ATGGAATAA's page

Yes. This is exactly what my life/tinker needed. The ability to airlift the rest of the party, and deploy what can be reasonably termed a flotilla. Keep up the awesome!

Good to know on #4; I may have to recalibrate some of my more heavily burdened designs. Either that, or ask my DM if I'm allowed to invent weapons. One way or another, I am intent on making a rideable large-sized scarab with pincers. With potion injectors, for injecting fluids into my friends, because I feel like if my creations aren't at least as menacing to my allies as they are to my enemies, I'm doing something horribly wrong.

Scaling could be accomplished by increasing proficiency at compound extraction and purification, for salves/poultices/tinctures prepared ahead of time. Also, I feel like varying the skill set by biome has a lot of promise; there can be a core set of herbs that are members of a globally found family/genus that have a base effect and a secondary effect that varies per biome, and cultivars that are biome specific, and have more intense and varied effects.
Take it from a biologist, when designing game mechanics, convergent evolution and climate-driven speciation are your friends.

I've been looking over the class, and it is thoroughly delightful. I have a couple of questions, though.

1. Does the tinker have to spend time building the automatons before deploying them, and is there a related material cost?

2. I'm planning on house-ruling in some inventions (such as wings); is there any criteria you used to determine the BP cost?

3. The class gets some pretty intense buffs to craft, but aside from a cheaper way to restock 1 use items such as crossbows/bolts, what utility was it intended to have?

4. If a automaton was outfitted with 2+ crossbows, all equipped with reloading winches, could both be reloaded simultaneously, or is there a power constraint that limits the automaton to the normal number of actions per turn? This isn't really limited to crossbows; if my tinker were to make a horrifyingly large beetle-shaped automaton with mandibles comprised of one or more sets of sickles, would it get terrifying bite attack, or just be limited to a more reasonable number of attacks/amount of damage per turn?

5. Does it take time to redesign blueprints?

6. The tinker appears to be able to give his automatons repair kits, but doesn't seem to be able to repair them on his own. As I am relatively new to pathfinder, it is entirely possible I have missed something very obvious here.

7. Perhaps it is just me, but I feel that everyone would benefit if the tinker was able to tell their automatons to cling them as an unsettling approximation of armor. Fidgeting, potentially explosive armor that stares at everyone unsettlingly.