Arcaian wrote:
I'd say the features that most contributed to the lack of focus in the mesmerist were Painful Stare and Touch Treatment. Painful Stare is on the list because it's a much larger bonus if you use it - but it's a 3/4 BAB class with no attack boosters, and the damage isn't enough to build around it in most cases (like sneak attack is, the easiest comparison). You definitely can focus on it if you want to make a damaging mesmerist, but for the most part it just comes up if you do happen to attack, otherwise you give the bonus out to someone else, and it feels tacked on (at least in my experience). Touch Treatment feels out-of-focus for a different reason - it's not that it doesn't fit thematically, but it doesn't function off of the stare (like most of the class), and doesn't come in at 1st level like Mesmerist Tricks do. I've never seen anyone build around Touch Treatment - if it happens to come up, it's a cool little bonus. If you were re-writing the 1e class, that'd be where I put my effort in - either incorporating them more closely, or removing them and adding something to the existing features instead.
That being said, 2e is a very different game from 1e. I don't think any of the features discussed above are bad for the mesmerist concept, they just felt a little off in the 1e implementation. As almost all of these would be chosen via Class Feats (I'd imagine Stare would be the main thing that is a class ability, likely as a 1-action focus cantrip), the lack of focus isn't much of an issue. You can have feats - or even class paths if you think they're that thematically weighty - for tricks, touch treatment, painful stare, etc, and let people pick which way they want to go. I think personally I'd probably go with a class feat or two at each option for these, and make it a Class Archetype for Bard right now. The bard chassis is very close to the mesmerist's, and 1-action stare cantrips replacing the compositions would be rather effective, I think.
Although the bard seems like the path of least resistance, the whole point of the mesmerist is you were doing the things that you do with a bard without the music and all that. You were like a magical cult leader for example. So the closest builds I've done is through cleric and mystic(in starfinder). I think they could maybe add some feats to a class but architypes have seemed underwhelming to me. I'm not sure why.
