weapon) is usable as a swift action and could be a thing for some dual-wield builds. On the whole, I consider this archetype to be orange (situationally useful).

There's no tradeoffs from taking the Fiend Flayer archetype, as long as you were going to be a tiefling anyway. At minimum, it provides some worst-case scenario options. So you're correct that there's no reason to not take it, because it's essentially a free archetype, but I think Kurald was saying that there's nothing particularly good about it. You gain access (not free) to two arcana that seem to apply to two very specific situations.

Fiendblade, as far as I understand it, prevents an enemy from disarming you and taking your weapon. Maybe that could happen, but it's rare. Bypassing Strike is only useful against evil outsiders, and how often does that come up? (Actually, if you're in a campaign where evil outsiders are common, then yes, that's quite powerful.)

Fiend Flayer would have been appealing if (1) you gained more than 1 arcane pool point in return for losing your level's worth in HP, and/or (2) the extra arcane pool point lasts as long as your Constitution damage lasts.