Sanityfaerie's page

So... in the lead up to the remaster, we did a lot of talking about how deities might blur the lines. Well, now we have some more information to blur the lines with. So let's talk about that.

Most of the good gods were Heal Only, can choose Holy. That all fits, and we won't bother hitting them individually.

Most of the neutral gods were Heal/Harm, can choose holy or unholy. That all fits, and we wont' bother hitting *them* individually either.

Asmodeus is mandatory unholy/harm. Anathema change from "don't free slaves" to "don't share power with the weak". No surprises here, and not much to say. Asmodeus continues to be an awful individual. News at 11.

Gozreh is Heal Only, No sanctification, which is interesting, but not surprising. Way more interested in making things alive than in making them dead, but wants no truck with the war in heaven.

Iomedae is mandatory holy/heal, which really ought not be a surprise to anyone.

Lamashtu is heal/harm, can choose unholy, which does that thing that lots of people have been looking forward to where you can play a nonhorrible child of the mother of monsters.

Norgorber is harm/can choose unholy, which opens up the possibility of... a non-horrible follower of Norgorber? Well, it's an interesting idea, at least.

Pharasma is None/Holy - basically the same schtick as Gozreh, except that she's more interested in the "smite the undead" part of the heal font than the "promote life" part.

Rovagug is, again, mandatory harm/unholy. No one is surprised.

Urgathoa is *also* mandatory harm/unholy, which puts a bit of a spanner in the gears for anyoen who was hoping to run a non-horrible splinter sect of hers.

...and finally, Zon-Kuthon is harm/can choose unholy. He's still a very edgy boy, but non-horrible devout followers are a real possibility (...and they probably mostly live in Nidal).

/**********/

Interesting breakdown bits:
- Iomedae is the only deity of the pre-war Core 20 at mandatory holy.
- Asmodeus, Rovagug, and Urgathoa are literally The Worst.
- Lamashtu, Norgorber, and Zon-Kuthon are there for your alignment-twisting pleasure, for those who want to run a character who's potentially sympathetic once you get to know them but is still super-creepy especially at first.

Lamashtu:
- Edicts: bring power to outcasts and the downtrodden, indoctrinate other in Lamashtu’s teachings, make the beautiful monstrous, reveal the corruption and flaws in all things
- Anathema: attempt to change that which makes you different, provide succor to Lamashtu’s enemies

Norgorber:
- Edicts: keep your true identity secret, sacrifice anyone necessary, take every advantage in a fight, work from the shadows
- Anathema: allow your true identity to be connected to your foul dealings, share a secret freely, show mercy

Zon-Kuthon:
- Edicts: bring pain to the world, mutilate your body
- Anathema: create permanent or long-lasting sources of light, provide comfort to those who suffer

So, first, I know that PF2 still has a good solid set of legs on it. I wouldn't be surprised to see it keep going for another 5 years or so, and that's cool.

At the same time, we all know that PF3 is coming eventually. Eventually the lifespan of this version of the game will come to a natural close, and it'll be time for it to be rebuilt.

We also know that the Paizo designers sometimes read these boards (and respond!) and so if we see structural issues with the current game, and we can come up with interesting workarounds, then that's maybe worthwhile.

This one is to talk about caster vs martial longevity over the course of the adventuring day, and some of the cool stuff, and some of the not so cool stuff, and possibly try to come up with solutions that let us keep the good bits without so much of the bad bits.

Martials are relatively simple. The core ability of the martial is very consistent. if you have enough healing power in your party to get their HP back to full, that generally means that they're good to go for the next fight, and can pretty much keep going indefinitely. They're great for people who don't want to worry about resource economies over the course of the day.

Casters are more complicated. Their more powerful effects take the form of a pile of daily resources. This means that they can burst a lot harder. A caster burning top slots is a lot more effective than that same caster throwing cantrips and focus spells. This is great for people who enjoy the resource-juggling game that it creates, deciding which fights to focus on and which to dial back on, picking the moments to use their more potent effects, and so forth.

All of that is fine. The problem is when it comes to the length of the adventuring day. Casters run out. Martials don't. A caster who can be assured that their adventuring day is one fight long can unload everything they have. A caster who's gong to be in a day that's six or eight encounters long is going to be seriously struggling. This causes a number of issues in both directions. In the one side, casters are motivated to advocate for the ten-minute workday, which can make games feel skewed, and if they get it, they can feel overpowered. On the other side, in a game where the days run long, or where the casters have credible reason to expect them to run long, the rationing of slots can make them feel weak.

Also, in some ways it can feel like the various options that add sustainability to casters are not necessarily as well-balanced as other parts of the system. They're harder to plug into the math.

So this thread is about discussing ways to separate these two concepts - to let the people who want to play caster have their ability to prioritize some encounters over others while not making them overpowered in short adventuring days and underpowered in long.

This is *not* a thread about specifics of anything having to do with the current classes or the balance of power between them. If you want to argue about whether casters are too weak and/or too strong there's an entirely different thread that's doing that just fine right now. Please go do that there.

/**********************/

So... the clearest answer that I see is to have some sort of resource that the caster can build up or spend down in encounters, that lasts at least as long as an adventuring day. Wake up int he morning with a decent supply of this stuff, but not a full tank, and then let you build up by going low-power or really unleash for the stronger stuff.

Of course, this has some weirdness of its own. In particular, it means that low-risk encounters actually give resources to the party. This has obvious bag-of-rats cheese issues, but those at least have well-known solutions. The weirder thing is that it does this on intended encounters as well. Like, suddenly, if you toss a few easy goblin encounters between the party and the big bad, they're likely to be walking into that big bad fight with more resources, rather than less. That gets a little odd.

In many cases, it also gives the players reason to want to drag their fights out. Like, if casters are regenerating magic fuel by blasting with cantrips, then once you've beaten the enemy down tot he point where they're not much of a threat, the thing you really want to do is disable them as much as possible, and let the casters chip away at them with those cantrips until they finally keep over and die. You might even want to heal them a few times, if the economy of ti works out right.

So... maybe something in the loot pools? Like, in addition to exp and whatever treasure there is to be found, there's some sort of caster resource that they can draw from defeated foes to fill up their resource pools. This has issues too, of course. Like, if all you do is drive your foes away, then you're not exactly in a position to extract their essences. It also seems like it might be a little tricky to square with doing things nonlethally... and that's before we get to the part where drawing the energies that power your magics from the bodies of fallen foes is just so very edgy, and all that that can bring with it.

So yeah. It's not a trivial issue... which is why I figure that it's a potentially useful issue to brainstorm about and chew over and maybe have people come up with ideas that I can't come up with. Anyone have thoughts?

So... the evolutionist is an interesting issue. We want it, we know we want it, but I'm pretty sure that we don't want it enough to have it get the full kineticist treatment. This is a class that thrives on having lots and lots of options to pick and choose from, but options get expensive. So... this is a thread that's primarily about workshopping ideas on how to make Evolutionist as cool as we really want it to be, while also not demanding too much of the Paizo SF2 design team (or too much page count).

/************/

My first thought...? Grafts. Grafts are really cool if you do them right, and everyone can use them. You could totally put together a strongly-themed "do freaky stuff with your biology" book with evolutionist, biohacker, maybe an appropriate ancestry or two, and a bunch of crazy new gear, including a whole pile of grafts. Let the lore bit be a deep-dive into a few biotech-themed megacorps, and probably a biotech-happy world or two. It would be great.

The thing about grafts is that for most folks, they have limitations. They absolutely require investment, and they could have some sort of "biological load" cost on top of that (with the load you can bear scaling with level and constitution?) that would limit the number of the more serious grafts that you could load on. You can't get overlapping grafts (your arm cannot be both an arcane projection of force and undead) and maybe there are issues if you try to have more than one type or something. I don't know what kind of limitations would be appropriate or fun, but the general idea is that most folks will have at most one or two because past that it's either impossible or just more hassle than it's worth.

Evolutionists are the ones that go deep on it. They get feats and possibly also class features that relax the limitations (like, say, extra investment slots that only work on grafts). They get buffs to their ability to use grafts (like being able to replace graft DC with class DC) and they maybe even get legendary proficiency in unarmed combat (all graft-based attacks would be unarmed). Then you give them some sort of class path setup that lets them focus in on particular graft types (gaining nifty bonuses the more grafts/load/whatever of that type they have) or lets them spread out and get lots of kinds of grafts.

Oh, and for the investment slots... even better than giving freebies would be allowing investment slots to count double when filling with grafts - so that the evolutionist is encouraged to use as little non-graft gear as they can get away with in order to crank on More Grafts.

I acknowledge that this could result in a problematic cash crunch for evolutionists who are trying to leverage their class to its fullest. I know that 3.x classes sometimes had "my class hands me money" as a thing, and that one is maybe not so great, but... possibly a discount? Like, in addition to grafts being half-price for investment slots, maybe they're also just straight-up half price? I dunno. This is mostly me just tossing out ideas.

So yeah. It's not that they're going transhumanist in ways that other people can't. It's that they're able to do a lot more of it, and they're encouraged to do a lot more of it, and they're better at it... and if anyone else wants to have a bit of that magic, then that's exactly what taking it as an archetype is for.

So... party optimization. When you go to seriously optimize a character in PF2, it becomes pretty clear pretty quickly that party op is the path to true power in this system... but we don't actually talk about it all that much. So this is a thread to encourage people to talk about it.

The premise is that you've got a party full of people who are generally fairly char-op capable, and they've all decided to try to work this party optimization thing to maximize their collective power. So... what should they be bearing in mind? What needs to be covered, and by how much? What combos can be usefully arranged? What combos could be usefully arranged if they knew certain facts about the upcoming campaign in advance?

We're really looking for two tiers, here. The first is the base necessities - what kinds of configurations are even viable? The second is digging a bit more into the synergies - what combos can you pull off to leverage the power that you have effectively while staying inside of those base necessities?

Additionally, if some bit of optimization or other is particular to a given level range (because it takes a while to get going, because it doesn't scale, or both) them mention that.

/************/

So... one thing to start with, and I'd like to ask for insight on this one in particular. The combo of forced movement and hazardous terrain is a really obvious one (if it's one of the kinds of forced movement that can actually push enemies into such things). Being able to control where the enemy is going to be has further synergies with area-effect attacks of all kinds (clustering the enemy up) and various debilitating zones (get more use out of powerful debilitating effects).

My issue is that the Kineticist is just entirely too shiny to me personally... and casters in general aren't. I look at this stuff, and to my eyes, it looks like it has "kineticist" written on every single part. At the same time, the all-kineticist party can have... issues. There are real issues with skill challenges, if nothing else. So... what are some good ways to lean into this particular combo-space without using more than, say, one kineticist?

Basic premise: You're creating a new character for PFS, specifically as part of a plan to share that experience with someone else. (Significant other? Younger sibling? Kid?) Regardless, that person is willing to let you have a lot of influence over their build, and you can make your own build, and you're specifically looking for a situation where the two of you have lots of fun synergy and support that you can provide one another, while still getting along with the rest of the party. So... what kind of interesting builds are there out there to work with?

It was commented that we should have more CharOp types talking about party op, and this is explicitly an attempt to get the ball rolling on that one a bit.

To get thigns started, I introduce the moderately unintuitive classic - two paladins. With two of you, you can provide a pretty solid steel wall to keep the enemy from getting past you, and if you stay close enough to one another, it doesn't matter who's getting swung at - the other one can punish. Having the lay on hands able to work both ways gives a nice bit of sustain, too.

So, in PF2, handing out attacks to your squadmates is expensive, particularly at early levels. This comes, in part, from the fact that it's relatively straightforward to play a hybrid-lord. You carry around a bow, you take a shot, and you hand an attack to someone else. Bam - an easy, straightforward way to get two MAPless attacks... and if you want to play a pure lazylord, then every direct damage-dealing tool that you have has to be balanced with that combo in mind, in spite of the fact that you'll never use it.

...but what if it wasn't so?

Making this work right would be a *bit* twisty, but there are a few different ways to do it.

- You could make it a feature of the tactics themselves. Say that you can't use the tactic unless you have no MAP, and your MAP increases for every attack that mas made via the tactic. It would work. I admit that I don't like it much, though. The true hybrid commander is going to have situations where they want to do things like "I use my feat-granted attack-and-debuff action, and then give my allies attacks to take advantage of the debuff with" and this would interfere with that fairly badly.

- You could make it a feat. Call it Armchair Tactician or something. Gives you a significant penalty to all attacks (have fun escaping that grapple!) but some sort of associated bonus to using certain kinds of tactics.

I'm sure you could come up with others. Regardless, worth a thought, right?

Side note: I think that in general it might be cool if different commanders could be better or worse at different kinds of tactics. Like, sprinkle a few appropriate tags around, and then feats that give you benefits when you use tactics with those tags. It's a bit throwback, but....

And yet again I am surprised.

Two of my favored deities still have the guillotine hovering over their head and I’m growing increasingly nervous to see where it falls.

This thread is for you to spool out your craziest, most crack-fueled ships between the various gods of Golarion. Go nuts. Here's mine.

So I've mentioned before, elsewhere, that my current favorite of the "Good" Gods of Golarion is Vildeis... and that's mostly because I keep wanting to ship her with Arazni or Zon-Kuthon. I mean, that's some pretty cracky stuff to begin with, sure... but then my crazed creativity bits slipped an "and" in there, and the idea of turning them into another triad pantheon was just so warped that I felt like I had to do something with it.

Spoilered because... well, seriously. This is a story about Zon-Kuthon, Arazni, and Vildeis getting into a serious relationship with one another. It's not pornographic or anything, but if considering the dominant themes of those three deities (and ZK/Vildeis in particular) makes you pause for a moment and think "I might not want to read that", then you're probably right.

So, Alloy Flesh and Steel (Kineticist Metal Impulse 14) is a two-action polymorph impulse that can last for up to a minute if sustained, and terminates at the end of your turn. As you get close to the end of that minute duration, there's nothing that specifically prevents you from attempting to use it a second time. It's a polymorph effect, though, and you're only allowed to have one of those at a time. If you attempt to recast, and thus instantiate the new effect while the old one is still running, you have to make a counterspell check against yourself. That all seems relatively straightforward... I think.

The question is... is there any way to voluntary-fail that counterspell check?

For context, this is particularly important because of environmental effects that cause conditions. Alloy Flesh and Steel makes you immune to a whole bunch of different kinds of effects. If you have it up when the effect hits, the effect just bounces right off to no effect. If you are under the effect when you activate the impulse, however, it merely suspends it, and once the effects of Alloy Flesh and Steel end from that use, you need to wait an hour before you can use it again. So there's potentially real value in being able to maintain the metal form in an ongoing way... and voluntarily ending the effect early and then reapplying it wouldn't actually do the job.

For further context, that particular aspect is less of a niche question than you'd think because of Plate in Treasure, and, in particular, abysium. Abysium is a particular rare precious material with the funny effect that it sickens everyone around it. If you're wearing abysium armor and carrying an abysium shield, and so forth, then you'll wind up applying that effect to, say, the enemies that happen to get too close to you... but it'll hit you even harder. Thing is that it doesn't apply to people who are straight-up immune to poison. So... this is a fun trick for those at level 17 or higher who are metal kineticists who also have the Earth or Wood resist junction, but Alloy Flesh and Steel is a lot more accessible.

/********/

Also, as a bonus question... how does Plate in Treasure interact with Metal element attack impulses? Like, I feel like you should be able to get the material bonus (or something like it) on whatever it was you were attacking with, but it doesn't make that entirely clear? Is this just a "GM ruling" moment?

I was just thinking about kineticists, and I thought of a kind of cool idea for a level 18/20 feat for them, and I thought I'd share... and since there was no thread to put it in, I thought I'd add one.

Composite Mastery (Kineticist lvl 18):

You are able to use all composite impulses of level 6 and below that you possess both elements for. If you are a single-element kineticist, you instead are able to use all composite impulses of level 6 and below that include your element. You may immediately retrain any feat that you previously had that gave you one of those impulses.

I don't think it would be overpowered. Not when it's competing with things like the level 18 capstone impulses, and Kinetic Pinnacle, and Omnikinesis. At the same time, there *are* people who want to be able to play the Avatar, and for *those* people, being able to just add 15 impulses to their list at one drop would be kind of awesome... even if some of those impulses are pretty janky. You can't retrain them, and you can't reflow them, and if anything it might be a bit understrength... but it would be cool, and I feel like ti would really help sell the fantasy of it.

Left at 18 rather than 20, because on the kineticist, level 18 feats are already competing for level 20 slots, and this would let them grab it immediately after taking their sixth element and actually play with it for a few levels... and because if they really want to do silly things with flexibility, this would allow someone to take both Composite Mastery and Omnikinesis on the same character. The way I see it, it's not overpowered, and people will want it anyway, and we should be supporting things like that.

Admittedly, I also think that a level 20 kineticist feat that allowed you to have two stances up at once would be cool... but that once feels a lot more likely to be OP.

(This would be distinct from the Monk's stance fusion because it would be kineticist stances only, you'd have to take the action to enter each stance separately, and you could mix and match a bit more if you happened to have 3 or more stances. Possibly a limitation where the two stances can't share elements or something. I consider this mostly a downgrade. I'm still not convinced that it would be balanced, even without the bit where it treads on the Monk's niche protection.)

So, a little while back, we got confirmation that Arazni is the deity that gets to join the Core 20. Okay, cool... and I was just recently realizing some of the implications of this.

- First, if she's one of the Core 20, that almost certainly means that she's stabilized her own personal philosophy, clarified her position on certain things, and come up with a relationship to her various clerics and followers that isn't "You're all wrong and heretical and I hate you all equally, but yes you can still have your cleric spells."

- Second, by the picture on the Lost Omens book that features her, she's likely continuing to move in what you or I would consider a morally positive direction.

- It is highly likely that she allows Holy sanctification. In addition to her probably continued walk towards the light, there's the fact that I just can't imagine her disliking the idea of having Champions that were particularly good at harming Tar-Baphon. Allowing unholy sanctification...?

- So here's the thing. prior to this going down, she's still worshiped as one of the more traditionalist deities in Geb. To my eyes, that goes one of two ways. Either she embraces the duality in some fashion, or she doesn't. If she does...? That could be interesting. I'd be interested to see where she'd go from there. If she doesn't, then her church in Geb is going to have some ugly spasms that are likely to cause real damage to the overall structure of that country... especially since, for her, the Necromancer Ghost Geb himself most certainly qualifies as someone who has hurt her. We don't really know what her edicts and anathema are going to look like coming out of this one, but I'd be real surprised if they had her looking kindly on the guy.

So mostly that's it. I think this is going to cause real damage to Tar-Baphon, and I am here for that. I'm pretty sure it's going to throw some real churn into Geb, too, though... and I honestly don't know where the chips are going to fall on that one.

So... I was poking around with the idea of tightly scoped specialist casters on a separate thread, and I'm running into a bit of a three-way squeeze. Our spells are currently arranged into broad traditions, and adding new tags of this variety is expensive in a number of ways. We certainly don't want to go back to 3.x where each spell had half a dozen tags of which niche classes it was supported by. Unfortunately, that means that if we want a tightly scoped list of spells, that all align to a specific, restrictive theme, then we wind up with a list that is static and stagnant. That's not desirable either. If we step back from that, we wind up where we are now, where if your'e a slot caster, your core casting ability is largely indistinguishable from the slot casting of anyone else with your tradition. Get kind of samey. For PF2? It looks like it's too late to fix this. What about PF3, though?

Basic idea is that we set up our spell lists from the beginning so that they're tightly themed and scoped. We have one list that is just "raising the undead, messing with, and buffing the undead." It maybe has some undead-themed maledictions in there too. We have one list that's pretty much entirely composed of spell attacks vs AC. We've got one that's just divinations and another that's just healing and curative spells and another that's just wacky metamagic effects like dispel magic and such... or whatever. You allow a bit of overlap here and there, but each spell should probably fall into only one or two of these... and then you can divvy the themes out to different classes in different ways. Instead of being full-on pick-a-list, you could have things like sorceror bloodlines and witch patrons (and cleric deity) offer a theme or two, on top of the base themes that the class gets by default. Themes become things that it might be reasonable to buy access to with feats. (I'd personally envision the Wizard as being the master of adding new themes to their spell pool.) The Oracle spell list and the Cleric spell list could be similar but not exactly the same... and when you get to specialist casters, you could just say "you get this one feat, and that's it" and you'd immediately have a specialist caster - whose spell list would grow organically along with everyone else's. It also makes it pretty easy to keep track of which capacities you're offering to each class. Do they have access to themes X, Y, or Z? No? Then they can't usefully attack the Will defense. Do they have A or B? If not, then they don't have particularly good access to healing... and so forth.

So, I was in a conversation the other day where one of our fellow posters expressed a wistful desire for true specialist mages - mages who would use cantrips and slots and focus spells just like other casters, but who would have sharply restricted pools to draw those from, but would then have class features to make the spells they did have access to really shine.

On further thought, it occurred to me that there were some really serious similarities between these types of caster, to the point that with a bit of effort, you might be able to fit them all as paths on the same (perhaps mildly bloated) class. It might be a bit tricky to justify any one of them as a standalone class, in terms of the overall interest level and the effort involved, but all of them? If you could capture some efficiencies of scale, that seems like it could be quite doable.

So the basic idea is that you have someone who's really good at spellcasting, but starkly limited int eh spells they can cast. What do they get?

Overall
- Standard caster proficiencies
- a 4-slot-per-day progression, because why not?
- a pretty standard number of cantrips
- one starter focus point

Each path gets
- A really strong theme.
- A starter focus spell to go with their starter focus point, that sits right in the middle of their theme
- A deeply constrained set of slot spells in their school. Like... maybe four per level. Maybe five. Maybe three. On the bright side, all of your spells are signature spells.
- a seriosuly constrained set of cantrips. Like, you might get more options than you get cantrips in your career to pick them with. Might.
- some sort of serious boost to your ability to Do Things in your area of specialty.

...and then you find ways to give them feats that let them dial in on their specialty *further*, and/or let them reach outside of it in limited ways. Like... why *not* have a feat that can improve your abilities with a specific spell? Possibly at a cost to the size of your already-limited repetoire?

This gives you your slot-spell blasters. It gives you your true summoning specialists. It could easily be a place for your battle form specialists. It could be a way to run a version of the classic minion necro (in a limited way). There are people who want specialist mages. I'm not one of them, but I do know that they're out there.

/*******/

The trick, of course, is in the details. How do you make this all work? Well... how about a stance? Let each path get a stance as their built-in focus spell. Each stance gives one or more significant, themed bonuses to the spells that are in the school (though the bonuses in question might or might not apply to every available spell). It also drops instantly if you cast or sustain any spell not in the school.

Path of Gates: Summons, teleportation, and Interesting Dimensional Stuff. The stance gives you a small boost to teleportation distances, and a direct buff to the combat stats of your summons.

Path of Shaping: it's all about self-transformation. The stance gives you status bonuses to attack rolls and damage for attacks generated by school effects, and probably has further buffs for your battle forms. In general, if you're in a fight, and you're not in a battle form, then you're just not taking the fight all that seriously. Utility spells... well, there are totally self-transformation utility spells out there, right?

Path of Targeted Elimination: Divination and spell attacks vs AC. Look. There really *are* people out there who want to play glass cannon nova and rack up more damage on the boss monster than anyone else, and this one is for them. The divination spells are all spells tat could be useful in tracking down your targets or getting an advantage over them in a fight. The stance offers a meaningful bonus to attack and possibly also damage, when using spells to target AC. The spell list should probably have magic missile and maybe a few single-target spells that hit reflex, but the stance won't help them much.

Path of Widespread Devastation: This is where your area-effect blasters live. Lots of attacks vs reflex, probably a decent smattering vs fortitude... and maybe not any will or AC. Classic "Catch the enemy in fireball formation and make their HP go down." Probably has some stuff like prone and forced move and whatnot in there as secondary effects, but that's all secondary. Probably has some moderately useful elemental effects spiced in there for utility. Stance bonuses are things like bonus to magic DC, bonus to damage, and the ability to exclude individual squares from your area effect so that you can do the low-budget version of party-friendly.

/************/

In general, these are going to be a much simpler sort of caster to build and play, but for the people who really want That Thing There, it's designed to give it to them. For the people who want to dial in further, and make "Cast disintegrate" be their go-to answer for every fight because they just love disintegrating people that much, they have feats that will let them dial in further. Of course, you can also reach out into the wider world of spellcasting for some flexibility - archetypes are a thing, and you do have a standard full-caster level of magic proficiency - but it doesn't play well with the stance that really gives you all of your awesomeness. So there's a degree of tension between how much you reach out and how much you dial in.

/***********/

Anyway, that's my thought on a rough chassis that might get the job done. It's lightweight enough to let Paizo hit a bunch of different options that people have wanted in the space of a single (maybe slightly bloated) class, it constrains options enough to let them free up some of the build budget for the raw power that people have been craving, and it's nice and clearly labeled, so that the people who walk in the door looking for this thing can probably find it. In particular, it makes a good first caster for players who know they want to play a full caster but who maybe aren't ready to engage with the whole system in the way that a full caster really wants to. "Welcome to first level. Your spell list is four entries long."

Still, as I've noted before, I am not the target audience here. I just like writing long and hopefully-helpful posts. For those who are the target audience... thoughts? Ideas? Do you have a way to do it better? Did I miss a Path that really should be on this list? (I admit, I thought about Minion Necro, but it felt a bit too similar to summoner.) Anyway, if you like this concept, this is the place to start trying to make it happen.

Hurl at the Horizon does on of two things. If your Meapon Ikon is a thrown weapon, then the immanence increases its range by 10. Cool, cool. No problems here. If it's a melee weapon, though, it gives it Thrown 15. Well, okay. The issue is that it doesn't give it returning. Further, due to the fact that it's only a thrown weapon as the result of an immanence effect, there's no way for anything *else* to give it returning.

So, if you get this feat for a melee ikon, then the only way to make use of it is to throw your weapon ikon away and not get it back. As use cases go, that's... niche. We'll call it niche.

So... as far as I can see, Exemplar is the only class in the game that doesn't get Weapon Specialization. It gets Spirit Striking instead, but those two are not the same thing... and this almost never matters. Almost. For those playing the dual-class variant rules, though, it means that as-written, a combo of Exemplar with anything else gets a notable damage boost, because they stack. Seems like we might want something in the rules to patch that hole.

So... immanence effects are kind of funny. They're fundamentally not always on, and they're also a fundamental part of the character. Arguably, retraining them shouldn't even be possible, and if it is, then it may not be appropriate for a given character's story.

So when you get something like Scar of the Survivor, which gives the Diehard feat as part of its immanence, it gets kind of weird. Scar of the Survivor is all about resilience and fortitude and surviving things that should have killed you. Great! Fantastic story fodder. Thing is, though, that if you take it, then you've suddenly put yourself in a place where buying the Diehard feat the normal way isn't as good. So now, either you forego taking a feat that would have been really appropriate for your legend, and instead get this version that only applies something like 1/3 of the time, or you take the feat, and you lose out on part of your scar's immanence effect. Oh, and if you don't take the feat you also can't take Numb to Death.

Basically, Ikons and Epithets should not be discouraging you from making choices that bring you more into alignment with the themes of that ikon/epithet.

Oh, and side note... the fact that the Epithets come before the Ikons in the class description feels a little weird.

I read a thing on a different thread that rang very true to me.

I do not think Starfinder necessarily needs "generalist combat class". It needs the ability to make characters with a wide variety of combat styles without dipping into Pathfinder classes. The answer to "How do I make X in Starfinder" should never be "Use this Pathfinder class." – Starfinder should stand on its own.

In other words, you should be able to make a martial artist, a sniper, a pistolero, a commander/tactician, and an assault trooper in Starfinder. They do not all need to be Soldiers, but they should all be doable within Starfinder itself.

Now, this is incredibly premature, but I thought it might be interesting to point out various character types that really ought to be doable in a Starfinder-like universe that aren't likely to be well-served by the existing classes, and then come up with classes that might fit in and be interesting that they would work well with... without either dippign into PF2 or copying anything over wholesale.

Further, let's assume for the moment that both "Mechanic" and "Technomancer" come out in a solid, playable form within reasonably short order. So... what else is left?

/*****/

Well, Operative has your pistols, knives, and sniper rifles. Soldier has your big heavy weapons (ranged and melee) and in particular, is covering the "I'm the party tank" role pretty well as far as weapons are concerned. So what's left is... the mid-range stuff? Like, yeah. We don't have anyone who's particularly good at rifles, or swords, or spears. We don't have anyone who's really focused on the "just being good at killing people" part of martial combat. We don't have any class that really works for Doomguy or the Master Chief or a random "more violence than skill" ganger out of Necromunda or that "brother, I hurt people" moment from TF2, or anything like that.

For the moment, let's call them the Reaver. I'm sure there are better names, but it's a start.

...and part of the problem there is that you kind of want to give them a fighter-like weapon proficiency track, and once you do that there's not all that much space left to differentiate them, and then they wind up being kind of bland and also mostly a fighter reskin. Still... let's start with the fighter, and see what we can pull off.
- Well, we can remove the bonus flexible feats they get. That's not nothing
- We can drop them to a base 8 hp, rather than a base 10. With the Soldier here, they're pretty much explicitly *not* there to serve as party tank.
- We can ditch the "favored weapon group" thing. This is kind of a big one, really. For that matter, we can delay some of their weapon proficiency growth. I'd still want them to hit Legendary eventually, but they don't necessarily have to start at Expert.
- Again, given that this is supposed to be a brutal DPR killer rather than a tank, you can drop the Opportunity Attack and the Shield Block. The Reaver doesn't need that stuff.

...and that's actually a decent chunk of stuff to play with. It's not huge, but it's not nothing. It's enough to make a few class paths to meaningfully differentiate subtypes (one of which might give back some of the tanking ability that we're stripping away here) and still have enough left for a useful class feature or two. Regardless, it *is* at least doable. Bonus points if you make the "I can still tank" subclass work by some means other than "shield block, 10 base HP, and opportunity attack"

I'm thinking that one of the other subclasses ought to be some sort of shock and awe focus - like, bonuses against enemies that haven't acted, bonuses when they kill someone or deal crits, tosses around a bunch of intimidation, possibly as free actions under certain circumstances - stuff like that.

So for this one, I don't actually have anything to offer on my own. I know little enough about the Solarian that I cannot currently offer useful insights.

At the same time...? Well, it's early days yet, and from what I do know about the Solarian, it seems like a really malleable concept. You have light powers and you have gravity powers and you can Do Awesome Things with them. We know that basically all of the classes are going to be nudged around at least a bit, and it seems like the Solarian is a bit more nudgeable than most. So... what's the Solarian deal, really? What are the totally awesome things that they should make sure to keep in some form? What are the not so awesome things that would be better done some other way?

Again, this is mostly a thoughts/ideas/analysis thread. The primary purpose is to provide potentially useful idea grist to the dev team.

So... it's me again. I'm doing the thing again. This time for Technomancers.

I'm seeing some thoughts that it would be good to have tech and magic be better integrated in Starfinder. I see a post (that no one seems to be arguing) that suggests that the old-style Technomancer is mostly a mage walking around in tech-themed clothing. Stuff like that. That seems like a sadness, because it seems like the Technomancer ought to be the poster child for tech/magic integration. Like, we ought to cram so much tech/magic integration in the Technomancer that other folks later can grab some easily just by poaching from them. So... given that the Technomancer is pretty much the same place the Mechanic is in the development cycle (and is likely to come out in the same book) let's try tossing out and poking at some ideas in the attempt to be helpful to the devs.

First, as a digression, I think there's also a really cool niche for a Technoshaman. Someone who communes with and calls up spirits of technology (Starfinder does have spirits of technology, right?) and uses that to do things like getting a friendly spirit to inhabit his buddy's multilaser to make ti work a bit better, or calls up a network spirit to do some hacking on his behalf (or to have the ghost int eh machine run defense against the hacking attempts of others). I think this is a really cool concept, and I think it would be great to have it in SF2 eventually, and I think we're not really ready to talk about it yet, and it's not what the technomancer is.

So... technomancer. Here's what I see.
- Various kinds of magically boosted hacking. Debuff, disable, or take control of technological devices from a distance, in combat time. Cause the guns in your opponent's hands to misfire in a variety of amusign ways... and so on. Actually, a "misfire" line of spells could be interesting. Cause a penalty to hit on their next shot, and then if they miss or crit-miss it triggers other interesting effects.
- Spells that inherently involve using technological devices. Like, you pour magic into a grenade, you throw, and when it hits you get the grenade's effect stacking on the spell effect. Have a fireball inside of a bullet so that it goes off wherever the bullet lands. Some of this might overlap the magus but that doesn't make it incorrect. Transportation spells that require that you be in a vehicle... and so forth.
- The ability to temporarily create technological items. Like, a spell that's literally just "every time you sustain this spell, you get a free grenade, popped into an empty hand (or dropped on the ground at your feet, primed to blow at the end of your turn)"

Actually... this is one of the concerns I have with SF2 magic. The four traditions fit PF2. They fit it really well. They really don't fit SF2. In a SF2 that was not beholden to PF2, letting the technomancer have their own line of tech-themed spells would be the obvious way to differentiate them. "What makes me a technomancer? Well, every single one of my spells is tech-themed." It's simple, ti's easy, it works, and it makes sense. You'd probably fit a few more class features in there too, because there is space in the budget, but you wouldn't need to. If the Technomancer needs to have a PF2 tradition, though... well, you could load one of those traditions down with tech spells, but that means that any pick-a-list out there could pick that list and wind up just as tech-focused. It also means that if you do a PF2 crossover, then suddenly the technomancer has a whole bunch of non-tech spells, and one (but only one) of the PF2 traditions does as well. If you don't make the spells do the heavy lifting on theme, then you need to have the class features do it all, and it's still a bit weird because, again, the technomancer is throwing around a bunch of spells that have nothing to do with tech.

So yeah. That's a serious concern. It feels like it's wrong for SF2, and it feels like it's one that's going to persist because it makes it more compatible than PF2, which also feels wrong.

...but lets say that this is non-negotiable, for whatever reason. Time to suck it up and deal. Okay. In that case, the Technomancer is going to need to get most of its theming from somewhere other than its spell list. Given that, I think you need to pare the spell slots back. I wouldn't say go full wave caster. That's too far, and I'm not suggesting and martial to replace it. I'm suggesting they trim back to a setup like the Psychic where you only get two slots per spell rank, and give the rest of the class budget in interesting magical powers, which you can theme strongly.

Various features that might be interesting...?

- The ability to somehow sense nearby tech, tag it, possibly detect things from that location, and then, critically, use that as the target point for a spell regardless of LOS or LOE. In general, I think I like the idea of a character who can tag a limited number of tech objects (held by allies, enemies, or just nearby) and then be able to act through those objects.

Yeah... that's me hitting the wall. Anyone else?

So... I am new here. Yes. At the same time, I notice things. About the Engineer in particular, I notice three things.

- SF2 totally needs to have a Mechanic class - something int-based that's all about being Jut Plain Better at Doing Tech Stuff than everyone else in some meaningful way. This is an action-adventure soft sci-fi setting (plus fantasy aspects). It needs this. It doesn't necessarily need to have that name specifically, but it needs to be that thing.

- It seems like there's not a really satisfying idea of what that class would look like in SF2. How does "really good at tech" translate into getting your share of awesomeness at the table?

- It's not one of the initial 6 classes. That means that Paizo isn't really working on this one yet, and that means that this is a pretty solid time for us to toss out ideas and churn on them and maybe give the folks over at Paizo some more grist to work with when they do come around to working on the mechanic (or engineer, or whatever it winds up being called).

I'll start.

First, they're on a basic martial chassis. You can't be Awesome At Technology if you can't pick up your awesome souped-up gun and Shoot Good. Also, mechanics have this Thing with wrenches. So we're talking about a martial here. Everything else they get is the bonus stuff that you pile on top of a martial chassis to make it worth playing.

past that, I see the following ideas for Cool Things.

- Widgets. Having a bunch of random tech bobbins and whatnot that you can pull out of the many pockets on your overalls to help handle the situation at hand is very much a mechanic thing. Either you just happen to have them on you (and know how to tweak them to make them Do The Thing) or you MacGyver them up on the spot to serve the needs of the moment. Regardless, this winds up looking an awful lot like the alchemist stuff from PF2, just with useful tech widgets rather than alchemy. I feel like Starfinder having alchemy-like Useful Tech Widgets is probably a win anyway.

- Personal Gear. There is absolutely a trope about the person who's totally into the tech and absolutely loves their gun/motorcycle/drone/computer/whatever and gives it the kind of maintenance and upgrades that people who aren't so into the tech simply don't have the time, dedication, or know-how for. Basically, they'd be able to pick some number of pieces of their own gear and give them upgrades... upgrades that would only work properly in their hands because, of course, they know exactly how to use their heavily modded whatever-it-is in a way that no one else really does.

- Proper Maintenance. There are also advantages to having a truly dedicated mechanic on the team. Essentially, this allows the Mechanic to hand out limited versions of the Personal Gear buffs to other people. Possibly some combination of "general check-up" stuff that gives small but meaningful general buffs around reliability, and more focused attention that offers noticeable improvements to a small number of pieces of party gear- like lesser versions of Personal Gear buffs that other people can enjoy. The idea here is to capture that moment where the Soldier finds out that there's going to be a mechanic in the party and starts getting that happy look.

....and, honestly, I think you could make it mostly that. Like, for the drone companion, anyone can get a drone companion by spending the feats for it, but a Mechanic can then pick their companion as one of their pieces of personal gear, and crank up the awesome a notch or two. Bonus points if there's a viable way to apply Proper Maintenance buffs to an SRO party member.

So... who else has ideas? Or things to say about these ideas? Those are good too.

Pretty much exactly what it says on the tin. This is a place to talk about which ancestries are particularly good at being kineticists (or even just specific kinds of kineticist) and why. First noting the common ancestries, which... honestly have pretty much already been discussed, but it feels weird to leave them out.

Human: First and most obvious. Pretty much *any* dual-element kineticist can come up with some way that they'd love to be able to use an extra level 1 class feat. Being able to get a dedication at level 9 is potentially also worthwhile... and then there's Versatile Heritage. Getting Medium Armor proficiency at level 1 could be pretty appealing for some builds.

Halfling: If for some reason it was really important to you to get that impulse junction at level 1, but you want to branch out at level 5? Cultural Adaptability into human means that you can buy a level 1 impulse at level 5 with a single ancestry feat. The halfling luck tree is also potentially worthwhile.

Goblin: Somewhat niche. Goblin Scuttle can be useful if you aren't interested in any of your in-class reactions. Burn It isn't useful *currently*, but might be with the remaster? There are aerokineticist builds that care about ability to be sneaky, and goblin has a fair number of sneaky feats.

Elf: base movespeed of 30 is a heck of an opener. Of course, losing 2 con is brutal... but we don't have to do that anymore, do we? Then there's Nimble Elf that cranks it up to 35 for an ancestry feat. For those that intend to get into the thick of things, the level 9 Elf Step isn't bad either. If for some reason you don't care about those mobility boosts? No particular reason to be an elf.

Dwarf... tries. +con/+wis/+free/-cha is nice. The movespeed 20 hurts, though. If you're planning on using Earth Armor, then you can pretty much buy that back with Unburdened Iron, at which point it starts being a decently solid choice, but it's still not amazing.

There is no reason whatsoever to be a gnome.

/********/

Moving past that, and on to the uncommons and rares, I'm not going to bother mentioning the ones that I see as having some particular kineticist-based reason to want.

Grippli: Arguably, long tongue (lvl 5) would allow you to deliver Ocean's Balm at reach. That's at least moderately interesting.

Leshy: +con/+wis/+free/-int is a strong combo for kineticist.

Tengu: The Stormtossed Tengu heritage autosucceeds at its flat check against concealment from rain and fog. Both Driving Rain (Water 6) and Impenetrable Fog (Water 8) produce those kinds of concealment in ways that might sometimes benefit your foes. Tengu Feather Fan *wants* to be interesting, but... kineticists are usually going to be better off using their own powers rather than cantrips, even if those cantrips are running off class DC.

Conrasu: +con/+wis/+free/-cha is also a strong combo for a kineticist. Additionally, Ceremony of Growth (level 13 feat) gives you unlimited access to the effects of Enlarge, including an increased reach and a bonus to melee (not just melee weapon) damage.

Poppet: +con/+cha/+free/-dex is potentially interesting for terrakineticists. Having an ancestry feat that can bump you up to base speed 30 is potentially interesting as well, especially for aerokineticists.

Skeleton: Fodder skeleton heritage has base speed of 30.

Goloma: base move speed of 30. Additionally, for those who want to get into the scrum for whatever reason, Watchful Gaze (lvl 1) plus Constant Gaze (lvl 9) makes you immune to flanking by creatures your level and lower. How often are you going to be flanked by two different creatures who are both higher level than you are?

Anandi: Spindly anandi get a move speed of 30.

/**********/

...and that's it, really. It's not that there's nothing of value to be gotten from ancestries, it's that so little of it has any real synergy with kineticist. I'll take a look at the versatile heritages next, but I don't hold out a lot of hope there.

So... one thing that you can bet about SF2 is that one way or another, a bunch of classes are going to wind up more interesting and/or flavorful than their SF1 versions. That's a good thing. It means that some of the classes might wind up pretty heavily remixed, though... which might mean that some niches go unfilled. If the niche is unimportant or unfun, that's not a problem. If it's core to someone's fantasy, though... that's an issue. So let's talk for a bit about what concepts are core to the Starfinder fantasy. I'll start out with the obvious ones, and I'd love to have people fill in behind me with the ones that are not obvious to an outsider.

- Tank. There has to be a way to be the big, beefy character who's hard to kill, and who at the same time has some way of convincing the enemy to target them rather than their friends. Ideally, there would be a way to do this for both mostly-ranged and mostly-melee tank, though ranged is probably the more important of the two.

- Weapon-based damage. There needs to be a way to build a character whose primary Thing is picking up a weapon, choosing an opponent, and making their HP drop. Again, ideally it would be possible to build this kind of character as either melee or ranged, though it doesn't necessarily need to be the same class. This character should not be one for whom stealth is inherently part of the build.

- The Operative still needs to be a thing. There needs to be a way to play someone who has "really skilled" as their primary schtick, there needs to be a way to play a stealth-based character, there needs to be a way to play an infiltration specialist, there needs to be a way to play a sniper, there needs to be a way to play assassin-types who aren't necessarily snipers, and clustering them all as the same class just makes way too much sense to do anything else.

- There needs to be a way to be a character who's awesome because they're really good at tech, without need to dip into spells. Whether it's a small swarm of robots or a set of overalls full of gadgets or whatever, the trope of the genius engineer who does Awesome Genius Engineer Things is too valuable to lose.

- There needs to be at least one class that's relatively simple to pick up and understand and play, and have it work out fine when you do.

That's what I got. What else is there?

So... I'm a total PF2 fan, who prior to this looked over at Starfinder and thought it looked potentially interesting, but was super turned-off by certain aspects the old 3.x chassis. I find myself both very excited by the news about SF2 and newly interested in Starfinder as a game that I might personally play at some point.

So now I suddenly have motivation to want the new Starfinder to be as awesome as it can be... but I have no experience with SF1. I don't really know what all the awesome bits of Starfinder are. At the same time, I do know that the Paizo devs are really good at taking feedback, and I figure that you all do know about what makes Starfinder awesome. So let's start with the percolating on tryign to bring these thigns together, yeah? After all, now is a particularly good time to be giving Paizo feedback on what the awesome parts of SF1 are that you'd like to see again in SF2... and what the maybe not-so-awesome bits are that maybe could use a few changes.

It's even better if you can boil down why a thing is awesome, or what makes it awesome. For an example, they're not going to hand you an SF2 version of a class that functions exactly like the SF1 version. It would be a wasted opportunity if nothing else. If you can help them identify what made it really cool to be or fun to play, though, there's a good chance they can preserve that.

So...?

I started putting this together as a way to organize my own thoughts and understanding about the various kineticist elements and try to get a better grasp on what they're good for overall. There's a lot to chew through, you know? I share it because... well, I figure that if I didn't have a particularly complete grasp of this stuff before I did this, then maybe some other folks didn't either. This is crude, slanted by my own biases, and limited to my own understanding, but it's a start, and I personally have found some interesting things along the way.

First, as a bit of context to help make sense of some of what I'm saying... there is a pretty clear antisynergy between overflow impulses (which take down your aura) on the one side and aura junctions (which therefore stop working until you can bring them back up) and aura stances (as above, but it also steals the free blast from your next channel elements) on the other. As such, for the most part, I advocate focusing on one or the other. If you're going to be throwing around a lot of overflow stuff, then you might want to put your junctions into non-aura things, and maybe avoid stances. If you really like your auras, then maybe not so much with the overflow. There is an exception, though, for opening moves. Having an overflow impulse as your standard opening move works just fine with aura stances, because you start out in aura but no stance, and would have to spend that action getting the stance up *anyway*. Now... on to the elements.

/********/

- Air:
--- Gets a lot of mobility, a decent bit of intrigue-like utility, a nice bit of forced movement... and surprisingly few ways to deal actual damage. Of the 15 impulses that each element gets, there are four that deal damage. Only five of the impulses are overflow (which includes two of the damaging impulses, and one of the lvl 18 impulses, but the other level 18 impulse is a damaging stance, and the final damaging option is lvl 1.)
--- It's got a few potentially interesting stances (including one of its capstone impulses and a rather nice hybrid impulse with Earth), a solid aura junction, and relatively few overflows. If you're willing to really lean into the idea that damage is not your primary job on the team, and the rest of the team is willing to let you roll with that, then going aura-primary starts making a lot of sense.
--- Impulse Junction, Critical Blast, and Aura Junction are all solidly useful. Aura and impulse hand out even more mobility, and crit blast gives you a 10-foot push.
--- Composite impulses: Metal is terrible, fire is another overflow "mobility with damage" power (you already had one), earth is a potentially interesting aura but it requires that you get close. water is another overflow "damage plus forced move" power, and wood actually gives you a bit of healing, plus an enemy debuff.
--- Conclusion: Air gets on-demand access to a very nice version of flight (starting at level 8), a very nice version of Message, and a very nice version of invisibility. Does that appeal to you? Air is a bit light on damage-dealing, but has lots of battlefield mobility. Is that interesting or disappointing? Those two questions will pretty much give you your answer as far as whether or not to seriously consider playing an aerokineticist. The best way to take Air as a dual element is probably to use it to poach those tasty, tasty mobility and utility powers, and then use your other element to fill in your core combat ability.

- Earth:
--- 6 of the 15 impulses are overflow. That's the level 1 damaging impulse, an okay level 4 reaction, a level 6 damaging impulse, two level 12 terrain modification powers, and the level 18 Big Boom damaging power. Incidentally, those three damaging overflows? Other than Elemental Blast, that's the only direct damage impulses that pure earth gets.
--- Strong on defense, weak on attack. Level 1 gives you the best of the three armors, the level 4 overflow reaction is pretty defensive, level 8 gives you Spike Skin, which is a nice little defensive boost with some thorns attached, and the level 14 and level 18 stances both help out your defenses in their own ways.
--- 3 stances. You get one at level 1 that gives you tremorsense (Not particularly helpful in combat. Useful for early nonflying invisible enemies, I guess?), and then you have to wait until level 14 for the next one. The level 14 and level 18 stances are both pretty awesome, but they compete with one another fairly directly.
--- Has a bit of terrain manipulation (one for walls, one for crevices), and a fair stack of utility. Earth gets tremorsense, dig, creating semipermanent stone objects, and creating stepping stones to walk on to avoid hazardous terrain. Some of them are pretty niche.
--- Impulse junction is simple, useful, and adds to your defenses again. Crit is a straightforward "The enemy is prone now", which is nice by itself and combos well with Wood's. Aura... makes you marginally more sticky. It probably isn't worth it. Weirdly, neither of the two earth stances that are actually good really care about your aura size, so that's one feat you can save yourself. I don't normally mention skill junctions, but the skill junction is actually potentially interesting here. It's athletics, and the Earth kineticist already has lots of reason to both invest in strength and get within reach of the enemy.
--- Composite impulses can actually help a lot. Wood, Metal, and Fire all give extra ways of damaging the enemy and are pretty solid impulses in their own right. Fire and wood are overflow, and Wood and Metal are sustained. Air gives a stance that, honestly, is mostly useful for buffing Air stuff. It's okay, if that's what you're looking for. Water gives a non-overflow direct damaging attack. It's not a lot of damage, but it is damage, and it's got some effects that are potentially useful for sucking up enemy actions. Sadly, we don't actually know its range or area of effect at the moment, so it's kind of hard to tell how good it is.
--- General conclusion: It may be light on overflow impulses, but the fact that its aura junction isn't all that impressive and it doesn't get a good stance aura until lvl 14 means that you might well want to lean into the overflows anyway. It's clearly angling to be the designated tank of the kineticists, and it makes a solid case for itself in that. At the same time... it lacks any sort of equivalent to Opportunity Attack, which is a bit problematic, and the "what do I actually do in the fight" options are a bit limited. If you want to go mono-Earth, I expect that you'll want to invest pretty heavily in composite impulses, and which ones you pick (Air doesn't really apply, but all of the others are solid) are going to have a significant effect on your midgame strategy. In general, though, I think that Earth serves best as a solid core to personal defenses for a multi-element kineticist who intends to get right up into the fact of the enemy. Even just taking the level 1 armor impulse alone is worth a decent bit there.

- Fire:
--- First thing is that the current-meta default serious "max the damage" build for kineticist is going to start with fire element, fire impulse junction, fire aura junction, and a damage-dealing fire stance. It's probably going to want to invest in strength, too, and get up close, and consider overflow powers a bit expensive for anything other than openers.
--- It's midrange on the overflows overall. 7 out of the 15. It's just... often it seems like the overflow powers aren't the exciting ones. Admittedly, I'm generally biased in favor of aura builds, which may be causing me to discount the overflow options, but it's pretty clear that the fire kineticist was designed specifically to at least allow for a high-damage low-overflow build, and I find it somewhat difficult to consider it in any other light.
--- In addition to the wealth of raw damage, fire is notable for having a solid set of mobility powers. Like, 4 of the 15 fire impulses have a mobility component, and 3 of the 5 composite impulses do as well. Fire has a lot of support for jumping, with optional explosions.
--- Impulse junction and aura junction are both valuable. If you're planning on going with an aura build, then aura is the more important of the two. Fire's resistance junction is notable for being the only resistance junction that covers two damage types. Given that they're fire and cold, that's pretty solid. Critical blast isn't particularly impressive and also scales poorly.
--- Composite Impulses: Air and Earth are interesting "Damage and also movement" powers. Water is similar, except in stance form. Metal is a beautiful two-action non-overflow attack that cashes in some of the immediate damage for a whole lot of hassle for your target, and it slots into the standard fire/stance damage build *beautifully*. Wood is... weird. It's really not worth taking unless you have wood element blasts. If you do... it's cool if you can prep the battlefield with it, and otherwise a bit meh.
--- Conclusion: Well... do you like damage? This is the place to go to get the damage as a kineticist. It works surprisingly well for mono-fire, though you're probably still stronger overall if you branch out at some point. Starting as a dual-element, then taking fire aura at 5 and fire impulse at 9 wouldn't be a mistake. Seriously consider flames oracle archetype, though if you have a friend who's a flames oracle, that's even better. You could probably put together a pretty cool/interesting long-range high-overflow build with this element, but every time I start looking at it, I get drawn away by the way that the short-range aura build all works together so well.

- Metal:
--- Second most raw damage of all the elements, but a lot of that damage is built around hazardous terrain, and pretty much all of it is overflow. Gets a nice early wall that can stagger the enemy advance a bit, eat a few actions, and then explode for damage. Has a built-in armor with a built-in shield. Has solid ways of horking over specific kinds of enemies - metallic ones, and ones who are weak to a certain metal.
--- Impulse junction gives a nice helping of thorns. Aura junction would be really cool but only works on metallic enemies. Immunity is... okay. Blast crit is a bit of extra ongoing damage, but scales poorly (much like Fire).
--- no mobility, no heals.
--- General conclusion: The three main selling points are "horks over specific foes", "excellent damage if you can exploit hazardous terrain" and "reasonably tanky+thorns", with the metalcrafting utility as a nice-to-have that comes along for the ride. The "horks over specific foes" is going to depend on your campaign, and the "can exploit hazardous terrain" is going to depend on your party. If you don't expect to get any love from either, it's probably not worth it. Should pretty clearly go overflow rather than aura.

- Water:
--- One of two healing elements, and the one that's the most straightforward to use.
--- Uses a lot of overflow. It has 15 base impulses. 9 of them are overflow, including every non-stance past level 4, and the level 4 non-stance impulse is niche utility. For aquatic adventures it's great, but it's not something you're going to want to throw around in combat all that often..
--- Lots of area effect. Has a fair bit of forced movement, difficult terrain, and "creatures inside this area are concealed, and creatures outside the area are concealed from them". No hazardous terrain. No single-target attacks. Other than the difficult terrain and zones of concealment, it only has a single standard ice wall for terrain modification.
--- Impulse Junction is really pretty nice, if you like forced movement. Aura junction niche. Crit junction is actively counterproductive in many cases. Has one of the better spreads of blast damage types, if you're willing to invest a couple of first-level feats in it.
--- Composite impulses: metal is too niche. Wood wants to be interesting, but seems impractical, unless you're able to prep the battlefield. Fire is a stance that has a lot of mobility and area-effect fire damage... that would actually be interesting if Water wasn't so overflow-heavy. Earth is potentially cool. It does mostly water stuff but *isn't* overflow. We'll need to actually find out what the area is before we know how good it is, though. Wind is potentially nice, and also very much more of the same as the rest of the stuff that water has to offer. May well be worth investing in, but doesn't change the profile any.
--- Conclusion: I'd take this for the healing and/or forced move. One of the auras is also pretty nice from a debuff standpoint... though the heavy use of overflow (and three-action overflow specifically) makes liking it for its auras not necessarily all that great. Everything else would be something that I adjusted to because I wanted those things, rather than being a thing I wanted for itself.

- Wood:
--- The other of your two healing elements. Worth noting that the way that kineticist healing works, it can absolutely be worth taking both if you want to go heavy on the healing side.
--- It's heavy on ways to hand out temp HP, and other forms of "we're just going to have you not take that damage after all".
--- Seven out of the 15 powers are overflow, largely weighted towards the upper levels
--- Impulse junction hands out chunks of temp HP. Aura junction hands out very small amounts of temp HP to you and all your nearby friends. It doesn't seem like an impressive amount, but it might be worth more than we think. blast crit is a nice little tax on enemy actions.
--- In addition to the healing, it has quite a bit of terrain manipulation, much of it aggressive. Much of the terrain manipulation is also overflow/sustained, which limits the ability to stack very much of it at once.
--- General conclusion: I'd go with Wood because I wanted the tree, I wanted the heals, or I wanted the aggressive terrain manipulation.

/********/

In the process of doing this, I noticed a few interesting things about potential builds.

- Metal/Water. I honestly did not see this coming, but it's two elements that are both quite fond of their overflows, one of which is big into dropping large areas of hazardous terrain, and the other of which is big into forced movement. That's a pretty solid core combo right there. Open up by dropping some largish area of hazardous terrain, and spend the rest of the fight pushing your enemies back into it and/or pushing them around in it.

- Earth/Wood. This one wasn't a surprise to me, so much, but it got reaffirmed.
Earth kind of needs a friend to give it useful things to do with its time. Wood's habits wrt healing and aggressive terrain give it useful things to do, and it also just stacks more tank on that tank. Then, too, if you've got to pick one composite impulse, jagged berms is a good one to pick. Finally, those blast crits really are two great tastes that taste great together. It's one pairing where I would absolutely grab two-element infusion (once I got both blast crits).

- Fire is funny. The Mono-Fire build almost writes itself... except that the only junctions it actually *uses* are impulse and aura. So... maybe mixing it with something else? Honestly not sure what to do with the other side of that combo, though I admit that Metal is at least a little tempting just for the joy of keeping Molten Wires, and it's not like being able to fill large blocks of the battlefield with hazardous terrain as an opener is a bad thing. Alternately, reach into Air for all of those fabulous Air shenanigans. You could be the tiny avatar of fiery death that you always were... while also being flying and invisible.

/**********/

agreements, disagreements, further insights, and other thoughts about derived build implications are all eagerly welcomed here.

I was thinking about how to build a purist fire kineticist recently. In particular, you might not want to put more than about a 12/+1 in dex for various reasons, but you also don't have access to the armor impulses, and you don't want to do things like take an entire archetype to get armor scaling... but I realized you don't really need that.

Armor Proficiency is right there as a general feat.

So, basically, you take the 12 dex that you want. You get some light armor that'll give you 2 AC and you accept that you're down by 2 and try not to die for the first two levels. At level 2, you archetype to Sentinel, and upgrade your armor to something like Chainmail or a Breastplate... and now you have the same AC as everyone else. At level 3, you take Armor Proficiency as your general feat, and retrain Sentinel to whatever level 2 class feat it was that you actually wanted. (Possibly Oracle? It isn't like it was going to actually help you much before level 4.) At 5, you get your ability boosts. You probably bump con/cha/str/dex. At 10, you do that again... and you switch back to light armor and retrain Armor Proficiency to something else, because you don't need it anymore. At 13 you get Expert in light armor, and the whole "nonscaling" thing would start to matter, but it doesn't, because you're done with that ride.

Oh, and if you're the right kind of human, you don't even need to wait until level 2.

The whole thing is so much easier than we've been telling ourselves this entire time.

I'm sure there are some out there who already realized this. This message isn't for you. It's for all of those people out there trying to build characters who are thinking like I was thinking as of yesterday.

I'm going to admit it. I'm just hyped out at this point. The Tian Xia announcement was pretty darned cool. The HotW announcement was moderately shiny. Even if it was mostly for people who are not me, it was nice to see them get theirs. Kineticist is something that I have a keen personal interest in, and honestly could have happily ingested my entire hype budget for this season all by itself, even without the rest of RoE (and it looks like there's some pretty cool stuff to be found in the rest of the book too). The remaster? The remaster? It's just too much. I can't even grapple with it all. At this point I'm just waiting for it all to arrive so I can stop all this guessing.

I'm sure I'll be happy for it all again once I can actually get my hands on it and start frobbing the systems in a real way and actually building test characters and stuff. Every indicator I've seen suggests that the remaster is going to be more good than bad - an upgrade in a number of small but valuable ways. That's on top of a PF2 that was pretty awesome to begin with. For right now, though, I am just tired.

Just noticed this on twitter: https://twitter.com/PaizoWorkers/status/1666236773763280897

(short version: Paizo and UPW have agreed on a union contract and it actually seems to be working out well for everyone.)

So... awesome. I'm especially pleased by the combination of the announcement itself and Eric Mona's reply to it. I remember when this stuff was a HUGE topic on this board, with lots of uncertainty and concern... and it's really cool to see that it all seems to have been going well and to be continuing to go well.

So, there's a lot of focus on the bits of the thrower's bandolier that let you put runes on things. That's fair... but I think that the real opportunity for shenanigans here is something we've all been sleeping on.

Activate (two action activity) envision, Interact; Effect All weapons attuned to the bandolier, not including any weapons you're currently wielding, return to the bandolier.

There's no range limitation. There's no LOS. There's not X-per-day. It cares not about who might have been holding the weapon, or what might have been done to it in the meantime. You spend the actions, and the weapons return to the bandolier. That's it.

- You could use it to pass messages. Leave a dagger with someone, let them affix a message to it by one means or another (depending on what your GM will allow). At the end of the day, drag your weapons back to you and get an update. Presumably it is not possible to have two different bandoliers attune to the same weapon, but this is not specified. If it is not so, the message-passing bets even easier.

- You have a really nice dagger. You sell it to someone, or use it as a bribe. On your way out of town, you call it back. Even better, if you first wait until they sell it to someone else, it's quite possible that they get blamed.

- You offer to arm a rag-tag group of desperate whatevers. All you have are daggers, but that's better than nothing, right? Well, no. You get them fully committed, and two actions later, it's exactly the same as nothing.

- You kludge together an impromptu bridge, using items from your bandolier as critical structural components (bolts an pins and whatnot). I don't have to tell you the rest of how this goes, right?

That's just what I came up with off the top of my head. I'm sure there's more.

So, Beliefs are gong to be more of a thing... and Alignment (as it was) is going away entirely. So this gives us some potentially very interesting possibilities for pivots in deities who had Beliefs that don't necessarily enshrine their old place on the 3x3 grid. This is a place to bring those out and take note of them and consider some of the potential implications... both for gods who might have been considered "good" and for those who might have been considered "evil" but whose Beliefs are... less that way.

In the hopes of not dragging this immediately into alignment argument hell, I'm going to just skip the ones I see as borderline entirely and look for the ones that are particularly blatant and/or odd takes. Further, I am taking as given for this purpose that the undead are inherently evil. There are a number of other gods that would make this list otherwise, and I'm trying to not step in that complexity. There's also at least a few cases where it seems pretty clear that the authors were seeing art as being inherently morally good. I'm not going to get into that one, either.

Baalzebub:
- Edicts: Convey yourself with regal dignity, claim what you desire and deserve, seek vengeance from those who wrong you
- Anathema: Provoke Baalzebul’s envy, show humility
These? Really not so bad. A refusal to show humility is a bit obnoxious, perhaps, but the real sting here comes in exactly how you interpret "those who wrong you" and "what you desire and deserve". With reasonable and sane interpretations of those two clauses, there's nothing preventing a devout follower of Baalzebub from also being a moderately arrogant but otherwise decent individual.

Dispater:
- Edicts: Uphold absolute law, pursue perfection in your surroundings, speak with refinement
- Anathema: Act above your station, neglect your defenses, betray a lover
This one takes it even a notch further. "Uphold absolute law" is *potentially* concerning, but not inherently evil, and the only other Belief that has moral implications one way or the other is an anathema against betraying a lover. That's really not bad.

Baphomet:
- Edicts Confuse paths and roads, outwit your foes instead of overpowering them, pace labyrinths
- Anathema Kill something that cannot significantly harm you, bargain with Asmodeus
This has been commented on before, but basically the only thing in here that's in any way troublesome is the edict about messing with the transportation infrastructure. On the flip side, there's a pretty heavy theme about *not* abusing your strength, which is nice, and an anathema against bargains with Asmodeus... which is both to his credit and jsut good sense. Fits in quite well with the bit where we know we're getting playable Minotaurs in Howl of the Wild.

Ragadahn:
- Edicts Draw spirals, seek primordial secrets, use poison, always carry water
- Anathema Suffer a linnorm’s death curse, destroy a fossil
None of these things are in any way even potentially problematic other than use of poison... and we've seen a bit too much acceptance of poison use elsewhere for me to really consider that one a problem.

Winlas:
- Edicts Serve leaders of ceremonies, craft ceremonial arms and armor, lead a congregation
- Anathema Deride sacred ceremonies, carelessly or lazily perform rituals, destroy ceremonial objects
First one on our list that started out on the Good side. In general, though? None of this is morally good or evil.

Arazni: Arazni is Arazni. This one should be pretty clear.

Lissala:
- Edicts Work hard and demand others do so as well, cooperate or avoid conflict with ophidian creatures
- Anathema Disobey a superior, shirk your duties, destroy a book
Honestly, all of this stuff looks pretty good to me? Assuming your neck of the woods isn't overrun with evil snakes, there's nothing to really object to here.

General Susumu:
- Edicts Seek glory in battle, loudly proclaim your victories, protect your possessions and strongholds
- Anathema Cower from fights, refuse a challenge from an equal, mistreat your weapons, abuse your mount
He's a bit of a braggart, but otherwise seems quite reasonable.

Arundhat
- Edicts Practice herbalism, tend to sacred flowers, offer appropriate flowers to other divinities
- Anathema Dispose of waste near flowers, harvest flowers without offering the proper prayers, dispose of withered flowers improperly
The only other initially-Good deity I felt confident adding to the list. Aside from floral theming, there's nothing here that aligns to moral rather than immoral behavior.

So, with swashbuckler, using Tumble Through, you can tumble past an enemy (and thus gain panache) midmovement. This immediately ups your move speed. Do you get to use that additional movement on the triggering tumble through action to travel a little further?

So... I was just re-reading a bit on Rahadoum for random reasons, and it occurred to me that the sort of "swearing to extradimensional entities" thing that the new alignment system is based on is pretty much exactly what Rahadoum is so virulently opposed to.

So now I'm imagining the Pure Legion walking around with some sort of "detect evil/good/chaos/law we don't actually care which one it is" items somehow.

So on the thread about mesmerists, it was brought up that PF2 is still a little light on oddball classes... and I think that's correct. There are players who will walk into an RPG group thinking "I want to play the weirdo". From time to time, I've been that player. For those who want to play weirdo characters with weirdo mechanics, things are still a bit thin on the ground. Now, I totally get why that is - classes that do unusual things with unusual mechanics are inherently difficult to balance. At the same time, recent classes suggest that Paizo has been getting comfortable enough with the balace structure they've set up that they're ready to reach further afield... so let's try to scout out some new fields for them.

This, then, is a place to toss ideas back and forth about weirdo ideas that could really open up the possibilities for players who just want to play something quirky or strange.

So... I looked at the Mesmerist idea fo Tricks, and, leaving behind any thoughts abotu flavor, a lot of it seemed... very similar to what we see in other classes? You're assembling a limited number of limited-use powers at the beginning of the day from a longer list. That part of the game is kind of a lot like wizard. The game as a whole feels a lot like the "item dispenser" part of alchemist, possibly with not quite as many steps. My understanding is that that's not the fun part of alchemist.

So instead of being all about planning out your day and deciding which fights to spend your little tokens on, why not make it more quick-twitch? So... you get a library of these little powers, and each of them does some nifty thing, probably either as a single action or as a reaction, and each one refreshes when you pull off some interesting other thing, and you can only hold a certain number of them charged at any one time. At level one you might have two powers - one generic, one from your class path - and be able to maintain one charged at a time. As you go up in level you might get more and be able to puck up yet more from feats. At level seven, you might have two charges and five powers or some such - maybe three charges and seven powers at level 18. The thing is, you're constantly looking for semi-useful places to dump them, because the next time you manage to get a crit against someone or successfully knock someone prone or an enemy goes down or you succeed on a save or whatever, the power that has that recharges off of that particular thing is going to come back online and if you don't have an open slot for it, it'll be wasted. You're basically constantly either looking for ways to usefully spend the tricks that you have or efficiently recharge one or two more. It lends itself to a chaotic, off-the-cuff combat style, but at the same time, basically everything you do is either helping out your allies in some way (because that's what your tricks do) or Doing Something Useful (because that's how you get them back)

Have it all run off of some sort of fate/luck/chaos magic. We know that fortune effects are a thing, and we know that chaos magic is a thing. There's plenty of space in there to fit a character who's all about random tiny bits of good luck happening to their allies all the time.

It would be a pretty generic martial chassis, probably with something to encourage melee, possibly encourage dex/finesse. Charisma also feels appropriate. It would also be a potentially cool way to build the "mascot character" idea without the feelsbad. Like, they're literally a good luck charm, and you can tell, because they just let you reroll the critfail you were about to get on that saving throw.

So... I've heard that Rage of the Elements is going to have an Elemental Instinct for the Barbarian... and that's literally all I know about it. Does anyone else know anything more? Any clue if they'll have a ranged option built in?

The power of your implement can also be turned to the more common task of combat, its power adding to and amplifying the effects of runes and other magical empowerments. When you Strike, you can trace mystic patterns with an implement you're holding to empower the Strike, causing it to deal 2 additional damage per weapon damage die. Channeling the power requires full use of your hands. You don't gain the benefit of implement's empowerment if you are holding anything in either hand other than a single one-handed weapon, other implements, or esoterica, and you must be holding at least one implement to gain the benefit.

I was just reading this,and it occurred to me to consider how it might apply to alchemical bombs. I'd be curious to hear feedback Here's what I've got.

- An alchemica bomb is a one-handed weapon that you can make strikes with, so it does at least work. The question is what it does. If you hit someone with the bomb itself, it's pretty obviously doing the standard damage, plus two per die. Cool. The splash damage, though? What does it do to the splash damage? On the one side, the weapon does have damage dice, and static damage adders do apply to the splash damage (though they dont' stack with themselves for the primary damage). So there's a suggestion that the splash damage would also benefit from the empowerment. On the other side, the bits that are being splashed don't have damage dice. So...?

So I recently noticed an interesting synergy.

- Barbarians get a feat called Come And Get It. It's a single action that adjusts the way that your rage functions until you stop raging. It's potentially okay, if a bit niche, but it comes with a really nice follow-on feat. Great. One of the changes is that it makes you flat-footed while it's in effect.

- Oracles get some potentially very cool revelation spels, but those things trigger curses. That's something that you can work with to a degree as a full Oracle, but for archetype Oracles it's worse. Every time you use them in a day after the first, you wind up flat-footed for the rest of the fight.

Flat-footed doesn't stack with itself.

So the question here is twofold.
- First, is there a real synergy here? Are there any revelation spells that would be particularly appealing to the kind of barbarian who might reasonably take (and use) Come And Get It? FA builds are fine, if that's what it takes.
- Second, is there anything else out there that has the PC voluntarily going flat footed for some other pertinent advantage? Any way we could usefully stack those?

At the moment, the best I've got is a crazy Torch Goblin with Incendiary Aura. He's willing to throw down with anyone at any time, and Really Likes Fire. It's not terrible, but it's not really more than a flavor build yet.

Smurf smurf smurf smurf smurf.

I haven't seem a thread go smurf in a while. I miss it. At the same time, I don't actually want to smurf up any of the existing threads, so....

Smurf.

Just a thread for tossing out silly ideas within a rough Pathfinder 2e scope. They don't have to be good ideas - just silly.

/******************/

Poppet atavism.

Michael J. Sayre just had some really interesting things to say on his twitter the other day.

https://mobile.twitter.com/MichaelJSayre1/status/1593256222966550528

We've noticed that Paizo books tend to cluster... and this sort of gives us some insight into the why of it... and, by extension, into the how.

So, given this context... what does Rage of the Elements help unlock?

To my mind...

- It's an important step to any sort of planar travel books.
- It's important for any lands that are heavy on Kineticists. I don't know enough about the various places to know what those would be, but... Tian Xia? I seem to recall something about kineticists being important to Tian Xia. I believe they also have a notable nagaji populace, so that's a bit of support pitched in by Impossible Lands.
- If there's anywhere that's really seriously wracked by elemental forces, it would be an unlock for that too.

This is mostly a fishing expedition for possible untapped class space... and it's specifically about iconic characters. We're looking for characters with the following features:

- Comes from a book, movie, TV show, or videogame. We're looking for something that someone might have seen once, said "I want to play *that*." and wish to play in game. Note that "other TTRPG" is *not* on the list. I suppose that wargames, board games, and CCGs are also a possibility... but we're specifically *not* looking for complaints that PF2 is missing out on some thing that PF1 had. We already know all of those. If you cherish a thing from PF1, and you want to get it in the thread, then see if you can find the essence of the thing you want in some other media, where we can actually distill out that essence without getting hung up on pointing at a bunch of class features and asking for those.

- Has to be actually in scope. We all know how tight the power balance is in PF2, and we're simply not going to get anything that breaks it.

- Has to be a character concept that you actually personally want and are interested in for some reason.

- There's something fundamental and important to the character (in your view) that you want and that you *cannot* get from PF2 as it is. The more clearly you can express this, the better. Discussing how to try to assemble something that resembles the thing you want from existing parts *is* on topic, but not as a "you're wrong" argument. Rather, it would be in order to refine what *exactly* is missing.

Also, as a specific caveat, let's assume that they do a good job on the Kineticist. In particular, let's assume that it's possible to build a reasonably satisfying elemental blaster out of it, and that they offer a level 1 feat that lets you do an appropriate amount of "I want to have everything I do be of damage type X". That one is currently pretty hypothetical, so let's be generous.

/*************/

...and I'll get us started off with one that we still don't have. (Admittedly, it's one I've mentioned before in other contexts) We don't have a true minion necro. The archetype has shown up in a bunch of places, but I'm going to take Diablo 2 as my official reference. This is the guy who's just got a horde of individually unimportant and largely disposable skeletons or zombies that follow him around and are effectively meaningful only in the aggregate. They're a huge tarpit that does okay damage, and they're generally able to support with some sort of spellcasting that lets them buff their allies or debuff their enemies or both. Mostly, though, it's the fantasy of having something like a small military unit's worth of skeletons following you around and doing what you tell them to, powered by your own necromantic abilities.

Really, all it would take to support this one in a satisfying way in my head would be to give the summoner a feat, or perhaps a small feat tree, that would let them change their eidolon into a troop, with appropriate modifications to stats. I know there are people out there who also want swarms, and that seems like the sort of thing that could be a follow-on feat or two. As it is, though, this option is not available to me.

Bonus points of you also offer a reasonably effective grapple/restraint ability that would let you simulate the target being grabbed and dragged down and piled on top of by something like twenty individually unimpressive zombies at once.

In the "what do you still need?" thread, someone commented that they really wanted to see more/new/better skill feats and, honestly, I kind of agree. I would like to see more skill feats, especially of the kind that do interesting things in skill-specific ways, and perhaps make "what skills are you focusing on" a more vibrant topic in character-building discussions.

A quick check on the feats under each skill in AoN gives us these raw numbers. No attempt has been made to filter for quality:

Acrobatics: 7
Arcana: 11
Athletics: 14
Crafting: 17
Deception: 13
Diplomacy: 12
Intimidation: 11
Lore: 9 (4 of which are only for specific lores)
Medicine: 16
Nature: 17
Occultism: 19
Performance: 6
Religion: 16
Society: 15
Stealth: 9
Survival: 11
Thievery: 6

So... which skills need more love? (I mean, I feel like Medicine is doing reasonably well, you know?) What kind of love do they need? Does anyone have any ideas for the kinds of skill feats that they'd like to see? Can you think of anything that you'd like to be able to do, that a skill feat ought to let you do, but that there's no skill feat for?

So... there's at least something of a hunger for medium draconic ancestries. One of the major issues holding Paizo back from providing same is that they don't want to get sued for copyright infringement by The RPG That Has "Dragon" Right There In The Name. So... if we want some sort of medium dragon-themed ancestry, then it might be helpful if we came up with names and explanations and whatnot that aren't stuff that D&D has already used.

So... no "draconians", "dragonborn", or "half-dragons".
Similarly, no "corrupting dragon eggs", no "magical conversion/rebirth via draconic deity", no "when a human and a dragon love each other very much".

Let's come up with some *new* stuff.

Well... I guess I'll start with some older stuff, but it was my own older stuff. I ran a 4th ed campaign about a decade ago that was intensely dragon-focused, and in it, I ran Dragonborn as basically ascended kobolds. They started out as kobolds, and then had dragon magic poured into them, causing them to literally increase in size and gain additional draconic abilities (like the breath weapon). So basically the idea here is that kobolds are tiny dragons, but they're super-stunted. If you pour enough power into them in the right ways, some of the limits on them break, and they increase in size naturally. Generally, this kind of powering up is going to require a sufficiently powerful patron of some sort, though it *is* possible via ritual as well. It would be a new ancestry, with heritages based on what the source of the power was... and it could have been discovered relatively recently, as well.

Like... perhaps some devil figured out the trick, and used it to start turning small tribes of half-starving kobolds into small tribes of relatively beefy shock troops, much to the consternation of the locals, who were prepared to deal with the former but not the latter. Some nearby dragon finds out about this, and notices their kobolds being tempted by the prospect. Well... they actually find the little blighters useful, so they put in the effort to come up with a response that lets them give the same sort of blessing... and so on. They'd be relatively few in number, but they'd mostly breed true, and you could have some really interesting tangled relationships around how they identify themselves now, and who they identify themselves with.

Sadly, I got nothing for names. Does anyone else have any ideas for names? Anything that's a historical reference would be ideal, though not strictly speaking necessary.

I apologize if this is not the correct forum to ask this question, but I couldn't figure out a better one.

I'm curious to know what unarmed ranged attacks are available out there. There are a number of builds where such a thing is potentially useful, after all. I'm particularly interested to know about any agile unarmed ranged attacks, for the swashbuckler tie-in.

The ones I know of:

- Kitsune foxfire (lvl 1 ancestry feat). 1d4 fire damage, max range 20.
Generally unimpressive, but we keep trying to find ways to make it useful.

- Leshy Seedpod (lvl 1 ancestry feat). deals 1d4 damage (like foxfire) but with a range increment of 10 rather than a hard max of 20. Again, generally unimpressive... even if you count in the unusual set of critical effects.

- Goblin scalding spit (lvl 9 ancestry feat that requires a lvl 5 ancestry feat that requires charhide heritage. Must be on fire): Quite a lot of effort to go to to get 1d6 fire damage at range 30.

- Wild Winds Stance (lvl 8 monk focus spell. Requires that you take one of two lvl 1 monk feats that unlock monk focus spells. spell provides a stance that enables the attack) 1t's a 1d6 damage ranged unarmed attack that doesn't require being on fire. That's nice. It's agile, which is also nice. The fact that anyone who isn't a monk is going to have to wait until level 16 for it is less nice.

- Automaton Energy Beam (lvl 1 ancestry feat): apparently, lvl 1 ancestry feat ranged unarmed attacks deal 1d4 damage. This one also has a moderately interesting critical effect.

- Automaton Core Cannon (lvl 17 ancestry feat): once per day, you can spend a single fight transformed such that you are immobile, and able to attack with what is effectively a d8-based ranged unarmed attack (fire). Again does ongoing damage on crit. It comes very late, though, the interaction with handwraps is a bit odd, and the fact that it's only one encounter per day means that you also have to have other answers.

This came up in another thread, and it seemed like a good use of a thread, so I'm starting it. This is the place to talk about various possible dual-class combos that are Good At Things (in an optimization way), and what they might happen to be good *at*. Damage is, of course, one fo the classic things to optimize for, but it's not the *only* thing.

I'll start with something a bit wacky, that's a resuscitation of a similar but notably weaker FA build. Spellscale Kobold monk/rogue. The monk side gives you FoB, Ki Strike, Stunning Strike, Stumbling stance, Stumbling Feint, and various mobility boosters. (Winding flow!) The rogue side takes Thief rogue, and a standard thief rogue damage build. Between the two of them, they cough up enough extra feats to take swashbuckler(fencer) archetype, Finishing Precision, Finishing Follow-through, and Bleeding Finisher. From kobold, you get a dex/cha race with a built-in Electric Arc as an innate. Dex>Cha>Con>Str/Int/Wis.

So... the payoff: Thief Rogue means that you get to have the best of all worlds on the monk dex vs str problem. By level 6, your Flurry of Blows has a built-in feint for free that applies to both attacks, forces a check against stun, and reasonably reliably triggers sneak attack. Also, you have Ki Strike to make it that much better once per fight. Then, if that feint was successful, you have panache, which you can use to attack at a -6. Not bad for your third attack of the round. That's only your second action, though. You can use your third to reposition (with monk movement shenanigans) or possibly toss off a second feint to support the finisher if your foe isn't flatfooted enough for you. Alternately, you can follow up that same juiced-up FoB with a solidly respectable Electric Arc (Cha for stat, and monk providing the casting proficiency) and/or use said EArc as a viable ranged option. I admit that I haven't used the thing in actual play (I am not well-suited to play characters who invest heavily in Deception), but I suspect that it won't shame you.

What does it get out of dual class? The rogue is the add-on here, and it brings sneak attack, extra skills, and a solid fix to the monk's perennial str-vs-dex problem. Additionally, the build was already very good at generating flat-footed, and already liked attacking a lot at reasonable to-hit penalties, both things that rogues rather like having.

/*********/

Other builds (less worked out):

- Fighter/Starlit Span Magus archetype into Psionic: because adding another +2 to-hit to Psionic Starlit Span pretty much is a plan. It's also thematically appropriate, as this manages to be just as boring in play as the traditional Psionic Starlit Span is.

- Gunslinger/Thaumaturge: The Thaumaturge would desperately like to play with some of the beefier one-handed firearms, but the action economy for reloading the things is punishing. The Gunslinger's major beef is a lack of raw damage per hit, which the Theumaturge can be of notable help with. It seems like arrangements could be made... and you're running on raw dex, which means that you can still crank charisma for the traditional thaumaturge "I am the party face and the party loremaster" shenanigans.

Just a place for "wait. Did you really mean that?" stuff about the kineticist.

Flame Eruption (lvl 1): it's described as a cylinder 5 feet in diameter. That's one square, right? At the same time, the rest of the description seems to be suggesting that it covers more area than that. It seems to be in error in some fashion.

So... Torch Goblin is a fun little feat that gives some entertaining advantages to an enterprising young goblin... as long as they are on fire. It requires that they be charhide goblins, which means that they both have resist fire equal to their character level and are more likely to stop being on fire in any given turn. So... we'd like ways for our goblin to start taking ongoing fire damage, but, ideally, ones that don't really take effort. Like, we want them to sort of incidentally burst into flame as a result of themselves or their party members doing other things. We already have a way for them to light themselves on fire with a single action and some materials, and we'd like to do better than that. So what have we got?

So far I've found...

- The Flames Oracle gets Incendiary Aura as their initial revelation spell. This 10-foot emanation causes everything in it to burst into flame (2d4 initially, but it goes up slow) whenever they take fire damage.

- The Alchemist's Exploitive Bomb feat (lvl 16) will give resistance penetration equal to their level, which is enough to slip a bit of splash damage through, so as to activate the Flames Oracle Aura. This is a greet way to trigger incidentally if the goblin in question is in melee, and there's a flames oracle (or archetype - perhaps the goblin themselves?) close enough to provide support. It's just that we'd like something before lvl 16.

So... at this point I guess I'm basically looking for area-effect stuff that deals ongoing fire damage, preferably without having to spend spell slots, and/or area-effect stuff that can deal small amounts of fire damage through a fire resistance equal to class level. Having support from other party members is no problem.

So... I'm again trying to dive into the "how do we give the blaster-kineticist fans what they want without taking too much away from everyone else?" and I'm realizing... well, kineticists really do care about their feats, don't they? Like, feats on a kineticist are kind of a big deal, and I'm sure that the full version is going to be even more that way, so why not try to come up with a feat-based answer? In particular, sinking a bunch of your feats into making your elemental blasts cool inherently limits your ability to throw around other impulses, because you don't have as many feats to buy impulses with.

Initially I was shying away from the idea of direct blast-buffing feats, but it's not like they're unprecedented. Alchemist has a bunch of feats that buff bomb-throwing, and there's plenty of other math feats out there.

Of course, there's the classic "just add my conmod in damage" to play with, but it might be interesting to include more interesting stuff in there too. Have a feat for each element that adds a trait/effect/rider for blasts of that element. (Water gets splash damage?) Have metablast feats (some as free actions, some not) that toss useful effects on there. Possibly rebuild some/all the existing blast multiattack feats as metablast feats so that the balance is more maintainable. In general, make space for reasonable builds that spend about half of their class feats on cranking their elemental blasts specifically, primarily as single-target attacks, and wind up actually satisfying the "direct damage elemental blaster" fantasy.

...and the bit where archetyped feats come in at twice the level will help deal with the potentially feelsbad "fighters are better elemental blasters than kineticists are" issue, too.

So... thoughts?

So, I was thinking about the differences of opinion on the Kineticist. In particular, there are some people who really want it to be the all-day elemental blaster, because they very much want an all-day elemental blaster, and they're pretty sure that if they don't get this one, they won't get one. There are others who really like the utility, and might even be willing to cash in elemental blast entirely if it gave them better access to other things. It occurs to me... it might be possible to run this with subclasses? Now, I'm not looking to get rid of the distinction between gate types. I think that the distinction between gate types is cool... but it wouldn't be the first class that had two intersecting subclass types to play with.

I wanted to toss the idea out there, and see what people thought of it, and what interesting things we might be able to do with it. What subclasses would we want to have?

- First, simplest, a blaster type. Gets some bonus to their elemental blasts - a damage bonus, a cross-the-board proficiency bump for blasts specifically (start at expert, end at legendary) - something. They might actually have some specific limit to what other infusions they can take - like, they lose one off their starter set of elemental feats, and may not spend class feats on elemental abilities or something.

- Second, the flip-side, a caster type. Straight-up loses elemental blast altogether. In return, they get some sort of love on their overwhelm powers

- Third... maybe an aura specialist? Gets various benefits to their aura powers, including increased area, earlier access to party-friendliness, and eventually being able to carry dual auras. Not sure what they should give up for it. Possibly lose access to all direct attack powers other than auras and elemental blast?

- Fourth... why not throw in burn, here? A subclass is chunky enough to allow for a burn mechanic with some meat on it, without having to warp anyone else's stuff. As for a disadvantage... honestly, a burn mechanic is its own disadvantage. Options available for spending urn both for dumping out overwhelms faster and for making your elemental blasts more special.

Ideas and critiques both welcome.

So... feelsgood and feelsbad are a thing, that go well beyond whether or not something is balanced. Sometimes, it comes from balance, but sometimes it does not. This place is for discussion of the second kind. We're trying to look for suggestions that would make the class feel better and better enable specific character ideas without really mucking about with power levels.

My contribution: Elemental Tuning. Available only to singe-element kineticists. 1st-level feat. Pick a damage type, from a long but not entirely exhaustive list. Your elemental blast now does that damage type. You may also choose to deal that damage type with any other impulses that you have that would otherwise deal physical damage.

Simple, straightforward, should be fairly well balanced as long as you don't put things like "force" on the list of available damage types, and provides a very solid answer for the players who, for example, really want to play a kineticist that focuses obsessively on acid damage or whatever. Possibly have a level 8 or so follow-on feat that offers a degree of resistance penetration for that damage type.

...and if someone wants to throw around lightning damage as an earth kineticist? Who cares? Maybe they have some wacky reason that it makes sense in their head, and being able to play out this very specific fantasy is the Best Thing Ever as far as they're concerned. Maybe they're just being weird because they want to be weird. Regardless, it's not going to break anything, so you might as well let it ride. Also, it preserves the space for elemental combos that aren't quite as strange, but still might be up for debate. (Lightning could arguably be water, air, or even fire. Cold could easily be water or air, and possibly earth. Acid could be water or earth... and so forth).

Stone Shield... It's trying, but it's got problems. At a basic level, it's like a standard raise a shield action, except that if you use it to take a blow, it crumbles into nothing rather than taking damage, and you have to regather the thing. It even gives you extra fort save. It seems fair... but the devil is in the details.

- It assigns your Gather. As such, it cannot be used with Kinetic Weapon.
- Raising the shield is an impulse action, and thus provokes opportunity attacks. Like... really?
- the shield block part is really inefficient. If we assume a Dedicated Gate, it's going to cost you a reaction (to block) and an action (to gather afterwards), and you won't have the shield bonuses for any other attacks that may come your way before your turn. The gather also provokes opportunity attacks.

Suggested solution: give a feat... level 6, say, that causes your gather and impulse actions - or even just the ones that don't overflow - to not provoke opportunity attacks. Maybe instead a lvl 8/10 version that makes them not provoke reactions? A lvl 2/4 version that jsut cranks your defenses against attacks made in reaction to same? Something. The Earth Kineticist is stacked high with "I'm trying to be a tank". If you want that to actually work as a thing, they need some way to not provoke attacks all the time. Kinetic Weapon is not an adequate response to the problem.