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Another vote of approval for renaming them "Entropaths". Nicely sci-fi sounding without being TOO specific, so the designers have room to play with the concept.

I also have this view that the different elements have strengths and weaknesses by design. For me, the kineticist idea is precisely that you can play with a single element for mechanical or thematic reasons and make the most of it, but will keep the obvious weaknesses of that element. Or divide itself into multiple elements seeking to benefit from the coverage over the weaknesses of each other at the cost of sacrificing junctions.

In case it was unclear or if anyone missed it, this is specifically confirmed by the developers that they did this, and did it on purpose. In the playtest after-action report, there's a chart towards the bottom showing how they designed the playtest impulses, though they said that wouldn't necessarily be how they showed up on the actual class.

Balance isn't my biggest concern. Let what worked in history, not your weird pop culture take on things, result in more effective warriors.

I enjoy the weird pop culture takes in my games, personally. I would prefer this gam kept leaning into those.

it's great for the Mechanic to be able to control minions and areas, but it'd be nice for them to do more actual mechanic stuff and play a bit more with items

I think I may like the class as written a little better than you, but I agree with this. The Mod ability gives me some of what I was hoping to see, but its not drawing in me as much as I expected.

One choice is to cancel all my subs and just hit the store once a month and look for whatever's new and buy the pdf. Pretty sure Paizo would rather I not do that, but I might. Would save me money in the long run, and space too. But I like books, and that's why I haven't made that jump. Also, manually searching for what's new would be a pain in the butt, and besides, I might miss something. :-(

That was the exact thought process, and pitfalls, I went through, with the added complication that I want this charge to always be on the 1st to maximize my credit card points. I used to have 6 subscriptions I think.

You say that, but every August there are people that whine that they're not getting their PDFs early. Every single one.

My sarcastic sense of humor keeps trying to assert itself as I write out a response, but bare honesty, this seems like not something worth worrying about. With or without a PDF subscription for rulebooks and LO lines, this is a complaint being made anyways. So why stress over the reactions of a group of people that provably cannot be placated?

Is the assumption is that instead of this being a once a year phenomenon, it’ll be every month that a LO or rulebook is released? Because it think it could just as easily work out the other way. Having the various PDF subscriptions, including the new ones I want, reinforce the idea that PDFs release on release day unless your physical subscription ships first, might get ahead of some of these complaints rather than feed into them.

But that’s pure speculation on my part, and admittedly appeals to me since it happens to justify what I want.

The biggest thing about the argument is that while in the long term PDFs do not hurt physical book sales, getting the PDF early would disincentivize brick and mortar stores from stocking Paizo books. There are already game stores that take umbrage to the current subscription process. Whether it actually hurts them or not tends to not matter to business owners who feel threatened.

And if you're not getting the PDF early at all, there are going to be people that complain when physical subscribers start getting their PDFs 2 weeks before them, even though thats not actually one of the stated benefits of the subs.

I mean, the answer is the same that is always been. PDFs get sent when subscriptions ship. “Ship date” for a PDF is the release date. Iirc, that’s how Paizo’s current PDF subscriptions work. I see no reason for that to change if Paizo expands their PDF subscriptions to the main product lines, and you’ve outlined several good reasons for that not to change.

This is the part that I get kerfluffled over, actually. I’m not asking Paizo to venture into some untested media territory that they have no institutional knowledge of how to navigate. They’ve been doing this literally for decades now, and digital ebook subscriptions are a LOT more commonplace for consumers than they were even 5 years ago, let alone 16. (Which in turn means I’m willing to believe them when they say PDF subscriptions don’t make sense for them, however disappointing that be to me. I don’t *understand*, but I believe that they know what they’re talking about).

Further, as you’ve said, early PDFs have never been advertised as a guaranteed perk. I agree that some people will complain that they aren’t getting something they were never offered in the first place, but what can you do for someone like that besides pat their hand and say, “there, there”? They’re getting what was promised and that they paid for.

Edit: honestly, having the ship date, and thus the credit card charge date, guaranteed to be the set release date has the benefit of you’d know well in advance exactly when that charge will hit. Which could very well be important for some customers. If I could *pick* a date each month for this to process, say the 1st, and you get anything that had released between your last sub date and this month’s day (again, nothing early), that would be even better for those that this is an important consideration. That is effectively what I do, assuming I remember to actually buy the pdfs on the 1st and don’t get sidetracked like I have the last 2 months. Having the website do the remembering for me would be ideal in my case, though of course I don’t think my wants are universal, or even typical.

I'd love to see PDF subscriptions. It would guarantee more purchases from me (and maybe others). I sometimes miss releases or pick and choose more than I would if I subscribed. For Paizo PDF subscriptions would allow them to see a guaranteed revenue stream.

Same. I genuinely forgot Rival Academies released recently. I'll try to remember to get it with my next batch of PDFs I guess.

Given the tariff roulette, I would really prefer Paizo lean onto their digital offerings anyways, including offering more digital subscriptions. I like the company, I like their products. Give me a more frictionless way to give you money, Paizo! One that doesn't depend on me remembering to do things.

Hopefully the new webpage they're creating will offer something along these lines, or something near enough.

This is very much a "Will not happen" deal, but, I would love an alchemy book. Many alchemcial items, especially strange ones that don't fit anywhere else, and a wealth of alchemical items and feats for not just alchemist, but everyone. Imagine a barbarian archtype centered around mutagen use, a sorcerer bloodline where you've got strange alchemical ooze powers, new fleshwarped feats representing being an alchemical experiment.

The reason I don't think this would happen is it'd be an unprecidented amount of focus on essentially one class. Ironically, if we didn't have alchemist yet, it'd be more likely to happen. There is also the fact that the "alchemy book" was probably treasure vault.

The obvious solution to that would be to have more classes that utilized Alchemy. At least one entirely new class, maybe 3 or 4 class archetypes and new class paths as you suggest, and several new archetypes that focus on specific alchemy categories, and we're mostly there.

I would add to your list gunslinger munitions crafter, that can activate an alchemical bullet at the same time they reload it and get some versatile vials to craft with.

Conclusion

In the end, the eidolon ends up having a much stronger offensive power than the companion and this without costing you an absurd 6 feats!

Honestly, if you are a caster and want to have a "companion" then you should seriously consider playing as a summoner. Because you will probably regret spending so many feats on a companion and receiving so little.

But if you want to play as a martial then the situation may be different. I would honestly recommend that you consider playing as an inventor because his companion receives many more benefits and is a true construct, with all the immunities that a construct would normally have, and is Repaired instead of Healed, which can be a problem to "heal" him in battle, but with Quick Repair, from level 7 onwards you can heal him without spending resources in a very efficient way. Besides, if he is destroyed, you can rebuild him the next day.

Not sure if anyone else feels this way, but I tend to think of the summoner as the "companion" and the Eidolon the actual character, at least as far as comparing proficiencies goes. Not sure if I ever checked point for point, but I recall the summoner's proficiencies winding up somewhere near a companion.

So basically you get a companion that can use scrolls.

I haven't changed my opinion on this, though given all the chances to errata that have not been taken, I no longer think this was some kind of error.

But, still, I think the basic bounded spellcasting benefits (BBSB) should be:

Usually gained at 6th level, these feats give you a 1st-rank spell slot and a 2nd-rank spell slot from that magical tradition. If you have a spell repertoire, you can select one spell from your repertoire as a signature spell. Archetypes refer to these benefits as the “basic bounded spellcasting benefits.” At 8th level, you replace your 1st-rank spell slot with a 3rd-rank spell slot. At 10th level, you replace your 2nd rank spell slot with a 4th rank spell slot.

instead of

Usually gained at 6th level, these feats give you a 1st-level spell slot and a 2nd-level spell slot from that magical tradition. If you have a spell repertoire, you can select one spell from your repertoire as a signature spell. Archetypes refer to these benefits as the “basic bounded spellcasting benefits.” At 10th level, you replace your 1st-level spell slot with a 3rd-level spell slot.

This would:

On the note of Elementalist class archetype, I'd like to see new Kineticist impulses. I noticed when I tried to make a pure air kineticist (no electricity) that the pickings were a bit slim.

Not to say there isn't enough to make a complete class, just more choices would be nice.

I never really dug into the final version of the kinetics, but is there a way to repurpose existing impulses so that they work for multiple elements?

Seems like that would be a straightforward way of expanding options without eating up page space.

Like, say, Deflecting Wave. I could see that being an Air or Metal impulse pretty readily, with almost no change to the description even.

And no, I'm not saying "just house rule it". I'd appreciate it if Paizo made it so every non-overflow impulse had 2 or 3 possible elements, to give elements a wider pool to choose from without increasing page count. Having it done on Paizo's end would allow them to reinforce the strengths and weaknesses of each element.

But as I said, I'm not fully up to speed on the release version of kineticists, so I may well be asking for something that already exists. If so, ignore me.

I feel like the dedication should also give one cantrip, and that basic and expert spellcasting should be other feat options.

So yeah, gives a little "works against itself" puzzle to solve.

Agreed. The skill stuff the dedication gives is interesting, but a cantrip slot (and/or a Vindicator specific focus cantrip) would actually enable the entire playstyle with a single feat. The more I think about the more head scratching this all seems.

New class options? I just thought of one just now that I think be fun. When you take in the fact Battle Harbringer has a feat at every level but level 14 and then at 18 you got to ask yourself something. Has any other sub-class/class option received so many custom feats to go along side it? They also have multiple feat choices at certain levels as well, increasing this as I feel Battle Harbinger might be the only Sub-Class/Class chassis which has multiple feats dedicated to them at the same level, where is the love for all the other doctrines or sub-classes. I want to see Flurry ranger get almost 10 exclusive feats, maybe we can do this to Barbarian!?

For a cleric, your deity is your subclass. If you compare what your deity gives you and what, say, a sorcerer bloodline gives them, they're pretty comparable.

Doctrines are functionally a class archetype, and of course BH literally is one. I've mentioned multiple times, including probably in this thread, that I wished they'd designed warpriest as "warmage", and made it the first class archetype, applicable to any caster class. Would have addressed multiple pain points, not least of which would be this frequent (and perfectly understandable) misclassification.

Now that we have BH as the blueprint, if I want anything, I think I'd like to see what a class archetype that turns any caster class into a wave caster, as BH does for clerics, would look like (if possible at all, of course). And if It can't be a single CA, then at least 1 or two that could hopefully cover multiple classes.

Finally getting a warmage CA would be cool too, but I think that's less critical now, and also something that PU could probably handle pretty well.

2. Give them four slots. Don't limit them by school. Just give them four slots each. With the oracle now having four slots and sorcerers, just give the wizard their four slots.

I'm still puzzled this did not happen. I personally would have done this, and turned spell schools into "spells you can prepare without needing them in your spellbook, they're spells you just know." It's mostly flavor still, but would lean into the idea that these spells and the theories behind them were so thoroughly studied that even ones you can't yet cast are indelibly entered into your mind.

There is precedent for monstrous ancestry archetypes in PF2E. That'd be the best approach I think.

Background would likely be too weak to satisfy, because the thing that the desired ancestry features are competing for is a skill feat. And I've seen enough Starfinder races at this point to know a lot of the stuff you'd want in one are more powerful than a skill-feat tradeoff. You'd likely need to sacrifice the skill and lore trainings, and potentially one of the attribute boosts to keep a similar power scale.

I never fully put it together, but the ancestral lore feats are essentially a way to get an additional "background" into your ancestry, with its 2 skills and the additional lore feat.

Which suggests you're correct about what needs to be traded. To get an ancestry feat, you'd need to sacrifice everything except the boosts.

I thought that'd be best as a skill feat if it couldn't just be added as part of Undead Lore, but I looked and found 5 or 6 archetype and ancestry feats, so my guess is that it will be a class feat.

I think some combination of Grave's Voice and Undead Empathy should do the trick.

Like, say:

You can use your choice of Undead Lore or Diplomacy to Make an Impression or Request things of undead creatures, even mindless undead. Even with this feat, you can only make simple requests of mindless undead. As long as there aren't any other living creatures besides you nearby, they usually let you speak. If the undead creature currently is in the thrall of a creature whose level is higher than yours, you typically need a critical success on your Diplomacy skill check.

-

All that said, I agree this should just be something you can do, probably as part of the Undead Lore ability.

..also, why wasn't this the Bone Speaker feat? It's just a name either way, but Bone Speaker sounds like a social feat, and being able to perform an autopsy sounds like it should be called something else like Osteology or Osteopathology.

Makes sense, but language updating that would be beneficial so that the question doesn't keep coming up.

Luke's suggestion to rewrite all these spells so they just target creatures, and let void immunity and vitality immunity sort out who gets targeted, seems optimal. Though there's still spells like heal that want to have different effects depending on if the creature is healed or harmed by an energy. Maybe reword those to say "if this spell heals the target" and "if this spell harms the target"? If you refuse to be specific on what kind of energy heals the target, and place the inflection point on the overall spell itself, then swapping out void for vitality would switch the polarity of the spell as intended.

Now THERE you have me. Not much I’ve suggested would reasonably apply to a huge or bigger corpse, so that’s somewhere Duplicate Foe-like summoning spell would be needed.

Although you gave me another idea. I was thinking that you could turn multiple enemy corpses into a troop, possibly as a ritual, but wasn’t sure of how to word it. Using one big corpse instead of a bunch of medium or small corpses would work a lot better.

-Corpse Raiser: Maybe untenable given the variety of enemies, but I'd like to see more done with raising actual corpses in the field. Might be a touch too evil.

Most of what I can imagine for this is pretty well covered already. Not only does Inevitable Return explicitly allow you to turn the corpses of your enemies into thralls, but I think create thrall and any other grave spell that creates a thrall should too. Certainly I’d allow a player to say, if they created a thrall in a square that had the corpse of a downed enemy, that they were using that corpse to create that thrall.

Some language to that effect might be nice, but that seems like a sidebar rather than rules content. Maybe tell GMs that necromancers can use any corpses lying about to create thralls if the other players are okay with that, but it isn’t required.

Edit: Oh, what if the inevitable return offered an action saving to grave spells that create thralls, as long as your new thrall is created in the same square as your downed enemy? I want to say this should probably be a feat, but on consideration it might be fine to just bake into the reaction.

Honestly I feel like PF2e could do with divorcing spell mechanics from the class chassis entirely and let players choose whether they are a Studied/Prepared, Repertoire/Spontaneous, Full List/Prepared caster along with what the key ability (Int, Wis, Cha) is.

But that might be just a little too much for some people potentially, especially newer players.

I tend to disagree, I don't think the design approach they take to creating classes could absorb that many choices (and so narrative tools) being taken out of the designer's hands.

A lot of us (or maybe just me) tend to think of classes as a sack of mechanics that you can apply narrative on top of. But Sayre, for one, explicitly said he takes the exact opposite approach; he starts narrative concept first and then picks out the basic structure that supports that.

And for casters, there's really not a heck of lot of structure to tinker with, since so much of the chassis is taken up by spells. Key Stat, Casting Style, List Access, and Tradition are the biggest tools in the designer's kit to flesh out their concept and differentiate classes from each other.

Further babbling on this point

If those tools are taken out of the developer's hands and given to the player, I think that would make it a lot harder for a designer to translate their concept into a mechanical class.

Sure, when they publish new lore, we’ll all take that as the new baseline. I won’t speak for others, but while new lore might not change my mind about what I think should be, but I will cheerfully accept whatever retroactive continuity Paizo feels they need.

So sure, next month that line I cited (which was an in world opinion, not ruled text) may get retconned or otherwise shown to be wrong, but next month that might also happen to stuff that got published last month. Or even stuff from the remastered guns and gears getting published in the next couple weeks. It’s all made up anyways, nothing is safe. But until they do either say something is not valid or publish something contradictory, I see no reason to assume it’s wrong.

Personally if I wanted to make the rune smith more martial, I would create resonance effects where a rune inscribed on your weapon interacts with a rune inscribed on the enemy for some sort of effect alongside invoking one of the runes.

Like for example if you had a wind rune on your weapon and the enemy had a fire rune whacking them would instead of the usual firey burst effect create a flaming vortex ring that does perhaps half damage but imbolised on a failed save and does some additional damage if they are still immobilised in the ring at the end of their next turn.

I think that might be a little too much for the class to get into, but I can see Tradition interaction feats stepping into this area. Instead of wind and fire, if you had a primal rune on your weapon and another on your target, a successful strike might hamper the movements of your target.

Another possible one might be if you have an occult rune on your weapon and you strike an occult rune bearing target with it, Rune Singer gets recharged.

If some of these resonance effects worked on strikes instead of invocations, that could incentivize keeping the passive up (on weapons and enemies at least), instead of triggering an invocation being the right choice in all situations.

and at level 1 you could use void warp and grim tendrils to damage undead.

Both of those only damage living creatures immune to vitality damage.

Pretty sure that’s what Luke meant about target massaging, you have to ignore the target or effect limits of the spells to use them for this.

Scouring pulse is good though, good find there. Also, its faction specific, not AP specific.

Spirit Monger

Thrall Enhancement Your thralls, while still being tied to the physical world, have an incorporeal essence. Whenever one of your thralls would deal physical damage, you can choose for that damage to be spirit or void damage instead.

That and necrotic bomb are the two most obvious sources for void damage that doesn't discriminate against living or dead targets.

I think...that they haven't fully made up their minds on that particular point. Or Occult could be either or both, depending on the need of the writer.

I imagine a primal necro would be throwing elemental skeletons at dudes

For me, it was "Death is a natural part of Life" flavoring that we see in many characters in literature and TV. The most recent one that comes to mind is Death in the MCU, who is presented as the green witch in the TV show she appears in.

Edit: as an aside, that comes up with surprising frequency in the text of this playtest class. I say surprising because if I were writing this class and coming at it to justify occult casting, this is not how I'd start off:

Death is as common as life, if not more so. Despite this, death and decay are considered subjects of the macabre, and those willing to dive headfirst into the fascinations they invoke are necromancers. These occult spellcasters seek the ever-changing borders of life and death, manipulating the energies—vitality and void—to suit their will.

I'd personally start by punching up occult's access to spirits and the restless undead, and maybe bring up the shadow pseudo-essence I mention in my previous post.

But if I was trying to justify twisting the primal tradition until it's arm broke, that is almost exactly what I would say to do it.

Beyond that, the idea of the musical or mentalistic necromancer is ill-supported outside of intentionally niche games like Crypt of the Necrodancer, and while we can agree that souls are important to necromancy, the mind is much more contentious, especially as the most common forms of raised undead are mindless.

If this is tripping folks up, I do have an explanation (of sorts) of why mind wound up with so much undeath when it seems like a reach. Basically, in my personal evaluation, Mind wound up covering too many concepts. All the obvious mind/memory spells of course, but also most emotion effects seem to be mind (which surprised me, I thought they'd be "spirit" by virtue of being on divine and occult lists, but no arcane and occult had more), illusions, and anything shadow related.

I think it's by this last element that Mind wanders into undead and, in some ways, shows its opposition to vital essence. On Golarian, the energies of the void are accessed by the filter of the Netherworld, or the old shadow plane. So because Mind is the essence most closely linked to shadow magic, they wind up with easier access to void energy.

Note, I've never fully liked this, and I am not defending it now. Hell, I don't even know if my guess is correct. But it's the explanation I came up with after analyzing the various traditions way back when.

Regarding primal necromancy, I personally wasn't advocating for fungi necro and those tropes. No objection to them, but I was thinking standard undead, just using the primal spell list. That they currently don't line up is part of the appeal to me, that would allow this specific class a limited ability to combine those themes while still leaving the primal tradition itself mostly untouched (I say mostly because I do want at least a couple primal void spells), since most of how they'd use those themes would be with their focus spells.

But I just realized we may well see something like that soon, maybe very soon. That seems like a good fit for backmatter in one of the spore war adventures. Well, not a class archetype of course, but maybe some feats or an archetype.

YuriP wrote:

PF2e traditions in practice was a design decision that Paizo designers made in order to solve the madness that is D&D and PF1e where each class has its own spell list

I think you are being a bit hyperbolic. We already have classes that include extra spells, such as sorcerer bloodline spells, wizard school spells, animist apparition spells, and oracle mystery spells, among others. Perhaps we could focus on the three necromancer sub-types—bone, muscle, and spirit—and assign them some fixed spells, with the usual caveat of consulting the GM to add appropriate spells as needed. I don’t understand the significant fuss about traditions when it’s clear that Paizo is consistently supplementing the gaps in the four traditions' spell lists.

That would be reasonable enough, it's the "toss all the vital and void and spirit spells in the game" want in the other thread that I objected to. It's one thing to get a flavorful and limited infusion of off-tradition spells; it's quite another to get every written and to be written spell of those traits. One is just that, flavor. The other is breaking the point of the traditions in the first place.

Arguably, having a spell system where every spell is in a trait group and your class gives you access to entire traits instead of traditions might be interesting, but that's not the system we have now.

Beyond personal preference? Nothing objective. I've pretty much already outlined my thoughts, but okay.

Honesty compels me to admit my divided mind on this topic

To me the difference is that arcane not having healing spells is a big balancing factor to nerf an already incredibly versatile spell list, while I don't see a druid or primal sorcerer getting a noticeable mechanical advantage from getting necromancy spells on the primal list. And even then, nothing stops an arcane witch from picking up the life boost spell, so I don't see how thats that different compared to a primal caster getting necromancy powers through class abilities.

I find the concept of a primal necromancer so exciting specifically because it plays against the stereotypes associated with primal castersband yet works imo really well thematically. Ofc I don't have big hope that paizo will agree with me here, but it can never hurt to try. And maybe at least something like a class archetype could be possible in the future...

Despite my arguing in another thread in defense of occult, I actually strongly agree with you that primal would have been pretty cool. It SHOULD have access to void, IMO. Druids shouldn't, I'm okay with that, but I think primal casting itself should. Or at least there should be a way for some primal caster to spec into it with a class archetype or just an archetype. The access ability that AestheticDialetic wrote here would work really well with a primal caster, probably even better than his proposal to add it to occult, since the number of concepts you could suddenly play would be so much greater.

I'm fine with occult as the only choice, but I'll definitely admit you make some compelling points. I would even give up my opposition to healing necromancy if it was done via primal magic instead of divine.

It occurred to me last night that if you really wanted, you COULD assign a skill to each essence for this class, using the next tier of knowledge skills:

Matter - Crafting
Mind - Society
Life - Survival (or Medicine)
Spirit - Performance

If this was the skill by which you drew or created your runes, and each gave you a bonus rune of that essence type, and maybe each had a level 1 feat associated with each skill that as part of it allowed you to use the alternate skill 1/minute, you'd have pretty clear class paths built into this.

But maybe not. The primary benefit for rune singing is the 1 action saving 1/minute, I wouldn't want to just give that to all runesmiths.

Don't have time at the moment to truly get into the weeds, but I can probably make a more complete pitch for this idea when I get home this afternoon. Likely you'd want to have a basic Lore Rune skill that is your default skill check (and automatically levels with your class DC) and the level 1 feats let you use alternate skills instead.

This is all just off the top of my head, so don't take it for anything serious. I just wanted to bring up the idea of skills matching essences.

Beyond personal preference? Nothing objective. I've pretty much already outlined my thoughts, but okay.

If I want to play a character that demonstrates great mastery over vital and void energy, and does so by using heal and harm spells, I would play a cleric. That's more or less what the class is designed to do; during the original cleric playtest the font mechanic was more central to the cleric's design than even your chosen deity. The feats don't mostly turn on the font now, of course, but you being a direct tap into either Creation Forge or the Void is still pretty important.

So to provide a different kind of character narrative, I want this class to demonstrate the ability to use void and vitality to damage their enemies, but I am less interested in seeing them use it to heal their allies. That, to me, is too big of a mechanic overlap with the cleric, despite replacing the font with Thralls as their battery.

For me, if I want to play a healing necromancer like you've described, I would probably just play a cleric or bones oracle and hope that there's some kind of archetype that gives access to the Thrall mechanic. Or I'd use one of the existing necromancer archetypes like Reanimator. I can imagine the "Mastery of Life and Death" class becoming a cleric feat, though probably pretty high level compared to the level 1 for necromancers (another reason to leave out heal/harm, those spells would make that ability too strong at 1 and force it higher up in the class).

For me, that’d be the worst of all worlds. You’d water down anything interesting about picking the occult list AND reinforce my least favorite aspect of the divine tradition. If healing is that important, then they should just use the divine list and be done with it. Then at least something interesting and transformative, namely that this would be a divine clash with no particular reference or need for any outside entity empowering you, is going on.

Also, had this class been based on primal or arcane, then yeah, sure, that’d make sense. But not occult. That’s too close to divine for that to make enough meaningful difference, aside from the increased access to healing.

I’m probably sounding harsher than I intend, and I apologize for that. If that helps you play the character you want, then it is impotent fur you to say so. But for me, it’s probably the most boring option they could possibly take.

With all of that said, though, being in favor of making the Necromancer occult on practical grounds does not contradict believing that the divine list would be a closer thematic fit for the class. All else held equal, and if there weren't so many divine casters already, I do think it would have made more sense to make the Necromancer divine, and doing so would've given the class access to all of the necromancy spells the occult list lacks. I think it is valid to criticize the thematic dissonance between a class that is clearly meant to harness vital essence in some form, yet uses a tradition that isn't based on vital essence at all, and I would go as far as to say that this thematic disconnect is pretty obvious when you look at the grounding and contents of each spell tradition.

To be clear, I'm not arguing on a practical basis. I guess I didn't really directly say this in my last post, but I think occult was a deliberate choice to give the class a different set of thematic grounding than the divine list would have offered. In particular, picking a list that eschews heal and harm entirely, which are the most flexible and direct void/vital spells in the game, tells a different story about how this class handles those energies versus how the cleric does.

One that the developers may have chosen to tell with this class on purpose.

I think the traditions aren’t anything more than a convenient vehicle for what they’re really after, the ability to combine runes to create synergistic and discordant effects. Someone mentioned words of power…probably in this thread. Might as well have been. But anyways, one aspect of Rune magic that frequently comes up is that in combination, some runes have greater reactions when use at the same time. I think traditions are a way to deliver that playstyle without having to get bogged down with paring specific runes with each other and deciding how they’d go. Instead, you can just have broad categories, and a pool of runes that can be applied to any one category, and anything in those categories counts.

It’s no different than if the runes had been assigned elements, or sanctification, or “Land, Sea, or Sky” groupings, all of which I’ve seen used to divvy up runes in a writer’s magic system. The divisions are arbitrary, the important part is that they’re divided at all. Since in pathfinder we’re already used to the idea that magic effects are tied to certain essences via specific traditions, traditions are as good as anything else for this purpose. Arguably tying the runes to essences would be better, as you’re really getting into the idea that runes are a kind of raw, pimoridial magic if you go that route, but traditions also give runesmiths a reason to pick up different skills, and essences would lack that.

graystone wrote:

Apples and oranges: there is ALWAYS going to be spells that are on theme that aren't on a classes spell list when classes do not have a bespoke spell list.

Correct, which is why you should perhaps not have brought them up as examples of thematic healing spells for a necromancer. If that is truly the best you can provide, then perhaps it may be time to admit that the occult list does not in fact provide the "mastery of life and death" that AestheticDialectic is asking for, certainly not as well as other spell lists.

I've begun to feel that is kind of the point. Because the cleric already possesses the class abilities and divine spell list access to provide the kind of character narrative you're looking for. A class archetype that excises your deity would be better (and ideally gives you Thralls), but right out of the box if you go all in on the heal/harm feats your character is very much that wielder of life and death that you're talking about. Picking up the necromancer multi class archetype once available will get you the rest of the way.

Which means this class should probably take an at least slightly different approach. Limiting access to healing, while providing access to all the attack options for void and vitality as well as the ability to freely swap the energy of the two at will and at need demonstrates a different kind of mastery.

But I don't insist on it. I just don't think more healing, or the divine list, is the way to go for this class.

It's okay to just want to see healing necromancers. There's no need to drag anything else beyond your own interest into this discussion.

Personally, I don't want to see them. I don't think it fits the theme of the class they're going for, and with spell schools dropped the whole "healing is necromancy" no longer applies to this game. Even with the description of necromancers as wielders of vitality, I read that as weaponized vital energy. So I'd rather they lean into Master of Life and Death and release some void and vital spells for the occult list that can only be used to harm, and that necromancers are uniquely able to cast at both the living and dead to equal effect.

I might also want to see Spirit Mongers get the choice of dealing spirit or vital damage as their thrall upgrade, and maybe add a 4th Grim Fascination that leans into shadow/netherworld aspects.

I don't know, man; I kind of like the elemental wizard. Being able to cast Element Embodied is nice, and polymorph spells like the Animist Avatar are some of my favorites.

Then to Gortle's point, a class archetype that allowed wizards (and magi and arcane witches/sorcerers/summoners) to cast primal instead of arcane spells would have enabled you to do exactly that without the need for a custom list.

Honestly the elementalist list seems like an attempt to have primal casting without druid casting, if that makes sense. All 4 traditions are very tied to the trappings of their base class, but primal has it the worst in terms of the number of spells that seem druid rather than primal. For instance all the speak with animal/animal ally spells and the like. Fits perfectly with a druid! I am less convinced that vital or material essence should enable that, when mind might be more appropriate. It works, don't get me wrong, but the explanation seems as forced as animate dead on the arcane list.

Had similar thoughts, and did not like the conclusions I came to.

As I see it, there's 3 ways the rune mechanic can go.

1. What we have: bespoke magical mechanics that are carved out from the rest of the system so as to not interact weirdly with it, but also is unlikely to get much support going forward. Also have to use a lot of page space to once again give basic options like "additional fire damage on a strike". Edit: points though to the designers for creativity with doing this by lowering the target's fire resistance. If it made the target vulnerable once their fire resistance was 0, that'd be even cooler.

2. Spells in a can: runes become a class specific way to generate spell casts, sort of like temporary scrolls.
Personally unsatisfying to me, but the benefit would be the designers could let the specific effects of runes be someone else's headache, and concentrate their efforts on making the application, creation, and usage of runes in combat and exploration modes interesting.

3. Runic Alchemy: The runesmith class mechanic becomes the ability to use runes (the magic item) better than any other class. Specifically they'd be able to quickly generate and apply those runes for free on the battlefield as a consumable, and add an activation effect to the passive rune. Probably want a third creation option "Engrave" to differentiate between runes that are meant to be applied permanently as normal (engraved) and those meant to be invoked (etched and traced).
I personally favor this approach right now, as it presents runesmiths as masters of those specific class of magic items, but what is interesting to me might not be the best for the game.

All 3 have pretty obvious problems and potential headaches. I'm not fond of option 1, but I also dislike the options they have presented, so that may be coloring my judgement. Genuinely not sure which way I even want them to take this class.

Would they fall?

I'm just reading over the Thrall sidebar, and the spell, and the description in the text. None of it mentions movement speed. and as someone pointed out we are allowed to flavor them as spirits... So even at level 1... would they necessarily fall? I mean, Even if we suppose they linger in the air, they still can't chase the target down, or anything. So would a suspended spirit thrall really be that wild of a supposition?

So, relevant to the entire discussion but especially this, the grave spell "Recurring Nightmare" says:

You conjure a thrall within range. Unlike other thralls, the nightmare can share space with other creatures, and other creatures can move through its space with ease. This thrall doesn’t fall if in the air, and any ability that would make it Stride makes it Fly instead.

Does a couple other interesting things, like allow you to Sustain to keep popping it into another creature's space so you can harass them, but the bolded section implies that normally Thralls do just fall if they're created in air. I suppose you can detonate them with Necrotic bomb, but otherwise yeah they just drop. It also seems to confirm that it is perfectly valid to create a thrall within the 30' sphere; they just fall and instantly get destroyed if they do. I would say they fall after making the Create Thrall melee strike against a flying enemy if one is there, swiping at the enemy even as they slide past like a cartoon cat shredding curtains.

I'm just guessing at this, so if we've gotten developer feedback that Wile E Coyote thralls are not, in fact, intended, then that's that. But it may need to be spelled out in the spell itself, perhaps by adding an "Area a square on the ground within 30 ft" section to the cantrip, and saying that the thrall is created in that area, as we see with the Zombie Horde grave spell.

Otherwise it seems like a simple upgrade to Create Thrall that gives it a longer range, and perhaps allow your thralls to simply hover in air (if you chose, creating a thrall and letting it fall directly on your enemy seems fun too), would solve several problems.

It was one of those "holy butts. Did I come up with this? This seems too smart to have come from me" moments. And attaching it to this class works really well with the flavor they're going with. My original idea was that the Medium would coax a spirit into becoming a trap. A Spirit Monger necromancer can just snap their fingers and force a thrall into becoming one.

Thinking further, since you could place limits on the number of active haunts up, and they fade after a minute (possibly extended by a focus point), this would likely work as a grave cantrip.

Guess we'll see what the final class looks like, and I can always toss it up on Infinite if nothing similar gets put in.

YuriP wrote:

I'm not so sure due the number of feats that companions requires. Maybe the designer wants to use this book space for other feats once that you can get this companion via archetype.

IMO, it'd be a perfect time for a sidenote saying 'hey, interested in an undead companion or familiar? Look here!'. Or they could add such feats as 'additional feats' without reprinting them in the book.

Or if they do reprint those feats, remaster and reprint the entire Reanimator and Undead Master archetypes. Both are appropriate for what I assume the book will be about.

Personally, I would love to see more on the spectral side, more interaction with ghosts and haunts, for example, like the animist’s apparition sense feat, or something along those lines.

A random idea I had a while ago while pomebrewing a Medium class was a feat that let you, as a psuedo-focus spell, create a haunt that used the rules for snares with a couple changes. The concept would probably work even better on this class using a thrall than my own version.

Naturally, I don't expect to see something quite like that, but something that lets you make a haunt or other kind of necromantic hazard could be a cool way to reuse a couple existing (and underutilized) aspects of the rules.

This is the case of thralls IMO. Once that the game doesn't just said "thralls are too stupid to Interact with things" the people will put in question "oh but why my thralls cannot Interact, they can Strike but cannot Interact. This dumb" when probably the idea is to make thrall to work like any zombie that can only bite, scratch or bang the things without any motor coordination and reasoning to do nothing more complex than that and that's strong due they numbers than due their capabilities.

Except that’s not actually the problem you had upthread. The problem was you saw “interact” and wanted it to be “activate”, which is a different activity entirely.

And no, I don’t think thralls are supposed to be ravenous zombie horde or the like, under the necromancer’s control. It’s the difference between thralls and minions, and thralls aren’t minions. Minions have their own will, however suppressed , but thralls are, well, in your thrall. They have no movement, no ability, no needs, wants, or motivations beyond what you explicitly give them, and that does not come cheap. It would be more accurate to describe thralls as physical extensions of your magic and personality than a discreet creature in their own right, one which you control instead of embody.

Agreed. I almost think it was meant to in some draft, with create thrall creating a pseudo focus pool that you could then spend, sort of like an Inventor’s unstable.

Sort of glad the did ultimately go with focus spells and regular spells, but a handful of grave cantrips that still used that would be cool.

Also, the grave fascination bonus focus spells do need to remain focus spells imo. Otherwise the necromancers don’t get focus spells or points at all at first, and that’s not good.

Actually, now that I think about it, there should probably be at least a couple grave cantrips that consume your Thrall as part of the cost instead of a focus point. Necrotic Bomb and Muscle Barrier could probably be dialed down a bit to be stronger than a cantrip but not as strong as a focus spell, but leave Life Tap and Dead Weight as focus spells. Bone Spear could go either way, but may as well leave that one alone since Bone Shapers use it.

That would solve part of the longevity issue at low levels people have mentioned.

All of this is to say that Occult really doesn't and shouldn't have the monopoly on all things gritty and spooky. Primal magic ought to be just as gory, if not outright gorier than occult magic due to its potential for body horror, and in a world where primal casters could be more than just Druids, there'd probably be room for necromantic primal casters too, same as divine necromancers. Neither need to consort with deities to raise the dead, they just need to be able to use void magic to create rather than destroy, which their control over vital essence should let them do. With all of this said, though, I'm not holding my breath for a total redo of spell traditions and lists, certainly not just for the Necromancer's sake, so I can understand going for a different tradition irrespective of thematics

Plus, death magicians that use nature to empower themselves is a pretty big trope that's not tapped in PF2! The most recent example from a major company being the MCU version of Death, presented as "the original Green Witch". This title seems like it would have been a great place to add that, and indeed we still might. Shadow Druids that draw on the Netherworld instead of the First World seem like something Geb would have figured out, given their economy is so based on food exports and, you know, the whole ruled over by undead thing.

As you said, I'm not holding my breath either, but it seems like kind of a missed opportunity here, much though having a prepared occult caster is in and of itself intriguing (and given how completely necromantic and void themed spells feature on the occult list, which is the biggest factor to me for why occult does make sense).

You'd probably have to write off a divine necromancer's ability to cast vitality spells, but then the occult tradition is an even worse fit, with lots of bard-y stuff like creating a bridge made of pure music. It works on the Psychic, because Psychics are very much about doing funky stuff with their minds

Well if we're really going to go there, I'd argue that Psychics should have been Arcane. There's not a lot from the Occult list I'd miss, and the Arcane list has the energy manipulation and body transformation that I feel is missing from the concepts the class can cover.

But anyways, I'd have thought Primal would be interesting thematically (because death magic is irretrievably linked to nature magic in my mind), but agree that it is missing far too many spells for that to be practical. As far as themes goes, Occult does seem like the best option.

Both arcane and occult shouldn't even have the animate dead spell if we are being consistent with what we've been given

Dead horse, and kind of off topic, but just wanted to say you are not alone in feeling this.

I got the game design logic and the offered in game explanation, but it was always something I just shrugged off rather than felt made the game more interesting. I may be the only person that hopes it is sorted out next iteration of pathfinder, but I do hope the big necromancy spells get quietly left out of Arcane (or whatever the equivalent winds ups called).

All that aside, I'm intrigued by this announcement and hope this does move the needle a bit more towards the "oh that's a cool reason that spell is on that list" side.

Teridax wrote:

Their central gameplay element is Create Thrall, a 1-action focus cantrip that summons a thrall that rises up and attacks a nearby creature, using your MAP. Thralls are immobile, can't use actions, have 1 HP, and automatically get hit and fail saving throws, but can be used in various ways, so less like minions and more like a resource you generate. Each time your spellcasting proficiency rank increases, you can create an additional thrall.

Close enough, welcome back, Minions from D&D 4e. I've missed you, and I'm surprised to see you on the player side of the table!

You and me both. One of my favorite parts of 4e.

Extremely late to this party, but this topic intrigued me.

So I agree that there is a large, open design space for shapeshifting/body mods.

To some extent they seem to have done this on purpose. The whole concept of battleforms shuts down a wide swath of concepts, which I believe started off as a balance concern, but which really shouldn't be any more. Like, I understand the balance concerns that keep my Beastkin Psychic from casting spells in her Tiny baby crocodile form (she could be hidden somewhere where she couldn't really be noticed or targeted), but those all went out the window as soon as Awakened Animals became a thing.

So there may be an opportunity to backtrack on that a bit, but they may very well not want to.

The other thing about body mods, though is that they don't play well at all tables. For some people there is an inherent squick factor -- body horror is a content warning for a reason. (I'll cop to being one of these -- I have never played an alchemist in any version of the game because bombs bore me and almost every other class feature freaks me out.) So building an entire class around it is problematic. Archetypes, subclasses, and feats are a more likely way to go.

Building an entire class around guns and steampunk is also extremely not what some DMs want at their tables. That's why they're in Guns and Gears, and to the extent possible self-contained in that book; for easy banning or allowing.

So the fact that not every table wants body horror/modification makes, I think, that topic more likely to spin an entire book around than less. Best to jam as much of it as possible into a single sourcebook, including an entire class or two that indulges the heck out of it, so that it can easily be dropped in or out as the DM and table deems appropriate.

Having said that, it suddenly occurs to me that more than most topics, this book would work as a bridge between PF2 and SF2, as both games previously had classes that went there. Have both teams develop part of it (and each get a class), and have options that are for either game and at least a few that work well as written for both.

Off the cuff that strikes me as a bad, overly complicated idea, but I'll be the first to admit the developers frequently see opportunities where I see problems. At the very least, a web supplement written by the other team suggesting how to adapt it into whichever game did not ultimately write the book would be welcome I think, so that the concepts are readily made available to the widest audience possible.

Also, kudos to Gaulin for bringing this up in the first place. Really cool idea.