CLASSifieds: The Saint (PFRPG) PDF

This pdf is 18 pages long, 1 page front cover, 1 page SRD, ~1/2 a page editorial, leaving us with 15 1/2 pages of content, so let's take a look at the saint, shall we?

Saints need to have the same alignment as their deity and get d8,4+Int skills per level, proficiency with the deity's favored weapon and simple weapons as well as shields and simple armor, but not tower shields. Saints get prepared divine spellcasting via wis of spells of up to 6th level from their own spell-list, 3/4 BAB-progression and good ref and will-saves and one domain from their patron's available list. Regarding their spell-list - the list has been modified and has lost, among others, expeditious retreat, moment of greatness ,timely inspiration,, vanish, gallant inspiration, control summoned creature, litany of sloth, litany of defense, litany of eloquence, litany of righteousness, glibness, litany of escape, litany of sight, primal scream, commune, litany of vengeance, getaway, veil but gained sun metal, reprobation.- all in all, still a strong spell-list with some exclusives, but not as broken as it was before.

Aforementioned domain deserves special mentioning, for it does NOT add the respective spells to the spell-list, instead converting them into spell-like abilities that can be cast interchangeably (essentially like the domain is cast spontaneously via a pool). The save-DC for said abilities is 10+1/2 level + wis-mod and are cast from essentially a pool: 3+Wis-mod cats per day, with spells level 1 to 3 costing one use, level 4-6 spells costing 2 uses and higher level spells eating 3 uses per day. A rather interesting expansion of the spellcasting capabilities - though I'm not comfortable with the increased DC - domain spells tend to be rather powerful and further increasing their DC might propel them towards regions I'm not wholly comfortable with - especially since they can't be counterspelled. While before, they ignored some of the costs, now saints need to provide costly components... which violates how spell-like abilities work: They have neither somatic, verbal, or material components and require no focus.

Saints add their class level to diplomacy and intimidate-checks versus unbelievers and get bonus feats at level 5 and every 4 levels after that - and that's the only ability to help the fluff-concept of a negotiator/peaceful agent of the gods. That's not the signature trick of the saint - said component would be favor, of which the saint gets wis-mod per day. They can be regained by vanquishing challenging foes with the deity's favored weapon and non-combat ways of gaining favor, like converting others and proving your loyalty are also included - essentially, we thus get a version of grit based on faith. And I love the idea. Seriously, my one complaint with divine spellcasting always was that it didn't FEEL like wonders bestowed by a god - but rather a class feature analogue to the one of arcane casters. Tying a class ability to a deity's favor feels distinctly divine to may and makes this a rather neat decision - so kudos to designer Tyler Beck for that!

A Saint's favor caps now at wis-mod. Furthermore, several graces may award temporary favor, of which a given Saint may have a maximum of one at any time and they only lass for class level rounds.

Where there's something like grit, there'll better be some mechanics akin to deeds - and we get them in the guise of graces: At 1st level, 3rd level and every 4 levels after that, the saint learns new favors, of which a total of 18 such favors are provided. Thematically, akin to deeds, there are some favors that require the expenditure of a favor point, whereas others are passive and work as long as you have at least one favor point in your pool. The favors per se are interesting - one for example nets the saint access to the bodyguard feat and expands it if the character also has combat reflexes, making it usable dex-mod times per day - really nice to see such interwoven rules. Since the graces now no longer allows for the infinite regaining of favor, no more complaints on my side. Another grace allows the saint to temporarily (for class level rounds) make his deity's favored weapon merciful and when s/he manages to render a foe unconscious with the weapon s/he gains a point of temporary favor. One minor nitpick here would be that the Saint could hand said weapon to an ally - while not getting the temporary favor, I'm not 100% sure that was intended. No penalty-points for this very minor ambiguity, though, since either interpretation isn't too strong. Favored Dodge has been purged and no longer exists..

There is also the so-called favored onslaught - an array of attacks that requires the expenditure of one point of favor, but nets the saint an additional attack at his/her highest BAB with the penalty of -2 applied to all attacks. As a caveat that makes this more viable regarding the saint's less than stellar BAB, favored onslaught uses a full BAB to calculate the attacks at -2 and also requires the use of the favored weapon of the deity and while it can be used in conjunction with two-weapon fighting and similar attacks, it does not stack with haste-based effects. This is essentially the saint's signature offensive ability and it can be combined with two weapon fighting. I applaud the courage of this decision, as most designers won't touch the mess that is something like flurry of blows with a 10-foot pole, much less potentially combining it with TWF. The ambiguities that hounded the previous iteration of this ability have been thankfully cleaned up, though it still requires careful deliberation on the side of the player.

At 3rd level Saints benefit from the "In Harm's Way"-feat as long as he has at least one favor point and gains a temporary favor point whenever he takes an attack for an ally. They may also use a bard's fascinate ability. They may also spend favor to increase the DC by + 2 when casting spells that influence the target's attitude - note that per the wording of the ability, this means that the domain spell-like abilities cannot be enhanced this way! (Otherwise you'd have me complaining about a high DC being increased even further...)

At 7th level, Saints may spend favor to cast cure-spells on allies at range, with one point making the range 15 feet, 2 points increasing it to 30 feet. To heal e.g. dhampirs, he can use this ability in conjunction with inflict-spells, but either application may not be used offensively. Wording-wise, this ability is slightly ambiguous since e.g. heal and similar conjuration [healing]-spells probably should be covered as well. That's nitpicky, though. Saints also may, as a swift action, spend a favor point to bypass up to 5 points of DR (unless it's DR/epic) with his/her favored weapon or add for one favor silent spell to his/her spells sans increasing the spell level. Unfortunately, no action-type is given for this application of favor and the ability can be added to spell-like abilities, which makes no sense since last time I checked, spell-like abilities had no verbal, somatic or material components.

At 11th level, Saints learn to spend favor to channel energy as a cleric of his level, but NOT power this ability via temporary favor. Furthermore, the Saint always may choose whether to channel positive or negative energy and always uses the variant channeling rules from Ultimate Magic, halving dice, but adding an effect depending on the Saint's chosen domain. Also at this level, the Saint gets bonuses when s/he interposes him/herself between allies and foes and further increases the amount of bypassed DR when using the righteous strike grace, dealing bonus damage, which even multiplies on crits. Not a fan of that one since it runs contrary to how bonus damage is handled in almost all other cases – this may lead to some confusion in the long run.

At 15th level, saints may sacrifice all remaining favor and take 1d6 points of damage on ALL physical attributes - but also save an ally that would otherwise perish. VERY cool last second save ability that comes with enough of a drawback to be considered well-crafted! The saint also gets a now fixed protective aura that slowly increases over the levels. Saints may also spend favor to pay for expensive components of their domain spell-like abilities...which makes sense in the context of these domain-spell-like-abilities, but it should be noted that the domain-casts per default are spell-like abilities and thus would not require material components in the first place - hence also my complaint in the original review (and here again) that these are slightly too powerful. Essentially this whole grace is moot.

At 19th level, the Saints may use divine vessel with favor for class level rounds, further improves righteous strike and shorten the casting of a spell from standard action to swift action via 2 points of favor - thankfully not working on the domain-casts.

As a capstone, we get an outsider-transformation, that nets the celestial or fiendish template, with neutral saints being able to choose as well as smite like a(n) (anti-) paladin 1/day and essentially sees the saint turn into a herald-like figure of the deity, including some exclusive casts that may only be used if they pertain their divine mission.

We also get three new feats: Expanded Favored Weapon, which allows you to use abilities that would usually require wielding your deity's weapon to the weapon's whole group (As if the basic ability wasn't powerful enough already...) and one for +2 favor points per day. The final feat adds +2 uses for the domain spell-like ability pool.

The pdf also features massive lists of favored class options for ALL core races, featured races and uncommon races -kudos, since some of them actually are very unique: Kobolds e.g. getting 1/4 ranger trap fits nice with their racial theme.

The updated version also has two archetypes for the Saint, first of which would be the Temple Guardian, who gains no spells, but retains the domain spell-like abilities (with all the issues they entail). They do get access to ranger traps, though these may only be placed close to places of worship. Instead of favored onslaught, the Temple Guardian gains access to a monk's flurry of blows as long as he has at least 1 favor, useable freely with unarmed strikes and the favored weapon. Problem here - sans improved unarmed strike, flurry of blows using unarmed attacks is a bad idea at best. Why is flurry of blows powerful here? Choose ANY deity with a two-handed weapon and you’ll know why – Greatsword-flurry. Yeah. Ouch. Not every DM will be comfortable with this. Temple Guardians also learn to spend a point of favor to create an aura that makes foes shaken (later frightened) on a failed save, consecrate areas via favor (allowing them to use ranger traps). They also get a sense on a limited area of 10 ft./level and can determine the presence of non-believers. So....do heretics count? What if an area is high? As written, the ability is 2-dimensional. Also: What type of action is designating the area in question? No idea. At 19th level, the temple guardian can meditate 1 hour to create portals to the nearest temple of his/her deity, a portal only he can use. So...can this portal be blocked by teleportation-hampering/redirecting spells/effects? How wide is it? Does it have a CL, if so, which one? Why is it SU when it does what spells do? Can e.g. a siege engines drawn by designated horses go through? Is there a limit on the amount of beings/material that may pass through? Could he create a portal to empty e.g. a small sea into a temple by designating that the water may pass? Can such a portal transcend planar boundaries of demiplanes or full planes? Many questions and alas, no answers.

The second archetype would be the Dark Apostle: Instead of favored bodyguard, these individuals get a rogue's sneak attack of up to +6d6 as long as s/he still has at least 1 favor remaining. Dark Apostles also get the poisoner (ex) quality and may gain temporary favor by poisoning creatures of a CR of at least their HD-2. Due to the cap of temporary favor still okay in my book. They may also spend favor to have their weapon weep a special profane poison (which is rather potent at DC 10+1/2 level, wis-mod rounds frequency, 1d3 Con and 2 required consecutive saves) and spend favor when sneak attacking foes to set them up for easier disarm attempts. At 7th level, one particular ability is hardcore broken here - Forget Secrets. As a SUPERNATURAL ability, the Apostle may cause nearby foes to forget the last minute, dazing them. While only usable once in 24 hours on a target, the ability ISN'T mind-influencing: No protections, no counterspells. That's insane and would change how many organizations work. This needs to AT LEAST be (sp) and mind-influencing. At higher levels, Dark Apostles may spend favor to make extra attacks against foes they sent into the dying state, shadow jump. At 15th level, the Apostle exudes an aura that causes non-allies to forget to forget all that happened inside the aura after 1d4 minutes - since this counter does not start upon leaving the aura, this is a permanent amnesia-machine. This is so insane. The aura requires no conscious effort and is maintained as long as the Apostle has at least one favor - an apostle could steal YEARS with this ability, by mere continued presence. Again, no protection since it's supernatural and not mind-influencing. Oh, and the Dark Apostle gets 1/2 class level to disguise, bluff and sleight of hand as well as a modified spell-list.

Conclusion in the product discussion.

Note: as of 1/28/14, this is an out of date review. Please read Endz' for an up-to-date review.

Getting this out of the way: I received a review copy of this product, so keep that in mind. As with all reviews, I try to limit by biases though. A favorite saying of mine when it comes to PFRPG is that while praise is nice, criticism is useful and this review is in as many ways an attempt to help the author grow as it is to help you, the reader, decide if it’s the right class for you.

The Saint is a hybrid class, combining aspects of the cleric, the gunslinger (namely, a Grit-like ability), and the monk (namely Flurry of Blows) to create a class that allows for holy warriors that aren’t just Paladins. For this reason, it occupies the same design space as Super Genius Games’ Templar does. They’re d8 HD, 4 base skills per level, 3/4ths BAB, and a 6th level caster. They’re a bit like the old Favored Soul from 3.5 as well, focusing on their deity’s favored weapon.

According to the product’s Role section the Saint prefers a diplomatic solution to conflict, and she does receive an ability to help out with this aspect: namely her level to Diplomacy and Intimidate checks against those of another faith. But as far as set-in-stone class abilities go, that’s it. That’s all they get to help out with their preferred solution to a problem. This is a bit jarring to see, as from the name of the class, you expect to see a more diplomatic class. One that focuses more on the divine miracles they can do than on the blade.

What we instead find is a fighter with a number of deity-approved tricks up their sleeve. But more on this later.

As to be expected, the saint receives a single domain, and acts as a cleric of the saint’s level. Interestingly, they get the bonus spells not as spells to fill a bonus spell slot, but instead as Spell-Like Abilities. She receives a pool of uses-per-day, and different spell levels use up a different amount of uses-per-day. For example, a 9th level domain SLA is going to cost you 3 uses of your uses-per-day. This is kind of an interesting mechanic, albeit a bit clunky. Slightly concerning however, is that they get to ignore up to 100 gp / level of expensive material components. For one, spell-like abilities already ignore the material components of spells. This snafu is strange because in other sections of the product, author Tyler Beck shows deep rules knowledge. If the ability is intended to work on the spells that the domain grants but not necessarily to the spell-like abilities, it’s badly laid out as the rest of the paragraph is exclusively about the spell-like abilities. But the very fact that they’re spell-like abilities is worrying, as the domains weren’t written with this in mind. The ability to easily cast 7 miracles, with no material component, per day is a bit worrisome, to say the least.

Their main class feature is that of Favor. Favor points work a lot like a gunslinger’s Grit works, in that you get a certain number of points to start the day, and you can use abilities to spend them, and you regain the favor points by doing certain actions. As written, the base method to get more favor points is to ‘vanquish’ a foe. By this, they mean that you need to reduce the enemy to negative hit points. There is the caveat that nonlethal damage can accomplish this, but this is another one of the paradoxical gaps in rules knowledge. Consider how this would work. To bring a creature to negative hit points as a fighter who fights non-lethally, say of a god of peace, or one strong on redemption, you’ll have to do enough non-lethal damage for their hit points to equal their non-lethal damage. If no one else is fighting your opponent, this means you’ll need to deal the enemy’s full HP in non-lethal damage. But this doesn’t knock them to negative hit points. It merely means that any additional non-lethal damage becomes lethal damage. So you need to go through their hit points twice to get them to negative HP, and thus regain a favor point.

And keep in mind that this is the only set-in-stone way to get favor back, even for deities that aren’t up on violence. This harkens back to the Turn Undead ability in 3.5, where no matter what your Deity did or was about, you had the ability to scare undead. This is a bit weird, to say the least. To the author’s credit, they do provide a number of other examples that all require GM arbitration. These methods involve converting others to your faith, proving your loyalty to a deity by doing some ritual, or doing specific feats related to your deity’s portfolio. There are a few other ways to regain favor, but more on that later. What's odd here is that one of these alternative methods are granted at 1st level as well, but it's hidden away in Graces.

Oh, and one more thing. Unlike Grit, there’s no limit on the number of favor points you can have, but every morning your favor is reset. Apparently your Deity doesn’t want you to be too rewarded for your good deeds the previous day, so they take a little bit of your excess divine energy.

Now, the saint receives some abilities called Graces. Graces work much like a magus’ arcana in that some require points to power, and others just work. While I believe oceanshieldwolf covered most of them, I’ll talk about a few of them. The Favored Bodyguard grace grants you the Bodyguard feat, and lets you use it more often than normal if you have the Combat Reflexes feat. This is a bit strange since this extra pool of Bodyguard uses doesn’t use the same language as Combat Reflexes, where it’s additional AoOs on top of your 1. Instead, it’s just a use of Bodyguard per point of Dexterity modifier. There’s another issue with this. Namely that if you have 8 Dex and Combat Reflexes, you’ll have 1 AoO per round. With Favored Bodyguard? You’ll have -1 uses, as it’s based off of the Dexterity modifier, not bonus. I highly doubt anyone would actually take CR with 8 Dex, but it does a rookie mistake.

Now, the nifty thing about Favored Bodyguard is that if you prevent an attack to an ally using it, you regain a favor point. This provides a method that doesn’t involve inflicting violence to regain favor, which is nice. Unfortunately, it doesn’t do anything to address any of the issues that these sort of abilities have. Who is to say that the reason the enemy missed the saint’s ally was the bodyguard bonus? Why wasn’t it the armor of the ally? Or their ring of deflection? Obviously, sometimes it’ll be the Bodyguard bonus, but it doesn’t make sense that it’s always that.

But here’s another problem with the ability. It can be trivially gamed by using allies to attack each other, just to get more favor points. And unlike the ‘vanquish` method of regaining favor, this one doesn’t need to be against a ‘worthy opponent’. It can be any attack, from any CR creature. Is this something that a sane GM will ever allow? No. But it still means that the saint fails the all-important Bag-O’-Rats Test. Using a bag of rats, there is a way to get a ton of favor, whether the bag of rats is literal or metaphorical. This is made worse by the lack of a limit on favor.

And then we get to Favored Onslaught. This ability is basically flurry of blows, but with the deity’s favored weapon. It grants you an extra attack, and sets your BAB to be your level for one round. And then we have the really weird sentence “this ability does not grant additional extra attacks at higher levels”. But we just read a sentence saying it does, specifically from a higher BAB. [Kudos on getting the language right for extra attacks for a high BAB though.] What this meant to say is that unlike flurry of blows, the extra attacks from TWF aren’t built in. But at the same time, the ability says that you can use Two-Weapon Fighting to add attacks. This isn’t the most clear, owing in part due to the monk’s flurry of blows fiasco, but it sounds like you can use TWF to just straight up get extra attacks. Confusingly, it doesn’t cover what ‘hand’ would be used if you’re using TWF to get extra attacks. This isn’t an issue with Flurry of Blows as you are always using the same set of rules and can’t mix it in with TWF. But with this ability, you can mix it in with TWF. Which penalty do you apply if you’re just attacking with one weapon? The main-hand or the off-hand? Even if this is resolved, there are some balance issues with the ability. For example, a level 1 Saint with a deity whose favored weapon is a greatsword that has TWF, you could spend a favor point to get 3 attacks. Just getting three natural attacks is awesome at 1st level, but the ability to do 3 attacks with a two-handed weapon? That’s really, really strong. As a saving grace (hah!), this ability does require favor to use, which helps quite a bit. I don’t think it’s enough.

Favored Sacrifice is another ability that can be used to regain favor. In this case, you receive the ‘in harms way’ feat. If you take an attack meant for an adjacent ally, you get a favor point back. This is even easier to ‘farm’ favor points with. Just have an ally use non-lethal damage against another ally, and ‘take the pain’ for your ally. This one could actually work in-game, especially for gods all about self-pain. This one really fails the bag of rats test.

Silver Tongue is a grace that actually helps out the diplomatic aspects of the saint. Namely, granting you the ability to add +4 to the DC of charm person type effects (or denounce type of effects). This bonus is absolutely huge, and also could be exploited by charming someone and just having your new best friend ‘convert’ to your religion. This would negate the cost of the favor point for +4, and would net you all the benefits of charm person.

Silent Prayer is, I think, indicative of the whole class. This grace is simple. Spend a favor point, and the spell or spell-like ability you’re casting is cast as if the silent spell metamagic was applied. One problem with this though. Spell-like abilities are already silent. This ability was so close to being right, but off by a little bit. We see the same sort of issue with the commune grace, where you can use commune to talk to your Deity once per day as a spell-like ability. It doesn’t require material components though, which is good, because SLAs already do not require them.

Rich of Spirit is particularly worrisome. It lets you spend a favor point to ignore up to 500 gp of an expensive material component, stacking with the reduced cost of the domain SLAs (which are already free). Combined with the ability to have a large amount of favor, you can get around just about any material component, removing a very-so-much-real balancing factor on a number of spells.

Protective Aura is also a strange grace. It requires you to be level 15, and grants a +2 deflection bonus to AC and a +2 resistance bonus to saving throws. They max out at +4 at 20th level, and it basically acts as a magic circle against evil (or good) as well as a lesser globe of invulnerability. For one, this ability doesn’t just affect spells of alignments other than your own. Yes, you’re immune to cure light wounds cast by someone trying to get you back above negative HP. And this globe of invulnerability is always up. Hope you didn’t plan on casting any long-lasting low level buffs! It also has the issue that it doesn’t work as magic circle against law / chaos. A bit of an oddity, as there are gods who focus more on those aspects than good versus evil.

Many of the other graces are all about combat. Some let you bypass some DR. Others pump you up when you vanquish a foe or prevent an attack.

There’s a small issue in the Favored Dodge grace where it calls the grace a ‘deed’.

As an extremely minor quibble, the class uses the female pronoun when necessary, but the front cover shows a male, and there’s only one third of the images are females. Just a little oddity.

The spell list has a large number of spells that only work with a reflavoring. Unfortunately, this reflavoring is not explicitly called out, so this leaves oddities like gallant inspiration, which grants a competence bonus to a roll, on the spell list. Clearly, it’s meant to be something like the deity saying ‘time to tip the scales in my favor’, but that doesn’t quite work with the mechanics, and bumping the spell to grant a sacred or profane bonus would probably make the spell a higher level.

This also touches upon another issue the spell list has. The Saint’s spell list is full of some of the best (formerly unique to certain classes) spells. In many cases, it makes some sense, but it’s still robbing the classes these come from of one of their stand-out features. Spells like good hope, the Litany family of spells, gallant inspiration, glibness, etc were all previously very exclusive, and now the Saint gets them too. While my disappointment is tempered by the fact that they do roughly make sense, I wish they had gotten new spells in their place. And these spells are exclusive because they are very, very good.

Which brings me to the third point about the spell list. All the spells are very good. Many of them are some of the best spells for their levels. It’s as if a highly optimized wizard took all of the spells he wanted, and created a spell list with them in it. It’s a little too good, and it doesn’t really have the ‘not-so-good’ choices that all spell lists possess.

That said, there is some very real praise to be given about the spell list. It doesn’t affect the magic item economy quite as much as classes like the Summoner does. The spells aren’t made available too early, and there is even a discussion on the effect earlier access to spells will have on the price of wands and scrolls. This is very smart, and they offer ways to mitigate the problem posed by it.

Summing this all up, the class feels very amateur. When I talked about it with some friends of mine, this was the main comment. There are a lot of good ideas in here, but the issues that are raised with the abilities are things that should’ve been caught in development. As I mentioned above, exacerbating this is that in some instances, the class shows a deep level of knowledge of the rules, but then flubs on very basic aspects.

The class is called the Saint. The first thing brought to mind by this is some sort of ‘cleric of the cloth’. A cleric without armor proficiency, and not as war-like as a cleric usually is. What is not brought to mind is a class that strongly focuses on combat. When the flavor of the class says that saints prefer diplomatic solutions, and then gives about 2 abilities to help this aspect out as opposed to a myriad combat abilities, we get a dissonance that leaves a sour taste in our mouths. I wish there was the ability to focus on one aspect or the other though.

Still, I think this class does have potential. I think it needs a rename and a serious scrubbing, but beneath all the issues I’ve enumerated is a class that does seem pretty interesting. I think that with a good GM who can curtail some of the issues, this would make a pretty good holy warrior. Better than SGG’s Templar? I’m not sure. But to me it’s definitely more interesting than the Templar.

Due to the issues raised above, I will rate this 2.5 stars, rounded down for this platform.

First off, let me say this PDF is a beautiful specimen of graphic design - the background is stylised with curling borders and metallic curlicues, the paper it appears on is mottled and appears water damaged- all nice touches in which to house the large font that is crisp and easy to read. Three typically realistic Rick Hershey art pieces round out the PDF giving the Saint some grounding in "characters you might want to play/encounter." Let's move on to the crunchy stuff!

So what exactly is the Saint and where does it fit within the divine class/caster milieu?

I found the Role description to be somewhat vague but basically the saint is a buffer, a protector, is excellent mobility-wise and none too weak with the old deity's favored weapon.

As a Base Cl ass we have a 3/4 BAB, d8 HD class, proficient with light armor, simple weapons + deity's favored weapon, that has diminished, Bard level, albeit prepared casting of spells from a spell list that is, by the author's reckoning "made up of a combination of Cleric, Bard and Paladin spells, focusing on buff, healing and charm..."

Ok, fair enough, but what else does the Saint do?

Saints have a domain, but their domain spells are gained as SLAs, usable 3+ Wis mod/day (though higher level spells cost more uses - a nice balancer there!)

The real excellent design trick for me as far as abilities in the Saint is the use of Favor, and Graces.

Favor is a tweak of the Gunslinger's Grit mechanic - and if you think about Favor as it applies to deities, and how they might reward their warlike apostles - in this case Saints, then you might start to see the genius of the concept. Author Tyler Beck provides some excellent ways to regain Favor not just in combat, but also through thematically appropriate methods - conversion, proof of loyalty to deity and a broad feats of faith option...

Graces are to Favor what Deeds are to Grit, but there the comparison ends. Really, the Saint takes the grit mechanic and runs away with it into fantastic design territory - almost a score of Graces running the gamut of low to high level, with names like Favored Bodyguard (as long as you have at least one favor point you are treated a shaving the Bodyguard feat, and it synergises if you have the Combat Reflexes feat - nice touch there); Preach a tweaked Bard's fascinate; Silent Prayer - use Favor to gain Silent Spell without increasing spell level on one spell or SLA (great for domain SLAs); another great one is Guided Hand - provides short term bonus to next foe after gaining a Favor point through vanquishing enemies.

Some of the Graces I'm not a fan of - namely Far Healing and, though this might seem crazy in a very favorable review, one of the central abilities of the class - Favored Onslaught. The former just doesn't seem to fit my very personal view of the theme of the class, so let's just say that's irrational bias.
The latter ability is something of a tricky problem personally for me. Basically it's a Monk's Flurry of Blows with the deity's favored weapon. Monk's Flurries do my head in on a good day, so really that's where part of the problem lies - I also see the BAB for the Favored Onslaught, and it takes the Saint into pretty powerful territory. I guess the balancer is that it requires a favor point expenditure, and though not exactly specified (and may not need to be) it's only for one round. The second part is that, with this signature ability, I really don't get why this class is called the Saint, and not the Champion or War-Apostle. Saint drags my mind into totally different territory than a spell using, armored, weapon dragging scion of deific inspired favor. Oh, I forgot - Favored Onslaught only works in light or no armor - which plays into the mobility mentioned in Role.
Hmm. Oh well. No biggie, It's still awesome.

To round out the class we get some Bonus Feats (including the option to choose guided hand or the rogue's evasion and improved evasion without meeting prereqs though the latter still limited to light armor) and the Emissary ability which adds the Saint's level and Diplomacy and Intimidate when dealing with "those of another faith". A little vague and broad for me, and perhaps narrowly applicable if you cant define "faiths", but a nice touch to bring in the devout aspect of the theme.

There's a great spell list, a couple of bonus feats and a favored class bonus for EVERY race in the Core Rulebook and the APG. Sheesh. Strangely the Favored class bonuses are often nothing to do with the Saint, but geared more to the race in question's capability - I guess I can see a reason for this - some of the bonuses are on theme - the grippli gains a bonus to the Princely racial trait for example- perhaps it's all due to divine inspiration, but it was a little weird for me at first.

All in all this is a well thought out Base Class that explores a niche in the canon of classes and makes use of some existing mechanics in innovative and fun ways.

If I truly had a gripe here it would be this - where are the archetypes? For me, the rigour or measure of a base class is that the chassis can bear more concepts - not only are none presented herein but as I read through it I wasn't immediately coming up with a bunch - not just because the theme wasn't making them occur to me but also because I couldn't immediately identify what to replace within the mechanica design space. I think that will change as I ponder the class a bit more. Perhaps it's my personal irreligion hampering my ability to connect to the class, and also, more to the point, the name throws me. I don't like the name for this awesome base class. I would prefer something with Devout/Devoted/Apostle of.... but I can see that "Saint" is simple, evocative and to the point.

Oh, to Hell and Heaven with it, and the Neutral Afterlife as well - 5 stars from your grumpy old OSW...

[Postscript - ooh ooh, OSW you are a dimbulb - of course - either a spell-less Saint (War-Apostle) or spell-less AND domain-less along the lines of the Inquisitor's "ideal-rather-than-deity" - that might really be a Battle-Saint!!!]