Initial thoughts on the Zealot Talents

[Trekkie90909]

Divine Training I - VI

It's nice that the casting stat synergizes with the social aspect's primary skill. Otherwise you cast as an inquisitor with fewer spells per day. Added to that the casting stat no longer helps your will saves (there's a feat which makes this less an issue, but adds a tax). Otherwise it's a 5 talent casting tax to still be sub-par.

Channel Energy

CE is pretty useful at early levels, and stops being as useful around the level Zealots can pick it up. Given the poor casting options I'd at least make this a real channel energy instead of a diminished one.

Discern Lies

Always found this to be useless on an inquisitor. What interrogation lasts a number of seconds equal to 6 times your level? More realistically needs to be minutes or hours per level.

Divine Bastion

This is nice. Why would the Zealot ever not be in the stance again?

Domain

I like domains; not very useful at mid-high levels though, and certainly not at the expense of a tax. For a tax I should at least get 2. And bonus Spells per day.

Empower Symbol

This is pretty neat.

Life Bond

Ok. I'll go play my Oradin, thanks. It has better armor proficiencies, the ability to heal itself without becoming useless, better class abilities, better healing, better saves, same weapon proficiencies, worse skills, better hp.

Penance Gaze

This is nifty. Unfortunately I have to hit enemies with it before I can use my frightening contenance stuff that requires enemies to be unaware of me. So that part could use some tweaking.

Revivifying Touch

Given level restrictions this should really be once/creature/day.

Stalwart

Nice, pretty high level restriction though. I might have to take divine training to fill all my early level slots. So it's nice to know I have a high level slot to look forward to filling at some point.

Stern Gaze

This is not worth a talent.

Track

What part of this says Zealot again?

I... expect at least... new-ish work from Paizo. This. Is. So. Lazy. 12 'unique' abilities, 4 of which were actually developed for Ultimate Intrigue. Seriously. Fire this guy.

[PIXIE DUST]

This has already been mentioned time and again...

The Zealot is just a bad Inquisitor pretty much all around.

[Trekkie90909]

I confess that I did not read through the zealot 'specialization' before today. The party in my playtest campaign just finished dealing with a lot of cultists in a neatly wrapped up story-arc and I think everyone is sick of them (also the three specializations looked more interesting from a brief skim -- read as I'm biased against playing divine casters to begin with).

[Nikosandros]

Trekkie90909 wrote:

Divine Bastion

This is nice. Why would the Zealot ever not be in the stance again?

Using a talent in order to get a bonus just to CMD does't strike me as being all that great, especially since 5 of the talents are eaten up by spell-casting.

[Trekkie90909]

Well 5 are eaten up by spell casting, and 4 others are actually worth getting. This actually means there aren't enough good talents to fill it's base quota so I see it as a non-issue.

Also given the number of grab + trip add-ons that enemies get I could see Divine Bastion being super useful long term.

Of course as it stands now the class really doesn't want to be standing next to people up in the front line, so the Zealot needs a lot of love to be at all worth leaving in the final product.