Nix Tigris's page

A note on the shifting rune. If you combine it with an owl bear claw talisman, you can get even more versatility because you know when you will crit, you can just shift your weapon into whatever crit spec works best for that time (probably pick or flail). You can also shift into various weapons for their properties, like parry or the various athletics (with Athletic Strategist).

I'm not sure if these would change the rating as it is rather situational, but it might be worth mentioning.

Looking through, I assumed being trained in spell DCs and attack rolls and being able to cast cantrips would allow you to qualify, but it does specify the Cast a Spell activity. I'm not sure why you would take minor magic then, when eldritch trickster exists, but that's a different thread.

However, they worded spellscaled explicitly to give training in arcane DCs and spell lists. Otherwise they would have worded it like one of the many others, or left it to the rules of innate spells. I have to see the cantrip and the training as two different effects. If its not meant to be, then this is clear errata territory.

Why we would be inclined to read it as applying to all spellcasting?

Because up until the last sentence, this is a copy pasta of all the other ones like storm's lash.

Wind and lightning have always been close friends to you. You can cast the electric arc cantrip as a primal innate spell at will. A cantrip is heightened to a spell level equal to half your level rounded up.

This is worded more like the rogue's minor magic:

You’ve dabbled in a variety of tricks, gaining minor magical abilities from a particular tradition. Choose arcane, divine, occult, or primal magic, and gain two cantrips from the common cantrips available to that tradition. Your key spellcasting ability is Charisma, and you're trained in spell attack rolls and DCs for the tradition of your chosen cantrips.

For rogues, that's not a problem, as they are not a spell-casting class and dedications all give the casting stat for their specific spells.

For kobolds, that leaves a weird state because it is explicitly different than the other cantrip granting heritages and ancestry feats, and works more like a feat that grants the ability to use magic items of a tradition. I don't think anyone would say that a rogue with minor magic would not have the ability to activate a wand of darkness.
This means that either non casting spellscales cannot activate magic items, even though as worded it would allow that, or that is allowed and wizard ones have two key scores (which is where most of the issues lie).

Maybe they felt it wasn't that clear the way it was written in the CRB, so they decided to change it with the APG.

That was what I thought as well, but if we compare it to something else that came out in the APG, Tengu's Storm Lash, that doesn't hold up. The wording for spellscale is so far off from everything I can't even give a RAI for it. They gain most of the benefits of a arcane sorc MC (missing a cantrip and repetoire) as a race, without actually being a sorcerer. Arguably more powerful, as this say key ability is for ALL arcane spells, not just sorcerer ones.

I would counter that with innate spells already scale of charisma, and you are explicitly trained in all innate spells so why would they feel the need to specify unless it was supposed to cover more than that spell?

I was looking at making a kobold wizard when I came across something weird. Spellscale kobold sets your key ability to charisma for arcane spells. This is something that no other racial feat or heritage does:
Seer Elf
Wellspring Gnome
Human's Adaptive Cantrip
Gnome's First World Magic
My question then becomes, if you go wizard or arcane witch, can you make your Key ability for that class Charisma rather than Intelligence? they both set your Key ability, rather than add to it, and since you get a boost to your key ability at character creation, you would be able to get an 18 Cha Wizard/witch.