Asmodeus.

Rovagug. 

The Rough Beast, too, will find His hearts' desire at the End of Things.

Asmodeus is number eight.

My experience with keenness of intellect has not been that it lends itself to a tidy numbered ranking.

That's why I'm using Their elos on golarion!chess.com as a proxy.

What are "Their elos on golarion!chess.com"??

3640, 3584, 3558, 3136, and 3109.

But I think we've wandered off-topic.

Asmodeus's machinations are long in the making, and they make take centuries, if not millennia, to see resolution. He works on a grand scale, carefully constructing insidious and inexplicable intrigues, maneuvering the forces of wickedness like chess pieces on a board that encompasses all of the planes. Asmodeus had to draw up new plans after the death of Typhon and Treaty of Arima, but I wouldn't be remotely surprised to learn that those plans are ahead of schedule.

Asmodeus wrote Hell's ultimate victory into the compromised Contract of Creation.

You can't accuse me of exaggeration or aggrandizement: I freely admit that there are Things more intelligent than the King of Hell, and that there are Things more powerful.

But there are very, very few of either. 

He's our best strategist, tactician, mage, diplomat, industrialist, researcher, and engineer. The demands on His time are tremendous.

One major focus of Hell's exacting industry is the interpretation of Asmodeus's will; it's better to have legions of devils poring over His opaque directives than to force Him to dumb things down for us and waste His invaluable time. 

We need to know what He thinks, and we need to know how He thinks. We can't match the Prince of Darkness's genius, but the more we close the gap, the easier we are to inform or correct, and the more frequently that's worthwhile to Him. And, let me tell you, incredible strides have been made in the last three hundred years. I'm going to nerd out about this for a while. We understand more than ever before the concepts which Asmodeus employs to reason about the world, what it is that He values, and the processes He uses to make decisions. We're turning petitioners into faulty little pseudo-Asmodeuses, and sometimes the horrid lunatics are even useful enough at something that we don't have to kill or cobble them. We're even finding improvements to make in the King of Hell's own mind; the lab I belong to regularly turns in little cognitive biases for major bounties. (Except when we find the kind of bias that defends itself from being corrected, in which case we use it ourselves or sell it to another player. (Except when the apparent self-defending biases are elaborate ruses to see if we'll turn them in anyway; we're either good at catching those or being lulled into a false sense of complacency. Uh, by the way, I never told you anything in either of these parentheticals.)) 

(That strikes me as ill-advised. Do you think you're tricking what you just called the eighth-smartest entity in Creation? If you play with fire, you're going to get burned.)

(It's not my lab, so, not really my say.

Not that I'd necessarily do any different: I live in literal Hell. Every day I decide to go on breathing is already one of those days where I'm playing to my outs.)

The wire you're wearing pipes straight from your ears to god's lips.

It's cheaper for Us than sending constant divine visions, and it'll take longer to boil your brain.

But it still takes Asmodeus's time. Capiche? Every round that Asmodeus spends trying to figure out whether what you're thinking makes any sense is a round He can't spend on grand strategy or on the fiddly micro. You need to make your thoughts clear to Him, and your plans, or He'll find something more important to do than pick your brain and this planet apart to figure out which inputs would give which outputs. If you want to make good use of it, we need to close some of that inferential distance. 

Ultimately, that's the reason that I'm here. I was deemed the most qualified devil in Hell to give a non-technical explanation of Asmodeus's will.

...What's your math background?

I'm no wizard, but I am pretty deft with numbers. I can add, subtract, divide, exponentiate, and I know the topology that's useful for figuring out what spells and magic items do.

I craft magic items with spellsilver. 

I'm well versed in incredibly-elementary-algebra-your-parents-teach-you-before-you-start-school, ridiculously-basic-topology-for-nine-year-olds, and to a lesser extent, linear-algebra-too-simple-to-bother-with and the-first-five-minutes-of-a-calculus-lesson.*

(*) Not literally the terms in Baseline, just what the actual and precise mathematical subject names sound like to any dath ilani.

...A very non-technical explanation of Asmodeus's will.

The devil's prior posturing and cantrip puffery entirely failed to impress Archbishop Ornher Reebs. 

But the idea that the it has inside info on what and how Asmodeus thinks is the same catnip to an Archbishop that promised glimpses of a stronger wizard's spellbook are to book casters. This, he finds impressive.

Reebs ego-defensively reminds himself that the devil that he's talking to invented little or nothing and is playing up its mere involvement, before opening his mouth to ask why Hell didn't send someone earlier. He understands that it's expensive for Hell to give Golarion the idea to do something, but did Rugatonn never ask for a planar ally who could explain the thing she saw?

How in Hell would I know? I don't even know who "Rugatonn" is, although I'm inferring from context that they're probably a cleric of Asmodeus. Ask her yourself, mortal. It's not worth Hell's infobudget to satisfy your idle curiosity.

Hell has spent as much of its real power influencing events in this Vault in the past hour as it spent on everything else to do with Golarion in the last 80 years, but don't think us utter profligates. It's cheaper (while not cheap) to explain Asmodeus's utility and decision functions for the same reason that it's cheaper (while not cheap) to sell the diamonds we secretly have in the Portable Hole: there's someone on Golarion preaching something very near to unbastardized Asmodean theology. There's at least two and up to about half a dozen mortals in your Vault who see the world much the way He does: you could extract this explanation from either, any, or all, if you knew how to prompt them. (But that'd have various unwanted side-effects, which is why We're spending more than it'd take to just explain how to do that.)

So if I want to skip the big fire, I think the natural break points are Paladin 8/Inquisitor 12, or Inquisitor 9/Paladin 11... without Stalwart at eleven and no way of getting 5th-level inquisitor spells I think Paladin 11 is the play... 

You do realize that this is inevitably going to bite you in the ass, right?

Sure, but in the meantime I'll have bigger numbers.

How much mileage I need to squeeze out of Demon Hunter depends on which other morale boni I can count on. I loop in the party bard and ask which spells she plans to learn out of moment of greatness, heroism, and good hope.

I'll just be over here failing a bluff check to hide my utter flabbergastion. 

My bonus on rolls is good, but there's a -10 penalty for such a far-fetched lie.

My good man, I am afraid that my hearing must not be what it once was.

Did you just call yourself a paladin of Asmodeus?

Asteriskodeus.

Gods below, did your parents never teach you not to deal with devils?

I really can't advise it. 

Did your parents teach you not to deal with devils? Because that's news to me if so.

My parents taught me to be very clear on what I was getting out of the deal, what they were getting out of it, what I was paying for it, and what they were paying for it.

Your parents should have given you the simple advice for idiots, which is to get gone or get compact. On account of how they were raising an idiot. 

Idiot.

A little harsh, much?

In the worst case scenario, I ditch the magic powers and I'm back where I started.