So I just discovered the Hidden Priest Archetype on the SRD.
Now it looks interesting, allowing a Divine caster to pretend to be an arcane caster hiding it. And later allow him to without cost cast spells with the Silent or Still effect on it once per day at 8 and once more per day for every 4 levels after.
What are the general thoughts on this archetype? What are the potential uses?
Well thanks to WotW I can see a priest of Asmodeus doing it.
I am not familiar with the setting or AP that you mentioned but, yeah its good if for some reason you need to hide your affinity or something but. In most games its usually the Arcane that are being hunted down.
Way of the Wicked. You're evil, you're trying to bring back worship of Asmodeus to an area it is now outlawed from, the Hidden priest would be perfect for when you must walk around normal folks or just because you started that way, you may have been exposed, or maybe you start out in jail for something else.
I ran a hidden priest of Desna in a Cheliax-based game. In Cheliax, worship of chaotic gods is forbidden and illegal. She pretended to be a bard, weaving the teachings of the Starsong into her music. She was a very fun character, from a role-playing and storyline perspective.
Mechanically, the trade-offs of this archetype are not to your advantage: You give up more than you gain. This is very much a flavor archetype.
Yes you lose 1 of your Domain powers, but you keep the spells.
From the perspective of someone who started with 3.5 the relative power levels to me make it a non issue. Who cares if it's flavorful, this is exactly something I've been interested in playing, and it will make my day when I can run this in Maximum Xcrawl. I'll get to be a priest of the one god cult pretending to be something else and hiding my true allegiances.