After playtesting the new classes a fair amount, I think it's time I wrote some playtest notes. This is something I've done for other classes and elements of the Starfinder playtest, and you should be able to find the list below. I'll split my post into sections, spoiler them, and add a TL;DR just so it's all a bit easier to navigate.
I ran my playtests mostly across levels 1-15, as I ran them mostly using the official Starfinder playtest scenarios and field tests. I ran some playtests at higher levels using Pathfinder content, but treated those as secondary to the playtest scenarios.
I ran my Technomancer with a variety of party compositions, mostly with just other Starfinder classes. I eventually started adding Pathfinder classes into the mix, and treated those playtests as secondary.
I tested my Technomancer using different Starfinder ancestries, including ancestries from the Galaxy Guide.
I ran the scenarios RAW for the most part, only adjudicating when something broke or was missing from the rules (or the class's core features). I then started playing with certain parameters, chiefly the Techomancer's own features, and treated those findings as secondary.
As per standard, I maxed out the Technomancer's Intelligence, then Dexterity, then Constitution, and finally Wisdom.
I settled for the most part on a laser rifle to "cast gun". While trying out different subclasses, I went out of my way to try to accommodate their item needs when possible, such as buying a spell gem at level 1 for the Viper subclass.
TL;DR I ran the Technomancer through a series of playtest encounters from low- to fairly high level, using a variety of ancestries and party compositions. After a little over a week, I started experimenting with altering the Technomancer's features to see how that would affect their gameplay.
Overclock Gear:
There's a lot to be said about Overclock Gear, in my opinion. It might not seem it, as the mechanic doesn't have all that much text to it, but that I think is part of it:
First, let's talk cost. Overclock Gear requires you to cast a non-cantrip spell, which means that your choice is to either cast a slot spell, which is particularly costly at low level when you have only 2 to begin with, or to cast your focus spellshape for the sole purpose of activating this feature. I order to overclock consistently, I ended up using the latter, which on some level did feel hack-y and thus thematically appropriate, but for the most part felt wasteful, especially when there wasn't much else I could do on that turn.
At low level, DPS++'s weapon overclock felt genuinely really good to use, as my attacks were hitting more often and dealing a higher minimum amount of damage, and it was one of the few overclocks I could put to immediate use by Striking as my third action. At higher levels, though, my Strikes were so weak compared to other things I could do that I ended up overclocking mostly just for Jailbreak Spell.
Fortrun was more consistently useful for its +1 to AC, if not its retaliatory damage on a ranged and extremely squishy class.
ServoShell was literally useless due to not having a permanent tech minion.
Viper ended up having the most useful overclock at higher level (in fact, the versatility it provided was perhaps a little too strong), but at low level was prohibitively expensive to use due to the cost of spell gems.
Although activating Overclock Gear is necessary to use Jailbreak Spell, I mostly ignored this at low level, because I simply did not have the resources to do both consistently enough (and especially not if I used my focus spellshape to overclock). Instead, I stayed overclocked for as long as I could when using DPS++ and Fortrun. At higher levels, though, I started overclocking purely to jailbreak, and disliked this, as overclocking felt like the only aspect of the Technomancer that actually has them use magic to interface with tech and not the other way round, and I didn't enjoy it being used mostly just as a means to something else.
One thing to note is that if you jailbreak a slot spell, you can Overclock Gear on the same turn to regain your overclock effect. This will effectively negate the benefit of jailbreaking as a free action, but lets you save resources. This is one of those hackier elements of the class that I found both nifty and a little awkward at the same time.
A more minor gripe I have with the mechanic is that you can overclock any gear, not just tech gear. This means you could overclock analog or even archaic gear, which to me feels like a bit of a thematic miss.
In general, I felt there was something lacking to this mechanic. I really wanted to overclock more stuff, and just interact with tech a lot more. Instead, I had one designated way of overclocking, with other "overclock" effects just being focus spells with the word in the name and no mechanical relation.
TL;DR Overclocking felt underbaked, and more as a means to the end that is jailbreaking than its own mechanic. Although Viper's overclock shines at high level and DPS++ at low level, the mechanic felt inconsistent in its power scaling, costly to use at low level, and ultimately really limited on what is meant to be the tech caster. I really feel this mechanic could use more love, as I think there's so many different ways to overclock, so much more tech to play with, and the current overclock focus spells could be tied into Overclock Gear better too.
Jailbreak Spell:
I have a fair bit to say about Jailbreak Spell, which I also discussed in a separate thread, so I thought I'd give the feature its own section here:
For starters, and to make one thing clear, this feature is very fun to use. This is by far the most powerful way of modifying a spell in 2e so far, and feels like a major power-up when you get to add lots of riders to your spell (and as a free action, too!).
The big caveat here is that this feature is very fun to use... when you get to actually use it. At low levels, I barely used Jailbreak Spell at all, because setting it up typically requires spending a spell slot, and you need another slot spell to get the most bang for your buck. At 3rd level in particular, I had only 5 spell slots to work with for the entire day or scenario, so despite how strong the feature felt, I couldn't justify spending a huge portion of my limited resources on it.
While Jailbreak Spell is quite impactful, it's also fairly complex and takes some getting used to. On my first few uses, it took me a little while to track all the moving parts, particularly when factoring in subclass features. Every spellshape also ended up becoming quite a bit more complex and wordy as a result of needing a special jailbreak entry.
On a similar note, I also felt that some jailbreak options were more restricted than the mechanic would suggest. The jailbreak effect on Incognito Spell, for instance, could have been an amazing spellshape on its own, and in practice felt like a poor fit for a base spellshape that's meant to allow spells to be cast unnoticed.
TL;DR Jailbreak Spell succeeds at its goal of providing a spellshape that feels super-powerful, but at the cost of significantly complicating the Technomancer's spellshapes and amplifying their low-level resource problems. As much as I like the mechanic, I question its place as a core class feature.
Core Class:
Splitting my feedback on the class's core chassis, subclasses, and feats for readability:
I'm personally actually quite a fan of the class having lower base stats than the Starfinder playtest classes. This new baseline feels much more appropriate, and while the class felt squishier than others, that squishiness wasn't a dealbreaker by any means either, and made sense on the Technomancer. I'd even argue that the class could stand to lose its light armor proficiency and work as a full cloth caster, much like a Pathfinder Wizard.
Much like Pathfinder's Wizard, however, I'm not a big fan of the 3 + Int mod skill proficiencies at level 1. Just because an arcane caster uses Intelligence doesn't mean in my opinion that they should have less than the minimum number of skills; their Intelligence and higher number of trained skills I think is meant to be part of their advantages. Not a dealbreaker, though, and more of a pet peeve.
My experience with the Technomancer's spell slots is as follows: on its own, I actually quite like that the Technomancer isn't yet another 4-slot caster, and think it's okay for the class to have fewer spell slots. However, the class is chock-full of mechanics that push them to use spell slots, which made them feel resource-starved at low level, and I don't think those mechanics necessarily make up the gap in power either. That, however, I think is a problem with the class's other mechanics, not their spell slots, and I'd personally want them to have less dependence on limited resources at low level than more spell slots, as I think they do fine with those at higher levels.
Download Spell is effectively what I've wanted from Pathfinder's Wizard and Spell Substitution for a long time, and the reasons why are clear on the Technomancer. It feels fantastic to switch to a reliable and thematically-fitting spell on the spot, and this has subtly been the most impactful mechanic on the Technomancer in my opinion on several encounters. It definitely does feel like the Technomancer's hacking into magic.
The Technomancer's focus spellshapes feel great... at high level. When you have spell slots to spare, it feels great to have lots of ways to modify your spells. When you don't, it means your only resourceless ways to contribute are the bare minimum of guns and cantrips, and even with overclocking that does not feel very good. It also means that with overclocking and jailbreaking, a huge portion of the Technomancer's power is contingent on their use of spell slots, which prevents them from making full use of their mechanics at low level.
While the Technomancer's ability to hack spells definitely felt well-established, their identity as an actual technomancer, i.e. a character that uses magic to act on tech, did not. Overclocking is the only core mechanic that lends itself to this, and I think it falls short for the reasons detailed in its own section.
Reinforcing the above I think is the class's DC. It's bog-standard for casters in that it remains stuck at trained, which means the Technomancer's accuracy with grenades and many other tech weapons drops off quite significantly over time. Adding insult to injury, the Witchwarper gets a class DC proficiency that scales up to master rank, making the latter better at using many kinds of tech than the actual Technomancer.
TL;DR The core Technomancer in many ways felt like they had everything I always wanted from the Wizard, with a better Spell Substitution mechanic and lots of spellshapes to begin with. I think this sits well with their lower durability, and leads to a class that feels like they get a lot of control over their own magic, which is great for a caster that's being put forth as a spellhacker. However, the class has way too much pressure overall to use spell slots and poor resourceless fallback tools, which does not sit well with their 3 spell slots per rank. Additionally, the core class didn't really feel like a technomancer, at least not the view I had where they could interact with tech in plenty of different and impactful ways.
Programming Languages:
When playtesting the Technomancer's different subclasses, I felt there was enough variance to them that it was worth talking a bit about each of them individually:
I'd first like to start by mentioning how much I love the subclass names. The references to actual programming and scripting languages are fantastic, and really helped sell the class's theme in my opinion.
Although spellshapes can be quite useful, I did not get that much use out of the subclass spellshape feats. Again, I think this is because the Technomancer has too few spell slots and is pushed to spend them in too many different ways, which led me to feel that the class had all of their eggs in one spellshaping basket when they could have benefited from a little bit of diversification.
DPS++ felt like one of the more functional subclasses at low level, mainly because their overclock felt genuinely impactful and their cache spells were pretty directly useful. However, thermoelectric phase change does not interact with supercharge weapon, the subclass's 1st-rank cache spell, so I started off using that focus spellshape purely to overclock. At higher levels, by contrast, I ended up overclocking purely to jailbreak, as my Strikes felt really limp and inaccurate even when overclocked.
Fortrun succeeds at making you feel pretty durable, particularly when you can give yourself a +2 bonus to your AC (+1 status from protection, +1 circumstance from overclocking). However, same as with DPS++, there is no interaction between this subclass's focus spellshape and its own 1st-rank cache spell (nor any of its other cache spells, for that matter), which reinforced the notion that a lot of the class was clashing with bits of itself, especially at low level. My small handful of attempts to test out the retaliatory damage ended up with my character getting chunked and dealing only piddly damage, so I ended up ignoring that entirely and instead using a jailbroken Denial of Safety (which, again, has no interaction with the subclass's cache spells) to yeet myself out of an enemy's melee reach if they ever got that close. I could've made more use of overclock armor to protect my HP and active defense firewall to prep a nasty spell and get more bang for my buck, but I honestly believe both work better as situational precautions rather than tools you'd use to actively put yourself in the front line.
ServoShell is just not fit for purpose. The Technomancer has no inherent means of obtaining a minion that can be Commanded, rather than Sustained, so its overclock effect is nonfunctional. Summon minion, while obviously appropriate for the subclass, makes it impossible to use on a turn where you want to overclock (which you might want to do to jailbreak). Signal relay has the benefit over DPS++ and Fortrun of actually synergizing with the subclass's 1st-rank cache spell, except it is so overly reliant on it that you must summon a minion first before getting to make any use out of the spellshape, a significant resource cost that is far too large at low level.
Finally, Viper I'd say is the subclass that comes out on top, but only at higher levels. At low levels, even your lowest-rank spell gems will be prohibitively expensive to buy constantly, even when you get to stretch their use out a little more with dynamic frequency scaling. When you do get to consistently use spell gems, though, Viper becomes immensely versatile, and because their subclass features actually work with each other, the subclass feels really good to use. At higher levels I ended up becoming a bit of a do-everything caster, particularly with higher-rank focus spellshapes letting me heighten non-arcane spells from spell gems and temporarily add them to my spell cache. I will say, however, that the jailbreak benefit dropped off quite significantly in effectiveness at higher levels given that I was making Area Fires with my perma-trained class DC, so that didn't feel so good.
TL;DR The Technomancer's subclasses have a lot of potential, and can genuinely impact the class's playstyle, but are also incredibly janky, especially at low level. ServoShell in particular felt almost like I was playing with no subclass at all, and Viper struggled with gem costs at early levels before shooting into hyper-effectiveness at higher levels. There is a shocking lack of synergy between many of the subclasses' spellshapes and their own cache spells, particularly at low levels, and I would have much preferred to have had feats that actually benefited my subclass rather than more spellshapes.
Feats:
I mostly focused on level 1-14 feats during my playtests, owing to the level range at which I mostly played:
First, let's start with the positives: there's a vast number of different spellshapes, many of which feel impactful and novel, and this makes me very happy. I've always wanted more spellshapes for Pathfinder's Wizard, as I think there's a lot of untapped potential to those, and it's good to see that potential tapped here, even if it's on another arcane caster class.
Second, and this I think bears mentioning: the feat names are awesome. Starfinder's ability names are at their best when they lean into the material they dig into and reference stuff we players are familiar with, in my opinion, and as a programmer I found it particularly appealing to identify and recognize all of the tech references. This I think really helps drive home the Technomancer's flavor.
On the more critical side, I was very disappointed to see so few tech-centric feats. The bulk of the Technomancer's feats are about spellshaping or playing with spells, and my expectation was that the class would also have many feats that would let them interact with tech-based items, hazards, environments, and so on in unique ways, much like how Pathfinder's Druid and Ranger have tons of feats that let them interact with natural features. This to me reinforced the notion that the Technomancer wasn't really living up to their name, and felt more like a Wizard in space with a bit of tech flavoring.
Adding to the above, it didn't really feel like I had many feat paths to focus on my gear if I wanted to. There are a small handful of gun and grenade feats, the latter of which struggle against the class's perma-trained class DC, and that's about it.
There is a sore lack of feats for tech familiars and robot companions, which is all the weirder considering how the Mechanic has a robot companion feat line. Either would've been a great 1st-level feat for a ServoShell Technomancer and would've solved a lot of their problems.
An issue I ran into with spellshape feats was how packed each one was. Each feat was basically two spellshapes rolled into one, and I feel there could've been a simpler way to do this that would have avoided that kind of bloat. Specifically, Double Spellshape at 4th level feels like it could've worked well as the baseline model to follow for jailbreaking.
On a much more minor note, Sudo Spell does not do what the name suggests it does. "Sudo" is a command that's generally known for running programs with maximum user privileges, and has no inherent link to duplication. It feels like "Copy and Paste" would've been more appropriate for that feat, and "Sudo Spell" could be a fitting name for the Root Level Access feat that gives you an extra 10th-rank spell.
TL;DR The Techomancer's feats offer a ton of fun spellshapes and have quite possibly some of the best feat names I've ever seen. However, there is a serious lack of feats that interact with tech of any kind, and in general it feels like there was far too much of a focus on manipulating spells, which feels more appropriate for a Pathfinder Wizard than a class that's meant to also have an affinity with tech in the same way a Druid has an affinity with nature.
The big TL;DR to all of this is that based on my experience, I think the Technomancer needs a lot more work unfortunately. They're among the weakest and least functional classes I have ever playtested at low level, and even at higher levels I never really felt the class was fully living up to their fantasy. Part of this is because I expected the class to interact much more with tech, when in practice the class hyperfocuses on spellshapes and uses its overclock mechanic more as a means to that end, rather than as its own fully-fledged aspect. There is far too much pressure on the class to use their limited spell slots on their class mechanics, and I feel this problem would still exist at low level even if the class were a 4-slot caster. My biggest recommendation would be to take at least a few eggs out of that spellshaping basket, and instead put them into the class's tech aspect, if only so that they can have more useful abilities at level 1.
If interested, here are the notes I compiled on adjustments I made to the Technomancer that worked well for me:
Adjustments and Recommendations:
I experimented with converting Overclock Gear and Download Spell into single-action focus spells, dropping their current restrictions on frequency or needing to cast a non-cantrip spell. This in my opinion made the Technomancer feel much more functional at low level, because they could overclock much more easily and without added resource expenditure, giving them the fallback tools they currently sorely lack. In general, it made the class more flexible and I think made the focus spellshape more palatable, as it didn't feel like you were being locked out of a useful focus spell at low level.
I experimented with swapping out the spellshape feats on a few of the subclasses and instead giving them feats that synergized with their other mechanics: with ServoShell, I gave them a basic robot companion, and that made their spellshapes and overclock so much more functional from the get-go. With Viper, I homebrewed a feat that let them choose a 1st-rank arcane spell, and become able to create a 1st-rank spell containing that arcane spell for free each day: this made a massive difference as well, because it allowed the subclass to function without imposing a huge credit drain on itself. My recommendation at this point would be to take out all spellshape feats on the subclasses, and replace them with other feats more directly beneficial to those subclasses.
I tried splitting up spellshapes and their jailbreak effects into separate spellshapes that I could then mix and match with Jailbreak Spell, as with Double Spellshape. This definitely made the Technomancer more versatile, but also just gave them even more spellshapes to play with. I didn't experience anything unbalanced either, so I'd go as far as to say that cutting Jailbreak Spell as a core feature and instead having Double Spellshape be the way to mix and match spellshapes could make sense on the class.
I experimented with giving the Technomancer a class DC that scaled at the same rate as their spell DC. This generally did not actually make a huge difference, other than it made a few grenade-based features and feats more functional and meant grenades were always a viable option on the tech-based class. I do think this could be added to the base class without unbalancing it, and doing so I think would guarantee that it would interact properly with certain tech items.
TL;DR In my playtesting, I experimented with making the Technomancer less of a hyperfocused spellshaper, and instead turning some of their existing features into a deck of magic hacks that could be used without needing to expend spell slots. I also gave them a scaling class DC so they could use grenades better, and swapped their subclass spellshape feats with feats more directly synergistic with their subclass features. This in my experience led to a significantly more functional class, especially at low level, that felt like it could play at least a little more with tech. This may come down to taste, but I didn't feel the reduction in their spellshaping aspect that strongly, because at lower level I did not have enough spell slots to spellshape much anyway, and at higher levels I had so many spellshapes to choose from that I could easily become a master spellshaper if I so wished. Based on this, my recommendation would be to force less of a focus on spellshapes on the base class, and instead give them the tools they need to make more use of tech and still be effective at low level when not expending spell slots. Because many bits of tech don't use daily resources, and existing feats in 2e allow the generation of daily resources for free, I think the two go hand-in-hand.
Haven't seen a thread for this specific mechanic yet, so here goes: Jailbreak Spell is a core class feature the Technomancer gains at 3rd level, which lets you trade in your gear overclocking for an action compressor on a spellshape, plus an additional jailbreak benefit, plus an additional benefit if you use a specific spellshape granted by your subclass. This probably starts to get to one of the things I want to discuss, but just to lay out the steps, here's how you jailbreak and what you get out of it:
First, you cast a non-cantrip spell. Because your only non-cantrip spells from your class at lower levels are spellshapes, it's likely going to be a slot spell.
Then, you use Overclock Gear, another Technomancer class action that grants a specific persistent benefit to some of your gear based on your subclass. This and casting the spell will likely take up your entire turn, and you must do both on the same turn.
On some later turn in the same encounter, you use Jailbreak Spell. This ends the overclock effect on your gear.
You then get to apply one of your spellshapes as a free action.
In most cases, your spellshape will also have a special jailbreak benefit, which you apply to your spell in addition to the basic spellshape effect.
If you're jailbreaking your spell with the spellshape gained from your subclass (not the focus spell, the other one), you also apply another jailbreak benefit from your subclass, for a total of four separate benefits.
Now, I'd first like to start with the positives: when you do get to use this, it does actually feel like you're jailbreaking your spell. The Technomancer gets lots of juicy spellshapes that add cool new effects to spells, adding another jailbreak benefit pushes the spell modding element even further, and doing all of this at no added action cost really feels like a huge boost. In the very limited few times I've used this mechanic so far, it felt like a really high moment, and I think the Starfriends really aced the design of a class that can hack magic with this mechanic.
Now, the less positive stuff: as the above should hopefully indicate, the process of jailbreaking is... well, it's a lot. The mechanic is complicated to set up, can be fairly complicated to use, and importantly, takes up a huge number of actions and resources to put to full use. At 3rd level in particular, your Technomancer will only have 5 spell slots, so you're not exactly going to be able to blow 2 spell slots per encounter at that stage, nor would you necessarily want to. This, along with a bunch of other mechanics on the class, I think contributes heavily to them not feeling fully functional at low levels, because they lack the resources to make proper use of their class mechanics, and have no real fallback options when they run out. It's also in this respect fairly encounter-centric, given how you need to power up and cast another spell beforehand, when I think there's space for jailbreaking spells outside of encounters and in situations where you wouldn't be doing all of that setup (for instance, Incognito Spell in a social encounter).
The other issue, in my opinion, is how this contributes to another problem some others have brought up: sacrificing your overclocking to gain this benefit puts some of the Technomancer's mechanics directly at odds with their ability to do more with tech. In my opinion, it's part of the reason why the "techno-" aspect feels like it's playing second fiddle to what otherwise plays like what many have wanted an Experimental Spellshaping Wizard to be this whole time.
Finally, and on a much more minor note, I feel the way jailbreaking is currently implemented is a little... restricted? Most jailbreak effects feel like they could just be regular spellshapes in their own right, and in fact the Double Spellshape feat you can get lets you apply two spellshapes instead of one spellshape and its jailbreak benefit. The same also applies to that extra effect you get from jailbreaking your subclass's spellshape: you might as well just be layering two to three independent spellshapes on top of one another, and breaking some of these jailbreak effects into their own spellshapes and implementing the effect of Double Spellshape as a baseline by letting you mix & match could both avoid overloading individual spellshapes and make it much easier to add new ones in the future, while also unlocking even more options.
TL;DR Jailbreak Spell giving the benefit of essentially two to three spellshapes plus action compression feels like a major power-up. Unfortunately, I also think right now it's a bit clunky to use and super resource-hungry. I really like the mechanic and definitely should stay on the Technomancer, but ideally I'd like it to be a bit more straightforward to use, and not come at the expense of their interaction with tech.
In short: the Witchwarper gets a scaling class DC up to master proficiency, presumably because their 1e version was also good with explosives, whereas the Technomancer's class DC gets stuck at trained proficiency, making the Witchwarper better at handling common bits of tech than the tech-themed caster class.
Beyond the bit of grumbling around theming, this is also mechanically relevant, because several of the Technomancer's abilities rely on grenades: the Viper subclass's Jailbreak Spellshape function has you make an Area Fire action as you treat a spell gem as an electromag grenade, and the Grenade Spell feat at 8th level also lets you infuse a burst spell into a grenade, which you throw with the Area Fire action. Because the Area Fire action uses your class DC for its Reflex save, you'd be using your trained DC both times, making both actions scale extremely poorly.
With this in mind, I think it would be to the Technomancer's benefit for them to receive a scaling class DC. Unlike the Witchwarper, I think it could even go to legendary, and I don't think this would break anything: the class is clearly good at AoE and is intended to do well with AoE weaponry, so being good at Area Fires ought to be an intended strength, and archetype or ancestry feats that rely on class DC almost always let you use your spell DC instead, so there would be no change there.
To begin: this thread is an offshoot of this homebrew thread from A Butter Idea, whose concept serves as a starting point for this one. I very much recommend reading their post first, as they cover several issues with detection and senses in Pathfinder 2e really well, and that thread gives context to what's being presented here. I initially thought of posting this concept on their thread, but didn't want to crowd out their work with my own divergent homebrew, so I decided to post it here instead. With that established, let's go over a few points of criticism I have for senses and detection in PF2e:
What's Wrong With Detection Rules?:
I think the most obvious way to highlight the problem with detection in Pathfinder is to ask the simple, relatively common question of "How well can I target this creature in the encounter?" and list all the elements that factor into it:
You have different conditions marking states of detection, from observed to unnoticed.
You have different senses, which each have different states from precise to vague (with an implicit fourth state for not having the sense at all).
You have different conditions determining how senses are impaired, i.e. blinded, dazzled, and deafened. There's no conditions for other senses, and more conditions against sight than against hearing.
You have different conditions determining how detectable, rather than detected, something is. This overlaps heavily with detection conditions, and as A Butter Idea points out in their thread, there is a significant bias towards sight over any other senses (both the concealed and invisible conditions affect how others can see you).
You have environmental factors that can provide various conditions, generally localized to the bit of the environment. These can be conditions that impair senses, conditions that affect how detectable someone is, or both (and often it's both). The mist spell, for example, conceals creatures inside from creatures on the outside and vice versa.
You have different player mechanics, such as spells and ancestry abilities, that allow you to counter some of those environmental factors that would hinder your ability to detect others, low-light vision and darkvision being the two most obvious ways of doing so. There is, again, a heavy bias towards sight here.
So from all of this, I think we can draw a few conclusions:
This system is pretty complicated relative to the simple question it is generally meant to answer.
There is a huge bias towards sight: creatures are assumed to rely on sight by default, and the bulk of conditions and mechanics around detection play with sight rather than other senses. A Butter Idea tackles this bias in their homebrew, and correctly points out that this limits the ability to play Daredevil-like characters who rely on senses other than sight, while potentially complicating play in Starfinder 2e when so many creatures across the Universe and beyond have special senses of their own. More specifically, it means having any precise sense other than sight is far more powerful than it needs to be, because that lets a creature bypass the entire current system of counters and counters-to-counters built around sight.
These mechanics and conditions are almost completely dissociated from the game's usual system of bonuses and penalties: the concealed and hidden conditions impose flat checks, for instance, which force rolling twice for the same effect each time instead of leaning into the game's robust system of status and circumstance modifiers.
There's a lot of ambiguity around certain interactions: the Hide action, for instance, again relies heavily on the assumption of trying to escape from sight, so the GM has to start doing a lot of legwork to adjudicate when a creature can Hide when senses other than sight are involved.
In short: detection and senses sit in this little island of highly complex, overlapping, yet also sometimes confusing and ambiguous rules mostly separate from the rest of the game's mechanics. There's a lot to take in, but even then the question of whether or not one can detect a creature or Hide from them isn't super-clear, particularly when senses other than sight get involved. A Butter Idea addresses the bias towards sight in their brew, and I think we can go even further and streamline these rules even further.
Before listing specifics, I think it's worth listing the general roadmap of what I'd like out of an ideal detection subsystem in a game like Pathfinder, which could take on a variety of implementations:
I'd like the process of detecting and targeting creatures to be straightforward, or at least as straightforward as any other general mechanic in Pathfinder.
I'd like modifiers to detection to rely on Pathfinder's overarching system of numeric bonuses and penalties, instead of imposing their own separate checks.
I'd like the subsystem to be open-ended and flexible enough to be able to easily handle a potentially infinite variety of senses.
Here's how I'd go about trying to implement the above:
Binary Sense and Detection States:
The basic rule I'd like to apply here is: either you have a sense or you don't, and either a creature is hidden to you or it's not. What are currently imprecise senses could thus just be senses like your sight, albeit with more limited ranges or other restrictions, and vague senses could either not exist or be even more limited, such as only being able to smell a creature if they're adjacent to you for instance.
As for detection, the principle would be: unless a creature is trying to escape detection or is under some kind of stealth effect, you can just target them normally if they're within range of your senses (which is usually the case if you can see them), and if you can't sense them at all, then they become hidden to you.
What does it mean to be hidden? What about concealment? This is where the next part comes in:
New and Updated Conditions: Disabled & Hidden, Impaired & Occluded:
This is the bit where I'd want to start tying detection states to bonuses and penalties, while opening the system up to work consistently for any sense. Let's start with the hidden condition we mentioned earlier, and its counterpart for turning off senses, the disabled condition:
Hidden: When you're hidden from a creature, that creature doesn't know where you are, or if you're even there at all. A creature you're hidden from is off-guard to you, and you're occluded 4 to it (more on that later); if it tries to target you with an effect, it must select a space it thinks you occupy and the GM makes any rolls for the effect in secret, trying to affect you if you do occupy the space. Because area effects do not target creatures, a creature does not need to select a space when you're in the area of one of its effects, though the GM still rolls in secret to determine how you're affected. You may be hidden to only one or some of a creature's senses and not others, in which case you're not hidden from that creature unless you're hidden from all of its senses. Creatures whose senses you're hidden from are immune to your effects that rely on that sense, such as the visual trait if you're hidden from sight or the auditory trait if you're hidden from hearing.
Disabled: When one of your senses is disabled, it stops working. All creatures and objects are hidden to that sense from you, and you can't use that sense to Seek or Search.
Effectively, the hidden condition would include a bit of the undetected condition, and would be able to cover the invisible condition plus any counterpart for other senses, while the disabled condition would uniformly cover any kind of condition that stops your sense from working, like blinded or deafened. For softer conditions, let's follow up with the occluded condition for being concealed from a sense, and the impaired condition for partially blocking that sense:
Occluded: When you're occluded from a creature, it's harder for that creature to sense you. The occluded condition always includes a value up to 4. You gain a circumstance bonus equal to your occluded value to your defenses against that creature's Seek actions and actions that target you, as well as your Stealth checks against that creature, and a circumstance penalty to your occluded value to the checks and DCs of your actions that require the creature to sense you, such as a visual action if you're occluded from a creature's sight. Because area effects do not target creatures, you do not gain this circumstance bonus against area effects. You may be occluded to only one or some of a creature's senses and not others, in which case your occluded value against that creature is equal to the lowest occluded value you have against any of that creature's senses that can sense you. For instance, if you're occluded 2 to a creature's sight but not occluded to its smell when within range of that sense, you're not occluded to that creature. If you're occluded 4 to a creature, you're hidden from it.
Impaired: When one of your senses is impaired, it's prevented from fully working. The impaired condition always includes a value up to 4. All creatures and objects are occluded to that sense from you, with an occluded value equal to your impaired value.
And with that, that should be a pretty simple, yet flexible way of expressing how well you can detect something with a sense: effects that currently conceal you could instead make you something like occluded 2, and depending on the effect you could choose whether this occludes you to sight, hearing, multiple senses, or just a certain subset. Similarly, the dazzled condition could just make your sight impaired 2, and you'd suddenly have plenty of room to easily apply this to any sense you'd like. While not strictly a part of the above, this kind of framework could also easily lead to other mechanics (and please excuse the weird formatting, it seems lists and spoiler text don't mix well):
---
If you wanted to express senses becoming less accurate over a distance, much like range increments on ranged attacks, you could have your impaired conditions for your senses increase with each of their respective increment, with the value capping at 4 and making creatures hidden at that point. This would likely require tweaking senses to have shorter ranges, and giving sight an explicit range increment (which wouldn't be a bad thing, as it'd help adjudicate certain long-distance scenarios a bit better), but could add even more depth to detection using the same rules.
---
If you wanted to condense different sense-based traits, you could just have one sense trait that specifies one or more senses each time, and requires creatures to have that sense (or those senses) to be able to be affected, so the visual trait could become "Sense: Sight", the auditory trait could be come "Sense: Hearing", and so on. This could more explicitly tie those effects into specific senses and the conditions that affect them, while making it easy to create new traits for other senses, such as "Sense: Lifesense" for an effect that relies on that specific sense.
---
You could easily implement a whole bunch of effects that'd mess with senses. If you have a cold or are in a cold environment, for instance, your smell could be impaired, a short-sighted creature could have their range increment on their sight reduced, or a creature that's hard of hearing or just has a really weak sense of hearing could have the sense permanently impaired. By contrast, creatures that have some kind of natural camouflage or register more dimly to certain senses (for instance, a creature that evolved to muffle its own sound, or an assassin trained to hide their thoughts from thoughtsense) could be occluded to those respective senses. You could potentially even go in the opposite direction and give a negative occluded value to creatures that are particularly detectable through certain senses, like xulgaths with their stench, or create a separate condition just for that.
More Consistent, Flexible, and Streamlined Environmental Effects:
With the above conditions established, let's see how this can be used to simplify how the environment affects senses (and again, apologies for the strange formatting):
---
Some environmental features could provide occlusion to certain senses, like dim light or darkness against sight. Occluding terrain renders all creatures and objects inside occluded, with a value determined by the intensity of the occlusion. Standard occlusion, like dim light, could make creatures occluded 2 to the applicable sense, and greater occlusion would make creatures hidden (or occluded 4, as both would be the same).
---
Sometimes the occlusion is two-way, as with magical darkness or the area of a silence spell. Just call this kind of terrain two-way occluding terrain, meaning all creatures and objects inside are occluded, but all creatures and objects outside the area are occluded to those creatures too.
---
Effects that ignore concealment or let creatures perceive clearly in certain environments could just let you ignore the occlusion of certain terrain: low-light vision could let you ignore the occlusion of dim light, darkvision could let you ignore the occlusion of nonmagical darkness and dim light, and greater darkvision could let you ignore the occlusion of all darkness and dim light, including magical darkness.
---
Cover does not automatically provide a bonus to Stealth checks. Instead, opaque objects and surfaces that often provide cover instead often provide occlusion to sight as well, with the objects and surfaces affecting the occlusion: simply having a wall in-between you and a creature may create two-way occlusion, but standing on the transparent side of a one-way mirror would provide one-way occlusion. If a terrain feature that provides two-way occlusion has an opening that takes a bit of positioning to sense through, such as a keyhole in a door, you can Take Cover behind the feature to sense through the feature normally, though the GM might determine that this focus occludes other creatures that you'd normally be able to sense.
---
This ought to make adjudicating how terrain affects the senses both fairly flexible but also quite easy: you could have terrain that hinders everyone's senses, like a loud crowd impeding hearing, and certain situations where you're occluding yourself to someone else's senses while keeping your own clear, like concealing yourself behind a bush. Depending on the intensity of the effect, the GM could even scale the occluded value accordingly. For existing effects that create occluding terrain, it'd be easy to describe it as such: a mist spell, for instance, could just provide two-way standard occlusion to sight, and that would be enough to describe the spell's functionality.
Updated, Less Binary Hide and Seek Actions:
Hide is currently an action that's both fairly binary and also quite ambiguous when it comes to hiding from certain specific senses. With the above, this no longer needs to be the case. For instance:
---
Hide (One-Action) Traits: Secret
You attempt to escape a creature's senses, if only momentarily. When you use this action, choose up to two senses you're trying to Hide from. Typically, you'll be trying to Hide from sight and hearing, though you may choose to Hide from other senses instead. You can choose up to three senses if you're an expert in Stealth, four if you're a master, and five if you're legendary. The GM rolls your Stealth check in secret and compares the result to the Perception DC of each creature that can sense you. You automatically critically fail your check if the creature can sense you using a sense you're not trying to Hide from.
Critical Success You become hidden to that creature until immediately after you take an obtrusive action that it can sense. This is typically a hostile action against the creature, but also includes other actions that are highly noticeable, such as Casting a Spell. If you try to perform an otherwise noticeable action in a particularly unobtrusive way, such as trying to quietly trying to Disable a Device, the GM might require you to perform another Stealth check to Hide from detection.
Success As critical success, but you become occluded 2 instead of hidden.
Failure As critical success, but you become occluded 1 instead of hidden.
Critical Failure You fail to escape the creature's senses.
---
With this, you'd no longer need to specifically be in cover or specific terrain to successfully Hide, though you'd still benefit from all of that, you'd have a range of effects depending on your degree of success, and you'd be explicitly stating which senses you're trying to Hide from. Seek could be even simpler:
---
Seek (One-Action) Traits: Concentrate, Secret
You scan an area for hidden creatures and objects. The GM attempts a single secret Perception check for you and compares the result to the Stealth DCs of any creatures within range of any of your senses.
Critical Success The creature loses the hidden or occluded condition against you that it gained by Hiding from you. The creature does not lose either of these conditions that are gained from other effects, such as terrain or a spell.
Success As critical success, but the creature remains occluded 2 to you if it was hidden.
---
So you'd just extend all your senses and potentially catch creatures trying to Hide from you within their range.
The TL;DR to all this is: rather than have lots of discrete states and conditions for senses, detection states, and levels of impairment or occlusion, use a circumstance bonus instead to determine how much a creature resists targeting and detection, with one single condition for being completely hidden, and have all of those different factors tie into that same bonus in the end, with conditions being able to apply to any sense in particular or in general as needed. Not only could this streamline what already exists and clarify certain specific points, it'd make it much easier to play with detection and stealth via new mechanics, with the GM having many more tools at their disposal for affecting senses and detection situationally. Although the above is quite a significant departure from what we'd got, it'd be a relatively simple process to map this new subsystem onto what already exists, such as by using the occluded condition instead of concealed (and using occluded 2 by default), or impaired instead of dazzled.
A quick introduction: this homebrew started with the Magus, and how to do the Magus differently. Starting with the foundation of the Magus, I wanted to let the class opt into different traditions, perhaps even emulate the features of other classes besides the Wizard's spellcasting, while also leaning more into utility... and realized that what I was developing wasn't the Magus at all, but something entirely new.
From this concept came the Scion, a completely different take on a gish class. The Scion is a hybrid class in purest form, in that they draw from the power of two separate classes, one caster and one martial, and combine spells and Strikes in combat in their own unique way. Here are the highlights:
Hybrid, class-based subclasses: The Scion has two dimensions of subclasses with their hybrid focus feature, and the class chooses one magical focus and one martial focus as their two subclasses. These foci each emulate an existing class, determining your proficiencies, your spell tradition, whether you're prepared or spontaneous, and give you a few of those classes' features as well. This is more than you'd get from a multiclass dedication, but far less than what the original class gets, and you don't get the scaling damage boosters of your martial focus's class or the spellcasting proficiency or spell output of your magical focus. With 14 magical foci and 20 martial foci to choose from, you get 280 different subclass combinations!
Spell Combat: Drawing from a key feature of 1e's Magus, Spell Combat is an action compressor action that lets the Scion cast a Strike and a cantrip against a single target at a reduced action cost. Because you start out only being able to use this with cantrips, your bounded spell slots become much more valuable for utility, but at higher levels you get fusion spells, special spell slots that let you cast spells with Spell Combat, and only with Spell Combat.
50 Feats: Many feats allow the Scion to modify Spell Combat in various ways, draw more power from their spell tradition, and mix magic into their skills in order to make more use of skill actions, among many other effects. In addition, your hybrid focus lets you take feats from the classes you're drawing from, making the Scion one of the most customizable classes in the game.
In short, the Scion is a class that shines not necessarily through raw power output, but through versatility and breadth of options. They're not a class I'd recommend to a player new to Pathfinder, but they have the ability to let players play a character that's split about 50/50 between two classes, rather than the typical 75/25 or so split you'd normally get from multiclassing, and that combines different class features into a harmonious new playstyle. Let me know what you think, and I hope you enjoy!
There's been a lot of discussions around the Wizard since the remaster, none of them all that positive. There's a consensus that the class has changed for the worse, and that the general landscape has evolved in a manner that's left them behind, which does not bode well for what seems to be an otherwise flavorful expansion themed entirely around wizarding academies across Golarion. For those who aren't familiar with the discussions already, here I think are some common points:
What's Wrong with the Wizard?:
Because the Wizard's arcane school slot got changed to work only with a limited curriculum of spells, rather than an entire OGL school of magic, the Wizard received a substantial nerf to their versatility. In some cases, this also came at a minor yet symbolic loss in power, as schools like Battle Magic force the class to prepare spells into lower-rank slots that become obsolete when not heightened enough.
Meanwhile, the remaster has seen most other casters buffed, sometimes substantially. The Oracle is now a four-slot caster, the Mystic and Witchwarper from the Starfinder playtest are both four-slot casters, and even the Sorcerer received a wave of buffs. Less directly, non-arcane spell lists received significant benefits with the addition of spirit damage and a host of new and improved spells, shortening the gap between traditions. This has left the Wizard's four-slot casting feeling much less unique, and has made players increasingly question the restrictions placed both upon the class's fourth slot, and their spell slots overall due to the limitations of their spellbook.
Although the Wizard did receive some positive changes, including some better feats, many issues remained largely unaddressed. Experimental Spellshaping is still not a very popular arcane thesis, Spell Substitution still competes with Refocusing, many school spells still aren't very useful, and the class still has only fairly few feats to choose from, especially for what is meant to be one of the four iconic spellcasters for their respective traditions (they have around half the amount of feats as the Bard, Cleric, or Druid). Unlike other spellcasters, they still can't get a pool of 3 Focus Points without taking an archetype, nor can they access the features of a different subclass, such as the curriculum or school spell of a different arcane school. This has led many players to feel like the Wizard has been neglected.
A lot of players have started to reexamine the Wizard in a more critical light: specifically, the class's overwhelming focus on casting arcane spells does not come across as truly unique in a game with plenty more arcane spellcasters. Similarly, their identity as a student of magic, and an intellectual class in general, doesn't particularly get to shine given how they lack feats that let them Recall Knowledge better, or more broady allow them to do more things that don't just involve casting spells.
Despite what appears to be fairly common ground for criticism, there doesn't seem to be much consensus over which direction to take the Wizard: some people want the class to remain a four-slot caster, others don't. Some people want the class to specialize in a particular school of magic, others don't. Some players even challenge the Wizard's spell preparation, as they dislike the inflexibility of Vancian spellcasting. It seems there are about as many different identities for the Wizard as there are players with an opinion on the Wizard, which makes it difficult to come up with a solution that satisfies everyone.
In short: the Wizard fell behind at a time where every other caster pulled significantly ahead, and as a result people are questioning their place in a game where their power struggles to stand out, and their flaws have become much more apparent. Lots of players want a new and better Wizard, but nobody can agree upon what that Wizard would look like, and so most threads critiquing the class often devolve into squabbling.
With this in mind, I can't really claim to offer a one-size-fits-all solution, because I don't think one exists for this particular problem: I do, however, think there is an approach to take here that could satisfy a greater number of players, and that is to let the player choose what they want the Wizard's specialty to be. If you're interested in specific details, I wrote a 25-page Wizard homebrew that adopts this approach. Beyond those specifics, here I think are the broad lines of how the Wizard could be improved, in whichever form that takes:
Power Concentrated into Arcane Thesis: On one hand, players can't seem to decide what the Wizard is meant to excel at. On the other, many players also want their arcane thesis to be more impactful. I think the Wizard's arcane thesis is the key to giving players what they want here: by no longer making the class a four-slot caster by default, that I think leaves a lot more room in the power budget for much stronger theses. Do you want to cast spellshapes as free actions from level 1? Do you want to shake off the limitations of prepared casting and gain the benefits of flexible spellcasting, without the drawbacks? Do you want to remain a 4-slot caster, but don't want your fourth slot to be restricted to a curriculum? In all of these cases and more, I think there's ample room to deliver that with a playstyle-defining subclass choice.
More Schools: One thing I think many of us are waiting for is a larger number of arcane schools, particularly as the Wizard ended up with fewer schools post-remaster, and the only school they got since is a reskin of the School of Mentalism. I suspect this is something Rival Academies will help with, and I think there's a prime opportunity here to take the Elementalist's elemental schools and make them proper schools for the core Wizard, as well as adapt the Runelord schools to a post-remaster 2e as arcane schools of their own.
More Feats: You can't go wrong with more feats, and with the Wizard there's a lot left to explore, in my opinion. In particular, I think there's plenty of room for feats that improve the Wizard's Lore skills and ability to Recall Knowledge, feats that let a Wizard gain some benefits from a different arcane school, and feats that build on the Wizard's arcane thesis.
In short, give the Wizard lots more options, but also make their arcane thesis the main feature that defines what the class excels at. I think there's room for more specific changes, like making Spell Substitution core to the class instead of their arcane bond feature and allowing the Wizard to substitute spells while Refocusing, but otherwise this sort of framework where each arcane thesis gets a lot more power I think would have a much better chance of tailoring the Wizard to the specific desires of different players than their current structure. You could have your spell battery Wizards, your spellshape-centric Wizards, and even your specialist Wizards all in one, and each would get to shine in their own specific way.
It feels like a good portion of criticism of the Necromancer class revolves around the static and largely inanimate nature of their thralls: the reasons behind that are mechanically understandable, as the class is built to just create more thralls instead of controlling them all on an individual basis, but thematically that's chafed with quite a few players, who see the class more as this more generic token-mancer than the master of an undead horde. I imagine it feels like something's missing in that respect, and I wonder if that's a gap that could be filled with an extra starting grave cantrip. For instance, something along the following lines:
With a command, you spur a thrall to action. The thrall Strides up to your Speed, or Burrows, Climbs, Flies, or Swims instead of Striding if you have the corresponding movement type. If the thrall ends its movement adjacent to an enemy, it can make a melee unarmed Strike using your spell attack modifier for the attack roll. This attack deals your choice of 1d6 bludgeoning, piercing, or slashing damage. This Strike uses and counts toward your multiple attack penalty.
If you have the expert necromancy class feature, you can command up to two thralls, increasing to three if you have master necromancy and four if you have legendary necromancy. A target can't be targeted by more than one thrall's Strike at a time, and you do not increase your multiple attack penalty until all of the Strikes have been made.
Heightened (+2) The damage increases by 1d6.
---
Effectively, instead of creating an existing thrall, you could move one around and have it make another attack from potentially farther away. This'd probably still not be a great ability to have at low level, especially given how a lot of thrall-based abilities have such short ranges, but with multiple thralls, this could potentially get more interesting as you make more attacks. Thralls right now have the problem of being permanently ground-bound, which makes the Necromancer quite difficult to play at higher levels when flying enemies become more common, so having them potentially inherit a fly Speed you may have could help alleviate that issue. Most importantly, though, this cantrip could let you do more with your thralls besides just consume them, and this time it'd be your thralls actually doing something too. What do y'all reckon, would this help make thralls feel a little less like static tokens?
This is more of a manifesto and a proof of concept than a brew in its own right, so I'll start with the point I want to prove: in a future Pathfinder edition, I think characters ought to be resourceless by default, because it's much easier to convert a resourceless character to daily resources than the reverse. To prove this, I homebrewed a class archetype for the Kineticist called the Kinetic Mage. The full details are in the linked document, but here are the highlights:
You no longer get impulse feats from your class features, and instead you get special slots called impulse slots, which work much like spell slots and are used to cast a certain number of daily impulses. These impulse slots determine the level of your impulses and their effects, much like heightening a spell, and you can still select at-will impulses using your class feats if you want.
You can choose to be a prepared or spontaneous Kinetic Mage. If you're prepared, you prepare impulses into your impulse slots each day, and if you're spontaneous, you have a repertoire of fixed-level daily impulses you can use impulse slots with, along with signature impulses that level up automatically based on the impulse slot used to "cast" them (just like signature spells!).
Instead of reflow elements, your daily impulses all go up in level, up to 2 extra levels. Because Kineticist impulses are generally balanced to be a rank below slot spells of your level range, this makes your 9th-rank impulse slots equal in power to 9th-rank spells.
There's a few details more, like getting an Elementalist focus spell to start and an improved Kinetic Activation feat in your dedication, but that's the meat of it. Beyond letting you play a Kineticist more like a traditional spellcaster if you're so inclined, this should also hopefully demonstrate how the slot-based caster framework is fairly simple to describe and apply to a class suited for it in 2e. If a spellcaster were designed using a framework like the Kineticist's, any player wanting to play them with a more traditional, daily resource-based playstyle would be able to easily opt into that, just as those wanting to avoid daily attrition would easily be able to get what they want as well. The reverse isn't as easy, however, and although it's somewhat possible to take daily attrition out of current spellcasters, it's much more complicated to pull off in my opinion and comes with its own issues.
Worth noting is how the above also enables a lot more customizability, as well: the Kineticist's framework lends itself easily to thematic specialization, so starting from that baseline could make it much easier to develop any kind of thematic caster. I chose to make my archetype a 3-slot caster, but it would be fairly simple in my opinion to make it a 2-slot caster in exchange for some buffs (for instance, a snall handful of free at-will impulses, or more gate junctions), or even potentially a 4-slot caster with some more tradeoffs (for instance, by nerfing the class's durability while forcing them to opt into a dual gate). In an environment where there's been increasing player demand for thematic casters and casters without the daily attrition of spell slots, the solution in a future edition could be to make thematic, attrition-free frameworks the default for any magic-user, and enable hyper-versatility, daily resources, and Vancian preparation through character options.
Of all the news we just got from the latest Paizo blog, this one's my personal favorite:
Paizo wrote:
One new element we'll be introducing is the traversal trait. This new trait mostly applies to player-facing rules that reference Stride. When it applies, traversal allows the use of alternative movement types (burrow, fly, and swim) to be used in place of land Speed, akin to how Sneak works. Expect to see this greatly impact some abilities used by the envoy and solarian (to name a few).
One of the many things I love about 2e, both with Pathfinder and Starfinder, is the system's modularity and its ability to compress a lot of meaning and functionality into traits, akin to functions in programming. This new addition, in my opinion, is a shining example of this, and how powerful 2e's system design is. I've been wanting to see exactly this kind of trait in a game that has a lot of movement abilities, and am very happy to see this, as this will not only improve many mechanics in Starfinder, but could also benefit several in Pathfinder too. Thank you for this new trait, Paizo; I look forward to seeing it in effect!
The premise here is fairly simple: the Battle Harbinger is meant to be a divine class who can fight well in martial combat and deploy auras. As it so happens, there's a divine martial class in Pathfinder that already comes pre-packaged with an aura and even spell proficiency progression, specifically the Champion. The latter class even comes with causes and tenets that spur them to action, much like a battle creed, and they can even take up oaths to combat specific foes! Thus, with just a few feats, I think the Champion could be easily made to fit the Battle Harbinger's niche much better than the Battle Harbinger themselves. Here are my suggestions, with a TL;DR below:
Aura of Devotion, a 1st-level feat for picking up aura devotion spells:
Aura of Devotion (Feat 1) Traits: champion Prerequisites: champion's aura
You can allow your deity's power to radiate from you, bathing creatures in your aura with divine energies. You gain a devotion spell based on your deity's divine font: beatifying aura if your deity allows heal, or execrative aura if your deity allows harm.
Beatifying Aura, an aura buff devotion spell:
Beatifying Aura (One Action, Focus 1) Traits: uncommon, champion, concentrate, focus Duration: sustained up to 1 minute
You bask in your deity's glory, spurring creatures within your aura to fight with renewed zeal. You and allies within your champion's aura gain a +1 status bonus to attack rolls, damage rolls, or saving throws, which you choose when you Cast the Spell. Once per round on subsequent turns, you can change the effect to a different option when you Sustain the spell. Beatifying aura can counteract execrative aura.
Execrative Aura, an aura debuff devotion spell:
Execrative Aura (One Action, Focus 1) Traits: uncommon, champion, concentrate, focus Defense: Will; Duration: sustained up to 1 minute
You exude your deity's hatred for its enemies, impeding foes who dare to exist in your presence. Enemies within your champion's aura must succeed at a Will save or take a -1 status penalty to attack rolls, damage rolls, or saving throws, which you choose when you Cast the Spell. Once per round on subsequent turns, you can change the effect to a different option and force enemies in the area that weren't yet affected to attempt another saving throw when you Sustain the spell. Execrative aura can counteract beatifying aura.
Radiate Exultation, a 6th-level counterpart to Tandem Onslaught:
Radiate Exultation (Free Action, Feat 6) Traits: champion Prerequisites: Aura of Devotion
Trigger: You deal damage to a creature with a successful Strike, and your beatifying aura or execrative aura is active.
As your blow lands true, your triumph reverberates across your divinely-suffused aura and renews it. You Sustain the triggering aura.
Redoubled Devotion, a 8th-level feat to apply multiple aura buffs or debuffs:
Redoubled Devotion (Feat 8) Traits: champion Prerequisites: Aura of Devotion
You reaffirm your commitment to your deity's cause with even greater fervor, channelling even more of your deity's glory or hatred. When you Cast beatifying aura or execrative aura, and each time you change the aura's effect, you can choose two options instead of one.
Empowered Exultation, a 10th-level counterpart to Empowered Onslaught:
Your greatest triumphs against your foes saturate your aura with even more intense deific power. When you Radiate Exultation and critically succeeded on the triggering Strike, increase the triggering aura's status bonus or penalty by 1, to a maximum of 4. This value remains for the rest of the aura's duration.
Trinity of Devotion, a 14th-level feat for even more aura effects:
Trinity of Devotion (Feat 14) Traits: champion Prerequisites: Redoubled Devotion
Your commitment to your cause is unquestionable, and your deity grants you unlimited sanction when you channel their power into your aura. When you Cast beatifying aura or execrative aura, and each time you change the aura's effect, you can choose three options instead of two, and can choose from all the options listed in both spells. Choosing to impose a penalty causes enemies not yet affected by your aura to make a Will save, even if your spell wouldn't normally induce a save.
Divine Clarion, a 16th-level feat for a free-action aura cast on initiative:
Divine Clarion (Free Action, Feat 16) Traits: champion Prerequisites: Aura of Devotion
Trigger: You roll initiative.
Your aura of devotion is like a battle cry from your deity itself, surging from you at the first sign of combat. You Cast beatifying aura or execrative aura.
Harbinger of War, a 20th-level feat to enable wave casting when archetyped with a Cleric:
Harbinger of War (Feat 20) Traits: champion Prerequisites: Master Cleric Spellcasting
Your closeness to your deity has made them choose you as a representative of their faith, granting you even greater magic that can be changed in preparation for warfare. You gain a 9th-rank spell slot from Master Cleric Spellcasting, in addition to the spell slots it normally provides you.
Each time you make your daily preparations, you can choose to prepare for war. If you do so, you lose all of the spell slots you gain from cleric archetype feats of 7th rank and below, and gain an additional 9th-rank spell slot from Master Cleric Spellcasting. If you have the Divine Breadth feat, you also gain an additional 8th-rank spell slot from Master Cleric Spellcasting. These spell slots last until the next time you make your daily preparations.
TL;DR: With just a few feats, you could easily have the Champion use their aura to buff or debuff to an even greater extent than they do now, and so more smoothly than with a Battle Harbinger. In fact, with just one capstone feat that would reward a 5-feat commitment to a Cleric archetype, you could even go full Battle Harbinger with wave casting!
Based on some ongoing conversations around making use of class DC, I think a few elements jump out:
There are vanishingly few mechanics that exclusively use class DC, and when they do, it's usually for things that can be done with spells, such as crit spec applying a condition with a save.
Class DC and spell DC are often used interchangeably, most notably for many ancestry and archetype feats that use a DC. This ends up creating a lot of extra wording each time.
The very few classes with a legendary class DC tend to be quite well-suited to doing things casters can do: for instance, the Kineticist has access to a lot of AoE and utility, and can even use their class DC to cast many spells via magic items.
In the past, I wondered what would happen if class DC and spell DC were merged, and tried out this sort of change at my table, especially when playtesting content for Starfinder. Specifically, here were be the changes:
Spell DC is no longer a statistic. Instead, any save uses your class DC.
You get just one class DC, and can use this for any DC that requires a class DC, including class features from a multiclass archetype that specify another class's DC.
Classes with a spellcasting feature start out trained in class DC (this is standard on remastered classes, but not classes that haven't yet been remastered, like the Magus), and get proficiency increases to their class DC when they would normally get an increase to their spell DC.
Optionally, classes with a spellcasting class feature also have their spell attack proficiency decoupled from their class DC proficiency in a manner outlined below:
Decoupled Spell Attacks:
To decouple spell attacks from class DC, apply the following, based on Mark Seifter's proposals for spell attack accuracy:
1. All classes with a spellcasting feature become experts in spell attacks at level 5, and masters at level 13. Nobody becomes legendary.
2. Spell attacks benefit from item bonuses to attack rolls, as well as attack potency bonuses when using Automatic Bonus Progression. Use the item bonus from the strongest weapon potency rune on an item you're wearing or holding.
3. Every named staff gets a weapon potency rune appropriate for its level.
4. If the staff would be cheaper than its weapon potency rune, increase its cost to match its rune. This generally would require only minor adjustments (level 10 staves would need their cost bumped up by 15 to 35 gp, some level 16 staves would need their cost bumped up by 35 to 435 gp). If the staff's Price already matches or exceeds that of the rune, no change.
5. Prevent the weapon potency rune from being transferred out of the staff for reselling: if the staff loses its rune, it loses the ability to be prepared and cast spells until it regains that rune once more.
6. If a player wants to craft a personal staff, have the resulting staff come with a weapon potency rune appropriate for its level. If the player has one such rune and wants to supply it during the crafting process, deduct its cost from the total crafting cost as normal.
7. You can apply the same change to Kineticists, having their impulse attack proficiency increase to expert at level 5 and master at level 13 (and no longer legendary at any level). You can even change their impulse attack proficiency to spell attack proficiency, and have their impulses work as spells (so you'd be Casting a Spell). If you do all of this, increase the item bonus provided by a major gate attenuator to +3.
8. As an optional additional rule, you can state as a baseline that spell attacks always use your key attribute as their attribute modifier, with classes and archetypes no longer needing to specify a spellcasting attribute. This would specifically affect the Magus and martial classes multiclassing into a caster.
When I tried out these changes, here are the benefits I noticed:
Handling saves became a much simpler affair, especially when multiclassing or very specific class features got involved (such as zone effects on Starfinder's Witchwarper). Everything used the same DC.
Multiclassing similarly became much simpler, because there weren't multiple parallel DCs to track. This became even simpler when using the above rules for decoupling spell attacks.
Multiclassing into a spellcasting archetype became generally more beneficial, for martials especially but also for casters opting into an archetype with a different spellcasting attribute. Classes became more generally accurate with spells gained from an archetype, as well as innate spells.
Non-Cleric spellcasters had a generally better time accessing more critical specialization effects. The Magus in particular was a big winner, being able to use the crit spec effect from Arcane Fists with a trained-to-master class DC rather than an untrained DC.
When also using decoupled spell attacks, attack spells ended up feeling significantly better to use, not just because they too were much simpler to use, but because they scaled much more smoothly.
The Magus and Kineticists were major winners with these changes. The Magus using their Strength-or-Dex-based class DC for spells and a physical attribute for spell attacks gave them more leeway for casting spells outside of Spellstrike, though Spellstrike still remained the option you wanted to take when you could due to its action and accuracy compression (Expansive Spellstrike became a fair bit better, too). The Kineticist casting their impulses as spells meant they were no longer isolated from the many mechanics that expect you to be casting a spell, and could more easily opt into stuff like mythic proficiency for their DC using mythic rules.
More specific to Starfinder, but these changes made spellcasting classes slightly more able to "cast gun" using the AoE weapons featured there, notably at early levels.
TL;DR: everything relating to spells became much simpler, these changes made multiclassing, innate spells, and crit spec effects more attractive to certain classes, and the Magus and Kineticist especially had more options available to them without necessarily changing their niche.
Here are the downsides and risks I encountered with these changes:
Because spell DCs and spell attacks were made more uniform, some of those fine-grained differences that came from using different attributes were lost.
Martial classes being able to opt more easily into spells and casters being able to opt more easily into crit spec effects may not be everyone's cup of tea. I don't think this breached niche protection, necessarily, as casters were undoubtedly more accurate with their spells than martial classes, and cases already existed where mental KAS classes like the Thaumaturge or Inventor could get to just a -2 relative to Charisma or Intelligence casters respectively, but it did thin the gap overall.
The Commander and Soldier, while both classes in playtesting, may also be classes to watch out for, as they're martial classes with a legendary class DC. The Battle Harbinger is an odd duck with the intentional split between their legendary class DC and expert spellcasting DC, but the class archetype is just odd and in need of changes in general (from my perspective, at least).
There's this looming fear that the Kineticist casting their impulses as spells means they'll break something. I don't know what that something is, much less have run into it, but the fear's still there.
... and that's my two cents about what worked and what didn't with these house rules. I don't think this is something to implement in-game, necessarily, because I think we're past the point of big systemic rewrites such as this and there are probably a lot of aspects to these changes that may be difficult or risky to implement, but it's certainly something you could try at your table with everyone else's consent if you wanted to. Give it a try if you want, and if this isn't something you'd want at your table, that's okay too!
Based on some ongoing discussions around the Animist, here's the premise: the Animist's Lore skills are really cool, and as a hyper-versatile Wisdom caster that has room to opt into Intelligence as a fourth score (at the expense of maybe Strength or Dexterity, which both feed into other apparitions and feats), I think there's plenty of room for an apparition centered around Recalling Knowledge. Here's the idea:
Speaker of Untold Tales
Speakers of untold tales appear wherever knowledge is exchanged in great amounts, often in bustling cities rich with gossip and intrigue. They eagerly seek out animists who will readily share their own life experiences, and for every story they are regaled with, they tell an equally captivating tale in return. There is nothing a speaker of untold tales hates more than a secret, however, and they will relentlessly pursue its keeper until it is revealed.
Your apparition spurs you to uncover what others would keep hidden, filling the gaps in your knowledge with rumors that might just prove true. For the duration, you become trained in Secret Lore, a special Lore skill that can be used only to Recall Knowledge, but on any topic. When you Cast this Spell and the first time you Sustain it each round, you Recall Knowledge using a Lore skill, which can be Secret Lore or any other Lore, and can immediately announce any knowledge you obtained from the check.
The information you obtain from your apparition is mostly hearsay, so you take a -2 circumstance penalty to checks using Secret Lore, but it provides additional details to your other knowledge domains, granting you a +1 circumstance bonus to checks to Recall Knowledge using any other Lore skill in which you're trained.
Heightened (3rd) Your proficiency in Secret Lore is expert, and the circumstance bonus is +2.
Heightened (5th) Your proficiency in Secret Lore is master, and the circumstance bonus is +3.
Heightened (9th) Your proficiency in Secret Lore is legendary, and the circumstance bonus is +4.
___
Effectively, you'd get an apparition that'd be really good for Recalling Knowledge, obtaining and communicating information in general, and also blasting out your foes' eardrums and setting them on fire as you spill the tea. Though useful on any Animist build, it'd be especially useful on an Animist who builds Intelligence, especially one that accumulates additional Lore skills or chooses their apparitions specifically for the Lore they provide. What do you think?
We're now several months into the Starfinder playtest, and these feedback forums are pretty much dead. I figured this might be a good time to discuss how the Witchwarper could be done differently, without the risk of burying any currently active discussion focused on more direct criticism and playtesting reports.
At this stage, I think it's pretty safe to say that the Witchwarper needs some work, specifically around their quantum field. Just a cursory look at this subforum shows many, many, many, many threads exclusively criticizing its quantum field for the same reasons, and even other threads which criticize the class more broadly, including a playtest report I wrote, cite its quantum field as a key pain point. The criticism tends to be pretty consistent, too: the quantum field is hard to move as combat goes on, and is so loosely-connected to the rest of the class's mechanics that it becomes all too easy to ignore. If nothing else, this should set a pretty clear message that this part of the class needs work, and so to address those specific issues.
On my side, as I was playtesting the Witchwarper, after collecting a certain amount of data I started tweaking the class and seeing how those changes panned out. This included stuff like baking the functionality of certain "must-have" quality-of-life feats into the core class like Quantum Pulse, which the developers also implemented in the playtest's 3rd wave of errata, but also more extreme stuff like changing the way the class's slot spells worked around their quantum field. After a fair bit more tweaking, testing, and refining, I wrote down the results in a document. To make things clear: this isn't a "implement this homebrew exactly as written" thread, nor even a request to change the Witchwarper into what's listed in the document. Rather, the goal here is to offer some material for comparison, as well as break down some general concepts included in the document that I think could apply to the Witchwarper in a variety of different ways. If you do decide to try out the changes outlined there, I recommend doing so after playtesting the vanilla class so that you can get a good impression of how the two differ.
Just to list some of the ideas in the doc and explain them a bit more, with the breakdown in spoilered text:
Sustaining QF moves it too:
The most common criticism of the quantum field mechanic is that it's exceedingly difficult to move around. The above proposes to fix this by essentially baking in the functionality of Quantum Transposition and making QF much easier to move around, going even farther and allowing it to work through other effects that Sustain QF, like those with the anchoring trait. In practice, this made QF extremely easy to move where it was needed, and made the mechanic much more desirable to use independently of other changes.
Warp spells are all single-action and interact specifically with QF:
Another common criticism is that QF is so disjointed from much of the Witchwarper's gameplay that you don't really need to do anything with it, and with warp spells you could just lay it down in any random location and still use most of them to full effect. To make matters worse, many warp spells take two actions or a reaction to cast, making them (and thus several subclasses) fairly ineffective at Sustaining QF easily. To remedy this, the above reframes warp spells to all use a single action and interact with QF's area one way or the other. This I think carried several benefits: QF felt much more important to each witchwarper's playstyle, and warp spells felt good to use in a manner similar to the Mystic's Transfer Vitality action, in that they fit neatly alongside the class's slot-based spellcasting (and cantrips, of course). Additionally, because these focus spells had varied effects and were often quite strong, albeit restricted to the class's QF, this allowed the class to feel exceptionally powerful and able to do lots of things at once when leaning into their core feature.
Enable QF juggling rather than one mega-QF:
Warped infinities, while not a feature that I playtested a lot, is one that I found broke QF in a bad way, turning the effect from a localized zone of control into an area so large it may as well just cover the whole battlemap each time in an encounter. This effectively took all the gameplay out of the mechanic and broke several other effects that depended on it, such as Complete Transposition letting you teleport any number of creatures in the encounter at-will up to 200 feet away as a single action (which you can also do several times per turn, in case the enemy succeeds on their save). However, I also found the idea of being able to lay down and manage multiple quantum fields with greater difficulty to be one worth including, and so experimented with removing the one-QF limit. This enabled a few interesting plays where I could divert my playstyle towards trying to sustain two QFs at once, even try creating a third so I could cover as much area at a time, at the expense of immediate spellcasting power. It didn't outperform spellcasting with one QF under most circumstances, and was quite unstable given how easily I would've had to drop my second QF on many turns, but it was fun to spin all of those plates and did have good returns on occasion, adding to the class's agency in my opinion.
Quantum benefits are zones instead:
This is much more minor than the rest, but one annoyance I had in my playtests was that the quantum benefit of each paradox, in addition to often not really feeling all that impactful, had no real interaction with the zone trait made specifically for the class. Adding zones I found also tended to add a bit of extra tracking as multiple effects started piling on. To remedy this, I changed quantum benefits into 1st-level zone feats: at 1st level, you get a zone feat based on your paradox, and you automatically apply that zone to any QF you create. This in practice made each different QF more consistent and simpler to track, and I expanded warp terrain to allow the inclusion of an extra zone for those looking to keep that gameplay. I also amended the base zone trait so that instead of locking yourself out of future zone effects, applying a new zone effect to a quantum field merely ends any zone effects it currently has.
Anchors as freeform feats:
Although the flavor of anchors themselves is largely interesting in my opinion, in practice I found they took up a lot of space without feeling particularly bespoke as their own thing. I experimented with making anchor actions 1st-level feats and letting the witchwarper pick any 1st-level anchoring feat of their choice, and that carried a few benefits: it let me choose from a much larger variety of anchoring actions, including Anchoring Strike for a ready-made gish playstyle or even a zone effect to play with those more (this worked especially well with an anomaly paradox and warp terrain, which I updated to enable the layering of multiple zone effects), and as a result I felt more flexible, with flavor text still reinforcing the notion that this action I was doing also helped anchor my character to their present reality. It did introduce a degree of analysis paralysis, though I found that wasn't a huge deal on a class that's already made to be fairly complex, due to the management component of their quantum field and having essentially two layers of subclasses at present.
Spells only work within QF, but ALL Witchwarper spells have the anchoring trait, not just signature spells, and use QF as their point of origin:
This is perhaps where things start to get more extreme. The starting point for this was pretty much the same as for many other changes: try to make QF a more important part of the Witchwarper, so that it can't just be ignored. I tried this version on a QF with a few more restrictions (range is shorter, laying down a QF requires line of sight), and this completely changed the Witchwarper's playstyle from any other caster's, in a way I found was really positive overall: all of a sudden, the class became extremely focused on a specific area, and the consideration became less a matter of spell range or radius, and more of where to focus their area. Because the witchwarper's spell effects were getting suppressed out of their QF, I couldn't just move the same QF around multiple times a turn to control multiple spread-out enemies at once, but because my spells originated from my QF, I could lay it down strategically to circumvent cover and use certain spells that would otherwise have been excessively short-ranged, adding a significant element of added choice and tactical play in Starfinder's range-focused combats. This made for some completely different choices from other spellcasters, allowing me to do things others couldn't while preventing me from easily doing things other casters normally take for granted (like catch many enemies spread out from one another with the same spell, or Cast a Spell right away after being severely disrupted for an entire round). As an added benefit, the anchoring trait to all of the class's spells made it much easier to Sustain a single QF on each of their turns, and made it a bit easier to juggle two QFs without having to dip into signature spells each time. Thematically, I felt it also significantly reinforced the class's flavor, as their magic was much more localized to the pockets of warped reality that they were creating, much like Elizabeth from BioShock Infinite who I see as an archetypal example of the class.
The Witchwarper gets less HP, only unarmored proficiency, and fewer spell slots, but also a bonus to their spell attacks and DCs inside their QF:
This is probably the other big controversial change, and started from the same place as much of the above, with the added factor of Pathfinder's Oracle: following the latter game's remaster, the Oracle got changed to have 4 spell slots per rank on top of their existing light armor proficiency, while their unique curse mechanic got made less impactful, to the point where one can now easily opt out of it. This, in my opinion, made the class too powerful, but also really generic, because it was all too easy to ignore what made them unique and just rely on their strong base stats and raw spell output to succeed. The playtest Witchwarper, I think is at risk of winding up in the exact same situation, and I feel the class doesn't really need to be especially durable or have a huge number of slot spells to output, particularly when they get three warp spells just from their natural progression. When I applied these changes, they basically just reinforced what was already there with the rest: the Witchwarper felt really good for making use of their QF, and their spells felt exceptionally powerful, and while the class was an easier and squishier target, this both felt appropriate for the class and was something they could play around with their spells and QF (they had much more of an incentive to shift their QF to themselves if someone tried to rush them in melee, for instance). Similarly, their reduced number of spell slots encouraged the class to rely on their warp spells more, which I also felt was a good thing. Overall, this made the class higher-risk, higher-reward, and further concentrated their power around their QF.
Along with the above, I made some more minor changes that probably require less explanation, like letting Restorative Recollection actually work while stunned, changing Radiant Zone to work as a persistent effect like other zones, knocking the unnecessary extra focus point off of Reality's Anchor so that it works like other full FP restoration feats, and removing the RNG elements to certain damage type effects in favor of player choice. When I playtested the class with these changes, I found the class to be a bit weaker overall to the baseline Witchwarper (they were squishier, had fewer slots, and couldn't cast spells as freely across encounters), yet also significantly more fun to play in my opinion, as they had many more interesting options at their disposal and bent the rules of spellcasting in a way that made them play in new ways from other casters. I could perhaps be wrong with my assessment, and there's of course likely a degree of bias at hand, but my experience with this version of the Witchwarper was really positive, certainly a lot more so than with the playtest version.
Although there are a lot of moving parts to the document, the principles behind them I think are fairly straightforward: nearly all of these aim to make the Witchwarper's quantum field better to use and a more important part of their gameplay, and try to drive as much unique gameplay as possible on a spellcasting class whose most central feature has them lay down a localized area. Even if the whole thing or the specifics of its implementation may not wind up in the end product, I do think the principles behind them are worth at least considering, if not applying in some form or another to the class as currently written.
For a game that's all about gun-based combat, Starfinder seems to be struggling to make guns feel good to playtesters. Threads critical of guns or their mechanics are among the most common discussions that appear, to the point where some even question their effectiveness over melee weapons entirely. Though I wouldn't go that far, I've written several critical reports of guns myself, and in my playtesting experience I found there were a lot of aspects to guns that were needlessly restrictive or tedious, some of which I think genuinely made certain classes worse to play too. To summarize some of the common criticisms made in these types of discussion:
Guns just feel weak, especially at low levels where a single, naked damage die can easily lead to rolling 1s, or 2s on a crit. The lack of a flat modifier typically found on melee weapons makes a big difference, especially when running up against enemies with resistances and Hardness balanced around Pathfinder's melee-centric combat, where successful hits and even crits often end up dealing zero damage.
Ranged combat doesn't necessarily bring out the best in guns just yet, because 2e's cover mechanics are a bit of an afterthought and there are no rules to encourage clever positioning at range, so ranged-versus-ranged encounters can end up becoming very static and repetitive.
Ammo tracking and expenditure is tedious and often pointless. Many guns don't need to reload mid-combat or quickly cease to require reloading once higher capacity comes into play, the expend statistic looks designed purely to make certain guns cost more to fire, which quickly becomes trivial with a few levels, and all of these statistics also apply to NPCs who usually die before they run out or even just need to reload.
There doesn't seem to be all that much diversity to guns at present. Every rifle-type gun has a single-shot magazine, energy damage seems to be costed quite heavily, and several of the new traits either seem to make little impact (boost, professional, or unwieldy, though the latter only because everyone who uses unwieldy weapons gets to ignore the unwieldy trait), or are relegated to just one or a handful of specific builds (area or automatic with the Soldier, unwieldy with the Soldier and Sniper Operative). Some advanced weapons have more interesting traits or trait combinations, but it's very difficult to access advanced weapons in the playtest and most of them are so weak as to not be worth picking over martial weapons (for instance, the advanced AoE weapons, whose implementation makes weapon proficiency irrelevant for their AoE attacks). Many traits from Pathfinder that could be used to make guns more interesting seem to be missing.
Some of the new traits I think just don't work. Unwieldy is a trait that has to be bypassed on every build that uses unwieldy weapons, and both area and automatic weapons are so mediocre that even the Soldier, who gets to set save DCs higher than those of casters and make a free Strike on top, needs extra help just to do well with them.
In a nutshell: guns in Starfinder should be about firing meaty lasers and explosives while using future tech to do things no bow or firearm in Pathfinder could achieve, but in practice using them is often an exercise in tedium, where even the most successful use of guns doesn't really generate great returns. This I think is disappointing, but also worrying, more so than any problems with classes or other mechanics, as guns are at the core of Starfinder and its combat. In order for this game to do well, I think it is absolutely non-negotiable for guns to feel good to use. Players have often argued to straight-up buff guns, and while I think there's room for that in several instances, I think the more important bit here is the feel: if we were to take out or change the elements that make guns feel worse to use, and instead try adding more stuff that makes them feel more fun and powerful, I think there's a lot of improvements that could be made before even starting to raise their power level.
I can't speak for everyone who's raised these criticisms, but here are some suggestions I'd throw in based on my experience, some of which I've seen others make too:
Let players add flat damage to their guns in some way in general, not just via the boost trait (which could itself be significantly improved in my opinion). In a brew I wrote and tested towards the latter stages of my playtest, I proposed a new universal single action, Spot, that let you buff an adjacent ally's next ranged Strike to partially ignore cover and deal bonus flat damage. In my playtest, this worked a charm, and made guns feel meatier when teamwork got involved.
Reward clever ranged positioning with more damage. In that same above brew, I added rules to cover that made creatures taking cover off-guard from angles where they weren't benefiting from cover, which not only increased the damage of guns overall, but also made combat significantly more dynamic as everyone moved around more and entrenched themselves in cover less.
Remove the expend statistic, and remove the magazine and reload statistics from as many weapons as possible. Most guns simply do not need to reload mid-combat, and streamlining all of this bean-counting in a manner that would be much easier to handwave as desired at the table would make guns much less tedious to fire. Players should not feel like they should have to hold back on using a gun in combat unless they're using special ammunition, in my opinion.
Make energy damage cost less in a weapon's power budget. The assumption seems to be that energy damage is a benefit, but in my experience it's more power-neutral, because energy damage may trigger weakness more often, but also runs more often into resistance and outright immunity.
Give some rifles a higher magazine capacity before needing to reload, and make the single-shot rifles more powerful. The Seeker Rifle in particular I think got massively overnerfed and could be made a lot better, even by simple weapon standards, and reload I think needs to be treated as a much more significant downside when it kicks in, especially as it becomes far more important the fewer shots you get to make before needing to reload.
Add many more traits to guns in Starfinder, including traits found exclusively on melee weapons in Pathfinder. We could do with more guns that have the agile, sweep, or twin traits, for example, and simply including these traits more would make guns significantly more diverse.
Special mention goes to the kickback trait, which adds bonus flat damage and imposes an accuracy penalty unless you have enough Strength: this is a power-neutral trait that would not only make some heavier guns feel meatier, but would also incentivize Strength on certain builds, as currently the attribute I think is the weakest in Starfinder and not really worth boosting if you're not opting into a melee build.
Just remove the unwieldy trait. It's a mechanic that divorces guns from 2e's three-action economy, arguably the best part of the system, and any build that currently uses unwieldy weapons is routinely made to ignore the trait. If it really needs to exist, just make it work like the opposite of agile where it incurs a heavier MAP (i.e. 0/-6/-12 instead of 0/-5/-10).
Rework AoE weapons. I've made several threads about this now, but having these guns make regular Strikes with various forms of splash damage has, in my experience, made them feel significantly better to play, usable on many more characters besides the Soldier, and far more able to interact with all of the traits and mechanics that make weapons so fun to use in 2e, including the above. When I adjusted the Soldier around these guns, the class also felt immensely better to play, without needing nearly as many compensatory mechanics as they do now.
All of this is to say: I'd like to see a Starfinder where my Soldier could fire a heavy machine gun with the kickback, agile, and maybe a cone splash trait for lots of rapid-fire, yet consistent attacks, while my Operative gets to choose between a single-shot assassin rifle that truly lives up to the motto of "one shot, one kill," or other slightly less intense rifles that get to fire more than once before running out. I'd like to see a much more diverse range of guns that get to have lots of combinations of traits and damage types, and although I'd like all of these weapons to be balanced along 2e's overall standards, I don't think that should go against being able to deal consistent base damage on a hit or crit with a gun. I'd like to fire all of these guns without having to do a bit of accounting with every shot, and I'd like to have more ways of making my guns feel even better if I interact with my teammates or position myself tactically against my enemies.
There are so many ways in my opinion to make Starfinder's guns feel better to play, many of which already exist in 2e, and if a new playtest ever rolls out that allows for more substantial changes to the material we have now, I'd like to see the envelope pushed much farther on all of this. In fact, while I do want balance compatibility with Pathfinder in the finished product, I would also be fine with a playtest that intentionally pulled out all the stops on guns and just focused on making them fun to play without worrying about them being too powerful, just to see how much could be achieved. Guns in Starfinder both deserve and need to feel awesome, and I'd like to see guns evolve significantly to achieve that in the future.
Replace the effect of Restorative Recollection with the following: “There is a part of your mind in another reality always processing your situation. You can Recall Knowledge with any skill you are trained in. Decrease your stunned value by 2 or slowed value by 1. If you lost an action this turn due to the stunned or slowed condition, you can use Restorative Recollection as a free action.”
For reference, here's how the stunned condition works:
Quote:
You've become senseless. You can't act. Stunned usually includes a value, which indicates how many total actions you lose, possibly over multiple turns, from being stunned. Each time you regain actions, reduce the number you regain by your stunned value, then reduce your stunned value by the number of actions you lost. For example, if you were stunned 4, you would lose all 3 of your actions on your turn, reducing you to stunned 1; on your next turn, you would lose 1 more action, and then be able to use your remaining 2 actions normally. Stunned might also have a duration instead, such as “stunned for 1 minute,” causing you to lose all your actions for the duration.
Emphasis added to the part most important here. You still can't use Restorative Recollection to reduce your stunned value, because if you have any stunned value, you can't act. By the time you can act once more, your stunned value will have disappeared.
Obligatory disclaimer: this is not a "Magus bad" thread. I don't consider the Magus to be at all a weak class, and in fact I think they're really strong in certain aspects and situations. Similarly, I don't find the Magus to be an unsatisfying class overall; I quite enjoy the class's flavor and several of their mechanics, even if I do think some aspects of their gameplay could be improved. It is this perceived opportunity for improvement that I'd like to try to express in feedback here, which may not reflect everyone else's opinion of the Magus but which is likely to overlap with some other criticisms made of the class in these discussion spaces, such as this popular meme that made the rounds on Reddit.
With that established, here's the gist: as a class that explicitly sets out to fill the spellblade niche so many players want out of a TTRPG character, the Magus I think satisfies a big part of this niche quite well, and the way Spellstrike works makes good use of both 2e's 3-action economy and multiple attack penalty mechanics to have the class combine spell and weapon attacks. However, as time went on, I think the class's limitations have also started to show, and the Magus I think has some of the most constrained turns and most restrictive build options out of any Pathfinder class, bar a few exceptions. I think the class could stand to have more flexibility with their turns, as well as the kinds of spells and weapons they want to use. For clarity and readability purposes, I'll split this post into sections, put my more detailed criticisms in spoilers, and add a TL;DR at the end of each.
The Magus's Actions:
Let's start with what is arguably the most common criticism made of the class: their action economy. The Magus has exceptionally busy turns and a lot of moving parts that, in my opinion, overcomplicate the class to their net detriment and contribute to their limited build freedom.
Let's start with the elephant in the room, i.e. Arcane Cascade stance. It requires an entire turn to set up, making the effect fairly inflexible by default, yet is also necessary to unlock the benefits of several subclasses. It is an additional limiter on a class that already has to spend two actions in melee to Spellstrike, and although infusing magic into Strikes is thematically appropriate, its implementation I think is a bit too rigid, crowds out the use of other actions, and feeds into the class's issue of feeling like they have a fixed action rotation and too much turn setup required.
Adding to the Magus's action taxes is their Spellstrike recharge. The intent seems to be to discourage the class from just Spellstriking each turn by having off-turns in-between, but that I feel would have been better-served by making Spellstrikes more varied, instead of taxing the Magus's actions further. This restriction also completely breaks down with Starlit Span, whose ability to Spellstrike and recharge every turn earns it the moniker of Starlit Spam, along with a reputation for having infamously samey turns.
Worth noting that even without these action taxes, the Magus would already have one of the most limited action economies of any melee class, because Spellstrike requires two actions to pull off. This isn't talked about all that often, but one of the reasons why martial classes get to feel so flexible in 2e is because most actions available to martial classes, i.e. Strikes, move actions, and skill actions, usually just take a single action each, so those classes get a lot of freedom in how they make use of their turn. Should a situation arise where a martial doesn't really want to Strike twice (and this comes up more often than is assumed in online discussions), they can still Strike once and use their two remaining actions for something else instead. The Magus doesn't have that kind of freedom with Spellstrike, which holds the bulk of their class's power. That much is fine, and it makes sense for a martial-caster hybrid to have the more rigid action economy of a caster (plus the additional restriction of being melee by default and needing to spend additional actions to move), but it's the addition of other action taxes that, in my opinion, pushes this class to a point where they feel a bit too limited.
TL;DR: The Magus is the closest this game gets to a class with a fixed action rotation, in a game that really isn't about having action rotations. Needing two actions to Spellstrike in melee range by itself is already a more limiting class feature than what most other martial classes get, and that would be fine if it weren't for the additional action taxes of Arcane Cascade and recharging, both of which crowd out more diverse options. The Magus could do without this rigidity, and could instead do with other means of varying their turns.
The Magus's Arsenal:
Next, let's talk about the Magus's arsenal, by which I mean their access to weapons and armor. Unlike most other martial classes, who get to opt into their choice of fighting style through class feats, the Magus has to pick a specific subclass, which I think comes with its own issues:
Let's start once again with the elephant in the room, i.e. Arcane Cascade stance. With four out of the class's five hybrid studies, if you're not in Arcane Cascade stance, you essentially have no subclass. This compounds the problem of the Magus needing to spend at least one whole turn setting themselves up before they can actually make full use of their mechanics.
The implementation of different weapon styles as subclasses was, in my opinion, a mistake, as I feel it would've been much easier to add to the Magus's arsenal options through feats. Classes like the Fighter, Monk, or Rogue get a lot of flexibility to their combat style just by picking feats that give them additional actions or other benefits to play with, and the Magus being locked into one specific combat style via their hybrid study I think contributes to the class's overall rigidity and feeling of limitation. I also feel there's a missed opportunity here to give the Magus plenty more feats that let them Spellstrike and do something else, or Spellstrike and get a particular benefit for using a certain weapon, so that they can have more varied turns.
As a result of the above, I also think there are quite a few gaps in what the Magus could achieve. There's room for opting into heavy armor, dual-wielding weapons, or mixing spells with guns, among many other concepts, and these are all fighting styles that could normally be enabled through feat chains, or just a single feat. Arcane Fists tries to do this, but inherently competes with the Magus's subclass (unless you're a Laughing Shadow) and isn't terribly well-implemented due to their lack of a class DC, which itself could be easily remediated.
TL;DR: Whereas most other martial classes get to opt into better usage of certain weapons and armor through feats, the Magus has to lock themselves into one of a handful of subclasses, limiting their options. Arcane Cascade further limits these subclasses by locking the Magus out of their benefits until the stance is activated. In my opinion, the class would've been better-served with feats that gave them benefits when Spellstriking with certain weapons, and just generally more actions to vary their turns while benefiting from the use of certain weapons and armor.
The Magus's Spells:
Finally, let's talk about the Magus's spells. In theory, the class is meant to contribute a nice bit of spell-based utility, like a mini-Wizard, but in practice I feel the class tends to go for a limited spell selection for a number of reasons:
For starters, there's the obvious problem of the Magus being a class all about dealing lots of burst damage with Spellstrike, having only a limited number of spell slots, yet also being able to Spellstrike with spell slots. I recall at least one developer stating the Magus doesn't really need to Spellstrike with a spell slot to deal good damage (despite the existence of feats and class features catering specifically to Spellstriking with a spell slot), but the allure is so powerful that many players will just prepare attack spells anyway, causing the Magus to be mostly just a burst damage class rather than a more well-rounded gish.
Because Spellstrike works on any attack spell, which in theory should give the class more build freedom, this in practice has mostly just led to the Magus opting into a Psychic dedication exclusively for imaginary weapon. This particular synergy is so strong that it is often assumed a Magus will have it when discussing the class's damage output and general power expression.
Not only is the class heavily incentivized to just pick lots of combat spells, it's specifically attack spells they're pushed to pick, because save spells require a feat to enable, require Intelligence for their save accuracy when attack spells don't when used to Spellstrike, and make use of the Magus's weaker spell save DC. As a result, a small subset of spells are disproportionately more effective than others on the Magus, such that their spell selection can feel fairly limited.
Because the Magus will usually want Strength for melee attack and damage rolls, plus Dex/Con/Wis for their defenses and Perception, that leaves little room to boost their actual spellcasting attribute, making the class inherently MAD. This in turn means the class isn't actually good at casting ranged attack spells in situations where they'd want to, further constraining their actions and making them feel like less of a hybrid so much as a character that's mostly good at just one thing.
Although the class has roots as essentially a cross between a Fighter and a Wizard, I personally feel the Magus has the potential to be more than just that. There's plenty of player demand for gishes of other traditions, especially divine gishes (beyond just the Warpriest), and if the class weren't so constrained to attack spells, they'd work mechanically quite well with any tradition. There's the argument that the element of study limits them to arcane magic, but I don't think that's true, as non-arcane casters like the Bard incorporate an element of study into their casting as well, and this component could be easily broadened to allow different Magi to incorporate martial techniques into other spellcasting traditions.
TL;DR: In theory, the Magus could be a versatile hybrid class that supplements their potent burst damage with limited amounts of spell-based utility. In practice, the class is all too easily incentivized to just put all their eggs in one basket and commit purely to attack spells and burst damage, further contributing to the feeling of the Magus being a touch too narrow for their own good.
The big TL;DR to all this is that, in my opinion, the common player impression that the Magus is an overly busy, limited, and narrow class is not completely unjustified: the Magus is full of action taxes that constrain their turns and make them more repetitive, their combat style is defined by one of five subclasses rather than the much more freeform system of class feats other martial classes use for their own fighting techniques, and their features and attribute requirements all too easily incentivize overcommitting to attack spells for Spellstrike instead of a more varied assortment of utility. They certainly can deal an incredible amount of burst damage when critting with a slot or imaginary weapon Spellstrike, but when that's essentially all you're aiming towards as a class, they can all too often feel like a one-trick pony. Should the class ever get a remaster, I'd like to see them freed up in all those different ways, so that they'd feel able to build and play in a greater variety of ways.
How the class ought to change more specifically is something that probably warrant its own thread, and is not the main focus of this post. If I were to hazard a few suggestions, they'd probably be along the following broad lines:
Suggestions:
I'd like to see Arcane Cascade stance removed, with instead a focus on implementing more actions that either build on Spellstrike or provide additional single actions to use for various situations, including more single-action Strikes with magical effects.
I'd want to remove Spellstrike's recharge requirement and let it work with save spells by default, perhaps even to a better extent than with Expansive Spellstrike. In exchange, this may warrant limiting it to cantrips, at least without feats to enable this, which would give the class more room to prepare utility spells (this could even make positive use of the class's weaker spellcasting modifier and DC by making slot spells with no attack rolls or save DC the more attractive choice).
I'd want to allow the class to opt into different spellcasting traditions via their hybrid study. A divine Magus with heroism in their back pocket could be a scary thing indeed.
Rather than have hybrid studies determine the weapon the Magus uses, instead have class feats let them opt into different fighting styles, including free-hand combat, two-handed weapons, and so on.
TL;DR I'd like to free up the Magus's action economy and spell selection significantly by removing Arcane Cascade and changing how Spellstrike works a little, while letting them opt into different fighting styles through feats rather than subclasses, and instead using their subclasses to let them opt into different spellcasting traditions. I can't speak for everyone here, but I'd be prepared to sacrifice a bit of the upper bound of the burst damage a Magus can inflict to achieve this too.
Concluding this series of playtest notes with the Mystic. For those interested, I've also done similar threads listing notes from my playtests for Starfinder's classes (i.e. the Envoy, Operative, Solarian, Soldier, and Witchwarper), Barathu ancestry, and guns. I'll split my post into sections, spoiler them, and add a TL;DR just so it's all a bit easier to navigate.
Methods:
Here are the methods I've used for my playtest:
Most of my playtests took place at levels 1-5, as I ran them mostly using the official Starfinder playtest scenarios and field tests. I ran some playtests at higher levels using Pathfinder content, but treated those as secondary to the playtest scenarios.
I ran my Mystic with a variety of party compositions, mostly with just other Starfinder classes. I eventually started adding Pathfinder classes into the mix, and treated those playtests as secondary.
I ran my Mystic under different ancestries, as I was playtesting those too.
I ran the scenarios RAW for the most part, only adjudicating when something broke or was missing from the rules (or the class's core features). I then started playing with certain parameters, like enemy behavior and compositions or the Mystic's features, and treated those findings as secondary.
As per standard, I maxed out the Mystic's Wisdom, then Dexterity, then Constitution. Thanks to the Mystic's Wisdom key attribute, I experimented with Strength, Intelligence, and Charisma as my fourth score.
I experimented with a bunch of different weapons and tried to "cast gun" when it felt appropriate. The pre-errata seeker rifle was obviously good for consistent damage, whereas a combination of laser pistol and carbon shield gave me a bunch more options in combat.
TL;DR: I ran the Mystic many times mainly through the official playtest scenarios at their low level range, using a variety of ancestries and party compositions. As I put the class through the same encounters, I altered some parameters over time to see how they would affect its performance.
Core Class:
Splitting my feedback on the class's core chassis and its feats for readability:
Let's talk about Mystic Bond/Vitality Network, the Mystic's defining class feature. I absolutely love it. The unrestricted range to the bond itself is perfect for a game that takes place across vast reaches of space (it also meant I didn't have to check for ranges if I wanted to know an ally's position during exploration), and Transfer Vitality is the perfect action for a caster: not only did its single-action cost make it the perfect third action on many of my turns, fitting neatly alongside my spell casts, the amount of healing I could provide on tap meant that I could choose almost any kind of spell I'd like, including a very aggressively-oriented repertoire, without feeling like I was compromising on the utility casters are known for. This alone was enough to make the Mystic feel like a standout caster, and in my opinion is one of the best-designed and implemented mechanics in the entire Starfinder playtest.
On a similar note, the unrestricted range to mystic bond makes for some really wacky and unique plays that the class's features and feats capitalize well on, such as Group Chat enabling telepathic communication. Although my playtesting was focused almost entirely around mechanics rather than broader roleplay, I did get major Sense8 vibes from the mystic's bonded allies all being intimately aware of one another and able to communicate with each other across potentially vast distances, which I really enjoyed and found full of roleplaying potential.
I very much enjoyed the Mystic's connections overall, and in general found the class's features quite generous in giving them flexibility and more things to do, including 3 focus spells. I will say that although I like the addition of a 19th-level bonus feature, like with the Witchwarper, I find that to be more the kind of thing a feat would provide, as casters in 2e already get a large boost at 19th level with their legendary spell proficiency and 10th-rank slot, and the Mystic is no exception.
As a side note, I quite like how the Mystic is encouraged to rank up their connection's skill in various ways, such as it increasing their vitality network's HP recovery or factoring into feats and focus spells like akashic fount. I'm on the fence about whether this should mean having the skill auto-scale, given how the Mystic probably gets a bit too much already (but then a lot of focus spells would fall off without that auto-scaling, creating a skill increase tax), but the existence of that scaling itself felt good and made the standard magic skill on a spellcasting class feel less perfunctory.
Akashic was quite a fun connection to play, as potent healing made it quite distinct from other occult casters, plus there was a neat combo with akashic fount and the free RK on the subclass's harmony. The subclass falls short on feat support though, which I'll talk about further down, and akashic assistent in the few times I used it seriously overperformed when I used the spell to Aid a martial class's attack rolls essentially for free and for an entire encounter. Given the spell's wording, I think the devs forgot that Aid can be used on attack rolls and not just skill checks, and the spell would be totally fine if it just worked on skills.
Elemental, by contrast, I think had a few issues: part of it was that most of the class's abilities felt like the optimal use case was to just dump lots of power onto a martial class, as elemental weapon + harmony meant you could pre-buff a martial to deal tons of extra damage on a hit. The other was that the harmony effect as written encourages not using an epiphany spell with a duration, because being able to stack lots of different types of persistent damage is really strong in and of itself. I feel part of this could be resolved by having the Mystic attune to one specific element at a time through daily preparations and a ten-minute activity that defines the element and damage type of various spells. Another part of addressing this could be to make elemental weapon's bonus damage specifically apply when wielded by the Mystic and not a bonded ally, or even just eliminate the bonus damage, as being able to create a weapon on the fly and choose what damage type it deals is already quite strong.
Healing was my favorite connection to use, and might very well be one of my favorite healers to play in all of 2e. The spell list and focus spells gave me basically everything I needed to be a great healer right off the bat, allowing me to pick any divine spells I wanted regardless of their healing capabilities, and the harmony effect made healing allies even more liberating, as I could heal essentially whenever I liked without feeling like I was wasting any Hit Points (and this in fact gave me momentum as I could easily refill my vitality network with overhealing for later use). Bonus points for the connection skill being Medicine, meaning I could spec into healing via skills and boost my Mystic powers even more, with Battle Medicine synergizing with my vitality network through harmony. Kudos to the Starfriends for designing a subclass that, in my experience, flowed beautifully and felt amazing to play. If I had to make one (very minor) criticism, it's that the mention of promession in the vital rebirth epiphany is redundant, as the spell is a death effect.
Rhythm felt quite decent to use, though the primal theming felt a bit off given how strongly tied music in 2e is to the soul, i.e. divine and occult magic, rather than anything to do with primal magic. The harmony effect I feel could also use some slightly different writing (the effect should just Sustain your epiphanies, as that's the thing you do to extend their duration by 1 round), and it also felt more restrictive than most other harmonies given its limitation to epiphany spells. I feel the harmony could have easily been extended to let you just Sustain anything by default, and then contribute one action towards casting an epiphany spell otherwise (as opposed to literally any 1-action focus spell as is currently the case).
Shadow was generally quite a decent subclass. The harmony effect worked well with both the Mystic thanks to their Stealth connection skill and a Sniper Operative, and less well on less stealthy party members. Shadow snap is a very strong spell, but also in my opinion poorly-worded right now: the stalk command implicitly expects its attack roll to deal the attack command's damage on a hit (and double damage on a critical hit), yet that is not a property implicit to attack rolls in 2e, so RAW the stalk command lets you make a spell attack roll that does nothing on a hit, and does nothing on a crit either if the triggering action was a ranged attack without the manipulate trait. The focus spell ought to be updated to describe how the shadow makes the same attack for both commands, and I also think the stalk command should have you use your reaction to make the attack, as otherwise it's just the attack command with the added prospect of potentially disrupting an important action (that, or the entire focus spell should just have the shadow stalk the target, and even then that should probably warrant a reaction cost).
My main criticism of the Mystic as a class is with its base stats: 4 slots per rank, 8 HP per level, and light armor proficiency is way too strong a combination by itself, in my opinion, let alone on a class that gets so much via their unique class features, subclass, and strong key attribute. The class needs to be pared down somewhere. I experimented with reducing the class's defenses, their spell slots per rank, and both, and in my experience the class felt the most balanced and functional with reduced defenses and no reduction to their spell slots per rank. Having more spells to choose from felt like an important part of the class's general freedom of choice, whereas their vitality network helped act as a buffer to their increased vulnerability when I reduced their HP and AC. I also experimented with changes to other classes during the latter parts of my playtest, and found that making the Mystic (and the Witchwarper) into a more fragile cloth caster worked fine when the Solarian and Soldier were changed to be better at attracting more enemy attention towards themselves. This makes me suspect that the Mystic's assumed need to have higher defenses in order to survive Starfinder's ranged meta stems more from shortcomings in the game's tank classes (which I discuss in my notes for those respective classes) than any problem with the ranged meta or the Mystic themselves.
On the flipside, the Mystic's Perception proficiency is stuck at trained at all levels, when every other class gets at least one proficiency increase as they level up. I'm glad the class got the weapon specialization feature they were missing added to them in the latest round of errata, but I feel the lack of expert Perception proficiency on the class is an oversight that still needs to be rectified.
Besides the above, the generally freeform nature of the Mystic's vitality network meant I got to "cast gun" as my third action quite easily. It felt good at levels 1-4, though distinctly less so once my weapon proficiency started falling off at higher levels, and after that I ended up relying more often on my vitality network. This still felt a lot more workable than with the Witchwarper, whose core mechanic felt like it needed much more action investment and wasn't nearly as functional.
When trying out fourth attributes, I found Intelligence to be a solid pick for the extra skills, especially on the Akashic connection for improved RK checks. Charisma also worked decently well when Demoralizing at close ranges, though I'm surprised to say Intelligence was the stronger performer overall. Strength did have some use when trying out a bone scepter build with Ebb & Flow, but otherwise I found it much less useful than the other two attributes, especially when feats like Cloud Storage further devalued the stat. Overall, the Mystic had a good choice of fourth score, which added to the class's overall feeling of freedom.
TL;DR: The Mystic's bond and vitality network worked incredibly well in my opinion, giving the class tremendous freedom of options and complementing their spellcasting perfectly. The class overall felt distinct from any other spellcaster in all the right ways, and their subclasses largely enhanced this with a clever choice of synergistic spells, harmony effects, and skills. The class felt overstatted, though, which I think could be solved by reducing their HP per level and defense proficiency to cloth caster levels, and they still need a proficiency bump to their Perception at later levels.
Feats:
I mostly focused on level 1-4 feats during my playtests, owing to the level range at which I mostly played:
In general, I really enjoyed choosing from and using the Mystic's feats. The integration of the class's vitality network, connections, and spell tradition into various feats made them feel much more bespoke than the feat selection I was generally used to with several casters in Pathfinder, and feats like Adaptive Defense and Ebb & Flow encouraged more aggressive playstyles using specific weapons.
The one major caveat to the above is that the Akashic connection and occult tradition felt generally less well-supported than the rest. The connection has no unique conversion feat at 12th level unlike the others, nor does occult have any bespoke 1st-level class feats. This isn't a huge oversight, but does make Akashic feel like an afterthought compared to the other connections, and could be remedied by just a few extra feats.
Cloud Storage was really fun to use simply for how silly it was and how convenient it made carrying items around. Being able to retrieve items from it out of any endpoint might perhaps trivialize traits like concealable, but otherwise this ended up feeling much more balanced than it read on paper.
Extended Vitality, by contrast, felt a touch more problematic simply because the extended range meant my Mystic could hang far, far back and still contribute heavily in encounters, without putting themselves at risk. The "same planet" restriction I feel also needs better wording, since several scenarios don't take place on a planet so much as a ship or space station: I ruled that the range extension still worked in those cases, but RAW the feat may very well do nothing in those circumstances, which would be a shame.
Curiously, there doesn't appear to be any feat that lets you refill your focus pool when you Refocus, even though that kind of feat is standard across other casters. Perhaps this was just for page space reasons, but otherwise I do think it would be worth including this for players who make especially heavy use of epiphany spells (which I did, especially with Rhythm letting me both Transfer Vitality and cast anthem on the same turn as when casting another spell).
TL;DR: I found the Mystic's feats did a terrific job of feeling both generally powerful and distinct to the class, addressing common concerns of caster feats in 2e. Besides certain unlimited-range feats needing a couple more checks to avoid abuse cases, my main recommendation would be to just give occult Mystics a bit more feat support to be in line with the others.
I saved the Mystic for last in posting my playtest notes here, as my experience of the class was the most positive, and I really had a blast playing one. They really felt distinct from any other caster I'd played, and in general came across as both a solid starter class and a good healer class for players who, for one reason or another, would not normally pick a healer in a tabletop game. You get to heal while blasting, laying down utility, or even just healing some more, and the class felt like they had some of the greatest freedom out of any caster, both in terms of actions and character build options. Aside from some issues with the character's base stats (they're overstatted and likely need less durability, but could also do with a proficiency bump to Perception at higher levels), and occult Mystics lacking feat support compared to the rest, there weren't very many real issues I took with the class. I've had some harsh words to say for some of the playtest's other classes, with several of them featuring design elements that gelled poorly with 2e's action economy or general design philosophy, but the Mystic by contrast I think was implemented in a way that made use of 2e's three-action economy and general approach to casters to the fullest. Kudos to the Starfriends for implementing the Mystic so well in 2e, I look forward to playing much more of the Mystic and even integrating them into my Pathfinder games.
Nearly done with these playtest notes, following similar threads for the Operative, Solarian, Soldier, and Witchwarper classes, the Barathu ancestry, and guns. In this thread I'll be discussing the Envoy class, and will split my post into sections, spoiler them, and add a TL;DR just so it's all a bit easier to navigate.
Methods:
Here are the methods I've used for my playtest:
Most of my playtests took place at levels 1-5, as I ran them mostly using the official Starfinder playtest scenarios and field tests. I ran some playtests at higher levels using Pathfinder content, but treated those as secondary to the playtest scenarios.
I ran my Envoy with a variety of party compositions, mostly with just other Starfinder classes. I eventually started adding Pathfinder classes into the mix, and treated those playtests as secondary.
I ran my Envoy under different ancestries, as I was playtesting those too.
I ran the scenarios RAW for the most part, only adjudicating when something broke or was missing from the rules. I then started playing with certain parameters, like enemy behavior and compositions or the Envoy's features, and treated those findings as secondary.
I maxed out Charisma, then Dexterity, then Constitution and Wisdom. This ended up not changing much even when picking leadership styles that would normally have favored Strength (From the Front) or Intelligence (Infosphere Director), and I'll talk a bit more about those in detail.
I tried a variety of guns on the Envoy, eventually settling on the pre-errata seeker rifle. More so than on other classes, I got to experiment with advanced weapons, and tried out the artillery laser and card slinger weapons.
TL;DR: I ran the Envoy many times mainly through the official playtest scenarios at their low level range, using a variety of ancestries and party compositions. As I put the class through the same encounters, I altered some parameters over time to see how they would affect its performance.
Directives:
Directives are the main new mechanic the Envoy introduces, and so merit their own section:
I very much enjoyed being able to deploy buffs for my whole team, and once I had access to multiple directives I enjoyed the choice of buffs to apply.
With that said, Get 'Em often felt like the best directive to use in the vast majority of cases, and often my turns ended up turning into a routine of Get 'Em + Strike x2. It's not that I had to Lead by Example each time, so much that that sequence of actions was often so much better than any alternative that it simply became the default.
In general, the action cost of using a directive and then Leading By Example each time a turn felt really costly and felt like it dampened the Envoy's flexibility a fair bit, while making the class quite repetitive (this I think is a recurring issue with martial classes in the Starfinder 2e playtest). Because of this, it also meant I didn't really feel any great desire to use costlier actions to Lead By Example, like Area/Auto-Fire with Guns Blazing, nor did I want to deploy two directives in one turn.
Due to the above, it also meant Infosphere Director secretly became the strongest subclass at level 6: although the reliance on Intelligence-based skills didn't work super-well with the Envoy, with Digital Diversion feeling completely pointless on a Charisma-based class, being able to Lead by Example using Recall Knowledge mean that thanks to the Automatic Knowledge feat, I could start Leading by Example as a free action, a significant action economy benefit over other classes. This felt more like an exploit than intended behavior.
I appreciate that Paizo is planning to give the Envoy's subclasses each their own directive, as I feel the class could use a much bigger choice of directives at low levels. I'd even support taking other directives besides Get 'Em! out of the class's core features and making them into feats.
I was afraid that Get'Em's circumstance penalty to AC would be made redundant by the off-guard condition, but enemies didn't find themselves off-guard all that often, unlike in Pathfinder, so the benefit was relevant most of the time. When I did integrate Pathfinder content, however, it did often become subsumed by off-guard, so there is a compatibility risk to the current implementation of the mechanic, though not necessarily an issue internal to just Starfinder.
Get 'Em!'s wording on Lead by Example is ambiguously written, in that the flavor text states the attack reveals a weak point, implying that the bonus only applies on subsequent hostile actions, yet the mechanic seems to intend to grant the bonus to damage rolls on that same attack, which is also how I've ruled it. I also assume the bonus to damage rolls applies to all damage rolls, not just damage rolls from attacks, at which point the mechanic may need to specify that the bonus applies only once on effects that damage an enemy multiple times, otherwise this would add significantly more damage to persistent damage rolls.
Another issue I took with Get 'Em's LBA benefit is that it only applies to dealing damage, which means using an Act of Leadership that deals no damage (i.e. most of them) doesn't work super well. By contrast, virtually every other directive's LBA mechanic is more open-ended and works better with Acts of Leadership, so I feel the directive could be adjusted a bit to be less restrictive.
Show 'Em What You Got!, in the few times I used it, didn't really feel like an interesting choice of directive alongside others so much as just a big power button you'd press at the start of every fight. It just makes everyone stronger in a way that's fairly predetermined by their class, which is made all the more obvious by how the Envoy themselves can't opt into defending or spellcasting if they want to Lead by Example, even if they archetype into something that would let them defend better or cast spells.
I liked the options of directives to boost my party's Speed and Seek checks as feats, though a +5 circumstance bonus on Search High and Low is excessive and I don't think should exist in 2e (this isn't 1e, and a +4 is already a massive increase). Take 'Em Alive! didn't provide a benefit that I found relevant in the playtest scenarios, but in my Pathfinder experience I can think of many situations where this could've been useful. My one issue here is that three directives is a very small number when these are meant to be the Envoy's bread-and-butter mechanic in encounters, and I think there ought to be many more choices of these.
Later on in my playtests, I experimented with turning directives into stances with a few adjustments, and this pretty much resolved the biggest issues I took with their action cost. Although my Envoy couldn't deploy multiple directives in one turn (which I found perfectly fine, as I didn't find spamming directives to be very interesting), the class generally felt much more flexible and free to act, with the subclasses shining more often by letting the Envoy Lead by Example in a greater variety of ways while doing more on their turn (and, importantly, playing more differently from one turn to the next). I would very much recommend implementing directives in this way to unclog the Envoy's action economy.
TL;DR: Directives I think are a solid core mechanic to a martial support class that let the Envoy buff their team, with an interesting aspect of opting into even greater benefits. My main issue with them as implemented now is that needing to spend an action on a directive every turn makes the Envoy far more repetitive and rigid than they ought to be. When I experimented with making directives work like stances, this eliminated those action economy issues and made the Envoy's turns much more dynamic and flexible overall.
Core Class:
Splitting my feedback on the class's core chassis and its feats for readability:
For starters, the Envoy has a lot of features, only very few of which felt truly necessary to the class. A lot of these were number boosters around Charisma checks that I didn't get to use that often, but they took up a lot of space on the class's feature list, and I think obscured the stuff that made them truly unique (namely Adaptive Talent, which I'll get to below).
Practice/Savvy/Effortless Influencer felt like one such unnecessary line of features, and stacking charges of a per-day ability felt like a 1e-ism to me when the standard in 2e is to simply change the mechanic's frequency to something more frequent. I have no real desire to track a resource on a martial class, and in the few times this kicked in, I mainly just spammed Demoralize checks at close range in encounters. If this is to stay, I'd rather make this a feat chain that lets you go from a once-per-day use to once per hour or even every 10 minutes.
Hidden/Indiscernible Agenda also felt like an unnecessary line of features, and also felt like very 1e-style design where eventually, rolls just cease to matter because of how hard these features alter degrees of success. 2e really does not need this degree of heavy-handedness to make a character good at being deceptive, and I don't think even the Envoy needs this when Deception is but one of several Charisma skills they can take.
Wise to the Game is, similarly, yet another number booster that that I found unnecessary and excessive when paired up with the class's already legendary Perception (which I also didn't find all that relevant to the class).
Silver Tongue uses this design present in other mechanics where it grants you a base benefit, then an even greater benefit if you have the base benefit already, and to me this just looked like a very complicated way of saying the player gets yet another charge of Practiced Influencer, except the effect has no synergy with Effortless Influencer despite working in almost the exact same way. This is just messy design, and I feel ought to be pruned from the Envoy's overloaded feature list.
Size Up and Saw it Coming felt extraneous to most Envoy builds I was picking. It felt very similar to the Investigator's Pursue a Lead, which didn't fit the flavor of every Envoy, but also often didn't come up in the playtest scenarios I ran, despite taking up so much space. These features I think could just have been feats, with adjustments to the feats that rely on them.
In spite of all of this feature overload, two other feature lines stuck out to me as genuinely interesting, namely Adaptive Talent and Improvised Mastery/Legendary Improvisation: put together, these features made my Envoy flexible with their skills in ways no other skill-heavy class really approached, as they could swap out their feats and become good at skills they weren't normally great at. I feel these features ought to be combined and given much more space in the Envoy's core power budget, so that the class has much more freedom to swap out their skill proficiencies and skill feats from one day to the next.
On a more minor note, I also feel the Envoy's proficiencies were somewhat overloaded. Giving the class legendary Will saves is definitely appropriate, but I also don't think the class needed to be so durable as to also get up-to-master Reflex saves, nor did they really need up-to-legendary Perception. They're not the only overstatted Starfinder class by any stretch, but I do believe that in addition to just normalizing those classes' stats, they ought to have weaker overall defenses than their Pathfinder counterparts.
I found most of the subclasses useful in differentiating my Envoys a bit, though mainly when their Acts of Leadership kicked in, which is why I'd support making those core to the subclasses at level 1. None of the subclasses really made me change my attributes, as I felt pretty locked into Charisma then Dex/Con/Wis, and this extended even to From the Front, which did not actually have me leading from the front so much as just using a shield with a one-handed gun.
As mentioned above Infosphere Director starts out as an entirely redundant subclass (you can already Create a Diversion using Deception much more accurately) that only becomes good via an exploit, i.e. using Automatic Knowledge for free-action Lead by Examples at 6th level onwards. This subclass needs to be touched up a little, in my opinion, and Acts of Leadership I think need a general provision of requiring the player to spend at least one action in order to Lead by Example, just to nip this kind of exploit in the bud.
Although I didn't feel like the Envoy was a major damage-dealer, nor did I believe they were meant to be, I still felt like they dealt solid baseline damage purely thanks to Get 'Em!'s circumstance bonus to damage. In an environment where even an Operative can end up dealing a piddly 4 damage on a crit, every +1 counts even on damage rolls.
In a similar vein, the Envoy is in an interesting space where they're much more able to opt into advanced guns than any other Starfinder martial class (Operatives would have to use them at a lower proficiency rank and sacrifice their exceptional accuracy, AoE advanced weapons are generally not great to use even on the Soldier, and the Solarian doesn't really interact with the game's weapon selection at all), but at the same time are much less dependent on specific weapons than other classes. When I used a pistol, the lower damage die didn't feel like it made a huge difference thanks to Get 'Em! contributing a large portion of my damage on a hit. This is a nice little bit of flexibility on a martial class that isn't as heavily focused on weapons as the other Starfinder martials.
TL;DR: Adaptive Talent and the Envoy's ability to become good at a skill that's needed in the moment are standout features that I think make the class shine as a skill-user in a manner completely different from Pathfinder's Investigator and Rogue. On the flipside, the class's core progression is ridiculously overloaded with extraneous, number-boosting features that I found added little to the class and felt more like they belonged in 1e than 2e. I would much prefer to give center stage to the class's directives and skill-based adaptability from level 1 onwards, and leave the rest either as feats or just prune them completely.
Feats:
I mostly focused on level 1-4 feats during my playtests, owing to the level range at which I mostly played:
In general, I had a blast selecting and using the Envoy's feats. Feats like Quip and Not in the Face! felt extremely flavorful and appropriate to use, while also feeling both mechanically solid and just plain fun. Although some effects have precedent in Pathfinder, like Watch Out!, simply the naming and flavoring of these effects went a long way towards illustrating how the Envoy would apply these benefits.
The one real criticism I had was that Acquire Asset felt essential in order to use Size Up in a regular encounter, as I wasn't going to be researching mooks. This to me reinforced the notion that Size Up ought to be a feat line, rather than a core class feature, and I even feel Acquire Asset could be the main feat, with other feats then giving the Envoy more out-of-combat benefits.
TL;DR: I found the Envoy's feats to be tremendously flavorful, balanced in my opinion, and fun to use. They made the class very supportive, canny, and nimble overall, reinforcing their role nicely, and the naming and flavoring of the feats I found was brilliant and added significantly to the joy of selecting them. Aside from Acquire Asset feeling essential to benefit consistently from Size Up (and this I think is more an issue with Size Up, which I'd find more appropriate as a feat than as a core class feature), all the feats I used felt solid.
The overall TL;DR from all this is that my experience of the Envoy was really positive overall. The class is by no means perfect, and I think is currently held back by repetitive action taxes on directives along with a serious amount of feature overload, but the Envoy nonetheless stands out for their team support capabilities and their skill-based adaptability, and so in a way that makes them distinct from any other class in 2e. I'm glad Paizo is giving the Envoy more directives, as that I think is the way to go, and I would strongly advocate for making directives work like stances to ease the action cost, while pruning most of the class's core features in favor of making their ability to swap out skill feats and maybe even skill proficiencies on the fly their other big selling point.
Past the halfway mark now of the playtest notes I've written down, with class notes on the Solarian, Soldier, and Witchwarper, general notes on guns, and a few on the Barathu ancestry. I'll be discussing the Operative in this one. I'll split my post into sections, spoiler them, and add a TL;DR just so it's all a bit easier to navigate.
Methods:
Here are the methods I've used for my playtest:
Most of my playtests took place at levels 1-5, as I ran them mostly using the official Starfinder playtest scenarios and field tests. I ran some playtests at higher levels using Pathfinder content, but treated those as secondary to the playtest scenarios.
I ran my Operative with a variety of party compositions, mostly with just other Starfinder classes. I eventually started adding Pathfinder classes into the mix, and treated those playtests as secondary.
I ran my Operative under different ancestries, as I was playtesting those too.
I ran the scenarios RAW for the most part, only adjudicating when something broke or was missing from the rules (including base features that were missing on the core class). I then started playing with certain parameters, like enemy behavior and compositions or the Operative's features, and treated those findings as secondary.
I maxed out Dexterity, then Constitution and Wisdom on my operative. I then tried to match my fourth attribute boost to my subclass's skill, and in the case of the Skirmisher and Sniper I went with Charisma, which I found had generally better returns than Strength or Intelligence due to Demoralize. On a Striker, I maxed out Strength as my key attribute but still maxed out Dex as my second stat for AC, Ref saves, and backup ranged Strikes.
I used single-shot rifles quite a bit, but ended up favoring the plasma caster and especially the pre-errata seeker rifle for their ability to fire multiple shots in a single turn (and also for better synergy with Hair Trigger, which we'll get to in a bit). I'll discuss this in more detail below.
TL;DR I ran the Operative many times mainly through the official playtest scenarios at their low level range, using a variety of ancestries and party compositions. As I put the class through the same encounters, I altered some parameters over time to see how they would affect the its performance.
Core Class:
Splitting my feedback on the class's core chassis and its feats for readability:
Aim is the central feature of the Operative, allowing them to deal additional damage to a mark and reducing the benefits they get from cover. It is also, in my opinion, the least interesting part of the class by a long shot, and I'd go as far as to say it makes the class less interesting. I often found it optimal to Aim + Strike x2 every turn whenever I could, or Aim + Strike + Reload when using a single-shot gun, and because I didn't need to maneuver to reduce or eliminate an enemy's cover, I often had no real incentive to use the tremendous mobility at my disposal. What in my opinion should have been a very mobile and dynamic class ended up becoming extremely static and repetitive as a result. I think this feature really worsens what could otherwise be a very interesting class, and would want to see it replaced with much more interactive gameplay than just an on-demand self-buff.
The Operative's class features are significantly overloaded: Urban Operator and Critical Aim felt more like flavorful class feats than core class features, whereas Tactical Barrage, the circumstance bonus from Operative's Edge, Mobile Reload, and On the Move (with the ramping benefits to Tactical Advance for double-dipping on the Speed bonus) all made the class outperform others that each specialized in one of these aspects individually, from my limited playtesting experience at high levels. As a result, the class felt significantly overtuned despite the lower damage of guns relative to melee weapons in Pathfinder. My opinion ended up being that practically all of these features could either have been made into feats or stripped from the class outright and the end result would still have been a strong class.
With that said, I will say that when I moved as an Operative, it felt incredible. Moving into the perfect position feels right for the class, and I feel that should be the central element to their gameplay, rather than their current loop of Aiming then shooting from a static perch.
I found it interesting for the Operative to be an expert in only one defense at the start, and appreciated how this made the class more of a glass cannon. However, this rapidly vanished as the class quickly slid into a regular martial proficiency track. I feel this is a missed opportunity for a fresh approach to defenses in Starfinder, as I feel most SF2e martial classes should have generally worse defenses than Pathfinder martials in exchange for their greater range. I'd even go as far as to want to push the Operative to have legendary Reflex saves in exchange for being stuck at Expert proficiency at maximum on Fort and Will saves.
I started out using single-shot rifles, which I felt were the best thematic fit for Operatives, but ended up getting much better results out of guns that could fire more than once per turn. Because Aim adds its bonus to all of the Strikes you make, you end up dealing even more damage with guns that shoot more than once a turn, and because single-shot guns were generally less effective (reload is a much bigger downgrade on those than seems to be accounted for), I ended up using the pre-errata Seeker Rifle a lot. When I experimented with alternatives, as I suspected the gun would get a nerf, I tried the plasma caster instead and then the artillery laser at very high levels when the Operative's advanced weapon proficiency finally equalized, and in all of those cases the results were generally more impressive than with single-shot rifles. I wish there were more rifles that could make two or three shots before needing to reload, if only for variety's sake.
I was looking forward to making a Barathu Operative who'd snipe from the air with single-shot rifles, but found that this didn't work due to Mobile Reload only enabling Stepping or Striding, and not Flying. The Barathu worked perfectly fine sniping from ground level, but it highlighted a general need to make all of these mobility effects let the user move in ways other than just Stepping or Striding.
While I liked the specializations pushing the Operative into different directions, I felt most of them didn't change my playstyle by much, simply because Aim + Strike x2 was such a dominant strategy compared to Sabotaging or trying to use Ghost Tap. The Ghost's initial exploit did provide some significant first-turn benefits when playing stealthily, however, and the Striker did change my playstyle significantly, as did the Skirmisher's enhanced exploit, so those were fun to try out.
With the Ghost and Sniper Operatives, Aim currently ends the hidden condition RAW, so I had to rule otherwise for some of their features to work.
I also found it strange that the Sniper's exploit let you ignore the volley trait of guns, as I thought that the intent of both sniping and the volley trait was that you'd work best at range. Rather than remove the inconvenience, I feel it would've been better to introduce a greater benefit for fighting at a distance. If the inconvenience needs to be removed for those guns to work, then that is a problem that needs to be addressed directly at the level of those guns' traits.
I get the impression the Operative was designed with newer players in mind, what with their fairly straightforward playstyle and developer commentary around the class, but if that is the case then I don't think the current implementation succeeds very well at this. There are several different bonuses to track that add to the Operative's other actions, such as Aim's damage dice or On the Move's Speed bonus, plus more complex interactions with mechanics like cover (Aim really makes you need to know what the values are for different cover types), as well as additional modifications on top of all this based on your subclass. I feel like the general idea behind these various effects could be implemented in 2e in a more elegant way, such as by having actions that make you move at high speeds instead of Speed bonuses, or having specializations specifically give you higher-level class feats ahead of time rather than mechanical rewrites.
TL;DR At the core of the Operative, there's this really solid playstyle of moving around quickly on the battlefield and picking off enemies with potent bursts of ranged damage, all while using exploits to do sneaky stuff along the way. However, that playstyle right now is smothered under a damage steroid that encourages the Operative to mostly just stay in the same place and spam as many attacks as they can. Aim I think makes the class less interesting and enjoyable to play, and the class is overloaded with features that simply do not need to be there, in many cases causing it to each several other classes' lunch.
Feats:
I mostly focused on level 1-4 feats during my playtests, owing to the level range at which I mostly played:
Let's get this out of the way: Hair Trigger is busted, and at this point most players seem aware of this. It's got the powerful effects of Reactive Strike, except unlike the latter's limited radius, Hair Trigger can trigger against anyone at a range of up to 120 feet, effectively the entire battlefield. Because nearly everyone's triggering these reactions by making ranged attacks, this amounted to a free, MAP-less Strike every round that was especially disruptive to enemy spellcasters. For this reason, I very quickly started taking this feat out of my playtests to avoid skewing results, unless it was to experiment with altered versions. The best iteration I got so far was requiring the enemy to be off-guard to the Operative, which worked particularly well with stealth play, bounced off of others' utility, and made the feat much more conditional, while still useful. It worked especially well with a house rule I tried out where enemies Taking Cover are off-guard to angles where they're not covered, further complementing the Operative's mobility.
On the flipside, and despite coming in significantly above the level range at which I was mostly playing, Parkour felt absolutely incredible to use. It breaks the game's normal restrictions on movement by letting you break down your move into as many subcomponents as you want, and that really felt like a game-changer on the class. I enjoyed this feat so much I ended up incorporating it into the class at level 1 with a few changes (I used it instead of On the Move, so I took out the Speed bonus, let you parkour up to twice your Speed, and had it let you use other move actions instead of Striding), and that made the class stand out far more than Aim ever did in my experience. When I experimented with rules changes that encouraged moving around, this really let the Operative shine as a hyper-mobile damage-dealer, to the point where I didn't feel the class needed a damage steroid to feel good at what it did.
Creative Cover runs into a problem present across several other mechanics in this playtest, where it's clearly built with another game element in mind (in this case, Barricade), but rather than incorporate that game element into itself, as would be the norm in Pathfinder, it instead repeats itself by having a baseline effect and an enhanced effect when the player also has the intended gameplay element. Simply giving the player the Barricade feat as a free feat and improving its use would have been a better implementation in my opinion to an otherwise fun and situationally useful feat.
All of the Aim action compression feats largely did not improve my choices or gameplay enjoyment, so much as just make me stronger at what I was already doing. Mobile Aim was a clear winner at level 1 simply because of how much more general-purpose it was than the others, and when I needed to move, I could still Aim + Strike x2 as well. This in my opinion "solved" an interesting dilemma that I think really did not need solving, as having more than one compelling choice is what makes gameplay good.
On a similar note, most of the Operator's feats seem to trip over themselves to incorporate Aim into pretty much any Strike the class makes, which highlights just how perfunctory the mechanic is in my opinion. Even on feats that were otherwise interesting and fun to use, like Kill Steal or 360 No Scope, this was a factor.
A lot of "Aim + Strike + something else" feats felt quite similar to the Fighter's "Strike + something else" feats, which made me feel like the class was getting a bit too close to the "Fighter in space" problem of the 1e Soldier owing to their similar weapon proficiencies and prevalent reactive Strikes. I don't think Aim is a very interesting mechanic, and I wish there were many more feats that instead encouraged clever positioning or things other than just Aiming and Striking.
Devastating Aim is a no-brainer for just dealing straight-up more damage, and is a clear-cut example of a feat that adds power and no gameplay. This feat ought to be removed, and if the Operator really needs this power (which I don't think is the case), then just buff Aim's base damage dice to d6s.
TL;DR Hair Trigger is an obvious outlier for how much power it outputs for such little restriction, whereas Parkour felt like such a positive game-changer that I genuinely want the feat to be a core class feature at level 1 as a replacement to On the Move (with adjustments to let Parkour provide more mobility on its own and accommodate different movement types). Besides that, there were a handful of feats that stood out for positive reasons, like Kill Steal, but right now I feel the Operative's feats are mired in what came across as this 1e-style approach of pumping as much power into the class without necessarily generating any new gameplay. This I think is primarily due to inserting Aim into pretty much everything the Operator does, which made the mechanic feel even more mandatory and devoid of interesting gameplay, and beyond that I felt a lot of the feat list ended up brushing up too close to the Fighter's in the kinds of things it did. While some Strike enhancers or action compressors would certainly benefit the class, I think there's much more room for interesting effects that capitalize on the class's mobility, range, and subclass.
When I started writing down these class feedback threads, I mentioned that I started with the ones whose design turned out the least well in my experience, and would go up from there. Of the classes I've written these threads on so far, the Operative I think is perhaps the first to enter genuinely positive territory. The big TL;DR here is that the class has a really solid bit of core gameplay hiding inside of it of having incredible mobility and range, and could really stand out if it weren't for a mechanic that I think actively makes the class much shallower (i.e. Aim), along with a heap of unnecessary class features and several feats that make the class far stronger than it needs to be, without really enhancing its gameplay at all. Unlike the Witchwarper, whose defining mechanic is held back by poor implementation, the Operative I think has all the elements it needs to succeed already, it just needs to focus on those rather than lots of excessive power that's very low on gameplay.
Above all, I would want to streamline the class significantly around being really mobile, and using that mobility to deal more damage, rather than a boring damage steroid you have to turn on every round. This may require expanding the rules for ranged combat in addition to changing the Operative, in ways I experimented with and listed in another thread, but in my opinion it would be well worth it. If I had to make just one suggestion, it would be to make Parkour the Operative's central mechanic, and not Aim. A Parkour-based Operative that had genuine reasons to maneuver behind enemy lines and pick off targets from there I think would be significantly more interesting than the current Operative that just wants to Aim + Strike x2 every turn, as the class would be much more dynamic and interactive than it is now.
Taking a slight break from writing class feedback after the Solarian, Soldier, and Witchwarper (plus playtest notes for the Barathu ancestry) to discuss one of the core aspects of the Starfinder playtest: the guns. How do they hold up? How did the new traits and mechanics feel to playtest? What state is the game's ranged meta in at the moment? Here are my findings from about a month of playtesting, which I'll split my post into sections, spoiler, and add a TL;DR just so it's all a bit easier to navigate. Some of the recent errata addressed some concerns I had, which I'll note in my feedback, but also raises or highlights other problems, which I'll also note.
Methods:
My playtesting methods were fairly straightforward, as were their limitations:
I initially started by trying to pair as many weapons with as many classes and ancestries as made sense, then experimented a bit with Pathfinder classes, before eventually settling on weapons I felt worked optimally with specific classes. This meant I ended up having far more data on guns like the seeker rifle than others like the streetsweeper.
Because most classes preferred to use guns, and the one melee-focused class in Starfinder used their own weapon, I ended up naturally focusing on guns rather than melee weapons, which is one of the reasons why this thread focuses on guns (that, I think guns are the real meat of Starfinder 2e's combat more than melee weapons).
I initially experimented pairing certain classes with weapons I knew wouldn't suit them (for instance, AoE weapons on the Operative), just to see how they felt and to confirm there weren't any hidden synergies I weren't aware of. As I refined my playtests over time, I ended up settling on more conventional picks.
Because the only class that could make adequate use of advanced weapons was a level 19-20 Operative (with the exception of AoE weapons, which had their own issues), I ended up with only little data around advanced weapons.
Once I ended up playing with different weapons, I eventually settled on the pre-errata seeker rifle as my "default" gun on most martials, not even because the weapon was stronger than alternatives, but because it made fights end faster (and I'll detail my issues with that below). I obviously haven't playtested the post-errata seeker rifle as much.
TL;DR: I started out by varying my weapon usage as much as possible on different classes and ancestries, before eventually settling on a smaller subset of picks. I ended up using the pre-errata seeker rifle and martial guns more than any other type of weapon, because simple weapons were otherwise weaker than martial guns and advanced weapons were mostly inaccessible.
General:
In this section I'll be discussing some of the broader aspects to guns, such as the inclusion of non-physical damage types, ammo, and their progression:
I'm a big fan of including non-physical weapon damage types, as I think this adds more variety to weapons and helped trigger more weaknesses in certain instances. However, this also meant martial characters ended up running up against immunities several times in A Cosmic Birthday, with a few monsters being immune to cold, electricity, or fire, and many creatures and hazards being immune to poison, which limited the appeal of the needler pistol and injection rifle. This to me says that backup weapons are going to be even more of a necessity in Starfinder, as martials will find their weapon getting hard-countered far more often. I don't think needing a backup weapon is a bad thing either, so long as it's made clear from the start that this is an expectation of martial classes in Starfinder in order to function as intended.
Because guns deal less damage than melee weapons and were the centerpiece of combat, it felt like martial damage was weaker overall and slowed down combat, which I'll detail more below. I do think this is more a problem with enemy Hit Points not being tuned around gun damage in Starfinder than a problem with guns, however, and I appreciate that their balance is somewhat close to that of ranged weapons in Pathfinder for compatibility reasons.
A major factor that impacts compatibility, however, is the extra upgrade slot guns get over property runes on archaic weapons. Because each slot means an additional damage upgrade that can be slotted, this creates a power creep problem where starting at level 8, Starfinder weapons get much more of a damage increase than archaic weapons, and end up dealing more damage overall. I would really advise against this extra upgrade slot, and would prefer it if there were alternative ways to customize guns at level 1 that didn't translate to this kind of power creep.
Resistances were a major problem with guns, and often were almost functionally identical to immunities because of their ability to completely negate damage from hits that weren't adding an attribute modifier to their damage rolls. A Corpse Fleet Officer's resistance of 5 to a bunch of different damage types is a big deal at a point where your Strikes are often going to be dealing less than 5 damage on a hit. I'll also raise this issue when discussing the ranged meta below, but I think resistances in Starfinder need to follow a different benchmark from Pathfinder, where the minimum in PF is the medium amount for resistances in SF.
Non-physical damage seems to be costed quite steeply, and these weapons felt weaker overall than their physical counterparts. While I understand the benefit in triggering energy weaknesses, part of the problem was that these weapon also ran equally into resistances and immunities, to the point where the non-physical damage type was much more of a downside than a positive in the case of poison. I feel non-physical damage types ought to be costed neutrally with the exception of strong damage types like force, vitality, void, or spirit, and in the case of poison damage ought to be treated as a downgrade.
Advanced is both a weapon category and a weapons grade, and this ambiguity I think needs to be rectified by renaming the advanced weapons grade to something else (and while we're at it, swap the positions of "paragon" and "ultimate", because ultimate gear is currently not in fact ultimate).
Advanced weapons were almost entirely impossible to playtest properly, because no character could use them adequately outside of a few specific scenarios. Operatives can use advanced guns at the same proficiency rank as martial guns at levels 19-20, plus the Card Slinger at level 15 for what it's worth, and AoE weapons break proficiency entirely (but AoE guns aren't worth using to most characters, which I'll detail further below), but that's it. Ancestry feats that allow the use of a simpler weapon proficiency track for advanced weapons offer no advanced weapons to use for this purpose.
Most of the new weapon groups' critical specialization effects are copies of Pathfinder crit spec effects, and so performed as they should, with one exception: sonic weapons deafen their target on a failed save for an entire minute, whereas every other condition lasts only a round at most (and persistent damage can be removed). This is, for starters, way too strong, but also makes this particular effect one-and-done for encounters, whereas even crit spec effects that deal persistent damage will have you wanting to reapply the effect to the same target.
TL;DR: Non-physical weapons are a great addition to weapons and tactical play but are currently costed too highly in my opinion, and the game doesn't seem to have adjusted its resistances and other NPC stats around the lower damage of guns. Aside from sonic crit specialization being overtuned and the extra upgrade slot on weapons harming compatibility through power creep, the basic 2e framework works well in Starfinder as it does in Pathfinder, though it would've helped to have been able to access advanced weapons more easily for playtesting purposes.
Expend, Magazine, and Reload:
I thought it best to discuss these three aspects of guns in a single section, as I think they all relate to one another and I think form this little island of associated problems at the moment:
In my experience, there were two types of guns: the ones that were likely to require reloading at least once in a fight, and the ones that didn't. The majority of weapons I used fell in the latter category with the exception of particularly drawn-out fights, which to me suggests that some guns are simply not worth the trouble to track how much of their magazine they're expending and when they need to reload.
Because each gun has its own magazine size, expend, and reload value, and this all needs to be used to calculate ammo expenditure with every Strike, tracking gun usage was particularly tedious for NPCs. I think it's okay for a player character to manage their own expenditure, but tracking ammo usage on NPCs both slowed down play quite a bit and often felt completely useless, because they almost always died before needing to reload.
Prior to the latest round of errata, ammo was far too expensive, and even after the errata we got to projectiles, this still remains the case for batteries and petrol tanks. This now creates a weird in-between situation where some weapons seem to have a higher expend just to present some added cost at lower levels, but this is no longer true for projectile weapons, whose ammo is now as cheap as in Pathfinder, so this just makes expend feel all the more finicky and pointless to have around.
Of all the reload 2 weapons in the game, only the reaction breacher and pre-errata magnetar rifle were likely to require reloading during a fight, with the autotarget rifle only running out when making Auto-Fires against multiple targets, and the flamethrower running out only in drawn-out fights. Overall, I felt only the reaction breacher truly warranted its long reload, as the other guns either didn't run out reliably enough for it to trigger in every fight, or have since been errata'd. Now that the seeker rifle is reduced to a magazine of 1, the gun takes an entire round to fire and then reload each time, which is one of the many ways in which I think the gun was overnerfed, even though I haven't yet playtested the errata'd version.
TL;DR: The system of magazine sizes, expends, and reloads bogged down play quite significantly while often having no effect on many guns and NPCs. I feel this is currently one of the major pain points of guns as implemented, as I think these stats make Starfinder's combat much less smooth to run and even more drawn-out than it ought to be. I'd go as far as to suggest removing expend and magazine sizes entirely, making most guns reload 0, and giving a trait to some of the remaining reload guns that let them make 2 or 3 shots before needing to reload, which I think would make for a similar end result while making guns significantly easier to track.
New Traits:
Starfinder adds quite a few new traits to guns, a welcome expansion from Pathfinder's ranged weapons. I'll discuss AoE traits in a separate section, but here are my findings on the rest:
Aeon and caster on the aeon rifle weren't a combo I got to test out much, due to the weapon being advanced, but the traits looked appealing as a means of further customizing weapons and adapting their damage. Worth noting though is that the aeon trait already exists and is used to describe aeon creatures, so that trait might need to be renamed to avoid confusion. It might also be worth moving the spell gem portion of the aeon trait to the caster trait, as a large portion of that trait also relies on having a spell gem slotted.
While I understand the usefulness of the analog trait in blocking out weapon rune usage, the trait added nothing within the context of Starfinder itself and just bloated weapon trait lists. I feel this could've been avoided by just declaring runes to be exclusive to archaic weapons.
Arc did not feature on weapons I used the most frequently, but its extra damage when it triggered felt like a weaker form of splash. I don't think this is a bad thing, as it's nice to have small traits that can be easily added onto weapons, though I also fear that this trait is going to be strictly limited to shock weapons, to the point where it almost feels like a stronger version of this ought to have been implemented as the weapon group's critical specialization effect.
Boost I think could've been a much more fun trait to make use of if martial classes in Starfinder didn't have Strike boost actions already: the Envoy wants to use Get'Em if they want to Strike, the Operative wants to Aim if they want to Strike, and neither the Solarian nor the Soldier really want to use boost weapons, whereas casters wouldn't want to spend two actions boosting then Striking. I think the problem here has more to do with the Envoy and Operative having such rote actions taking up their turns than the boost trait itself, and in a different environment it'd likely feel much more useful. It'd also be interesting to see boost actually add traits rather than damage, but I can understand the current implementation being more conservative.
Breakdown was essentially a non-trait, as assembling the weapon when its light Bulk would prevent you from becoming encumbered would encumber you then and there. It also made no difference on the card slinger, as the weapon already has light Bulk.
Alternative critical effects are one of those interesting ideas that I think need more associated mechanics to showcase: currently, there seems to be little reason to not just put those weapons into the critical trait's weapon group, though this would change if certain options specifically relied on a weapon belonging to a certain group.
My experience with the professional trait is limited to its pre-errata version, though in both cases the trait creates this awkward little proficiency gap specifically with the Operative at levels 13 and 14, where their weapon proficiency outstrips their proficiency in any skill (also, the trait is misspelled on the hammer). Beyond this, this trait looks like an interesting way to incentivize specializing in a certain skill, so I'll be keen to see more weapons with this trait to see how it impacts build choices.
The unwieldy trait felt almost entirely redundant in the vast majority of cases, as the weapons that used it either had the area trait, which meant they could only fire once per round anyway, or had a magazine size of 1, so most classes wouldn't shoot it more than once per round. This was exacerbated by the feats and class features that instructed me to ignore the unwieldy trait when it did apply, which made me feel like this new trait was mostly just a big waste of space that only occasionally barred the use of a reaction. I'd be happy to see this trait removed entirely, as I don't think it has a place in 2e.
TL;DR: Starfinder introduces some interesting traits, particularly the aeon, boost, caster, and professional traits, though my ability to properly test out these traits was limited due to the inaccessibility of advanced weapons and busy action economies of the classes that might want to boost their weapon. Aeon as a trait needs renaming to avoid clashing with aeon creatures, and unwieldy I think needs to be nixed entirely due to being almost entirely redundant.
AoE Weapons:
Since the design of area and automatic weapons was revealed in Field Test #1, I was skeptical of their implementation, and had my concerns regarding how they'd shake out in practice. Playtesting has only worsened my impression of these weapons. I've detailed my lengthy criticisms of AoE guns in multiple other threads, but will list them again here:
Because weapon proficiency doesn't matter on AoE weapons (their saving throws use your class DC), I had total freedom of choice over which ones to pick, on any class. This is not a good thing in my opinion, and is one of the interactions that AoE weapons break.
Unfortunately, for some strange reasons the majority of advanced AoE weapons felt worse than their martial counterparts: The pre-errata magnetar rifle could only target up to three opponents with an Auto-Fire, and even post-errata makes crap Strikes at advanced weapon proficiency, the plasma cannon has worse stats than the stellar cannon in nearly every respect save for its damage die, and the screamer is way too short-ranged for a weapon that can only fire within its first range increment. Even with a full range of options, I ended up going for the stellar cannon and the machine gun on my Soldier, which I felt performed the best overall. If an actually strong advanced AoE weapon were to ever be released, however, it would easily run the risk of invalidating every other AoE weapon due to this, and causing problems if it were strong on any one class irrespective of proficiency.
When I gave one of these weapons to a Pathfinder Commander, they ended up using these weapons better than anyone else besides the Soldier alongside single-action tactics like Reload!, gaining access to more AoE than they could otherwise access despite being a class whose damage is entirely single-target: if AoE weapons didn't have so many problems, I'd consider this a genuine compatibility risk, and the fact that a class with a legendary class DC wasn't enough to redeem AoE weapons is, in my opinion, a damning indictment of those weapons in their current state.
On any other class but the Soldier, AoE weapons did not perform well in my opinion. Even when just a trained DC would've been enough, casters couldn't afford to take two actions to make an attack instead of casting a spell, and martial classes using these weapons dropped significantly in damage output overall, and felt about as rigid as a caster due to needing to spend two actions to do their main thing of attacking, while often operating from only a limited range. Starfinder martials actually did worse overall than Pathfinder martials, surprisingly, because SF2e's martial classes often have to spend at least one action doing their class's thing before taking the rest of their turn, and a three-action rotation was just too inflexible even for a Guns Blazing Envoy.
I significantly disliked the non-interaction between AoE attacks and the bonuses and penalties that normally benefit Strikes, like off-guard or heroism. This came up a few times in my playtests, and made those guns feel shallower overall, while not feeling like real weapons. This also made them subtly even weaker than regular guns than would seem on paper, because they were less likely to increase in accuracy through tactical play.
I ran into a lot of enemies with high Reflex saves, and while I think that makes sense for Starfinder (SF enemies I think ought to have better Ref saves and worse Fort saves than in Pathfinder overall), this made AoE weapons less accurate overall.
Worth noting that even on the Soldier, AoE weapons often fell dramatically in effectiveness due to having a hard range limit on their AoE attacks, another interaction with normal weapon stats that these weapons break (in this instance, range increments). Fighting Amnieka in A Cosmic Birthday when the creature was flying high above ground meant my automatic weapon-wielding Soldier could only make regular Strikes at a steep accuracy penalty, and my area weapon-wielding Soldier couldn't attack with their cannon at all. A similar problem occurred when I made the flying repair drones fly a bit higher than prescribed in the scenario.
To top it all off, one of the consistent issues I ran into with AoE weapons was that in Starfinder's combats, enemies often were spaced too far apart for the AoE bit to kick in. In the Fire Team Fiasco encounter from Field Test #5, for instance, every enemy starts 20 feet away from the next, and the distance only increases as combat plays out. In the instances where I did catch multiple enemies at a time, usually 2 and often with the help of a graviton Solarian, it still didn't feel like this amazing burst of damage for the actions I was spending, even if it was satisfying catching more than one enemy in my AoE.
On a more minor note, I found it tiresome for the Soldier's entries in particular to keep repeating "Area Fire or Auto-Fire". I find it strange that these two extremely similar types of weapons that basically do the same thing (range and expend aside, Auto-Fire is functionally just a cone Area Fire) required different rules, which added a lot of text to the Soldier's entry especially.
While it didn't come up often, the interaction between Disarm and AoE attacks is ambiguous, as they don't make attack rolls. I ruled in favor of Disarm applying the penalty to the DC, but can't confirm whether this is RAW for sure.
Towards the latter portions of my playtests, I experimented with homebrew and house rules to see what impact they'd have over regular gameplay. One such instance was implementing AoE weapons as regular guns with various traits that let them deal splash damage on their Strikes, and the result was a significant improvement to their gameplay, especially to the Soldier after adjusting the class around this. This also to me suggests that AoE weapons would be much more usable if they had the flexibility of regular weapons and just had the interactions of regular weapons overall.
TL;DR: AoE weapons in my experienced performed so poorly that I don't believe they are fit for purpose as written. They are clunky, altogether weak, and don't actually feel like real weapons so much as a different mechanic altogether shoehorned into a few guns, breaking several basic interactions along the way that risk causing even bigger problems further down the line (if an actually strong advanced AoE gun gets added, for instance, literally anyone could take it). Because the Soldier is made to use these weapons, these are a major contributing factor to the problems I experienced with the class in playtesting. As loath as some people would be to see this, I very much recommend Paizo try implementing these weapons as regular guns that deal splash damage in bursts, cones, and lines alongside their Strike damage, perhaps even also add the agile trait to automatic guns, as trying out versions of these guns significantly improved the gameplay of AoE weapons in my experience.
Ranged Meta:
In this section I'll go over the ranged meta overall, as right now I think there's some room for improvement:
For starters, I can confirm that the ranged meta was a thing in my games. Characters defaulted to guns because their mechanics often worked better with those and they started a distance away from their opponents, and in some encounters it was literally impossible to fight in melee. This part of the ranged meta I think is a success.
The ranged meta, however, is incredibly slow. Enemies seem to use the same Hit Point and resistance benchmarks as for Pathfinder despite gun damage being much lower than melee damage overall, and for this reason combat ended up being much more drawn-out than in Pathfinder. I think NPCs need to operate on a lower benchmark of HP in Starfinder than in Pathfinder.
For a similar reason, my party didn't generally feel really threatened in ranged combat, because most classes seemed to have really over-padded defenses, especially the casters. It was easier for the enemy to focus the casters than in Pathfinder combat, but this I think was due to the Solarian and Soldier failing to draw adequate attention to themselves and thus "wasting" their own defenses. If those classes could tank like their Pathfinder counterparts, the Mystic and Witchwarper wouldn't need their current inflated defenses, and cloth casters from Pathfinder would be able to thrive better too.
The ranged meta also felt really repetitive in my experience. It's very easy for characters to entrench themselves in cover and just not leave, and because often ended up shooting then taking cover from the same position, combat generally felt really static, fairly shallow, and much less dynamic than melee combat in Pathfinder. The additional AC everyone was getting dragged out combat for even longer, as nearly everyone missed more often. I can understand Pathfinder not really needing to flesh out its ranged-versus-ranged combat, but Starfinder I think needs to add mechanics around ranged combat that encourage more dynamic positioning and punish staying behind the same piece of cover for too long.
As mentioned with AoE weapons, enemies rarely end up getting close to each other, unless they're melee or some specific mechanic incentivizes them to do so. This obviously didn't favor AoE weapons, but also meant AoE spells were trickier to pull off than in Pathfinder, though I did get to facilitate this a bit more with a graviton Solarian. There's perhaps room to incentivize people to group together more in general.
Later in my playtests, I experimented with a few extra general extra rules of play: one was to make enemies Taking Cover off-guard to attacks from angles where they didn't benefit from cover, and this made positioning much more interesting by encouraging characters to move to a position where they could literally catch an opponent off-guard. RAW, moving to negate someone's cover also negates your own cover, so you're generally giving up an advantage similar to the one you're hoping to gain, whereas this tipped the scale in favor of the aggressor, while still leaving situations where taking cover was the right thing to do for just one round.
Another couple of extra mechanics I experimented with was one universal action that let you help an adjacent ally Take Cover, and another universal action that let you give an adjacent ally a circumstance bonus to their next attack's damage roll and let it partially ignore cover. These actions encouraged everyone to group up more, at the very least into pairs, and the damage action sped up combat a fair bit too.
TL;DR: The ranged meta exists in Starfinder in that guns were the default weapon to use, but I don't think is entirely successful as implemented right now. Ranged fights are slow and repetitive due to the lower damage of guns and the overuse of cover, which to me suggests 2e needs to add more meat to the bones of its ranged-versus-ranged combat, obviously not a focus for Pathfinder but definitely one for Starfinder. Defenses need to be deflated in SF, and I think there needs to be additional mechanics added to encourage grouping up and reward good positioning, while punishing long-term entrenchment behind the same piece of cover.
The big TL;DR to all this is that I think Starfinder's gun-based combat has some solid elements owing to its 2e framework, but also quite a few shaky bits that will need refining. Some new mechanics added to Starfinder's weapons I think need reworks or outright removal, as they didn't pan out well in practice, and above all I think the game really needs to speed up its combat beyond its current pace, mainly by deflating enemy defensive stats and discouraging excessive entrenchment in cover. Other players have noted that guns felt weak and need buffing, and while I do think guns could be improved in many ways (chiefly, by streamlining them with the removal of the magazine and expend statistics for the most part, and by making most guns reload 0), the underlying issue I'd say is more that Starfinder needs to harmonize its NPCs with its gun-based gameplay, which I think ought to mean lower HP and resistances overall. I think one of the challenges the current playtest missed was adapting 2e's framework to ranged-centric gameplay: Pathfinder doesn't flesh out ranged combat terribly much, but Starfinder really needs to if it wants to be on the same level of tactical play, in my opinion.
Continuing from the Solarian and Soldier feedback threads, here's my feedback on the Witchwarper class based on around a month of playtesting. I'll split my post into sections, spoiler them, and add a TL;DR just so it's all a bit easier to navigate.
Methods:
Here are the methods I've used for my playtest:
Most of my playtests took place at levels 1-5, as I ran them mostly using the official Starfinder playtest scenarios and field tests. I ran some playtests at higher levels using Pathfinder content, but treated those as secondary to the playtest scenarios.
I ran my Witchwarper with a variety of party compositions, mostly with just other Starfinder classes. I eventually started adding Pathfinder classes into the mix, and treated those playtests as secondary.
I ran my Witchwarper under different ancestries, as I was playtesting those too.
I ran the scenarios RAW for the most part, only adjudicating when something broke or was missing from the rules (including base features that were missing on the core class). I then started playing with certain parameters, like enemy behavior and compositions or the Witchwarper's features, and treated those findings as secondary.
My ability setup was pretty straightforward: I maxed out my Intelligence, then Dexterity for max AC, then Constitution and Wisdom to max out my remaining defenses.
TL;DR I ran the Witchwarper many times mainly through the official playtest scenarios at their low level range, using a variety of ancestries and party compositions. As I put the class through the same encounters, I altered some parameters over time to see how they would affect the its performance.
Quantum Field:
Although casters tend to have fewer unique class features than martials, I ended up having a lot to say about the Witchwarper's quantum field mechanic and their features around it:
Warp Reality is meant to be the Witchwarper's distinguishing feature, but the ability felt incredibly clunky to use in practice. Moving the quantum field requires either spending two actions Dismissing the effect then using Warp Reality again, or waiting another round for it to vanish on its own, which led to the field often feeling largely useless by itself, and mostly there just to enable anchoring effects.
On top of the quantum field being finicky to deploy and move to a relevant area, I also simply did not find its effects particularly impressive. I expected its zone to provide intense area denial, but outside of the anomaly paradox, in practice it just enabled a few decent special actions and turned on some other effects regardless of whether or not they took place in the area. Many times, I found it better to just not bother with Warp Reality and instead just play the Witchwarper as a generic caster -- which worked really well, because the class's base stats are so strong. This is not a good thing, in my opinion, and made the class's defining feature feel more like a bolted-on gimmick than a genuinely new way to play a caster.
Anchoring spells was quite useful in providing an additional means of Sustaining the quantum field when trying to do something else, and would be perfectly helpful if it weren't for the fact that it makes it more difficult to wait for the quantum field to run out in order to redeploy it. This I think is more an issue with the quantum field itself being a clunky mechanic to work with right now than with the anchoring spells feature.
Quantum Transposition felt essential as a means of actually moving the Quantum Field as needed, and Quantum Pulse felt similarly far better than alternatives for the action economy benefit it provided. I'm citing both feats here as I think both ought to be part of the core class by default, and I'd even go farther and say that the player should be able to redeploy their quantum field each time they Sustain it by any means.
Anchors came up a few times, but not enough to really feel like a core class feature. In general, the Witchwarper's anchor and subclass provided lots of diffuse benefits, often just to oneself, which I didn't consider particularly relevant to their core quantum field mechanic or the rest of their playstyle, and so these didn't really add much to my play experience save for more power.
While I appreciate the ease with which the anchors can be used to create a neurodivergent character as an autistic person myself, I'm less a fan of how much of the flavor text the coding currently represents, and how it often assumes some degree of mental turbulence. I feel it could be adjusted in a way that preserves some of the coding, but makes it less central and more positive overall.
Restorative Recollection does not fully work as written, because you can't act while stunned. It is therefore impossible to use this action to reduce one's stunned condition.
Warp Spells felt like a mixed bag overall. Some, like warp terrain, worked nicely as a Sustain mechanic and properly enhanced the quantum field (and in that spell's case, comboed quite nicely with a Solarian and Soldier), and others, like warp probability, felt like they had nothing to do with the quantum field at all, nor did they Sustain it adequately due to working as reaction spells. This also meant that some paradoxes, like analyst and gap influenced, were unable to Sustain their quantum field with their focus spells at low levels, and the analyst subclass in particular can't use their focus spells to Sustain their QF until 11th level, at which point the one warp spell that they can use takes two actions and can't be used alongside a slot spell or cantrip. Overall, I think there needs to be a pass made across these spells so that they properly relate to the quantum field and take one action to use, so that they can Sustain QF and also don't take up too much of the Witchwarper's turns.
Warped Infinities turned the quantum field from a thing that was super-finicky and hard to deploy into something that was trivially easy to exert across the battlefield, with no real need for redeployment or any gameplay around that at all. While the benefit to convenience was significant, I also feel it took all the interactivity out of the feature and made it less interesting as a result, so I don't feel the feature is really justified.
TL;DR The Witchwarper's quantum field is thematically interesting, but its ability to provide good area-based gameplay is stymied by its extreme clunkiness and a set of core features and warp spells that only sometimes interact with the area. I was really looking forward to this mechanic, as I feel it's full of potential and flavor, but right now it feels more like a gimmick than a fully functional core feature.
Core Class:
Splitting my feedback on the class's core chassis and its feats for readability:
The Witchwarper is currently missing an expert Strikes feature that normally appears at 13th level. I don't believe this exclusion is deliberate, as this is standard on casters even when they're not expected to use weapons.
The Witchwarper's scaling class DC seems to exist to make them good at AoE weapons or at the least grenades, which seems like a legacy inclusion, but in practice it just means their Quantum Field features fell off at high levels and were slightly less intuitive by dint of not relying on a spellcaster's spell DC. I feel it would be better to just make Spellsurge Ammo use the Witchwarper's spell DC for grenade Area Fires, and have the class use their spell DC for everything on their class that requires a DC.
The Witchwarper's combination of 8 HP per level, light armor proficiency, and 4 spell slots per rank I really don't think ought to exist in general, because the end result is just a caster that is generically too good and can ignore their core class features, which I ended up doing here simply because Warp Reality was often not worth the difficulty of managing the mechanic. The argument given for the Mystic was that casters need high defenses to avoid dying too quickly, but I found that the real culprit was that the game's tank classes, i.e. the Solarian and Soldier, were deficient at actual tanking and thus caused casters to get focused more, albeit with much lower damage from gunfire than the much higher damage from melee weapons that Pathfinder cloth casters deal with (or try to avoid dealing with, rather). When I experimented with changes that made the Solarian or Soldier better at drawing attention to themselves, or included Pathfinder tanks, the Witchwarper drew much less attention to themselves, to the point where I think they ought to be reduced to a 6 HP/level caster with no armor proficiency.
With the above said, I also didn't feel like 4 spell slots per rank would be needed even with all of the above. In practice, the Witchwarper struck me as a class that's expected to spend entire turns manipulating their quantum field and using focus spells, and with that amount of abilities that don't rely on daily attrition, that to me is a sign the class ought to have fewer spell slots. Lowering the class's spell slots per rank I think would also allow the Witchwarper's quantum field mechanic to be made much stronger, as from my experience I found it mostly lacking, to the point of it feeling more like a gimmick than a core class feature.
Due to the short range on many cantrips, the Witchwarper felt surprisingly exposed compared to many martial classes unless they used a few specific cantrips from Pathfinder's Player Cores. This made several new cantrips less desirable to use simply because of their more limited range.
TL;DR The class is missing a key feature and strangely relies on a up-to-master class DC that messes up its high-level scaling, but is also massively overstatted right now, to the point where they can ignore their quantum field mechanic and still end up being a really strong, generic caster. This I think is the least interesting way of engaging with a caster class (the remastered Oracle I think suffers from the same problem), and I'd much rather take out a lot of power from the Witchwarper's core stats if it means making their quantum field much easier to use and significantly more powerful.
Feats:
I mostly focused on level 1-4 feats during my playtests, owing to the level range at which I mostly played:
As mentioned in the quantum field section, Quantum Pulse and Quantum Transposition felt essential to properly deploy and move around the Witchwarper's quantum field, and when I made those feats baseline to the class their mechanic felt much more usable.
I quite enjoyed the Witchwarper feats that interacted with the class's quantum fields. The subclass feats at 2nd level helped dig into each of their niche, and were among the few effects that made me feel good for having my QF in the right place. By contrast, effects like Meandering Mind, whose requirement is redundant given its anchoring trait, don't interact with the class's actual quantum field, and so their requirement feels perfunctory.
Zone effects need a bit more precision, as Radiant Zone implies a limited duration to its effect, but Debris Zone implies that its effects are persistent for the duration of the quantum field. I ruled that Radiant Zone happened instantly and had no duration, but right now there is ambiguity to how these work.
This is probably more of a personal preference, but I'm not a big fan of effects randomly determine what you do, as with Shift Energy, and I feel letting the player choose to trigger weaknesses more accurately might make for more interesting gameplay, even if it meant making the feat higher-level.
Reality's Anchor is straight-up power creep with no apparent justification. I see no reason why any class should have 4 Focus Points, nor why the Witchwarper in particular needs this over any other class.
Quantum negation is missing an action cost.
TL;DR There are some solid elements to feats that interact properly with the Witchwarper's quantum field, which I found the most enjoyable. A lot of feats interacted only superficially with QF in that they just needed it up, others seemed to add power without real gameplay, and zone effects need more consistent writing.
The big TL;DR from me here is that the Witchwarper was the class I was looking forward to playing the most due to their theme, but their core mechanic I don't think is fully there yet. I wanted the class to lay down one or even multiple quantum fields for area control and extremely concentrated power in a localized area, but instead the class is currently just generically really strong and saddled with a gimmick that's not fully functional and doesn't entirely integrate with the rest of their spellcasting. If I were to make one suggestion, it would be to tone down the Witchwarper's base stats and make their QF both much smoother to use and much more powerful, and beyond that I had more ideas that may or may not be worth trying out (I did have a good time playing with these alterations after playing the base class RAW, but that may be just me):
Witchwarper Suggestions:
Some more suggestions for what I'd want to see on the Witchwarper, which I've tried out with positive results:
Reduce the Witchwarper to a 6 HP/level caster with only unarmored proficiency. When the Solarian and Soldier were drawing more fire as appropriate for their classes, this felt completely fine.
Reduce the class to a 3-slot caster. This took out a lot of generic power out of the class and made them rely more on their quantum field, which I think is what ought to happen for a Witchwarper.
Have the class use their spell DC rather than their class DC for all of their class feats and features. This made no difference at most levels save for levels 19-20, where it stopped a few effects from falling off in accuracy.
Bake Quantum Pulse into Warp Reality, remove the limit of one QF at a time, and let the player move their QF each time they Sustain it from any source. This would allow a Witchwarper to maintain multiple QFs if they commit to that.
Prevent most of the Witchwarper's spells from working out of their QF (basically anything with a range greater than touch and less than 1 mile), but let their spells originate from any place inside their QF, give all of their spells the anchoring trait, and maybe even let the Witchwarper's spell attacks and spell DC gain an item bonus at the same levels when martials gain their own item bonuses to attacks. Implementing this made the Witchwarper play radically differently from other casters, focusing on one or two specific areas with extremely powerful effects from a longer distance instead of just casting less intense spells overall anywhere.
Standardize warp spells to single-action spells and make them properly relate to the Witchwarper's Quantum Field, which would make it much easier for the class to Sustain their QF, potentially even several at a time, and do that alongside casting slot spells or cantrips.
In summary, I'd like the Witchwarper to be much more concentrated around their Quantum Field -- I think it'd be quite interesting to play a caster class whose spells are focused exclusively around one or a couple of highly localized areas, and when I tried a version of this I ended up making very different decisions from other casters. I ended up feeling much less free in certain respects, of course, but much more powerful in others, with the additional freedom of being able to target enemies from a greater range. Even if the specifics of the above don't make it into the final version, I'd like to see more of that direction, which already exists in the class to an extent, and if fully realized could really make the Witchwarper stand out from everyone else in a good way.
Following up on the Solarian class feedback thread I wrote, here's my feedback on the Soldier based on playtesting the class for about a month. I'll split my post into sections, spoiler them, and add a TL;DR just so it's all a bit easier to navigate.
Methods:
Here are the methods I've used for my playtest:
As with the Solarian and the other classes, I playtested the Soldier mainly at levels 1-5 through the official playtest scenarios. I used Pathfinder monsters to playtest the class at higher levels, but treated those findings as secondary.
I ran the Soldier in a variety of party compositions mainly using other Starfinder classes. I also tried some scenarios with Pathfinder classes in the party, but also treated those findings as secondary.
I ran the scenarios RAW for the most part, only adjudicating when something broke or was missing from the rules (which happened a few times). I then started playing with certain parameters, like enemy behavior and compositions or the Soldier's features, and treated those findings as secondary.
I ran my Soldier under various different ancestries, as I was playtesting those too.
I maxed out my Soldier's Constitution first, then my Dexterity, and then increased my Wisdom and Strength for the most part. I experimented with Charisma or Intelligence as a fourth stat instead of Strength but didn't get much out of it, for reasons I'll detail below.
I went with the Aegis Series armor, as it gives a +6 to AC for the least Bulk. I experimented with various AoE weapons, but eventually settled on a stellar cannon for area weapons, and a machine gun for automatic weapons, for reasons I'll detail below.
TL;DR: I ran the Soldier many times mainly through the official playtest scenarios at their low level range, using a variety of ancestries and party compositions. As I put the class through the same encounters, I altered some parameters over time to see how they would affect the its performance.
AoE Weapons:
It's going to be impossible to discuss the Soldier without discussing AoE weapons, so this would be a good occasion to discuss them and the various issues I took with them:
Because weapon proficiency doesn't matter on AoE weapons (their saving throws use your class DC), I had total freedom of choice over which ones to pick, on any class. This is not a good thing in my opinion, and is one of the interactions that AoE weapons break.
Unfortunately, for some strange reasons the majority of advanced AoE weapons felt worse than their martial counterparts: The magnetar rifle can only target up to three opponents with an Auto-Fire, the plasma cannon has worse stats than the stellar cannon in nearly every respect save for its damage die, and the screamer is way too short-ranged for a weapon that can only fire within its first range increment. Even with a full range of options, I ended up going for the stellar cannon and the machine gun, which I felt performed the best overall. If an actually strong advanced AoE weapon were to ever be released, however, it would easily run the risk of invalidating every other AoE weapon due to this, and causing problems if it were strong on any one class irrespective of proficiency.
When I gave one of these weapons to a Commander, they ended up using these weapons better than anyone else besides the Soldier alongside single-action tactics like Reload!, gaining access to more AoE than they could otherwise access despite being a class whose damage is entirely single-target: if AoE weapons didn't have so many problems, I'd consider this a genuine compatibility risk, and the fact that a class with a legendary class DC wasn't enough to redeem AoE weapons is, in my opinion, a damning indictment of those weapons in their current state.
On any other class but the Soldier, AoE weapons did not perform well in my opinion. Even when just a trained DC would've been enough, casters couldn't afford to take two actions to make an attack instead of casting a spell, and martial classes using these weapons dropped significantly in damage output overall, and felt about as rigid as a caster due to needing to spend two actions to do their main thing of attacking, while often operating from only a limited range. Starfinder martials actually did worse overall than Pathfinder martials, surprisingly, because SF2e's martial classes often have to spend at least one action doing their class's thing before taking the rest of their turn, and a three-action rotation was just too inflexible even for a Guns Blazing Envoy.
Worth noting that even on the Soldier, AoE weapons often fell dramatically in effectiveness due to having a hard range limit on their AoE attacks, another interaction with normal weapon stats that these weapons break (in this instance, range increments). Fighting Amnieka in A Cosmic Birthday when the creature was flying high above ground meant my automatic weapon-wielding Soldier could only make regular Strikes at a steep accuracy penalty, and my area weapon-wielding Soldier couldn't attack with their cannon at all. A similar problem occurred when I made the flying repair drones fly a bit higher than prescribed in the scenario.
To top it all off, one of the consistent issues I ran into with AoE weapons was that in Starfinder's combats, enemies often were spaced too far apart for the AoE bit to kick in. In the Fire Team Fiasco encounter from Field Test #5, for instance, every enemy starts 20 feet away from the next, and the distance only increases as combat plays out. In the instances where I did catch multiple enemies at a time, usually 2 and often with the help of a graviton Solarian, it still didn't feel like this amazing burst of damage for the actions I was spending, even if it was satisfying catching more than one enemy in my AoE.
On a more minor note, I found it tiresome for the Soldier's entries to keep repeating "Area Fire or Auto-Fire". I find it strange that these two extremely similar types of weapons that basically do the same thing (range and expend aside, Auto-Fire is functionally just a cone Area Fire) required different rules, which added a lot of text to the Soldier's entry especially.
While it didn't come up often, the interaction between Disarm and AoE attacks is ambiguous, as they don't make attack rolls. I ruled in favor of Disarm applying the penalty to the DC, but can't confirm whether this is RAW for sure.
I discuss the problem with the underlying math and mechanics with AoE weapons at even greater length in another thread, and one of the changes I tried out was making AoE weapons into regular guns that dealt splash damage in various different areas. Although splash damage is unpopular among some members of the community, these altered weapons (whose stats are listed in the thread) performed significantly better than vanilla area weapons as written, and were genuinely desirable to use on many more characters. I adjusted the Soldier around these weapons, in ways I mention below, and the class felt significantly improved overall.
TL;DR: AoE weapons in my experienced performed so poorly that I don't believe they are fit for purpose as written. They are clunky, altogether weak, and don't actually feel like real weapons so much as a different mechanic altogether shoehorned into a few guns, breaking several basic interactions along the way that risk causing even bigger problems further down the line (if an actually strong advanced AoE gun gets added, for instance, literally anyone could take it). Because the Soldier is made to use these weapons, these are a major contributing factor to the problems I experienced with the class. As loath as some people would be to see this, I very much recommend Paizo try implementing these weapons as regular guns that deal splash damage in bursts, cones, and lines alongside their Strike damage, perhaps even also add the agile trait to automatic guns, as trying out versions of these guns significantly improved the gameplay of AoE weapons in my experience and made the Soldier feel a lot better to play (after adjusting the class around these mechanics).
Core Class:
Splitting my feedback on the class's core chassis and its feats for readability:
Suppressing Fire felt useful in distinguishing the Soldier and giving them a unique contribution besides AoE damage, but the suppressed condition felt lackluster, especially against ranged enemies who didn't need to move. If I were able to hit more enemies at a time with AoE weapons, perhaps the condition would've felt a bit better, and the Speed penalty did help against melee opponents (I ruled that the penalty was -10, as there's currently a discrepancy between the condition as listed on the Soldier class and as listed in the general rules, the latter of which lists the penalty as -5), but in practice I was often just suppressing one target at a time, if that.
The Soldier's general contribution of AoE damage generally did not materialize, as enemies did not clump up often enough for it to really kick in. This I think is an issue with Starfinder's ranged combat in general more than the Soldier themselves, and when I experimented with adding some universal actions that incentivized people to group up, the Soldier felt better to use, though still not great against groups of 2 at a time.
Because the Soldier wasn't really getting to lay down all that much threat overall, I found that intelligent enemies had a better time just targeting other party members. As such, despite the Soldier being made to tank damage, they often just got ignored, and this along with a similar problem on the Solarian I suspect is why Starfinder's casters needed more base defenses.
Primary Target was helpful as a means of making me feel like I wasn't just spending two actions on just about a Strike's worth of damage oftentimes, but it also still didn't feel great to use for a number of reasons: my Soldier's Strikes were less accurate due to relying on my Dexterity, the fact that I had to max out Dexterity as my second stat to make good use of Primary Target felt really inappropriate on such a bulky class, and making Area Fires all the time, including with feats, felt strangely more repetitive than a martial class making Strikes, perhaps because I knew in the back of my mind that Strikes are a thing martial classes normally do that would often have been more appropriate for the situation I was in. I would've much preferred to have the option to make regular Strikes against single targets and AoE attacks against crowds instead of nailing every problem with the same hammer, in this case Area/Auto-Fire + Primary Target.
One interaction worth reporting as well is that Primary Target easily leads to a Soldier spending their entire turn focusing a single target with an automatic weapon, as the third action spent making a Strike only has a -5 MAP after Primary Target. This was something I could easily do all throughout an encounter with a machine gun due to its large magazine size. This also ended up making the Soldier strangely effective at single-target damage relative to other ranged martial classes besides the Operative, which I really didn't think was appropriate for the class and their niche.
Walking Armory and especially Fearsome Bulwark felt a bit janky: these features weren't interesting to use, didn't particularly evoke anything thematically interesting that couldn't already be achieved with existing options (Intimidating Prowess, for instance), and merely served to make the Soldier use Constitution for more things in a way that both felt unnecessary (Strength is an appropriate secondary stat on the Soldier, and Charisma ought to be a good fourth stat option), and seemed to miss the problem of the Soldier still being overly reliant on Dexterity for Primary Target. The fact that Fearsome Bulwark happens only partway through the Soldier's progression also creates this bizarre shift where Charisma starts out being a decent score to have on a Soldier, then drops massively in value once it gets replaced by Constitution at level 3. Most of the effects of the features I feel could've been easily dropped in favor of just one level 1 feature that lets you easily wear heavy armor as a Constitution class (which you can do already with just +3 Strength and the aegis series), and keys your two-handed weapon attack rolls to Constitution.
The Soldier's base stat progression makes the class more durable than the Champion, with more HP and legendary Fort saves. This should not happen, particularly in a game where damage is lower overall due to coming much more often from ranged attacks. At legendary armor proficiency, a Soldier has more AC than a caster taking greater cover, further disincentivizing enemies from focusing the Soldier over another, more impactful party member. I think the legendary Fort saves are fine, but the class could stand to have just master AC at most and perhaps even trained-to-expert Ref and Will saves, as I do think Starfinder classes that fight at range generally ought to have fewer defenses than their melee Pathfinder counterparts.
The Bombard felt like its benefits ought to be baseline to the class. Suppressed on a successful save is a significant power boost that doesn't induce any playstyle alterations, and no longer friendly-firing my Solarian feels like a basic convenience that any soldier ought to know.
In general, the subclasses felt like they could use some improvements. Auto-Fire basically meant my Soldier only used machine guns and didn't really alter my playstyle so much as make me straight-up stronger, Armor Storm made me even more needlessly durable and undesirable to hit than I already was, Close Quarters didn't interact well with the Soldier's core features and felt like it required Whirling Swipe to properly start working, and Erudite Warrior basically just let me spend the rest of my turn suppressing one more target, which was nice but not terribly interactive. In general, none of the Soldier's subclasses felt to me like they really helped shape the class's identity or add variety to their playstyle, to the point where they mostly felt superfluous.
Despite Strength having its function mostly overtaken by Constitution due to the Soldier's features, I still ended up increasing it just in case I ended up fighting in melee, which happened from time to time due to the short range of AoE weapons. Charisma didn't really offer that many benefits once Fearsome Bulwark kicked in, and Intelligence just didn't do much for the class at all.
When I started playing a bit more with certain changes, I tried a version of the Soldier that used single-target guns that dealt splash damage, keyed their two-handed attacks to Constitution, and instead of Primary Target gave them a feature that let them spend two actions to Strike every target in the splash area of their gun instead of making just one Strike with splash damage. The end result was a class that felt immensely more varied and flexible, with real choice over how they got to engage their targets. They also felt like their contributions aligned more with what the class was meant to do, as their single-target damage wasn't great but their AoEs felt really good, especially in combination with other bonuses and penalties to Strikes and AC.
TL;DR: The Soldier generally felt samey, repetitive, and overly simplistic, with a feature list that mostly just pushed the class to do the same thing all the time and max out a very specific stat list. Despite this, I was very reliant on Dexterity for Primary Target, which I disliked, and didn't feel like the Soldier's contributions shone through: the class didn't really get much of a chance to deal lots of AoE damage, they didn't really apply all that much crowd control, and as a result they often got ignored by an enemy who often targeted the Mystic or Witchwarper instead, which to me explains why the latter classes needed more defenses. More than anything else, the class just felt extremely rigid due to the implementation of AoE weapons and all of their class features that ride on their use, and felt like they were being given just one big hammer to smash against every problem instead of having a slightly more varied toolset.
Feats:
I mostly focused on level 1-4 feats during my playtests, owing to the level range at which I mostly played:
Not the most important part of the Soldier specifically, but Quick Swap, an effective feat in and of itself, highlights a compatibility issue in my opinion with having multiple pairs of hands: if the option to switch hands specifically has to be mentioned on an option for it to work as an alternative to swapping weapons, then this means any ancestry with more than two hands is going to have a lot of trouble with many Pathfinder feats, which assume only one pair of hands and just have you draw an item or swap items. Switching hands ought to be a default alternative option to drawing or swapping an item, which would give ancestries with more than two arms the added benefit of using those feats without triggering reactions that normally occur when using a manipulate action.
Despite using a machine gun, which has a reload value of 2, I had to reload so infrequently in any given fight that Ready Reload really did not feel worth it. In general, I don't believe most Starfinder guns ought to be balanced around needing to reload.
Warning Spray as written still lets the Soldier use Primary Target to make a Strike and damage the target, which doesn't seem to be the feat's intention.
Menacing Laughter still has your Demoralize check take a penalty if you don't speak the target's language, even though the flavor text suggests you're not really speaking so much as shouting or laughing in an intimidating fashion. "Laughs in Vesk" is canonically how the feat works right now, and that's just plain weird.
Shot on the Run is another example of Starfinder movement abilities lacking the option to let the user move using a different movement type. This caused my Barathu Soldier to use Shot on the Run and Stride a grand total of 5 feet, with no option to Fly instead. There needs to be a consistency pass for these movement abilities to let the character use other movement types, like with Sudden Charge and other equivalent Pathfinder options.
Punishing Salvo is outright designed to make the Soldier focus down single targets across their entire turn with area weapons just as they would with automatic weapons. This is really not a good idea in my opinion, and ends up causing the Soldier's single-target damage to brush up dangerously close to the Operative's when single-target damage is not meant to be a great strength of the class, at least not as I understand it.
Stock Striker was a really fun feat to use. I really enjoyed the flexibility and action economy benefit it gave me of letting my Soldier make melee Strikes as needed without having to switch to a different weapon.
I did not enjoy using Widen Area: although its improvement to my machine gun's cone was quite significant, spending my entire turn on doing just one thing really did not feel good on a martial class, even if it would normally be fine for a caster. On line weapons the effect wasn't as significant, I feel, and the stellar cannon is the only burst area weapon that can currently benefit from the feat.
Bullet Hell looks like it ought to use the rules for hazardous terrain to describe the damage taken when moving into the area, rather than the current save effect that looks like it could add a lot of time to combat rounds.
Run, Cowards! is strange in that it applies an effect that clearly looks like it ought to be fear, but lacks the fear and mental traits. Unlike suppressed, which I think doesn't need to be a mental condition due to it being the Soldier's bread and butter (and could also be explained in ways other than messing with a creature's mind), here I think there's more of a dissonance that I think is harder to justify.
There are quite a few action compression feats that have you make an Area/Auto-Fire and something else, and while I quite enjoyed them in general, I also feel this feeds into a problem right now where the Soldier just wants to make AoE attacks all the time even when there's just one target around. When I experimented with adjusting the Soldier around AoE guns that made Strikes rather than two-action Area/Auto-Fires, I made these feats single actions with a Strike and gave them the flourish trait, and the Soldier overall felt like they had many more options at their disposal, and more interesting turns overall.
On a more positive note, there were several Soldier feats that I found really exciting: Rocket Jump, Special Delivery, and Damoritosh's Grip are among my favorites, and in general I do think most of the Soldier's feats do a good job of digging into the class's flavor in a way that feels distinct from other martial classes.
TL;DR: Although several of the low-level feats I tested had some issues, I actually quite enjoyed the Soldier's feats overall. I don't think they give the class as much variety as I'd hoped, but that I think is a problem with the base class mainly, and there are quite a few flavorful options that are fun to use.
My concluding TL;DR is that right now, the Soldier suffers mainly because their design is built around the giant pile of clunk that is AoE weapons. Their feats are largely fun to use, and the class stands out from other martials, so that I think is a success for what was originally "Fighter in space", but AoE weapons felt so bad to use, and the class is so overly-focused around making two-action AoE attacks and increasing their attributes in a certain way, that right now the class feels like it's got the worst of both worlds, with the rigid action economy of a caster and the restricted options of a martial class.
Based on my experience with both the class and AoE weapons in general, the one recommendation I'd make is to just take AoE weapons back to the drawing board, and work from there. Based on the experiments I'd made with tweaked versions of both AoE guns and the Soldier, making those guns work like actual weapons, Strikes and all, made them worth using on many more classes besides the Soldier, and made the Soldier themselves feel like an actual full class, with a proper range of options and a greater feeling of agency. Other factors, like tweaks to ranged combat, also brought out the Soldier's AoE capabilities more, and once the Soldier started laying down more threat, they started getting targeted more, which took the heat off of the party's casters in particular. For those wondering, the Soldier also still felt distinct from classes like the Fighter even when making more Strikes, as the class's contributions and feats differ quite significantly from the Fighter's.
After playtesting the Starfinder 2e playtest for about a month now, I'm feeling ready to write down some more detailed notes on specific aspects of the game. In this one, I'll be discussing the Solarian. I'll split my post into sections, spoiler them, and add a TL;DR just so it's all a bit easier to navigate.
Methods:
Here are the methods I've used for my playtest:
I mostly playtested by running a Solarian in the various playtest scenarios and field test encounters we've been given, which means most of my playtesting happened at levels 1 through 5. I did playtest the Solarian at higher levels using Pathfinder content, but treated that playtesting as secondary to the official scenarios.
Because I was playtesting the other Starfinder classes at the same time, I ran my Solarian in a variety of party compositions, initially just with Starfinder classes, and over time with some Pathfinder classes in the mix. As with the level ranges, I treated the instances with Pathfinder classes as secondary to the playtests run exclusively with Starfinder content.
I started by running the scenarios exactly as written, or as close as possible when there were gaps or issues. After several runs of the same encounters, I started altering certain parameters, such as by changing enemy behavior or their composition, and a while after that I started including changes to the class itself and comparing them to my findings on the vanilla class. Obviously, I treated the findings under those alterations as secondary to the findings when running the class and scenarios as written.
Because I was playtesting other ancestries, and had a hunch some would have interesting interactions with the class, I ran my Solarian as various different ancestries.
I maxed out my Solarian's Strength, then went for a mix of Dexterity, Constitution, and Wisdom. I experimented with prioritizing Dexterity over Constitution and vice versa for the most part, and while I experimented a little with sacrificing a bit of those secondary stats for Intelligence or Charisma, I quickly gave up on it for reasons detailed below in the core class feedback.
I mainly just used freebooter armor, and for this reason I always had at least a +1 to my Dex mod.
TL;DR: I ran the Solarian many times mainly through the official playtest scenarios at their low level range, using a variety of ancestries and party compositions. As I put the class through the same encounters, I altered some parameters over time to see how they would affect the its performance.
Solar Shot:
I was going to bundle together all solar manifestations in the same section, but felt Solar Shot needed its own section in the end, because I have a lot of feedback concerning it in particular:
It should come as little surprise that Solar Shot, in my opinion, had a lot of issues. Because I found it difficult to impossible for the Solarian to close gaps with certain enemies and get into melee range of them (more on that below), I had to rely on Solar Shot as my primary attack in several encounters, or at least try to, which made its problems all the more apparent.
The biggest problem with Solar Shot by far was its limited range, in my experience. Not only does it have a maximum range, rather than a range increment, the extremely short range of 15 to 30 feet made it sometimes impossible to use, forcing me to draw a backup gun and start shooting with that instead. The playtest scenarios seem to actively try to hide this issue by giving many enemies a range of 30 feet on their ranged attack, or in the case of Shards of the Glass Planet instructing the GM to have the repair drones stay only 30 feet off the ground, but in the fight against Amnieka, the midwife is instructed to fly "far overhead" and ended up being out of Solar Shot range.
Solar Shot relying on Dexterity was the main reason why I experimented with prioritizing Dex over Con. Not only did this make my Solar Shots inaccurate even when prioritizing Dex to the complete exclusion of Con and Wisdom, the fact that I had to use Solar Shot or a gun quite often made me feel like the Solarian was quite reliant on Dex, when in my opinion that's not really what the class was meant to be about.
Solar Shot's on-crit effects on both attunements rarely triggered for me due to the inaccuracy of the attack. I'm honestly baffled by the inclusion of on-crit effects on this mechanic in the first place.
I rarely used the graviton version of Solar Shot, because with a 15-foot range I could either get in range of the target (if they were at ground level), or had to use an actual gun (if they were flying, often more than 15 feet away). Additionally, the Trip attempt on a crit isn't exempted from MAP, making it much less effective at taking flying enemies out of the sky as I'd hoped.
I quickly ended up using the photon version of Solar Shot whenever possible, and so purely due to its range. The persistent damage on a crit rarely triggered, but that didn't matter, as the range was the main factor.
On a more personal note, I really disliked having to use Solar Shot so often. I did not enjoy playing a class that was meant to be a melee character designed for Starfinder's combat, only to spend entire encounters making ranged attacks. If the class were actually able to close gaps properly when needed, I don't think this effect would even be necessary on the core class.
The one positive thing I'll say is that when Solar Shot hit, it felt meaty. When everyone else was dealing just a die of damage, a +4 to my damage roll made a significant difference and let me stand out as an exceptional damage-dealer compared to most other classes.
TL;DR: Solar Shot felt like a crutch to the frequent dysfunctionalities of the core class more than anything else, and even then it didn't feel like it really worked properly. It's meant to be a backup ranged attack, but sometimes I had to pull out a backup gun for some fights due to its limited range, and it did not feel fun having to make ranged attacks at between a -1 and a -3 penalty compared to my melee attacks, even if the damage rolls were better than on most other classes. I really don't think this should be part of the core class, as the Solarian in my opinion is meant to be the one melee-centric class in Starfinder, but given their other problems it feels like a necessity at the moment.
Nimbus Surge+Solar Weapon:
Covering the other two solar manifestations in the same section, as I ended up having less to say than Solar Shot:
Solar Nimbus was just okay for the most part, and didn't feel like a huge component to my character or their playstyle. I don't feel like this needed to be part of the core class, and I feel the theme of making your own solar armor could've perhaps been developed further as a feat.
Solar weapon's core structure has the same problem in my opinion as with the Mind Smith archetype in Pathfinder: its limited set of parameters means the weapons you forge end up being quite samey, and because you only get a fixed list of traits, it doesn't look like it's going to be easily scalable as Starfinder adds more weapon traits. I question this implementation over being able to actually forge weapons from the melee weapons list, and when I experimented with enabling the latter it felt like I had a lot more choice.
I question restricting the solar weapon to a one-handed or free-hand weapon, particularly given how little support the Solarian has for shields (they don't get Shield Block for free, unlike most Pathfinder melee classes) or free-hand builds.
Despite the above, I can understand the limitation, because even with just a one-handed weapon, the Solarian easily ends up outdamaging every other Starfinder class when they get to fight in melee, due to being the only one besides the Envoy to add their attribute modifier to their damage rolls. It Came From The Vast! in particular seemed almost entirely designed to cater to a Solarian, what with their melee-focused encounters where all of the enemies were massively weak to fire. In the instances where the class could fight in melee, their damage output felt extremely strong, at least compared to the weaker damage output of Starfinder classes rather than the usually greater melee damage of Pathfinder classes.
Often I preferred to use the photon-attuned version of my solar weapon for more damage, until I unlocked a particularly nasty combo at level 4: because the graviton-attuned version makes the target treat all adjacent squares as difficult terrain, and you can't Step into difficult terrain, hitting an enemy you're expecting to move with a graviton solar weapon makes them much more liable to trigger a Reactive Strike, which you can get at 4th level.
TL;DR: Solar Nimbus felt nice to have, but not really worthy of being a core feature, whereas the Solarian's solar weapon felt quite restricted in several odd ways. Because melee strikes inherently tend to deal more damage, Striking in melee with a solar weapon felt much stronger than the average ranged Strike, especially when triggering weaknesses, but I don't think it compares all that favorably to Pathfinder melee damage even with the photon-attuned damage bonus, due to the weapon being one-handed.
Attune + Solarian Arrangements:
Bundling these two features together as they're part of the same general system:
Attune I think needs a bit of refinement. It's one of those mechanics that draws comparisons to the Kineticist, except it misses what makes Channel Elements work, which is that the latter lets you make a single-action impulse as you turn your class features back on. By contrast, Attuning simply enables your class's basic features, including the ability to Strike with your solar weapon, so it feels like you're using an action to do nothing in the immediate.
Similarly, one of the things that helps with the Kineticist is that the class usually fights from range. The Solarian, by contrast, prefers melee or at least close-quarters combat, so when all of their features turn off (including Solar Nimbus's reaction), they're significantly more vulnerable. That the class can essentially do nothing at all until they spend that action to Attune once more feels quite harsh, and I found the class much more flexible when I allowed them to use certain actions without the attunement bonus when unattuned.
The favored attunement bit didn't feel particularly necessary to me. Two of the arrangements only do something when you're in one specific attunement, so you're already going to be incentivized to favor one over the other anyway. Attune could very well just let you choose your attunement as a baseline, which I experimented with and worked just fine on the class, removing the need to have a separate Attunement Control activity for exploration.
Cycle as a trait I think is fun to use, and I generally enjoyed dipping into one or the other attunement effect for most abilities, but the rigidity of attuning limited my ability to alter my playtstyle on the fly and make meaningful decisions most of the time. Being able to attune to any attunement freely would help this, I think.
The balanced arrangement felt strong, but also mostly full of filler. Binaric Assault dealt a lot of damage, but again I disliked how it made me use a ranged attack on a melee class, especially at point-blank range. In the few higher-level playtests I ran, Ascended Stability basically let me re-Attune as a reaction rather than an action, which in terms of action economy was super-strong, but negating that downside so cheaply didn't feel terribly thematic or conducive to interesting gameplay. Astrologic Sense felt meh; one extra action to gain an extra attunement effect felt okay, but limited as a once-per-encounter effect, especially on a class that would often need to spend that third action moving or doing something else.
Degradant felt like the best subclass, mainly because Black Hole actually let me close gaps. It's not super-reliable as a once-per-encounter save effect, but a mass pull from 30 feet at level 1 with damage on top felt super strong when I did press that button, plus it made for some spicy combos with a Soldier or AoE spellcaster in the party (it also pulled enemies out of cover, which was generally helpful). Defy Gravity however felt awful, not just because the Fly speed happened at a point where I'd already have gotten to equip ultralight wings on my Solarian many levels ago, but also because if you swap attunements or unattune, you drop from the air like a brick. Singularity felt strangely less powerful than Black Hole due to the Reflex save, lack of gapclosing, and use of void damage, the latter of which mystifies me given how bludgeoning, cold, or force looked much more appropriate.
A minor detail, but Singularity refers to "supernatural darkness". This is a 1e-ism, one of many in the playtest, as effects in 2e are either magical or nonmagical. The fact that the solarian's abilities are generally nonmagical runs into issues, which I'll describe in more detail below.
Radiant didn't help the Solarian close any gaps, and for that reason it felt like the weakest arrangement. It has a place due to its AoE damage and crowd control, but I would've much preferred a gapcloser at early levels. As with Defy Gravity, Solar Wind felt like too little, too late. Something I'll also note in the feats is that despite photons literally being light particles, none of the Radiant arrangement's abilities have the light trait, making for strange non-interactions at times.
TL;DR: Attune needs some tweaking to avoid feeling like a pure action tax, and could benefit from just letting you choose your attunement regardless of subclass. Balanced felt strong-yet-boring as a subclass, Degradant's first revelation was super-useful due to its gapclosing abilities, and Radiant didn't feel as good due to the lack of gapclosing. In general, I felt like the Solarian consistently needed a gapcloser out of their initial revelation, not a once-per-encounter ability.
Core Class:
Splitting my feedback on the class's core chassis and its feats for readability:
Let's talk about the elephant in the room: the Solarian can't close gaps well, even at all sometimes. This in my opinion makes the class extremely feast-or-famine: when the class can fight in melee, they feel like they're dealing more damage than any other Starfinder class (not necessarily Pathfinder classes though), but when the class can't fight in melee, which happens especially against ranged, flying enemies, they just feel utterly awful to play. While it's okay for a class to be weaker in situations that don't work in their favor, those particular situations where I couldn't get in melee felt so exceptionally poor by 2e's standards that I would go as far as to say that the class is currently dysfunctional in their current state.
Because of this, I didn't feel like my Solarian was able to draw focus consistently: when they got into melee or fought in melee encounters, they certainly kept enemies busy, but while they were getting in range, or if they were fighting at range, as the GM I felt like I could easily ignore the class and prioritize targets that were a lot more immediately threatening, like the party Mystic or Witchwarper. This I think not only harmed the Solarian, who didn't feel able to do what they were supposed to all around, but also harmed those other party members, who felt much more exposed than they ought to have been.
Not super-serious, but the above-average number of skills on the Solarian struck me as odd, given how the class really didn't feel like they were meant to be particularly good at skills.
The Solarian is oddly dependent on Dexterity for a number of reasons: for one, they need it to make Solar Shot work, but also, despite being a Strength class the Solarian needs a feat to opt into heavy armor, forcing them to rely on Dex for AC and Reflex saves. This limited the class's ability to opt into more attributes that have more uses out of combat in my experience, like Intelligence or Charisma.
Despite having otherwise fairly standard HP and armor proficiency, the Soldier's weak Fort saves really screwed the class over against certain hazards, plus a few enemies in A Cosmic Birthday. When I prioritized Dex over Con for the sake of less inaccurate Solar Shots, this made me feel quite a bit squishier than the average Pathfinder martial class, to the point where I initially felt like the class ought to be keyed to Constitution to avoid this. I've changed my mind on that particular point since, but still feel the class isn't quite as durable as they ought to be for one of Starfinder's tank classes.
Pensive Assessor is one of many class features in the Starfinder playtest that just tacks on numerical bonuses willy-nilly. I didn't test too much at its level, but its +2 felt unnecessary, and even the expert-to-master Perception didn't feel as necessary to me as better Fort saves.
Similarly, becoming legendary in solar weapons at 19th level is extremely awkward by 2e's standards: classes that are balanced around legendary attack proficiency become legendary at 13th level, so 19th level is far too late, and at that point the Solarian basically becomes a Fighter with attunement effects instead of flexible feats. I get that the devs needed some other feature besides class DC to signify progression at that level, but this feels like a bad choice and ought to be changed to something else in my opinion, like instantly reforging one's solar weapon or something.
I experimented with giving the class a fly Speed at level 1, and that in my opinion was a game-changer. Not only did the Solarian feel able to actually function properly on the occasions where enemies were out of melee range, the class ended up being much less reliant on Solar Shot and backup guns, and therefore Dexterity. I would go as far as to say that this sort of change, or any change that lets the Solarian consistently close gaps, is going to be essential in order for the class to have a decent baseline of functionality in Starfinder's encounters.
TL;DR: The Solarian's chassis, like with other Starfinder playtest classes, is full of little awkward deviations from the norm that feel more like accidents than conscious choices, but the worst flaw by far, and the Solarian's biggest problem in my opinion, is that they fundamentally lack the ability to close gaps, despite being a melee-centric class in a game where enemies can fly and shoot as early as level 1. The class in my opinion is not fit for purpose for this reason alone, and coupled with awkward defenses and a general over-reliance on Dexterity also makes the class far squishier and less able to draw focus from enemies than they ought to be. More than anything, the Solarian desperately needs built-in gapclosers at level 1.
Feats:
I mostly focused on level 1-4 feats during my playtests, owing to the level range at which I mostly played. Many feats are quite similar to Pathfinder feats, so I'll mainly cover the differences:
Stellar Rush, like most other movement abilities in the Starfinder playtests, lacks the text usually found on Pathfinder movement feats that let you use a variety of movement types, as with Sudden Charge. This caused my Barathu Solarian to move a measly 30 feet. To make matters worse, the concealment on the photon attunement often made me an active impediment to my allies as I concealed enemies from them as I rushed into melee.
Solar Rampart feels like it ought to be baseline to the class, and Solar Shield I feel ought to drop the free Shield Block feat in exchange for a better circumstance bonus to AC, or better yet the ability to manifest an actual shield from the shield list.
The Shattering Impact and Twin Guard feats have this strange bit of text that does this very 1e-style thing of countering a very specific counter: both are disharmony effects, which cause you to become unattuned (and therefore unmanifests your weapons), so in most cases the text is redundant. The exception to this is the balanced arrangement's Ascended Stability, which counters the unattunement, and in those cases it counters that counter. This to me just looks messy, and I don't think the text about unmanifesting solar weapons ought to remain.
As with the radiant arrangement's abilities, and photon-attuned effects in general, none of the photon-attuned effects have the light trait, which feels like an oversight. Because the light emitted by certain photon effects is nonmagical, given that the solarian's abilities are nonmagical, this causes them to be instantly extinguished by magical effects with the darkness trait, which is particularly bad for feats like Corona.
Because the vast majority of Solarian feats require you to be attuned, becoming unattuned means you effectively get to do nothing unless you spend that action tax. When I experimented with letting an unattuned Solarian still use certain abilities without gaining their attunement bonuses, the class felt like they had more interesting choices to make in the short-term, even if it was still more beneficial to attune in the long-term.
With all of this said, several feats felt quite fun to use. Eclipse Strike combined really well with good positioning when fighting in melee, Plasma Ejection added a nice bit of AoE and sometimes crowd control at close range, and Reactive Strike at level 4 rather than the usual level 6 immediately made my Solarian much better at controlling enemies.
TL;DR: The Solarian's feats need a consistency pass where they're given the appropriate traits and texts you'd expect from their effects in 2e, such as photon abilities having the light trait or Stellar Rush letting you use other movement types (the Solarian's effects also need to be made magical in general so that their light doesn't get instantly extinguished by magical darkness). More importantly, the feats felt fairly inflexible in how they mostly require attuning first, which I don't think is necessary. However, several feats did feel cool to use, so once the Solarian becomes more functional, I think they'll be able to do some more fun and impressive things, especially in melee.
The final TL;DR to this is that if my assessment feels like it's really negative, it's because it is. When I decided to start writing down my playtest findings of Starfinder's classes, I chose to begin with the one I think was the least successful. As a melee-focused class built for Starfinder's primarily ranged combat, the Solarian in my opinion absolutely needs to be able to get within melee range of their enemies: it doesn't have to always be easy, but it ought to always be possible. This is currently not the case, and while the class can be fairly powerful in melee for a Starfinder class (less so a Pathfinder class), they really don't feel great when they can't get in melee, and even worse when enemies are out of range of their extremely limited Solar Shot. As written, the Solarian is therefore, in my opinion, unfit for purpose.
If I were to make just one suggestion, it would be to give the Solarian gapclosers at level 1, whether it be a fly Speed, reusable initial revelations that let them close the distance between an enemy, or both. Currently, the class has a ton of stuff that has no relation to their core purpose, and that could easily be moved to feats, later-level revelations, or done away with entirely. If instead of that they had the means to actually engage consistently in melee, the class I think would come out much better for it.
Automatic Bonus Progression is a fantastic variant rule, allowing a GM to automatically hand out certain bonuses that are essential to character progression without worrying too hard about giving exactly the right items with the right fundamental runes at the right level. It's a rule I use often in my games, and it's quite a popular variant in general, which is likely why it got included in the remastered GM Core. It's also generally cited as a reference for when characters should be expected to have which item bonuses outside of ABP, and thus extrapolated as a larger reference for which effects are essential to character progression, making it a useful tool even to players not using the variant.
It is, however, not a rule without some flaws, and this is what this thread sets out to outline. For starters, a few points just so that we're on the same page:
A rule being flawed is not the same as a rule being bad, unplayable, or unfixable, much less the game as a whole being bad. I enjoy and use ABP despite its flaws, and most of the people who notice the flaws in ABP are players or GMs who use it a lot.
Let's all be mindful of the Oberoni fallacy: just because a problem with a rule can be fixed by GM fiat does not mean the problem does not exist. It is worth discussing the flaws in ABP because not everyone who uses ABP or wants to use it may be aware of these flaws, and because it would still be better for those problems to be eventually addressed at the source rather than at the table by the GM each time.
ABP does not intend to replace magic items entirely, but it does aim to enable GMs to run adventures without magic items or party treasure more easily if they so wish. GMs should be able to run games smoothly with ABP regardless of whether or not they include magic items in their adventure.
In the remaster, ABP got a bit of disclaimer text that acknowledges some of the problems with the variant and warns the GM about them. This is great, and likely the best that could be done within the remaster's short time frame, but it does not resolve the problem by itself, as it will still exist when using this variant.
Although ABP is a variant, it is not its stated intention to be disruptive to the game or to make it less functional. The fact that it parcels out its bonuses at very precise level intervals indicates it tries to avoid being unnecessarily disruptive. Therefore, I don't think it would be valid to dismiss aspects of ABP that do cause unnecessary disruption merely on the grounds that it's a variant rule, especially given its popularity.
Now that that's established, here's a list of some of the flaws I've run into in my usage of ABP:
Naked Rangers with Monk AC: The defense potency bonus you get as a replacement for armor potency runes applies even when wearing no armor or Explorer's Clothing, in fact nothing at all. Because being completely unarmored has no Dexterity cap, this means any class with Dexterity as a key attribute can eventually reach a +7 Dex mod to their AC on top of their defense potency bonus, exceeding their current AC limits and reaching AC comparable to that of a Monk outside the variant (who would themselves exceed the AC of a Champion outside the variant).
Sad Mutagenists: Because items that normally give item bonuses no longer do this in ABP, mutagens no longer function properly, as their purpose is to give item bonuses that exceed what you'd normally get at your level. Mutagenist Alchemists therefore end up having a very hard time when running ABP, and I personally caution my players against picking the subclass, and just using mutagens at all, in the games where I include the variant.
Sad Casters: Although ABP says you can do away with as much party treasure as you like, and suggests that it could be possible to run adventures with no magic items under this variant, doing so actually puts casters at a significant disadvantage, because scrolls, staves, and wands are an essential part of caster item progression. This in my experience has led to more than one adventure where a less experienced GM ran their game with ABP and without giving casters access to those items, leaving them feeling weak and limited (in fact, I suspect this, the prevalence of Abomination Vaults as a first-time AP, and a few other factors are a major influence on how casters are sometimes negatively perceived in online discussion spaces).
Property runes can be found, but not etched onto your weapons: The attack potency bonus you get as a replacement for weapon potency runes does not include the bit about letting you etch property runes onto your weapon. This means that under ABP, you can't etch property runes onto your weapons, though if the GM enables magic items, you can still come across weapons that have property runes baked-in.
Omitting property runes causes a substantial dip in martial damage: Starting at 8th level, property runes start offering bonus on-hit damage, which in theory is meant to be a choice as viable as any other property rune, but in practice dominates choices to such a degree that Paizo themselves noted in their post-remaster disclaimer text to the variant that using ABP will likely cause your damage to dip:
Automatic Bonus Progression wrote:
If you choose to eliminate runes entirely, this can reduce the PCs' damage since they won't have runes like flaming or holy.
For those interested, here's a bit of math outlining just how much of a dip this represents:
How much damage do property runes add?:
Looking at damage property runes, like flaming or shock, each adds 1d6 to your damage, and while this doesn't look like much, it adds up: at level 8, that's an additional 3.5 damage to each hit on average. Let's just pick a d12 melee weapon on a full Strength Fighter, where the relative increase in damage will be the smallest possible: at level 8, a weapon with one of these runes deals on average 2d12+1d6+4+3 = 23.5 damage on a hit, compared to 20 damage without. That's about a 17.5% increase in damage, which is quite significant. At level 19, a maxed-out weapon on that Fighter with a full complement of damaging property runes will deal 4d12+3d6+7+8 = 51.5 damage on a hit on average, and 41 average damage without, an even more significant 26% damage increase. On the flipside, if you were a regular martial with a piddly d4 ranged weapon, those property runes would increase your damage by 50% at level 8, and 66% at level 19.
TL;DR Damage property runes will increase your damage by up to 10.5 per hit on average, which depending on your weapon will raise its damage by anything between over a quarter and about two-thirds. This is a massive increase, to the point where the extra d6s from damage property runes should probably be treated the same way as the extra damage dice from striking runes and their corresponding devastating attacks bonus (in fact, the extra d6s will be bigger than those extra dice if your weapon's damage die is a d4).
All of this is to say that ABP, while an excellent variant, still has some room for improvement. Addressing some of these issues shouldn't be too complicated (for instance, simply stating that you need to be wearing armor or Explorer's Clothing to benefit from a defense potency bonus), and the developers likely didn't want to dedicate too much time or page space to fully remastering a variant that mostly does what it's supposed to. Nevertheless, Paizo is also a company that updates and improves their content over time, and some of these problems have been noted for quite some time, so it'd be nice to see the above addressed in some future errata cycle to the benefit of any table running this variant. These have been my observations from my play experience, and I imagine others have encountered problems with ABP not mentioned above too.
The barathu's been a particularly fun ancestry to play in the Starfinder playtest, owing mainly to their fly Speed. Their ability to recombine their genetics and retrain ancestry feats super-quick has also been fantastic to play with too, and I very much enjoyed their feats altogether. I'll also note that a few players on the forums criticized the ancestry's need to Fly each turn, but in practice barathus can simply use Fly to move around at ground level, without falling any further if they spend a turn not moving, so that was surprisingly unproblematic.
Here's what stuck out to me as having some room for improvement or expansion:
Although barathus can float at ground level just fine, the fact that they need to Fly to hold themselves aloft when they're full of buoyant gas I think leaves room for at least one feat to let them hover, while creating an inconsistency where barathus can't float and sleep at the same time, making them unable to survive on their homeworld as written.
Barathus currently interact poorly with movement feats in Starfinder, such as the Solarian's Stellar Rush, as most of those require Striding and the ancestry has a land Speed of 5 feet (for those who don't yet know, the indicated Speed of 25 feet is a typo). This is less an issue with the barathu specifically as it is with those feats missing the text commonly used for the same mechanics in Pathfinder, where you get to use any sort of movement type that you have (Vent Gas could also use this).
Not a real criticism, but we're definitely going to need compatibility adjustments for flying ancestries like the barathu, as well as other flying creatures below 9th level, so that they can play well in Pathfinder (besides disallowing them outright, which I think would be a shame).
My suggestions at this point would therefore be to implement the following:
An extra ancestral ability (not a feat) that simply lets you hover in place while sleeping normally unless you choose not to. This would let you sleep aloft while resting, which could have some extremely niche uses and also make barathus not sink while sleeping in gas giants.
A lower-level ancestry feat similar to Pathfinder's Smooth Hover where, as a free action at the start of your turn, you Fly 0 feet to hover in place. This would allow barathu Operatives and other classes with fixed action rotations to take their actions in mid-air without moving. Although the original Pathfinder feat is 12th-level, it should be okay to have this as a 5th-level feat in Starfinder, where ancestries can fly at 1st level (like the barathu!).
Standardize all movement feats (including Vent Gas) to let you Burrow, Climb, Fly, Stride, or Swim for the movement, like with Sudden Charge and similar Pathfinder feats.
Once Pathfinder compatibility becomes a focus, consider implementing a compatibility rule where when running a game of Pathfinder, flying player characters, as well as flying NPCs with a ranged attack, lose their fly Speed and gain other benefits instead until 9th level (this is when Pathfinder ancestries like the tengu start to access permanent fly Speeds). For instance, gaining a land Speed equal to your fly Speed, being still able to Arrest a Fall, Leaping 5 additional feet, no longer automatically failing checks to High Jump or Long Jump when not Striding 10 feet beforehand, and jumping 10 feet more than your check's result for a Long Jump (but not more than your Speed) would mirror effects like the strix's ancestral ability and the kobold's Winglets feat for the most part.
And that's my findings for the barathu. I'll be curious to know of others' experience with the ancestry in their own games, and if they caught anything the above misses too.
One of the more minor bugbears I've had with the Starfinder playtest is the general lack of feat options for making the most out of being multi-armed. When we first saw the multi-armed rules in Field Test 1, I was hopeful that the tight balancing around multiple arms would be itself counterbalanced by higher-level ancestry feats that would allow you to eventually make full use of them. In practice, we got one 9th-level feat that lets you use your other hands for one round once per day, and that's it.
I've written some more general notes I might share here at some point, but here's the stuff I tried for multiple hands:
Not a change, but made note of a typo: pages 14, 20, 36, and 47 all refer to the Switch Active Hands action, but the actual action for this is called Switch Hands.
Add the All Hands on Deck feat (the one that lets you treat one or two extra pairs of hands as active hands for a round) to the barathu and ysoki’s feat lists, with Grasping Tendrils as a prerequisite for the barathu and Prehensile Tail as a prerequisite for the ysoki (the barathu one could probably let you treat two pairs of hands as active hands, like the skittermander's version, just in case you pick grasping Tendrils twice). Basically, if you can ever get multiple hands from your ancestry, you should probably have access to All Hands on Deck.
Add the following ancestry feats to all of the above ancestries:
Hand-Eye Coordination (Feat 13) Prerequisites All Hands on Deck
You’re able to focus on your additional limbs more frequently and for longer. You can use All Hands on Deck once per hour, and you gain its benefits for 1 minute when you use it.
You leverage your extra appendages effortlessly. You permanently gain the benefits of All Hands on Deck.
So effectively, if you really want to focus entirely on being able to use multiple arms, much like how some Pathfinder ancestries might want to dedicate their ancestry feats towards flying, you'd be able to. I haven't tested these feats super-extensively, as they appear only at high levels, but in the instances where I tried them I made the following notes:
Hand-Eye Coordination felt like a big step up from All Hands on Deck, mainly due to the duration increase, and Multitasker comparatively less so.
I was afraid of unwieldy being neutered as a trait with this, but surprisingly it made no difference in nearly every case but the doshko's (and we'll get to that). Unwieldy guns either have a magazine capacity of 1, limiting their ability to be fired multiple times a round, or are AoE and require two actions to fire anyway.
I got to make a skittermander Close Quarters Soldier successfully wield a rotolaser and two doshkos, and that was fun. It sounded very silly, but in practice basically amounted to giving a Pathfinder greatsword the parry trait at the cost of requiring two extra hands and a bunch of feats, which ultimately didn't feel like a big push.
I also played a bit with shields, and carrying two doshkos and a mobile bulwark shield on that same skittermander Soldier felt quite powerful. Making two d12 Strikes in close combat and then gaining +3 AC by Raising a Shield definitely felt above the curve. I can't say for certain whether this is too powerful, especially given the feat investment and the fact that it's not always easy getting into melee, but it felt strong.
Besides the Soldier, other classes didn't seem to get the same benefits. A skittermander Solarian could wield a backup gun alongside their solar weapon and a shield, while leaving hands free for Athletics maneuvers, but the need for a backup gun was mitigated at higher levels where they could access Ultralight Wings and move around a bit better. Operatives could wield three assassin rifles or injection weapons for an early boost in a fight, but by the second round needed to start reloading. In general, the biggest benefit came from being able to carry a shield and Raise a Shield whenever for more AC, plus Shield Block with the feat, without needing to Take Cover.
So while this is too early to make any conclusive statement, and would require a lot more playtesting, my preliminary assessment of these feats is that they didn't seem to do anything that felt broken, particularly not at those level ranges. They did enable a little more build variety on characters, particularly skittermanders and Grasping Tendrils x2 barathus (who'd have retrained all of their ancestry feats towards this), so in a larger ruleset it could be worth adding feats to this effect.
Pathfinder Second Edition is a game that prides itself on being fully functional right out the box, and with good reason: its math is smartly-constructed, and its design cleverly bakes essential progression automatically into classes and their key items, allowing characters to naturally excel at what they do and make choices freely from there. Options are genuinely about adding gameplay, and not just power, so that you generally don't have to choose between the option that's fun and the option that just makes you straight-up more powerful. So clear-cut is this progression that the Automatic Bonus Progression variant rule gives you a list of all the bonuses you'd need to apply from items, should you choose to forgo magic items altogether in your campaign or just simplify the essentials of progression. You could follow this variant from level 1 to 20 and be just as powerful as if you'd just used magic weapons normally.
That is, of course, right up until you're not.
Despite appearances, ABP does in fact miss a few crucial elements: many who have run this variant will have noticed how it doesn't cover the scrolls, staves, and wands that form the core of caster item progression, and we'll talk about that, but first, let's talk about the other, less talked-about glaring issue with both ABP and the game's math, which is damage property runes.
In case you're not familiar with Pathfinder 2e's upgrade system, it works based on runes, which are sorted into two categories: you have fundamental runes, which are essential to a character's item progression and are factored into the ABP variant, and then you have property runes, which are "nice to have" runes that are mostly about adding neat little effects to your weapon that aren't essential to its progression, and are thus not factored into ABP. The core assumption is that if a rune straight-up increases your weapon's raw damage, such as by increasing its accuracy or damage dice, it's a fundamental rune, and otherwise it's a property rune.
Now, you can probably see where this is going: despite being property runes, and therefore only optional, damage property runes do in fact straight-up increase your weapon's damage, which is why in practice players tend to load up on these runes to the exclusion of most others. Looking at these runes, like flaming or shock, each adds 1d6 to your damage, and while this doesn't look like much, it adds up: at level 8, that's an additional 3.5 damage to each hit on average. Let's just pick a d12 melee weapon on a full Strength Fighter, where the relative increase in damage will be the smallest possible: at level 8, a weapon with one of these runes deals on average 2d12+1d6+4+3 = 23.5 damage on a hit, compared to 20 damage without. That's about a 17.5% increase in damage, which is quite significant. At level 19, a maxed-out weapon on that Fighter with a full complement of damaging property runes will deal 4d12+3d6+7+8 = 51.5 damage on a hit on average, and 41 average damage without, an even more significant 26% damage increase. On the flipside, if you were a regular martial with a piddly d4 ranged weapon, those property runes would increase your damage by 50% at level 8, and 66% at level 19. That's too large an increase to really qualify as "optional".
Martial characters aren't the only ones left out here: as is more well-known with ABP, the variant doesn't include any caster items, despite the power they hold in both versatility and spell output. A caster with a staff can cast an extra spell just below max rank, or a variety of different lower-rank utility spells, can cast additional free spells up to one rank below max with wands, and can cast even more spells in a pinch with scrolls. Versatility is power on casters, but so is spell output, so omitting this core progression entirely deprives casters of a lot of their power.
You might be thinking: this isn't so bad in practice, because you can just pick up these runes and items as you play, right? Well, unfortunately, this kind of omission carries a few negative consequences regardless:
It creates the kind of false choices that Pathfinder tries so hard to avoid: because damage property runes make you straight-up stronger, you're basically putting yourself at a comparative disadvantage by not picking these runes. The rare exceptions where one particular rune is essential for your playstyle to function, like a returning rune for a weapon you're planning on throwing all the time, incur a tax in raw damage that subtly put some flavorful playstyle behind others.
It means ABP puts you actually quite significantly behind in power relative to taking magic weapons, and martial players using the variant without any compensation will end up going against much spongier-feeling enemies.
As also noted, using ABP as a replacement for magic items means casters get none of their item progression, and end up being deceptively much weaker than they ought to be.
Less importantly, it messes up people's calculations when they try to do the math for certain features or martial class damage, as these property runes often get ignored.
So, how could this be improved? Well, thankfully, even this part of the math is quite consistent, so I'd say it wouldn't be the most difficult thing in the world to work some of that core progression in. A couple of ideas:
Include some new fundamental weapon runes at 8th, 10th, and 16th levels that increase your weapon damage by 1d6 each on a hit, and make current damage property runes into cheaper, perhaps lower-level runes that simply convert one of your damage dice to their damage type, with maybe their additional effects as well. Include the damage die increase in ABP as well.
Add to ABP that at 3rd level and every odd level thereafter, if you're a caster you get one additional spell slot of one rank below that of your max-rank spell slot, allowing you to either prepare more of your spells into those slots or add more spells to your repertoire. This should probably limit your ability to use scrolls, staves, and wands, however.
You could probably also get more adventurous with this: for instance, you could just blend the damage increase into current striking runes and having your weapon's damage die increase at 4th level and every 3 levels thereafter (so 4/7/10/13/16/19 instead of 4/8/10/12/16/19, but be careful to adjust the deadly and fatal traits, plus other effects that scale with weapon damage dice), and you could add a variant to the variant for wave casters where instead of getting one slot of each rank, they'd start losing those bonus lower-rank slots and getting two extra total slots of their two highest ranks. The above stuff in the bulletpoints though would be the closest to the original benefits, so if you wanted minimal change you could just stick to that.
(For the record, there's no official previous threads to this, I just couldn't resist a title with a reference!)
As you may have guessed, this is another thread about AoE weapons. There's been a lot of those going around lately, because as playtesters are starting to find, AoE weapons have a lot of problems, some of which have been raised over a year ago. This isn't just an "AoE weapons bad" thread, though I'll go over some of my play experience and reasoning as to why I believe AoE weapons are not really workable in their current implementation: rather, this is a thread to present some alterations I've tried with AoE weapons that, from my playtests so far, have in my opinion successfully made those weapons both generally desirable and particularly good for the Soldier (not just good on the Soldier, good for the Soldier, and I'll explain why). Here are my findings:
Episode I: The Phantom Mess
If this is your first time encountering this kind of thread, the starting criticism here is: AoE weapons are not very good, and in my opinion they'll never be good in their current shape. In case you've seen all of this before or just don't feel like going through an entire opening crawl's worth of text, I've spoilered the list of reasons and left a TL;DR below.
What's Wrong with AoE Weapons?:
There are, in my opinion, quite a few things wrong with AoE weapons as currently implemented, some more serious than others. Here I think are the major ones:
Their Damage is Awful
Right off the bat, AoE weapons are not going to be dealing the damage you'd expect from their damage dice. If you're a martial class Striking an at-level enemy twice with regular proficiency, you'll generally deal 110% of your weapon's damage on a hit on average. A single Area or Auto-Fire at up-to-master proficiency when your class DC isn't behind your attack proficiency (which will be between 8 and 12 of your character's levels), by contrast, deals 80% of your weapon's damage on a hit on average, about a 27% reduction in damage overall. In other words, a d12 AoE gun would deal barely more damage to any one target than a d8 regular gun, and that d8 singing coil is going to be dealing less single-target damage than a d6 laser pistol. That's pretty bad.
But surely, it's worth it if you catch lots of low-level enemies together, right? Unfortunately, still no. Just as an example, let's say you're a 10th-level martial who just managed to catch some level 6 enemies in your fully-upgraded stellar cannon's AoE. Because they're PL-4, let's say they all critically fail their save. Your expected damage is going to be 4*5.5 + 4*3.5 + 4 = 40 damage... which against a level 6 creature's average of 95 HP, is nowhere near enough to kill them, even if you max out all of your damage dice. In fact, even if they all had the average of low HP at 71 and you dealt the maximum of 68 damage, it would still not quite kill them. Even in the best-case scenario, you're therefore going to be unlikely to kill even the weakest of non-trivial enemies unless they're already softened up, at which point a fireball from your caster would've been much more likely to do the job.
So poorly does this damage scale that even at 20th level and with a full complement of upgrades, your AoE weapon will deal an average of about 34 damage per Area Fire, barely above a cast of needle darts at that level at about 31... and that's if the enemy doesn't have high Reflex saves, which is about two-thirds of enemies in Starfinder so far, at which point your damage drops below that.
Nobody Really Wants These
An important question that needs to be asked here is: who is actually going to be using these AoE weapons? Obviously, there's the Soldier, because that's what their abilities rely on, but who else? Someone on Reddit wrote a thorough breakdown of classes and how they'd do with AoE weapons, and lemme tell you the conclusion right now: most wouldn't ever touch these. Casters are out, because their class DC doesn't scale and they need two actions a turn generally to cast spells (so even a Witchwarper with their scaling class DC wouldn't really find those weapons appealing), but most martial classes also have class DCs that scale way too slowly for these guns to even compete with normal weapons, to say nothing of the general lack of synergy with their abilities and the conflicts with the actions they'd want to do on their turn. This does not bode well for a subgroup of weapons that are meant to be at least somewhat attractive to more than just one class.
And All The Rest
A lot of the above tries to put Area Fires and Auto-Fires on equal footing with Strikes, but the reality is that making Strikes is much better than taking two actions to force a saving throw for a variety of reasons:
Strikes are more flexible, in that you can spend one or two actions Striking on your turn, whereas AoE attacks will always take up 2 actions. Sometimes, you'll want to Strike only once as you spend the rest of your turn doing something else, and that flexibility is one of the big strengths of 2e's martial classes overall.
Attack rolls interact much more with 2e's system of bonuses and penalties: a character can have heroism cast on them, have an Operative Aid their Strike, and attack an off-guard target for an incredible potential +9 to their attack roll. That same character wouldn't benefit from any of these effects when making an Area Fire or Auto-Fire, and most effects that would benefit those AoE attacks, like clumsy, frightened, or sickened, would also benefit Strikes.
Attack rolls are much more consistent because AC is much more consistent than saving throws, which vary much more. As mentioned above, most Starfinder enemies have high Reflex saves, so even with tracking bonuses added to your DC, you are likely to deal even less damage than expected with your AoE attacks on average.
Honorable mention also goes to class DC just being a weird bucket to draw from for AoE weapon attacks: in general, the stat doesn't reflect proficiency with AoE, so Commanders from Pathfinder will suddenly find themselves among the better users of these weak weapons, despite AoE damage not at all featuring in their kit. Because there's no interaction with weapon proficiency, there's little reason for anyone interested to use anything but the strongest weapons on offer regardless of their class's proficiency track, rendering simple AoE weapons in particular completely redundant.
TL;DR: AoE weapons are doomed to deal awful damage compared to regular guns, are ineffective even in the absolute best-case scenario where you catch lots of enemies bunched up together, are undesirable to nearly every class, and interact poorly or not at all with all of the things that make single-action Strikes so good. Coupled with their reliance on a stat that has nothing to do with weapon usage or even AoE, these weapons are, in my opinion, unfit for purpose. They also just strike me as an attempt to fit a square peg into a round hole, offering the false promise of making classes good at a thing they're not meant to be good at, using mechanics that are not designed to accommodate AoE terribly well, and involving weird use of certain stats that are both unintuitive and already prone to abuse.
Episode II: Attack of the Clone(d Trait)s
So, now what? If current AoE weapons are doomed to disappoint, should we just scrap them altogether? Personally, I wouldn't want that, because I do think there ought to be room for weapons that play a little differently from each other, especially in a game like Starfinder where rotolasers and stellar cannons would cater to many a player's character fantasy even when not playing a Soldier. I think it's still worth trying, especially because precedent exists in 2e for letting weapons deal a bit of AoE damage.
Now, you might be thinking: "I've got a bad feeling about this." And I'd normally agree with you, because I'm talking about the Scatter trait, a trait that lets you deal 1 damage per weapon damage die to enemies in a burst radius around your initial Strike target on a hit. This sounds terrible, and for a long time I also thought the trait was terrible, because scatter firearms are just not very good.
However, after modifying a few guns to incorporate this trait, along with a few custom traits I wrote that riff off of the same theme, I actually ended up having a really good time. For starters, here are the traits and modified weapons I used in my playtests, with an explanatory TL;DR:
Traits and Weapons:
Traits
For starters, I included the Scatter trait, which I modified slightly. The mechanical changes are listed in bold:
Scatter: This weapon deals collateral damage in an area. Scatter always has an area listed with it, indicating the radius of the spray. If an attack with a scatter weapon fails (but does not critically fail), succeeds, or critically succeeds, all creatures within the listed radius other than the primary target take 1 point of splash damage per weapon damage die. If the attack fails, but does not critically fail, the target takes that same amount of splash damage.
Effectively, instead of adding a point of damage to the main target on a hit and only working on a hit, scatter here provides a reliable, minimal amount of damage even if you miss (this is good for casters looking to "cast gun"), along with some fairly reliable AoE. I felt it was okay to differ a bit from the scatter listed in Guns & Gears because a) the book is getting remastered, and b) nobody uses scatter firearms, including Gunslingers due to their reliance on the fatal trait for decent damage. Here's a couple of other traits I used that mimic the above:
Line: This weapon can pierce through multiple targets at a time. If an attack with a line weapon fails (but does not critically fail), succeeds, or critically succeeds, all creatures in a 5-foot line in-between you and the primary target, but not the primary target itself, take 1 point of splash damage per weapon damage die. If the attack fails, but does not critically fail, the target takes that same amount of splash damage.
Cone: This weapon damages multiple targets at a time in a cone. Cone always has an area listed with it, indicating the radius of the spray. If an attack with a cone weapon fails (but does not critically fail), succeeds, or critically succeeds, all creatures within the listed cone aimed at the primary target, but not the primary target itself, take 1 point of splash damage per weapon damage die. If the attack fails, but does not critically fail, and the primary target is in the cone's area, the target takes that same amount of splash damage.
Pretty straightforward, right?
Weapon Balance
So, with these traits hashed out, I applied them to the playtest's 13 existing AoE weapons (plus the missile launcher), with a few more alterations:
Scatter I think is overcosted on Pathfinder firearms, so when I applied these traits to AoE weapons, I decided to cost them pretty cheaply: Line, Cone 15 ft, and Scatter 5 ft. I felt ought to be a minor trait (so about one-third of a damage die), and Cone 30 ft. and Scatter 10 ft. I costed as a major trait (so about two-thirds of a damage die).
The Starfinder playtest's balancing of weapons is generally funky, and energy damage seems to be quite expensive on a weapon's power budget. I consider the change neutral, since you'll be running into immunities far more often than physical damage types, and while I don't mention damage types here, I didn't cost them.
I'm generally not a fan of expends and specific magazine sizes on weapons that can fire for potentially an entire encounter without needing to reload, so the general assumption here unless stated otherwise is that these weapons have a reload of 0 and basically an unlimited magazine size. In the rare cases where a weapon has a reload value and no magazine size listed, its magazine size is 1.
I hate the unwieldy trait with a passion, and preferred to replace it with reload 1 instead.
And outside of that, I tried balancing the weapons to be close to Pathfinder's shortbow (for simple weapons), longbow (for martial weapons), and better-than-longbow for advanced weapons (not picking the daikyu, because it's a terrible weapon that's arguably worse than the longbow). Now, without further ado:
Simple Guns
Autotarget Rifle: 1d6, range increment 60 ft., has the analog and cone 30 ft. traits.
Scattergun: 1d8, range increment 15 ft., has the analog, concussive, and cone 15 ft. traits.
Martial Guns
Arc Emitter: 1d10 , range increment 15 ft., has the arc, cone 15 ft., nonlethal, and tech trait (side note, but I found it weird that the OG arc emitter didn't have the arc trait).
Flamethrower: 1d10, range increment 15 ft., has the analog and cone 15 ft. traits (why do flamethrowers need tech to work?).
Machine Gun: 1d8, range increment 60 ft., has the analog and cone 30 ft. traits.
Missile Launcher: 1d12 (probably bludgeoning damage), range increment 60 ft., reload 1 (and reloads after every shot), has the concussive, scatter 5 ft., and tech traits.
Rotolaser: 1d10, range increment 30 ft., has the cone 15 ft. and tech traits.
Singing Coil: 1d12, range increment 60 ft., reload 1 (and reloads after every shot), has the line, professional (Performance), and tech traits.
Stellar Cannon: 1d8, range increment 60 ft., has the analog and scatter 10 ft. traits.
Zero Cannon: 1d10, range increment 30 ft., has the line and tech traits.
Advanced Guns
Magnetar Rifle: 1d10, range increment 120 ft., has the analog and line traits.
Plasma Cannon: 1d12, range increment 30 ft., has the scatter 5 ft. and tech traits.
Screamer: 1d12, range increment 15 ft., has the cone 15 ft. and tech traits.
Starfall Pistol: 1d10, range increment 30 ft., reload 1 (and reloads after every shot), has the line and tech traits (as a 1-handed weapon, this one ought to be weaker than the rest).
I may have over-egged it a little, but the general intent was to have these weapons have damage dice similar to what you'd find on other guns of the same group.
TL;DR: I took the Scatter Trait, made it more of a reliable source of splash damage rather than added single-target damage, copied it for lines and cones, and modified AoE weapons to use these traits. All AoE guns therefore became regular guns that dealt splash damage on anything but a critical miss with every Strike.
So, how did these weapons do? Surprisingly, quite well! I've listed some more details in the spoilers below, along with the TL;DR below that:
Splash Weapon Playtest Findings:
For the purpose of this playtest, I ran encounters from the playtest scenarios we've received, plus some custom encounters, and incorporated a few modifications to ranged combat that encouraged more enemies to group together, listed here. I tested these guns out on an Envoy, an Operative, a modified Soldier, and a Witchwarper. I'll talk about the Soldier further below, because there's a lot to discuss there, but here were my findings with the others:
The Envoy was a surprisingly large beneficiary of these guns due to the greater fluidity of making Strikes. Just like with any other gun, they could use a directive, Lead by Example, and still do something else on their turn, including Strike again.
The Operative was, very surprisingly, a big winner with these weapons, but I also found the results to be deceptive: in these playtests, I gave them a missile launcher, which let them make a d12 Strike each turn, and the only reason they wouldn't have done better with any other gun is because there are no single-target d12 guns, the fatal guns are all unwieldy, and the one deadly gun has a crappy d4 damage die. Were there more high-damage guns out there that weren't so heavily restricted, the Operative would likely have preferred those alternatives.
The Witchwarper actually got to "cast gun" with these weapons. I gave them an autotarget rifle, and while the class would've probably preferred a line or scatter weapon for the splash-on-miss at a farther range, on the occasions where they were in range, they basically felt guaranteed to get something out of their third action, which was really nice.
Although 1 splash damage per weapon damage die doesn't seem like much on paper, it added up quite nicely in practice. I was tallying up the extra damage being done, and at lower levels, catching just one other enemy in the splash radius had the machine gun and stellar cannon deal about 26% more damage on average, and that was including the increased damage to the main target from the miss damage. This didn't make party members kill groups of enemies in one hit, but it did make cleanup a lot easier after the Soldier or Witchwarper threw in some full-on AoE.
The damage on a miss made quite a big difference, especially on the Witchwarper but also some of the Envoy's second Strikes. This made these weapons much more reliable, which I think might make some more casters go for these weapons just for that fact. I would go as far as to say that even if these traits were costed much more heavily, to the point of dropping a damage die, those weapons would still have reasons to be picked.
The Corpse Fleet encounter in Field Test #5 incurred a bit of a domino effect: because everyone was dealing single-target gun damage and a bit of splash damage, plus focus-firing enemies one at a time, the second infantry went down quite a bit quicker than the first. The cybernetic zombie took more hits, but once they got focus-fired, they went down fairly quickly too, in a way that wouldn't have been possible with AoE guns. When incorporating the Corpse Fleet Officer as part of a higher-level encounter, the splash damage shredded through the unit's THP aura super-reliably, with the exception of the officer itself due to its resistances.
The hatchling swarm encounter in It Came From the Vast was an absolute bloodbath for the hatchlings, unsurprisingly. The swarms are weak to splash and everyone was using splash weapons, so they went down very quickly. There was also a funny interaction where the splash on a miss was triggering the weakness, but not the damage on a hit, which could probably be fixed by just saying the main damage counts as splash damage for the purpose of triggering the weakness.
Overall, individual enemies went down more quickly due to the better single-target damage on these guns. Although there were still sometimes multiple enemies to deal with, this made fights easier to handle than with AoE guns, as it was easier to take units out of the fight. In some rare cases, some enemies did die two at a time, usually after the Witchwarper or Soldier used AoE damage and left enemies low enough to die from the splash damage (or get finished off with one Strike each).
During the instances where there weren't enemies close enough to catch in the splash radius (I ran into this with the last Shards of the Glass Planet encounter), the guns still felt competent at gun stuff due to their damage die, perhaps a little more so with the on-miss damage. There were probably better options, but they weren't trailing far behind like with AoE guns.
TL;DR: Splash guns performed significantly better than their AoE counterparts. Although they wouldn't be must-haves on every class, particularly the Operative who'd prefer on-crit traits, they became actually usable on everyone, gave the caster a bit of reliable third-action damage, and at worst basically functioned like a capable damage stick with other traits. They also allowed for much more fluid turns, particularly for the Envoy and Operative I tried out who had options for their third action. Even if I'd downgraded these weapons' damage die by a step, they'd still have been far more usable than current AoE guns.
Episode III: Revenge of the Soldier
So, splash weapons are a success! All that's left is the biggest question: what about the Soldier? Their entire kit is made to work with Area Fire and Auto-Fire, so how does this benefit them?
So, as mentioned above, I ran these experiments with a Soldier, and before talking about the results it's worth mentioning that I heavily modified the class's core features to work with these new guns. The details are in the spoilered bit and the summary's in the TL;DR below:
Modding the Soldier:
To make the Soldier work with these traits, and try out a different mode of play, I basically reversed Primary Target: rather than deal additional single-target damage with an AoE attack, the Soldier now dealt additional AoE damage with their splash weapon Strikes. Here's the level 1 feature:
Area Fire (single action) manipulate, soldier
You excel at saturating the battlefield with gunfire. If your next action is to Strike, or to use an action that has you make at least one Strike, and you use a weapon or unarmed attack that has the cone, line, scatter, or splash traits for that Strike, you don't deal splash damage. Instead, you make an additional Strike with the weapon or unarmed attack against each target that would have normally taken splash damage other than the primary target, without expending additional ammo. On a failure, a target takes half damage, including the primary target. Each attack counts toward your multiple attack penalty, but you do not increase your penalty until you have made all your attacks.
So if you see an opportunity to deal lots of extra damage with your gun, you can spend an additional action to do so, with even more reliable damage dealt. You might be wondering: where does this leave Suppressing Fire? Well, here's how I wrote it:
Suppressing Fire (single action) flourish, soldier
You have a knack for using powerful weapons to hinder your foes and prevent
them from operating at their peak. Make a Strike. A creature damaged by this Strike, including by splash damage, is suppressed until the start of your next turn.
Pretty simple, right? You'll notice that this means you'll be suppressing enemies even on a miss, so I basically cannibalized the Bombard. It also means you can suppress enemies even as a single action, not just with a meatier Area Fire, and you can combine the two to deal lots of damage and apply suppression. You'll also notice that neither Area Fire nor Suppressing Fire specify that you need to make a ranged Strike, which made for an extremely easy rework of Whirling Swipe:
Whirling Swipe (Feat 1) soldier
Your heavier weapons cleave in a deadly arc. Two-handed weapons you wield gain the cone 10 ft. trait. If your weapon has the reach trait, it gains the cone 15 ft. trait instead.
And with this, you can make Area Fires and Suppressing Fires with your melee weapons to your heart's content, while also working much better with other weapon-based feats. I didn't rework every feat for this, but did alter one more:
Shot On The Run (single action, Feat 2) flourish, soldier
By readying your weapon while on the move, you can do some of your weapon’s setup
in advance of firing. Stride up to half your Speed and Strike.
Same as with Suppressing Fire, you get to choose whether or not to make this an Area Fire. In exchange for this flexibility, I gave the action the flourish trait, as with Suppressing Fire, and this does mean you can't also suppress at the same time, but that ended up working quite nicely for the class's gameplay, as detailed below.
TL;DR Instead of Primary Target, I gave the Soldier an Area Fire action that's basically a spellshape for your splash guns, letting you deal lots more AoE damage. Other effects like Suppressing Fire and Shot on the Run are instead single action flourishes that let you Strike with a bonus, whereas Whirling Swipe just adds splash damage to your two-handed weapons and lets you interact with your other feats. The overall intent here was to make the Soldier much more flexible and give them more interesting choices to make in an encounter.
So, how'd the Soldier do? As it turns out, very, very well. Compared to my previous playtesting experience, it was like night and day. Same deal as the above, details are in the spoilers and summary in the TL;DR below:
Soldier Playtest Findings:
I'll try to organize my findings around a few key points: function, flexibility, and fun.
Function
The vanilla Soldier in my opinion is one of the major underperformers of the playtest: when they get to deal AoE damage, they can feel quite good, and Primary Target does help with single-target damage, but often they can feel quite flat when only dealing with single targets. Because AoE guns are weak, their damage can also feel quite wet.
In this particular case, though, the Soldier was flat-out stronger overall. Against single targets, the Soldier could Strike twice, and thanks to the action compression on the modded feats could suppress them, move around, and just do a whole bunch more stuff on the same turn. Against crowds, the Soldier was brutal: even when firing at a relative -1 compared to other martials, their damage was extremely reliable, and while their baseline damage was a bit better than with an AoE gun, they really got to shine when shooting off-guard enemies, and their damage shot up sharply.
The one caveat to all this is that the Soldier's single-target damage dropped somewhat: making an Area Fire and Primary Target is better than Striking Twice, and the lack of MAP on Primary Target allows a Soldier to make a second Strike with an automatic weapon on their third action. Thus, the vanilla Soldier could burst down single targets a bit better than the modded version, though even with this dip, I felt that was appropriate for a class that's meant to excel at AoE damage more than single-target damage.
Flexibility
This was by far the most marked improvement, and a major driving factor behind the Soldier's performance. Whereas normally the Soldier has extremely rigid turns, with Area/Auto-Fire taking up most of their actions, with these changes the Soldier felt like a proper martial class, able to make single-action Strikes when more appropriate and still get to use their class's features and feats. The class was more mobile, especially with Shot on the Run, which on one particular turn in the Fire Team Fiasco encounter from Field Test #5 allowed them to Stride+Stride+Shot On The Run from one side of the map to the next and shoot an aeon guard that was hiding behind cover. Being able to suppress targets one at a time as a single action, or just spend one action to suppress enemies while spending two actions on other stuff, gave the Soldier a lot more freedom of action, and let them apply their signature crowd control far more easily. Normally, the Soldier I found to be very feast-or-famine and repetitive, but here, the class could competently handle a far greater number of situations, and was running their turn differently a lot of the time.
Fun
This is without a doubt the most subjective part of the assessment, but I genuinely had a lot of fun playtesting this version of the Soldier, in a way I just didn't playing the vanilla class. Again, a lot of it came down to flexibility: with the above changes, I felt like I was making genuine choices, as some attractive options competed with others, and I could achieve different things on the same turn depending on what I did: for instance, on that turn where I did a double Stride and Shot on the Run, the alternative was to use a Suppressing Fire + Demoralize on the glass serpent, and make a second Strike against the aeon guard hiding behind cover. On a vanilla Soldier, I would've just done an Area Fire + Primary Target on the glass serpent, with the option to maybe do the same to the aeon guard through cover with Shot on the Run.
I think an important takeaway here was that these changes allowed me to patch up the situations where the Soldier would've normally felt bad to play, without taking away from the class's high moments when things did work out really well. When enemies grouped together, my Soldier was dealing tons of damage and felt like a proper AoE powerhouse, especially when exploiting buffs and debuffs: I went out of my way to have my Gap Influenced Witchwarper cast heroism on the Soldier, and thanks to the house rules making enemies off-guard more often, they were critting a surprising amount.
TL;DR: With the above changes, the Soldier felt significantly better to play, in large part due to their flexibility. Their AoE damage was better overall, and they were able to handle themselves a lot better when enemies weren't grouped up too. Importantly to me, it felt like I was making many more interesting choices with this Soldier, and could do a much greater range of things.
Episode IV: A New Hope
AoE guns, as written right now, aren't working very well, and in my opinion are unlikely to ever truly work. However, there is still a niche for AoE on guns, especially if enemies are to group together more often, and from my playtesting experience, the above altered guns worked much better. Classes who wouldn't normally touch those weapons would find greater use for them, and with a few adjustments, the Soldier I think would become a class with more flexibility and diversity to their gameplay without sacrificing their AoE effectiveness. Beyond just allowing more classes to pick guns that do a bit of AoE, the above altered weapons I think allowed the Soldier to have more choices, deeper gameplay, and just more opportunities to shine overall. This is why I think the above sorts of guns would be good for the Soldier, not just on the Soldier, and that alone I think is reason enough to at least give the above a try.
Here's a thought experiment that ought to be fairly easy to playtest: Bubbles the Barathu hates Solarians. Maybe a Solarian burned their cat, or maybe their cat just decided to become a Solarian and ran off. In all cases, they want to kill a Solarian, so they do a bit of research, strap on their commercial laser pistol, pack an obscene amount of batteries, and set off to find a Solarian... and they do! In fact, they're 8th-level while Bubbles is a piddly level -1 civilian, so if they knew anything about encounter rules they'd realize this would go well beyond Extreme and into certain death territory. Regardless, they float 35 feet in the air, follow the Solarian around wherever they go, and start plinking them down relentlessly with their laser pistol... and they win! Because despite this solar knight wielding cosmic powers beyond most mortal comprehension, they have absolutely no innate means of using any their abilities against a big stupid jellyfish that can just float around and shoot at the same time.
Now, this scenario is obviously meant to be quite silly, and if that Solarian had a laser pistol of their own, Bubbles would be toast (or they could use a seeker rifle instead and float a bit higher). The point is to illustrate that the Solarian, a melee class in a ranged-centric game where characters are allowed to fly from very early on, has no inherent means of using their abilities against flying enemies, particularly if those enemies can shoot too. The playtest asks if the Solarian needs more ways of closing the gap between themselves and their opponents, and in my opinion this example proves that yes, they very much do. It's not just that they need actual gapcloser abilities, they need to be able to move much more freely if they're expected to get into melee range (or close to it) to function properly. Flight on one subclass at level 9 does not cut it. While the Solarian already has a lot of stuff going on at 1st level already, I would personally gladly trade away their solar nimbus and solar shot if it meant letting them move in range of any target they choose.
Now, you might be thinking: wouldn't a class with flight at level 1 break compatibility with Pathfinder? Yes, it would, in the same way as a Barathu would break compatibility too. That much is a concession the Starfriends have already allowed for Starfinder in order to enable its ranged meta. What's more, though, it is also something that could be relatively simple to address with a compatibility note: for instance, you could just state that any ancestry or class that gets flight at 1st level instead gets a bonus to their Speed, and that would let them function just fine in PF2e. In fact, you could just make this a trait (e.g. give every low-level flying creature the "flying" trait) and add compatibility rules to the trait itself. In all cases, a Solarian that can fly at 1st level would be able to actually function smoothly against flying or otherwise difficult-to-reach ranged enemies, and being able to fly right off the bat would feel pretty rad too.
Following the debrief we got for two upcoming Pathfinder classes, I think it's time to bring up a familiar topic: area weapons in Starfinder 2e, as outlined in Field Test #1, make targets do a Reflex save against your class DC. The premium user of area weapons is meant to be the Soldier, a class also outlined in that field test. However, this isn't entirely true, and as written in the field test, the best user of area weapons is in fact the Kineticist, a Pathfinder class whose class DC is the only one to go all the way up to legendary proficiency rank.
Now, at the time, this generated a lot of discourse: a common line was that it made mechanical sense for the Kineticist, a class with lots of access to AoE, to be good at AoE weapons, but it still didn't really make thematic sense for Aang from Avatar to spray a rotolaser more accurately than the battle-trained soldier who specializes in exactly that, nor is it good form in 2e for a class to encroach on an entirely different class's specialty like that (we certainly don't see classes in Pathfinder getting legendary weapon accuracy by accident). Eventually, it was suggested to factor in the weapon-user's proficiency in said weapon somehow, so that only those meant to be good at using those weapons would truly excel at area attacks, and that looked like it would resolve the issue. Unless, of course, we ended up with a class that had both master martial weapon proficiency and a legendary class DC...
So yeah, the Commander is a class with both master martial weapon proficiency and a legendary class DC. In many ways, their problem is the inverse of the Kineticist's, where they're perfectly-suited thematically for firing area weapons, but mechanically have absolutely nothing in their kit that makes them inherently good at AoE damage. Sure, the Soldier's tankier and can shoot one target in their area an extra time, but that in my opinion still doesn't hold up to a +2 to weapon accuracy in Pathfinder given what the Fighter can achieve, and that's before factoring in the entire unique system of tactics the Commander brings to the table. One could dismiss this by saying the Commander's a Pathfinder class and this is Starfinder (even though PF2e and SF2e are meant to be mutually compatible), but this problem is bound to appear if we ever get a martial class with a legendary class DC in Starfinder, which is not impossible. Clearly, if area weapons are still to keep relying on class DC (and maybe weapon proficiency), then something needs to be done to make sure that the Soldier doesn't get beaten at their own game by some random other class that happens to have a legendary class DC.
Now, there are lots of ways this could be achieved: you could pull a Gunslinger, for instance, nerf area weapons, and put that power back into the Soldier so that they'd be the only class who'd really want to use them. You could double down on the Soldier's usage of area weapons by giving them a legendary class DC, plus lots of other perks that guarantee they wouldn't get outmatched. You could even give the Soldier some bespoke mechanic that let them override the DCs of area weapons in a way that always worked to their advantage. Personally, though, I'm of the opinion that basing area weapon damage on class DC is a fundamentally bad idea: as shown with the Commander, class DC isn't a bucket that automatically signals good AoE damage, and we could see this already in other Pathfinder martial classes that use class DC mainly for single-target effects. In general, class DC isn't a bucket that signals anything in particular, which is why it's used so differently from one class to another.
There's a ton of other issues tied to switching from attack rolls to Reflex saves on a weapon that I won't rehash here, but the long and short of it is that area weapons, as written in the field test, could probably use a different implementation for their AoE attacks. Given how these weapons specifically tap into AoE damage, which martial classes in 2e typically aren't supposed to have, I'd even go as far as to suggest bundling them into a brand-new weapon category, so that Pathfinder classes like the Fighter and Gunslinger can't access them easily, but classes like the Soldier or any other AoE-capable character in Starfinder can. Perhaps the implementation for AoE weapons has already advanced far beyond that field test and accounted for all of the above, so this post could very well already be obsolete, but if that's the case, I'd also be curious to read a developer update on the subject, as I otherwise do really like the concept of AoE weapons and am looking forward to playing with them in SF2e.
Given the number of threads that have popped up recently around casters and how their design could be evolved in the future, I figured it'd be worth posting a brew I made a while back that's relevant to the subject matter. The starting point was: what would a thematic caster look like? A lot of players mention dedicated blasters, and I think this can be extended to any sort of specialty, like controlling, buffing/debuffing, and healing, and can all be expressed in roleplaying and flavor terms as well, like a light mage or a poison mage. The intent behind this homebrew class was to be able to express a variety of different themes in as simple a framework as possible.
For reference, here is the link to the class, which I'll summarize below.
The pitch behind the Paragon is: a thematic caster who revolves around a conceptual sphere of power, casting a very small number of spells based on a handful of traits more freely than other, more generalist casters. Because this kind of topic tends to be contentious, let me start by listing the tradeoffs this caster makes, just to make it clear I'm not trying to develop an overpowered class:
The Paragon gets the HP and defenses of a Wizard, so they're extremely squishy.
The Paragon gets the smallest spell list out of any caster, only being able to choose spells fitting their chosen narrow theme.
The Paragon also gets the smallest spell repertoire out of any caster, culminating at ten spells and two cantrips at 19th level.
With that established, let's talk about the cool things the class does:
Your spellcasting revolves around a sphere of power, effectively a collection of traits. Your spell list is formed of all the spells with your sphere of power's traits, transcending the normal limitations of spell traditions. If your sphere of power is sound, for example, your spell list will have spells with the auditory or sonic traits, and if your sphere is shadow, your spell list will instead have spells with the darkness or shadow traits.
You don't have spell slots. Instead, you start with 3 Focus Points, and can cast spells from your repertoire as if they were focus spells, allowing you to cast your spells without worrying about daily attrition. The only exception is 10th-rank spells, for which you eventually get a regular spell slot to cast.
You get a focus cantrip, destruction, that guarantees you can always deal damage even if you pick a sphere with few to no damaging spells. Many feats will also let you modify your cantrips and spells, with some also catering to your sphere by giving you new abilities related to one of your sphere of power's traits.
You start with a unique class feature, Rewrite Reality, that converts hard counters against you into soft counters: if an enemy's immune to your limited spells, you can still affect them, and convert their immunity into a high amount of resistance instead.
Effectively, you sacrifice pretty much everything, including the generalist versatility typical of casters, in exchange for being able to excel at your chosen specialty. You'd still be more versatile than most martials, but would be a lot less versatile than any caster, and wouldn't have quite the same uptime on your powerful effects as martial classes either.
So here's how I'm seeing it: I really like the new angle the Guardian brings to tanking, but I also feel that in order for a concept to justify its existence as a fully-fledged class, it needs to have a certain critical mass of core features that are either too powerful or complex to properly encapsulate in just an archetype, or require a specialized chassis to put to full use. The Commander, for instance, had complex and powerful mechanics in the form of their banner and multiple tactics, which the current Marshal archetype doesn't approach, and all of those mechanics are well-served by a combination of sub-par HP, legendary DC, and Int key attribute that can't be perfectly replicated altogether on another class, not even Int martials like the Investigator. In my opinion, the Commander's existence as its own class is justified.
With the Guardian, however, I'm less sure: looking at the class's core features, their proficiency track is extremely similar to the Champion's, and past level 1, most of the class's unique features are free feats and number boosts, and not the kind of number boost like the Fighter's +2 to attacks. The two standout features are Intercept Attack and Taunt, which to me raises the question: what's stopping Paizo from just having those be feats on characters like the Champion, the Fighter, or even other martials like the Barbarian? Perhaps I'm wrong, but neither feature looks to me like it's complex or game-changing enough to define a whole class, and in the same vein a lot of the Guardian's feats look like they would be at home on other tough, brawny martial classes. A Fighter that intercepted damage and taunted enemies would be durable enough to survive, if not quite as tough as a Guardian, and in my opinion would still feel like a Fighter thematically. Similarly, a Barbarian with those abilities would still feel like a Barbarian, and a soak tank too, and a Champion would diverge even less from their existing theme given that feats like Devoted Guardian exist.
I guess all of this is to say that, based on a look at the playtest material at least, I don't feel like the Guardian currently stands out mechanically or thematically to justify its existence as a separate class. If its two unique actions and class feats were cannibalized by Strength-based martials that currently play with heavy armor, damage mitigation, or just tanking damage to varying degrees, I don't think that would really cause those classes to break from their current theme or niche.
The stunned condition has always been a little problematic when it comes to being stunned on your own turn, such as from a Stunning Fist, and from the looks of it, this isn't a problem that went away with the remaster. Because you can't act while stunned, a likely interpretation of RAW is that getting stunned on your turn effectively ends your turn prematurely, which is generally rare but makes the effect disproportionately effective in certain edge cases. In my opinion, this ambiguity needn't exist, and I feel the stunned condition could be cleaned up significantly if it were decremented with an action similarly to the sickened condition. Here's my take on what that could look like:
Stunned
You've become senseless. You can't act while stunned except to try to regain your senses as a single action. Stunned usually includes a value, and each time you spend an action to attempt to regain your senses, you reduce your stunned value by 1. Stunned might also have a duration instead of a value, such as “stunned for 1 minute.” In this case, you can't act for the listed duration, no matter how much you try to recover.
If we want to keep the interaction with the slowed condition: Any actions you lose from being slowed count towards attempting to recover from the stunned condition. So, if you were slowed 1 and stunned 2 at the beginning of your turn, you would lose 1 action from slowed, and would then become stunned 1.
---
Would this work? In most cases, this wouldn't functionally change how the stunned condition works, but on the rare occasion where someone gets stunned on their own turn, the main appeal is that this would let them immediately try to recover by losing actions on that turn, instead of being stunned for the rest of their turn for "free" and then having to lose actions on their next turn.
As commonly perceived, Intelligence feels somewhat lacking relative to other attributes like Strength or Charisma. Whereas the latter two skills tend to provide consistent use as a fourth attribute due to their strong benefits in combat (Strength) or social encounters (Charisma), as well as other advantages, Intelligence doesn't feel like it has the same standout strengths, with its additional trained skills and languages feeling only situationally useful compared to the benefit of other stats. The proposal here is simple: rather than give the player additional trained skills and languages, what if increasing Intelligence gave more 1st-level general feats instead?
For example: Ezren the Wizard starts out with +4 Intelligence at level 1. Normally, this would let him know 4 additional languages and become trained in 4 additional skills, for a total of 7. Under this variant, he instead gains 4 1st-level general feats: if Ezren really wants more trained skills, he can take Skill Training 4 times and stay at 7 trained skills, though fewer languages known. If he wants to become a polyglot instead, he can take Multilingual a couple times for those 4 additional languages and still have room for some more general feats, such as Canny Acumen or Incredible Initiative. Perhaps he may want to master the arcane arts early instead, and take Arcana skill feats such as Quick Identification or Recognize Spell. As he boosts his Intelligence to +5 at 10th level, +6 at 17th level, and +7 at 20th level, he gains an extra 1st-level general feat each time, giving him additional benefits.
Effectively, the proposal here is to buff Intelligence's versatility, though not necessarily its direct power: as noted with the example of Skill Training and Multilingual, trying to replicate the exact benefits of Intelligence as currently implemented would leave you worse off. However, you'd have significantly more options as an Intelligence-based character, affording you much more character customization early on and the opportunity to build on your existing strengths too. As a side benefit, this would let Intelligence-heavy, skill-based classes like Investigators distinguish themselves significantly better from Rogues and their own large set of trained skills, as they'd have lots of flexibility and versatility but not necessarily lots of different skill proficiencies (unless they want those).
I'd be keen to see how this performs in playtesting, and would also be interesting in hearing preliminary feedback in case there are some standout abuse cases. Some thoughts:
This model makes it harder to handle a -1 Int mod, though in that case the easy workaround could be to just decrement the character's trained skills and known languages by one (down to the usual minimum) until their Intelligence mod increases.
This model can make it very easy for a level 1 Intelligence character to put all of their general feats into things like Armor and Weapon Proficiency, which would normally require a particular human heritage to acquire that early (and only once). This may not necessarily be a bad thing, however.
I think it would help to keep the general feats at 1st-level regardless of when you boost your Intelligence, that way there aren't any weird considerations around which level to boost your Int. That, and there are so many good 1st-level feats that it should feel good picking more even at high level.
This is less of a specific thread and more a general rambling about encounter design, and came mainly from a couple of other threads, mainly this Reddit thread about incorporating monster templates from D&D 4e. One of the general assumptions held about Pathfinder 2e is that its math, by and large, just works, and that this applies particularly well to encounter design: rather than apply a mixture of convoluted rules and individual adjustments to create encounters of a certain challenge levels, it's easy to craft a balanced encounter using monster levels and a couple of simple tables.
By and large, this system works, and thanks to PF2e's level-based scaling, this has the added benefit of making solo boss monsters live up to their stated difficulty level, making up for differences in action economy with greater defenses and more powerful attacks. However, there are also several other general understandings players end up having of those rules with play experience:
Higher-level enemies are often much more difficult than their level suggests at very early party levels, with some like the barbazu being particularly infamous for their ability to induce TPKs. This is because early levels represent the largest spikes in power, with player characters doubling their damage with striking runes and literally multiplying their options through spells and feats. Monsters are balanced around fundamental runes as well as levels, which creates even larger gaps in-between the levels at which players are meant to access those for the first time.
Even when balanced, solo boss enemies tend to not feel terribly fun to play against. The Reddit thread I linked explains why quite well, but the short of it is that above-average defenses shut down more player actions, which feels particularly bad if you're a Gunslinger or other crit-dependent character, or a caster whose nearly every spell costs a resource.
Solo bosses are also not usually the best way for a GM to showcase what a powerful monster can do, because the usual solo boss will have between 9 and 15 actions to showcase their entire moveset, and many of those actions will be taken up by movement.
Difficult encounters made up of hordes of low-level enemies, while technically possible, are a nightmare to run in practice, because having to manage lots of creatures and potentially dozens of actions a round really slows down play. This is likely why most moderate-to-severe encounters in Paizo's APs tend to feature smaller amounts of higher-level enemies, and why most people think of PL+3 encounters as solo bosses, or minibosses with a small number of minions or hazards. Swarms and troops technically exist to simulate lots of enemies with less micromanagement, but no rules exist as of yet for applying those traits to any given enemy.
As a result, I think the statement that Paizo's encounter-building "just works" is largely true, but doesn't tell the whole story: while it is true that an encounter against a lone PL+3 boss will be balanced, and that the rules also allow building a PL+3 encounter with a dozen PL-4 enemies, in practice these rules still don't make every encounter fun or practical to run right out of the box. This is why Paizo had to change from their early AP's encounter design and implement fewer solo boss encounters, and why many players often suggest a PL+1 or PL+2 boss with a few minions or hazards for an ideal PL+3 encounter.
Thus, with the encounter-building rules we have, the most common type of challenging encounter tends to be fewer but more powerful monsters, which I think has a few knock-on effects: because crit-fishing depends in part on monster defenses, routinely dealing with monsters above party level can often reduce chances of critical hits, or critical failures on spells, down to 5%. If your AP is mostly made up of solo boss encounters, your Gunslinger or AoE caster are going to have a bad time, as is any character who wants to make use of powerful incapacitation effects, and so it is no surprise that criticism of those classes' performance happens often, and particularly in relation to older APs that are still among the most frequently-played.
---
The heart of this problem, in my opinion, is that current encounter building rules are creature-focused: to make up an encounter, you generally add creatures of certain levels until your XP budget is met. While there are rules for supplementing encounters with hazards, those are secondary, as are the details of the environment in which your encounter happens. This is definitely intuitive in a way, as most players tend to think of encounters, especially challenging encounters, in terms of big powerful monsters, but in practice it doesn't factor in a bunch of other considerations that affect the fun factor of an encounter, like player agency, speed of play, and additional choices and complicating factors via environmental design. In the worst of cases, your encounter turns into a white room with a random monster in it, and while PF2e's monsters are generally interesting enough to offer unique gameplay, that's not always enough to guarantee a fun and meaningful experience.
In my opinion, an alternative way to approach things, and the point to this ramble, is to approach the encounter itself as if it were a creature. Rather than think in terms of individual monsters with their own actions and HP, think of the encounter as its own entity, with a larger number of actions and HP distributed among component creatures, hazards, you name it. This I think could have several interesting implications:
Rather than increase a boss monster's defenses and offense, give it more HP and turns per round so it can do more things, survive more hits, and shake off more crowd control.
Conversely, rather than fill encounters with low-level minions that each have a full 3 actions, consider giving them fewer actions so that you can have hordes of creatures without slowing play down to a crawl.
Rather than treat hazards and the environment as an add-on to the main creature in an encounter, treat them as an equal and essential component, even if they don't necessarily increase the difficulty. You're rarely just fighting a lich or a dragon, you're fighting a lich or dragon in their lair, which may be filled with traps, magical devices, roiling lava, and other interesting environmental features that will almost certainly affect how your party approaches the encounter.
While perhaps slightly less intuitive, I feel the above methodology could carry several benefits:
If encounters were always balanced around player characters having similar overall success chances, players of certain classes would likely feel like they'd have more agency, even if their net effectiveness would be the same. For instance, critting more often against an enemy with more HP would likely feel more fun than critting less often against an enemy with less HP, even if you'd be taking out the same percentage of the enemy's HP each round.
Balancing solo bosses around more HP and turns would make them more consistent to run as a GM, and would give more opportunities to showcase their different abilities.
Balancing hordes around each enemy having fewer actions would make challenging horde-style encounters more feasible without bogging down play nearly as much, and with less need to bundle enemies together into swarms or troops.
More broadly, thinking of encounters in terms of a fixed number of total actions on the encounter's side would make for more consistent expectations around the duration of combat encounters.
Holding enemies and the environment as equal components to a combat encounter, with stronger rules for budgeting the two together and pairing certain environmental features with specific enemies, would avoid white-room scenarios, and enable more memorable encounters as a result.
---
The big question to all of this is how to apply this methodology to PF2e, and I don't feel I have a full answer to that. The Reddit thread I linked mentions using templates from D&D 4e, which I think can work, and I do think there is room for applying traits to monsters that either strengthen them by increasing their HP, level, and number of turns per round, with extra rules for handling persistent conditions, or weaken them by reducing their HP and actions. A possible extension to this, which I haven't tested, would be to also implement proficiency without level to open up a greater pool of monsters to include in encounters in this way, as monster difficulty wouldn't depend as much on level-based increases to defenses and success chances. All of this, however, is still a bit fuzzy, and my gut feeling is that no matter the implementation, it's always going to feel like a bit of a kludge, as Pathfinder isn't inherently built with this methodology in mind. I'm sure others have thoughts on this too, including different takes on encounter design, and I'd be keen to hear what everyone else has in mind on the matter.
As many of us have seen by now, Daze got the short end of the stick following the remaster: for years, the cantrip has been generally-recognized as one of the worst, with exceptionally weak damage progression that fails to be justified by an altogether unreliable critical failure effect. Many of us hoped for the remaster to give us a new an improved version... except the new Daze is even worse, as it's the exact same cantrip, with the one difference being that its initial damage is 1d6, an average of 3.5 compared to the 4 from a caster's initial spellcasting attribute mod. It's been commonly suggested that this is due to a typo, as other descriptions of Daze in Player Core 1 reference the cantrip being able to render enemies off-guard or slow. I feel this is likely close to the truth: my personal suspicion is that the developers were still iterating on Daze, but didn't have the time to finalize it, and so shelved its latest iteration in favor of a safer version to avoid releasing an overtuned cantrip, while forgetting to revert the descriptive text around it.
With the above in mind, the intent behind this homebrew is simple: to propose a version of Daze that is better, but still balanced. Without further ado, here's the brew:
Daze (Two Actions) Traits: cantrip, concentrate, manipulate, mental, nonlethal Range 60 feet
Targets 1 creature
Defense Will
Duration 1 round
You cloud the target's mind and daze it with a mental jolt, dealing 1d4 mental damage and potentially rendering it off-guard based on its Will save.
Critical Success The target is unaffected.
Success The target takes half damage.
Failure The target takes full damage and is off-guard against the next attack attempted against it for the duration.
Critical Failure The target takes double damage. You can choose to either render the target off-guard for the duration or stunned 1.
Heightened (+1) The damage increases by 1d4.
---
The key changes being:
The damage starts out lower, but progresses a lot better, with the cantrip being heightened every rank rather than every 2 ranks.
The failure effect is significantly better by making the target off-guard against an attack.
The critical failure effect, while still unreliable, would give the player more choice over how to debuff their opponent.
So Daze still wouldn't be your premier damage option, but would offer a piece of useful crowd control at all levels and smoother-scaling damage, making it a more useful cantrip all around. If you feel this version is too weak, feel free to bump its damage die up a step, though I erred on the side of caution here as I do feel the cantrip's crowd control should come at a cost to its damage.
At the risk of creating a few threads in too quick a succession, this one is based off of this discussion of the Swashbuckler. The class, in my opinion, has a terrific flavor to it, and a fantastic bit of gameplay in its panache mechanic, but also a few issues:
Panache at early levels is excessively difficult to obtain, to the point where the Swashbuckler may spend most of their actions fishing for panache and then hold onto it without using a finisher the entire encounter. This, among other things, causes some players to consider After You a mandatory feat.
The Swashbuckler's panache-generating skills are essential for them to function, yet those skills don't increase automatically, forcing the player to commit most of their skill increases towards those.
The bones of the Rogue can be clearly seen in the Swashbuckler with Precise Strike and finishers. These, in my opinion, shouldn't be the only use for panache on a class whose flashy moves often have nothing to do with attacking.
The broad changes I'd want of a Swashbuckler rework would be the following:
More reliable access to panache at early levels, even at a tradeoff.
More uses for panache besides finishers.
Better support for the Swashbuckler's panache skills, even at a tradeoff in other class features or trained skills.
Here would be the specifics:
Core Class
Additional trained skills reduced to 2 + Int mod rather than 4 + Int mod.
Panache reworked; see below for full description.
The following class features are removed: precise strike, confident finisher, opportune riposte, vivacious speed, exemplary finisher, continuous flair, keen flair, and eternal confidence. Opportune riposte and keen flair are instead class feats and may be altered (see below).
Stylish tricks reworked: now grants a skill feat for Acrobatics or the trained skill from your Swashbuckler's style at 3rd level and every 2 levels thereafter, rather than just at 3rd, 7th, and 15th level.
New 3rd-level feature: skillful flair. At 3rd level, your proficiency rank in Acrobatics and the trained skill from your Swashbuckler's style automatically increases to expert at 3rd level, master at 7th level, and legendary at 15th level.
New 19th-level feature: swashbuckler mastery. You become a master in swashbuckler class DC (this is just a replacement for eternal confidence).
Panache
You care as much about the way you accomplish something as whether you actually accomplish it in the first place. When you perform an action with particular bravado, you can leverage this moment of verve to perform spectacular, deadly maneuvers. This state of flair is called panache, and you are either in a state of panache or you are not.
You typically gain panache only in combat encounters, and in the following ways:
You succeed on a check, and critically succeed on a normal DC for your level. At least one other creature must have been able to perceive this success for you to gain panache.
An enemy critically fails an attack or ability check against you. You must have been able to perceive this failure for you to gain panache.
You successfully Tumble Through an enemy.
You succeed on one of the actions determined by your Swashbuckler's style.
You use the En Garde! action, listed below.
You successfully perform a particularly daring action, as determined by the GM.
Due to your exceptional agility, you are permanently quickened. You can only use the extra action while you have panache, and you can only use it to perform an action with the panache trait, or contribute an action to an activity with the panache trait. All move actions that you have access to, that lack the exploration or downtime traits, and that don't deal damage have the panache trait, as do the actions determined by your swashbuckler's style. Certain swashbuckler class features or feats may grant you more actions with the panache trait, or add the panache trait to existing actions.
You gain the En Garde!, Use Panache, and Superb Strike actions, listed below.
En Garde! (Single Action) Swashbuckler Requirements You haven't yet had panache this turn.
Targets One creature you can see or hear.
With a signature phrase, battle cry, elaborate gesture, or any combination of the above, you make a show of challenging a foe to a duel. You gain panache, and your turn immediately ends, even if you had actions left.
If your challenge included a phrase or cry, this action gains the concentrate and auditory traits. If your challenge included a gesture, this action gains the manipulate and visual traits.
Use Panache (Free Action) Swashbuckler Requirements You have panache.
Your next action will be spectacular. You lose panache, and if your next action is to use an action or activity with the panache trait that has you make one or more checks, the result of the check (or checks) is one degree of success better. Critically succeeding on a check in this way does not cause you to gain panache unless the unmodified result would have also been a critical success.
If you critically succeed on a panache action's unmodified check and improve its degree of success, you get a spectacular success. If a panache action has a spectacular success effect, you use that effect, otherwise you use the effect for a critical success. A spectacular success is a critical success for the purpose of effects that trigger on a critical success, and a success for the purpose of effects that trigger on a success.
Superb Strike (Single Action) Panache, Swashbuckler
You strike with flair. Make a Strike with an agile or finesse melee weapon or agile or finesse unarmed attack. You can add your Dexterity modifier to the damage roll instead of your Strength modifier. On a spectacular success, you deal quadruple damage.
Styles
As noted in the core class changes, the exemplary finisher class feature is removed.
Battledancer
In addition to the current benefits, you also gain the Focused Fascination feat as a free feat, and targets don't become immune to further attempts to fascinate them.
On a spectacular success when you Perform, targets are also dazzled for 1 minute.
Braggart
In addition to the current benefits, targets don't become immune to further attempts to Demoralize them.
On a spectacular success when you Demoralize a creature, the target is frightened 3 and fleeing for 1 round.
Fencer
In addition to the current benefits, targets don't gain a circumstance bonus to further attempts to Create a Diversion against them.
On a spectacular success when you Feint or Create a Diversion, targets are off-guard until the end of your next turn.
Gymnast
In addition to the current benefits, you gain the Disarming Flair class feat.
On a spectacular success when you Disarm a foe, you can either knock the weapon up to 10 feet away from the target, or Interact to grab and wield the weapon. You must be able to hold the weapon in one hand to use this second option.
On a spectacular success when you Grapple a foe, weapon and unarmed attacks against the target gain a circumstance bonus to their damage rolls equal to the number of weapon damage dice while the target is restrained.
On a spectacular success when you Shove a foe, you push your target up to 20 feet away from you. You can Stride after it, but you must move the same distance and in the same direction.
On a spectacular success when you Trip a foe, weapon and unarmed attacks against the target gain a circumstance bonus to their damage rolls equal to the number of weapon damage dice while the target is prone.
Wit
On a spectacular success at a Bon Mot, the target takes the same status penalty to its attack rolls for the duration or until it issues a retort.
Feats
TL;DR: some class features that would be removed would be feats instead, finishers would be changed to moves that can be used all the time for a lesser effect, some feats would allow panache to be used on other rolls. Some examples:
Opportune Riposte is now a 2nd-level class feat. The feat no longer lets you Disarm a foe, but triggers on a failure if you have panache. Rather than Strike, you make a Superb Strike instead.
New 8th-level class feat: Opportune Panache. When you use your Opportune Riposte, you can instead use another panache action. The action must take exactly one action to perform, and can't target anyone other than the target of your Opportune Riposte.
New 10th-level class feat: Instant Flair. Whenever you would gain panache from critically succeeding on a check from a panache action, you can choose to forgo gaining panache and instead change the result to a spectacular success. You can use this benefit to change the result of subsequent checks made by the same action as well, but you can't retroactively change the result of checks made by that action which have already been resolved.
New 12th-level class feat: Spectacular Defense. You can Use Panache on your saving throws.
Keen Flair is now a 14th-level class feat. The benefit only applies to your Precise Strike.
Current finishers would be removed, and replaced with the following feats:
Dual Flair (Two Actions) Feat 1 Panache, Swashbuckler Prerequisites Superb Strike
Requirements You are wielding two melee weapons, each in a different hand, and each weapon has the finesse or agile trait.
You split your attacks. Make two Superb Strikes, one with each required weapon, against the same target. If the second Strike is made with a non-agile weapon, it takes a –2 penalty. Increase your multiple attack penalty only after attempting both Strikes.
If both attacks hit, combine their damage, and then add any other applicable effects from both weapons. You add any precision damage only once, to the attack of your choice. Combine the damage from both Strikes and apply resistances and weaknesses only once.
Precise Disarm (One Action) Feat 2 Panache, Swashbuckler Prerequisites Superb Strike
You attempt to knock a weapon out of your opponent's hand with a deft strike. Make a Superb Strike. The attack deals no damage, but instead may disarm the target based on the result of your attack roll.
Spectacular Success You knock the item out of the target's grasp. You can either knock the weapon up to 10 feet away from the target, or Interact to grab and wield the weapon. You must be able to hold the weapon in one hand to use this second option.
Critical Success You knock the item out of the target's grasp. It falls to the ground in the target's space.
Success You weaken your target's grasp on the item. Further attempts to Disarm the target of that item gain a +2 circumstance bonus, and the target takes a –2 circumstance penalty to attacks with the item or other checks requiring a firm grasp on the item. The creature can end the effect by Interacting to change its grip on the item; otherwise, it lasts as long as the creature holds the item.
Critical Failure You lose your balance and become off-guard until the start of your next turn.
Right Between The Eyes (One Action) Feat 2 Panache, Swashbuckler Prerequisites Superb Strike
You attempt to knock your foe off-balance with a well-placed blow to the head. Make a Superb Strike. The attack deals no damage, but may instead knock the target off-guard or even stun them based on the result of your attack roll.
Spectacular Success The target is off-guard for 1 round, stunned 1, and can't take reactions for 1 minute.
Critical Success The target is off-guard and can't take reactions for 1 round.
Success The target can't take reactions for 1 round.
Line Them Up, Knock Them Down (Two Actions) Feat 4 Panache, Swashbuckler Prerequisites Superb Strike
With a single attack, you strike at two foes, one behind the other. Make a Superb Strike. If you succeed, make another Superb Strike against a foe adjacent to and directly behind the first target. Increase your multiple attack penalty only after attempting all Strikes.
Bleeding Finisher (One Action) Feat 8 Panache, Swashbuckler Prerequisites Superb Strike
Your blow inflicts profuse bleeding. Make a Superb Strike. Rather than deal its normal damage, the attack inflicts persistent bleed damage based on the result of your attack roll.
Thwarting Attack (One Action) Feat 10 Panache, Swashbuckler Prerequisites Superb Strike
Your attack hinders your foe instead of harming them. Make a Superb Strike, and choose clumsy, enfeebled, or stupefied. The attack deals no damage, but may instead weaken the target based on your choice and the result of your attack roll.
Spectacular Success The target suffers 4 of the chosen condition for 1 round, and remains at 2 of the condition for 1 minute.
Critical Success The target suffers 2 of the chosen condition for 1 round, and remains at 1 of the condition for 1 minute.
Success The target suffers 1 of the chosen condition for 1 round.
Swashbuckler Archetype
While the archetype still grants you the ability to gain and use panache like a swashbuckler, it does not permanently quicken you (the main benefit would be therefore empowering your Acrobatics checks and checks with another skill based on your swashbuckler style).
Finishing Precision, Swashbuckler's Riposte, and Swashbuckler's Speed removed. Instead, you can get the Spectacular Style feat at 4th level which unlocks the spectacular success effect (or effects) of your swashbuckler style.
The new Swashbuckler Resiliency feat at 4th level would grant additional Hit Points based on your number of swashbuckler archetype class feats, in the same way as other resiliency feats.
The TL;DR to all this is:
The Swashbuckler would have more options and actions when they have panache, and easier access to panache in exchange for a bit of raw speed.
The class would have a greater range of ways to spend panache, including much more combat support and access to even better defenses.
The class would be an ultra-specialist at their panache-generating skills, gaining auto-scaling proficiency and extra skill feats in exchange for a bit of breadth.
Effectively, the Swash would be extra at pretty much everything they do: they'd have more actions, they'd succeed more, and they'd get to do even more on super-special crit successes. Their damage wouldn't necessarily be amazing overall (though quad damage would certainly look spectacular), but they'd have incredible action economy, combat support, and defense to make up for it.
Jumping off of this thread, I feel there's room for the Inventor to evolve a little from its initial design. The criticisms I have of the class are the following:
The class has a tendency to feel diluted, with innovations like the weapon somewhat failing to fully deliver their intended fantasy.
The class is fairly MAD, as it wants good Int, but also good Dex/Wis/Con, but also often Strength for heavier armor and more melee attack damage.
Many feats are tightly-coupled to existing innovations, making it difficult to expand them properly.
Overdrive is a fairly uninteresting and perfunctory damage buff that can be frustrating when it doesn't go off. A similar criticism can be made of Offensive Boost at 9th level.
Unstable feels excessively punitive as a trait by shutting down all other unstable functions.
Several of the Inventor's features require downtime, which isn't great for many APs. In particular, taking a full day of downtime just to rebuild a destroyed invention isn't always possible and can leave the Inventor feeling like half a class.
With this in mind, I'd propose the following broad goals for changes:
Strip back the core Inventor's power to put more power into their innovation.
Improve their quality of life by making it easier to rebuild, repair, and modify their innovation.
Rework the unstable trait to involve a Crafting check and damage the innovation, rather than the Inventor, without disabling further unstable actions.
Here would be the specifics:
Core Class
No longer trained in martial weapons (you still get this with the weapon innovation, see below).
No longer trained in medium armor (you still get this with the armor innovation, see below).
You lose the following class features: Overdrive, Explode, Shield Block, Expert Overdrive, Breakthrough Innovation, Master Overdrive, Offensive Boost, Legendary Overdrive, Revolutionary Innovation, and Infinite Invention. You gain other features instead that often provide similar benefits, listed below.
You gain the Inventive Expertise and Inventive Mastery features at levels 7 and 15 respectively, rather than 9 and 17. You also gain a new feature at level 19: Inventive Legend. This feature makes you legendary in Inventor class DC.
Innovation feature altered: unless your innovation has its HP values listed elsewhere, it has HP equal to 5 times your level, and a BT of twice your level. This includes armor, which would normally start out more durable. During your daily preparations, you automatically repair your innovation and restore its HP to maximum, or rebuild it if your innovation was lost or destroyed.
Peerless Inventor feature altered: you also gain the Quick Repair skill feat as a free feat, and don't need to place your innovation on a stable surface to repair it.
You gain a new 1st-level feature: Additional Modifications. At every odd-numbered level, you gain an additional inventor class feat. This feat must have the modification trait (these are your innovation modifications; see below).
Reconfigure feature altered: you become an expert in Crafting, can change your modifications during your daily preparations rather than downtime, and can do so without making a check.
Lightning Reflexes moved to 9th level rather than 7th level.
Complete Reconfiguration moved to 7th level, rather than 13th level, and altered to match the updated Reconfigure features (retrain modification feats during daily preparations without making a check). It also makes you a master in Crafting.
You gain a new 15th-level feature: Infinite Reconfiguration. You become legendary in Crafting, and each time you successfully Repair your innovation, you can also retrain one modification feat affecting it. You can Repair your innovation in this way even if it's not damaged.
Innovations
All innovation modifications are now inventor class feats with the modification traits, with their respective innovation as a prerequisite, and spread out across levels.
Because the Additional Modifications feature would already let you choose a modification at 1st rank, your Innovation feature would no longer provide its own initial modification (there would also no longer be any such thing as initial, breakthrough, or revolutionary modifications).
Armor Innovation
You become trained in medium and heavy armor, and gain the Shield Block feat.
Your armor uses the statistics of any level 0 common suit of armor of your choice, or any other level 0 suit of armor to which you have access. You can instead use the statistics of a 1st-level common suit of armor of your choice, or another 1st-level suit of armor to which you have access, but you must pay the monetary Price for the weapon.
You gain the armor specialization effect of your armor innovation. By default, your armor innovation's armor group is always composite, though you can modify this with a modification feat.
You gain the Static Shock two-action activity, which has the electicity, inventor, and unstable traits (the unstable trait is changed; see below): you discharge batteries embedded in your armor, dealing 2d6 electricity damage (+1d6 every 2 levels) to all creatures in a 5-foot emanation around it with a basic Reflex save. A creature that fails its save is also off-guard for 1 round, and also stunned 1 on a critical failure. You automatically critically succeed on your save against this effect.
Construct Innovation
You gain the Detonate two-action activity. This is effectively the same as Explode, except the damage dice are d10s, and you automatically critically succeed on your save against this effect.
Weapon Innovation
You become trained in martial and advanced weapons, and your weapon innovation can also be an advanced weapon of appropriate level and availability.
You gain the critical specialization effect of your weapon innovation at 1st level.
If your weapon innovation is based on a simple weapon, you gain the Complex Simplicity modification feat as a free feat. If your weapon innovation is based on a martial weapon, it gains one of the following traits of your choice: versatile B, versatile P, or versatile S.
You gain the Fragmented Attack two-action activity, which has the inventor and unstable traits: hidden devices, shrapnel, or other volatile bits of material erupt in a 5-foot burst within your weapon's reach, or first range increment if it's ranged, dealing 2 of your weapon's damage dice (+1 every 2 levels) of its damage type with a basic Reflex save. You can apply your weapon innovation's traits to this activity as if it were an attack, with effects on a hit occurring on a failed save, and effects on a critical hit occurring on a critical failure. If your weapon innovation uses ammunition, you spend one ammunition to use this activity. You automatically critically succeed on your save against this effect.
Unstable Trait
The unstable trait is altered: after you use an action with the unstable trait, your innovation takes damage equal to your level, which ignores its Hardness, based on the result of a normal Crafting check for your level: no damage on a critical success, half damage on a success (minimum of 1), full damage on a failure, and double damage on a critical failure. Failing the check no longer prevents you from using further unstable actions, so you can keep using them until your innovation is destroyed.
Feats
Feats that have a different effect based on your innovation, such as Megaton Strike and Full Automation, are instead split into separate feats for each innovation. These feats have the modification trait and have their respective innovation as a prerequisite.
Feats that would be incompatible with the above changes, such as Ubiquitous Overdrive, would be removed or adapted to work on their own. For example, Variable Core could be used to alter the damage type of an innovation's inherent unstable action, and the Overdrive Ally feat line could instead list its own Crafting check to give an ally a persistent damage bonus.
Haphazard Repair would be removed, as the updated unstable trait and Quick Repair feat would both invalidate the class feat's benefits.
Additional feats could expand existing innovations. For instance, you could have a Mixed Materials modification feat for your armor innovation that would let you change its armor group.
Particular mention goes to the weapon innovation, whose modifications are currently all about strapping extra traits onto the same weapon. Transforming modifications into feats should allow for many more modifications that provide actual actions to do with the weapon innovation, such as Fighter-esque maneuvers with a twist in the form of an unstable option. The same could be done for the armor and construct innovations as well.
And that should about cover it! The general idea here is to make the Inventor more customizable, with more things to do in general without necessarily becoming straight-up more powerful (you'd have worse single-target damage, for instance, in exchange for better AoE). Rather than simply not be able to do things, here the intent would be to incur different kinds of costs when possible (i.e. with the unstable trait damaging your innovation instead of shutting down all unstable actions), or just improve accessibility across APs (i.e. changing downtime features to daily preparation).
Bouncing off of this thread, I figured it might be worth going into specifics in the homebrew subforum by trying to redraw spell lists based on that thread's redrawing of spell traditions and magical essences, if only to see what identity each resulting tradition could have. A few notes before getting into the nitty-gritty:
Redrawing these spell lists would affect the versatility of various classes. In particular, arcane casters like the wizard would be less versatile overall (though they'd gain some good spells too), and divine casters like the cleric would have more baseline versatility. The intent is not to leave those classes in the dust, and I would support adjustments to those classes to make them feel truly good, with some examples listed further down below.
Adding to the above, these redrawn spell lists would leave each tradition with notable gaps in what they can do. This I think is a good thing, and should allow casters of those traditions to have more features and feats to fill in those gaps, or build on existing strengths.
These spell lists are not meant to be tailored towards any particular caster, even if they're meant to cover the general flavor of casters of each respective traditions. If you feel your wizard should be able to do more than just what's listed in the arcane tradition, for example, then it might be better to bridge that difference with the wizard themselves, and give them the class features, feats, and so on to aid that.
Effectively, the general purpose to this thought exercise isn't to nerf any particular caster, but to sharpen the identity of spell traditions so that they can each feel really distinct from one another, and so that casters have potentially more room for even further differentiation, as well as more reasons to be able to poach spells from other traditions if the player so wishes. Our current spell lists I think are severely affected by legacy design, and redrawing them would avoid the confusion many players have between certain spell lists, chiefly arcane and occult.
Part 1: Spell Lists
The following redrawn spell lists break each down into two parts: spells that are added, and spells that are removed. Spells that are currently in the tradition's spell list and aren't mentioned are assumed to be kept in. Each spoilered entry lists general reasons for the additions and removals, with a broad statement of each spell list's identity and range of contributions. As a general note, some added or kept spells I feel could be split into several to align more closely with individual magical traditions, such as Plane Shift being split into two plane-hopping spells covering the Inner Sphere and Outer Sphere.
Removed Spells: Agonizing Despair, All is One, One is All, Ancient Dust, Animate Dead, Bandit's Doom, Banishment, Belittling Boast, Bind Undead, Black Tentacles, Blink, Blood Feast, Bound in Death, Burning Blossoms, Call Fluxwraith, Call the Blood, Charitable Urge, Cinder Swarm, Charm, Chill Touch, Cloudkill, Command, Compel True Name, Confusion, Coral Eruption, Coral Scourge, Crushing Despair, Cup of Dust, Daemon Form, Demon Form, Devil Form, Déjà Vu, Dive and Breach, Divinity Leech, Dominate, Draw Ire, Dull Ambition, Eclipse Burst, Elemental Confluence, Elysian Whimsy, Empathic Link, Endure, Energy Aegis, Enervation, Enthrall, Entrancing Eyes, Entwined Roots, False Life, Fated Confrontation, Favorable Review, Fear, Feast of Ashes, Flames of Ego, Flourishing Flora, Gate, Gentle Repose, Ghostly Weapon, Glimmer of Charm, Goblin Pox, Grim Tendrils, Helpful Wood Spirits, Hideous Laughter, Horrid Wilting, Horrifying Blood Loss, Hungry Depths, Impeccable Flow, Impending Doom, Inexhaustible Cynicism, Infectious Comedy, Infectious Enthusiasm, Invoke Spirits, Invoke True Name, Life-Draining Roots, Lotus Walk, Lucky Number, Mantle of the Unwavering Heart, Mask of Terror, Massacre, Mind of Menace, Mirror Malefactors, Mirror's Misfortune, Musical Accompaniment, Necromancer's Generosity, Necrotic Radiation, Necrotize, Nudge the Odds, Outcast's Curse, Overselling Flourish, Phantasmal Killer, Plane Shift, Power Word Kill, Procyal Philosophy, Protect Companion, Rapid Adaptation, Ravenous Portal, Repulsion, Roaring Applause, Root Reading, Rouse Skeletons, Sanguine Mist, Schadenfreude, Scouring Pulse, Seal Fate, Secret Chest, Shadow Siphon, Shadow Walk, Shadow Zombie, Subconscious Suggestion, Suggestion, Summon Animal, Summon Archmage, Summon Draconic Legion, Summon Dragon, Summon Elemental, Summon Elemental Herald, Summoner's Precaution, Swallow Light, Tanglefoot, Telepathic Demand, Tempest of Shades, Umbral Extraction, Uncontrollable Dance, Unspeakable Shadow, Vampiric Exsanguination, Vampiric Maiden, Vampiric Touch, Vicious Jealousy, Vision of Beauty, Vomit Swarm, Wall of Shrubs, Wall of Virtue, Warding Aggression, Warrior's Regret, Weird, Winning Streak, Wisdom of the Winds, Word of Revision.
This is a lot of changes overall, with only a slight reduction to the spell list's size in total. The general gist of the changes is as follows:
Arcane magic would have far better access to effects that gain information, disrupt the senses (such as Synesthesia), change something or someone's shape, and use the elements.
Arcane magic would lose access to necromancy, effects that dominate others or influence their emotions, and extraplanar influence.
Arcane magic would gain a degree of healing by undoing damage to inanimate matter or the mind (though Soothe I think ought to provide temporary hit points and not hit point healing).
Overall, an arcane caster wouldn't be able to do a little bit of everything quite as much as they do now, but would excel at direct physical and energy damage, manipulation of information through both divinatory and illusion effects, and alteration of physical properties. Arcane casters would have mastery of space and time, and would be the only casters able to teleport, use telekinesis, and alter time itself. On the flipside, arcane magic would no longer be good at directly manipulating the living or undead, and would still lack the broader healing powers of primal and divine casters, while also being unable to cross planar borders.
Divine
Click here to show the full divine spell list:
Added Spells: Biting Words, Black Tentacles, Blink, Blistering Invective, Call the Blood, Charm, Chroma Leach, Crushing Despair, Cup of Dust, Cutting Insult, Dive and Breach, Divinity Leech, Dominate, Elemental Confluence, Empathic Link, Endure, Enthrall, Entrancing Eyes, False Life, Favorable Review, Feast of Ashes, Feral Shades, Flames of Ego, Ghostly Weapon, Glimmer of Charm, Grim Tendrils, Healing Plaster, Helpful Wood Spirits, Hideous Laughter, Horrid Wilting, Ill Omen, Infectious Comedy, Infectious Enthusiasm, Infectious Melody, Liberating Command, Mad Monkeys, Musical Accompaniment, Overselling Flourish, Paranoia, Possession, Power Word Kill, Secret Chest, Shadow Walk, Speak with Animals, Speak with Plants, Spirit Song, Subconscious Suggestion, Suggestion, Summon Archmage, Summon Elemental, Summon Elemental Herald, Summon Entity, Summon Fey, Summon Plant or Fungus, Tame, Threefold Aspect, Umbral Extraction, Uncontrollable Dance, Verminous Lure, Winning Streak, Word of Revision.
Removed Spells: Admonishing Ray, Advanced Scurvy, Agonizing Despair, Air Bubble, Air Walk, Alarm, Allfood, Approximate, Astral Labyrinth, Awaken Entropy, Bandit's Doom, Blade Barrier, Blast of the Bellows, Blazing Armory, Blazing Blade, Blindness, Blink Charge, Blood Feast, Blood Vendetta, Bloodspray Curse, Bone Spray, Boneshaker, Bralani Referendum, Breadcrumbs, Bullhorn, Catch Your Name, Cauterize Wounds, Clad in Metal, Cleanse Air, Comprehend Language, Concordant Choir, Continual Flame, Create Food, Create Water, Dancing Shield, Darkness, Darkvision, Daze, Deafness, Deep Sight, Detect Metal, Detect Poison, Discern Lies, Discern Location, Draw Moisture, Dream Message, Drop Dead, Echoing Weapon, Endure Elements, Energy Aegis, Enhance Senses, Enhance Victuals, Familiar's Face, Faerie Fire, Fate's Travels, Fear the Sun, Final Sacrifice, Fireproof, Flense, Foresight, Forgotten Lines, Freedom of Movement, Gentle Breeze, Ghoulish Cravings, Globe of Invulnerability, Glowing Trail, Glyph of Warding, Grave Impressions, Guiding Star, Haunting Hymn, Heatvision, Helpful Steps, Illuminate, Inside Ropes, Internal Insurrection, Instant Armor, Know Direction, Know Location, Lashunta's Life Bubble, Light, Locate, Lock, Lotus Walk, Magic Mailbox, Magic Weapon, Mending, Message, Mirecloak, Mirror Malefactors, Misty Memory, Movanic Glimmer, Needle Darts, Organsight, Painful Vibrations, Percussive Impact, Pet Cache, Phoenix Ward, Prestidigitation, Proliferating Eyes, Prying Eye, Purify Food and Drink, Putrefy Food and Drink, Quick Sort, Radiant Field, Ravenous Darkness, Ray of Enfeeblement, Read Aura, Read the Air, Remake, Remove Paralysis, Repelling Pulse, Resist Energy, Restore Senses, Restyle, Return to Essence, Rewinding Step, Rousing Splash, Safe Passage, Scintillating Safeguard, Scrying Ripples, See Invisibility, Sending, Shield, Shielded Arm, Shock to the System, Show the Way, Sigil, Silence, Soothing Blossoms, Soothing Spring, Sound Burst, Sparkleskin, Spellwrack, Suffocate, Status, Steal Voice, Stone to Flesh, Stonesense, Summoner's Visage, Sunburst, Synchronize, Talking Corpse, Telepathic Demand, Temporal Ward, Temporary Glyph, Thermal Remedy, Thoughtful Gift, Tongues, Torturous Trauma, Tremor Signs, True Seeing, Ventriloquism, Wall of Flesh, Water Breathing, Water Walk, Web of Eyes, Whirling Scarves, Ymeri's Mark.
This may not look terribly good at first glance, as there are a lot of removals to an already small spell list. To me, this further indicates that we need a proper expansion book for divine spells, as there's a ton of magic to be had around eliciting emotions, controlling creatures, manipulating lifeforce and souls, and so on that just isn't really there in Pathfinder's current spells.
However, I do think there are a lot of benefits to be had here nonetheless:
Divine casters would gain a ton of control effects, like Charm, Dominate, and Fear, as well as many additional summoning effects.
Divine casters would lose an assorted number of effects, mainly tied to obtaining information or protecting against material energy.
The end result should be that divine casters would still be extremely good at healing and protection, but would also be able to do more things beyond that: the remaster should hopefully be giving them better damage, and with the above they would be the absolute best class for planar travel, as they'd access both the Inner and Outer Sphere and be able to call upon creatures from both. They wouldn't be great at interacting with the material world, but would have the greatest variety of things to do with creatures, including some of the strongest forms of mind control. Really, with more spells that would cover the creation and control of undead, resurrection, control over the flow of souls, and other things to do with the intersection of vital and spiritual energy, divine casters could have a really solid baseline of things to do.
Occult
Click here to show the full occult spell list:
Added Spells: Angel Form, Animal Vision, Befuddle, Blessing of Defiance, Crusade, Daemon Form, Demon Form, Devil Form, Divine Decree, Divine Inspiration, Divine Lance, Divine Wrath, Drop Dead, Elysian Whimsy, Entrancing Eyes, Falsify Heat, Halcyon Infusion, Movanic Glimmer, Power Word Blind, Power Word Stun, Radiant Heart of Devotion, Show the Way, Spiritual Guardian, Summon Anarch, Summon Archmage, Summon Axiom, Summon Celestial, Summon Fiend, Summon Lesser Servitor, Wall of Virtue, Warding Aggression, Web of Influence.
Removed Spells: Aberrant Form, Alarm, Animate Dead, Animate Rope, Animated Assault, Aqueous Blast, Awaken Entropy, Bestial Curse, Bilocation, Binding Muzzle, Blanket of Stars, Blinding Foam, Blink Charge, Blightburn Blast, Blister, Blood Duplicate, Blood Feast, Blood Vendetta, Bloodspray Curse, Bottomless Stomach, Bound in Death, Bracing Tendrils, Breadcrumbs, Bullhorn, Bursting Bloom, Call Fluxwraith, Call the Blood, Cast into Time, Chill Touch, Chromatic Armor, Chromatic Ray, Chromatic Wall, Cloak of Colors, Clownish Curse, Collective Transposition, Concordant Choir, Confetti Cloud, Continual Flame, Countless Eyes, Cozy Cabin, Cup of Dust, Curse of Lost Time, Cyclone Rondo, Dancing Lights, Dancing Shield, Darkness, Dawnflower's Light, Day's Weight, Death Knell, Death Ward, Detect Metal, Devour Life, Dimension Door, Divinity Leech, Duplicate Foe, Eat Fire, Echoing Weapon, Empty Pack, Energy Aegis, Enervation, Etheric Shards, Faerie Fire, Falling Sky, False Life, Fashionista, Feast of Ashes, Fey Form, Final Sacrifice, Flame Dancer, Floating Disk, Fly, Force Cage, Forceful Hand, Friendfetch, Gaseous Form, Gentle Breeze, Gentle Repose, Ghoulish Cravings, Globe of Invulnerability, Glowing Trail, Glyph of Warding, Gravitational Pull, Gravity Well, Grim Tendrils, Hag's Fruit, Haste, Haunting Hymn, Helpful Steps, Humanoid Form, Illuminate, Inkshot, Inside Ropes, Instant Armor, Internal Insurrection, Kinetic Ram, Knock, Lashing Rope, Levitate, Life Pact, Light, Lock, Loose Time's Arrow, Mage Armor, Mage Hand, Magic Mailbox, Magic Missile, Magic Weapon, Magical Fetters, Magnificent Mansion, Martyr's Intervention, Maze, Maze of Locked Doors, Mending, Mercurial Stride, Message Rune, Mimic Undead, Momentary Recovery, Morass of Ages, Moth's Supper, Necrotic Radiation, Needle Darts, Nothing Up My Sleeve, Ooze Form, Painful Vibrations, Painted Scout, Penumbral Disguise, Penumbral Shroud, Percussive Impact, Persistent Servant, Pet Cache, Phantom Steed, Phase Bolt, Pocket Library, Poltergeist's Fury, Prestidigitation, Prismatic Armor, Prismatic Shield, Prismatic Sphere, Prismatic Spray, Prismatic Wall, Protect Companion, Pyrotechnics, Quick Sort, Quicken Time, Radiant Field, Rally Point, Ravening Maw, Ravenous Darkness, Ravenous Portal, Ray of Enfeeblement, Reaper's Lantern, Rebounding Barrier, Remake, Repelling Pulse, Replicate, Resilient Sphere, Resist Energy, Resplendent Mansion, Restoration, Restyle, Return Beacon, Reverse Gravity, Rewinding Step, Rope Trick, Rouse Skeletons, Sanguine Mist, Scintillating Safeguard, Scorching Blast, Scouring Pulse, Scrying Ripples, Sculpt Sound, Sea of Thought, Seashell of Stolen Sound, Shadow Army, Shadow Blast, Shadow Raid, Shadow Siphon, Shadow Spy, Shadow Walk, Shadow Zombie, Shatter, Shield, Shock to the System, Sigil, Signal Skyrocket, Silence, Slow, Soft Landing, Sonata Span, Soulshelter Vessel, Sound Burst, Sparkleskin, Spectral Hand, Spellwrack, Spirit Link, Spy's Mark, Stagnate Time, Steal Voice, Summon Ancient Fleshforged, Summon Fey, Summon Irii, Summoner's Precaution, Swallow Light, Synchronize, Telekinetic Bombardment, Telekinetic Haul, Telekinetic Maneuver, Telekinetic Projectile, Teleport, Tempest of Shades, Temporal Twin, Temporal Ward, Temporary Glyph, Threefold Aspect, Thoughtful Gift, Thundering Dominance, Time Beacon, Time Jump, Time Pocket, Time Stop, Tortoise and the Hare, Transcribe Conflict, Tremor Signs, Tremorsense, Umbral Extraction, Umbral Graft, Undermine Reality, Unexpected Transposition, Unseen Servant, Vampiric Exsanguination, Vampiric Maiden, Vampiric Touch, Variable Gravity, Voice on the Breeze, Vomit Swarm, Wall of Flesh, Wall of Force, Wall of Shadow, Warp Step, Whirling Scarves, Wisdom of the Winds, Wooden Double, Worm's Repast, Zero Gravity.
There's a lot of removals here, and I feel this corresponds to a frequent criticism made of the occult tradition, which is that it's currently a big grab bag of effects that don't have all that much to do with one another: a lot of spells feel like they were added to the tradition just because they're a little spooky, even though many of them are about manipulating flesh and lifeforce, but also the tradition tries to single-handedly do all of what one would expect from a psychic character, which is why it has all of the mind-over-matter spells that should normally be arcane (and I'll talk about how this affects the psychic further below). The above may not look nice, but I feel would go a long way towards sharpening the tradition's identity:
Occult casters would gain access to the few information-gaining spells that slipped in-between the cracks, while also gaining greater access to spells related to the Outer Sphere. This should mean access to spirit damage as well as mental damage with the remaster's spells.
Occult casters would lose access to telekinesis, teleportation, and time manipulation, which is the domain of arcane magic, as well as general horror-themed spells that would make more sense as primal or divine.
Despite losing quite a few spells, occult casters would be by far the best controllers in the game, able to affect allies enemies with a variety of buffs, debuffs, and harder crowd control. They would also still excel at information-gathering, while having better interaction with the Outer Planes. The intent is also, however, for occult casters to lack interaction with the material world, and lose hit point healing, with their protection bolstering defenses in various ways instead.
Removed Spells: Alarm, Animal Vision, Approximate, Blessing of Defiance, Blinding Fury, Blindness, Catch Your Name, Charm, Compel True Name, Curse of Lost Time, Dancing Shield, Darkvision, Day's Weight, Deafness, Deep Sight, Elysian Whimsy, Engrave Memory, Enhance Senses, Falsify Heat, Far Sight, Fated Confrontation, Fear, Fear the Sun, Glimmer of Charm, Glyph of Warding, Grasp of the Deep, Guidance, Halcyon Infusion, Hallucinatory Terrain, Heatvision, Impart Empathy, Instant Armor, Invoke True Name, Know Direction, Know Location, Loose Time's Arrow, Lose the Path, Mariner's Curse, Mask of Terror, Mind of Menace, Misty Memory, Movanic Glimmer, Nondetection, Ocular Overload, Oneiric Mire, Organsight, Pack Attack, Pet Cache, Prestidigitation, Quick Sort, Radiant Heart of Devotion, Remove Fear, Remove Paralysis, Restore Senses, Scrying Ripples, Show the Way, Sigil, Slow, Status, Synchronize, Tame, Temporary Glyph, True Seeing, Ventriloquism, Warding Aggression, Web of Eyes, Ymeri's Mark.
Primal is perhaps the one tradition here to have more spells added than removed, and looking at which spells are in and out, a theme ought to jump out pretty quickly: primal casters can be necromancers now! Primal is the only tradition with only one dedicated caster, and the above makes it clear to see why: just as arcane is the wizard spell list in practice, primal very much is still the druid spell list. Even though primal magic ties into the essence of vitality and void, spells that would lean more towards void than vitality, undeath than life, are completely excluded, so that anyone wanting to play a necromancer would likely have to pick a wizard instead, or maybe a divine caster. In fact, even spells that look somewhat evil are excluded from the primal list, even though ripping flesh from bone and drawing the blood out of enemies is stuff a master of material and vital energies would absolutely be able to do. Thus, there are two broad lines of changes:
Primal casters get to do more evil and spooky stuff like drain the life out of others, raise undead, and tap into the Netherworld, a part of the Inner Sphere through which vital energy flows. All of this fits into existing mechanics of being good at summoning, surviving, and dealing damage.
Primal casters lose the few effects in the list that are assigned to every tradition by default, that apply crowd control, like Charm or Fear, or that do mind stuff rather than life/undeath or matter/energy stuff.
The end result should be that the primal tradition would be even more direct, yet would have a significantly expanded theme in that primal casters don't all have to be tree-hugging nature lovers, i.e. druids. Primal magic can be used to reverse the natural flow of vital energy, just like divine magic, and that should ideally open up thematic room for entirely different sorts of primal casters along the way.
Part 2: Classes and Focus Spells
The most natural question to ask following all of the above is: what does this say about my characters, or the ones I want to build? By itself, this kind of redrawing of spell traditions would not only be disruptive, but would also impose much stricter definitions on what a caster of each tradition can and can't do: occult casters can't manipulate matter, primal casters can't control minds, and so on. On its face, this is a very limiting framework.
However, I would say that this kind of stricter framework would actually make for a better game overall, because it would give individual caster classes more room to shine: if current wizards feel too limited, for example, their class features could be expanded to include new schools like the Magaambya (for primal magic), a school of theurgy (for divine magic), and the magical equivalent of the humanities (for occult magic). Psychics I think ought to be a dual-tradition class that can choose to be either arcane or occult, as both draw from mental energy, and more generally I think there's room for dual-tradition casters based entirely around physical essence (maybe a shifter?), spiritual essence (some kind of soul shepherd or reincarnated soul?), and vital essence (necromancer 100%). Generally, classes exist to toy with the rules of the main game, and caster classes ought to "break" the rules of spellcasting by either accessing cross-tradition versatility, or having unique features that build on their tradition's strengths.
In addition to this, I think there's an additional layer of differentiation in the form of focus spells: focus spells in my opinion have this terrific potential for delivering mechanics independent of spell traditions, as they cater specifically to a particular class or subclass, and reinforce those differences by dint of being more frequently available. For instance, if you want to have a blood-bending primal caster who puppeteers enemies via their blood, effectively working much like a mind control spell that the primal tradition lacks, a focus spell would be able to fill that niche and bring it to the forefront of the relevant character's gameplay. More sharply-defined traditions don't have to be limiting, and in fact it is their sharper definition that would give room for this deeper level of differentiation between casters.
Part 3: Conclusion
While this post lies in the domain of homebrew and is therefore largely just a thought exercise, I do think there is value to be had from this kind of dive into what magical traditions are meant to represent in Pathfinder. Beyond the specifics, simply giving each tradition a clear-cut identity, each completely distinct from the others, would present a lot of advantages in making casters play differently from one another before getting into specific class features and feats. PF2e has many more martial classes than casters, and I feel part of the reason is because despite the effort Paizo has put into creating four separate spell lists that can be easily bolted onto any caster chassis, those spell lists are so fuzzy or overly tied to specific "iconic" casters that it's difficult to release a caster class that would easily stand out. By refining each spell list so that one can concisely say "this tradition does X, Y, and Z", instead of looking for the fewer things the tradition doesn't do, current and future casters would have much more room to layer their own identity and gameplay on top.
Any forumgoer who's been on here for a little while will have probably seen a few threads like these already: both arcanemagic and occultmagic are particular subjects of controversy, as there's a general player confusion as to what those traditions are meant to be about. Divinemagic gets its own criticism for lacking spells, particularly many strong spells, compared to other traditions. The upcoming remaster is set to change a few things, such as by implementing spirit damage that will hopefully make divine spell damage a lot more consistent, but I feel there are quite a few unanswered questions and unaddressed problems that remain:
Despite moving away from the old eight schools of magic, arcane magic is still likely to include them implicitly in the form of all of the spells previously assigned those schools. This retains a tradition that's been overloaded with spells mainly just to accommodate the wizard class as known in previous editions, making it no surprise that arcane magic feels overly broad and unfocused to many.
Occult magic is starting to become similarly problematic: because the occult is so often defined as the magic of the unknown, it often just comes across to many as just "weird arcane magic" and puts the two traditions at odds with one another. Secrets of Magic even calls this out, but there is genuine cause for concern given the excessive overlap between the two spell lists, a remnant from splitting the old wizard's spell lists into two. The association between the occult and space, beyond lacking much justification besides outer space being weird and largely unknown, is starting to become problematic for Starfinder 2e, where every caster there could easily be themed as occult, an issue Paizo is trying very hard to avoid.
Player attempts to define all of these traditions tend to have the issue of always coming from many different starting points: because the lore around magic in 2e is largely defined around spell lists designed to accommodate classes from prior editions, there's a lot of fuzziness and inconsistency depending on what you start with, e.g. themes, essences, examples of famous casters, and so on. This also makes for a chicken-and-egg problem where there's no consistent agreement on what to start from in order to define the rest.
Looking at individual spells, their assignment often can feel arbitrary and influenced more by legacy than by any consistent thematic methodology. For example, Mending is a spell that's specifically about fixing a broken item, yet that's given to every tradition of magic, including traditions that aren't supposed to deal with the material at all. By contrast, Synesthesia, a powerful mind-scrambling spell, is exclusive to the occult tradition despite also ostensibly making sense as an arcane spell, and the first argument made to justify that is one of balance, rather than theme (i.e. "arcane magic would be too strong if it had nearly all of the game's strongest spells").
Finally, a common criticism levied even by the developers themselves is that casters are often defined by what they can't do, rather than by what they can do, which makes it more difficult to define them properly in the long run. For instance, defining the wizard as "a caster who can do anything except heal" makes for a class that has no real specialty, which is why many players continue to expect radically different things from the wizard.
Effectively, while the creation of magical traditions and caster-agnostic spell lists has allowed for greater differentiation and better future-proofing than class-specific spell lists of old, there is also a deep-set problem of niche protection not being terribly respected across these traditions. Primal magic seems to have come out the best, with a strong identity across spells with perhaps only a few thematic exceptions, while every other tradition has ended up suffering from a lack of similar sharpness, which in turn makes some character builds just a bit more difficult to differentiate, and some classes just a bit too generalist for their own good. It's unlikely to be a problem that will be fixed in 2e, barring some massive redrawing of spell lists, but I think this is still a topic worth discussing in view of a hypothetical 3e or other future edition.
---
Part 1: An Essence-Based Breakdown
Let's first bear in mind what was said in the above: because there isn't all that much consistency to how magic traditions, magical essences, and spell lists are defined, there's no truly objective starting point for trying to define magic in Pathfinder. In trying to set clear delimitations to spell traditions, I'm inherently making a subjective call here, which I'll nonetheless try to justify as best I can: defining magic by underlying essences is, in my opinion, a great idea, because that can start to set identifiable niches that can inform what each given tradition and its casters can be expected to do (as opposed to what they can't do, even though it informs that as well). By starting with the four magical essences, we can start to get a picture of the general ballpark of effects that can be combined with each other.
Important to note, however, is that the four essences as defined are not, in my opinion, immune to criticism, and could do with some tweaks in my opinion: spiritual essence in particular is not terribly well-defined I feel, because decision-making is attributed to mental essence, whereas faith and belief are attributed to vital essence. If spiritual essence isn't what lets creatures forge their own path in the grand cosmic cycle of souls, what is it even meant to do? I would thus want to use the four essences as a starting point, but also tweak them slightly, which would make the result probably a little more subjective, but also hopefully leave more thematic room for certain traditions and casters.
With all of this said, here's what I think the four essences ought to look like as the basic building blocks of magic:
Material Essence
Starting with the simplest (in theory), material essence I think is the most well-defined currently, in that it's the magical essence governing physical matter.
Material essence ought to govern the alteration of matter, which should include mending inanimate matter (and thus healing constructs), and changing the basic properties of inanimate matter, such as by altering its shape, composition, and dimensions such as weight or size.
Material essence also ought to govern the projection, absorption, and redirection of energy. This ought to mean access to kinetic damage types such as bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing, but also the commonly-known energy damage types such as acid, cold, electricity, fire, and sonic.
Mental Essence
Mental essence I feel ought to be refined slightly, in that I think it ought to still cover knowledge and the senses, but not emotion and decision-making in and of itself, in order to not overtake spiritual essence, which I'll explain further below.
Mental essence ought to govern any sharing of information, including telepathic communication, scrying, and divinatory spells that obtain cold, hard facts.
Mental essence also ought to govern mental damage, as well as protection against effects that would damage the mind or try to wrest information from it.
Spiritual Essence
The biggest change here I think is that spiritual essence, in my opinion, should cover the soul's ability to feel emotion and make decisions, as those I think are the essential qualities that let souls make the moral choices that shape their journey across the planes in the cycle of souls.
Spiritual essence ought to affect the soul, such as by dealing spirit damage, eliciting emotions, affecting decisions, or stopping or deviating a soul's normal path throughout the multiverse.
Spiritual essence I think also ought to govern interaction with the Outer Sphere, such as travel to and from those planes, and the ability to contact outsiders from those planes.
Vital Essence
Vital essence I don't think needs to change that much, in that it should cover life and its flow across the multiverse.
Vital essence ought to govern the manipulation of vitality, such as by healing hit points and dealing vitality damage, as well as the void, such as by dealing void damage and healing creatures whose flow of life energy has been reversed, such as undead. This should also mean exclusive access to the death trait on spells.
Because vital essence flows from Creation's Forge to the Void, it ought to govern interaction with the Inner Sphere, such as travel to and from those planes, and the ability to contact creatures from those planes.
So far, so simple, right? You might notice that a few different effects are missing, which brings us to the step where we start combining these building blocks up into traditions, each of which is greater than the sum of its parts:
---
Part 2: Redrawn Magical Traditions
With the basic foundation of magical essences redrawn, let's see what happens when we put those together into magical traditions, and what could change from what we have now:
Arcane
This I feel would have the biggest changes: if material essence covers inanimate matter and energy, and mental essence covers information and the senses, that I think leads to a much more succinct delimitation of arcane magic as the magic of the structure, the kind of magic you use reshape reality as we know it. If the Universe were a video game, arcane magic would be the equivalent of cheat codes you'd get to use to alter any property that isn't a health bar or other players. While the application of mind over matter lends itself naturally to formal study, study shouldn't be the only way to wield arcane magic. This means outside of wizards and magi, there should be room for other arcane casters who may be self-taught, or who make use of runes and other magical structures to produce the exact forms and flows of arcane spells.
In addition to the basic portfolios of material and mental essence, arcane magic I think ought to govern alteration of more abstract properties, such as space and time. This means arcane magic ought to be what lets you teleport through space, though not across planes. This should also mean, in my opinion, exclusive access to applications of mind over matter, such as telekinesis and force constructs.
Contrary to current implementation, arcane magic in my opinion shouldn't allow the creation of undead, shapeshifting, or the wielding of vitality or void damage, as all of that I think requires manipulating vital essence. I also don't think it should cover the manipulation of emotions or the domination of wills, which I think gets into the domain of spiritual essence. Though arcane magic should be what lets you teleport through space, interplanar travel I think ought to be the domain of other spell traditions.
Also contrary to current implementation, I think arcane magic could do with increased access to protective and restorative spells that cover inanimate matter and the mind specifically. A wizard should therefore be able to cure the effects of Feeblemind and other specifically mental (but not spiritual or vital) debuffs, but should also be able to access all spells that scramble the mind directly, like Synesthesia
As an aside, force damage I think ought to be dropped. Most existing force damage spells are likely to be redone as spirit damage spells, and the remaining few arcane force damage spells would likely make more sense as spells that deal physical or energy damage. Arcane already has the largest selection of damage types, and ought to rely on using the right type for the occasion instead of bypassing all resistances and immunities with one type.
Occult
Also a tradition I think would change a fair bit along these lines, the occult tradition should remain the magic of stories, and specifically cover pretty much anything you'd expect from telepathy (but not telekinesis), along with a bit of spooky extraplanar interactions. Crafting illusions, enchanting the mind and the spirit, and communicating with souls from beyond this mortal coil ought to be the specialty of occult casters, who would be second to none at manipulating creatures, for good or ill. Occult casters should not, however, be able to influence matter, even if they could pick up thoughts and emotions around otherwise inanimate objects, nor should they be able to alter a creature's lifeforce.
Because occult magic lies at the intersection of the mental and the spiritual, occult casters should have exclusive access to all effects that mess with a target's mind and emotions at the same time, like Phantasmal Killer or Weird, effects that rely on performance, like Overselling Flourish, or effects that rely on true names and the importance attached to them.
Because occult magic uses spiritual essence, occult casters ought to be able to deal spirit damage, and alter a target's fate (arcane and primal casters shouldn't, by contrast).
Occult magic shouldn't be able to heal, as that ought to be the domain of vital essence, and I feel a lot of spells currently labeled as spiritual ought to be vital instead. Rather, occult spells should be able to grant temporary hit points instead, while protecting against damage to the mind or spirit and curing ailments to both.
Occult magic I don't think ought to cover telekinetic effects, as manipulating matter ought to be the domain of the arcane. Because of this, I feel the psychic could probably be made into a dual-tradition caster, with some conscious minds providing access to the arcane list, and others granting access to the occult list, as both incorporate the mental essence psychics hinge upon.
Divine
Divine I think (and hope) would be the biggest winner from this redrawing, as it would hopefully gain access to more spells, plus would be able to be the best spell list for a bunch of things. Not only would divine magic cover healing and death effects thanks to access to vital essence, it should cover a whole slew of buffs, debuffs, and crowd control related to spiritual essence. Divine magic would have the best access to interplanar travel and communication, and would also have exclusive access to resurrection, which would require both returning a soul to its body and infusing it with life.
I feel divine magic ought to cover exclusively spirit, vitality, and void damage, with deities and feats instead providing other damage types (Sarenrae's divine fire would likely be divine ice if it came from Kostchtchie, even if the base effect would be the same).
Any spell-based buff or debuff that doesn't cover the manipulation of matter, energy, information, or senses should be a divine spell.
We need more spells that are exclusively divine, i.e. that lie at the intersection of vital and spiritual essence. It's not just that divine magic should incorporate all of the lifeforce manipulation of primal magic and the soul manipulation of spiritual magic, divine magic also ought to include curses harmful to both health and fate, spells that turn constructs into truly living creatures with a soul, and spells that not only slay a creature, but destroy their soul as well.
Primal
Primal I think needs the least changes, and would likely be the tradition that would change the least. As with now, you'd get to control matter and energy, as well as life and death, and as a result of it be able to shape living matter as well as the inanimate, as well as summon new and existing lifeforms to your aid and unleash deadly diseases. Spells that specifically rely on living matter, like Inside Ropes, I feel ought to be exclusively primal as a result. Same as now, primal would therefore be the most direct tradition, with spells that would be great for creating, destroying, and transforming, though not so much controlling or manipulating other creatures unless they're made specifically of nothing but material or vital essence.
Part 3: Conclusion
The long and short of it all is that, in a more ideal world, I'd like spell traditions to be redrawn so that they're more or less equalized in size and range of things they can do. On one hand, this I think should mean reducing the breadth of arcane and occult magic to a more focused list of effects, but then also expanding divine magic somewhat to have more privileged access to a whole bunch of effects, particularly crowd control. This may not be a universally-agreed separation of traditions and their spells, but I feel it could lead to a structure for future implementations of those traditions that I think would lead to easier differentiation, as well as more easily identifiable caster classes.
The final thing I'd like to add to the above wall of text is that the above redrawing of spell traditions I think carries a few implications:
Pretty much all spells currently given to all traditions, like Mending, ought to be made exclusive to one or two.
Several spells that are currently a bit broad, like Plane Shift or Remove Curse, likely ought to be split into multiple spells that cover a smaller range of effects more specific to one or more traditions, e.g. "Travel the Inner Sphere"/"Travel the Outer Sphere", or "Cure Mental/Spiritual/Vital Ailment" (ideally with less generic names).
The magus, witch, and wizard would likely no longer need to use a spellbook-like mechanic to avoid becoming too versatile, and could instead use their spellbook or familiar to learn other kinds of things.
If the above traditions ever turn out to be too specific for existing casters, caster class and subclass features ought to fill in the gaps, just like how the current druid chassis features good defenses to make up for the primal tradition's focus on direct combat.
Full disclaimer: though I am not a foremost expert on Pathfinder's wizard, I do like the class as implemented in 2e. With a former background in D&D, my expectation for the class is that they'd cast plenty of diverse spells in a variety of ways, and the wizard assuredly delivers in that respect.
With that said, however, there is clearly some room for refinement, as Paizo has explicitly called out the fact that the wizard, despite being a scholar of magic, doesn't have that much of a scholarly theme embedded into their gameplay, a flaw the developers are aiming to remediate with proper schools of magic in the remaster. It is this same broad line of criticism that I found resonating with in another player's comment in a different thread: even with the changes we've seen with the remaster, there isn't that much tying the game's foremost bookworm to any actual knowledge, bar a single Recall Knowledge-based feat ported from the Magus.
The original thread discussing the wizard went a little bit everywhere and got shut down, so I intend this to be the thread covering the more homebrew aspects of what more could be done with the wizard: the class as we know it is unlikely to fundamentally change in 2e, so whichever imperfections one may perceive in the class are unlikely to ever be fully addressed, barring a brand-new edition (whose hypotheticals can also be fun to discuss). With that said, there is still room to do new things with the wizard class, particularly in the world of homebrew, ranging from new feats to core class changes of varying scope.
If you're reading this, perhaps you may disagree with the above and feel like the wizard needs no changes, at least not in this respect. If you do feel like the wizard could use some more knowledge-based abilities, however, feel free to express your thoughts here. Some thoughts off the top of my head for feats that could work towards that theme:
A feat that lets the wizard transcribe lore into their spellbook or potentially gain access to an extradimensional library, gaining the benefits of Additional Lore with the added benefit of being able to "prepare" a different Lore skill each day.
A feat that would let you use Arcana to Recall Knowledge on any creature, except the only information you'd gain for a creature not normally covered by Arcana would be related to magic, i.e. its immunity, resistance, and weakness to different types of magical energy, its defenses against magic, the kind of magic it can produce, and so on.
Give the wizard access to some more Recall Knowledge-based class feats, including potentially Assured Knowledge, Know-It-All, and True Hypercognition (side note, but why do so many knowledge-based class feats belong to Charisma classes?).
A feat that builds off of Recognize Spell and lets you Learn a common arcane Spell that you've recognized more easily, bypassing the need for a teacher or magical writing so long as you Learn the Spell before your next daily preparations.
The general idea being to give the Wizard more feats that let them show off their brainpower, as well as their affinity with facts, books, and learning, rather than just spells.
Right, we all know how controversial this general topic of discussion can get, so I'll start by laying out my intentions clearly: the objective of this brew is to try to implement an option for spellcasting classes to cast spells without the usual attrition of spell slots at a sufficient tradeoff, specifically in versatility. The intent is not to buff casters, so if the tradeoffs presented are insufficient, I would want to increase those tradeoffs until they are.
This brew, the Steadfast Spellcaster, is a class archetype much like the Flexible Spellcaster archetype: it can be picked up by any class that can cast spells with spell slots at level 1, has a single and mandatory dedication feat at level 2, and can be summarized as such: rather than have an ever-growing list of spell slots, you only have a tiny number of spell slots, and a significantly reduced number of spells you can learn or prepare, but those spell slots scale up in rank, and you regain those spell slots when you Refocus. Design notes that are not part of the homebrew rules are listed in italics.
Steadfast Spellcaster (1st)
You've unlocked the secret to quickly replenishing your magical reserves, sacrificing your breadth of spells in exchange for spell slots that recover when you Refocus. This class feature alters your spellcasting class feature (such as arcane spellcasting for the wizard or divine spellcasting for the cleric). If you choose this class archetype, you must select Steadfast Spellcaster Dedication as your 2nd-level class feat.
Prerequisites You must have a class that has a spellcasting class feature.
Steadfast Spell Slots Your number of spell slots does not increase as you level up, and you therefore always have the same number of spell slots from your class as you have at 1st level. If you choose this class archetype at a level higher than 1st, you lose any additional spell slots you gain from your class at higher levels. Instead, your spell slots from your class become steadfast spell slots, a special type of spell slot that works differently from other spell slots. You recover 1 expended steadfast spell slot when you Refocus. Your steadfast spell slots also increase in rank as you level up, matching the highest rank of spell you can cast with your class using normal spell slots.
Flexible Prepared Spellcasting If you prepare spells in spell slots, you instead prepare a spell collection during your daily preparations, as with the Flexible Spellcaster archetype. You can cast any spell in your collection by using a steadfast spell slot, and you can heighten the spell up to the slot's rank, similar to a spontaneous caster's signature spells. This archetype doesn't change the way you prepare cantrips.
For the sake of brevity in a fairly loaded post, I'll omit the rules detailing how spell collections work. The idea here is that if you are a prepared caster, this archetype also makes you a Flexible Spellcaster, with all of the caveats around extra spell slots with restrictions, as well as feats and features that refer to or require prepared spells.
Reduced Spells You learn or prepare fewer spells than normal, though you learn spells and select them from the same source as normal for your class (a wizard uses a spellbook, a witch relies on their familiar, and so on). Reduce the number of cantrips you gain from your class by 2. The number of spells you can learn or prepare depends on your type of spellcasting:
Bounded Prepared Spellcasting Prepared bounded casters such as magi have 1 spell in their spell collection. Your spell collection does not increase in size as you level up.
Bounded Spontaneous Spellcasting Spontaneous bounded casters such as summoners have a spell repertoire of 2 spells, learning 2 1st-rank spells at 1st level. Your spell repertoire does not increase in size as you level up, though you can swap out your spells as normal.
Prepared Spellcasting If you have a class that prepares spells in spell slots, such as clerics, druids, witches, and wizards, the number of spells in your spell collection equals the rank of your steadfast spell slots. For example, a 5th-level druid has 3rd-rank slots, and therefore has 3 spells in their spell collection.
Spontaneous Spellcasting If you have a class with a spell repertoire, such as bards, oracles, psychics, and sorcerers, you have a number of 1st-rank spells in your repertoire equal to your number of steadfast spell slots at 1st level. Each time your slots increase in rank, add the same number of spells of that rank to your spell repertoire, which can be higher-rank versions of spells you already know. For example, a bard has two spell slots at 1st level, and therefore starts with a spell repertoire of two 1st-rank spells, adding two 2nd-rank spells when their slots become 2nd-rank at 3rd level and so on. Features and feats that add to this repertoire, such as the psychic's conscious mind, are unchanged.
This is the main intended tradeoff of this class archetype, and can be summarized as such: if you're a spontaneous caster, you'll have 1 fewer spell in your repertoire per spell rank than normal; if you're a prepared caster, it's 2 fewer spells per rank. This may seem particularly harsh for prepared casters, particularly the magus with their one prepared spell, so I'll try to give out my rationale:
Because being able to cast one or more max-rank spells every encounter is very strong, this recovery needs to be counterbalanced by reduced versatility in order for the archetype to be balanced. I tried to do this by shaving off 1 spell known/prepared per spell rank, or halving the number of spells bounded spellcasters can have at a time.
Due to the way this archetype changes spell slots, I've found it necessary to give all prepared casters flexible spellcasting as well, which comes with its own tradeoffs in spell versatility as with the Flexible Spellcaster archetype. I copied the tradeoff here by shaving off another spell prepared per spell rank, and halving the number of spells bounded prepared casters can prepare once again. The net result is that prepared casters end up only being able to prepare between 1 and 9 spells at a time, with magi remaining at 1 the whole way through.
10th-Rank Spells If your class has a feature that gives you a 10th-rank spell slot, this archetype doesn't change the way that spell works. The slot is therefore not a steadfast spell slot, and doesn't recover when you Refocus. If you prepare spells in spell slots, you prepare a spell in that slot as normal, and if you have a spell repertoire, you add two common 10th-level spells of your tradition to your repertoire as normal.
Drain Bonded Item Because steadfast spellcasting renders the expenditure of spell slots largely trivial, you can use Drain Bonded Item to allow the casting of any spell in your collection without spending a spell slot, even if you haven't yet cast the spell today. If you are a universalist wizard, you can do this once per day for each rank of wizard spells you can cast.
Steadfast Spellcasting Archetypes You can apply steadfast spellcasting to spellcasting archetypes you take. If you do, you choose from the steadfast spellcasting benefits listed below instead of the corresponding spellcasting benefits listed in the archetype feats you take. Though you can normally gain the basic spellcasting feat at 4th level, you can only gain it at 8th level to gain the basic steadfast spellcasting benefits. If the archetype has a Breadth feat, such as the bard's Occult Breadth archetype feat, that feat is disallowed when applying steadfast spellcasting.
Basic Steadfast Spellcasting Benefits You gain a 1st-rank steadfast spell slot, which becomes a 2nd-rank slot at 10th level. If the class normally prepares spells in spell slots, you have a spell collection of 1 spell. If the class has a spell repertoire, you add two 1st-rank spells to your spell repertoire, and do not add additional spells as described in the feat. Both of these spells are signature spells, and must be common spells or spells to which you have access of the appropriate magical tradition.
Expert Steadfast Spellcasting Benefits You become an expert in spell attack rolls and DCs of the appropriate magical tradition. Your steadfast spell slot's rank increases to 3rd rank, increases to 4th rank at 14th level, and increases again to 5th rank at 16th level.
Master Steadfast Spellcasting Benefits You become a master in spell attack rolls and DCs of the appropriate magical tradition. Your steadfast spell slot's rank increases to 6th rank, and increases again to 7th rank at 20th level.
This is more of a bonus than a core part of the archetype, and is there for players who want to not only cast their class's spells without attrition, but want to do the same with multiclassing. Because steadfast slots are stronger than regular spell slots, I tried to limit the power of multiclassing into a spellcaster by raising the level requirement for the basic spellcasting benefits, and reducing the max rank of the spell slot you'd gain to 7th rank, rather than 8th rank.
You gain an additional cantrip from your spell list, and another at 4th level. If you have a spell collection, you prepare these additional cantrips in the same way as your other cantrips. If you have a spell repertoire, you add these cantrips to your spell repertoire as normal.
With the remaster, spellcasters are getting proficiency in effectively all spell attack rolls and spell DCs, rather than tradition-based spell proficiency. They are also all getting trained in class DC.
Spell DC and attack roll scaling scales at an equivalent rate: if you're a class with legendary DCs, like a spellcaster or the Kineticist, your proficiency in either spell DC or class DC ranks up at levels 7, 15, and 19. If you're a class with master DCs, like a martial class or the Warpriest, your proficiency in either spell DC ranks up at levels 11 and 19. If you're a Magus or Summoner, these breakpoints are two levels earlier, at levels 9 and 17.
Class DC only does a tiny handful of things, namely apply to some class features and crit specialization effects. Often, when a spellcaster applies a crit specialization effect, its save is keyed to their spell DC instead.
I may be missing something pretty obvious here, but wouldn't it just be simpler to key spellcasting to class DC in the same way as the Kineticist, and have the class DC of spellcasters scale up to their usual amounts? It feels like it would simplify things a fair bit, particularly when it comes to casters who can also apply critical specialization. At worst, it would allow martial classes to start with one or two extra proficiency bumps when taking a spellcasting archetype, but if spellcasters can opt into entirely different traditions while still keeping their legendary proficiency, having just a sliver of that power at a -2 to spell attacks and DCs may not infringe upon the post-remaster state of niche protection either.
Compiling a bit of feedback I've had regarding the Animist with my experience so far. I'll be breaking it down into sections, and including aspects of the new class I really like in addition to criticisms, mentions of typos, and suggestions.
Praise:
The combination of prepared and spontaneous spellcasting I think makes the class's spell usage feel markedly different from that of other classes.
Each apparition individually feels like it adds a solid role to the class.
Extra Lore skills I think help add to the character's feeling of otherworldly knowledge in a manner few other classes access as easily.
Sustaining Dance feels like an excellent action compressor for any kind of class heavy on sustained spells, in addition to feeling thematically appropriate for the Animist.
Overall, I love the Animist's different take on spellcasting, and feel bringing in spell lists from otherworldly apparitions is a great way of building upon the more limited divine spell list.
Typos:
Page 6: the Intermediary Boon for the Channeler practice increases the Animist's proficiency in Fortitude saves to Master, but grants a beneficial effect to Will saves usually associated with master proficiency (Will saves would remain at expert proficiency). Perhaps this might be intended, but it feels like the Channeler was intended to gain both benefits for one type of saving throw or the other, rather than a mix of both.
Page 13: the Imposter in Hidden Places' vessel spell is listed as both "discomforting whispers" (in the apparition entry) and "discomfiting whispers" (in the focus spell description).
Criticism:
Being able to swap apparitions on a daily basis feels too versatile and too complicated: because each apparition looks to give the Animist a more defined role, being able to stack multiple at a time from the get-go and swap around every day lets the class be a bit too good at specializing into something new on a day-to-day basis. It also muddies the Animist's thematic and mechanical expression, as the class can do almost anything, be almost anything from one day to the next. It also means having to construct a new spell repertoire every day, which adds to the complication of what I find to be an exceptionally complex class already.
Several of the focus spells are way too strong. Particular note goes to Garden of Healing, which can be used out of combat to heal every party member 25 HP on average per spell rank every 10 minutes, more than a critical success on Treat Wounds for each individual. Compare Discomforting/Discomfiting Whispers to Ill Omen, a 1st-rank slot spell, and save for range the former spell blows the latter out of the water almost entirely.
Despite this, the current implementation of these spells as sustained feels fairly clunky, as the Animist ends up feeling slowed over an entire counter as they output an amount of persistent power so vast as to be mandatory. In the case of River Carving Mountains, having to spend an additional action to Stride leaves the class with a constant dangling third action that can't really be used for spellcasting. Sustaining Dance feels like an essential feat to get more out of an Animist's turns.
The Channeler and Sage practices in my opinion don't particularly add to the Animist's theme, and currently their balance feels fairly one-sided: the Channeler gets the immense versatility of switching vessel spells with just one action, whereas the Sage's pre-emptive protection against possession feels difficult to properly use even on occasions where it would be useful. I also don't really understand what it is thematically about a Sage that makes an Animist gain better armor proficiency early on but no master save proficiency ever.
The Animist is currently the only class that can have no master proficiency in saves. Despite the class's current excessive strength in my opinion, I don't think that justifies the lack of consistent master Will saves.
Multiple apparitions and 2 Focus Points from lelvel 1 don't feel justified given that a single vessel spell can last the entire encounter, and each apparition functions like a fully-fledged subclass.
The concept of a primary apparition just means the Animist can access only one focus spell at a time (unless you're a Channeler) for the vast majority of their leveling, and not much more. This adds more information overhead for what appears to be not that much payoff.
Wandering feats are made to accommodate switching apparitions every day, both of which make for a character whose core build decisions can change way too quickly as I feel it, and require a lot of rebuilding each day. This I think adds to the class's overcomplication.
Prepared vs. spontaneous spell slots as implemented add a lot of additional complexity to the class while also injecting a degree of confusion: is the class a prepared or spontaneous caster for the purpose of effects like staves or the Flexible Spellcaster feat? Why do the class's spell slots spike at level 10, and why do they lack an extra 9th-rank spell slot at level 20?
Overall, I feel the Animist is currently implemented in a way that adds a lot of unnecessary complication to the class, making it too versatile and too powerful in the process while also muddying its identity. Really, an Animist who can build into channelling a spirit of battle or a spirit of healing is fine, as is one who commits their build to a bit of both. An Animist who can accumulate up to four roles at a time, without any feat investment, while being able to switch between them at-will every turn (despite having fairly heavy action taxes otherwise) I think is just too good, and more importantly, too complicated.
Suggestions:
It is a known fact that players are notoriously effective at pointing out problems in game design, but infamously bad at giving workable solutions. I would take all of the following suggestions with a particularly large gain of salt as a result, as all of these are merely my opinions without much backing of yet in playtesting experience:
I would limit the Animist to one single apparition, and prevent the class from switching apparitions as a baseline. This would allow apparitions to work as proper subclasses, and help flesh out the class's identity while cutting out excess power. There ought to then be feats allowing an Animist to opt into additional apparitions, in a style similar to Multifarious Muse.
I would reimplement the Animist as a standard 3-slot prepared caster, and instead allow apparitions to override the class's spell slots by using any prepared spell slot to cast an apparition spell as a spontaneous spell. This would streamline the class's spellcasting a fair amount (the class would unambiguously be a prepared caster) while also letting an Animist use spontaneous casting to "clean up" prepared slots that aren't appropriate for a given situation, which would be very strong in its own right. A less powerful alternative could be to let the Animist leave certain spell slots intentionally unprepared, which would turn them into spontaneous spell slots for their apparition, which would offer less overall versatility but still give the Animist agency over how many slots to devote to divine versus apparition spells.
I'd get rid of the animist practices entirely, giving the Animist a standard progression of saves and AC while reimplementing the more flavorful effects, like possession resistance, as feats. I'd instead have each apparition give the Animist an extra feat, reinforcing each apparition's feel as a fully-formed subclass.
I would alter the vessel spells significantly, both to reduce their power and to make Sustaining them do most of the spell's work. Rather than apply some major persistent benefit, I'd instead follow Earth's Bile as a model and have Sustaining the spell apply the spell's effect to a more localized area, or perhaps just one target in the case of Garden of Healing and Discomforting/Discomfiting Whispers. Perhaps this could happen each time you Sustain the spell, rather than just the first time, and maybe this could justify baking in an action compressor from level 1 to help the Animist keep those spells going by Sustaining and doing something else at once (in fact, this could be the basis for each apparition's class feat).
Effectively, I think the Animist could be streamlined significantly to have a much clearer role definition based on their apparition, which could still produce a highly powerful and versatile class. A player certainly should have the option to go for additional roles, but in my opinion shouldn't be given those extra roles without build investment. In exchange, though, I'd also want the Animist to have their actions collide less, so that they can keep up their vessel spells, cast spells or Strike normally, and still have room to do things like use skill actions, spellshape actions, or move around on their turn.
Why homebrew this early? Well, there's been discussion going on over the field test, its material, and some of its quirks. Already, some common criticisms have emerged around topics like AoE weapons, switching hands, and the Soldier, almost all of which are condensed in a thorough analysis in another thread that I recommend reading, if you haven't done so already. There's nothing necessarily that needs fixing at this stage, given that we're not yet in the playtesting phase, and any amateur attempt to "fix" jank is at serious risk of just leading to more jank, hence the title. With that in mind, the above brew offers an alternative take on several bits in the brew, summarized here:
Hands: The brew lists out a multi-handed trait for any creature with more total hands than active hands. It is this trait that gives access to the Switch Active Hands action, and also sets the general rule that you can Switch Active Hands instead of Interacting to draw an item. This means the trait can easily map onto any existing Pathfinder feat, and allow Starfinder feats to be written in the same way without needing to add text for multi-handed characters each time. Additionally, Switch Active Hands no longer relies on the Interact action, which means it won't trigger reactions like Attack of Opportunity/Reactive Strike, and it scales with any number of hands, including odd numbers, without needing to group hands into sets. This combination should make it easy to make any character you like multi-handed and automatically have supporting guidelines.
Weapons: Area and automatic weapons now use the same Area Fire action, which works completely differently in the brew: rather than targets making a Reflex save against your class DC, you make a different Strike for each target, allowing those weapons to work with weapon proficiency. "Capacity" is changed to "ammo" to avoid confusion with the capacity trait in Pathfinder, and Usage is removed entirely, with gun ammo reserves rebalanced to more accurately reflect their consumption rate.
Suppressed: The condition is slightly tweaked to be able to scale, and decrements in the same way as the frightened condition in Pathfinder 2e. Under this new model, it would be possible to make an enemy suppressed 2 or even suppressed 3 for even harsher penalties to attack rolls and movement.
The Soldier: The Soldier receives several changes that keep to the class's intended spirit as a tanky AoE specialist, but try to dig deeper into their flavor and gameplay. Particulars include:
Base Stats: The Soldier's key attribute is now Strength or Dexterity, rather than Constitution, with choice of subclass determining the attribute. The class's fixed skill proficiency also depends on subclass.
Arsenal: The Soldier gets an arsenal of weapons they're specialized in, with expert starting proficiency in the arsenal's simple and martial weapons and trained proficiency in the arsenal's advanced weapons. Your arsenal includes automatic weapons, plus extra weapons based on subclass.
Alternative Fire Modes: The Soldier gets special and improved ways using Area Fire, gained through class features, subclass, and feats. Disciplined Fire is a core feature letting you shoot to avoid friendly fire, and Suppressive Fire lets you shoot to apply the suppressed condition. Actions gained through feats can let you reload while shooting, focus on a primary target, or brace against incoming damage and forced movement, among other options.
Soldier Divisions: The Soldier's fighting styles are replaced with divisions, which change the class's playstyle far more significantly. Each division defines your key attribute, expands your arsenal with new weapons, gives you a trained skill proficiency, and gives you an entirely new bespoke firing mode. Depending on subclass, you get incentivized to opt into Strength, Intelligence, or Charisma, in addition to the usual Dex/Con/Wis.
Quick Cover: As a replacement for Fearsome Bulwark at 3rd level, Quick Cover instead lets you take cover as a reaction.
Feats: Feats are changed to provide alternative fire modes, rather than more power onto the same area attacks, while also letting you opt into a larger arsenal or gain benefits against suppressed targets.
Soldier Multiclass Archetype: Just for fun, this brew adds a soldier archetype if you want to multiclass into one.
Hopefully this brew is relevant to this forum, and offers a take that can help add to discussion around the field test. Let me know what you think, and I hope you enjoy!
As implemented in the current field test, the area fire and automatic fire attacks on the field test's weapons impose a Reflex save based on class DC, rather than a DC based on weapon proficiency. Based on developer commentary, this is to avoid Pathfinder 2e classes with legendary weapon proficiency like the Fighter or Gunslinger having excessively good at-will AoE damage. This is understandable, given that those classes are meant to specialize in single-target damage through weapons rather than AoE damage, and giving those classes good at-will AoE through cross-pollination with SF2e's weapons would be disruptive to balance. However, I feel the current implementation creates a few problems:
* As per the title, AoE weapon attacks don't at all scale with weapon proficiency, which is misleading and breaks from the way weapon strikes typically work.
* With automatic weapons specifically, it means their single-target Strikes and AoE automatic fire scale completely differently and use entirely different modifiers, which is not intuitive. This is particularly visible on the Soldier, who's built to have good AoE but can easily have a terrible modifier when attempting a single-target attack with Primary Target.
* Because AoE weapons don't rely on weapon proficiency, there is no point to labelling these weapons simple, martial, or even advanced weapons, because a character can access and use these weapons equally well based on their class DC, even if they're untrained in all of these weapon categories.
* Because these AoE attacks rely on class DC, which has no inherent connection to weapons or any specific game mechanic besides maybe weapon crit specializations and a few class feats, this creates an implication where any class with a high class DC is going to also be the most accurate with these weapons, which may create future issues if a class needs a high class DC to excel at any kind of single-target specialization.
* Because these weapons scale with class DC and work with Pathfinder classes, this means the class with the most accurate rotolaser AoE so far is the Kineticist, a class that makes little to no use of weapons.
Now, to be clear: these weapons aren't hugely disruptive to the current state of balance, because the Kineticist being good at AoE isn't anything new. However, I feel the current implementation of these AoE attacks is clunky, unintuitive, and not terribly cohesive with the way PF2e handles weapons and weapon proficiency. Using class DC in particular creates weird thematic outliers like the Kineticist and I feel will limit the design of future classes with high class DCs, as they will have to account for their accuracy with AoE weapons regardless of how good they're actually meant to be with those weapons.
Designing AoE weapons in a system where weapons so far have largely been assumed to specialize in single-target damage is tough, and compatibility with Pathfinder means the developers have to work with existing precedents and make sure the new toys we get from Starfinder don't break the ones we've already got. Bypassing the system's own mechanics through this kind of workaround, however, I don't think is the answer. I can't suggest anything concrete, but I would say AoE weapon mechanics ought to change in the following ways:
* If these things are going to be weapons, then a character should be at least trained in the relevant AoE weapon to be able to use it properly. This is non-negotiable in my opinion, and just how weapons normally work in this system.
* Striking with an automatic weapon and using that weapon's automatic fire ought to use the same modifiers, so that a character using their Dex to shoot doesn't suddenly find themselves shooting with their Con or Charisma.
* As the designated AoE weapons specialist, the Soldier should still make the best use of these weapons regardless of how they change. The Gunslinger is a good example of how to do this in my opinion, because firearms aren't great on their own, but the Gunslinger gets to use them very well thanks to their class features. Making AoE weapons not great on any other class (including the Kineticist), but having the Soldier make those weapons truly sing, I think would be the more sound approach than divorcing weapons from weapon proficiency entirely and risking weird interactions further down the line.
And that's about my 2 cents for AoE weapons thus far. Love that we're getting them, hate how their AoE is currently implemented.
