GameDesignerDM's page

I have played several Fighters. None of them have been unplayable - in fact, they are very much playable. Highly, even.

Highly doubt that, it might just be the expectations are different (i.e. starting at 2nd-level, when people don't have a lot of skill increases, higher proficiencies from class chassis bumps, ect.)

I think Myth-Speaker will give us more and the first real idea of the arena Paizo was thinking for Mythic beyond the stuff in WoI.

A bit of a moot point, anyway, I think since Paizo has basically already said we won't ever get anything that is a bespoke Ninja or Samurai class/archetype or anything like that.

Wait you mean all this time he wasn't just a angel pretending to be a wizard but a real wizard, I guess I have misjudged him he is back to being one of my favorite wizards.

No, he is an angel, effectively. Nothing Deriven said changes the fact that he is a Maia, a messenger of the Valar sent to aid the peoples of Middle-earth, with innate powers as an Ainur. You can't talk about Wizards in Arda and then not consider what magic is and what it means, and how it differs from what we view it in d20 games.

(In the 5E version of The One Ring, the only 'magic' you can do is maybe little things related to your culture - like Elves with lights - but its not spells, and in some cases is actually more 'knowledge' than anything magical. Arda's magic is fundamentally different, and you can't discount it when talking about Wizards.)

He was sent once before, to protect the Elves at Cuiviénen, and he wasn't in the guise of an old man then, and likely used his actual name - Olórin.

The Pathfinder Wizard has little to do with Gandalf at all - or any of the Istari - barring an aesthetic similarity, and even then, only if you make certain choices.

Like, there are times when Jedi are called 'Wizards' in Star Wars, but they aren't at all like Wizards in Pathfinder, either. Many others have already stated that the word itself is broad and that it has little identity on its own, and that Pathfinder's Wizard has its own identity that should be used to make the class unique.

World-based spins are irrelevant. For Tolkien's world, the Istari were wizards. You are wrong about where their power comes from. They learned magic in Middle Earth and practiced it learning it from various ancient traditions. That is why Gandalf is known to use spells he learned. Saruman also learned how to weave magic and send it against others. It was something learned, not something automatic.

No, I'm not. I quoted the man himself. They are Ainur, and they have innate magic. Doubly so when they were the Five Guardians, and Morgoth and Sauron (also Ainur) had innate magic.

Men believed that they acquired it through study, but that was something that they permitted them to believe - Elrond, Círdan, and Galadriel were the only ones who knew the truth of their origin. There wasn't anyone to teach them magic, because the Ainur were the ones who taught the Elves much of their magic when they dwelt in Aman, and Men cannot weave magic in the same way. (Letter 155 puts forth that something like knowing the language of an animal would not be magic, but knowledgeable.)

Narya had the power to subtly allow people to resist tyranny, and the usual concealment by all except the One, and resistance against time - but anyone in Pathfinder can wear a magic ring, that's not the domain of any one class.

They are not Wizards as would be found in Pathfinder, and again, they would be more akin to NPCs with their own rules than any real class. I have long held that magic in Arda is a poor example for mainstay d20 magic systems because it functions fundamentally different and is a subtle thing, not as we know magic in these games.

If anything, Gandalf is closer to Odin than Merlin. Look at depictions of Odin and you'll see Gandalf is pretty much a 1:1. There's also a ton of norse-inspired things in LoTR so the paralalles to Odin are even more obvious. But regardless of that, I don't think Gandalf or the Istari are wizards, clerics, or any members of a particular class. They are closer to being pure divine beings like angels or azata. AKA they use monster creation rules.

Absolutely, yeah. I think it was a 1946 letter that Tolkien made the same point, calling him an 'Odinic wanderer' and his name comes from the Völuspá of the Elder Edda, where he took the names of the dwarves in The Hobbit from.

GameDesignerDM wrote:

Deriven Firelion wrote:

R3st8 wrote:

I wonder why its so hard to get this one class right but others are relatively ok some even great, what is so special about the wizard?

In fantasy, Merlin, Gandalf, Raistlin, Saruman, Morgana Le Fay, Bayaz, Circe, and the list of fantasy wizards could go on.

Gandalf, Saruman, and the Istari from LotR are really more Clerics than Wizards in d20 terms, and aren't the best example, in fairness.

Not really. They don't do a whole lot of healing or any of that. They are skilled at different types of magic. Gandalf and Saruman being more wizard-like. Radagast you could probably make a druid since he could talk to animals.

They were definitely known as wizards and practiced magic as a wizard learning spells like when Gandalf was searching his mind for opening spells.

Obviously, they were also likely Maia sent from up on high and that learned magic over their long lives.

It's not about their healing, it's the source of their magic. Really, they likely aren't any class, but NPCs with their own rules, and probably had been sent as the Five Guardians to protect the Elves before they were the Heren Istarion.

They were each direct servants of a Valar, which is where they got most of their powers - Gandalf Manwë and Varda, Saruman Aulë, Radagast Yavanna, and the Blue Wizards Oromë - which is why they aren't d20 Wizards to me, but Clerics if they needed to be mapped to a class, but again are probably NPCs since they hit so many boxes. Gandalf, notably, often directly fighting with a sword and staff than using any spell, or Saruman abandoning his way in favor of material craft and industrialization, or Radagast having more care for the natural world, animals, and plants.

They may have studied lore, but their magic was innate - and magic in Arda is very different from Golarion anyway. It was subtle, often unseen, and not very flashy. Tolkien himself also admitted he was probably too casual about the use of the word 'magic', or describing what it is.

(Gandalf does talk about 'spells in the tongues of Men, Elves, and Orcs' in the Fellowship, but Tolkien wrote later in a letter that 'a difference between the use of 'magic' in this story is that it is not to be come by 'lore' or spells; but it is an inherent power not possessed or attainable by Men as such.')

Whatever they might be, they aren't d20 Wizards to me, and trying to emulate any of them with the class is a fool's errand. More to the topic, it's like it was said above that I agree with - Wizard is really broad and unspecific, and difficult to satisfy all parties thoughts of what one is.

R3st8 wrote:

I wonder why its so hard to get this one class right but others are relatively ok some even great, what is so special about the wizard?

In fantasy, Merlin, Gandalf, Raistlin, Saruman, Morgana Le Fay, Bayaz, Circe, and the list of fantasy wizards could go on.

Gandalf, Saruman, and the Istari from LotR are really more Clerics than Wizards in d20 terms, and aren't the best example, in fairness.

It doesn't hurt that we've still got an entire Tian Xia's worth of plot hooks unharvested for the future - and with luck, Arcadia will join it soon!

And Casmaron! Myth-Speaker should give us a taste of that, hopefully.

GameDesignerDM wrote:

I also played a Sniper Gunslinger who was the single greatest contributor to combat and out of combat.

Once again, i don't mean to be mean but you can understand that singular experiences are not absolute statements and they don't account for the absurdly singular and unique experience everyone has. i've seen, on multiple accounts, a warpriest outdamage a barbarian, should we say that warpriests are better damage dealer than barbarians?

The same can be said of your statements too, though. Like, whenever someone comes to the forums and says some declarative X statement, there are always people coming out being like "actually no, that's not been my experience" - so I really don't think any of this is some outlier or anything like that, and just that everyone's experience is actually different, and maybe we shouldn't be making blanket statements about something being universally true.

I also played a Sniper Gunslinger who was the single greatest contributor to combat and out of combat.

PossibleCabbage wrote:

It's entirely plausible that the tradition of Necromancy as represented by the class specifically developed over time in order to avoid divine attention from the likes of Pharasma or Urgathoa. It's not like you really want attention from Tar-Baphon or Geb either.

The sorts of "actually raising the dead" or "making mindless undead that last longer than you have use for them" or "creating intelligent undead" is specifically the sort of thing that will get you attention from powers that want to control or destroy you, so you figure out how to play with the energies of life and death in a way that doesn't create those kinds of problems.

All of which speaks to the issue with Pathfinder 2 being so embedded into the lore of Golarion. For those without these narrative “barriers”, they…don’t exist.

So while it might help Paizo craft an identity for their necromancer, and give some reasons for mechanical limitations/boundaries, it leaves those of us who play largely outside of Golarion…bereft of equally interesting mechanical options because “story”.

You can just make up your own story to work with the class, then.

IIRC, the reason we only ever get two classes now in supplement books as opposed to four like the APG is specifically because of page space. The Kineticist is an outlier because of the Impulses.

I also don't know what to tell you in that, yeah, they sometimes make decisions for business/corporate/cost reasons and in publishing page space is like the number one concern because pages equal cost.

Sure - but playtesting four classes vs. two and having it result in the same amount of good data requires longer playtests and more runway, which if I remember, was one of the reasons why the APG classes had such disjointed final versions.

They've found a good spot with two classes per book, and I don't think they should change it, in my opinion.

YuriP wrote:

Because unfortunately we have an space limit in the books and turn a class more versatile also usually means that it will be more restricted in their specialized options.

That is such a corporate mindset to have. Classes can only be made once; they can be supplemented later, but fixing the core is much harder. If they are so constrained by page space, then perhaps releasing two at a time isn't the best idea. Additionally, was it ever confirmed that they consider list selection under balance? It's not as if you can switch between spell lists once chosen, so I will need some evidence for that.

IIRC, the reason we only ever get two classes now in supplement books as opposed to four like the APG is specifically because of page space. The Kineticist is an outlier because of the Impulses.

I also don't know what to tell you in that, yeah, they sometimes make decisions for business/corporate/cost reasons and in publishing page space is like the number one concern because pages equal cost.

PossibleCabbage wrote:

No more class-specific spell lists please. The number of focus spells is probably too high too, since you don't really want more than ~3-4 of them.

But the Necromancer should probably get a feat or something that adds certain "Necromancy themed spells" to their Dirge. Like how Clerics of Fire Gods get to cast Fireball even though it's an Arcane spell.

Keeping a limited number of spell lists makes things easy and economical, but ease is not always the best choice. Sometimes, you have to choose quality over convenience in order to make a class shine to its fullest potential. This principle works both ways; for example, a necromancer's spell list could be utilized by other classes and archetypes, so it's not a complete loss in terms of economy.

For the health of the game and the designer's sanity, the spell lists we have now are the proper solution and class-specific lists should not make a return.

They didn't really ruin it for everyone, though. I've been playing PF2E since it came out and have had at least one or two casters in every game I've played in or GM'd and I've seen Sure Strike cast like maybe 10 times, if that.

Sometimes things get nerfed or changed because it counters what the original intention of the feature was - and that's just fine. Nerfs aren't malicious, they're just things that sometimes are needed, and players may not always know why its needed.

graystone wrote:

I'd just say to express in the Playtest Survey what you're like to see in the complete class.

I don't really get what is your point here, aren't these forum made specifically for people to tell what they think about the iteration of the class that's being playtested?

Sure, interaction with already released element of the game need less playtesting, but it still need some of it if they want to use these elements in uncommon ways. And these forum are made for us to talk about how we feel about the current iteration of the class, so i'm reporting (and I'm not the only one), that from my perspective, the necromancer don't interact enough with necromancy in general, instead focussing solely on it's own special feature. So I'm expressing that I would like more feature, no matter the form they take, that allow for this class to make better use of the already released necromancy option.

It's more that say, for example, Animist didn't have a Familiar option in the Playtest, but does in the final release - because Paizo already knows how Familiars interact with wide swathes of the system, and there was no need to gather data that could take away from the other aspects they really are looking for input on.

Thus, the same is true here with Thralls and any hypothetical undead familiar/companion feats in the final release..

ElementalofCuteness wrote:

Trip.H wrote:

It is pretty frustrating to see how much this errata was "the squeaky wheel gets the grease" though.

And where is he confirmation or denial that Rogue don't get crit success on all 3 saves at level 17? That been a very "The sequaky wheel gets the grease."

But there are a few issues still there like why Blade Ally works the way it does?

That phrase doesn't mean that devs capitulate to community complaints and reward whiners with buffs.

The devs can genuinely look at such clamor and think "Nope, that one's fine/working as intended/good enough/ etc."

That's why my example was inhaled, something that's literally got an incomplete ruleset, and not something that just presently sucks too bad to be an appealing option, like Blade Ally.

I know you have lots of pain points, but as was said in this thread already, it may help to just lower expectations of them ever being fixed or being something Paizo thinks is an actual issue - because at a certain point, and after numerous errata, the latter may just be the case.

So they nerfed Sure Strike?

One of the very few (if not the only) spells that actually gives SA roll spells a chance at functioning?

My SA rolls are miserable enough with how their odds are designed. Do they just not want casters having fun, or something? How is it that every time I come back around to 2E, its always casters getting their skulls cracked with the errata bat? ;_;

It looks more like they likely had an intent with designing the spell in what the use or expected player behavior would be with it, and it went against that, so are now adding it rules to make it closer to their original desire.

That is, they don't want it to be that someone just loads up all of their spell slots with it and constantly spams it.

It honestly just sounds like no version of this class that would actually make it in the design ecosystem that is PF2E - outside of third-party - would ever satisfy what you're looking for.

That's a bummer, of course, but not every class needs to appeal to everyone, and that's okay.

GameDesignerDM wrote:

'Actual' necromancers were those who communed with the dead and evolved from early shamanistic practices, and mostly summoned spirits to commune with or provide guidance and what have you.

The version that is being talked about being wanted (and that this class absolutely successfully emulates) is far more modern and isn't the 'only' way to do necromancy.

How do summoned Thralls that stand still doing nothing, emulate animated bodies?

You are using necromantic energies to summon creatures made of bone, flesh, or ectoplasm/spiritual essence - all things that are derived from the history of necromancers in both folklore, myth, and modern depictions.

Again, you are talking about one interpretation - not the only one. Paizo is carving out a bespoke niche for their named version, and its one that is clearly inspired by all kinds of necromancers, and is not more right or wrong than any other kind.

'Actual' necromancers were those who communed with the dead and evolved from early shamanistic practices, and mostly summoned spirits to commune with or provide guidance and what have you.

The version that is being talked about being wanted (and that this class absolutely successfully emulates) is far more modern and isn't the 'only' way to do necromancy.

No, it absolutely is a necromancer - it just doesn't fit what you specifically want, but it does for plenty of others.

Yeah, that just sounds like what we are getting? So I'm not sure what else you would expect.

I also think its okay - and good - that an IP is carving out their own space and expectations for a fantasy trope. It keeps the genre alive and fresh, and helps people to shift expectations in what various games are wanting to deliver.

PossibleCabbage wrote:

Maya Coleman wrote:

Definitely here to change the lack of interaction! I know I'm not a Dev, but I'll take the questions I see here to the team and scurry back with answers as soon as I can!

Could you bother the heads of the playtest to get two clarifications on fairly fundamental questions?

- Does the Runesmith feat "Runic Tattoo" require a rune that can go on a creature, or can you use it with a weapon/shield/armor rune?

- Does the attack from "Create Thrall" need to be with the thrall you've just created, or can it be from any basic thrall?

Back in the day the lead for each class playtest used to post occasionally in the subforums and could answer stuff like this.

I'm on it, PossibleCabbage! I'll get you answers as soon as I can!

You're awesome, Maya.

Hey, can we stop assuming what Paizo is doing, has done, or has 'lost', or whatever? It's all mostly speculation, anyway.

It's unproductive, and its stuff like this that makes ANY dev not want to engage with the community.

YuriP wrote:

Another thematic solution to not depend from corpses is that necromancer could use "material components/locus" to create the thralls like bones for osteomancers, pieces of flesh for caromancers or piles of funeral ashes for vitamancers. And the rest of the undead body grows from magical energy. These components doesn't really exists mechanically being part of manipulate trait.

This means that thrall would keep their current mechanic of being created from nowhere but with a better explanation of how it's made.

I was thinking along these lines too, where the Necromancer carries tokens to transform, i.e. teeth (perhaps from a hydra for fans of Ray). Whether Necros recycle them, pluck their own hair or nails, or whatnot doesn't really matter; that little flavor smooths over the "from nothing/no once living body" or "tapping the (evil) Void itself" issues.

This is actually already alluded to in the descriptions for the Grim Fascinations -

Bone shapers, also known as osteomancers, craft what they desire from the skeletons of the dead or simply create new skeletons by expanding and shaping small bone pieces.

The other two imply similar things, so I think that might be what they are going for with the class.

I love the Dirge - it's spooky and weird and perfect for an occult prepared caster.

Wizard: "Where's your spellbook?"

Necromancer: "I don't have one."

Wizard: "Then, were do you keep all your notations on spells?"

Necromancer: "In my soul - in my bones! You can hear the whispering echoes sometimes, if you listen real close. When I sleep, they're like a lullaby."

I dunno, it fits real well to me, and you can do a lot of flavoring with it. Intelligence fits, too, since they are studying the minutiae of life and death, and everything with that.

"[X Product/Game/Company] is dead/dying/ect." is like the oldest adage in internet fandom and is almost never actually true - change, sure, but that's not the same, and a healthy anything is a balance of retention vs. acquisition.

Also, in game dev across the board, turnover is pretty high (usually people leave after say a project or a few projects) and even when everything is going well, it still happens. Plus, people who aren't 'plugged in' probably don't even know who makes the game they play. All the best to Michael Sayre.

I'm sure Paizo is fine - and the game will be fine.

Anyway, glad to see the errata coming soon.

I should also be able to RP my Necromancer as polite, practical, and charming if I want.

My concept is very much Emmrich from Dragon Age, yeah.

Aren't all undead unholy? And thus your thralls and their attacks would count as u holy as well.

Nothing in the Necromancer kit is Unholy.

GameDesignerDM wrote:

Dariush Amani wrote:

There are few things this community likes more than to say the magus is fine *waves hand* don't talk about the magus. Its deplorable action economy is justified, its bad spellslot design is justified, its rote play cycle is justified. Spellstrike isn't a trap, you don't need to do the thing your class traded everything for, every round even though you can't use it on round 1 anyway. Magus players telling the community it needs improvements are to be shouted down by the non-magus playing masses. You're not allowed to have more fun with the class.

They don't think it be like it is, but it do.

There are multiple Magus players in this thread saying they aren't wildly unplayable or broken or whatever else you are claiming they are - and despite that, still saying some small things could be tweaked to smooth our minor rough edges.

There isn't some conspiracy going on.

And here we have a perfect example. It barely took more than 1 minute.

Yeah, we all know conspiracy theories (which this idea basically is) can't really be disproven and are just constantly taking everything as evidence of its existence.

There's also a whole other thread that was made by Magus players to talk about what changes could be made to smooth out the small wrinkles, but I guess it's convenient to ignore that.

There are few things this community likes more than to say the magus is fine *waves hand* don't talk about the magus. Its deplorable action economy is justified, its bad spellslot design is justified, its rote play cycle is justified. Spellstrike isn't a trap, you don't need to do the thing your class traded everything for, every round even though you can't use it on round 1 anyway. Magus players telling the community it needs improvements are to be shouted down by the non-magus playing masses. You're not allowed to have more fun with the class.

They don't think it be like it is, but it do.

There are multiple Magus players in this thread saying they aren't wildly unplayable or broken or whatever else you are claiming they are - and despite that, still saying some small things could be tweaked to smooth our minor rough edges.

There isn't some conspiracy going on.

Yeah, I could see them getting a Feat chain for a Familiar in the final release, just there's probably no real need to playtest it since they already know how something like that functions.

Errenor wrote:

Tremaine wrote:

Castilliano wrote:

Tremaine wrote:

So the necromancer does not reanimate the dead, and the beings it summons are just tokens for abilities....then why call it necromancer?

Why not?...

It does resemble Diablos necro, Bone spear, corpse explosion etc, Not the more 'traditional' carefully ritually prepared corpses for animation route.

Good thing nobody removed rituals. Or Summon Undead. Or Reanimator.

Aaand. You can put all of that into Necromancer too if you want!

So any other caster is a better or at least equal necromancer to the class with that name...

Well, no, I wouldn't think so necessarily - until now we haven't had a bespoke class that is capital 'N' Necromancer (Wizard had a school, but was still a Wizard on the tin) and if Golarion's capital 'N' Necromancer is one that utilizes Thralls in this fashion, then they are alone in that.

Its Archetype will give you some version of it, certainly, but you still won't be on the same level.

Okay, Necromancer is already my new favorite caster.

Beyond the mechanics, I'm excited to brainstorm what my Necromancer's Thralls might look like - that will be fun to see from other folks, too, I think.

That doesn't sound like a very healthy table mindset - and if any GM does that, they should not be GMing.

I expect the necromancer won't have real undead minions, but rather class abilities and magical effects that pretend to be. I predict that, at least initially, the necromancer will be another disaster akin to the Swarmkeeper archetype.

They literally summon physical things that are undead.

The poster mentioned they get some Feats that interact with weapons which sound pretty cool -

They've got caster proficiencies, but some feats about using weapons, such as one that lets them use certain martial weapons, one that lets then summon a weapon with maxed out fundamental runes and a Decaying rune, and one that lets them make a strike where they sacrifice thralls to deal bonus damage and regain HP on a hit

Thralls could have some rider granted to them by a Feat or Dirge that has something to the effect of doing a small amount of damage any time its killed (outside of the AoE ability you can do) so that even if enemies go and kill your Thrall, they are still getting hit with something.

GameDesignerDM wrote:

Sometimes in game dev, decisions made by one designer may not have been something agreed upon by another, and when one has a chance to alter that decision, they do so.

Not saying that's the case here, but sometimes its just "because we/I/my team wanted to" and that's completely within their prerogative to do so. The results vary with how they are received but sometimes its nothing more than that. I've encountered it a whole lot in my job.

So your hypothesis is that a random dev didn't like these rituals being available without even more hoops to jump through and thus pushed through a change with little upside just for the lulz... This is not a strong argument for why we should be cool with this change.

Notice I said 'results may vary' but yeah sometimes that's what happens. Design is often a feels based discipline - and it can play out that way more often than you think. I've been in numerous situations where game directors are just like 'feels bad, change it' and the design team just has to tweak it until they get a 'feels good, ship it'.

Not for 'lulz' either, but a sincere belief something is better the way they envision - most devs don't do their jobs in bad faith, and even when it isn't received well, there is more often than not genuine intent behind it.

Darksol the Painbringer wrote:

As I said before, unless Paizo comes out and speaks on the matter, it's all speculation, but acting like changes don't get done just to get done (such as nerfs to an existing option, nuking options into oblivion, etc.) is absurd. It's all a part of game balance. Sometimes you have to make the harsh decision nobody likes.

So what balance issue was a high-level rarity gated ritual causing? You're suggesting that this was a harsh decision that needed to be made for the sake of balance, so what exactly was the old version of this ritual breaking?

Sometimes in game dev, decisions made by one designer may not have been something agreed upon by another, and when one has a chance to alter that decision, they do so.

Not saying that's the case here, but sometimes its just "because we/I/my team wanted to" and that's completely within their prerogative to do so. The results vary with how they are received but sometimes its nothing more than that. I've encountered it a whole lot in my job.

(Or there's some heretofore unknown material coming in the future that does something more with Rituals and gives non-Mythic reprinted/slightly altered versions of those or what not, and this is just preplanning for that.)

Ravingdork wrote:

Darksol the Painbringer wrote:

Tell me you're mad about losing that toy you left in the attic without telling me you're mad about losing that toy you left in the attic.

You really need someone to tell you why it's bad that someone is stealing stuff from your home???

Is Paizo breaking into your house and changing your ritual rules in your books? No? Then it's not even an apt comparison to begin with. The point is that something you've never used and valued being changed into something else you've never used and valued doesn't change the fact that you aren't using or valuing the thing being changed, before or after the fact, so getting upset about it happening makes no sense.

Yeah, and a lot of discourse that occurs these days on the internet is people being mad or upset about things they didn't care about before they were told to be upset about it - or are upset about something they don't even have or use.

So I don't blame people for questioning reactions, especially with such a small change in the grand scheme of things - and, no, I don't think it's the start of some big trend.

Darksol the Painbringer wrote:

Tell me you're mad about losing that toy you left in the attic without telling me you're mad about losing that toy you left in the attic.

You really need someone to tell you why it's bad that someone is stealing stuff from your home???

This is sort of a bad analogy, because you can just play with those Rituals as they were before WoI - Paizo isn't actually coming into your game and telling you 'no'.

Which is true, of like, everything that people do in their home games.

Well, no, all we know is that it has a thing called a Dirge and things called Thralls which they can explode for damage, eat to regain a focus point, or jump onto an enemy - only a few things they can do that we know of.

Thralls also don't last long on purpose, so they aren't like animal companions or familiars.

That's really it - so I think jumping to conclusions about certain things is premature at this point. How much of a 'minion master' they are is still TBD.

The spell is not required to literally sprout from the single atom at the tip of the arrow at the time of impact. It hits the whole square. If you target one tiny creature with burning hands spellstrike in a square containing four tiny creatures, all of them must save.

It feels like you've been making increasingly odd nitpicks in service of a desire for expansive spellstrike to work in a way that would objectively and provably be out of line with other damage options. You have to acknowledge at some point that you need to make an abstraction to turn something into a game mechanic, and that abstraction will fail to perfectly click with logic—especially if you care about game balance.

This particular poster also wants Fighters to just be objectively better than they currently are, to the point there would be like no reason to play any other martial.

I wouldn't read too much into the artworks. The one with the spirit mirror is from Book of the Dead and depicts the Exorcist archetype, for example. I would assume the other artworks are from some previous publications as well.

With any luck, well get sketch drawings of the new iconic with the playtest on Monday. At least that's been the case for all previous playtests.

They bucked that trend with Commander and Guardian, iirc - they said something about not being ready to reveal them or something to that effect.