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So, here's my evaluation of the archmage path abilities and mythic feats. Note that this is primarily from the perspective of the sorcerer and wizard, not so much for summoners, witches, or magi, though I haven't completely ignored them.
Note that Wild Arcana is almost always a better choice than Arcane Surge. The exceptions are preparation spellcasters that specialize in save-or-die/suck spells that aren't strictly damage. However, the overlaps with Eldritch Breach and Channel Power make this an area open to a great deal of nuance depending on campaign.
If you are a sorcerer, forget everything I just said about nuance and take Wild Arcana. Now your build is viable even if you're not a human with the arcane bloodline!
Path abilities:
Blue (Must haves):
Abundant Casting: Quite good, especially at low levels. The second part of the ability remains relevant at high levels.
Eldritch Breach: Since it applies not only to SR, but also to dispel checks and other things besides, it is Very Good.
Perfect Preparation: This gives you access to your whole spell list. Take it.
Rapid Preparation: If you took Arcane Surge, take this for the same spontaneity of Wild Arcana, though with an action tax and without the free spell slot. If you have Wild Arcana, just take the Fast Study arcane secret at 5th level and skip this, since it is otherwise inferior in every way.
Arcane Metamastery: One of the best out there. If you can, take it four times. When nova is a must, combine with the borrowed time spell for 3 spells per round.
Mythic Spellpower: Straight-up boost to your spellcasting. I don’t even need to tell you to take it.
Channel Power: Blows the other options out of the water. Unlike Empower Spell, this does stack with Maximize. Auto-bypass SR, effectively increase saves by 2 to 4, double duration for spells with a duration. Saves you a bucketload of feats.
Green: (Pretty friggin good, but may only be so for certain builds):
Bloodline Intensity: Almost a blue, but so many bloodline lists and powers suck. But more spells per day is always at least worth a good look.
Coupled Arcana: This is blue for witches and magi.
Crafting Mastery: Depends on the game. But if you have a lot of downtime, it rules.
Elemental Bond: Very, very good for blasters.
Enduring Armor: Better at low levels. The ability to give the protection of +5 full plate or better means you'll never feel too bad for yourself if you pick it.
Energy Conversion: Great when combined with Elemental bond.
Enhance Magic Items: Can be incredibly good in the right campaign.
Flexible School: Potentially good.
Harmonious Mage: Cancel out your one disadvantage for specialization.
Mythic Bloodline: It’s the third sentence that’s the kicker. This means you can have from four to eight uses of something you’re supposed to only have 3 uses of by 20th level. Can be great in the right build.
Mythic Hexes: Pretty sweet, especially with slumber hex.
Mythic school: Can be good, depends on school.
Necromantic Mastery: Necromancers and undead sorcerers want this. Synergizes well with mass-producing undead.
Sensory Link: Let your bat or quasit familiar act as your project image spell. Pretty good.
Shapeshifting Mastery: With this one path ability, you can potentially replace the BSF for a brief while. An orc witch with the archetype that uses Constitution for spellcasting and takes the Transformation patron and Abyssal Improved Eldritch Heritage can potentially replace the BSF on a semipermanent basis.
Arcane Potency: Nicer for summoners and magi due to the way their spell levels scale; not as good for other classes.
Component Freedom: Save a bundle on material components, and in a pinch cast while bound or in the area of a silence effect. Taking this at least once is almost a must, but only take it once.
Eldritch Insight: Really takes a lot of the sting out of using metamagic feats. Arcane sorcerers and wizards will benefit the most.
Infectious Spell: For debuffers, very good to excellent. Combine with Abundant Casting for maximum misery.
Speedy Summons: Good for anybody that casts summon monster. Many conjurers and almost all summoners will want this, as will Abyssal sorcerers. For them, it’s blue.
Tangible Illusion: Ranges from ludicrously situational to ludicrously cheesy, depending on your creativity. Potentially worth it just to say “disbelieve this!” before whacking someone in the face with a masterwork adamantine greatsword you conjured from silent image.
Dominion Over Outsiders: The mythic power cost can be steep, but making the already easily-abused planar binding spells even more open-ended is excellent.
Orange (Situational, only become good if the campaign is structured a certain way):
Competent Caster: You shouldn’t be getting hit anyway. However, this is blue for a magi, or if your DM is that special brand of ass who constantly has archers ready an action to attack you when you cast.
Flash of Omniscience: Requires GM cooperation for it to be good
Flexible Counterspell: Depends highly on the campaign
Greater Familiar Link: Meh. Your familiar doesn't have many hit points anyway.
Reactive Ward: Try to avoid being in places where you have to spend mythic power to help make a save. However, if you cannot, this power means you will almost certainly make the save (and remove “almost” if you are a wizard or sage)
Resilient Arcana: In a game where most foes have greater dispel magic at will, this might become a necessary evil.
Shifting Mastery: Orange at best, and only because it provides flexibility to an already powerful subschool of magic.
Throw Spell: Arcane touch spells start to thin out past the early levels. However, magi can get a bit more use out of this, since using metamagic to get Reach Spell is tougher on 6-level casters.
Bloodline Immunity: With the right bloodline, you can drive your DM crazy.
Eldritch flight: If you have limited access to magic items, this is more useful, but as is it’s orange.
Many Forms: Good as your first power for a campaign that won’t reach high levels, but it doesn’t scale well. If higher tiers granted greater polymorph, might be worth a look, but otherwise only use if the campaign will wrap up in a level or two.
Mirror Dodge: If your party fighter/paladin/am barb can’t keep foes away, this may become a necessary evil.
Divine Knowledge: Depending on campaign, may be worth taking once to get shield of faith, divine favor, etc.; however, you have many other options. If it weren’t so limited, it wouldn’t be orange.
Red (Flat-out trap, or requires not only specific campaigns but specific circumstances within those campaigns:
Arcane Endurance: Very, very situational
Deep Understanding: Perhaps useful for counterspell builds? Not that good.
Remixer: Extremely situational
Transformative Familiar: Hilariously pointless. If it gave you both a familiar and bonded object casting, it might be better, but it doesn’t.
Reverse Scrying: Ludicrously situational.
Spell Sieve: Godawful. Just use spell turning.
Teleportation Master: Crap.
Sanctum: Essentially a mega bag of holding. Other items can do enough of the same things to make this unjustifiable.
Star Walker: Just plain stupid.
Mythic Feats:
Extra Mythic Power: Super powerful.
Extra Path Ability: There are so many archmage path abilities that are essentially “must-haves,” this feat lets you feel just a tad bit less cookie-cutter.
Improved Initiative: Ludicrously overpowered. Take it take it TAKE IT.
Mythic Spell Lore: The default feat to spend your slots on.
Augment Summoning: Summoners, conjurers, and Abyssal sorcerers want this. Allows your summoned minions to overcome epic DR and actually get a save against some of the nastier mythic powers.
Eldritch Heritage: For summoners and conjurers, the Abyssal bloodline beckons.
Elemental Focus: If you’re a draconic kobold sorcerer with Elemental Bond, this is a given. Otherwise no.
Mythic Paragon: A surprisingly powerful feat. Never a bad choice, though there may be better ones.
Spell Focus: If you’re a specialist, take this.
Command Undead: Good for necromancers, because your garbage Charisma means your save DC sucks and you don’t want to give intelligent undead any more opportunities to break free than you have to.
Dual Path: If you want something like Divine Blessing from Hierophant, maybe pick this up. Few other paths have useful abilities, though.
Improved Counterspell: If there are a great many wizards whose lives you must make miserable in the campaign, this may be justifiable. Otherwise, unless you can counterspell SLAs somehow, not very good.
Improved Familiar: If you’re into familiars, this could be good. That's a big if, though. Go for Dexterity or Charisma if you take this.
Spell Mastery: A poor man’s Rapid Preparation. If you can afford to buy the path ability, skip this.
Spell Penetration: If you’ve taken Eldritch Breach, this is overkill.
Spontaneous Metafocus: Better for non-arcane sorcerers, for whom this feat is never obsoleted.
Eschew Materials: Inferior to Component Freedom. Take Extra Path Ability (component freedom) instead, if you must.
Fabulous Figments: Not as good as it sounds. Nowhere, nowhere near as good as it sounds.
Sample build:
Mythic Feats: Mythic Spell Lore x3, Extra Path Ability (Component Freedom), Extra Mythic Power.
Path Abilities: Wild Arcana, Perfect Preparation, Abundant Casting, Component Freedom, Arcane Metamastery x4, Channel Power, Mythic Spellpower x3.
Tactics: Activate Arcane Metamastery as a swift action for 1 minute of automatic Quickened spells. Cast borrowed time as a standard action, and another spell of your choice as a swift action (perhaps with Channel Power attached).
Continue casting three spells per round until your minute is up. If you don't want to take Constitution damage from borrowed time, activate iron body and use Component Freedom to ignore the 35% spell failure. Since by this point you have either flight or walk through space, the speed reduction is minimal.
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Does anyone have any thoughts, suggestions, or critiques?
Honestly, why rate Sanctum very highly? You can duplicate the effect with a Rod of Security (which is basically like 1/week Timestop for a duration of dozens of days for 1 party).
Rating Mirror Dodge so lowly I think is a mistake. Thinking that your Martials are "Not doing their job" if you get attacked is pretty out of touch thinking - they can't block everything. In every campaign I play, casters are primary targets and the allies that I've most often seen actually go down/die.
Perfect Preperation does not give you access to your whole spell list. You just prepare spells without needing something else to do it - essentially you become a Sorcerer. Really, you think something like that would be a 1st tier power that costs no MP? It's actually a pretty crappy ability when you think about it - only the Witch should consider it given their familiar runs the risk of getting killed.
Rapid Preperation I fail to see the use for. Only good if you have some kind of Minutes/Lvl buff going and need to memorize some spell in an open slot right before an encounter. The second ability is lamer than Wild Arcana
The thing is, Sanctum's only relevant advantage over MMM is its size, duration, and the ability to send your familiar into it from anywhere & get it back out. Theoretically, you could have an entire house full of magic items for your familiar to pick through and retrieve something, but it isn't as fast as a bag of holding or handy haversack. Other than that, its role can be filled with the MMM spell, which doesn't take up a precious, precious Path Ability slot.
First, if you're looking to make this into a comprehensive guide, it will look a lot better if you put in up in google docs or the like and put in some nice formatting.
Feedback:
Abundant Casting is trash, except for the magus and very specific touch spell builds, for the second part of the ability. After level 7 or so, I have a hard time imagining spells the first part of the ability will even help.
Mythic Spellpower feels like a rather poor analysis and an example of wording you should correct elsewhere in your guide as well. Why is this such an obvious choice? It's a path ability that's comparable to having a few extra uses of mythic power, which is decent but largely dependent on your number of encounters per day. It does have a niche use with augmented spells that take a lot of mythic points to augment, but that should be mentioned specifically, rather than just "Take this it's obvious lol." You should be telling us why it's so good.
Coupled Arcana is absolutely blue. The action economy it provides magi, witches, bards and void school wizards among others is insane.
Flexible School is awesome, especially with foresight, admixture, and void.
Arcane Potency is complete garbage.
Mythic Hexes is absolutely blue for a witch.
Tangible Illusion is easily blue for any illusionist.
Mirror Dodge is quite good as a get out of jail free card. I would peg it at least green.
Eldritch Flight is trash for any class with access to overland flight, but for a class with few magical abilities accessing it through dual path or trickster's path dabbling, constant supernatural flight isn't the worst thing you could have.
Eldritch Heritage is amazing for anyone. You're getting an entire bloodline out of the deal.
Dual Path should be near the top if you're taking magi, bards, or the like into consideration at all. Even pure casters benefit. Summoners might like Mighty Summons, while a buffing wizard can get some really cool things from Marshal.
Fabulous Figments is another case of... care to explain why? That's the sort of thing that should be stated in the guide.
I'm sure I missed some stuff, but those are the things I saw at a glance. All in all, you have to decide what you're catering to. If you're focusing just on wizard and sorcerer archmages, feel free to ignore some of my advice. If you're trying to create a comprehensive archmage guide, though, there's a lot more perspectives that can be covered.
It's always welcome to see new mythic guides and material. Nice work!
Rapid Preperation I fail to see the use for. Only good if you have some kind of Minutes/Lvl buff going and need to memorize some spell in an open slot right before an encounter. The second ability is lamer than Wild Arcana
I noted the overlap with Wild Arcana in the entry, didn't I? Or did the forum eat the revision?
Anyway, if you picked Arcane Surge instead of Wild Arcana, Rapid Preparation lets you get back some of the flexibility of Wild Arcana, though not as versatile.
Abundant Casting is trash, except for the magus and very specific touch spell builds, for the second part of the ability. After level 7 or so, I have a hard time imagining spells the first part of the ability will even help.
You can spend 1 mythic power to have a single-target spell like flesh to stone or dominate monster target two creatures at once. This effectively doubles your action economy, and stacks with things like a rod of Persistent Spell.
Mythic Spellpower feels like a rather poor analysis and an example of wording you should correct elsewhere in your guide as well. Why is this such an obvious choice? It's a path ability that's comparable to having a few extra uses of mythic power, which is decent but largely dependent on your number of encounters per day. It does have a niche use with augmented spells that take a lot of mythic points to augment, but that should be mentioned specifically, rather than just "Take this it's obvious lol." You should be telling us why it's so good.
Since spellcasting is your bread and butter, you're pretty much guaranteed to get mileage out of this. It frees up mythic power to spend on things like Wild Arcana (which doesn't cost a slot and is only a swift action)
Coupled Arcana is absolutely blue. The action economy it provides magi, witches, bards and void school wizards among others is insane.
I hadn't thought about bards. Yes, it's good for magi and witches. I just wish the 3 + Int / 3 + Cha wizard and sorcerer powers weren't a waste of an action past level 4.
Flexible School is awesome, especially with foresight, admixture, and void.
I plumb forgot about the diviner's initiative bonus. Yes, if you're not a diviner, this is blue, since initiative is everything.
Arcane Potency is complete garbage.
I was trying to be kind. But yes, when it went from "unlimited uses" to "4 uses," Paizo hacked off its balls.
Mythic Hexes is absolutely blue for a witch.
I hope I noted that in the guide. But yes, a class whose main feature is Hexes should prioritize Mythic Hexes.
Tangible Illusion is easily blue for any illusionist.
Yeah, it's really good. Almost too good. Come to think of it, it turns silent image into a poor man's wall of stone. It's open-ended, which means it's easier to abuse than Tina Turner.
I still stand by an overall rating of green, since it requires you use figments frequently to get any benefit. But yes, in the right hands it is blue.
Mirror Dodge is quite good as a get out of jail free card. I would peg it at least green.
I think I might have underrated it, yeah. It's probably a byproduct of the Schrodinger mentality synergizing with the "wizard as untouchable invisible flying god" of Treantmonk fame. I suppose in real play, you'll eventually fight stuff with truesight, flight, and greater teleport, at which point it's impossible to avoid them.
Eldritch Flight is trash for any class with access to overland flight, but for a class with few magical abilities accessing it through dual path or trickster's path dabbling, constant supernatural flight isn't the worst thing you could have.
I think I put it pretty low, didn't I? But yeah, it's one of those "ooh, aah" noob-bait options.
Eldritch Heritage is amazing for anyone. You're getting an entire bloodline out of the deal.
I guess I did underrate it, since I have little experience of some of the other bloodlines and how they would interact with other classes.
Dual Path should be near the top if you're taking magi, bards, or the like into consideration at all. Even pure casters benefit. Summoners might like Mighty Summons, while a buffing wizard can get some really cool things from Marshal.
Well, what do you know, Mighty Summons is exclusive to the hierophant. Well, then it goes up to blue for a great many builds, and green overall.
I don't see any specific buff wizard enhancements in Marshal.
Looking again at the Marshal, it seems that there are several methods to make the Master Summoner even more ridiculous. I'll have to look into that.
Fabulous Figments is another case of... care to explain why?
I think I might have underrated it. The feat itself isn't very clear. Does making a successful Spellcraft check let you disbelieve the figment even if your Will save would fail, since you know it's a persistent image or whatever? Does this identification barrier prevent them from identifying an illusion as you cast it?
It's tough to understand, which is why I might have misrated it.
I'd actually rate Divine Knowledge as green/orange.
Take druid spells instead of cleric and pick up entangle (1st-level 40 ft radius SoS), faerie fire (similar to glitterdust without the blinding), and possibly aspect of the falcon (if also an archer), cure light wounds (to act as a secondary healer with a wand), longstrider (long-term movement increase), or shillelagh (strictly better than magic weapon on a quarterstaff). Taking it twice, you can pick up barkskin (use that neck slot for something other than an amulet of natural armor, like an amulet of spell cunning/mastery or a hand of glory), tar ball (damage + Dex penalty, no save or SR), and possibly flame blade (melee touch attacks for damage in a pinch) or lesser restoration (to use a wand or scribe a scroll for emergencies).
...
Abundant Casting- I totally misread that second part. You're right and that ability is much better than I thought. Derp.
Mythic Spellpower- We'll have to agree to disagree on this. I would take extra mythic power before this gladly, and I suppose if I really needed more mythic power, I might take it... but I find that mythic power is in more and more of an excess as you level. At 3rd tier, you have a minimum of 9 uses a day already, and with how fast mythic parties tend to smoke fights, I find this choice of path ability a hard sell.
Coupled Arcana- Void School's reveal weakness is hardly a waste of an action- coupling it to wild arcana is crushingly powerful. But yes, a lot of them are trash. It's good action economy with the aura powers of void/foresight as well, though.
Eldritch Flight- You did. I was just pointing out that it can actually be quite appealing for a non-caster. Archmage is perhaps the only mythic path that's overpowered enough to be appealing to a class that has nothing to do with its primary function, with things like Constant Supernatural Flight, Polymorph as an SLA, and all the crafting feats for one path ability. Again, it makes sense for the guide to focused purely on casters, but amusingly it can benefit something with no casting abilities at all.
Fabulous Figments- I'm not trying to say whether it's good or bad (I'm still confused by it too.) but moreso that your guide should explain -why- it's good or bad to be most helpful to the reader.
I think at the moment you don't have Eldritch Reciprocation listed at all. As long as you don't mind smacking yourself in the face a bit, it's an easy way to replenish your mythic power by hitting yourself with a maximized snowball a few times and healing off the damage.
Are you planning to cover universal path abilities? There's a number of handy abilities in there, though few specifically archmage-good ones.