| ChainsawSam |
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
I had originally ranted and raved quite a bit and had this big long thing. If I want to be objective however, my dice were pretty lousy all night. So I decided to take a step back and come at things with more of a level head.
So here is my feedback and feature by feature breakdown of the class. Again, bear in mind that my dice were pretty lame most of the night. Also bear in mind that I have a lot of experience with both Magus, Cleric, and Inquisitor, classes which I feel are pissing all over the Warpriest's Cheerios.
Base Attack Bonus/Hit Dice
d8's an 3/4 BAB can work fine for a frontline combatant, as seen pretty clearly with other classes. Where things break down is classes such as the Rogue which have no way to effectively raise their hit bonus.
Overall I managed to get my hit bonuses high enough by being an Archer and focusing on Dexterity. It helps that, as an Archer, I essentially had 3 attacks at my highest BAB between Many Shot and Rapid Shot.
I really ended up missing Judgments since if I needed more hit or damage I had to spend a round buffing myself. Similarly I missed the versatility of an Arcane Pool and Arcane Accuracy when I needed it.
Directly compared to a Cleric, I had a lot of Feats but ultimately felt the same way most Clerics do in combat except I didn't have the extra spells to back it up. Action Economy tugged me towards both attacking and casting, I didn't particularly feel any more martial than a Cleric.
Skill points
Another 2 per level class. There are only 2 other classes which get 2 per level without full BAB or spellcasting, the Magus and the Summoner. Both of those other classes have enough unique abilities to remain interesting and are able to fulfill their roles and concepts.
The Warpriest, as it stands, does not. The lack of Skill Points hurts. Currently anyway. I'm not saying the class needs more skill points, but it needs more something. In my playtest, the lack of skill points was just icing on the disappointment cake.
Weapon and Armor Proficiency
It is nice to have access to all martial weapons as a Divine caster, but why bother? The class is shoehorned in to its deity's Favored Weapon so the extra proficiencies are effectively a tease.
Focus Weapon
Here is where things become a cruel joke. If a Warpriest has no deity they have to choose a Simple Weapon for their Focus Weapon. They're still proficient with all martial weapons, they're just stuck using a crappy one anyway. Ha ha.
As a Warpriest of Erastil it was nice to focus on the Longbow, but all it particularly amounts to is Weapon Focus for free giving me (a human) 4 feats at first level. Sidenote: If you're playing a low level one-off, go with a Warpriest of Erastil to have enough Archery oomph to make the Rangers jealous.
As a level 12 it was just one more bonus feat and didn't much matter to me.
Bonus Feats
Here we go.
Too many.
As a 12th level Human Warpriest I had 13 feats at level 12. I didn't notice until this morning, but I had only actually taken 12 feats.
I had so many feats that I didn't notice or care about not having one.
Filling these feats in was actually a gigantic pain in the ass. I got so many, but because of lower BAB and CMD I had nothing to really use them on. Practically all of the bonus feats of being a Fighter without all the cool Fighter stuff to spend them on.
At least I was an Archer. There are a lot of interesting archery feats to pick up and they rounded out all my slots. Had I been building a any other type of Warpriest it would have been an "Embarassment of Riches." So many feats with nothing particularly interesting to take.
Having Warpriest levels count as Fighter levels for choosing feats related to their favored weapon and allowing neat feats would be my preferred direction this mess. Maybe allowing the Warpriest to treat their Level as their BAB for the purposes of maneuvers with their favored weapon. Something that makes actually using all those feats more appealing.
Blessings
Domains give a cleric access to bonus spells and a couple of other effects as they level up. Blessings just give effects. Right out the gate, Blessings are worse than Domains.
Very few Blessings are appealing, most have only mediocre effects. As a Warpriest of Erastil they are even less appealing. Yay.
I got access to 5 blessings: Plant, Animal, Community, Good, and Law.
Of those 5, 4 of them do practically the same thing for their Major Blessing. Animal and Plant give access to Standard Action Summon Nature's Ally. Good and Law give access to Standard Action Summon Monster. So as far as Major Blessings go, none of my options particularly felt like options.
To compound the issue, the same 4 Blessing choices had a melee effect for their Minor Blessing. Plant, requires melee attack. Good and Law require a melee weapon. Animal grants melee attacks.
Finally, Community. Community is the most ill conceived of all the Blessings. Community is only granted by Erastil. Erastil's weapon is the Longbow. Now stay with me here.
Community's Minor effect is an Aid Another bonus. If I am in range to take advantage of this bonus in combat (because lord knows I don't have the skill points to take advantage of it out of combat), then something has gone terribly wrong and we're all about to die.
Community's Major effect requires a shield. Like, a strapped to the arm shield. That's pretty crappy, but at least maybe I can use it on an Ally. BUT WAIT THERES MORE!
In addition, any projectile or thrown weapon aimed at a target within 10 feet of the shield’s bearer diverts from its original target and targets the bearer instead.
You know who makes a lot of ranged attacks? Warpriests of Erastil.
Why. The. F***. Would a Warpriest of Erastil want this effect to be anywhere near the battlefield.
It doesn't say "any hostile projectile" it says "any."
Any is a pretty large category which I am pretty sure includes my own projectiles.
Again, the only deity which grants this ability is the deity who favors the long bow.
This shows a flagrant lack of forethought that would be offensive if it wasn't so funny.
So, to recap, my Blessing options are a bunch of melee effects I cannot use for myself and another effect which allows me to hamstring myself. There isn't a single beneficial effect I can plan on using on myself, the Warpriest.
If I wanted to make a character around buffing other people I would have been a Cleric and been a lot better at it.
Well, at least Summoning something as a Standard Action is alright at first glance...
Summoning Something as a Standard Action
Not as good as advertised.
It is perpetually behind a tier. So while I could cast Summon Monster 5 at 12th level, a real caster could get an awful lot more mileage out of Summon Monster 6.
That isn't to say that Summon Monster 5 is completely useless at 12th level, but a real caster could summon a handful of the buggers at once.
At least it sticks around for a whole minute. Wait. Hold on. That's only 10 rounds.
I'm level 12. If I cast the spell normally I'd get 12 rounds.
That means I get only one substandard monster for a substandard amount of time. I've been robbed of two rounds!
Isn't it amazing how quickly my "best Blessing" just became as mediocre as everything else?
Channel Energy
Frankly, not worth the class slot. By 12th level the Cleric has already forgotten all about Channel Energy except to save themselves some Wand of Cure Light Wounds charges between combats.
The Warpriest's channeling is worse.
I would say I used it to top off between combats, but the phrase "top off" is far too optimistic for how Channel Energy actually performed.
It would allow me to take Channel Smite, except that I'm a good guy so Channel Smite is terrible. As many feats as I have, being able to hit one undead extra hard three whole times a day would still be a waste. Of course, I'm an Archer, so Channel Smite isn't even available to me.
Fortunately, Channel Energy is such a terrible ability on a Warpriest that I avoided it entirely. The only function a War Priest's Channel Energy currently serves is to trick new players into thinking they need Charisma. It should be gotten rid of entirely.
Sacred Weapon
Sacred Weapon is what I like to think of as the Warpriest's "main class feature," though this might be because I had such a violently negative reaction to the Blessings.
At three levels later than the Magus, the Warpriest can enhance their focus weapon with a scaling bonus, rather than any weapon like a Magus. This bonus caps out at +5, three levels later than the Magus' ability reaches maximum effect. The Warpriest can add less useful effects than the Magus and the ability lasts one round per level rather than one minute per arcane point spent. Furthermore you can only choose which bonuses to get once each day rather than tailoring them for each encounter like the Magus can.
In case I wasn't clear, it is worse than the Magus version in every way.
I think the biggest issue for me is in presentation.
Warpriest: You have a bunch of crappy features and less spells than a cleric. Instead of Domains and extra spells, you get Blessings which are generally worse than Domains and no extra spells. Also you can channel, but not great. Oh and we gave you a bunch of feats that you can only spend on lackluster things because your BAB and CMB suck and you have no Fighter levels. You get ONE weapon type that you can get bonuses with and enhance.
Magus: You cast less spells than a Wizard but you can do them whenever the hell you want, screw Action Economy. Go ahead and pick up whatever weapon you want and stab someone with lightning, see if I care. Man are you awesome. Here, have some Fighter feats, we don't mind. While we're at it, how about you use some of your cool-guy-points do all sorts of zany things like cast metamagic willy nilly, get your spells back, or do all sorts of other nifty stuff.
oh and if you're not too busy being awesome, your cool-guy-points also let you enhance your weapon. You know, if you get around to it
For the Warpriest, the ability is presented as some sort of life changing ability. A diamond in the rough. With the Magus it's just one more thing Arcane Points do.
So the Warpriest's version being remarkably worse than the Magus' version is obnoxious.
Sacred Armor
This ability is legitimately unique, if not particularly interesting. It lasts minutes per level, which is enough to last you through most days though the bonuses on armor are much less exciting than the stuff you can do with weapons.
Overall
I picked an Archer precisely because it was the only way I felt I could actually make use of all the class' Feats. What I had not accounted for was that my Blessings would provide very little benefit to myself since I was not a melee combatant. Very disappointing. I summoned as a Standard Action a couple times and I buffed our frontline fighter's weapon.
The weapon bonuses were nice, but sort of a hassle. Being that I couldn't change the effects for each encounter I usually just stuck with boring stuff. I ran out of rounds one day. That really sucked. We had a Magus in party. Her version was better.
The Armor bonuses were useful and lasted long enough. Boring, but I can't rightly complain.
BOTH Sacred Armor and Weapon take a Swift Action to activate. This was obnoxious as it required two rounds of combat to become "fully effective."
Channel. Bleh.
Skills. Bleh.
Essentially, I spent the entire night missing my Inquisitors. Judgment goes above and beyond the weapon and armor enhancement caps and I could cover both offense and defense with one Swift Action. Greater Bane is ten times the weapon enhancement that the Warpriest gets. Really, what other weapon Enhancement could someone need? Finally an Inquisitor gets enough skills and extra perks that it is a much more useful and versatile class both in and out of combat.
The Warpriest felt like a watered down cleric. The only aspects of the Fighter class are martial weapon proficiency and bonus feats, neither of which the class can properly utilize.
As an Archer, I could utilize the feats, but my Blessing choices were aggravatingly bad and contributed virtually nothing to my performance.
Overall, the class needs a lot of work. Likely some of this work will need to be done in a completely new direction.
| Scavion |
Mother of feedback heh.
Really sad that the Community Blessing offers nothing to the Warpriest of Erastil. Extremely sad that it would outright cancel out followers of Erastil. I missed that on my read.
Thanks for your feedback.
| ChainsawSam |
None of the Blessings offered to a Warpriest of Erastil are particularly helpful, Community is just somehow the antithesis of what the Warpriest would want.
I really don't think it is too much to ask for the weapon bonuses provided by the Alignment Blessings to be applied to ranged weapons as well. At the very least the Warpriest's own ranged weapon.
Blessings as a whole don't seem any more powerful than domains, but don't grant bonus spells. There's a couple that are alright I guess, but most of them are either mediocre or grant bonuses that are easily outgrown by items.
Balgin
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Sacred Armor
This ability is legitimately unique, if not particularly interesting. It lasts minutes per level, which is enough to last you through most days though the bonuses on armor are much less exciting than the stuff you can do with weapons.
Glad you see it that way. I saw it as being similar (at least in concept) to the Divine Defender or Sacred Shield paladin archetypes who have a similar defensive boost power. By no means identical 'though.
I tell you what, giving the warpriest the fighter's armour training class feature would go a long way to making them feel different to a less casty cleric.
| ChainsawSam |
ChainsawSam wrote:Sacred Armor
This ability is legitimately unique, if not particularly interesting. It lasts minutes per level, which is enough to last you through most days though the bonuses on armor are much less exciting than the stuff you can do with weapons.Glad you see it that way. I saw it as being similar (at least in concept) to the Divine Defender or Sacred Shield paladin archetypes who have a similar defensive boost power. By no means identical 'though.
I tell you what, giving the warpriest the fighter's armour training class feature would go a long way to making them feel different to a less casty cleric.
You could very well be right. I have almost zero experience with the prestige classes because I don't think I've ever seen someone play one.
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Balgin
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Not prestige classes - archetypes.
The Divine defender paladin gets his sacred bond with his armour instead of a mount of a weapon. The Sacred Shield gets it with his shield instead of a mount or weapon. They function like a normal paladin but different (especially the Sacred Shield who specialises in being a protective old school style paladin instead of a 3rd edition angry smashing one).
| ChainsawSam |
Not prestige classes - archetypes.
The Divine defender paladin gets his sacred bond with his armour instead of a mount of a weapon. The Sacred Shield gets it with his shield instead of a mount or weapon. They function like a normal paladin but different (especially the Sacred Shield who specialises in being a protective old school style paladin instead of a 3rd edition angry smashing one).
Those sound like the saddest archetype abilities I've ever heard of. Potentially the least amount of fun in a game which encourages action over reaction.
| Arae Garven |
Hmm. Even when playing a shield paladin, the way to go is two-weapon fighting and smite. The cost of enchanting the shield as a shield is way lower than doing it with a weapon, so you're better off going with slapping the standard weapon bond onto your shield than the sacred shield archetype bond.
That is to say, sword and board standard paladin on high point buys rip holes in stuff. S&B sacred shields don't to the same degree. They aren't particularly more durable either.