This will contain unmarked spoilers for Slave Ships of Absalom. Please do not read ahead if you wish to not be spoiled.
I tried a newly-rolled L1 Hydrokineticist in Society today, doing this scenario. Most of it went pretty well - I was hitting regularly and doing well in closed quarters because of my use of Cold Blast and its ranged touch AC.
There were three problems that I felt the class had with this scenario, which were:
- When fighting the human caster in the ship's hold, I was actually afraid to move into the Grease spell he had just cast because I didn't have enough skill points (even as a human) to afford a point in Acrobatics. I built my character with 20 Dexterity, so Reflex saves weren't really an issue, but there are a whole bunch of Dex-based skills that I felt I would take if I had more skill points but couldn't.
- When trying to put out the brazier during the final encounter, both I and the rest of the group found it a little weird that the Hydrokineticist doesn't have an ability that mimics Create Water. It felt kind of odd hitting the brazier with a cold blast to stop the fire, rather than simply creating or manipulating some water to do the same job.
- The social parts were definitely a major weak point for this character, since Charisma was my dump stat. However, I feel like that because Constitution is the main stat for the class, it's kind of hard to be really good at anything besides Dexterity-based skills, since no skills use Constitution as their associated stat.
In building the character, I think it's kind of odd that Constitution is the class's primary stat, but the Kineticist gains no real benefits (other than the HP from having a higher Con score) from it. In fact, I wound up going 18 (20 with human bonus) in Dexterity and leaving Con at 15, simply because I didn't think taking Burn in any amount would be a prudent thing to do at such a low level. It's also probably a good thing I didn't take Kinetic Healer and instead opted for Extended Range, because had I passed on the single point of Burn to either the Paladin or the Samurai in my group they would likely have died from the lower max HP from the Burn.
In my opinion, there are three changes I think should be made to Kineticist to make them a little more all-round useful:
1. Raise the skills per level to 4+Int, as was previously suggested by many other people.
2. Give the Kineticist the ability to use their force of will to enhance their skill rolls - this would balance out Constitution being their main stat in terms of skill use.
3. Give the Kineticist some free Talents that allow them some minor manipulation of their chosen element - something like Create Water for the Hydrokineticist. I think this would also help with the ranged-attack blasts which seemingly require material components (water, fire, unattended objects) and give them a bit more usefulness in general.
