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Hello, one and all and everyone!
So, this is a homebrew class I've been fiddling with for a few months now on and off, that I thought I might share with y'all. The basic concept was to create a warlock-style class, but focus on spontaneous casting with a spellpoint-like system rather than invocations like they worked in 3.5.. I also wanted to add a witch-y flavor to the class and give it a slightly more butch familiar than what the witch class has. It is rather a hefty document, so I'd really appreciate any notes, comments, critiques or observations, however small. I must admit I'm not sure if the numbers of all the abilities add up; I've been playtesting this class in a current level 6 adventure, in a party with an illusionist sorcerer and a melee fighter. So far things have seemed to work okay, but obviously I haven't had time to try out all the different combinations of witchings, patrons and familiar evolution strategies available.
Anyway, I hope to hear from some of you about this:
EDIT: Apparently Google Drive messed up the colors of my beautiful iconic; sorry about that, folks!
EDIT: I do realize the document is quite sizeable. If people would rather I separated it up so, say, the witchings, major witchings and grand witchings and the patronal hexfire are separate documents, I could totally do that!
Oh, what the heck. I went ahead and chopped up the document for ease of use anyhow.
Here are the relevant links:
There are also links inside the main Wyrder document itself, but I copied them here for ease of reference.
Well this seems like it could have potential.
But it's a bit large for what I have time for right now...Saving off.
Also, as written, the Hexfire does 1/4th damage to objects, since the text says it does half damage, and fire already does half damage to objects, I believe.
Oh, shoot, that's a good catch; cheers, Cheapy! I really need to brush up on my knowledge of all those mundane material and item-related rules. I'll just cut that out of the hexfire desc. then. Hope to hear from you once you've had time to digest this. Relating to the size of the docs; I did create rather a plethora of abilities. Suggestions along the lines of cutting a few of them to trim the fat I'm not at all averse to.
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Reading though this now, it's a little similar to my Warlock, so I may be able to help. Still reading through it now though.
Cheers. I'll give your Warlock a look ASAP!
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First thing I'm seeing is the elemental blast...I'm not really seeing a huge reason to take them. Like just changing the element isn't great without some rider effect that differentiates the element (unless it's sonic or force), especially to cold or something that's almost as resisted as fire.
I do like the Patronal Hex Fires, they're pretty flavorful.
Honestly a lot of the abilities are very long, which detracts from me wanting to read through them all. It's mostly about formatting, if they were broken up more into paragraphs, I think they'd all be easier to digest.
The different Dragonfires seem a little superfluous, like it feels like there's a more universal way they could be set up.
Dragonform really needs some way to buff attack bonus or else it's kind of weak coming off a 1/2 BAB, especially with the reduced duration which I don't think is needed.
Again, the ability length did feel a bit difficult to read through, so some of them were more skimmed.
I do rather enjoy Cruel Claw, just seems very thematic, although difficult to land due to the 1/2 BAB making melee basically suicide.
Also enjoying Heal and Harm, quite nice.
I'll admit your class has 'weaker' abilities than mine, but yours also has way more utility and healing, which I feel balance each other out nicely.
Something I'd like to see is more scaling in the Witchings, since some of them just seem to stop where there'd be some fun for advancement.
The advanced focus of the familiar is nice, really serves to make it feel more unique. Almost seems like there should be an ability to let it become a weaker eidolon at some point.
Something I'd like to see is maybe more abilities that give meta magic to the Spell Like Abilities this class is casting for a possible expenditure of Wyrd Points.
Overall very nice though.
Thanks for the critique, N. Jolly. Some really useful points for me. Hopefully I can rather condense my reply:
I do realize a lot of the abilities are quite lengthily worded. I'll try to shorten them, but I must admit I'm not great at expressing rules tersely. I have a hard time determining when I'm saying too much or too little.
For instance, is it clear that you still always need to spend 1 extra wyrd point when healing with your hexfire, even if you use a witching like hexbreath or similar to heal? It just struck me that it might seem like you only need to spend the one wyrd point for hexbreath to heal a whole bunch of people.
I'll have a look at consolidating dragonfire, though in truth I'm currently drawing a blank on how to do that. I did very much want to give players access to the various unique breath abilities of different kinds of true dragons.
I can look into scaling witchings, I suppose, though I did rather feel like each one gives a concrete, pre-packaged advantage and that the "scaling" happens automatically as your wyrd pool increases and you can start using them more and more often. It's a very different dynamic from, say your Black Arts for the PF Warlock, where the effects are always on. Anyway, I do suppose things like Cruel Claw and Petition Patron which scale with level are more fun, so maybe I can fix up a few other ones to work like that. I could also totally imagine just basically creating witchings that work like metamagic for the spell-likes. Hadn't occurred to me, basically. Good call!
Additionally, I suppose I should add some riders to the elemental blasts. I was unsure whether they were good enough on their own or not, but I always suspected they were a bit bland. Shouldn't be too hard to come up with some fun little debuffs added on for the price of an extra wyrd point.
I actually don't think the 1/2 BAB is such a bane for this class as you might think. It still has d8 HD and good fort and will saves and gets stalwart at level 11. All hexfire abilities, including cruel claw, are touch attacks and so should have a good chance of hitting foes even with the lower BAB. The big thing you're missing out on is really iteratives, but that was a conscious design choice as I wanted to keep the damage mid-to-low but steady.
I've been thinking very similarly to you on the familiar and its potential for further improvement, actually. As things stand now I'm working on an archetype that gets an elemental eidolon made of pure hexfire that alters elemental subtype as you change your hexfire's damage type around. So possibly I'll just keep on with that rather than cluttering up the main class with yet more witchings. I mostly envisaged the familiar as providing more flexible utility than a base one, rather than being a full-on combat beast. But I'll have to mull that over.
Lastly, yeah, dragonform was rather hastily cobbled together to get a few more grand witchings in. I'll definitely change the duration and fix it so you get some sort of temporary BAB increase to make it viable. Again, good call, cheers!
So I changed the three elemental witchings to this:
Hexbolt (Su)*: The wyrder can choose to deal electricity damage with her hexfire. She makes this choice each time she uses the ability. In addition, by spending 1 wyrd point as part of dealing electricity damage with her hexfire, the wyrder can cause one target affected by it to become stunned for 1 round unless it makes a Fortitude save.
Hexfrost (Su)*: The wyrder can choose to deal cold damage with her hexfire. She makes this choice each time she uses the ability. In addition, by spending 1 wyrd point as part of dealing cold damage with her hexfire, the wyrder can cause one target affected by it to become staggered for 1d4+1 rounds unless it makes a Fortitude save.
Hexseethe (Su)*: The wyrder can choose to deal acid damage with her hexfire. She makes this choice each time she uses the ability. In addition, by spending 1 wyrd point as part of dealing acid damage with her hexfire, the wyrder can cause all targets adjacent to a single creature affected by it to take acid damage equal to the minimum damage her hexfire can normally deal. Targets of this extra damage can halve it by succeeding on a Reflex save.
It strikes me as balanced considering the relative power level between the different kinds of elemental damage.
EDIT: Oh dang it. Pardon the double post.
Looks pretty cool, and yes, different from N. Jolly's Warlock...
* On this:
The wyrder chooses a patron from the witch class's list at 1st level. She gains the first spell on that patron's spell list at 1st level...
Is this ahead of the vanilla witch? I do see that these are cast as SLAs, and so can be used in light armor. As a fan of armored warlocks, I'm happy with the armor, and always like to see bucklers - my Direlock Base Class has light armor and buckler proficiencies.
* There are references to green fire or similar - is it necessary to be so specific?
* Does Cruel Claw require the expenditure of 2 points - 1 point for hexclaw and 1 point for cruel claw?
* The flavor justification for Eldritch Lore and Presentient feel very thin for me.
Thanks for the read-through, Oceanshieldwolf.
1. Yes, they get their patron spells one level ahead of a witch. This might seem inelegant, but I hardly think it's a balance issue since they get so few spells known overall. It seems to have worked fine for my 6th-level wyrder with the Spirits patron thus far.
2. Yeah, there was this idea that hexfire is always distinguishable from both non-magical and also traditional magical sources of fire by being some other color or something like that, but I'd certainly be open to something less specific and potentially off-putting to certain people's aesthetic tastes than codifying it as green. I'd love some suggestions on this score!
3. The hexclaw witching costs 1 wyrd point to allow you to manifest the claw as a move action, but then the claw last 1 minute/level and so after that you are free to make melee touch attacks with it till that duration ends. Then, if you also possess the cruel claw witching, you can spend 1 additional wyrd point every time you want to try to deliver a cruelty via such a melee touch attack.
4. Actually, I agree. Those two abilities are leftovers from an older version of the class that had more of an occult investigator feel. Although I don't really feel like there's anything wrong with presentiment. Doesn't seem that different from say, a Lore Oracle's Sidestep Secret revelation or similar. Wyrders do have a more visceral and direct connection to their patrons after all, as opposed to witches whom I've always felt more like solicit them for magical knowledge and then forge their own paths. The idea is that a wyrder's fate is slightly more guided and shaped by their patron, and thus they will watch over them and grant them brief glimmers of foresight to help keep them out of danger.
Eldritch Lore, though...I've got nothing. Would people feel happier if I just cut that ability out, or could some more elegant flavor justification be thought up?
EDIT: Will check out the Direlock post-haste! Hardly surprising to see there're so many different spins on warlocks out and about. Black magic FTW!
EDIT II: Got a few questions of my own I came up with for people, actually:
1. Does it seem too cheap to allow healing via hexfire to just cost 1 wyrd point? Should it instead be two? The wyrd pool was smaller in earlier drafts, and while I don't think the witchings in general need a cost boost, this does offer up the potential for a lot of healing.
2. Again, is it made clear that you always pay the 1 wyrd point cost for healing on top of whatever witchings you apply to your hexfire in addition to that? I might need to reword the wyrd pool otherwise.
3. Does the wyrd pool size in general feel alright? An older version of the class had 3/4 BAB and medium armor prof and the wyrd pool capped out at 39 at level 20, rather than 58 as is the case now. But I wanted a more caster-y feel for the class, so I amped up the wyrd pool and toned down the BAB and armor profs.
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To answer your questions:
1. Yeah, healing should cost more. Healing is harder to do than damage for most everything (compare how CLW scales against how any other first level damage spell scales), so it should cost more to heal.
2. It really isn't, I found myself wondering how point usage worked. Like I assumed Cruel Claw didn't cost two, just the one, and the payment for it was using your Witching on Cruel Claw.
3. I'd keep it at 1/2th BAB, especially now. Seems there's a lot of people in the 3/4ths BAB pool (myself included), so keeping it 1/2th would help differentiate it from the others. I need to figure out how to release my class as a PDF one day.
Well, alright. I'll change the cost for healing to 2 wyrd points. Sound good?
I'll add a clarification regarding the cost for healing and the point cost for witchings. Again, you do only pay 1 wyrd point each time you use Cruel Claw. It's just you have to pay 1 wyrd point first to form the hexclaw you use to deliver it. But the hexclaw sticks around for 1 min/level, so once that's summoned each use of Cruel Claw is just a wyrd point. I'm really not sure what's unclear about that particular ability, I gotta say.
Yeah, I definitely want to keep these guys 1/2 BAB. Their focus is to be able to do touch attacks (ranged and melee) while also being survivable in melee. Since they never do full attack rounds and never target non-touch AC with their special abilities, 1/2 BAB should work. I'll just make an adjustment so you get a bit more BAB when you change into dragonform, but that's only for a single grand witching so it's rather an exception.
EDIT: Wyrd pool reads like this now:
"
At 1st level, the wyrder gains a pool of wyrd points, slivers of good fortune and pactbound providence that she can use to augment her occult powers and the flow of her volatile hexfire. The number of points in a wyrder's wyrd pool is equal to 1 + her Charisma modifier at 1st level. At every level thereafter, the wyrder adds 3 points to her wyrd pool. The wyrd pool is replenished each morning after 8 hours of rest or meditation; these hours do not need to be consecutive.
By spending points from her wyrd pool, a wyrder can do one of the following:
• Heal a creature with her hexfire as a standard action. The wyrder targets a willing creature within 60 feet and heals it an amount equal to the damage her hexfire would ordinarily deal to a foe. She must succeed on a ranged attack roll against AC 10 to hit her target, though no wyrd point is spent if she misses. This ability only requires a swift action if the wyrder is using it to heal herself or her familiar, and in that case it does not require making an attack roll. This ability costs 2 wyrd points to use. This cost is paid in addition to any further costs incurred by modifying the healing hexfire with witchings.
• Use a swift action to change her hexfire's damage type to either acid, cold or electricity for 1 round. This costs 1 wyrd point, though the wyrder can pay additional wyrd points as part of the swift action used to activate this ability to extend the duration of the change of energy type by 1 round for each extra wyrd point spent.
• Use a standard action to add any number of evolution points to her familiar's evolution pool, if it has one, up to a maximum equal to 1/2 the wyrder's class level. The wyrder pays 1 wyrd point per evolution point granted. These evolution points instantaneously manifest as any combination of evolutions the wyrder wishes, provided her familiar meets all their prerequisites. They can even be used to grant an upgrade to an evolution that the familiar already possesses. Any evolutions granted via this ability persist for a number of rounds equal to the wyrder's Charisma modifier."
EDIT II: Yeah, it'd be cool to see your warlock go up as a PDF. I'd like to do something similar with the wyrder, the feywarden I posted on these boards earlier and a third class with a similar casting mechanic called the pilgrim that I'm still working on. With archetypes and new feats and what not for all three classes added in. Someday...
So, I tried my hands at an archetype for these guys, for those people who'd like a more melee-capable pet:
I'm not sure, though. Maybe the altered spell list is a tad too much? I did want to go along with the elemental theme and make them a bit more summoner-y along the way, but possibly I'm hemming in their build choices too much. Any notes'd be helpful, both on these guys and the original class!