Playtest of the Witch and Oracle


Advanced Player's Guide Playtest: Final Playtest


we are a grupe playing the Legacy of fire avp(reviced to Pathfinder rules) and we have the following characters in our grupe.

Druid(heavy focus on mele)
Cleric of nethys
Bard
Fighter/wizard(aming at the eldric knight PrC)
Oracles(with wind Mystery and the air barrier revalation and blindness curse)
Witch (viper familiar with the evil eye hex and fortune hex)

all characters are lvl 2 at the moment(since we just stated the AVP)

we have been trough the first couple of encounters and a few thing became clear.
1: Both the wich and the Oracle suffer a bit in the save department, since they are focused in cha and int to make better spellcasters), the problem with the witch is not that big since int also provides skillpoints.

2: the oracles curse is a HEAVY penalty. when we had one of our first fights with about 10 bad guys in a pretty larger room he got seperated from the rest of the party and his blindness prevented him from spotting the enemy and his partymembers, beeing blind made him spend a lot of time moving around to get targets in sight and prevented the use of area effects bacause he couldent see if allys would get cought in the area, it also prevented him from useing attacks/spells at range, witch where a major problem in this fight bacause the bad guys where using ranged attacks from a higher vantage point... i think we will houserule that the distance of his sight is 60' with the last 30' granting concealment to the enemy untill lvl 5.

the feel of the classes are pretty good, they fell and seem to work different from the rest of the core classes, especially the cures thing with the oracle(witch should be less of a penalty, but still there....also the deaf curse seem to heavy in that it prevent the PC from interacting with most non combat encounters).

the oracle seem to be a lot of fun to play and the fact that it has more spells per day(like sorceres) seem to balance outh that it cant use channel energy... (perhaps some healing revalation that worked like out of combat would be Nice to have), the player playing ther oracle is not the Munchkin type so he might be a little less interested in game balance. the air barrier seems a little to weak thogh, since it grants armor bonus it dosent seem to stack with ordinary armor, and that makes it kind of weak....perhaop if it granted deflection bonus(and a lesser bonus than it does now...somthing like +1 at first lvl with a max of +5 at lvl 17 or somthing).

on to the witch:

the class seems to work ok. its slow spell progression and few spells pr day puts a lot of wight in the Hexes. as far as we can see the evil eye hex workes pretty good and the class seems pretty balanced in power. there is however one problem compared to the other arcane spellcasters. the class seems a tiny bit dull somtimes since most of its ability are suportive in nature and/or debuffs... and somtimes you just want to blast the monsters:), an other problem related to the hexes are the fact that many of the relies on a save or suck system.

one final thing is the witch familiar, since its also a spellbook(sort of) the player took the viper since its som tiny that it can be hitten in a pocket.

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