DMurnett's page

To be clear I already love this class. Much more than Mechanic. But it is very clear that they're struggling in multiple areas and I don't want that for them, so I figured I'll toss in some suggestions for what to do about it (I'm no game designer tho so take it with a heap of salt).

Technomancer's action economy is bad and multiple subclasses struggle to get mileage out of their gimmicks. I think this would be alleviated if, across the board, their level 1 focus spells were 1-2 action spells that are meant to synergize with their spellshapes and overclocks and jailbreak benefits, instead of Even More Spellshapes. They could also get action compression feats that let them do X action plus spellshape, such as step/stride, shoot/reload, or take out an item like, for example, a spell gem.

Paradoxically enough, they also don't really get good one-action tasks to fit into their turns, that aren't spellshapes at least, which means they're much more railroaded into always casting spells. While giving them ways to spellshape alongside other actions could alleviate this, I think the class just needs more to do in general. We've heard of casters that focus on their casting, Wizard and Sorcerer are both more or less no-frills hyper-effective casters, while I think there's definitely space (heh) to explore that even further in Starfinder I definitely don't think a concept as brimming with identity as "Technomancer" should be the place to do it.

Which leads into my next point actually, which is that Technomancer doesn't have a ton of techy things to do despite the name. The flavor of the class is on point but the class really needs more ways to interact with ambient tech or carried gear above and beyond their spell list and the fairly narrow Overclock. This could be a perfect space to slot in more one-action feats and features past their spellshapes. More things like the Ammo Infector Virus! Technomancer is a fun idea, they need to do more with it!

Brought to you by the author of "Akashic Connection Should Be Deleted From The Game", now presenting: Mines Exocortex Needs To Be Reworked Beyond Recognition Or Replaced Outright

It's mechanically (heh) poorly supported, has notable action economy problems, potentially has an even worse case of playtest Necromancer's grounded thralls issue, can potentially run out of its main class feature with no recourse (which as of remaster not even Alchemist does), and is just... Strangely narrow as a base concept. But I don't believe it's completely beyond saving. For one, making it a more nonspecific trapper than just mines could do it wonders in increased adaptability, and wouldn't compromise its area denial shtick. For another, it could focus on one mine (or ideally other traps but for now I'll stick to mine lingo to avoid confusion) at a time instead of peppering the battlefield with them, which would make it easier to balance letting you mod it and possibly removing their resource restrictions, though admittedly this would make it less unique. Even barring that, Mines Mechanic should absolutely get a default way to generate more mines mid-combat somehow, either at an action tax or reduced functionality or possibly both, similar to Alchemist.

Well, technically they're on par but I don't buy that. Wizard is trained in their tradition skill (Arcana) and 2+int free skills. Techno gets their tradition skill (Arcana), Computers, and 1+int free skills. That's guaranteed 3 for both of them, and yes, realistically a good amount more since they're int classes, but like... Why does Technomancer have a marginally worse version of Wizard's most notable weakness? I legitimately cannot think of another class, PF2 or SF2, that has 1+int free skills. So yeah, I think Technomancer should get a small bump up to 2+int free skills, as a treat.

I have no clue where to put this post so here goes... I've been interested in the Pathfinder Comics but both due to preference and financial status I want to get them digitally. I have found no obvious way to do so. Are they just, not available in digital form anywhere or have I just not been looking hard enough?

This is something I noticed on both of the playtest classes. Necromancer can effortlessly opt into feats that deal with the other types of undead, and Runesmith explicitly has a lot of feats that only work if you inscribe multiple tradition runes. To be clear I think this is great, I love having the option to be really non-committal with my build. That said I love even more to cling to one specific narrow idea and build everything around it! And currently neither class supports that fantasy especially well. A full vitamancer ghosts only build simply doesn't have enough feat support, and a full Arcane runesmith even less so.

As written, you can etch a rune by spending 10 minutes in exploration mode. Nowhere is it specified that this has to be your exploration activity. You can sneak and etch, track and etch, treat wounds and etch, with archetyping you can refocus and etch, so on. This is a fact RAW but I'm wondering if this is actually intended or not, what does everyone else think?

Undead Lore is already a standard lore, it's a creature type and a popular one at that. There's plenty of backgrounds that give it too. Bardic and Esoteric lore don't conflict with standard lores so I don't see why this one does. It's an easy fix though, just name the special lore the class gives you something else, like Necromantic lore, it already covers more than standard Undead lore theoretically would.

Full disclosure: I don't have War of Immortals and have only seen as much as Paizo, AMAs, and YouTubers have shared so I don't know the exact rules of Mythic, but I would hope that that doesn't matter much. So, Mythic Destinies. They're awesome aren't they? And even on release there's a pretty good variety of them already, but there's always room for more! I wanna speculate/suggest more of them because that's fun, and I wanna hear everyone else's ideas too.

Fiends really made out good with two separate destinies when celestials only got one which everyone and their mother already knows but I haven't seen many people mention that you can't become a Psychopomp Usher. Or any Monitor in fact. Let us! Other fairly obvious creature types to throw in are fey and elementals, I've also heard someone bring up dragons as an idea and I absolutely love that too. An Athamaru using those mythic points to just barely succeed at swimming up a waterfall to claim its true dragonhood, anyone?

An idea I came up with that I'm pretty proud of is like, a merged "I will carry on my mentor's legacy" and "I am the wise old mentor figure" type destiny. You start out practicing the super secret unique technique that only your teacher knew and are on your path to, like, perfect Ansatsuken without giving into the dark temptations it offers or whatever, and as you level up further you start taking on your own pupils and eventually become a bona fide Uncle Iroh or Ben Kenobi. The level 20 feat that gives you a form of immortality would be understood as you semi-literally living on through your pupils as you, the player, get control of one of them who have stats of your choice of maybe a slightly lower level than you (though probably otherwise very similar to yourself.) Its feats could include stuff like if you help anyone retrain or otherwise learn an option, they get some sort of typed bonus to using it for a certain amount of time.

Well, more specifically Warrior Android weirdness. This technically applies to PF Androids too but since those guys are fairly old and I can only hope due for a remaster any time now, I'm surprised this hasn't been addressed in this playtest. How come the heritage (sub-heritage?) specifically called out for being the fighty one is the worst pick for a martial character? It gives you absolutely nothing if you already have martial proficiency. It's also more generally kind of bad, this martial proficiency doesn't scale at all so even if you're a caster that really wants to shoot the bigger shooty guns you're better off playing a human and taking the general feat for that. It's always a feel-bad moment for me when making a character when the flavorful thing to pick entirely overlaps with a different flavorful thing I've already picked, and I don't think I could begin to imagine a worse example than "Warrior" being bad for warrior characters. I feel like at the very least rolling medium armor proficiency into it too would make it feel less underwhelming at least a little bit, but more generally I think Warrior just needs some form of a rework. Also unrelated but what happened to Impersonator Android, why was that one not grandfathered into SF2? I get that it's more thematically appropriate on lost Golarion and Androids' situation there, but I wouldn't think it's by such a huge margin that it's lost alongside the planet...

A Kineticist pregen? Does that mean that going forward we can expect pregenerated sheets for non-core classes as well? That would be very exciting indeed! At least to my knowledge Yoon is the first one.

So we know that Mechanic and Technomancer aren't coming in the system's initial release, and will begin playtesting... Eventually. Last I heard, the Starfriends are dedicated to making sure that time isn't too far past the release of the initial core books so that some version of them can be played from day 1. This may or may not coincide with the starship playtest, we'll see. In discussions recently, I see more and more people explicitly saying that the eventual full release of Mechanic and Technomancer will be in some sort of splatbook themed around technology.

Has anyone at Paizo actually said that? If so, where? Because while it's a safe assumption just based on the thematic link, to me it seems unlikely. I figure those two (being former 1e core classes), as well as starships, the first batch of archetypes for the system, and just anything miscellaneous not covered at launch, will be in an APG/PC2-esque core book rather than some dedicated tech supplement. Again, if we have word otherwise I'd love a source.

God I'm gonna get lynched for this... I truly do apologize but the contrarian on my shoulder won't let me not share this take. Remember when they said in the field test that they planned to not give Mystic any occult subclasses? And then I assume everyone said "well why not? Give it one" because Akashic is here and it's a mess. Its feat support is abysmal and it feels much more underwhelming than the other connections. I know that this can be fixed just by, you know, giving it better support, but there's other issues.

Thanks to it existing, half of the other subclasses are also a mess just by proxy. Both shadows and music have consistently been associated with the occult arts in Pathfinder, but Shadow and Rhythm are divine and primal respectively. If there wasn't occult support for this class I'd agree that those are the most reasonable substitutions, but that's not the class we have now. They end up feeling really out of place with the current Mystic. Changing both (or even just one of them) to occult would mean that it's comparatively way overrepresented, especially when compared to whichever poor tradition is only getting one fifth of one half of the casters in the game.

Not to mention the loss of beautiful symmetry, oh my poor heart can't take it! This is by far my least... Good argument but it's still a real complaint I have so here goes. Having two caster classes, with two traditions each, and with two subclasses per tradition is really intuitive and just has a very nice flow about it. Akashic tramples all over it. Looking at it from a new player perspective especially, it's not nearly as neat as Pathfinder's caster selection. There in both the old and new core book there's one caster for each tradition and one that can choose via subclass. With the smaller core class selection of Starfinder that's not really viable, so having two casters with variable traditions grouped by which two are the most alike is an elegant compromise, and should have been kept that way.

The most common and best counterargument I'm anticipating is that Mystic feels like a class that should be able to do occultism. I actually agree with this, I think it would have been great if the Starfinder team found better ways of allocating the traditions between classes! But this is what they went with. I know the playtest is grounds for some pretty big shakeups (I'm advocating for some if you couldn't tell), but the class lineup changing is not one I'm anticipating. And with the current lineup, splitting the spell lists between a divine/primal Mystic and arcane/occult Witchwarper is simply the cleanest solution. They made their bed. It's time to lie in it and get rid of occult on Mystic.

Characters, without exception, want some form of armor, which have improvements at the same levels (and actually, as currently written, earlier) that give you an equal item bonus to AC. Casters don't want to run around unarmored when they have Light Armor proficiency now. Plated Vesks at least aren't wearing tech armor, but they do get access to Resiliency runes as normal so they get the same item bonus too. Not to mention, having literally anything, even a Flight Suit, is preferable to dying in the icy cold vacuum of space in the event that the air locks crap out or something.

I can't think of a single scenario in this system where a character would actually rather wear nothing than have armor. Not least of all because there's no augment to get a similar item bonus to AC or basic environmental protections. If there were I could almost envision some absolute madman of a Solarian or Operative going for it as a meme build but no such luck. I'm surprised we're getting stuff that's more pointless than the pre-remaster Bracers of Armor were.

This is strange, especially since they do have near identical math and progression. Seemingly to make it the same levels as armor progression? That seems backasswards to me, it seems like bad design when a highly armored character has to shell out credits for upgrades to both of their AC boosters at once instead of having them spaced out between levels. If it has its own progression that only occasionally overlaps with other equipment improvements this issue comes up much less, and best I can tell in Pathfinder it only happens with Weapon runes so there's an actually interesting choice to make about whether you think a shield up or weapon up is more immediately pressing, instead of making a choice between what flavor of defense improvement you want first. That's if you even care about advancing your shield which a class without Shield Block, and especially one with the Shield cantrip, might not.

Also, random tangent, Shield improvements don't have the same max stat line limitations as the Reinforcing Rune. Seems like a pointless thing to exclude. To be fair it was mostly irrelevant on the shields that were actually printed in the game but still.

It might seem out there at first but hear me out. From Kineticist, we have the idea that classes with powers that are more "physical" than spellcasting but nonetheless mystical in nature use Constitution for their abilities. I don't understand Starfinder lore enough to tell whether a Solarian's powers are supposed to be considered magical (I.e. subject to an anti-magic field the same way a Kineticist is, please clarify this somewhere Paizo) but, and this is just my opinion, wielding the very sun as your sword feels like a pretty mystical ability. So the change would be consistent with past PF classes with similar flavor, for one.

And for another, this change would help a lot with how MAD the Solarian is. Think about it. If it focuses on Strength as its attack/damage stat, you have to make a choice between Dex for AC and Con for survivability, with Dex also determining (among other things) their accuracy with Solar Flare and potentially guns. If Con was the main stat, and both the to-hit and damage of their attacks used it like they should, they'd be far less split between Strength for heavier armor and Dex for lighter. This gives much needed build freedom to the class.

Finally, this frees up Soldier to be a Strength class. Let's be honest here, a majority of Soldier's early class progression is features making up for the fact that it's not supposed to take Strength. Walking Armory is a non-feature. Fearsome Bulwark equally so, and that one actually hurts Soldier builds thanks to being delayed. And then Close Quarters wants Strength anyways! Simply giving it Strength, maybe giving it 12 HP, and ideally giving it a feature to use its heavy weapons as Brutal would fix almost all of the class' awkwardness.

This is an oxymoron. But I'm not lying, go read its Armor Expertise feature. To my knowledge there's no errata either, though it might have been addressed on other social media and I wouldn't know. Is the feature incorrect and only supposed to give it for medium armor (and maybe heavy armor if you took the level 1 feat), or is the text of armor specialization finally outdated and light armor can theoretically have armor spec?

Feel free to add your own observations if you don't think it warrants its own thread.

Unclear if/how effects that alter the size of your quantum field (most notably Warped Infinities) interacts with Quantum Aura.

Predict Outcome's legendary clause applies regardless of whether the skill you're actually legendary in is your tradition's skill. I.e. a Precog, occult caster, could very well be untrained in occultism but legendary in arcana (a skill nominally irrelevant to how it Witchwarps) and still get the benefits. Either change the clause to being legendary in "the skill appropriate to your spellcasting tradition" or to your paradox skill (both are also good for future-proofing on the off-chance we get non-occult/arcane paradoxes.)

Shift Energy feat should specify that it alters the spell's traits as well as its damage. I.e. if it makes a cold spell deal acid damage, it should remove the spell's Cold trait and replace it with Acid. I'm also unsure what "a creature's immunities are unaffected" means in this context. The feat makes no mention of bypassing resistances or exploiting weaknesses, besides the implied effect that dealing a different damage type won't interact with them to begin with. Or does this mean that a fire elemental will still be immune to a Fireball even if it now deals cold damage?

How does In Another Life interact with the myriad ways in which you can get feats from things other than your own ancestry? Can you take your Versatile Heritage's ancestry feats if you have one? Can you take one from an Adopted Ancestry? Can you take one from an ancestry you chose for Barathu's Convergent/Manifold Evolution? That last one I'm especially curious about because I'd love to play a Barathu Witchwarper focused around silly ancestry feat combinations.

Zone Overlap is really cool but the enhanced double-up effect should probably be described in Zone feats themselves. Without that any future Zone effects still have to specify it themselves leading to inconsistency, and this change would also mean that theoretically other feats/features can interact with the enhanced effect.

Unless I'm missing something, they just aren't. Why, again? It seems strange to me that you have to use on of your free skill proficiencies to become trained in Arcana if you're an Analyst Witchwarper. In Pathfinder 2e every caster gets innate proficiency for their casting skill, even ones with a variable tradition such as Sorcerer and Witch, and for good reason, it makes sense for a class to be good at the thing that drives their spellcasting. I do think it's great that certain skills scale off of the non-tradition skill a subclass gives you (such as getting the Epiphany spell of another Mystic connection) instead of its tradition skill for a change, but your tradition skill still isn't, nor should it be, irrelevant enough to be optional.

Well, not the ability itself. I think it's a very fun and flavorful, and I wish some strength-based characters got something similar because yes, being buff enough can in itself be intimidating. The thing that confuses me is why this is a level 3 ability. I had the same reaction to the field test.

Intimidation, at least, is a skill that the soldier starts trained in, but has a hard time using without a charisma dip until level 3. Of course you might want to play a charismatic soldier, but if you don't, your main skill is really bad for exactly two levels.

Athletics is not that much more reasonable, if you take proficiency in it at all. Thanks to armor having strength requirements you would want something of a strength dip, but soldier gets Walking Armory at level 1 which makes that (and carrying capacity) con reliant! Currently strength is only really relevant to soldier if you play Close Quarters. If you wanna go athletics (which you might only want to if you go Close Quarters and want more strength anyways), you have an increased reliance on strength for a very short amount of time for some reason.

This ability encourages some very strange build choices, either making an attribute dip that (potentially) won't be relevant to you past very early levels, or playing at a pretty major disadvantage in skills you're nominally supposed to be good at for a (usually) negligible portion of your adventuring career. This doesn't even affect characters that start at a higher level since they can fully dump both of those stats with no repercussions. I would either move it to a basic starting feature like Walking Armory, or a level 1 feat if always starting with it feels too strong. But Soldiers should have access to it at level 1 because leaving it for later necessarily introduces the mess I just laid out.