Happy Little Trees's page

A lot of people felt like the favored one was just always better than the other and it kind of locked you to the one but instead of rebalancing them they effectively hard nerfed the solarian by locking all of them away behind feats so instead of automatically getting some cool abilities that are what make your class unique every once in awhile; they hand you slightly flavored reactive locking you down to your every once in awhile class feat as the only truly themed thing you get. The fact that for example you unlock supernova and plasma ejection both at level 4 hindering higher level feat progression if you want both is very frustrating.

You make an amazing point Teridax, I didn't think about it that far and at first just went "cool I can pick whatever crit specialization I want and not be locked to certain traits" seeing your points definitely make me understand how much more power other classes can have for sometimes having to use an action to draw the weapon. I also think just having the solar weapon emulate a different one of your choice maybe with a feat to grab more advanced one would be great. I think the goal was a set of simpler build it yourself and you can reforge every 10 minutes (I thought this was op at first) to what the situation needs but most players don't want to have to think that much about swapping weapons around from what they're used to. Let alone whether they actually have enough intel to know what they'll want from the reforging. I think just giving more power and locking behind a longer reforge time makes much more sense.

I think if the solarian could choose like a semicircle or half emanation maybe that would help tons though no clue how to flavor that. Maybe if they rework cosmic infusion to be a supernova healing feat for solarian? As long as out of combat attunement isn't abused you could maybe choose to deal 1/2 of the fire damage you would deal to allies and make it healing instead? Or maybe better one half of your emanation is healing and the other is fire tho and half of the damage goes one way and half as healing the other. Currently though I've been managing by getting the other melee to delay, sprinting in and supernova turn 1 of an encounter it seems like it would be necessary for.

The way I've played to manage and have fun is the Dual Weapon Warrior dedication. Not saying the base class is well designed but just obviously radiant solarian with twin weapons has the best long term feat support and when combined with dual weapon warrior it feels nice to have big aoe stuff with plasma ejection when needed and be an absolute single target menace. Having double slice + sustain constellation vortex or what ever I need for that 3rd action and dual weapon blitz for mobility has felt amazing. If I didn't get tpk'd earlier tonight I was even going to grab twin parry as a defensive alternative to sustaining constellation vortex. Base class rn feels bad but with more support for the other solar manifestation honestly it could likely become not too terrible to effectively grab feats for 2 manifestations mostly rather than twin weapon + dedication and still feel fulfilled in the variety of what you can do.

Ok so there's an inside joke about a made up world called "Vesk 14" that we made canon and that's the original homeworld. I loved the idea of being an engineer of sorts using solar flame so I left my homeworld to become am engineer for a Dragon CEO on Triaxus but realised how oppresive it was and slowly trained to escape. Eventually doing so and settling in the Diaspora I effectively am just a simple radiant solarian with twin weapons who grabbed the Dual Weapon Warrior dedication for double slice and while using my solar flame in my crafting I've begun to hone my skill with 2 solar knives through combat.

So I'm a player and let's just say one of the other party members made a not so informed or sensible choice to divert power causing the super weapon to charge faster. We got through the bbeg guy made by the devourer fight and with divert power and due to an action he made before dying we supposedly had 1 minute before anything happened. This 1 minute disappeared instantly though as we tried to interact with the computer console to obviously try and stop the super weapon. Then in part due to a poor description (party thought electricity shooting out meant the computer console broke) the console was destroyed. The whole party then did everything they could with wire disconnects and such amd got too where the 1 spellcaster could do the arcana check with the reactor and the skittermander went through the small hole and found out about the blue wires. We quickly broke the window and obliterated about half the wires or so. DM himself said that we got to the final point where only a nat 20 by the gun could successfully fire... and that's what was rolled. A secondary flat check (maybe much easier) or something in the case of nat 20's I feel may be necessary here because our party literally just got wiped by an unbeatable initiative (our highest bonus operative had nat 20 initiative of one lower) rolling a nat 20 to fire at the start of round 5 before we could do anything. Lower hazard initiative or a fallback such as 2 easier flat checks to make failing harder after a checkpoint of progress would just feel much better than this ending.
TLDR: One dumb player decision, One misunderstanding and a Super Weapon Nat 20 turned an intense close call but we are at 99% completion exciting adventure and turned into an oops we all die cuz one dice roll.