Advanced Class Guide Playtest
Five 9th lvl Human PC's all at 15 point buy, Core book only (Arcanist, Warpriest, Investigator, Bloodrager, & Hunter).
Module: The Harrowing.
A pretty good mix of social interaction, puzzle solving, and combat. They completed the module with only one character death (which was due mostly to really unlucky dice rolls rather than any player mistakes). Afterwards I asked the players what their "plusses & minuses" were for these classes.
Arcanist +'s:
1) Blood Focus is a cool ability, but should apply to the school powers of the chosen arcane school as well as the chosen bloodline.
2) Metamagic Versatility: being able to either prepare spells with metamagic or add metamagic on the fly is very nice.
Arcanist -'s:
1) Blood Focus: the fact that you have to leave a point wasting away there doing nothing or take a penalty sucked. Other classes that use a similar "pool" feature (magus, monk, ninja, etc.) don't take such a penalty, and sometimes even gain a bonus for leaving a point in the pool - i'm looking at you ki strike.
2)The class still feels a little too much like a wizard (INT-based casting, spellbook, spellmastery access), and not enough like a seperate class.
Bloodrager +'s
1) No Trap Sense: It has never made sense to me why a "raging ball of chaos" would gain an innate bonus vs traps in the 1st place.
2) Arcane spells in medium armor - very cool. Noone else gets to do this.
3) More bloodline feats than a standard sorcerer.
Bloodrager -'s
1) Bloodrage: The 1st thing Jesse said when looking at the class was "this ability is exactly the same as barbarian rage, so why not just call it rage instead of making up new terms for the same ability?". She thought is was disapointing to see it packaged as a "new" ability only to realize that it was just the same old ability with a new name.
2) Bloodline Powers - Barbarian Comparison: Core barbarians gain 4 rage powers at 9th level selected from a list of 28; Bloodragers only get 3 bloodline powers at 9th lvl and they're fixed, so no versatility there.
** I think that the bloodline powers are generally more powerful than the standard rage powers so this is an exceptable trade, but she disagreed.
Hunter +'s
1) Animal Focus: cool and versatile and obviously a dumbed down version of the druids wild shape. It does seem a bit strange 'tho that I've got a wolf, companion and animal focus with a frog and an owl. Maybe it would be better if each animal had a list of 2-3 different abilities that you could gain from that specific animal instead.
Hunter -'s
1) Hunter Tactics: this is basically the cavalier tactics ability, but whereas that one applies to all the cavaliers allies, this one only applies to the hunters animal companion and is therefore less versatile. Perhaps if the hunter gained more companions as he leveled up - at 6th, 12th, and 18th levels maybe. then it would be more worthwhile.
2) No Favored Terrain: It seems like favored terrain would be a core ability of a hunter class. To be able to easily track and confront your prey in any type of terrain just seems vital to a class called "The Hunter".
Investigator +'s
1) Everything: this class truely shined during the adventure. every aspect of it fell into place like a well-oiled machine. Hell, even the warpriest player said he wished he'd picked investigator instead. In fact the only complaint that Jaime had was that she was hoping for a rogue-type class that didn't have sneak attack.
Warpriest +'s
1) Sacred Armor/Sacred Weapon: taking the paladins divine bond ability, adding some extra enchants based on alignment, and also doing a similar ability for armor is cool.
Warpriest -'s
2) Everything Else: "It fights worse than a fighter, heals worse than a cleric, and does both combined worse than a paladin. Just remove the LG restriction from the paladin and discard the warpriest to the trash where it belongs."
** Those were Mark's words when asked what he thought of the class. I don't completely agree with him, as i thought the class did pretty much what it was designed to do. My only true gripe with the warpriest is that the capstone ability seems kinda weak compared to some others. I would solve this buy allowing it's use x3/day instead of only once.
Well that's it. I wish I had time to throw together something for the other 5 new classes, but with the holidays fast approaching, I'm swamped. Hope this helps with your data.
In my group the players mentioned that the Arcanist felt like a wizard who was better at being a prepared spell caster than the actual wizard. Did your group have a similar opinion?
Our reasoning for this was the fact that he could spontaneously cast any of his prepared spells during the course of a day. This makes the wizard feel very lacking in comparison.
Thoughts?
-GMwolf
How did the warpriest approach his choice of diety?
What weapon did he end up using?
We've had raging debates about this on another thread. I'm not looking to bring them here, but I'd love to hear what someone playing the class felt about it. Maybe it didn't even come up as an issue?
@Wrathgar: He didn't comment on that aspect of the class. he did however mention that the sorcerer side gets kind of shafted by limiting it's access to bloodline powers to the number of blood focus uses/day instead of having constant access to them. To your point 'tho, I feel that the sorcerer-like delay on acquiring higher level spells (4th lvl instead of 5th lvl in our playtest) more than evens out any advantages over a straight wizard - at least until lvl 20 when the arcanist does indeed gain the advantage that you speak of.
@Arae: He was a warpriest of Gorum wielding a greatsword. He said he just didn't like the feel of the class and would rather just play a straight up cleric or fighter or paladin.
@James Knowles, thanks for the feedback!