Vallarthis's page

The sword-and-pistol style is spectacular, no question, but I'd like to play a drifter who uses a two-handed gun as both ranged and melee weapon. Rules for bayonets or bashing with a rifle butt would be welcome.

I have two groups I and running through a scenario, I thought I would put my observations here. We've just started, I'll add more as we play.

The first group is 3 magi and a summoner.

Two of the magi chose slide casting, and the third chose shooting star with returning javelin, which I thought was clever. All three had plenty of fun with their schtick, and the shooting star player didn't seem annoyed about not getting the free move. There was plenty of talk at the table about how cool the various magus feats and features were, and they all made liberal use of the fact you can hold your spell in your weapon for a round to split a spellstrike up, which made them able to be more flexible with their actions than I was expecting.
The overall first impression from the magus players was that it is a class with lots of fun ideas, but missing most of your spells makes it a bit of a bummer in practice.

The summoner kept getting tripped up by manifesting taking a full turn. They were moving through a foggy town, not knowing if the next creatures they encounter are going to be monsters to fight or panicy townsfolk to rescue (who might freak out about her ghost), and guessing wrong meant she lost the first round of combat. Everyone felt a full round to manifest was punishing.
Once in combat, though, the eidolon proved a powerful tank, what with the summoner standing out of danger healing herself. The player seemed satisfied with it's attacks and damage, even though she only used boost eidolon once.

Some of them have been liberal with their slotted spells, so we'll get some data on their endurance in the next session, I'm sure.

In brief, a warpriest-style variation of the witch would make darn near exactly the character I've been trying to build since the 2e playtest.
The cloistered cleric is pretty similar to the witch, at least in those areas touched upon by doctrines, so I thought I could reasonably apply the same changes from cloistered cleric to warpriest to the witch, and get a WarWitch.

I am here today to run that concept past the collective system mastery of the forums, to see if anyone can identify a glaring problem I have missed in my enthusiasm for the idea.

First doctrine is a focus spell and focus point, which maps pretty cleanly to Phase Familiar and your first focus point coming from that.
Clerics get proficiency with one martial weapon and critical specialization with it, which is a little tricky, but I would interpret that as plain old proficiency with simple weapons when translated to the witch.

I'm eager for your impressions.

Produce Flame goes out of its way to say it can be delivered as a melee spell attack instead of a ranged spell attack if you so wish. Why? Ranged attacks trigger AoOs and melee attacks don't, but it has the somatic casting action which makes it a manipulate action, so it triggers AoO anyway, no?
I would be grateful if someone could explain what I'm missing.