8th level Witch playtest - large group 1-shot


Round 2: Summoner and Witch


I spent an hour writing this last night on the forum, only to have the board eat my post. This will be shortened because of it. Note to Paizo: remove the forum time-out for subsequent playtests.

9 player dungeon/puzzle one-shot with the following class makeup:

Paladin 8
Barbarian 8
Witch 8
Oracle 8 (Bones, Haunted)
Druid 8
Cleric 8
Sorc 5 / Dragon Disc 3
Rogue 6 / Shadow Dancer 2
Rogue 5 / Shadow Dancer 3

Let me start by saying that my stat line was amazing compared to most anyone else. My rolls were 18, 16, 16, 14, 14, 12. Any character I made would be vastly numerically superior to anyone else. Once gear and levels were included, I had a +7 Int mod. Ultimately, I feel as though playing the Witch was less beneficial to my party than playing a Wizard instead. Bold sections indicate something the Witch could do that the Wizard has difficulty doing or cannot do.

Encounter 1: Phase Spiders

The annoyance of this fight is that you find yourself saying “I hold my action until the Phase Spider reappears” every round. That, and Con damage poison.

Spiders surprised the party, half of which was looking around in one room, the other half waiting outside and looking around in a main hall. Party was split Oracle, Cleric, Paladin, Witch, Dragon Disc and Rogue, Rogue, Barb, Druid w/ Pet. Group 1 clumped up to maximize available actions when the spider reappeared. Witch attempted to use Slumber hex, got poisoned from the Attack of Opportunity, and missed the target on the touch attack. Spider 1 is shortly thereafter smooshed. Group 2 has a fair spread around a small room, Spider 2 was essentially Power Attacked to death by the Barbarian.

Puzzles: Detect Magic and Spellcraft on many, many things. Good rolls and high mods help substantially.

Encounter 2: Iron Golem (which we were supposed to run from, apparently)

Golem is woken up by me prematurely, blocks the entrance to the room. 2 people are knocked to Neg by AoOs. The Barb, who happened to have an Adamantine weapon to bypass the damage reduction, went Neg after carving a substantial chunk out of the golem. Witch used Fortune on Barbarian, Evil Eye for -4 Attack on Golem. It turns out that -4 attack doesn't matter when the golem's attack bonus starts at +28 and your highest armor party members are hovering around 22-24. After dragging the negative health players out of the room through the door that the golem couldn't fit through, we heal up using the Witch's Wand of Cure Light Wounds. It took about half of the charges.

Encounter 3: Swarm of CR2 Sahagin

Sahagin surprise us, get into good positions. Well placed Fireball eliminates 6 as I entertain the players with my cutting-out-a-blast-template-on-a-paper-towel-fu. A Cleave, Scorching Ray, and Summon Nature's Ally later, the encounter is over.

Encounter 4: 2 Frost Giants and 2 Winter Wolves

In a 30 ft radius circular room with two large, cover-providing obstacles...with Great Cleave and 10 ft reach on the giants. After a long, brutal encounter, we walk out with 2 dead. The fight was fairly unremarkable on our parts. The giants saved against both a Hold Person and a Phantasmal Killer from me (DC 20 and 21, respectively).

Conclusions:

Hexes: Drop the AoO or move them all to at least 30 ft. ALL of them. I'm fine with Slumber having a Ranged Touch Attack along with a save, but punishing the Witch with an Attack of Opportunity because it's Melee Touch makes this ability less than worthless. The same applies to Misfortune. Personally, I say 30 ft range is sufficient to remedy the majority of the problems on these Hexes. The general weakness of the Hexes is a separate issue. There's no compelling reason that I can see to have Fortune limited to once per round while Misfortune is not limited at all. While many of the Major Hexes are solid, rest-of-the-character-life abilities, the standard Hexes are difficult to find a use for in most situations.

Spell lists and spell availability: I'm tempted to say that the Witch would be a better class if they were a Divine Int-based caster. The limitations of spells known played a substantial role in my decisions. Ultimately, the Int-based Arcane rules simply felt like a reflavored, weaker Wizard. The ability to use even Light Armor as a Witch would be nice and balance out the extremely limited spell selection well. Since the Hexes (pre-10, at least) don't make up for the extremely gimped spell list, it would be nice to see what would happen if you had someone with Arcane spells that didn't worry about Arcane Spell Failure.

Skill selection: I felt as though the Witch skill list was sufficient, if only slightly weaker than the Wizard for having fewer Knowledges as class skills. In some regards, this encouraged me to make greater use of the fixed-from-3.5 non-class skills, but losing the +3 bonus to several Knowledges as an Int-based character was painful enough to avoid spending points in them and rely on other party members. The total change in class skills between the two looks like this:

Wizard to Witch conversion: +Heal, +Intimidate, -Appraise, -Knowledge (Dungeoneering, Engineering, Geograph, Local, Nobility, Religion), -Linguistics, + Use Magic Device

So...you can 2 Cha based skills and 1 Wis based skill to lose 7 Int-based skills. True, Heal is a good skill, but Intimidate works just as well on the Fighter/Barb/melee character who can take Intimidating Prowess and Dazzling Display and Use Magic Device is not necessary to use the majority of staples in your arsenal, particularly the ever-useful Wand of Cure Light Wounds (a.k.a. I spent 750 gold to not worry about damage between combats for a few weeks).

Overall impression: Substantive changes need to be made to the mechanics of the class to make it competitive with other core classes pre-10, under the operating assumption that the Major Hex and Grand Hex choices are actually competitive. There is the possibility that I am mistaken about them being good. I certainly was wrong about the standard Hexes. My short list of recommendations are:
1.30 ft range on all existing Melee Touch Hexes. Melee Touch converted to Ranged Touch. If not this, remove Attack of Opportunity verbiage from the Hexes.
2.Change the Witch to a Divine Caster, with the full spell list availability that comes with it.
3.Revisit class-skill selection, potentially to add 1-2 knowledge skills to the class-skill list.
4.Address Familiar frailty such that the Familiar becomes a more flavorful part of the class, rather than just “that snake/rat/etc. that hides in a belt pouch/Familiar Pocket.”


This seems like just the sort of feedback needed...
Personally, I would prefer adding MORE Divine spells to the Witch list rather than ditching their current Arcane selection. What Familiar did you use, and how did it's bonus spell-list work out?

FYI, if you use Firefox, an extension called "Lazarus" auto-saves all active forms every 5-10 seconds, allowing you to recover them later, even if the server times out and you have to hit "add new post" again. It's saved me much frustration since I discovered it.

...It'd be great if Paizo put a link to it somewhere visible, like at the top of the forums.


Quandary wrote:

This seems like just the sort of feedback needed...

Personally, I would prefer adding MORE Divine spells to the Witch list rather than ditching their current Arcane selection. What Familiar did you use, and how did it's bonus spell-list work out?

FYI, if you use Firefox, an extension called "Lazarus" auto-saves all active forms every 5-10 seconds, allowing you to recover them later, even if the server times out and you have to hit "add new post" again. It's saved me much frustration since I discovered it.

...It'd be great if Paizo put a link to it somewhere visible, like at the top of the forums.

I used the Viper familiar, which gave me a small selection of Evocation nukes. This worked very well with the "Hey, you're in combat and the enemy has a surprise round" issue that we had, while the utility spells of other familiars would have been better in an outdoor setting.

As for the Arcane/Divine thing, I think you're misunderstanding what I'm recommending. The spell list is fine as is. You'll note that there are a number of cross-over spells that used to be Divine-only that are currently in the Arcane camp due to the Witch (Cure Light/Mod/Ser/Crit, for example). What I'm saying is that the Witch should stop being an Arcane caster and move over to the Divine caster type. Divine casters, by nature, have access to the entire spell list when they level up and can learn to use armor.

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