Title, I'm having trouble re-creating the "Railgun" (Misaka Mikoto) from A Certain Scientific Railgun, with the Kineticist class.
It fits very well outside of one issue - I want to recreate the truly devastating "signature blast" she uses. As of yet, I can't seem to find a way to get very close outside of being an Admixture Wizard and making Disintegrate deal electricity damage.
Thoughts and ideas welcome.
With Kineticist, probably air with electric blast, followed by aether using coins as the projectile. She started much weaker, though it was before the series, and her most damaging attack doesn't deal electricity damage at all; it's an electromagnetically fired physical projectile.
What are the difficulties you're encountering with the build, specifically?
With Kineticist, probably air with electric blast, followed by aether using coins as the projectile. She started much weaker, though it was before the series, and her most damaging attack doesn't deal electricity damage at all; it's an electromagnetically fired physical projectile.
What are the difficulties you're encountering with the build, specifically?
Mostly just wanting to develop an actual Railgun "move" - a highly flashy/damaging ability to really give that feel, but the standard blasts that kineticists have just don't seem to...do enough, in my opinion anyway.
Depends on the level. At level 17, when you get metakinesis (twice), you could do aether/anyelement(probably air for lightning)/aether, with disintegrating infusion, and then do a twice empowered maximized disintegrating blast for probably a little over 400 force damage touch attack to a single target. Caveat: this truly devastating attack also will devastate your Misaka character, as it eats 1 point of internal buffer and then still costs 5 burn cost. However, the results speak for themselves, given that touch attacks almost always hit, and you're expected to one-shot anything up to CR 21 if it misses the save (and really even a CR 22 or 23 are going to be so low that the rest of your party would have to be pretty weak to not be able to mop it up). If you're worried about the save, another possibility would be earth/earth/(aether or air) and just use the metal blast as a railgunned coin. This would do even more than 400 damage (should do a touch under 475) with no save to reduce but would require an attack roll against normal AC (not that you would be likely to miss if you've been watching your accuracy).
I can see what you mean, but her railgun in the show is pretty much heavy artillery, and blasting is kinda underrepresented in Pathfinder. Composite blasts are the best way to represent that that I can think of.
Edit: this was in response to elfinlocks, not Mark, and he answered it much better than I did. Even without going up to a 5 burn meganova, blasts get pretty big later on.
I agree with Mark Seifter here. I heavily approve of this concept. I myself had to figure out how to make Touma's "Imagine Breaker" work, which was a bit less character creation and more GM assigned 'curse' of a permanently on touch-only Mage's Disjunction.
Since it's connected to his body, he pretty much can't use anything magical like, ever. Including most effects that grant luck bonuses. Hence disjunction. And the proof is in the fact that he broke Index's walking church and it never did get fixed properly.
But on you topic, yeah I think that the air/earth for the metal 'coin' being fired off as a powered shot would be appropriate. Keep in mind that while Railgun has her signature power, she doesn't throw it around all over the place. In fact if you see the interactions between Touma and her, she throws lightning blasts more often than fires subway tokens. (Which I think that's what they are in the show)
So update, I played the first session with my Railgun character on Saturday, and it went very well - we all had a lot of fun and I felt pretty useful hitting an insanely high AC boss with one of my touch attacks. Can't wait to level up further!
Thanks for all the advice guys :)
What sort of build did you end up with in the end? Out of curiosity.
Also curious about the build.
Also, i spent way too long reading this thread wondering why N. Jolly needed kineticist advice.
Final Build is going to be Air/Air/Void. The campaign started at level 8, currently level 9. I found myself most useful when using my electric blasts to hit through heavy AC opponents.
I also invested in a cloak of elvenkind and did my best to max out stealth, which when combined with my unlimited flight due to Wings of Air, made me an excellent scout for the party which gave us some valuable info in multiple places.
I bought myself a belt of dexterity over constitution to improve my hit chances, which has worked very well, as I keep up in damage per round with our Zen Archer Monk (we each are dealing around 70-90 damage per round, which will be far easier for me to do with maximizing metakinsesis infusion).