siegfriedliner's page

My advice to beginners wanting to play an alchemist is don't it's a uniquely over complicated mess of a class.

Swarms are immune to the prone I am sure their must be few other monsters who are as well.

I was looking at building a thaumaturge and was looking though the implents and noticed the wand seemed pretty underwhelming until paragon.

I am possibly unfairly comparing it to electric arc but most of the implements give you really cool novel abilities that work well together and the wand gets you a pseudo cantrips that doesn't benefit from your main class feature.

Has anyone used it and how did they find it ?

I too think a primal spontaneous caster would make sense (mainly because when I think shaman o think the little girl from spirited away and river spirits).

Ideally with the option to swap out spells depending which spirit you are communing with at present.

I would also like a social feature you can announce yourself in a new area to gain the notice of the local spirits.

In fact, the more I play this build, and the more I start to think it could be the superior Summoner. It really removes the issues of the Summoner (2 separate minis on the battleground, the lack of tanking ability of the Eidolon, the fact that when you go down you can't get the Eidolon back easily, etc...). All the Eidolon centric builds I've seen were investing everything on the Eidolon without really getting it on par with an actual martial.

I'll wait to be higher level to get a final stance on that. But if it's the case, I may review my pseudo guide and make an actual guide out of it, with more tactical elements gathered from my experience.

Most of my builds I have seen focused on martial brawler + electric arc/spell caster. I haven't seen any summoner who forgot they could spell cast because spells are really powerful. But knocking enemies prone/grappling and and getting extra reaction attacks is a great way to supplement your action economy. So I still rate the standard builds as fairly balanced rather entirely eidolon focused. It's the composite of doing comparable melee damage to investigators plus being a weak Spellcaster which in my mind's makes the whole package pretty potent.

My idea of a optimised eidolon probably involves reach attack of opportunity and heroism with the deadly or fatal natural attack. Which should be doing a lot more damage.

I am building a campaign using 2e set in a fantasy 15 century holy Roman empire with intrigue based around the election of a new emperor.

Now I want other heritages but human to be an option but I was wondering how I should have heritages intersects with national lines.

Or if I should bite the bullet and say all heritages live everywhere regardless of national line and not worry.

So I was wondering does paizo have any information about heritage, Identity and nationality collide in Golarian ?

You would need to change the size and the attribute bumps but kobold would work.

Psychic doesn't tend to compare well to similar classes.

It's like the bard but it gets one more focus spell (up to 12 level), one less spell per level, weaker defences and nothing quite as good at will as the bards focus cantrips.

If interested, you can read the entire 400+ post thread on the Paizo General Discussion forum here.

Danka

So on the other side of the fence on 5e land their has been a major reasonably sizable blow up about a new open gaming license. Were still in leaking and leaking territory with nothing verified. But assuming worst case scenario how much do people think pathfinder might be affected by all this ?

Mostly I see any coding for fantasy races to better reconcile medieval xenophobia than our current prejudice - Orcs always seemed like vikings to me (strong religious focus on battle and a strong tradition of raiding other cultures).

They are undoubtedly people with a vibrant culture even if they play the role of the bad guy in a lot of story centred on people living in fantasy England.

siegfriedliner wrote:

One of those trials was literally bearing a cross on a mountain hike. Now the way he set that up is we needed to make a standard DC for level 10 athletics check every hour to keep the cross aloft.

That triggers my "Is this even fun?" flag.

Rolling dice after dice just make each roll less and less meaningful and interesting. Very quickly, it becomes a burden to play.

I would have considered that keeping the cross aloft doesn't require a roll but that obstacles and hazards along the way ask for their specific checks to see the progression (going over a chasm, crossing a swamp, with Survival, Acrobatics, Athletics checks required to easily go through).

In practice it wasn't much fun and I don't roleplay with this Gm anymore. I just wanted to know the best ways to avoid that particular pit trap if I were to GM something similar in the future and to see if other people had similarly awkward experiences in 2e.

Why didn't they use Follow the Expert to have people Expert+ in Athletics "pull up" the stragglers? Unless that was very early levels and nobody was Expert in Athletics yet, that is.

That still meant trying to hit a DC of 27 with a +12 bonus to make progress which is possible but not easy and some party member either getting massively ahead of others or making much slower progress.

So I had a pathfinder 2e GM that had us all taking a set of challenges to earn the approval of the local leadership.

One of those trials was literally bearing a cross on a mountain hike. Now the way he set that up is we needed to make a standard DC for level 10 athletics check every hour to keep the cross aloft.

Now we had two non strength focused casters who hadn't focused on athletics in the group who were incapable of lifting the cross and so couldn't join the party on their hike for two weeks.

Now personally I am of the opinion this wasn't the best bit of GM I had ever seen but was wondering what he should have done differently ?

I am of the opinion that printing a fixed and free attribute with the new rules is pretty much a waste of ink.

But it's not that much ink so I don't think it's a sustainability issue.

personally I would prefer the default was either two boost or three boosts and flaw but I suppose I can't have everything.

This current arrangement still leaves best races for classes mixes. The mighty gnomes will remain the best bard/sorcerer's.

In terms of the attribute boosts I think the new answer is fine, it was annoying that some heritages attribute boost made the less than ideal for some classes and now that isn't a problem. I can make a mean halfling maul fighter now without it being suboptimal.

As for biological essentialism I don't care about those sorts of debates your large bear companion is probably only as strong as your halfling fighter does it make sense no does it matter no

I am bard at level 4 and was thinking of arcytping into psychic to grab some offensive focus spells to give me a little more variety on my focus casting.

I have decentish AC (17+Level) so I was caught in condrum about what to take in terms of psychic cantrips, anyone have any recommendations ?

I'm not convinced it's better than slow (though slow is arguably the best spell in the game).

Sustained vs duration is a clear weakness, more enemies are immune to it and its upgrade is worse than slows.

It's still a great spell but if I was bard I would pick slow over it because its more universal and there are other sustained spell that I like more (hideous laughter for one).

Hi I noticed people talking about harm blasters in another thread and suggesting they were good. I always thought harm was one of the weakest damage spells scaling poorly and vs fortitude which is one of the most commonly strong or extreme saves for monsters.

So I was wondering what I was missing ?

Deriven Firelion wrote:

There is little proof in the math that you are supposed to have them every encounter and get a 10 minute rest between every encounter other than perhaps level 1 to 3 games where you can lose a lot of hit points or get dropped easily. But that has little to do with focus points and everything to do with just being low level and weak.

At the tables I've been in, people don't waste 10 minutes for Refocusing. If the only thing that is lacking is a Focus Point people will generaly move on with the next fight. But they definitely spend time either healing or identifying items/interacting with the dungeon. So, on average, everyone can refocus freely during most fights. And if you don't do that you end up with TPKs because PCs start fights with not enough hit points to handle them.

So, I fail to see how you play. There must be assumptions in your games that compensate for the lack of rest otherwise your dungeons would be too deadly. Is it the difficulty of encounters that are tuned down, healing through items that is improved or whatever, but there is a difference somewhere.

I assuming based on what he said about his oracle that they are playing a heal bot and dedicating the majority of their spell casting resources to hp.

Usually everyone wants that ten minutes when they can get it, to treat wounds, refocus etc so it not the wizard pausing the adventuring day.

Unless stuff are actively breathing down your neck it should be possible to take a breather and the encounter math clearly expects you to.

Most groups will try to avoid triggering an encounter when they are badly injured so if people are treating wounds you may as well be refocusing.

For the magus having 5-7 heavy hitting spells in an extreme or composite encounter is better than 4 and having a strictly better at will spell to spell strike well is strictly better.

But I always thought the magus should have its own poweful focus spells to keep them going with their limited spells slot so it makes sense that given the class doesn't provide it people would go fishing.

Personally I am hoping that each element gets access to at least two damage types to help pyrokinetics deal with their immunity problem.

I don't care what their second damage type is though force makes sense if you equate fire with exploaions and pressure waves like I do.

I love it when people talk about optimization in 2e.

I love it even more when said veteran optimizers fall on their face during actual play in this edition while more casual (and often new) players win the day.

If you're not working with your party in this game, you're holding them back, in spite of any successes so far.

This game is not like 1e. Not at all. If you're focused on you, or just DPR, you are going to end up very far from what this game's new paradigm considers optimized.

Optimisation exists in this edition, knowing the dread striker is more worth having if you have a bard sorcerer with demoralise or dirge of dooms is optimisation, knowing that it might be a good idea to have a ranged option for some encounters is the same, knowing certain class benefit more from some buffs than others is optimisation. Knowing that your party is almost certainly going to benefit more from having any other support class other than an alchemist is optimising.

Knowing prepared spellcasting is a pain in the ass is experience though and defiantly not optimising.

I also think knowing when to cast heroism/haste/invisibility (and other buffs) on which ally is a form of optimising and making use of the right feats to aid another to get some pretty impressive statistical buffs on an ally that relies on one attack is probably optimisation too.

That's kinda the point of Extract Element isn't it? Turns immunity into resistance (other than with Golems afaik).

Or devil's etc

I am not sure this is a problem but single element fire kinetsists are very much shut down by enemies with fire immunity which at least in quite the few aps I have played seems quite common.

One example was an extended conflict with the forces of a fire themed God which had one fire immune enemy after the next. I can't remember anything else quite do intense but they are common enough that most aps have a few encounters where fire isn't a viable option.

Now obviously this is nothing new and was an issue in 1e too, but the fire kinetisist does seem the most vulnerable class to this issue in 2e, most spellcasters would need to select all spells that are entirley invalidated by fire immunity. Its doable but its very much an active choice.

Whereas the kinetesist really needs to make two choices (soul element and fire) to be in that situation and the pyromancer/fire starter is probably the most common trope of kinetesist (followed by your aether Carrie telekinetisist which is no longer an option in 2e).

So kinetic blasts are the weapon like element of the class they function in most ways like weapons (use runes, has master proficiency etc) and so they are the obvious tool you would think to use against golums as opposed to the kinetesists more spell like abilities

Except your weapon has all the weakness of a spell and a lot less benefits than a notmal strike (no flurry of blows, haste, other weapon feats).

Arguably the best way to be a kinetesist in melee is take a monk archetype or martial artist as powerful fist is on par with all the melee kinetic blasts and doesn't provoke can be hasted, flurried, used with an attack of opportunity etc.

It's not necessarily a problem that options for what you can do with kinetic blasts are for the most part inferior to the options you can fish from archytpe a lot of casters fish for melee features from archytpes but kinetic blasts appear like a big part of the class identity and power and are really poorly supported.

Interestingly catfall doesn't have any limitations on when you can use it so you can be rolled off a cliff in heavy duty chains and still at legendary acrobatics and still take no damage.

Why are 2e kinetesists often considered reckless?

Because they are too impulsive ...

Kinetic Aura especially damaging kinetic auras are mostly pretty weak and situation until 8th level when suddenly they are incrediable with the shape aura ability.

That feels like weird balance to me anyone played auras before and after the feat ?

I agree with Unicore. There are plenty of options even at low levels.

To say otherwise strikes me as disingenuous.

Fair winds alone has a dramatic impact on how a party might tackle an encounter. It simultaneously buffs the party, debuffs the enemy, denies enemy actions, and allows allies to more easily gain desirable tactical positioning. I'd dare say it's better than Inspire Courage in many instances.

Other low level kineticist abilities aren't quite that good, but many are close.

I think your overating flinging shove before level 10, I am not saying it isn't good (it totally is and could easily be a life saver) but trading 2 actions for roughly 1 action of movement for an ally or repositioning an enemy on a failed save is much more situational than giving all allies a +1 bonus to hit, damage and saves vs fear for 1 action.

I disagree if you want dynamic ,casters with 30+ plus different spells which each do different things does that. The kinetsist has far fewer less diverse tricks. The kinetesist main gimmick seems to be the duracell bunny I can do this all day hp allowing.

I thought I would list the main issues with kinetic blasts as I could see them, this isn't about damage just some practicality issues I thought I could highlight in one place.

First they count as spells for all defensive features this means that golums are mostly immune entirely to kinetesist (apart from golums who effected by fire). The kinetsist doesn't at the moment have much alternatives to impulses driven offence and they have a lot elemental flexibility than the casters which help them counter golem.

Second melee kinetic blasts provokes, its minor but there seems limited reason to massive disentive kinetists from going into melee.

Third it doesn't benefit from haste because it's a separate action rather than a strike (even though it includes a strike).

I think the easiest solution to all of these is to simply consider a gathered element a weapon (with the statistics ofa kinetic blast) that you can strike with.

The inquisitor is named after an organisation that stole, murdered, tortured people for a cruel dogma that was practically genocidal. So a certain degree of presumed edginess is reasonable.

siegfriedliner wrote:

The three thematic hearts of the inquistor are surprise, fear, ruthless efficency and an almost fanatical dedication to their god.

?? The thematic heart of the inquisitor was being a divine spellcaster who uses a combination of skill and martial prowess to defeat their enemies in the name of their deity.

Similar to the paladin, but with a skillset closer to a ranger or rogue's than a fighter's.

They got a bonus to intimidate as a class feature, but they also got a bonus to sense motive, knowledge checks, and survival. So it's weird to single out only one of those as "the heart" of the class when to be honest they're all fairly minor features.

... Nothing within the class requires them to be 'fanatical' any moreso than a paladin or cleric was. Actually maybe less so, the ex-inquisitor language was a bit more permissive than the ex-cleric one.

So this assessment seems blatantly inaccurate on its face.

I wasn't expecting the Spanish inquisition when I made that joke.

NECR0G1ANT wrote:

keftiu wrote:

In the same way that a Fighter covered in dirt is not a Ranger, and a Wizard with a guitar is not a Bard, I don't personally take an especially-pious Thaumaturge as an Inquisitor. "Knowing things and fighting monsters" is hardly a unique niche in the d20 fantasy space, and if it was, then we'd just have Investigators with a penchant for the occult instead of the Thaumaturge existing.

There's room for another class, especially when the flavor is radically different.

There are a lot more more similarities between Inquisitor and Thaumaturge than "knowing things and fighting monsters", see above.

Is the flavor radically different? 1E inquisitors were more like specialized monster hunters than a church militant. Thaumaturges fill that niche.

The thematic heart of an Inquisitor is their devotion to faith, belief strong enough to have forged that person into a weapon for their god/church/cause. There’s not really anything resembling that in the Thaumaturge’s flavor, while shaking a big gaggle of religious symbols at monsters is indeed the opposite of what one should do. Thaum also isn’t touching on the gish niche much at all, whereas a lot of folks here have voiced wanting to see a 2e Inquisitor with Focus Spells (at least) and (potentially) being a divine wave caster.

At the end of the day, the narrative fantasy of the two is pretty distinct. Can you play a Thaumaturge as a monster hunter? Absolutely. But the existence of the Aberrant Bloodline Sorcerer didn’t disqualify the Psychic from existing, and I see the same thing in play here.

The chief thematic heart of an inquisitor is surpise and fear.

The two thematic hearts of the inquisitior are surprise, fear and ruthless efficency.

The three thematic hearts of the inquistor are surprise, fear, ruthless efficency and an almost fanatical dedication to their god.

Personally I think it would be cool to have an ability to kinetic blast enemies who take an attack of opportunity against you with the option of disrupting the attack of opportunity on a hit. Which would make melee kinetesist feel a lot better.

I do note one interesting thing out of this playtest that I think might be worth considering more broadly. Their experience was that using Extract Elements is a lot of fun. dragging your magical power out of the bodies of your foes in a way that causes them damage directly is *fun*. So... feat chain? I mean, why shouldn't I be able to drag elemental water out of a slime, or pull earth out of a Stone Golem? I have no idea how to balance it properly, but if this is one of the fun things, then....

Or hellfire out of a devil, personally I would like to see a feat that let extract an element work on all creatures that are immune to fire otherwise our single gate pyrokinetics are going to be stuffed in a fairly substantial number of encounters.

My favourite bit of the 1e kinetesist were the infusions that let you feel like you could fully customise your element. Currently their aren't any infusions in this new playtest do you recon we will see anything like infusions in the final product?

Or instead of focus infusions literally any other resource and infusions.

Seriously, it doesn't hurt the game if Kineticist is one of 3 classes to have a unique pool of resources.

I just really want infusions they were my favourite bit of the 1e version.

Squiggit wrote:

The-Magic-Sword wrote:

we have a mechanic for that, in fact the most appropriate mechanic, the amps, have only been used once in the game so far.

That just seems like a bad direction to take the class. Like you said, Amps are already a thing. People who want to play a psychic can just go play a psychic.

Pushing into new territory is the major appeal of the kineticist for a lot of people.

I mean, I hope we're not just going to use the amp mechanic once, prepared spell casting gets a bunch of classes, as does spontaneous casting. Besides Psychic has spell slots and the occult spell list, so itd be pretty different in that respect too. Plus I don't think anyone is really looking for 'pushing into new territory' from the kineticist, I think they're looking for 'elemental blasting' maybe a 'dedicated blaster' or an 'ATLA Bender Simulation.'

I think that one thing that the kinetesist has lost from 1e is infusions.

So if instead of focus spells or augments they had focus infusions that would be golden.

Themetricsystem wrote:

Nothing in the rules indicates that the AC bonus goes away from Raise a Shield if you lose the Shield before the stated end duration.

This tends to be more of a problem with the Raise a Shield Action and rules rather than the Stone Shield ability, but by RAW that AC sticks regardless of if you still hold the Shield since the Action was spent.

well, if you believe (and allow in your games) that if you raise a shield (any shield), and then that shield gets destroyed, disintegrated, stolen, erased from existence, disarmed, etc but somehow you are still "raising a shield and getting a bonus from it" then sure, go ahead and allow Stone shield without stone element.

Remember everyone is inhabiting the same 6 seconds regardless of when they are in the initiative so the fact that at some point you had you shield up during those six seconds could effect the actions of someone during those six seconds even if it the last two seconds of those six you don't. Round are sequential as a game mechanic but in reality everything is happening all at once.

Blissey1 wrote:

Like if I start turn with earth gathered, raised earth shield, then gather another element, do I still get the benefit of a shield being raised? Or like if you first action Earth Shield and then used a two action overflow like Rolling Boulder. It doesn't specifically say you loose your shield if you drop your element in the text but doing so would completely negate the penalty for using it to block and the description/flavor is very much that you are using your gathered element as the shield

I think you loose because of the statement:

Quote:

You Raise a Shield, turning your gathered element into the shield and gaining a +2 circumstance bonus to AC until the start of your next turn. (You can still use this shield for anything requiring a gathered element).

So when you rise a Stone Shield you begin to use your Stone Shield as gathered element, so if you change or loose your gathered element you automatically loose your shield. Including this create a strange interaction with Elemental Weapon because the Elemental Weapon is your gathered element too, so when a player is using a earth bastard sword when it rises a Stone Shield is it using the sword as shield?

If you read the ability once you use the the Stone shield ability you get the +2 to ac and fortitude saves unitl the beginning of your next turn.

Not having your element doesn't override the duration which doesn't include an provisio saying that bonus lasts only whilst you have your Stone shield raised.

But as the system currently works if you were to select dex or str as your key ability that would also apply to your class proficiency (which is automatically based of your key ability score) and your class proficiency applies to your aoe dcs.

Throne wrote:

I read it as Ravingdork suggesting the class gets to choose between Str, Dex and Con for key ability for Melee, Ranged, AoE builds respectively, the way other classes get to choose between Str and Dex for melee or ranged builds.

If Str or Dex was their key, it means their class DC is now based on Str or Dex by default, so those builds would just be better at both things and Con would only have a little extra HP.

Unless they make the class DC explicitly separate from key stat, which... well, Spellshot did it so I guess it could be a thing, you're right.

They could explicitly create a new impulse proficiency separate from class proficiency to get the same effects. It probably would make things a lot easier to balance for the inevitable archetype.

Impulses are the kinetesist spells and Casters tend to be able to use their casting attribute for most elements of their casting.

Con is effectively the kinetesist casting attribute and kinetic blasts are impulses (which are subject to the same limitations as spells and provoke) so using con for them makes perfect sense. Casters don't make ranged spell attacks with dex in this edition.

I was wondering does the target of flinging updraft provoke attacks of opportunity ?

Having devoured the playtest material I have found I really love a good number of the impulses.

But I have found one element has far more of my favourites and that element is air.

I love at will flight and getting from level 8 and being able to share it is amazing.

I love invisibility and getting it at will is also amazingly solid.

Ferocious cyclone is my pick for the best aoe the kinetesist gets a 10ft wide 60ft line is a large area of effect but I also find lines easier than bursts to avoid friendly fire and the damage is almost as good as the 3 actions abilities with less hurdles to jump through.

I also like spiked skin as a long duration damage mitigation and damage hat scales really well.

So what are your favourite elements and impulses.

Honestly if they hadn't precluded using elemental blasts alongside overflow abilities (action economy) until level 19 the damage would be fine, 1 blast + an ubercantrip should keep you in the ok damage figures.