Warlock forcefully cookie cutter?

[PIXIE DUST]

I feel like the changes to Mystic Bolt and Paizo's adamant stubborn ness to keep spell casting talents will have the consequence for making damn near every Warlock identicle...

First off, talents... if you take every spellcasting talent you would be left with 3 talents to use by level 16... not much variaty there. And to suggest to just not take the talents would be poor aince the warlock lacka any other real meaningful way to contribute...

Out of your remaining 3, 1 will most pprobably be Arcane Bolt. So this leaves you with 2... now with the damage hit to Arcane bolt, Arcane striker has become amust, so that leaves you with 1 talent...now take your pick between casting in armor, having a different damage option for your bolt, or shadow form.. Yeah... lots of options..

Now we have the issue with the bolts. With the drop.in damage for the bolts you are pretty much forced into TWF and Rapid Shot to get any meaningful damage out of them... but both trees are horridly feat intensive... so pretty much alL your feats go to just trying to use mystic bolt to some usefulness.

Combined together, this will pretty much force just about every Warlock to look identical.... and from all the complaining.i have seen of Magus I feel like this Is not a good thing...

Whatbdo you all think?

[Archangel62]

This is just exasperating, it feels like they took our complaints about the warlock issues and decided to actually make the problems worse

[Trekkie90909]

They've addressed some complaints; it's nice to see them going step by step. Definitely not a finished product yet, but that's why we playtest.

[Zwordsman]

everything is a proccess. and we only see some of it.

I do really hope they have some way to deal with resistances.

[Trekkie90909]

Regarding Pixie's initial concern about feat intensive bolts:

I'm personally very happy with the changes; the interaction with arcane striker means the damage drop off isn't too bad, and they get some nifty add ons at higher levels. I was planning on investing feats towards mystic bolts anyways -- Also notice that they changed from Sp to Su! No more spell pen required! Which freed up 2 feat slots. Resistances still tremendously limiting.

If you don't want to go TWF, you really don't have to; conductive weapons mean that you can still get plenty of utility off of mystic bolt just from picking up the Talent.

I would like to see spell casting buffed so that there's another obvious build choice. The Warlock really need to be able to cast in light armor at level 1, the spell scaling needs to be appreciably better than an Adept's. It needs talent options giving the warlock some nice metamagical or penetrative effects so it feels like a powerful arcane duelist or at least like a flavored utility caster.