The Confirmation playtest: Investigator, Warpriest, Arcanist, Hunter

[Cheapy]

Hey all,

Here's my playtest report for the Confirmation. This was my first PFS game and first PbP, and you can find it here if you want to see how it went down.

Spoilers below.

My character was an Elven Investigator. His stats were

Quote:

Str: 14

Dex: 14
Con: 12
Int: 16
Wis: 12
Cha: 11

I went for the Envoy alternative racial trait, and using that, I picked up Arcane Strike. This was in response to the reports of investigator's not having all that great combat at low levels. I used Arcane Strike on all of my attacks, and while the ability to overcome DR didn't come up, I'm sure I would've been very grateful if it had.

The first encounter was with a pair of spider swarms, but we dropped them really fast with a burning hands and an alchemical fire.

Our second encounter was with the Minotaur. The rest of my party elected to fight it, drawing its attention from Janira. We made use of the difficult terrain, and while we blew most of our resources (arcanist used grease twice, I used 2 points for Inspiration on a key attack roll), we did eventually take it down. We lost the Hunter's badger animal companion in the process though. RIP Badgah.

The hunter was fairly optimized from what I could tell. He made use of Tribal Scars to start out with 16 HP, so he was sort of our tank. I don't know which option he used for that feat. He also had Rime Spell and Magical Lineage (snowball), allowing him to augment that wonderful spell snowball so it could cause a foe to be staggered and entangled for a round. He used it on the minotaur and hit, but the mino saved against the staggered. He was still entangled for a round tho, which really helped the characters in melee to pull out.

My character ran for the backpack after throwing a sling at the minotaur, and picked up a tanglefoot bag from it. After that, he spent hte next round moving closer to the minotaur, and finally throwing it. I rolled a 3 on the attack roll, but had said I was spending Inspiration on it, so I got a total of 9. Had I read the class more carefully, I would've known that you choose to add inspiration only AFTER the roll. I wouldn't have added it in this case had I known that. HOWEVER! 9 hit him, keeping him entangled, and more or less forcing him to attack the badger, rather than us.

Poor badger died at this point.

With regard to this fight, I felt that I was able to contribute, but this was in many ways due to not having anything else to contribute with, making it so checking out that backpack was my best option. Kind of counter intuitive.

After dropping the Minotaur, we built a cairn for Badgah and said our prayers. We then went spelunking. Inspiration didn't help much with the first few parts of the cave, but I was able to use Linguistics and the free inspiration to learn about the pictographs on the wall. It was fun to be able to get that extra 1d6, despite how simple it is.

After crossing the pit, I was able to decipher parts of the old Azlant paintings depicting sections of Aroden's holy book, again using Inspiration. This was fun too. Yay!

We met the Gillman, and after waffling on what to do, we went to greet him. I walked up to him, and said "Hello, friend" in Abolethese (which I had because I wanted to take advantage of the free Linguistics Inspiration, so I needed the rank). Turns out he couldn't hear me, but we were able to handle this event peacefully. I believe I spent my last point of Inspiration here too, on a Perception check to notice his cloak. We ended up trading the cloak we got with his wand of shield of faith, which proved key for later on, when the AC bonus saved our warpriest from a nasty hit by a critter.

Following this, we went to one of the caves, and faced off against some skeletons. At this point, our arcanist was left with just using a whip to try and trip enemies. Kind of clever, come to think of it. He didn't have any offensive cantrips, so that's about all he could do.

I mostly used my sling against the skeletons we faced, and got unlucky and then very lucky with rolls. Nothing specific to report about the investigator here, other than that taking Arcane Strike to make up for the lack of offensive capabilities proved helpful.

We then found the second passageway out. Fast forward to the next cave path...I used my extract of blend to be able to scout ahead. This was very, very helpful, and let me see which creatures we were going to face before facing them. There was a communication breakdown with the GM, and he thought we were closer to them than we all thought, so it ended up being that the mites heard us discussing our plan of attack. Ah well, element of surprise lost.

During the battle, I didn't much use investigator abilities, but did use Comprehend Languages from the Envoy racial trait to understand what the mites were saying. Again, I got that trait primarily for Arcane Strike, but those 4 spells it grants (comprehend languages, detect magic, read magic, and detect poison) fit the Investigator very well, and I wanted to be able to cast them despite not having cantrips. I could just use my own extracts for comprehend languages.

As other comments:

There was some question on who should have the wand of Cure Light Wounds, but after learning that the investigator was not meant to be able to use wands, that was resolved pretty quickly.

I took a look at the 2nd level stuff an investigator gets, and wasn't too interested. It's a very boring level, especially due to how expensive poison is.

To just be able to use my class features, I needed to spend 55 gp on thieves tools (trapfinding) and alchemist's crafting kit (extracts). This leaves 50 gp on average left for the investigator to spend on anything else. Armor, weapons, food, backpack, bed roll, etc. Thankfully, this was for PFS, so I had 150 gp to spend total. But still, having to use either 1/2 or 1/3rd of starting gold just for the bare minimum tools to use your class features is really painful.

The alchemist's crafting kit gives the supplies for bombs, mutagens, and extracts. The investigator only needs a third of those, so an item that just has the material for extracts would be helpful, especially if it were much cheaper.

GM was a bit frustrated with Inspiration. It messes up secret rolls as he doesn't know if I would've spent inspiration or not. It also doesn't let him just ask for random perception checks, a very common thing to do that I think is even recommended in the GMG, as if I spend a point of inspiration on it, it's literally a wasted point. In a home game, he could give it back, but in PFS, I don't think that's an option. He didn't ask for random rolls this game, due to that.

Overall (Investigator):

Was it fun to play an investigator? Yes, I enjoyed myself.

Was it fun to create an investigator? Not particularly. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out the gold stuff due to the cost of the tools to use extracts and trapfinding. I also spent a lot of time looking for ways to be useful in combat, settling on Arcane Strike. It seemed most of my stuff went to shoring up weaknesses, rather than making someone who was fun and awesome.

Was he useful in combat? Yep, thanks to Arcane Strike and his sling.

Was he useful out of combat? Yes! Inspiration was a great help.

Thoughts on other party members:
Warpriest: He seemed to work pretty well. I believe he had War and Sun as his blessings? He used War to buff himself and the hunter up a few times, and that was helpful.
Arcanist: He dumped Charisma and Str, and chose Potent Spells for that +2. The minotaur made his save against a greased-up-weapon, but failed it against the grease on the ground. Ended up whipping things in combats after the minotaur.
Hunter: Lost the animal companion really fast, so I don't think I can really comment on how his class worked.

And that was that.

[Oladon]

Aforementioned Warpriest here to add my thoughts. Character is here.

Stats wrote:

Str:14 Dex:10 Con:15 Int:14 Wis:16 Cha:8

Compared to the others in the group, I hardly used any of my resources: I cast no level 1 spells, used only one of my minor blessings (twice), and didn't even use Dazzling Display (the feat I chose for my bonus combat feat at level 1). I tend to be a fairly resource-conservative player, which is probably why.

As Cheapy said, I had the War and Sun Blessings (and again, I'd really prefer a less redundant wording: saying "the War Blessing's minor blessing" is rather unoptimized). The Sun Blessing's minor blessing (Blinding Strike) would have come in handy with the minotaur, except that I really didn't want to get in melee range of it. I might have attempted to use it on the centipede, but trading a regular attack with my longsword for a fairly low chance (55% at a DC 13) of blinding it for one round. (It'd be neat if I could deliver it with my deity's favored weapon, but I can see that being considered too close to the Magus.)

The War Blessing's minor blessing was much more useful; I used it twice, once on the Hunter and once on myself. The versatility of it was nice, and lasted longer than either of the combats for which I used it. It also helped make up for the 2 strength damage I'd suffered earlier.

The d8 HD came in quite handy, as I was reduced to 1hp at one point due to my fairly low AC and some lucky rolls by the DM.

Overall (Warpriest):

• Was it fun to play a warpriest? I had fun. It did sortof feel like I wasn't quite sure what my "role" was meant to be... I soaked up a lot of damage and buffed the party. Didn't do a ton of damage myself, partly because of poor dice rolls.
  
• Was it fun to create a warpriest? Eh, not terribly. Apart from what bonus combat feat to take, there aren't many decisions to make; deity choice pretty much dictates which Blessings you have, and I'm not sure I'd feel good about much variation on the stat array. However, it seems like it could be a good class for new players for just that reason.
  
• Was he useful in combat? Yes, fairly. I didn't get to hit things very often with my longsword, but I provided some buffs and self-healing that I like to think helped us win fights.
  
• Was he useful out of combat? Somewhat. Survival and Knowledge (Religion) came up, and fortunately Swim (-3) and Acrobatics/Stealth (-5) didn't. Wearing armor is hard!
  
• Did he feel like a new class? Not really... he pretty much felt like a cleric with a new domain and no domain spell.

[Avatar-1]

"Minor War Blessing" is the wording I think you were after :)

[Oladon]

Avatar-1 wrote:

"Minor War Blessing" is the wording I think you were after :)

That wording had occurred to me, but makes it sound like there are two kinds of Blessings. It'd be like saying "Minor War Domain", and would tend to confuse the terminology. As it is, I realized they're actually calling them "powers", so you get "War Blessing's minor power", which is somewhat better.

[Quandary]

I've gravitated towards "Minor/Major (Domain) Blessings" myself,
but I did think that how it's presented in the "book" is not very helpful.
If it actually made a direct reference to the powers with some clear specific term that would be helpful,
whether that is "Minor/Major Power", "Minor/Major Blessing", or something else.
I am in favor of keeping terminology to a minimu, so I think the Blessing approach that Avatar-1 recommended is preferrable...
If the book is actually explicitly utilizing that terminology, I don't think there will be confusion (like Oladon had to Avatar's post).