Part One
We play tested Sanctum of a Lost Age. Our Party consisted of five level 7 characters. We used 20 pt builds PFS rules and 23,500gp
First off if you have not played Sanctum of a lost age it was pretty cool. I liked the module/dungeon crawl. It was well written and enjoyable.
In our party we had two front liners a Swashbuckler and a Slayer. The Swashbuckler used an Agile Rapier, and the Slayer used an adamantine Greatsword. We had two archers an inquisitor and a shaman and another Shaman who was more of a blaster.
I will invite the team and DM to add in their thoughts as well. I will share my observations focusing mostly on the Shaman as that is what I played.
Half-Orc Swashbuckler – At this level he did extremely well he seemed to hit very hard and very reliably on his first hit. He was very optimized and it showed. However early on he had a bad string with no crits and no kills so that his panache was not re-filling. However, that changed after the first few fights and his rolls warmed up. This seemed like a very strong class. To me it seemed crazy that they got improved crit for free at 5th level.
Half-Orc Slayer – Our slayer did an all around build. He had no bad stats, power attack and deadly aim so he could switch hit. At this level he had no magic weapons which was problematic in one encounter. However, usually he did enough damage that it didn’t matter too much. He and the Swashbuckler did some good team work to keep things in flank. When he could sneak attack his damage was on par with the swashbuckler. He invested quite a bit in skills and I think if the class had 6 skill points it would have been easier for him to spend less points on his int and charisma. Overall this seems like quite a capable class, as long as they can get the sneak attack in they can do great damage.
Half-Elf Investigator – This class is crazy knowledgeable. Our investigator started with 18 int and spent all her inspirations talents on increasing her skill abilities. She knew everything. She used all her feats for Archery and was an ok archer. We talked a lot about sneak attack and were conflicted if it really worked well as a mechanic for the feel of Investigator. We really felt that she should be using this knowledge to help herself and even others hit harder, more accurately and with precision. It does need something about as damaging as sneak attack but that could come from some kind of monster lore like ability. After identifying a creature you get level to damage and int to attack that creature or type of creature. Make it a move action and then later a swift or free action, something using their highly deductive mind to strike with precision to disable creatures quickly.
Elf Shaman – Lore and Fire the “Blaster” Shaman. This was a pretty effective blaster. He had access to good “hexes” the Mind probe was fun and worked well. As a Druid he also had quite a few battle field control spells. He had very low physical scores but all of his mental scores were quite high. Lore seems really potent for abilities and extremely situational spells. I think it was a pretty successful caster at 7th level.
Human Shaman – Battle and Life the “Archer/healer”. I took battle and life because of their spirit abilities and my role was “healer”. While I didn’t let anyone die I found that cure moderate as a 3rd level spell is awful. So I relied on cure light my 4 channels and archery. What I found is I was stretched too thin ability wise. I wanted to hit with my bow and have some channeling and healing/buffing. It turns out that other than Barkskin there are not a lot of buff spells for druids for other people at low level. No Bless, No Prayer, no Blessing of Fervor. Our whole team missed these kind of spells terribly. I like playing “support casters” and found that I was not enjoying the druid spell list for this role. I also found that now that I had the druid spell list a lot of the Spirit magic spell slots for the more blasty spirits looked more redundant. The only battle spell I used was Wall of fire, while I ended up using all of the life ones at some point including restoration after the fight with the ghost tiger. I was a pretty poor archer even with 18 dex and a +1 bow (+1 str). I really did not like most of the Hexes available and one of them was duplicated between Life and Battle. With not being able to spontaneously cast heal spells I had to pre pare them which after playing clerics and oracles seemed painful. There should be a healing hex that allows you to spontaneously cast some heals as a cleric. In general I felt that the hexes were weaker than a witches and because my primary casting is wisdom that charisma to uses or number of times per day was not as strong as revelations. During the Behir fight and the Necromancer/dire lion fight I was having a problem keeping people alive and ran out of healing spell prepared and channels, the only reason we lived was the battle healing lesser spirit ability or I would have lost the slayer twice. As it is we nearly burned a wand of cure light wounds out of combat for this module I think we used 38 charges. Aqueous Orb from the other shaman saved our life in the necromancer and the flesh golem fight.
At this point in the play test I would really like to see the cleric list re-instated. While I love the battlefield control and damage abilities of the Druid more than the cleric’s list I felt the lack of buff spells and heal spells very keenly. I think however, our blaster/control shaman may disagree as he performed his role a lot better than I did mine. However, this could be fixed with better life spirit abilities and Hexes. Let the greater spirit ability be spontaneously cast cure spells and then I think I would not feel so bad. Also if there were abilities like the lore’s ability to add sorcerer/wizards spells to their list. To add some cleric/wizard something group buffing in that would be good. The druid is awesome at buffing animals and animal companions but we don’t have those. So there is a good portion of the druid spell list that really does not fit us thematically.
Also I did not like that hex uses were based on charisma, the witches are unlimited use (other than once per person). The life spirit channel ability should be 3+ cha or 1+ Wisdom. I felt too MAD to successfully be a “Battle” shaman. I don't think I used a life or battle hex the entire module as I always had better options with spells or shooting my bow.
