| Torbyne |
Hello again,
Following Mrs. Torbyne's experience with the Mesmerist, she decided to try a Psychic as she was playing as a full caster anyways so it looked to be a better fit for her.
For those who didnt see the previous feedback post, Mrs. Torbyne has about a year of experience with table top games and that is mostly with a Sorceress and a little bit of Witch.
We play in a home brewed setting with two major house rules:
1) Each player rolled one stat value and the group as a whole uses the same rolled stats, before racial modifiers that was 17, 14, 14, 12, 12, 12.
2) We use max HP for players and enemies will normally be at 80% of max possible, the group takes a slight hit to treasure value to balance greater HP pools. This probably has a big effect on how the Kineticists played.
The party for this game was six players:
Bloodrager (elemental bloodline) Ifreet 6
Hunter 6 Human
Gunslinger (Bolt Ace) Ratfolk 6
Fighter 4/Rogue 2 Vishkanya
Sorcerer (celestial bloodline) Human6
Pyschic (discipline of pain) Human 6
The group picked up in a logging camp where they signed on to escort a merchant caravan through Ogre infested trails to the nearest major city. The stealthy characters scouted ahead and found animal tracks from something monstrous, this lead them to discovering an ambush ahead of the caravan. One scout circled back to warn the caravan with the Gunslinger (with an amazing +28 stealth skill) stayed to keep an eye on the Ogres. The players settled on a tactic of sending in the Psychic, Sorcerer and Bloodrager along the main road to set off the ambush while the Hunter and Fighter attack from the woods. this lead too...
Combat 1: 4x Ogre Brutes (each a CR 6) and 2x Gorthek (each a CR 7)
Round 1: This was a bad start to things, no one knew what a Gorthek was and when the Pyschic rolled a great knowledge check i keyed them in on their exceptional resistance to damage and legendary charging abilities. Both Gorthek landed Powerful Charges against the Bloodrager and she nearly dropped on that round.
The Pyschic had cast Mirror Image when they neared the ambush site and had four images going at the start of the fight. an Ogre charged her and landed a crit! ... against an image. The Psychic retorted with a Hold Person that took the Ogre out of the fight.
Round 2: 2nd Ogre brute moves in to swing at the Psychic and whiffed against an image. Psychic countered with an overmind boosted Mind Thrust II for 19 damage.
Round 3: A full attack from that Ogre took out the last two mirror images before the Psychic landed another Hold Person that took a 2nd Ogre out of the fight. A swift action goes towards 3 nonlethal to last turn's Ogre.
Round 4: The Ratfolk Bolt Ace is downed after taking out one ogre, the last standing ogre moves through the trees and closes in to the Psychic but cant get close enough to attack. Psychic tries out her Ego Whip for 2 CHA damage and 1 round of stagger.
Round 5: The sorcerer and Bloodrager managed to down the Gortheks and turn to the held Ogres. The Psychic tries to Command the last Ogre but it made the save. The Sorcerer lands a Hideous Laughter though and the group cleans up.
After combat they bind the laughing Ogre and land a Charm Person on it followed by some impressive diplomacy rolls (a 34)from the Psychic and some nice good cop, bad cop routines. They get some good intel on the local Ogre scene and acidentally/purposefully execute the prisoner.
25 charges of a wand of cure light wounds later...
That night while the caravan is camping, the fighter/rogue spots some movement and flickering light above the tree line. He alerts the group to an attack and we find ourselves in combat once again.
Combat 2: 8x Hobgoblin Lieutenants(each a CR 4) and 3x level 7 Aeromancer Kineticists (each a CR 6).
*I am not very fluent with the Kineticist class, havent had the time to read it as much as i would have liked but they ended up working perfectly for what i had in mind.
Each of the Aeromancers used the same stats as the players with Point Blank Shot, Medium Armor Proficiency and Arcane Strike. They all had Rings of Protection +1, Breastplates +1 and Belts with +2 Con effective Dex was 14 and Con was 22. They were flying and had Magnetic Blasts which they used on full round actions for 1 burn. Their underlings had bows and who ever got magnetized was pin-cushioned*
Round 1: Psychic spends a move action to stand and casts Mirror Image.
Round 2: Once again the caster is on the front line but luck is on her side and the touch blast smashes into an image to no real effect. She lands an Ego Whip for 3 CHA damage and a stagger.
Round 3: She goes for the Command again and decides to burn a phrenic point boosting it with Overmind... but the Aeromancer saves.
Round 4: Blindness/Deafness effectively negates a Hobgoblin Lieutenant.
Round 5: Mind Thrust II lands for 19 points.
The three remaining enemies break off and flee only to have one run down by a tiger, one get double critical longbow shots to the head and the third fails a save against that Hold Person from our Psychic. Oh joy, they have another prisoner.
Can you guess what happens next? Charm Person, amazing diplomacy, intimidate, a real group effort, they all bond over the "enhanced interrogation" session while getting information from the Hobgoblin about what they are doing and how they relate to the Ogre problems in the region.
The session ended on everyone making it up to Level 7 :)
SO! what did i see out of the Psychic?
1) Decent spell list, but nothing a sorcerer couldnt have done. Mind Thrust was really disappointing and each time it was cast the player felt she should have done something else with the spell slot. from my perspective i asked about any rider effects, it really felt it should have staggered or left a will penalty or something. The player loved the idea of Ego Whip but in practice the CHA damage did nothing and stagger is a weak effect from a level 3 slot that has a save. even against Ogres with 5 Charisma, she was doing 2-3 points of damage per casting so it would have taken maybe 3 rounds and 3 level 3 slots to keep stagger going. For our play style spending 3 rounds to stick a debuff is a huge disappointment as most creatures are dead or dealt with by this time.
2) Disciple powers looked really cool! but residual nonlethal damage was very meh and being a low HP caster type, she probably wouldnt have survived more than two hits from the Ogres so she never regained Phrenic points from that. we briefly talked about having someone in the party slap her around to recover them after the fight but she had plenty of points to spare and didnt feel the need to get that dark with the character. As she was diligent with Mirror Image, she never took damage so the self healing never came up either. There was a lot of wishing from other players that she could heal them though.
3) Overall the character was much closer to the player's concept of a manipulative mind caster but nothing unique to the class, either in spells or class abilities seemed better than already existing sorcerer options. she missed Blistering Invective from her Mesmerist build. After the session she decided to reroll as a Bard for the spell mix and even better skills. well see how that goes next week.
Random bits: 10 skill points a level with being human and using FCB for skills. she maxed out ranks in Linguistics as well and had +18 to the skills she really cared about. that was all very cool.
And about those Kineticists...
1) The players first thought they were sorcerers since they kept zapping them each round but couldnt figure out where the magnetism was coming into it from... The fighter/rogue blew through four different poisons before deciding their Fort save must be godly (it was at a +11)After that they thought they might be some kind of Witch Doctor as they had huge Fort saves and took several hits from arrows without flinching.
2) Damage was consistantly between 15-17 points. That didnt seem like much considering the numbers the players usually drop but being flying and having a miss chance against incoming arrows made them nearly invulnerable, magnetism on the jolts was awesome and made the players really start sweating the fight.
3) Hit rolls, they only ever missed shots against the Mirror Image, a +8 against Touch AC was more than enough.
| kestral287 |
Ego Whip is pretty much meant as an anti-Caster/anti-SLA tool. I would never use it against something that wasn't a Cha-based sorcerer or a monster with Cha-based SLAs, personally.
Mind Thrust gets a rider effect at higher levels but its lower-level versions aren't great. However, it's a Divination spell that does damage.