Shriketalon's page

With all respect, I feel there would be little difference with a Fire kineticist.

What would make them different ? Casting slot spells and cantrips instead of using Impulses ?

As someone who thinks the Kineticist is the best class Paizo has ever designed, I see this as an absolute win.

On a more serious note, since we're talking about class design for a hypothetical third edition, nothing about the existing class list would necessarily be on the table. Resembling the 2nd Edition Kineticist wouldn't be an issue, since everything would be designed for the 3rd edition. The Kineticist itself might not even exist, though lessons from the class would hopefully live on.

And yes, it's true that multiple classes that pick the Fire sphere might feel pretty similar when they're casting fire spells. It's worth noting, though, that that's even more true for the current giant spell lists. Is there that big a difference between a Familiar Thesis Wizard and an arcane Rune Witch? How about the differences in what spells you cast during a battle between a Cleric, an Oracle, a Divine Sorcerer, a Divine Witch, and the Animist currently being playtested? The differences are largely going to come down to class features and individual abilities like focus spells, not the bread-and-butter casting they do during the adventure.

I feel like giving each class only a handful of "themes" to work with will hamper their utility, unless they make sure to cover all the bases in each theme. And at that point, what's the point of picking a theme?

To continue discussing the Kineticist for a moment, I think the major advantage of a spell theme system would be what Amaya/Polaris points out. It enables the choice between versatility and specialization.

The Kineticist is absolutely brilliant because they found a way to balance a class that can choose to have a versatile repertoire of different abilities or focus on doing one thing really, really well, and both options come out relatively fun and balanced. It works so well because they designed the impulse list to combine with the junction system, buffs specifically designed for that element to enhance its overall theme.

That split is something sorely lacking for casters in the current system. Michael Sayre posted an article on their class balance a few days ago that discussed how they had to balance casters under the assumption that they would have the appropriate spell for any given situation. If you've decided to play your wizard as a dedicated necromancer, a blasting battle mage, an artistic illusionist, the game is not balanced around making those themes actually work on their own. It's balanced under the assumption that you'll prepare the best spells in your giant spell list for a given situation...the same spell list that every wizard possesses.

Imagine the wizard had the same kind of decision as a kineticist. A battle mage might get the Arcana theme for being a wizard, and the Battle Mage school grants them Warding and a choice between Fire/Lightning/Ice/Acid/Thunder. Over time, the mage takes the Expanded Studies option to pick up more elements and a few other war-appropriate themes for a huge repertoire of spells. This mage exploits elemental weaknesses to bombard enemies and pairs it with a few buffs or summons for good measure. They are versatile, and powerful as a result.

Meanwhile, another wizard might decide to be a dedicated necromancer. They have Arcane, Necromancy, and Malediction from their class and school. They forgo Expanded Studies in favor of Secrets of Magic and unlock a bunch of Necromancy-specific abilities tailored directly for the spells in that theme. They don't care about versatility at all, because they're here to animate corpses and chew bubblegum, and they're damn good at it.

That sort of design would give the wizard the same choice as the Kineticist. Do you want to be decent at many things, or really good at one thing? It's the best of both worlds, and if they can do it for one class, they can do it for many.

There's also a point of perspective. Currently, there are a total of 20 10th-level spells in the game. That includes Dinosaur Fort. The initial Core Rulebook had 26 cantrips and 511 slot spells total, including 13 of level 10, 19 of level 9, and 22 of level 8. Now, it's reasonable to have *some* overlap, but I feel like each theme should have at least one spell at each level, and if you're rocking 40 themes, then that overlap at the top starts getting a bit heavy.

One thing that could vastly improve the efficiency of the system is to stop designing spells for each level/rank, and make a lot of spells that are all available at 1st level that scale upward and outward.

Consider Chilling Spray and Cone of Cold. Both are cone-shaped ice damage spells, one at level 1 and one at level 5. Instead of creating another cone at 3, another at 7, and another at 9, it would be much better if we just had one single spell that handled "I want to shoot a spray of ice." That way, instead of having to design a Cone of Flames to pair with Burning Hands, one spell handles it all.

Cone of Cold could be a level 1 spell, a 15 foot cone that deals ice damage and penalizes movement. At the end of the spell description, it could have a description or table that shows how it scales in size and damage with each level, and the level 5 stats would have the size and damage of the current version (but keep the slow, because that fits the theme of ice). As long as they crunch the math, something this edition did extremely well, they can make spells that are balanced in all their incarnations. Fireball can be a tiny burst at level 1, and scale upward to a bigger and bigger explosion, Summon Animal can have stats balanced at all ranks, so the spell is playable at all levels, etc.

So when a Spell Theme/Sphere/Essence/Category is designed, it might only have around 15-20 spells total. Over half of them would be available at or near level 1 and cement the concept of that spell theme. Some concepts would definitely need to be higher ranks (powerful conditions, off-brand abilities like summoning on an element theme, etc), and it would be nice to give each theme at least one capstone spell that represents ultimate mastery, but a lot of them could be compressed down. Anything more eclectic could be handled by a more robust ritual system, or even things like skill feats with Theme tags that require access to that theme.

So the Fire theme would focus heavily on attacks combined with some buffs and utility, and end up looking something like this...
Low Level - burst spell (Fireball), cone spell (Burning Hands), ranged attack (Scorching Ray), melee strike (Shocking Grasp but fiery), cylinder (Flame Vortex), sustained AoE (Flaming Sphere), mixed control and damage (Heat Metal), offensive buff (Blazing Blade/Flame Dancer), utility (Smoke cloud), utility (Pyrotechnics)
Mid Level - mobility (Blazing Dive), control (Wall of Fire), empowerment (Fiery Body/Mantle of the Magma Heart), retaliatory defense (Fire Shield), complex attack (Volcanic Eruption), summon (Summon Fire Elemental)
Capstone - big, beefy spell (Meteor Swarm)

That list certainly isn't perfect, but something like that would do a reasonable job of representing what a theme is all about. Fire burns things. That can sometimes be useful for utility effects, but it mostly just roasts everything. Themes of Ice, Mind, Holy, or Plant would look dramatically different, but distilling them down into their core concepts and making those concepts scale across all ranks would make things far more efficient and easier to read through. Much like how they represented the elements so well in the kineticist, each theme could take its main concepts and turn them into a master list of iconic effects.