SpireSwagon's page

This is a very petty point, but I play petty characters. Being a necromancer means being able to wave your hand and some shambling corpse, skeletal servitor, or spectral shade will pour you a goblet of wine. They don't necessarily need to be able to do anything fancy, but I should be able to have menial out-of-combat stuff done without a spell slot. If I have a reason to be casting Phantasmal Minion, then something is off.

- Absolutely, I can ask the GM for this. Almost any of them will say yes, outside of PFS. It's a lot more satisfying to have the class itself support that, and might help the "video game necromancer" feel by giving some roleplay options.
- Yes, there's some cognitive dissonance involved in allowing this without allowing trap checking. (Necromancers should also never walk down a dungeon hallway without sending a disposable undead ahead, but that's not something PF2 balance would ever allow.) But we already have something like that for familiars, so I'm not too worried about that.

Maybe one special thrall per day can be made well enough for this? No duration, takes simple commands outside combat. Then if it's sent to check for traps, it's gone for the day like a Witch's familiar. Or the "attack" option of the cantrip can be an interact or manipulate out of combat.

They actually point out that you can and should be using thralls to trap check.

Hmm I feel like some of the stuff on Demiplane doesn't list the number of actions. I don't think I noticed how many actions any of the Focus spells cost. Then I just got to the 10th level feat Quickened Casting for the Necromancer and it doesn't list any actions it takes. Though if that takes actual actions it wouldn't be any good. Looking around and it seems some other classes have a feat with the same name, that is a Free Action, but those also have a frequency of once a day while the Necromancer one does not list that.

Quick casting for necro is almost certainly a typo, though it's theoretically possible they decided they could get away with it... but I highly doubt it

Squiggit wrote:

The class might lose steam in long combats, but normal encounters should be fine. If you're casing a focus spell every round (and Consume a thrall somewhere in there) you don't run into an issue until round five and that's a pretty rare combat.

At a glance, I kind of wish they had a few more sustainable options at low level, and that their melee options came online a bit sooner and/or had a bit more juice... but this is a hype thread and the playtest will start soon enough.

I love what I'm seeing from both classes at a glance though, the ideas are very cool.

LOL, a Necromancer should get stronger as more bodies hit the floor!

(The concept, not the class as described.)
Hopefully they'll have several ways to make use of fresh corpses, maybe even sucking out a Focus Point if they're so depleted or maybe making a new thrall that doesn't cost resources or more powerful minion that does.

Thralls do not cost resources

With the *absurd* amount of focus spells the necromancer has, I actually think a large part of this playtest is going to focus on if they are sustainable enough on this stuff cause sheeeesh, even though they essentially have 4 focus points per fight they are still gonna be fighting those resources *hard* when 14 out of their 34 feats give focus spells, several of which create the things you can currently mostly use with only focus spells.

At first I thought the options like draining strike were kinda mediocre, but considering how damn many you are able to have by late game, I think having non-focus point sinks that just consume a half dozen at once is going to be valuable lmao

A part of me wishes they didn't 'always get hit'. But if they had a low saves and 1 HP, and perhaps when targeting a Thrall you didn't ever apply MAP to hit, it might come close to the same but leave some room for some chances. Also could leave room for Thralls potentially having resistance which might prevent some higher level ones potentially having some immunity from particularly low level minions attacking them with specific types of attacks or certain weak splash weapons.

I wonder if they can 'inhabit' a Thrall's body to be more up front and personal about attacking, but end up sharing damage like a summoner, with the benefit that they may have a reaction where they can leave a thrall anytime it was damaged as a reaction causing them to only take half damage from the attack, leaving the thrall to automatically crumble under the attack.

It is realistic to get 20 of them. Quite frankly I'm avoiding skeleton thralls because they get defensive roles and I never want to have to roll 20 individual saves at once lmao

Oh, right, one more bit of speculation because I guess I wasn't done yet.

I think I would be surprised if the Necromancer class was built to clog the battlefield. We know that they're going to have expendable thralls that are individually weaker than traditional companions, and I assume this means you'll have the ability to have multiple thralls at once, but unless the designers are planning to ignore the design philosophy behind minions in 2e up until this point, I imagine that they'll be looking for ways to reap the feel of being a horde master without the traditional drawbacks.

For one, it would be strange if the Necromancer can just control all of their thralls at once in a single turn. Perhaps they can issue general, simple commands (Advance, Group Up, Retreat, etc.) that take up very little extra time resolving each thrall, but no matter how weak the thralls, I don't see them rolling dozens of attacks per turn for their horde. Either they'll be limited to only a couple thralls on the field at a time, or they won't be able to command all thralls in one turn. Possibly both.

Likewise, even if there's a low thralls fielded limit, I wouldn't be surprised if the thralls had a special swarming ability that allows them to share a space with another creature, allowing them to stand among your allies without blocking them from participating in the fight.

(... and if the designers somehow happen to have forgotten about room size limitations, it will be our job to remind them soon)

I suspect we will have no more than 3 maybe 4 concurrent thralls and that's *if* they can be concurrent.

From what we've seen so far I expect this necromancer to play at the horde fantasy kind of like necromancer sienna in vermintide 2, small groups for actual summons and then abilities that summon short term masses for specific effects and sacrifice members of those small replaceable groups.

This in my opinion is the smartest way to do it outside of a war game as it effectively implies numbers without actually needing to model individuals to an obnoxious and typically unhelpful degree

SpireSwagon wrote:

I highly doubt this because if you only had one thrall the abilities we've seen would be aggressively unusable. I suspect you will be right about not controlling too many bodies, but that they will make heavy use of the sort of incarnation spell template and sacrificing temporary minions

I'd be very in favor of something like that. I'm honestly really dreading the possibility that the necromancer will clutter the map with multiple minions. I've played in games where someone did that, and without fail they devolved into prolonged rest breaks for everyone at the table while the one person with loads of minions took their five, seven, or even ten turns.

Honestly my highest hopes for the class essentially come down to having an undead master esque feat chain for multiple undead companions, access to the create undead ritual and then a slew of incarnate style abilities and focus spells that allow you to use implicit summons to sustain immediate effects.

After all, in system 10 zombies would do nothing to a level 5 enemy, but 10 zombies all at the same time *would* make a pretty convincing wall.

I'm kinda scared with the necromancer being a full caster.

Yeah, the animist has recently confirmed that casters can have fun toys too, but the animist is explicitly still a spellcaster in its core. The necromancer, however, is being sold as a minion master, so unless each minion is absurdly weak, I don't know how they could fit the caster chassis on such a class.

Assuming they don't do a psychic 2.0 in that it's technically a full caster in chassis but with way less spell slots than most casters, I'm assuming the most likely (and sadly disappointing) outcome for this class is that the undead you control would work like a regular animal companion with the troop trait, though the actual size of the troop wouldn't be of exactly 16 squares but rather start small and go bigger during the fight. Possibly even allowing you to split the troop in two later on.

This wouldn't be a bad class per se, though it wouldn't be that much different than a druid with an animal companion besides the flavor. It would also disappoint most people because its very likely want to have an undead troop in which each of the undead has its own statistics even if they are weak individually.

I highly doubt this because if you only had one thrall the abilities we've seen would be aggressively unusable. I suspect you will be right about not controlling too many bodies, but that they will make heavy use of the sort of incarnation spell template and sacrificing temporary minions

The summoner isn't really summoning all that much. Maybe the Necromancer adds a new twist to the concept as well?

Thralls seem to be a class resource that's quick to use and easy to replenish. I'm thinking they might work somewhat similar to the alchemists versatile Vials, mechanically. Just as actual creatures instead of items.

Yeah, the way they sacrifice them willy nilly seems to suggest a per-encounter kind of resource going on. I think disposable creatures on a per-encounter basis is actually a pretty clever way to design a class about hordes and numbers in a game that doesn't support that well.

Come to think of it, Thralls being magical incarnations of the stories and fears about undead (ie Occult), rather than real Undead would solve a lot of issues.

Not using Void energy to create them would mean they are not almost required to be Unholy and they are not healed by void/negative healing (which the Occult list lacks IIRC) nor hurt by vitality/positive energy.

I think we may be overthinking this. not to say it isn't possible and certainly not to judge, I'm resetting this page every 4 minutes exactly because I am *also* overthinking this... but I honestly think it's occult cause that's where the spooky mind effecting spells congregate and it's the other intelligence based knowledge skill.

I know logically speaking and functionally divine works the best for necromancy, but they've always been tied to arcane and study so I think they avoided divine because it alienates the popular perception of a necromancer.

I'm really curious to see more about the dirge and if it's something they cultivate and grow or if this means they are something like an undead sorcerer or something.

But, I mean, what would the Exemplar multiclass give you if not an ikon?

I'd rather have a MC archetype that's really good than another fighter or swashbuckler archetype situation.

Considering I had someone on the subreddit actually quote fighter archetype as if it's what multi-class archetypes are supposed to aspire to... yeah.

I would *much* rather live in a world where the book gives cool options that are a little overtuned than absolutely nothing worth using lol

Red Griffyn wrote:

Michael Sayre wrote:

Red Griffyn wrote:

So will there be a way to get access to this in PFS or is this just for home games?

The degree to which mythic rules generally do or do not get integrated into PFS will be dependent of the needs of the campaign.

The rules clarifications and updates will be treated just like any other official rules clarifications and updates are generally treated for organized play.

I mean more specifically the exemplar class and archetype. I'm not too concerned/worried about mythic rules being in PFS. Unless you're saying this class is part of 'mythic rules' and to play with an exemplar is synonymous with playing with at least some part of the mythic rules.

I'd love to play it in PFS, I guess, is what I'm saying.

There are a number of character options that PFS specifically grants players access to that would otherwise be locked away behind a boon (that may or may not exist) due to their rarity - a number of ancestries (poppet, kobold, etc.) and versatile heritages (nephilim, changeling, etc.), the gunslinger and inventor classes, and so on.

No official word on whether the exemplar is going to be added to that list as of yet, but it wouldn't surprise me.

I suspect we'll get an answer fairly soon, possibly by the book's official release day.

I suspect that we'll end up with a system like playing a skeleton or other rare ancestry, requiring points and possibly even being a one per account sort of thing

wildweasel wrote:

Kaliac wrote:

Does anyone know when the PDF will actually be available?

October 30th for non-subscribers.

And for subscribers?

Whenever your book ships. If you're in the US, probably in the next couple days, though we're running low on shipping deadline for today, so hope for tommorow or Friday, otherwise probably next week.

It's my understanding that persistent damage occurs at the end of the effected parties turn, thereby, they would drop after having a turn to deal with the persistent damage or the low health, which seems perfectly fair

...So does anyone know when the first round of deliveries will hit? I'm slightly surprised I haven't seen anyone talk about the book yet, but most likely I'm just ludicrously impatient lol