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I'm not saying that all that much effort should be allocated, but the point of calling it out in the playtest is that it's really trivial to fix at this stage. Al they have to do is declare that these two features actually are the same feature, it's just that the Exemplars comes in Spirit damage (or something similar).

Good catch and good point. Easy simple fix to kill any potential issues.

I guess that is up to the balance department. The Warped by Rage gives you another effect on top of the Immanence effect, while also essentially extending the immanence effect.

Thanks for your playtest feedback.

I think this is a good point, a lot of the Transcend abilities may not have any utility on a given turn. I think this class does seem to be based around the player planning well for their next turn, but there are certainly instances where even if you plan well there isn't really a Transcend that will help you for the Worn or the Body Ikons -- Worn Ikons in particular seem to have the most situational abilities.

I think the base Ikons should have broad applicability and maybe feats should provide some more niche powers, rather than the base Ikon have the niche power and feats for providing some alternative options.

Root Epithets are really strong in my opinion. They provide a pretty nice effect for just using your Body Ikon's transcend. Brave, Mournful, and Radiant are all nice perks.

To me, this kills the utility of Worn Ikons because it significantly tilts the strength toward Body Ikons as a "secondary Ikon" after the Weapon Ikon.

I think the player should be able to choose whether the Root Epithet enhances the Body or the Worn Ikon when the feature is selected (or maybe just both).

Thoughts?

Actually, I just realized what is missing with worn ikons. There should be a feat or class ability that allows your worn immanence to still work until the end of your next turn after you transcend. A limited form of Lingering Composition that doesn't consume a focus point I suppose. Higher level feats could add your body and weapon immanence, and increase to 2 rounds, to allow you to have a more stable character sheet.

The level 12 Warped by Rage essentially does this, so there is some precedent for this type of effect already.

I think that I agree i would probably prefer that for these Worn Ikons instead of their current Transcend abilities, excepting maybe the thousand-league sandals. The sandals sort of double down on the immanence effect, where the others basically do something unrelated to the Immanence.

As a side note, exemplars tripling down on tanking probably fall hard into the tank fallacy

I'm not saying its a good idea, just trying to understand the philosophy of the design. =)

Good point, and this feeds into another thought i had. Root epithets are really good, but they are so good that they basically kill Worn Ikons for me. Worn Ikons are kind of weak to begin with (IMO), and this is the nail in the coffin.

My question is, from a design perspective, are the three types of Ikons (Weapon, Body, Worn) supposed to each have a mechanical niche? It seems like the Weapon Ikon powers are meant to encourage and enable one to attack. The Body Ikon powers tend to revolve around Tanking/Defense/Healing. The Worn Ikon powers tend to be more about supporting the group and mobility.

Though this seems to be the niche, there are some specific Ikons/powers that exist outside these niches. Currently someone can use the Barrow's Edge, Scar of the Survivor and Palisade Bangles to triple-down on tanking abilities. Is this intended?

You cannot use two Ikons simultaneously, so it seems like they should cover different situations, such as one mainly for attacking, another for when you need to focus on defense, or supporting your party. However, the design also makes it so you cannot just use one Ikon all the time -- which would force you to switch between "roles" each turn. With the current slate of Ikons, you could "double down" on tanking by picking Barrow's Edge and Scar of the Survivor, so you have a healing power available to you every turn.

I would prefer the Ikon types to have a niche, but I am also okay if there are a small number of Ikons/feats/epithets that break the niche if someone wants to double down their character.

My concern is that if the Ikon Types do not have a clear niche, it can become confusing on what you should be using your Ikons for. As an example, the Victor's Wreath gives the user +1 to attack -- should I be attacking with this or use my Weapon Ikon?

What do you all think?

My worry is if you try to give some passive bonuses, then presumably the actual Transcend effects would need to be neutered to keep the same power budget. I would rather the designer's buff the other Ikons so you also feel good using them.

I'd be okay purposefully choosing in my turn to give up some of the damage to get a cool support effect. Would be a nice niche bouncing between high damage, high support, high utility since the average would be reasonable. I think right now, maybe it just feels like bouncing between high damage to mid damage + circumstantial benefit.

It goes from an initial 1dX+4 to 3dX+8 at level 18, always fully replacing the immanence effect. That is what the ability states RAW. Basically, starting at level 4, this is Power Attack plus your normal damage from immanence. The likely reason it is phrased so oddly is to define what additional damage you get in total in one place and to link everything to Fracture Mountain's last sentence.

I'm still not sure what the designer's intended. My arguments against this interpretation is mainly out of hope:

1) If it as you say, then it mostly would just follow the standard Immanence bonus due to increased striking, but slightly different. I don't see why they would "clarify" here.

2) If all it was meant to do was mimic Power Attack, that seems lazy. One can just get PA with an archetype. Gleaming Blade's is like Double Slice, but it is different in that you can put a much bigger damage die on the weapon. If Titan's Breaker was just PA, then I would expect Gleaming Blade's to be just Double Slice reskinned.

3) I assume the designer's did some math and could see that this would be much weaker than anything else.

I have a slightly different potential interpretation. I wonder if the designer's meant to essentially give the +2 additional damage for the dice added by the PA, which would not normally get the +2 spirit damage. But, they forgot about the +2 normally also adding for the striking rune... So it would be like PA'ing with all the dice rolling with the +2 damage... At Level 1 its 4 spirit damage because its 2 dice total... At 10 it would be 3 dice total (not accounting for striking), 18 - 4 dice (not accounting for striking).

Here's my damage analysis again equal level opponent (it is slightly wrong because I did not adjust weapon specialization to level 5 instead of 7): https://imgur.com/sYtFOMr
This includes damaging property runes at 8, 10, 16

That said, the ability makes little sense as written when you don't read it as "x per damage die". At the respective levels, the transcendence bonus will already give you that exact number, so why mention it twice?

This. Now go to the other thread =P.

I wonder about this as well. I'm actually kind of okay with it if the highs are high so that the average works out to be pretty good. Similar to the Magus in playstyle. There are already a lot of classes that can do the consistent thing.

I find the Ikons are a bit uneven now, so maybe with tuning the "off-turn" won't feel too bad. I think if I was doing something like Gleaming Blade Transcend one turn, followed by Body Ikon Scar of the Survivor heal, with either Brave Epithet (to move so I can get 2 Strikes with +2 Passive damage) or Radiant Epithet to up my healing game - I think i'd feel pretty good.

There's a separate thread about this. Please go there =)

Okay, so what I am trying to say is not about Noble Branch vs some other Weapon Ikon, my thesis is this:

1) Gambling to move your spark sucks. Spending 1 action to just move your spark sucks. This is my main point.

With that said, I think Noble Branch is a trap. It might convince its user that it opens up new opportunities if you miss with your Strike. I just don't think that is true. That logic has nothing to do with other Weapon Ikons (Titan Breaker's ability is a bit ambiguous, but Gleaming Blade is clearly stronger than Noble Branch's damage, but this is not my point).

You have the Noble Branch and are planning your turn. You think you want to spend two actions on the offense, maybe you need to stride, aid, or do something else with your third action. So, you think you want to Strike -> Transcend. That's what you think would be a good use of your 2 actions.

You hit, so you use the Transcend ability. You are happy.

What happens if you miss with your first strike? This is where Noble Branch tries to convince you it has some value. Let's say for your second action you decide to demoralize instead of take the MAP 1x-5 Strike. You may not realize it, but what you have essentially decided is that:
Strike -> Transcend Noble Branch is more valuable than Strike -> Demoralize, and Strike -> Demoralize is more valuable than Strike -> Strike.

The Noble Branch Transcend ability is similar in value to the MAP 1x-5 strike. So, I posit that there are not many cases where demoralize can be better than the MAP 1x-5 Strike, but weaker than Noble Branch's Transcend.

You might think the Noble Branch has opened up new possibilities for your turn, but I imagine in most instances your second action would either be a MAP 1x-5 Strike or you would have just originally chosen to only do a single Strike and use your 2nd and third actions to do something else. I don't think the miss will actually impact your decision making.

With all that being said, Noble Branch might have a niche where you want to spend all 3 of your actions on the offense. I just think the value it provides here is small relative to the risk it messes up where you want to put your spark.

I think the Noble Branch would be a lot more interesting if there were other useful ways to Transcend your weapon Ikon in the event you miss the strike and therefore cannot active it's Transcend.

Okay, let me re-explain.

Your saying if you washed to hit and do something else, you could have picked a different ikon, but thats not the argument here. We’re talking about when you MISS. When you hit power attack is better when you miss noble branch is situationally better.

I think you are missing my point here, and I'm not trying to be argumentative.

Let's say one wants to Strike and then Transcend their Noble Branch, this is their top choice of what you want to happen during their turn. However, one misses. Now, instead of Striking again, one chooses to stride. You are basically saying there are situations where one might think:

Strike -> Transcend is better than Strike -> Stride (action X)

AND

Strike -> Stride (action X) is better than Strike -> Strike

Substitute Stride (action X) with anything, and I find it hard to believe you will encounter many situations unless Transcend is wayyy stronger than a second Strike. It's not, or else it would imbalanced. Noble Branch is probably similar to Power Attacking since it adds more dice, but can't crit - and Power Attacking is similar in damage (though in many cases worse) than Striking twice.

If Strike -> Transcend is not their top choice for action, then any other Weapon Ikon could do that just as effectively.

So, my point is that while Noble Branch let's you decide what to do after a miss, I find it hard to believe it will actually realistically change your decisions.

I will give you that there is the scenario where you want to maximize damage with 3 actions, or use Grapple/Trip etc, where Noble Branch might have a niche.

Exactly, you decided that using Mournful No Scar But This is better (i.e. increasing your survivability) was better than transcending your weapon in the first place (i.e. doing more damage). So you would probably make the decision with a different Weapon Ikon as well, assuming their damage is reasonably well balanced.

I started a separate thread to discuss the issue of the spark being stuck where you don't want it when you miss with the initial attack.

My quick response is that if you really wanted to Transcend Body or Item in a turn when it started in the Weapon, you could do that regardless of having Noble Branch. The only benefit of Noble Branch is in the niche where you think the Transcend damage is more valuable than doing other action X, but other action X is better than just a second Strike. So if you hit you transcend, but if you miss you do X. I find it hard to believe there are many scenarios where you can find this action X.

I'm having a hard time articulating my logic. I acknowledge that the apparent benefit of Noble Branch is you can wait to see the outcome to decide what to do next. However, my point is that I find it hard to come up with scenarios where it would actually change my decision making in a good way, rather than having to salvage a bad turn.

A key assumption I am making is that the design intent is that using Transcend is more damage than just keeping the passive Immanence damage bonus.

If I hit with my Noble Branch and then choose to Transcend, that's probably what I wanted to happen. If I hit and then do something else, I could have done the same with a different Weapon Ikon.

So, the benefit arises if I miss with the Noble Branch. If I decide to attack again, then I would have been better off (on average) of using one of the stronger damage Ikons. I have no new information here, so I should have just spent 2 actions to do a better thing. The key assumption that Transcending is more damage than passive Immanence means that there is not really value in keeping the spark in your weapon longer than just spending it as soon as you can. Damage later is worse than damage now.

If I instead decide to do something else, I am basically saying that my initial logic was that Transcending the Noble Branch is better than X, but X might be better than just doing a second attack. This is the KEY decision making point. I think the area where X is worse than Transcending but better than a second attack is small. In other words, if you thought spending two actions to deal damage was a good use of your actions, then that's probably true whether you spend the second action on the Transcend or just a second Strike.

This was just about Noble Branch, but my central thesis is that deciding the location of your spark based on RNG is going to feel bad. For Barrow's Edge, presumably you are mainly going to keep the spark out of the weapon until you get to the stage where you actually want to activate its Transcend ability to get healed. Keeping it in the Weapon Ikon just to get the passive persistent damage bonus is probably not why you picked it.

Thesis: Abilities that do not guarantee you will be able to use your transcend are problematic.

Examples: Barrow's Edge's "Drink of my Foes", Noble Branch's "Strike, Breathe, Rend", "Reap the Field". These are conditional on if something else occurs during your turn. In each of these cases, that trigger is a successful strike, though you could imagine the designers' could add other abilities with other triggers, such as you successfully demoralize, etc.

1. One can only use a transcend ability once per turn. As such, transcend is a limited resource. Transcend abilities are strong for their action economy. Therefore, not using transcend in a turn is essentially wasting a strong resource.

2. Putting the divine spark where you might need it next turn seems to be an important part of playing an Exemplar. Abilities where you gamble on being able to move the spark seem counter to this playstyle.

For these reasons, I think the above abilities are problematic in design (the mechanics of Strike, Breathe, Rend and Reap the Field are also weak). One is not sure if they will actually successfully trigger the Transcend in a given turn. So, one might not be able to spend this limited resource in a given turn. One could always choose to just move the spark as an action if the trigger fails, and that somewhat solves the issue with having the spark in the "wrong place" on the next turn, but that's pretty bad action economy in my opinion.

Solution:
1. Redesign these abilities.

2. Particularly for Weapon Ikons, add some feats with 1 action Transcend. that do not require a trigger -- or maybe trigger if a strike fails?

3. I think we need some feats that improve action economy for moving the spark. I think it is going to feel bad if your divine spark is not where you want it in a turn. The Root Epithet's sort of already do this, but it does cost you use the Transcend ability. Kineticist's get the Elemental Blast as part of activating their aura, there could be something similar here.

Thoughts?

Thanks for the write up. Been thinking about Noble Branch... as you say the damage is pretty weak compared to the the other options, but also the transcend not being guaranteed. I've been thinking about this second point a bit.

Since transcending is generally strong for its action economy, and its a limited resource (1/turn), a turn where you dont transcend is a "bad" turn. With Noble branch, activating it is not guaranteed, which can essentially waste your spending the resource. It can also throw off your next turn because it messed with your ability to move the spark.

Much has been said about Reap's terrible mechanics, but it also needs dtating that it has the issue of not being a guarnteed use of your spark.

I agree the feat isnt super strong, but i like it better than the original transcend ability. I might consider using it against a bunch of mooks.

The original transcend is pretty terrible. As OP states, you really need a high chance to hit for it be better than just two strikes. And even then, it only hits two targets.

I dont like mathematical trap feats. Agree with OP that this is very circumstantial. I wonder if they should just swap the level 6 feat motionless cutter here. I dont think that feat is particularly strong, but sort of fills the aoe niche that many of these Dominion epithets are covering.

I see where OP is coming from. But, I think I also disagree. I think if you could transcend twice, turns might become something like transcend weapon + transcend body every turn.

I think I would rather they balance the abilities such that they know you can only be doing one a turn.

That being said, haven't actually played it.

Thanks, yes i found this link that clarifies the rule on damage dice.

https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=226

This transcend ability is a bit confusing. I am not sure how the designer's intended it to work. I think there are a few possible interpretations:

1. The new spirit damage bonus applies to all weapon damage dice including the new dice added at levels 1, 10, and 18.
For example:
At level 1, the extra spirit damage would be 4 x 2 weapon dice (added power attack die and the bonus went up from 2 to 4)
At level 4, the extra spirit damage would be 4 x 3 weapon dice (striking rune)
At level 10, the extra spirit damage would be 6 x 4 weapon dice (another die from the power attack and the damage went from 4 to 6)

2. The new spirit damage bonus only applies to the original weapon damage dice (i.e. from striking runes)
At level 1, the extra spirit damage would be 4 x 1 weapon dice
At level 4, the extra spirit damage would be 4 x 2 weapon dice (striking rune)
At level 10, the extra spirit damage would be 6 x 2 weapon dice (the damage went from 4 to 6)

3. The spirit damage bonus going from 2 to 4 to 6, etc. was meant to account for the additional weapon die added by the power attack
At level 1, the extra spirit damage would be 2 x 2 weapon dice (added power attack die)
At level 4, the extra spirit damage would be 2 x 3 weapon dice (striking rune)
At level 10, the extra spirit damage would be 2 x 4 weapon dice (another die from the power attack)

I think 1 or 3 are the more likely intents. What do people think?

I just don't see how you came to that conclusion based on the way it is written. Steam Knight says you can "jump up to your speed." Leap says:

"You can Leap up to 10 feet horizontally if your Speed is at least 15 feet, or up to 15 feet horizontally if your Speed is at least 30 feet. You land in the space where your Leap ends (meaning you can typically clear a 5-foot gap, or a 10-foot gap if your Speed is 30 feet or more).

If you Leap vertically, you can move up to 3 feet vertically and 5 feet horizontally onto an elevated surface."

I do not think "jump up to your speed" can be unambiguously interpreted based on the text of Leap. In the Leap text, your speed only comes up in determining the distance of a long jump. Its not like Leap says you "jump up to half your speed" or something like that. So how this sentence actually impacts Leap mechanically is ambiguous and reads more like plain language rather than adjusting the mechanics of Leap.

The Feat Powerful Leap makes it abundantly clear how it affects both the horizontal and vertical components of the Leap action

For horizontal leap, I think your interpretation may seem reasonable, but it is unclear how it would affect the vertical leap that already has both horizontal and vertical movement.

I think this needs erratum? The stated "When you Leap, you can jump up to your Speed" does not really make sense for how the Leap action is written. The way other feats/abilities interact with Leap is much more clearly written.

If I was the GM, I'd treat it like the Jump spell.

Yep its looks like they forgot to add these impulses ranges. As GM I probably will assuming 60ft once they are lvl 6 impulses and this the the range of Wall of Thorns a rank 3 physical wall spell.

But this needs to be errated.

I was thinking 120 ft based on most of the wall spells I looked at and the range of Jagged Berms, but good point on the precedence from Wall of Thorns

Scrap Barricade(pg 30) and Wooden Palisade (pg 34) do not list a range. Assuming 120 ft?