| Lilkinsly |
I can understand how people are reading the feat as written, which is kind of a mess. The “4 choices” end result would seem to make sense to the letter of the rules as written. But does that make sense for the system?
First you channel the energy of your God, that energy is the same no matter what. Due to feats and such you can “tweak” the frequency of it, but the energy never changes.
Second you have a list of what that energy is damaging too. You start with Undead, then with a feat like Alignment channel you can choose say Evil Outsiders. Now you have 2 things on your list Undead and EO. So you can choose to damage one of them at a time. Trying to do both at once would take more then you could handle.
The third part is where it gets all confusing. Because when you heal, it heals living creatures for example and not undead. Does it do that because you swap energy types? No, your Gods energy is the same, heavenly light is still heavenly light, even if you tweaked it a bit. Did you switch from positive to negative? No, your gods energy is the same. What does change is your INTENT, you are focusing on either doing damage or healing. You can only have one intention at a time, damage a specific type, damage undead. Taking the Alignment Channel again let’s you add one more damage intention as you add another type to the list.
If a type is on the “list” it can NEVER be healed by your channel, you have tweaked the frequency and it is now poisonous to those on the list. You don’t harm them when you are healing, because you a mere mortal don’t have the capacity to do that. The same do damage you can only focus group type when dealing damage.
I think the reason this gets so confusing is because people consider living as the polar opposite of undead, like Good and Evil. But (I think) It’s poorly worded saying living, when it really means anything that is not in the Undead category. That’s why constructs and such can get healed. None of them are categorically Undead. Right now people are reading Alignment channel as if you pick Evil Outsider, then you can cast Heal Good Outsider and it will only heal them. The thing is that’s not how anything else in the system works as said above. Your not healing a “living” group, your healing everybody but undead. You would just channel regular heal, and everything except undead and EO would heal.
The same thing goes for every other Channel feat, your gods energy never changes, you just tweak the frequency and control it better.
****TLDR The whole thing is a ton easier if it was just looked at as you pick a type like Evil outsider, and that name goes on the “can harm” list. Nothing on your can harm list will ever be healed by your Gods energy.