As a player, I am not especially taken with the new base classes in their current form - they'll need a lot more tweaking before they'll fit in with the Big 11.
But as written, these are KICKASS evil NPC classes! The cavalier is the perfect foil for your party's snotty paladin, and a great way to design Hellknights for Pathfinder campaigns.
The inquisitor would make a great recurring baddie. Imagine him as the evil cult fanatic leading an unsavory posse, relentlessly chasing the PCs across the countryside! Those tactical feats would make him great at leveraging minions.
Everytime I try to picture an alchemist PC, I get a horrible vision of a schumuck covered in sloshing glass. But stick him and the PCs in a flaming lab, and you've got a boss fight for the ages!
The summoner's the best of the lot - it's one of the few classes I've seen that could pull off a solo spellcaster encounter with the PCs under the PFRPG's tougher spellcasting rules.
The oracle? Spice up your temple fight! Witch? The perfect evil mastermind!
Anyway, I'm just writing to ask that the designers include lots of options for evil characters in the finished product. I'm sure that once the shakedown is done, these classes will even better options for the DM!
A DM might need to be a little careful. . . some of these abilities might be *too* good as bad guy NPCs. My immediate concerns are the oracle curses and the Charisma damage as part of alchemist mutagens. Since NPCs are really only designed for a single encounter (or maybe recurring encounters at different times), the drawbacks for Charisma damage and/or curses can be mitigated usually without even realizing it.
Are DMs playtesting these classes as bad guy NPCs?
|
A DM might need to be a little careful. . . some of these abilities might be *too* good as bad guy NPCs. My immediate concerns are the oracle curses and the Charisma damage as part of alchemist mutagens. Since NPCs are really only designed for a single encounter (or maybe recurring encounters at different times), the drawbacks for Charisma damage and/or curses can be mitigated usually without even realizing it.
Are DMs playtesting these classes as bad guy NPCs?
I know I have read one playtest where the OP had run a witch and then a summoner as enemies, and the end result was that the summoner was highly effective (stayed invisible and just summoned creatures to aid the Eidolon)
No experience on my part though, my DM won't even let the PCs try the classes :(
I ran the big bad guy at the end of Burnt Offerings as a summoner. The eidolon took a couple hits, but the summoner was paralyzed by a spectral handed ghoul touch, and goup de graced...
Will be adding a witch and oracle into the next couple sessions...hopefully they fair better than, well, any of the other named NPCs in the series...
Absolutely goint to have a crazed bomb weilding alchemist flying arround on one of those floating boards they have in the Ebberon setting. Doubt I'll name the NPC hob/green goblin...but I might give him a mask...