Spenson's page

A character I'd like to try one day if we play a CE campaign is priest of the fallen+fractured mind (maybe also scourge, which is compatible, because you can do some cool stuff with priest of the fallen) spiritualist 8 / antipaladin 2 / elder mythos cleric 1 / evangelist X (you don't miss any phantom level if you pick phantom ally as your feat at level 7)

Basically I see the character as the heir of a family of worshipers/zealots of an elder god who all channel the power of their ancestrors. Oh look, this is uncle Johnny, he poisoned 92 people and 3 dogs. This one is my great grandmother Bertha, she killed a duchess and pretended to be her for 3 years in order to further the cause of our god. Etc etc.

First of all, don't listen too much to what everyone says (including me). I really like spiritualist, it's very flavourful but it is indeed not very strong. You may need to optimize your character more than the other players to be as effective as them. Summoner for example will almost always be stronger.

On the other hand you don't always have to care about how powerful something is. As long as it's consistent with what you decided with the DM and the other players.

I think priest of the fallen is almost an unchained spiritualist as it gives you a lot of interesting stuff with few drawbacks if you want a combat oriented spiritualist. It is also compatible with fractued mind (and scourge but it's highly optionnal).

When you combine everything, you'll see that some foci are more effective at lower levels while others are stronger later. Being able to totally customize your phantom twice a day provides an incredible flexibility at the cost of a ton of research and bookkeeping.
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As a final note, a lot of the guides you will find on the internet are terribly outdated and paint a very negative image of the spiritualist as it was before it received some deserved buffs (e.g. the priest of the fallen).

This forum and reddit have a lot of interesting resources but most of them are quite old. The spiritualist received a new archetype, the Priest of the fallen in 2019 but unfortunately the guides I found are not recent enough.

The only info I have are from this and a few people speculating here and there.

It looks ok on paper when you combine it with fractured mind but I still don't know enough about the game to assess how viable things are. My DM told me that the class is quite weak and I'm about to start an AP that is fairly challenging.

Has anyone ever tried this archetype? If yes, how was it?