I always read it as you can give it the functionality of all qualifying toolkits if you pay. The Technomancer servoshell programming language does the same with minibots. None of this particularly powerful, it’s minor flavor/utility/convenience. No this is improved by making a mechanic have to swap out an extra toolkit in his body.
I’ve also seen it suggested they may not want to have core books cite non-core rules. Even if the rules are available online it undermines the “these are the basic books you need, all else is optional” marketing message if optional sources are necessary to understand your hardcopy basic rules source.
When the Technomancer hits Archives of Nethys in a couple of weeks there's going to be a lot apologies for their bad opinions in this thread.
Free claude failed, even after I edited my prompt to suggested a trinary approach. Chatgpt failed the first time but said “oh of course that helps immensely!” with the Starfinder game and trinary secondary context advice.
Free chatgpt was able to translate this after it asked for a source and context and I explained that Starfinder often uses trinary rather binary computer language. It spotted that it's a base-27 alphabet decoding as: DO STARSHIP NOISES FOR HERO POINTS.
The spells section in player core does establish that in this edition Technomancers, and presumably their emoji spells, are fringe weirdos outside the magical mainstream.
The runesmith's tiny repertoire of runes and etching slots make both the healing and "alpha strike" options I've seen so much pant wetting about subject to horrific opportunity costs. If you lean towards a heal or "blow everything up in rounds 1-2" build you're doing very little else.
Germantria can down the runesmith from max HP if he and the runebearer both crit fail an AOE. It’s not pure benefit in combat, and Paizo doesn’t care about out of combat healing anymore. The blood Necromancer and Runesmith vital compound invocation feat are further examples of unlimited fast healing.
Investigators can make good use of this, the teleport options are effectively provide a ranged strike on a secondary target when they have a bad devise. As far as distinguishing the image left behind, sometimes you’ll teleport away and the only thing someone sees is the image. That’s when it being indistinguishable from you will definitely matter.
I think this is actually sometimes useful if you have a party with a bomber alchemist and a necromancer. You can put a thrall you're willing to lose between two or three enemies with a relevant elemental weakness or a swarm/troop and the bomber can hit them with a MAP -10 bomb. The bomber won't even care if it's at max range increment with this technique.
Imagine telling James Jacobs he's told enough stories in Varisia.
Surely if Paizo intended this tactic they would published some sort of guidance on the first page of the class like: “While Exploring… You might summon your undead thralls to trigger traps or to serve as a decoy when you think enemies are near.” Missed opportunity! I wonder what they did put in that section.
One suggestion I saw is have it give critical specialization with those weapons at 5th.
Thanks for the write up. For what it’s worth I don’t adopt either Inevitable Return concept you propose. To me it’s just a flash of death energy powering a quick, cut down version of Create Thrall that looks like the normal result, just with a single no action thrall appearing. No effect on the corpse.
This is wrong. Thralls have a rule in their side bar that they can only take an order from your necromancer ability (including those granted by feats) or grave spells (slotted spells can’t compel them, allied or archetype defensive swap can’t get them to move either).It may have the Trait, but there are other ways one may take control of a Thrall, as an example, if a caster uses Bind Undead (Thrall is a mindless Undead) he automatically gets the Command a Thrall Action as well.Basically, anyone that somehow has a Thrall has access to the "Command a Thrall Action" the same way that anyone with a sword can Strike with a Sword. It's not a "Necromancer Ability or Spell".It literally has the necromancer trait and gaining access to it requires the Necromancer class or Necromancer dedication. This is so deeply confused I can tell there’s no point in discussing it. I simply note the correct answer for the benefit others.
Pinky trace while holding your greatsword.
It may have the Trait, but there are other ways one may take control of a Thrall, as an example, if a caster uses Bind Undead (Thrall is a mindless Undead) he automatically gets the Command a Thrall Action as well.Basically, anyone that somehow has a Thrall has access to the "Command a Thrall Action" the same way that anyone with a sword can Strike with a Sword. It's not a "Necromancer Ability or Spell".It literally has the necromancer trait and gaining access to it requires the Necromancer class or Necromancer dedication. This is wrong. Thralls have a rule in their side bar that they can only take an order from your necromancer ability (including those granted by feats) or grave spells (slotted spells can’t compel them, allied or archetype defensive swap can’t get them to move either).
Yeah, no. The obvious use case on this is to double a Dominate 10 to have a good shot at grabbing a couple of decent 3a minions that don't cost an action to command for the day (or forever with a little luck and debuffing).
Moonweave applying to blood thralls looks like a big problem in mid to late levels. I strongly suggest interpreting it not to work, as do the bones, spirit, and flesh unions.
There's another gear book on the schedule, Legacy of the Forge. You might get focused items there.
Remastered is a separate issue from OGL or ORC. Rage of Elements is the first book with remastered elements but is still OGL as ORC hadn't been completed yet. Remastered refers to certain changes in rules and rules terminology they did for cleanup/lessons learned/improvement reasons. Remastered did mostly coincide with the shift to OGL, as they figured "as long as we're stripping out all the OGL verbiage and have to republish new versions to make sure we have a shippable product in the future, let's change the rules and make them better or at least more marketable." Something like no alignment is considered a remastered rule choice, rather than an ORC vs OGL thing, even if it was likely inspired in part to avoid old OGL associations. Similarly, off-guard as a rules term change is remastered flat-footed, it's supposed to be a cleaner term that more accurately indicates what's going on unless you're a 50+ year-old boxing fan. Both of these are examples of remastered changes that first appeared in Rage of Elements.
As a rare thrall targeting spell that doesn’t destroy the thrall it’s good for a necro familiar or one of the super thralls with some durability and mobility.
Infinite thralls for tripping hazards in front of you is an under appreciated use of
I also saw someone suggest a couple of specific familiars that can use independent actions to trigger this. Mockingfey is one.
There’s a feat to 1/10 minutes absorb from the environment.
In Impossible Magic on page 60 the Eck-, diacritic rune of phantasma does persistent damage "to each of your enemies adjacent to the runebearer," but doesn't state when this adjacency condition triggers the persistent damage. It could be start of their turn, end of their turn, when when the base rune is invoked, if they are ever at any point of their movement or the runebearer's movement adjacent to the runebearer, etc.
I just saw the rune section got added. Astillu, Rune of Submersion, combos very well with Pillar of Water spell (3rd rank, creates up to 15' radius pillar) in any campaign, not just an aquatic one. Put it on 1-2 melee guys with reactive strikes and you can ruthlessly bully casters, fire users, or creatures without piercing melee attacks once your primal or arcane caster surrounds everyone with water, preferably blocking them in a corner they have to Shove themselves out of (perhaps more than once) to escape - no Tumble Through without a swim speed. One use for Jurroz is to make enemies engaging your melee front liners off guard to ranged PCs. Regarding Eck- "each of your enemies adjacent to the rune-bearer takes 1d8 persistent spirit damage." What did Paizo mean by this? They didn't say it triggers at the beggining or end of a turn, so as written this starts ticking if they're ever next to you - Stride next to the entire encounter to get it going, I guess. One use of Auien is that it will let you follow an enemy who uses Translocate 5th rank to escape if they have a traced rune on them and you have or can trace Auien on enough of your party to safely pursue. Sorry, high level fiend, you are actually going to die today. And as a goofy way to handwave certain exploration challenges, should they not be trivially solveable by flight at this level, carry at a minimum a sling, or perhaps a 100-200 increment ranged weapon and start throwing/shooting nonmagical ammo with sigils 250-1000' over/past obstacles that you can then teleport to.
something else I'm picking up (as I'm thinking of homebrewing a rune)... Runic magic is not clear on when you determine the Tradition of the rune. so if you are trained in all four of the skills could you trace a rune on one person as Divine, another as Primal, and on another as Arcane? You determine the tradition (if it has the magical trait, which can be replaced with a tradition) when you trace/etch it.
I meant first tier of them at 5th level. I think of the diacritics as 1st and 2nd groups rather than 5th and 13th levels for some reason. I'd missed that Sar- inflicts drained 1 on invocation even if used on a Holy creature. "No one is without sin." Inth- does 2d4 growing up to 8d4 persistent fire, or average 5-20 persistent. That's better than the flat 2+ half level from Ur- as you put on a few levels after you get Inth-. I think I prefer Clashing Compound Invocation feat to the guaranteed Drained 1 of Sar-, although you can of course do both and apply them to different enemies.
Transpose Etching, which you rated ??? is one of the ranged "trace" efficiency paths for rune plus diacritic, in addition to the familiar and an extending rune combined with Drawn in Vital Ink that you referenced. If you have two base runes with diacritics preetched (for four total etched slots), you can use two actions to Transpose both of them, then invoke. This is equivalent to four ranged traces (eight actions) plus an invocation, or 9a actions for 3a. For etching combinations, if you don't have fire or physical resistances then En-Atryl (fire 15' emanation) or En-Thullax (acid 15' emanation) can be used for this to pop one or two elemental AOEs in turn 1, but if you have four etched rune slots you have 9th level runes, so moving a Ur-Cruonign to an enemy (or different ally) weapon to detonate for a unique cone aim is also a possibility. As an alternative to Transposing your etched runes, you can trace base rune, trace diacritic, transpose to a distant target. You got 4a worth of ranged tracing for three actions, next turn 2a trace a base rune, invoke. Of course you need to have diacritics worth using for this to pay off, and it only looks "good" in action terms because ranged tracing is such an abysmal action sink. It's not as good as the other workarounds, but that's why it doesn't require set up (Vital Ink, familiar positioning) or have a frequency limitation (Rune Singer, Diacritic Fluency), or the risk of AOE/melee from doing it adjacent yourself or with a familiar.
Pharasma's probably going to weigh use of holy/unholy tools as a factor in where your soul goes, but if you're using both I don't know. The holy rune isn't generally applicable the same way the unholy one is - that persistent fire is better extra damage than the 1st [correction, 5th] level diacritic for flat damage boost. I am tempted to use it, and that's how they get you.
Two birds, one stone: remaster the psychic by making it a dual class with inventor.
I've seen ten posts like this on Reddit and Discord. What you're missing is that many to most of the runes don't have a tradition trait, and if they don't you can add any trait of your choice as long as you're trained in the relevant skill. Runes are magical effects. Some runes have a specific tradition trait; for instance, the elemental ranshu, rune of thunder is a primal rune. If a rune has the magical trait, you can choose to replace the magical trait with a specific tradition trait, provided you’re trained in the skill matching that tradition. For instance, you could create an arcane pluuna, rune of illumination if you were trained in Arcana. So Vital Compound Invocation can be used with any two runes as long as neither has the Occult or Arcane trait and you're trained in both Nature and Religion. That's 5/16 of the 1st level runes, 4/12 of the 9th level runes, and 1/4 of the 17th level runes you can't use with VIC. The other compound invocation feats will face similar restrictions, just with different mix and match traditions. I also think you can add a second, different tradition to the base runes with diacritics to make compound invocations easier. The holy and unholy diacritics have the divine trait, implying you can add them on top of an existing base rune to potentially give htem two tradition traits, and the rest are magical trait, letting you sub them for a trait of your choice to mix and match as needed to qualify for compound invocation feats. You pay the usual cost of diacritics to do that - an extra etch slot or trace action(s).
I'm not familiar with the series or character, but if you're using a spiked gauntlet for runes you want to etch on whetstones at level 1 (passively add bleed to your strikes, invoke for a d8 per "rank" slashing blast against someone adjacent). At level 5 you can enhance this with the En-diacritic, which will invoke it in a 15' emanation around you (not friendly fire!). At level 9 there are two good ones you want. The gravity rune etched on armor gives you a permanent +1-3 status bonus to all manuevers and the effects of titan wrestler on big opponents, invoking it pulls everyone within 15' to come 5' closer on a failed save. The other good one is the rune of leaching: passively etching it gives your punches void damage and generates THP, invoking it creates a 30' cone AOE attack and heals you if anyone is hurt. I don't know if any of the rest particularly match your desired playstyle or the character. I like the forlorn sorry rune, it makes any enemy approaching you suffer difficult terrain if they get closer than 20'. You can invoke for save or slow 1/2 for 1 round. There's also the rune of observation, which in addition to letting you see invisibile stuff gives all-around vision and prevents you from being flanked, invoke to reduce invsibility/concealment near you for 2 rounds. Finally Germatria, the rune of partnership is one of the most powerful because it allows infinitely healing. Passive is that you share HP damage suffered by whoever you put it on, invoke it to heal you both (starts at 20 HP each, scales up to 45 HP each). If you were using a trip/disarm/shove weapon instead of gauntlets I'd suggest the 6th level Engraving Manuever feat, which for 1a gives you one of those manuevers and then if it hits a free trace action. But gauntlets aren't compatible.
The Living Graveyard artwork is one of the best things ever published by Paizo.
One shot limited rule systems with no further support? Not in my Pathfinder!
Newest favorite dumb combo: Necromancer and Commander buddy comedy. Thralls can't be squadmates who drill and qualify for tactics. But... End It! has this for its Requirements: "Requirements You and your allies currently outnumber enemies on the battlefield, and you or a squadmate have reduced an enemy to 0 Hit Points since the start of your last turn." If a party of four is facing nine or fewer enemies, and the puppeteer necromancer uses two actions to summon five thralls, the party just needs to focus one enemy to death (don't let a thrall get the death blow) to trigger End It! and possibly force some of them to flee if squadmates can make qualifying free action Steps. Defensive Swap feat also allows as a reaction to to swap with a thrall, always completely negating any single attack targeting you that round. A necromancer could do Defensive Swap himself (4th level, strictly superior to his own similar Body Shield feat at that level) with an archetype, although I can't see people doing it without free archetype. If so, there's some other stuff to feasibly take like some banner feats and Rapid Assessment with the Bone Speaker creature identifying feat.
No. It gives you the focus spell but not the fascination (which would come with the unique thrall benefits, and later access to the 12th level fascination specific feats).
People who live in a world where according to folklore a cow destroyed the city of Chicago with a population of 300,000: "wow, I can't imagine how a powerful wizard could accomplish such a thing."
Yeah, seriously. Kyle got very mild criticism for his strongly stated opinions and reacted like someone had insulted his ancestors. Doubly strange since he had no problem slagging on Thraben_U and Mathfinder unpromptedly. [psychologists and psychiatrists and people with internet experience going back to Usenet] "Actually, there's nothing strange at all about this."
I'm really not sure what else it could be, though. Proficiency plus stat would make sense if they decide to errata it, but it's definitely not ambiguous.I'm pretty sure the DC substitution is intentional, and that's why you're so limited on what you can grab and how. It's the benefit that you get from the dedication, too, not some surprise that shows up later. What else it could be is "lots of smart players have struggled to understand what this archetype does or how, and it's entirely possible that no one in charge ever invested the same brain power to realize what an explosive mess this is, it slipped through, it will get corrected to be in line with the normal DC expectations of the game." Freelancers writing copy according to the provided guidelines can get away with a lot if the developer reviewing it and editing it in line with normal/overall rules guidelines miss some important fundamental aspect or fringe exploit. And sometimes the effects of the language don't reflect what the author intended - this was the case with the ranged solarion in SF1 and interaction with soulfire fusion. By the plain language it couldn't apply, 40-70% of players were unable to parse basic English logical structure to understand that it couldn't apply, the freelancer chimed in to say that they though it would apply and they wanted it to apply when they wrote it, and eventually the developers said that yes, English is English, it doesn't apply.
The latter would be the Cast a Spell exploration activity which allows you to spam a cantrip as you go. You’d have to work out the details with your GM but you’d either be creating 2-3 out in front of you (who could be elsewhere when you roll initiative if you “outwalked your coverage”) or creating 1-2 plus a stride to try to try trigger traps ahead.
The new Floating Harness spell lays to rest the idea that a familiar can ride along on your shoulder or a big pocket for free action economy. It's 2nd rank to make the equivalent of a 1 hour baby carrier (4th rank gets you 8 hours) for a familiar, companion, or eidolon that you drag around adjacent to you as you move.
You can etch the elemental damaging runes on objects, so you can put them on some random stones or whatever tied to your belt. Then take the Transpose Etching feat at level 4, which lets you move an etched (or traced, but why) rune to a new target within 30' feat. This solves your early ranged blasting action economy issues if you're willing to devote etched runes to this: 1a transpose one etched blasting rune, 1a transpose a different one, 1a invoke both. You didn't have to move closer or do 2a traces. The downside is that this eats up etch slots you could have used for party buffs or utility, which I would often say are a better use of your resources.
Pupeteers can pull four focus spells once per day. There's also an 8th level spellshape that every 10 minutes lets you recover a focus spell if you kill someone with a grave spell. With the 10th level "know everyone's HP" feat this is trivial (and not that risky to hit someone for the third time in round 3), so you can reliably have 4 points per 10 minute fight. Some of the "summon super thrall" (like Conglomeration of Limbs) focus spells are point/round efficient, as you'll be able to pop that round 1 and have it run around at least 2-3 rounds striding, double striking for bonus damage, and hopefully grabbing two targets per round. No further spellcasting required except maybe dropping some supplemental thralls. The Reaper is pretty bad, although 2nd level isn't when you'll drop off drastically - you can be as good as a Thaum/Inventor/Runesmith from levels 1-4. Your limited saving grace is you can 99% of the time guarantee yourself off guard to close accuracy gaps, and at higher levels you can use Bind Heroic Spirit (at the cost of 2a and a focus point) to buff your hit and saves.
Ughhhhhh. No way to learn additional spells on a prepared caster? I have seen it alleged this is similar to missing "duh" text for the Wizard that wasn't fixed until either a late errata or even the remaster spelled out that yes, they can add spells known to their book and here's the rules to do it. Perhaps I’m missing something here, but this seems fairly inline with the language in both the Witch and Wizard, with the obvious exception except of their unique mechanics for learning. Yeah, supposedly early versions of Wizard didn't say this and were as vague/unclear as the Necromancer currently is (don't know about Witch). This is a place to apply common sense.
Got my PDF. I know nobody asked, but Dead Weight got a massive improvement. It now has the Thrall move up to 15 feat, is a fortitude save that destroys the thrall, but on a success they are Off-Guard, on failure they are Slowed 1 & Off-Guard, on a Crit Failure they are Slowed 2 & Off-Guard. Bone Burst is the same and still there. Bone Spear is 30' range to a thrall, 15' line, but now standard fireball 2d6 per rank damage with a reflex save. Got my PDF. I know nobody asked, but Dead Weight got a massive improvement. It now has the Thrall move up to 15 feat, is a fortitude save that destroys the thrall, but on a success they are Off-Guard, on failure they are Slowed 1 & Off-Guard, on a Crit Failure they are Slowed 2 & Off-Guard.Is that for a round, until they escape, or something else? That sounds much better! Always 1 round, no provision to escape early.
Maybe one or two going off memory, but most of them are Secrets of Magic reprints. Did the people cry out for Approximate and Wash your Luck? Well, we got them regardless.
For those worried about too much AOE spam from invoking the leeching rune, the Invoke Rune action has this text: "Though you can invoke up to two runes with a single Invoke Rune action, creatures that would be affected by multiple copies of the same rune are affected only once, as
If you want to hit a creature twice in one round with the same damaging rune you have to invoke twice (or three times). If you want to stack lots of different variety of damaging runes you are blowing a huge chunk of your repertoire on that limited capability.
1. Call of the Quenching (rank 7, primal)The Everfull Moon (rank 2, occult/primal) Pyroclastic Truth (rank 1, arcane/primal) Under Sunless Skies (rank 9, arcane/divine/occult) Veil of Broken Reality (rank 10, arcane/divine/occult) - THIS SPELL IS BONKERS. It's The Gap-lite. If they didn't intend for it to make everyone (who you don't exempt) within 100 miles slowed 1 for 24 hours even on a successful save they didn't write it corretly. Hope you don't want to remember why you used the spell or have your friends remember who you are afterwards, though. If you've read There is No Anti-Mimetics Division, the end state is similar to how that book ends. 2.
Infintesimal Collapse Field: Sustained emanation, enemies who enter/start must save or be encumbered/slowed/unable to take reactions based on their result. Space Fold Gate: Make two Portal gates, you can walk/fire physical ammo through them. Must be able to see both portal locations you create, sustained, range and portal size goes up as you heighten.
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