BURN
please give me thoughts about this haha. It's just occured to me so i figured why not ask peoples thoughts.
So plenty of people have noted that burn is hard to use and such. mainly because using it causes serious HP impairment.
So I know people hate having other things to track. but I still feel like almost all the burn issues are handled pretty well with having it track as a seperate(ish) pool that only floods into your actual health points once you go over it.
You have your hp. For simplicitiy i'll go with lv 10 max hp ap and hp per level bonuses,20 con= +5 con cause I like simple numbers.
so 80+10+50 = 140hp right?
So you've got 140hp normally you could take 14 (140points) of burn before you pass out under current rules; so generally no one would go beyond 13burn considering I don't even know what happens if you pass out like that. I guess you stay out cold for 8 hours..
I think you should have a "burn track" and "hp burn track". The burn track is the normal burn we see (the 14 burn). the hp burn track is equal to your HP, and tracks as normal burn )1burn = character level hp burn. )
So 140hp and then 140 burnable hp. So you track the burnable hp but it does not directly affect your hp. However if you burn over your HP (i.e. if you burn 14 times) (lets call it "overburn")then you start burning yourself properly. Once you "over burn" it begins burning your Con score. so the first time you burn your 20cont burns a point down to 19 con.
This then affects your real HP in an unhealable way like the flavor text and how the designers wanted. it also lowers some of your DC's and damage. Because after all.. you taxed your body so damn much that you've got almost nothing left!
Every point of burn you use after burns one more con point. You could either let someone burn themselves to death if they'd like or you could restrict it. I'm a fan of "burn yourself to nothing if you want to" so you can go out like an utter bad ass defending a town from a deamonic army covering the innocent's escape
This temporary damage is only healed when you sleep for 8 hours like the original burn.
Might require retooling of burn values though.
doing it this way solves almost all the problems people have mentioned with Burn mechanic while keeping what people like about burn..
You can burn a few points for free ,and how much you can burn goes up as you level because of HP growth (baring bad hp rolls). So a high level guy should be able to burn more than a lv 1 (baring bad rolls etc).
so you don't gimp yourself using some abilities, and you can actuall ytake advantage of "feel the burn" class ability where before.. I honestly would have a hard time ever using.
So it would help with some accuracy issues as well.
Hell you could even make a semi useful healer out of this now.
As it stands you generally hurt yourself as much as you heal.. so Honestly I don't think I'd ever really use it outside of certain death.
but if you could do it this way? That's some usuable healing
A Kineticist can actually only eat 3+Con mod in Burn per day, so even with 140 HP that Kineticist is locked into 8 Burn tops.
Conceptually, I don't think the idea is flawed, though the numbers are... massively off. For fun I worked out the math of a nova attack with my Water/Air Kineticist at 20th (or 19th; same results) level:
Arashi carries around 6 Burn as a fact of life; keeping his Feel the Burn maxed (and incidentally, letting him run around as a Huge Elemental and keeping his AC bonus off Shroud of Water high). He has Form Specialization twice and Substance Specialization three times, and Metakinetic Master is applied to Empowered. His Con stat is 32, for a +11 modifier, meaning his maximum allowable Burn is 14. Thus, Arashi's 'nova' option is going to be unleashing his Burn to cap (8) in a single attack sequence. I am assuming here that everything hits; if accuracy is a concern for Arashi his burn will actually go down as he shifts from Composite Blasts to standard blasts to target Touch AC (this frees up 2 Burn, meaning the first attack will also be Maximized).
He identifies his target, and begins the fight with a Quickened (+3) Empowered (+1-1=0) Extreme Range (+2-2=0) Chilling (+3-3=0) Blizzard Blast (+2-1=1) with Ride the Blast (0). He's eating four Burn off that attack, and it will do (20D6+20+11)*1.5+6= an average of 157 damage.
Arashi is now in melee with his target. He activates a Maximized (+2) Empowered (+1-1=0) Kinetic Whip (+2-2=0) Chilling (+3-3=0) Blizzard Blast (+2-1=1), for three additional burn, and full attacks. That'll do an average of 207 damage per attack, and Arashi has two iterative attacks, plus one Hasted attack (as he bought himself some Boots of Speed).
And now he's one point under his Burn cap, having dealt a total of 207*4+157 = 985 damage, which is sufficient to kill the CR20 opponent I happen to have had pulled up two-and-a bit times over (in fact if accuracy can be ensured, it'll put the Tarrasque down to -400 HP). If they did survive, they have to make a separate Fort save for each hit to avoid being staggered.
So: when a Kineticist goes nova, they can do damage. A lot of damage. But of course, after unleashing that attack, Arashi is done. He's incredibly vulnerable to being knocked out or outright killed.
If he could, under your setup, eat 14 Burn freely... he could unload two-three of those attacks per day.
Now, that's not to say that I don't think the idea has merit, but I think the numbers need some serious work. A feat that can be taken to give a Burn Pool of 2 would be very welcome, and is not out of line with some other abilities. I would even allow it to be taken multiple times, perhaps once per five levels. That gives the level 20 Kineticist a Burn Pool of 8 if he invests in it, which is sufficient for one 'free' nova attack-- a fair exchange for four feat slots on a class that gets no bonus feats, I feel.
ooh totally missed that total burn.. I just saw the "total per round" thing.
and yeah I'm not good at the not in an actual game number crunching stuff. Never have been. That makes it pretty hard to use some things then..
Having one or two free nova blasts or a bunch of free heals/utility stuff doesn't look bad. Though I'm not a fan of the melee kinetists so I hadn't thought about how much they could do using that..
I feel like they really need some way to have free points of burn applied for their Feel the Burn and someway to make the healing more useful..
So how would the idea of having 3+con per day free burn points, then any burn points after that reducing Con or start reducing HP? (I'm a fan of con but it just gives a cooler visual to me. )
In your example he could nova once free and get one long range sniper for free. That doesn't sound too insane considering the level and what others could do for their nova at that level.. Anything past that would start chunking into them. Which means they could nova a ton again but seriously cut a large chunk of their life force off for it and reduce their abilities and damage..
Though if one wanted to that means in the morning they could spend just a ton of burn points to raise their defense to some crazy levels right? Though they couldn't use much burn after that I guess..
If it makes you feel any better I actually missed the total per round part. Arashi would cap at 6 Burn per round, so he has to make a cut in output somewhere (likely, the first shot becomes a Cold Blast rather than a Blizzard).
3+Con free burn points was actually what I assumed you'd wind up meaning, given that that's the current limit. That's getting his daily 6 points of burn up and running and letting him nova once (6 points due to that cap) for free, then once more (4 Con damage) at some cost and he can rattle off one more if he needs to (10 Con damage total). At that point he's at only a -5 on his modifier (normally a +11) so not crippling-- if the situation was truly dire he could keep going. But the big issue here is... look at the raw damage of that nova attack. You can put down a Green Great Wyrm (first CR20 opponent I pulled up) with a fraction of that level of firepower-- assume you miss on all iteratives, it's still dead twice over. More realistically, you can actually tone /back/ the Burn by switching entirely to Touch blasts, giving you 95% accuracy on the Wyrm (it has a Touch AC of 0, you can only miss on a 1), and still putting it down in one round easily unless you whiff on every Spell Resistance roll.
That's a CR20 opponent, meaning it's supposed to be a straight fight for a 20th level party. Even status quo, Arashi can bring it down with only a handful of items (Con boosting Belt/Book is all that's truly needed; realistically he'd be buffing Dex too). And there'd be... very little that the dragon could do about it. An emphasis on Dex means that Arashi is likely to out-initiative it, and he can launch this attack from 480' away.
Now, under the current rules I think that's fair, because again it's costing Arashi a huge amount of his defenses, meaning after that he's more of a liability on the party than an advantage (12 Burn puts him at 240 nonlethal damage; average HP assuming Toughness and FCB is 353; at level 20 113 HP is not going to get far, so hope that Great Wyrm doesn't have a friend). But that's not something I want to see multiple times per day. That's too much boom.
Hum. Yeah it looks really hard to balance melee vs blasting aspects.
the damage doable goes up so much with iteratives..
I dunno I guess my sense of b alance is pretty off these days haha.
My two GM/coplayers characters regularly can put down higher than CR solo. Usually its my character that isn't able to do that haha. Since I like the weird builds (quite often I'll hit and run build looks cool-isn't effective. One reason I have hopes for this character).
It half feels like you won't be able to balance blasts-1 hit per round and the melee -iteratives aspects of this class especially with regards to burn.
Kinda seems like they should standardize one way or the other.. shame
The kineticist should be able to use some of his best powers without consuming life. Burn is a good thematic mechanic, but it should have some damage free points first, an amount that increases as the class grows in levels.
Heladriell wrote: The kineticist should be able to use some of his best powers without consuming life. Burn is a good thematic mechanic, but it should have some damage free points first, an amount that increases as the class grows in levels. I mean, they have that with Infusion Specialization. Where at 5th level and every 3 levels, they reduce all form or substance infusions by 1 burn. Which I feel is a nice counteract to burn. So really, at higher levels, you'll only spend a small amount of burn for some of the best abilities. And ~75% you wouldn't spend any.
|
1 person marked this as a favorite.
|
I'm trying this variation.
A kineticist gets a "Burn Pool" equal to his Con mod. Using a point from this pool acts as burn as normal, with no damage.
A kineticist can burn up to Con+3 per day. So you get some burn free, and when you get to the "I HAVE TO do this" you still get the damage for extra oomph - keeping the flavor.
I've thought about adding in "but no higher than you level" to the burn pool (like Canny Defense) - leaving a 1st level Kineticist with 1 free burn with no extra time. This would indicate the character gaining better control of his powers as he raises levels.
Lord Mhoram
So your doing it this way
Con mod of free burn points, 3+con mod maximum a day. If they use any of those 3 points then it damages them?
Lemee know how that goes!
I've done semi games trying out my 3+con mod free, past that burns your con mod directly. I've also thought 1/2 your maximum burn pool is free per day. that would lower the amount.. If they wanted to stick with the non lethal damage thing. Still I just love con damage aspect over unhealable non lethal.
It works pretty amusingly so far, I wish I could test it in an actual game though..
At higher level it may be a tad crazy though; since you could super explode once or twice for free if you blow your whole free pool in one or two rounds. but then your back to nothing else that day without hurting yourself. So I think it fits nicel ybetween martial and magic.
Plus.. well I love the idea of actually being able to be a secondary healer without just destroying yourself.
that.. and more skills. would really open up what places this class can fill
Why not just make Composite Blasts not require burn? Like, what's the benefit of them having burn? Even without burn, they don't make the class OP in combat. It gives them at least something they can sorta do. You still need to expend Burn on Form/Substance/Improvements.
Pathfinder Adventure Path, Rulebook Subscriber
kestral287 wrote: A Kineticist can actually only eat 3+Con mod in Burn per day, so even with 140 HP that Kineticist is locked into 8 Burn tops.
Not withstanding HP, I would say an Kineticist could easily have more. 18 Con at level 1, 4 stat boosts and a +6 item for 28 con at level 16. With (on a higher point by) a 20 start and a 30 finish.
Goblinsaurus wrote: Why not just make Composite Blasts not require burn? Like, what's the benefit of them having burn? Even without burn, they don't make the class OP in combat. It gives them at least something they can sorta do. You still need to expend Burn on Form/Substance/Improvements. They double your damage output.
Of course, they also your vulnerabilities since you have to deal with everything but SR, so whether or not it's unbalancing is an entirely different question, but I can see being leery of it. It makes every basic non-Touch blast utterly irrelevant because why would I do 1d6 when I can do 2d6 (and get more options for infusions) instead?
Personally, I think I'd like to see them cost 1 Burn, then Composite Specialization can drop them to 0 for a better end-game damage output.
Galnörag wrote: kestral287 wrote: A Kineticist can actually only eat 3+Con mod in Burn per day, so even with 140 HP that Kineticist is locked into 8 Burn tops.
Not withstanding HP, I would say an Kineticist could easily have more. 18 Con at level 1, 4 stat boosts and a +6 item for 28 con at level 16. With (on a higher point by) a 20 start and a 30 finish. I came out to 32 as my 20th-level's end-game Burn, with the potential to go higher if he used Kinetic Form on a Water elemental instead of an Air (but that's reaaaally tanking his to-hit rates). But the original posited Kineticist had a Con mod of +5.
I'm pretty ok with current burn costs and ways to reduce. If they had some form of free-use burns before any "overburn" kicks in.
kestral287 wrote: Goblinsaurus wrote: Why not just make Composite Blasts not require burn? Like, what's the benefit of them having burn? Even without burn, they don't make the class OP in combat. It gives them at least something they can sorta do. You still need to expend Burn on Form/Substance/Improvements. They double your damage output.
Galnörag wrote: kestral287 wrote: A Kineticist can actually only eat 3+Con mod in Burn per day, so even with 140 HP that Kineticist is locked into 8 Burn tops.
Not withstanding HP, I would say an Kineticist could easily have more. 18 Con at level 1, 4 stat boosts and a +6 item for 28 con at level 16. With (on a higher point by) a 20 start and a 30 finish. I came out to 32 as my 20th-level's end-game Burn, with the potential to go higher if he used Kinetic Form on a Water elemental instead of an Air (but that's reaaaally tanking his to-hit rates). But the original posited Kineticist had a Con mod of +5. They double your god-awful damage output that puts an anemic Rogue in a good light. Go look at the math done on the class. That doubled damage still doesn't even TOUCH the damage of other classes.
Recent threads in Rules Discussion
|
