Today my regular group tried out 5 of the classes as a team. We had all but the Kineticist and played at level 5 in a home brew dungeon crawl.
I played as a melee tank style occultist. Seemed to work alright. I took abjuration, and transmutation in order to access the various offense and defence buffs. Took conjuration as a backup just to put the cure spells on my list. Never actually had to cast them, but it let me use a CLW wand for out of battle heals reliably.
I outfit the occultist with a longsword, breastplate, and heavy shield. When combined with the focus powers from Abj. and Trans. I was able to get a pretty good AC. What really made it was putting 6 focus into the sword to give it keen and flaming.
during the dungeon crawl, i was able to use the object reading power a few times on plot items, but didn't really get anything useful out of it. I think our DM didn't really know how to use that kind of skill in play. Still, Flavor-wise I think it worked pretty well, and it let me identify some potions we found.
The dungeon was a typical wizards lair, with some conjured devils, hirelings, and, as a surprise, a basilisk.
The Basilisk was the most difficult fight. None of our classes had any useful skills or spells to really deal with it other than direct blasting from our psychic. The medium tried rushing in to beat it down, but failed his second save. The mesmerist... Ahh the mesmerist. The mesmerist was completely useless in that fight. The range of his stare abilities was the same as the basilisks stone gaze. We joked that the mesmerist would loose a staring contest with the basilisk.
As for my occultist, I ended up dropping the sword i had invested my focus in(and feats) to use my backup bow to fight from a safe distance. We managed to win, using a number of the psychics spells to blast it.
I was able to show off the occultist's skills in a fight with a bearded devil and 2 imps. On the previous turn, the bearded devil managed to inflict its infernal wounds ability on the medium, so when it tried to attack me, I activated the abjuration implement Warding Shield as an immediate action. Negated the hit completely(10 points of negation blocking 7 damage) thus preventing the infernal wounds. The psychic player was impressed, wanting to know how often i could do that. (only once more at that point)
I personally didn't have any trouble tracking the focus i put into my items, but that may be because I only used 2, my sword for trans. and my cloak for abj. Using the warding shield took 2 of the 5 points in my cloak, reducing the AC bonus it was giving me from +2 to +1.
At the end of the night, we all agreed that we liked the classes, and saw a lot of potential. We also agreed that occult classes only lacked a lot of basic role potential. No one had a full BAB or higher than a D8 HD, so we whiffed a lot of attacks. My melee build only ended up with a +10 to attack after everything was accounted for, so I was far behind on damage dealing potential compared to a fighter or barbarian.
Personally, I felt more like a cleric. Tanky, with a number of potential special abilities to adapt to the situation. I can also see that there are a number of build possibilities with the occultist, and that makes it a class Ill look into again in the future, perhaps with a High Int build to go more caster style.
Sorry for long post, Hope this info is of some help!
Did the Spiritualist do anything of note? You don't appear to have mentioned that character at all lol.
The spiritualist focused more on role playing his character being haunted. Guy kept talking to himself...
However, he did use the phantom in incorporeal form to do a lot of scouting. We discovered though that that phantom cant really attack in incorporeal form, so he ended up not doing much fighting.
Not his fault, the medium kept rushing into the fights before the spiritualist got a chance to change his phantom to corporeal form.