Is the Kineticist's aether puppet useful?


Advice


From what I read on the d20pfsrd, the animated objects have terrible accuracy and really low damage. Then you have to bring the object with you in order to reliably use it. The most useful use I can see for it is to give flank to allies.


Yeah it's kind of bad. An example of Paizo being overtly conservative about free abilities to the point of making them rubbish.

The biggest problem is that animated objects are slightly weak for their CR and on top of that you're getting them long, long after that CR has stopped being relevant. CR3 at 10, CR3 with two attacks at 12. CR5 at 14 and so on. It's a mess.

You can use them to flank but they're squishy enough that they're likely to die with incidental damage and I'm not sure if it's worth spending the burn or losing your ability to gather. Not unless you really need that flanking.

The only other real use for it is for breaking things. Since you don't get material based bonuses until much later you can, say, animate an adamantine sword to reduce its hardness to 5. Though most of the time that won't be relevant often enough to matter.


There is one interesting aspect of this ability: it doesn't share the limitations of the animate objects spell. This means that not only can you animate magical objects, you can animate objects that are worn or carried by any creature, including an enemy, with no save. I'm sure you could come up with all sorts of shenanigans for that, depending on the specifics of any given combat. But if you'd rather not turn to that, all that comes to mind is random convenience animations of locked doors and ladders and whatnot - but that's going to stop being truly relevant well before level 10. In combat, they have pretty much no chance of doing anything more than soaking up some damage - which actually isn't that bad of a role. If you can get a group of low intelligence creatures to waste their attacks of opportunity on these meaningless lumps of matter, then they've served as good a purpose as any. Oh, and remember that slimes, molds, and the like are considered objects. It might be nice to keep some brown mold or green slime on hand in a bag of holding - you never know when it might be worth spending an action to bring one out and send it to wreck havoc. If nothing else, animating them allows you to put them in the perfect position to lay traps before allowing them to revert to their normal, destructive state. And out of combat, slime can work very well for all your object destruction needs.

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