Continuing from the Solarian and Soldier feedback threads, here's my feedback on the Witchwarper class based on around a month of playtesting. I'll split my post into sections, spoiler them, and add a TL;DR just so it's all a bit easier to navigate.
Methods:
Here are the methods I've used for my playtest:
Most of my playtests took place at levels 1-5, as I ran them mostly using the official Starfinder playtest scenarios and field tests. I ran some playtests at higher levels using Pathfinder content, but treated those as secondary to the playtest scenarios.
I ran my Witchwarper with a variety of party compositions, mostly with just other Starfinder classes. I eventually started adding Pathfinder classes into the mix, and treated those playtests as secondary.
I ran my Witchwarper under different ancestries, as I was playtesting those too.
I ran the scenarios RAW for the most part, only adjudicating when something broke or was missing from the rules (including base features that were missing on the core class). I then started playing with certain parameters, like enemy behavior and compositions or the Witchwarper's features, and treated those findings as secondary.
My ability setup was pretty straightforward: I maxed out my Intelligence, then Dexterity for max AC, then Constitution and Wisdom to max out my remaining defenses.
TL;DR I ran the Witchwarper many times mainly through the official playtest scenarios at their low level range, using a variety of ancestries and party compositions. As I put the class through the same encounters, I altered some parameters over time to see how they would affect the its performance.
Quantum Field:
Although casters tend to have fewer unique class features than martials, I ended up having a lot to say about the Witchwarper's quantum field mechanic and their features around it:
Warp Reality is meant to be the Witchwarper's distinguishing feature, but the ability felt incredibly clunky to use in practice. Moving the quantum field requires either spending two actions Dismissing the effect then using Warp Reality again, or waiting another round for it to vanish on its own, which led to the field often feeling largely useless by itself, and mostly there just to enable anchoring effects.
On top of the quantum field being finicky to deploy and move to a relevant area, I also simply did not find its effects particularly impressive. I expected its zone to provide intense area denial, but outside of the anomaly paradox, in practice it just enabled a few decent special actions and turned on some other effects regardless of whether or not they took place in the area. Many times, I found it better to just not bother with Warp Reality and instead just play the Witchwarper as a generic caster -- which worked really well, because the class's base stats are so strong. This is not a good thing, in my opinion, and made the class's defining feature feel more like a bolted-on gimmick than a genuinely new way to play a caster.
Anchoring spells was quite useful in providing an additional means of Sustaining the quantum field when trying to do something else, and would be perfectly helpful if it weren't for the fact that it makes it more difficult to wait for the quantum field to run out in order to redeploy it. This I think is more an issue with the quantum field itself being a clunky mechanic to work with right now than with the anchoring spells feature.
Quantum Transposition felt essential as a means of actually moving the Quantum Field as needed, and Quantum Pulse felt similarly far better than alternatives for the action economy benefit it provided. I'm citing both feats here as I think both ought to be part of the core class by default, and I'd even go farther and say that the player should be able to redeploy their quantum field each time they Sustain it by any means.
Anchors came up a few times, but not enough to really feel like a core class feature. In general, the Witchwarper's anchor and subclass provided lots of diffuse benefits, often just to oneself, which I didn't consider particularly relevant to their core quantum field mechanic or the rest of their playstyle, and so these didn't really add much to my play experience save for more power.
While I appreciate the ease with which the anchors can be used to create a neurodivergent character as an autistic person myself, I'm less a fan of how much of the flavor text the coding currently represents, and how it often assumes some degree of mental turbulence. I feel it could be adjusted in a way that preserves some of the coding, but makes it less central and more positive overall.
Restorative Recollection does not fully work as written, because you can't act while stunned. It is therefore impossible to use this action to reduce one's stunned condition.
Warp Spells felt like a mixed bag overall. Some, like warp terrain, worked nicely as a Sustain mechanic and properly enhanced the quantum field (and in that spell's case, comboed quite nicely with a Solarian and Soldier), and others, like warp probability, felt like they had nothing to do with the quantum field at all, nor did they Sustain it adequately due to working as reaction spells. This also meant that some paradoxes, like analyst and gap influenced, were unable to Sustain their quantum field with their focus spells at low levels, and the analyst subclass in particular can't use their focus spells to Sustain their QF until 11th level, at which point the one warp spell that they can use takes two actions and can't be used alongside a slot spell or cantrip. Overall, I think there needs to be a pass made across these spells so that they properly relate to the quantum field and take one action to use, so that they can Sustain QF and also don't take up too much of the Witchwarper's turns.
Warped Infinities turned the quantum field from a thing that was super-finicky and hard to deploy into something that was trivially easy to exert across the battlefield, with no real need for redeployment or any gameplay around that at all. While the benefit to convenience was significant, I also feel it took all the interactivity out of the feature and made it less interesting as a result, so I don't feel the feature is really justified.
TL;DR The Witchwarper's quantum field is thematically interesting, but its ability to provide good area-based gameplay is stymied by its extreme clunkiness and a set of core features and warp spells that only sometimes interact with the area. I was really looking forward to this mechanic, as I feel it's full of potential and flavor, but right now it feels more like a gimmick than a fully functional core feature.
Core Class:
Splitting my feedback on the class's core chassis and its feats for readability:
The Witchwarper is currently missing an expert Strikes feature that normally appears at 13th level. I don't believe this exclusion is deliberate, as this is standard on casters even when they're not expected to use weapons.
The Witchwarper's scaling class DC seems to exist to make them good at AoE weapons or at the least grenades, which seems like a legacy inclusion, but in practice it just means their Quantum Field features fell off at high levels and were slightly less intuitive by dint of not relying on a spellcaster's spell DC. I feel it would be better to just make Spellsurge Ammo use the Witchwarper's spell DC for grenade Area Fires, and have the class use their spell DC for everything on their class that requires a DC.
The Witchwarper's combination of 8 HP per level, light armor proficiency, and 4 spell slots per rank I really don't think ought to exist in general, because the end result is just a caster that is generically too good and can ignore their core class features, which I ended up doing here simply because Warp Reality was often not worth the difficulty of managing the mechanic. The argument given for the Mystic was that casters need high defenses to avoid dying too quickly, but I found that the real culprit was that the game's tank classes, i.e. the Solarian and Soldier, were deficient at actual tanking and thus caused casters to get focused more, albeit with much lower damage from gunfire than the much higher damage from melee weapons that Pathfinder cloth casters deal with (or try to avoid dealing with, rather). When I experimented with changes that made the Solarian or Soldier better at drawing attention to themselves, or included Pathfinder tanks, the Witchwarper drew much less attention to themselves, to the point where I think they ought to be reduced to a 6 HP/level caster with no armor proficiency.
With the above said, I also didn't feel like 4 spell slots per rank would be needed even with all of the above. In practice, the Witchwarper struck me as a class that's expected to spend entire turns manipulating their quantum field and using focus spells, and with that amount of abilities that don't rely on daily attrition, that to me is a sign the class ought to have fewer spell slots. Lowering the class's spell slots per rank I think would also allow the Witchwarper's quantum field mechanic to be made much stronger, as from my experience I found it mostly lacking, to the point of it feeling more like a gimmick than a core class feature.
Due to the short range on many cantrips, the Witchwarper felt surprisingly exposed compared to many martial classes unless they used a few specific cantrips from Pathfinder's Player Cores. This made several new cantrips less desirable to use simply because of their more limited range.
TL;DR The class is missing a key feature and strangely relies on a up-to-master class DC that messes up its high-level scaling, but is also massively overstatted right now, to the point where they can ignore their quantum field mechanic and still end up being a really strong, generic caster. This I think is the least interesting way of engaging with a caster class (the remastered Oracle I think suffers from the same problem), and I'd much rather take out a lot of power from the Witchwarper's core stats if it means making their quantum field much easier to use and significantly more powerful.
Feats:
I mostly focused on level 1-4 feats during my playtests, owing to the level range at which I mostly played:
As mentioned in the quantum field section, Quantum Pulse and Quantum Transposition felt essential to properly deploy and move around the Witchwarper's quantum field, and when I made those feats baseline to the class their mechanic felt much more usable.
I quite enjoyed the Witchwarper feats that interacted with the class's quantum fields. The subclass feats at 2nd level helped dig into each of their niche, and were among the few effects that made me feel good for having my QF in the right place. By contrast, effects like Meandering Mind, whose requirement is redundant given its anchoring trait, don't interact with the class's actual quantum field, and so their requirement feels perfunctory.
Zone effects need a bit more precision, as Radiant Zone implies a limited duration to its effect, but Debris Zone implies that its effects are persistent for the duration of the quantum field. I ruled that Radiant Zone happened instantly and had no duration, but right now there is ambiguity to how these work.
This is probably more of a personal preference, but I'm not a big fan of effects randomly determine what you do, as with Shift Energy, and I feel letting the player choose to trigger weaknesses more accurately might make for more interesting gameplay, even if it meant making the feat higher-level.
Reality's Anchor is straight-up power creep with no apparent justification. I see no reason why any class should have 4 Focus Points, nor why the Witchwarper in particular needs this over any other class.
Quantum negation is missing an action cost.
TL;DR There are some solid elements to feats that interact properly with the Witchwarper's quantum field, which I found the most enjoyable. A lot of feats interacted only superficially with QF in that they just needed it up, others seemed to add power without real gameplay, and zone effects need more consistent writing.
The big TL;DR from me here is that the Witchwarper was the class I was looking forward to playing the most due to their theme, but their core mechanic I don't think is fully there yet. I wanted the class to lay down one or even multiple quantum fields for area control and extremely concentrated power in a localized area, but instead the class is currently just generically really strong and saddled with a gimmick that's not fully functional and doesn't entirely integrate with the rest of their spellcasting. If I were to make one suggestion, it would be to tone down the Witchwarper's base stats and make their QF both much smoother to use and much more powerful, and beyond that I had more ideas that may or may not be worth trying out (I did have a good time playing with these alterations after playing the base class RAW, but that may be just me):
Witchwarper Suggestions:
Some more suggestions for what I'd want to see on the Witchwarper, which I've tried out with positive results:
Reduce the Witchwarper to a 6 HP/level caster with only unarmored proficiency. When the Solarian and Soldier were drawing more fire as appropriate for their classes, this felt completely fine.
Reduce the class to a 3-slot caster. This took out a lot of generic power out of the class and made them rely more on their quantum field, which I think is what ought to happen for a Witchwarper.
Have the class use their spell DC rather than their class DC for all of their class feats and features. This made no difference at most levels save for levels 19-20, where it stopped a few effects from falling off in accuracy.
Bake Quantum Pulse into Warp Reality, remove the limit of one QF at a time, and let the player move their QF each time they Sustain it from any source. This would allow a Witchwarper to maintain multiple QFs if they commit to that.
Prevent most of the Witchwarper's spells from working out of their QF (basically anything with a range greater than touch and less than 1 mile), but let their spells originate from any place inside their QF, give all of their spells the anchoring trait, and maybe even let the Witchwarper's spell attacks and spell DC gain an item bonus at the same levels when martials gain their own item bonuses to attacks. Implementing this made the Witchwarper play radically differently from other casters, focusing on one or two specific areas with extremely powerful effects from a longer distance instead of just casting less intense spells overall anywhere.
Standardize warp spells to single-action spells and make them properly relate to the Witchwarper's Quantum Field, which would make it much easier for the class to Sustain their QF, potentially even several at a time, and do that alongside casting slot spells or cantrips.
In summary, I'd like the Witchwarper to be much more concentrated around their Quantum Field -- I think it'd be quite interesting to play a caster class whose spells are focused exclusively around one or a couple of highly localized areas, and when I tried a version of this I ended up making very different decisions from other casters. I ended up feeling much less free in certain respects, of course, but much more powerful in others, with the additional freedom of being able to target enemies from a greater range. Even if the specifics of the above don't make it into the final version, I'd like to see more of that direction, which already exists in the class to an extent, and if fully realized could really make the Witchwarper stand out from everyone else in a good way.
and others, like warp probability, felt like they had nothing to do with the quantum field at all, nor did they Sustain it adequately due to working as reaction spells. This also meant that some paradoxes, like analyst and gap influenced, were unable to Sustain their quantum field with their focus spells at low levels, and the analyst subclass in particular can't use their focus spells to Sustain their QF until 11th level, at which point the one warp spell that they can use takes two actions and can't be used alongside a slot spell or cantrip.
While it's true that Warp Probability won't sustain if used to reroll a save off turn, it will sustain the Quantum Field if you strike, miss, and then cast Warp Probability to reroll your strike on your turn. It works well with Anchoring Strike - if you hit the strike you sustain and don't need to spend a focus point, if you miss you get a second chance, sustain, and can still cast a regular spell.
While less predictable, valuable, and under your control, the same is true of the Warp Presence reaction anchoring spell if you trigger an enemy reaction to target you on your turn. Just supremely difficult and largely pointless or counterproductive, not actually impossible.
Just supremely difficult and largely pointless or counterproductive, not actually impossible.
I would say that if you're spending actions trying to trigger enemy reactions just so that you can then use an anchoring warp spell as a reaction, at that point you may as well just cast a signature spell. Reactions by nature don't mesh well with the Sustain action, and even Warp Probability would be better off as something else -- ultimately, it has no real interaction with the quantum field itself, it just requires you to have it up.
