Fixed it again for you. =)
It seems like a weird mixture of barbarian, monk, and divination wizard. I like it. However, I don't really get the connection between the class and imbuing anarchic/axiomatic weapon properties. It's still a stretch, but I can maybe see the attacks being so fast that they combust and deal fire damage and foes have a chance to catch on fire... sort of like the fire tracks the car leaves in Back To The Future. Which is also the same as the fire trail spell from the ARG. You could use that for inspiration, too.
Wouldn't this work better as a Fighter archetype?
Wouldn't this work better as a Fighter archetype?
I'm curious, why do you suggest this?
Wouldn't this work better as a Fighter archetype?I'm curious, why do you suggest this?
It seems to me the time powers are mostly martial of nature. And I'd just like Fighters to get nice things too.
I know someone on these boards who would tell you that fighters should never get supernatural abilities through an archetype since they have none to begin with. I don't disagree with you, though. That's why I tend to favor gishes. =)
It seems to me the time powers are mostly martial of nature. And I'd just like Fighters to get nice things too.
This reply fills me with respect and amusement. :)
Personally I think if you wanted to give fighters more nice things it would be a lot easier to make some fancy new fighter only feats than a whole archetype.
It was moved because this is a Homebrew topic (making your own class) and as such belongs in the House Rules/Homebrew section. Advice is for people who want advice on how to run a game, build a character, etc.
I'll reiterate the comment I made on the other version of this thread (which is moot I guess because the discussion is in this one): He is too powerful. He gets a variation of basically barbarian rage (Dex and Wis) but has no actual downside during the "rage", it's only after it ends, which if he's being played right will never happen during the battle anyway. He gets abilities that are better than a fighter's bonus feats every other level. They're more like Magus arcana, and those come every 3rd level.
I think you should rework this as a Magus archetype instead of a fresh class. It let's you compare the abilities one-for-one with the abilities of an existing class, so you make sure the power level doesn't increase too much. The arcana-like abilities could just be new magus arcana for him to choose, for example.
Looks like my comment wasn't moved so i'll move it meself...
Lets see. Uh... Ow ow ow my brain?
I agree with Big Lemon. It seems like a cherry picking of abilities with a storyline wrapped around it, but some of these abilities don't seem to make sense... Giving fast healing feels more like it was picked because 'boy I sure would like fast healing' and less like theres a good reason for someone who can bend time to have fast healing. How are the ability and the class connected exactly?
I'm bending time in such a way as to imply i've had 8 hours of rest in the last 6 seconds?
What does controlling time have to do with axiomatic/anarchic damage?
At level 7 the character gets an ability called 'unleash the omega 13?'
Yeah. It's a little over the top.
Seems like it would be easier to rename the class Neener neener you cant hurt me never happened (raspberry sound) and give it only one ability
"DR Infinity/Unless you make me unconsious or one shot me."
I apologize. Let me put it a different way. One of the reasons I left 3.5 and came to pathfinder was because of the splatbooks and this has some serious 'you cant hurt me' splatbook flavor.
I did give very specific examples of the things about it that dont sit well with me which is what you were asking.
From a subjective standpoint the important thing to keep in mind for any class you create that does things that have never been done before isn't necessarily 'would this be fun for me to play' but 'would my gm want to smite my character with a brick if i played this'... All I'm saying is this feels very brickable.
I'm sorry if my words are built from a vocabulary built primarily on snark so I put in as much detail in my first post as possible. There is nothing in your class build that says they get fast healing because time heals all wounds so there was a cognitive dissonance that I made sure to mention. I still am not clear why time travel has anything to do with axiomatic anything, and having an ability that basically says if I don't die outright I can undo anything I don't like that just happened as a level 7 ability feels munchkin to me. If you weren't looking for this opinion then such as it is... keep doing what you're doing. Don't ever let anyone tell you how to play.
I couldnt get away with what you're building in any of my groups, and i've clearly outlined why.
I haven't spoken to the rage thing because I tend to play wizards and my groups have never played barbarians. I'm not clear on the details of how rage works so I respectfully do not speak to those issues.
If on top of being able to undo any event that doesnt kill you outright and never be surprised and if anything ever does manage to hit you theres always fast healing which you can pick up as early as level 2... Pepper in some I'm not standing where you think i'm standing and you cant flank me... And thats just defense...
How bout starting at level 2 being able to make everyone act lower in an initiative round... If it doesnt drop quick it'll eventually be fatigued, and by level 7 you're making them take age penalties?
I don't even see anywhere in this class that has anything to do with rage so if I glossed over the fact that you'd like to have rage bonuses too? Why not toss in some spells while you're at it.
I guess if you cant be hurt and get fast healing at level 2 and can leave the square you were standing in with impunity and the longer we hang out near you the greater the chance we'll just die of old age then who needs spells right?
It all seems great if you're GM allows it, but it seems like very little thought went into 'how is my GM not going to think this is overpowered'... 'how are my abilities limited'
If any thought was put in to 'what are my weaknesses' it seems like that thought was spent mitigating them, not creating them so that my GM might think i just wasnt trying to create a cross between x men's nightcrawler and a time lord.
I believe there is specifically a section on this in the pathfinder books and to paraphrase what the books say 'if you think that given the choice anyone would be more inclined to play your class than any of the classes that are already out there then yeah... it's too powerful. I hope any of this makes sense.
I think its the gestalt of all the abilities combined that gives it that montyhaul feel. If you make a class thats one part psylocke being able to tell whats going to happen, one part nightcrawler never being where you think he is, and one part wolverine's healing factor, and the question you're asking is 'cool huh?' then sure...
Thats not the best way to build a class though... Sure we have to think about limits so lets see what those limits are...
If the limiting factor here is that they can only do this a number of rounds per day equal to their level then thats almost cool. Of course presuming anyone who plays this class will max out their wisdom goes without saying. So 6 rounds to start out with isnt bad. And that ability goes up really quick... You're up to 16 rounds by level 6 when you get your fast healing. So 2 extra rounds per level is huge. Add in the fact that at certain points he gets another donkey-huge 6 point wisdom bonus (greater flow of time) to help his ability to succeed at that age body skill. which has limits on the number of times he can do it except we negate that penalty by also allowing him to age things just by doing damage to them as well?
Lets talk defense.
Now by 2nd level we already have 'undo a critical attack against me as an immediate action... Meaning if you surprise me and i dont go unconscious or die outright, you cant hurt me even if you surprise me, I can spend most of my daily combat time in 'can't touch this' time, and the higher level i am the less likely that i'll even have to bother undoing your critical surprise backstab (practically the only way i ever take damage) because i see them all coming ahead of time.
Combine you cant hurt me with you cant ever get the jump on me and it's a combination that makes players say hell yeah and gms say hell no.
In its most simplest form my argument would be
wisdom ac bonus+Moment step+Annul+Avoid critical+avoid attack = omnipresent/omnicient.
alignment damage abilities+aging by damaging=omnipotent.
so you've created a god class.
and the only sure fire cure for your power is to force your character into more fights per day than you can keep this up... which with 2 extra rounds per level you could practically be in a gladiator arena and still have temporal power to spare at the end.
Using Rage gives you a -2 to AC and cannot use any Dexterity, Intelligence, or Charisma based skills while in rage (so he can't use Acrobatics to tumble around enemies to flank them and then hit with his boosted damage much more easily, for example). He is fighting wild and is less aware of his surrounding, making him easier to hit and unable to do fine-tuned work.
Making a character class is not the same thing as making a character for a novel or comic. Yes, thematically healing can play into time-warping, and so do these phase-out, phase-in abilities, but give one character automatic access to all of these things with no drawbacks makes him STRICTLY more powerful then every other character class. You can't just have a character be able to do everything you can think of and expect it to fit in nicely with the rest of the cast.
If you had a group of 3 normal classes and 1 of these guys, he would be much stronger than them in combat even if they were the same level. He would be making all the hits in combat while never being significantly hurt himself, and the other players will just be following in his footsteps picking up his leftovers. I've played in a game with a completely broken character before, and it was not fun. And that was a legit build of existing classes (a really specific metamagic build of wizard/magus to be precise). Makign your own class that is incredibly powerful compared to the regular classes if going to make no one want to play a regular class, and you'll find yourself ultimately making up an entirely new game, which I can tell you from experience is a challenge.
Big Lemon is right. It wouldnt even be a matter of if the GM wanted to throw a brick at your head. Even your own party would want to kill this guy off.
They wouldnt even want to kill him off.
They'd give him a regeneration ring and dip him halfway in lava so he'd just keep burning and regenerating and burning and regenerating... If they could ever catch him in the first place.
Basically what we have is a guy that never gets surprised. He knows whats going to happen before it happens. Either he's entering combat knowingly so he hasn't 'powered up' yet, or something unexpected happened like he got backstabbed before he even knew what was going on. Then he can instantly undo that bad thing that surprised him, and even if he cant undo it he can now distance himself from the threat and heal the damage.
Massive dex and wisdom bonuses combine into a ludicrous 'hit me once, shame on you, but you'll never hit me twice' thing. Once he knows 'its on' he can pretty much stay 'powered up' longer than most fights last.
He's got instant heals and heal over time, the ability to 'unluck' anybody who bothers to attack him instead of the more hittable members of your party, and why would anyone try since this guy timeslips out of combat range at will...
So you wont surprise him, wont hit him, wont ever get in a second shot once he knows you're trying to hit him, and you'll die before he runs out of these abilities.
The defense part of this character is enough to put your whole party off thier perch.
You could completely get rid of the anarchy/axiomatic part and the age creature to death parts and this character would still be too powerful for anyone to want to hang out with.
No longer the 'too powerful' by killing stuff off kinda too powerful, but the 'neener neener you cant hit me but if you did you cant twice and i only need enough healing to correct the one lucky shot you'll ever get on me' kinda too powerful.
Ah, I misread that. Nevermind. He can tumble.
In any case the point is there is a constant, present drawback. I stand by my opinion that you should rethink this is a class archetype.
I am not in any way trying to put you down or shame you, but I must ask: How long have you been playing Pathfinder, and how many times have you acted as GM, if at all? I ask because I think someone must either have played a lot or run a few times before one can build up the amount of understanding of game mechanics and power level to be able to create your own content out of the air.
The Magus is probably the closest class to this one out of those that exist. Consider each of the abilities of this class and the other base classes. Each abilty they get, how strong it is, how each of their abilities work with each other. Adding the Cure/Inflict spells to the Magus spell list for this potential Time Walker archetype would represent being able to use time to heal/errode without upsetting the powerlevel. He could gain this quasi-rage ability (with a new weakness) and in exchange have diminished spellcasting or a smaller arcane pool.
So instead lets do the opposite. lets wipe out everything in the class that makes it that annoying kind of 'you'll never hit me' kind of annoying and just focus on the time walker as an offensive nemesis.
by level 11 you've got greater flow of time. so 24 wisdom minimum...which makes the dc of your age creature ability 15+wisdom bonus or 22. It lasts 6 rounds, can be done 12 times per day... so how many age categories are there again? Middle, old, venerable, dead... Guess what happens at level 12... He can do 2 age categories per hit... you die in 2 swings. Good luck!
The dc 22 with 12 times per day is actually conservative. It doesnt even account for the possibility that the character has gotten any wisdom enhancing magic items or has a wizard in the party with attribute spells. My outlandish examples are in fact conservative examples. Practically the only thing this character couldnt kill in 2 hits would be dragons, since they have more age categories than everything else.
Imagine this guy gets hasted, or buffed in any way at all...
It doesnt take much. It would actually be hard not to be percieved as too powerful.
age object can not kill its in the ability i believe
Age creature doesn't specify wether it could age a creature to death or not, which certain rules lawyers would argue means it could... Even if it cant you've just turned your opponent into a 99 year old man in 2 swings. If your party cant defeat a 99 year old man then being around a time walker isnt going to help them.
No like I say its cool.
I also think you'll find it rare to find someone on these forums who doesnt consider druid broken...
and if they didnt consider it broken and they had to choose which class in the game was the closest to broken, they'd all pick druid...
so using a druids power level to gauge if your class is overpowered you'd want to undershoot it. not overshoot it.
Using a specific build of druid even, because someone may play a specific concept that isn't broken.
As an offset for his Wis and DEx bonus, you could give him a Str penalty. This would make it less all-around useful. And seriously, because all of his abilities are based on Wisdom, tennengar's concerns about spell resistence are valid.
Also the age object ability really is broken. It doesnt matter if this ability can't kill a person outright; he can just swing his sword normally afterward and kill the guy in one blow. Again, you don't look at these abilities in insolation, but together.
There's a perfect example of this in Ultimate Magic, in the section with rules for creating spells: The spell True Strike can only be cast on yourself because, if you were allowed to cast in on any target by touch, you would just keep casting that spell on the party's fighter and gain guaranteed hits 100% of the time. Similarly, there is no 1st level sonic damage spell in the core book because there are few creatures, if any at all, that have sonic resistance at low levels, which would make such a spell strictly better than Burning Hands or Shocking Grasp, which both have plenty of creatures at all levels that have resistance.
This class is kind of odd. Lots of defensive abilities, and very few offensive ones. Kind of a skill monkey, but not as good as all the other ones.
The fast healing isn't over powered because it's only useable when you're "rushing" or whatever.
The quasi-rage is a very good defensive ability: +2 to Reflex and Will, +4 to AC, +2 to some very useful skills (Acrobatics, Stealth, Perception, etc.).
It seems like this class might be designed to use up the actions of the opponents. It might be oddly effective, as action economy is king in combat, and this class makes your opponents paupers, as it allows you to undo the actions of your opponents.
This class is kind of odd. Lots of defensive abilities, and very few offensive ones. Kind of a skill monkey, but not as good as all the other ones.
The fast healing isn't over powered because it's only useable when you're "rushing" or whatever.
The quasi-rage is a very good defensive ability: +2 to Reflex and Will, +4 to AC, +2 to some very useful skills (Acrobatics, Stealth, Perception, etc.).
It seems like this class might be designed to use up the actions of the opponents. It might be oddly effective, as action economy is king in combat, and this class makes your opponents paupers, as it allows you to undo the actions of your opponents.
I didn't even think about the AC benefits from Wisdom with this ability. Yeah, it's even more powerful than I thought.
I'll put my two cp in and say this a good class on its way to becoming a great class. You've taken a lot of cool words and phrases relating to Time and turned them all into fairly neat class abilities. Here are some other words that may inspire more time power choices.
Destiny, Fate, Prophecy, Pace, Rhythm, Chrono-Logic,
There may be potential to utilize clocks, watches, sun dials, water clocks, metronomes, astrolabes and hourglasses in some cool mystical way.
More options = more customization = more flare.
Perhaps a Rhythm-based combat style that would allow extra attacks?
Or a Clock-based combat style that grants two weapon fighting. The short sword represents the hour hand; it stays in close, is patient and precise. The longsword represents the minute hand; it is held out more and is deceptively fast when not watched constantly. The rapier is the second hand; very fast and thin as it blends in against the length of other blades only to emerge to strike again.
That's all I got. I hope it helps inspire.