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I'm reading the description and I'm reading the description and I'm just not getting this...
Burn --
"For each point of 'burn' she accepts, she takes 1 point of non-lethal damage." I get the "...non-lethal damage...", but not sure what "accepts" means in this case. Based on other threads I've read, it sounds kind of like a sort of "pool" of points that I would be able to fill up and use from. So, would I take the damage as I "fill up" the pool? So, in theory, I could basically start the day with one point of "burn" stored all day and essentially be down my level in hp all day. And if I never use that "burn", I'm still out those hp, right? (I think that part of my confusion comes from their limitation on how much burn they can accept each round -- which kind of feels like it's something that's being used rather than stored.) And I don't get the hp back once the burn's been used, right? Once the burn's been used, can someone heal the non-lethal damage? (Or can they heal it while I have burn in my "pool"?)
Gather Power -- If I haven't "accepted any burn" yet, can I still use a 1 burn blast wild talent using Gather Power as a move action?
Elemental Overflow -- So it sounds like this is some kind of additional effect while I have at least some "burn" in my pool. (Although "...at 16th level with 7 points of burn..." -- that's like 112 non-lethal hp of damage right to begin with? ouch.) What if I use my burn for some other ability, does the overflow go away? (or is it reduced?) Are there other "passive" benefits to having a pool of burn but not used?
Things like "Flesh of Stone" -- ..."By accepting
1 point of burn, you can increase the DR by 1 until the next time
your burn is removed..." Not sure what the "next time my burn is removed" means. If I've "accepted" 1 point of burn, does that mean that as long as I have the 1 point of burn in my pool? Or am I using the burn to gain this ability?
Thank you for any clarification you can provide.
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each point of burn is 1 non lethal damage per hit die. so at level 7 1 burn is 7 non lethal.
burn cannot be removed EVER in anyway until you rest for a night. so you will have permanent non lethal damage till you sleep.
Not sure that helps.
"Burn cannot be removed EVER in anyway until you rest..." So it isn't used even on talents? So if I have 4 burn, I can continually use talents that require 4 burn all day? And never gain additional non-lethal damage?
Correct. Burn isn't "used" as much as it is "totaled".
Burn: You start the day with zero burn and you must "accept" burn through the cost of your abilities. Paying the burn cost *is* accumulating more. Typically a player would be cautious about too much burn because then they have to use "gather energy" to use anything more than their basic blasts. The non-lethal damage taken through this cannot be healed by anything other than sleep or mechanical equivalent. No Mythic feat, no alchemist/druid shenanigans, Nothing. Just natural sleep.
Gather Power: Yes, in fact it seems like the recommended balance of the ability is "casting" your abilities tends to be a full-round action unless you want to burn through your Burn in the first encounter.
Elemental Overflow: Literally the opposite of all of that. Since Burn is accumulated and not spent, Elemental Overflow is a perk that makes having more burn useful.
Other things: By accepting X point/s of Burn you expend some of your pool (In an inverse way, because it's actually increasing) you can create alternate effects that aren't related to your blasts.
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Pay Burn to activate an ability.
Suffer nonlethal damage.
Recover nonlethal damage by resting.
If this is true, then how does "overflow" work? Do you only get "overflow" when you use burn? (And related to this, the defense abilities?)
Also, so then I can only use abilities that cost 1 burn until level 6? And I use it and then it's gone?
Do I only gain the non-lethal damage when I use an ability with burn?
I'm going to use sorcerer comparisons for this. Your max burn is your CON+3. This is equivalent to your total spell slots. That may sound like very few slots but your low level infusions become free (e.g. cantrips) as you gain levels. When you begin your day, you have 0 burn (all spell slots). When you are at max burn, CON+3, then you have used up all of your "spell slots" (but that doesn't mean you are now useless, unlike casters.
Elemental Overflow looks at your current total accepted burn, it looks at "how many total spell slots" you have spent up for the day.
Utility Wild Talents
A lot of them are free (cost 0 burn) but some of them do cost some burn to use. You cannot use gather power to prevent burn on these talents. You can pay the burn into these talents to activate or boost them.
In the morning your level 6 kineticist wakes up and you can invest 3 burn into your flesh of stone (FoS). You now have 3 burn (3xlevel Non-lethal damage) and your FoS goes from 3 DR/Adamantine to 6 DR/Adamantine. Because you are level 6, your Elemental Overflow (EO) size bonus kicks in and you gain a +2 to your DEX and your CON, effectively negating 1 of the 3 burn you got while increasing your accuracy and damage. Your EO also gives you +2 to attack and +4 to damage because you have 2 burn.
Infusion Wild Talents (and metakinesis)
Your base kinetic blast costs no burn to use. You can use it all day, even when you are at max burn. You have two flavors of infusions, substance and form. Any single blast can only have at most 1 of each type of infusion. Each infusion has an associated burn cost to use. This is where Gather Power (GP) comes into play. You can gather power to negate the burn of your infusions and your metakinesis.At level 4 you can infuse an extended range to your blast for 1 burn. You can either accept the burn or you can GP to negate the burn cost. Accepting the burn is like expending a spell slot while GP reduces the cost. One extended range infusion + move action GP means you can blast and not take any burn.
Bowling infusion costs 2 burn. Pushing infusion plus extended range each cost 1 for a combined total of 2. Empower Metakinesis costs 1 burn, and is not reduced by infusion specialization. But if you are level 5 then you have infusion specialization 1 and the total cost of an infused blast is reduced by 1. You can:
bowling infusion + move action GP = burn free blast
bowling infusion + empower + move action GP = blast and accept 1 burn
Pushing infusion + extended range infusion + move action GP = burn free blast
Pushing infusion + empower + move action GP = burn free blast
Move + extend range infusion = burn free blast
and many more combinations
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Correct. Burn isn't "used" as much as it is "totaled".
Burn: You start the day with zero burn and you must "accept" burn through the cost of your abilities. Paying the burn cost *is* accumulating more. Typically a player would be cautious about too much burn because then they have to use "gather energy" to use anything more than their basic blasts. The non-lethal damage taken through this cannot be healed by anything other than sleep or mechanical equivalent. No Mythic feat, no alchemist/druid shenanigans, Nothing. Just natural sleep.
Gather Power: Yes, in fact it seems like the recommended balance of the ability is "casting" your abilities tends to be a full-round action unless you want to burn through your Burn in the first encounter.
Elemental Overflow: Literally the opposite of all of that. Since Burn is accumulated and not spent, Elemental Overflow is a perk that makes having more burn useful.
Other things: By accepting X point/s of Burn you expend some of your pool (In an inverse way, because it's actually increasing) you can create alternate effects that aren't related to your blasts.
This is helping a little bit.
So things like the overflow -- if I use an amount of burn using a number of talents -- the more passive abilities -- like overflow and the earth based defensive ability -- they actually increase in ability without expending anything?
Okay, a kineticist can only take as much Burn equal to 3+Constitution modifier. So if you have a Con modifier of +4 you can take a total of 7 Burn each day. For each point of Burn you take, you also take Nonlethal damage equal to your character level per point of Burn. Example: 7th level kineticist takes two points of Burn, he takes 14 points of nonlethal damage.
Every talent has a Burn cost. You must pay that cost by taking that many points of Burn, which consequently causes you to take nonlethal damage. The nonlethal damage you take cannot be removed by healing or any other way, except for getting rest.
Elemental Overflow is basically a bonus for taking Burn. At 3rd level, if you have 1 point of Burn, you get the Elemental Overflow bonuses.
In regards to your second question... No. You can take any ability that you possess regardless of its Burn cost. However, once you have reached your maximum level of Burn, you cannot take anymore Burn that day. Period.
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This was interesting...
In the morning your level 6 kineticist wakes up and you can invest 3 burn into your flesh of stone (FoS). You now have 3 burn (3xlevel Non-lethal damage) and your FoS goes from 3 DR/Adamantine to 6 DR/Adamantine. Because you are level 6, your Elemental Overflow (EO) size bonus kicks in and you gain a +2 to your DEX and your CON, effectively negating 1 of the 3 burn you got while increasing your accuracy and damage. Your EO also gives you +2 to attack and +4 to damage because you have 2 burn.
This seems a little contradictory -- Don't you still have three burn? But your total "burn" allowed has been increased by 1?
This was interesting...
This seems a little contradictory -- Don't you still have three burn? But your total "burn" allowed has been increased by 1?
In the morning your level 6 kineticist wakes up and you can invest 3 burn into your flesh of stone (FoS). You now have 3 burn (3xlevel Non-lethal damage) and your FoS goes from 3 DR/Adamantine to 6 DR/Adamantine. Because you are level 6, your Elemental Overflow (EO) size bonus kicks in and you gain a +2 to your DEX and your CON, effectively negating 1 of the 3 burn you got while increasing your accuracy and damage. Your EO also gives you +2 to attack and +4 to damage because you have 2 burn.
Correct. Lets say before you had a CON mod of 4 for a total max burn of 8. You accept 3 burn, EO kicks in and you get +2 DEX/+2 CON. Your CON goes from 4 to 5 and max burn up to 9. You also gain the HP from the CON boost. The move from 2 burn to 3 burn is no increase in effective health (NLD floor goes up but your max HP goes up by an equal amount), your remaining amount of burn you can accept remains the same, but you gain all the benefits of +2 DEX and +2 CON for saves, AC, attacks, and damage.
Think of burn kind of like the opposite of a "pool". Whereas a gunslinger spends grit to accomplish deeds (or a magus spends arcane pool points, or psychic spends phrenic pool points etc.), you put a point of burn into the "pool" to activate abilities. You don't use or spend burn, rather you "accept" it. Hence the language used in the class.
Some kineticist abilities require accepting burn to activate.
Let's say an infusion costs 1 burn. In order to use it, you accept 1 point of burn as you activate it (taking 1 point of non-lethal damage per hit-die. 7 points of non-lethal damage at level 7, for example). You then have 1 point of burn. To use the "pool" metaphor, you now have 1 point of burn in the pool. As previously stated, you never spend points from the pool, rather you put points into it to power things.
Other abilities are passive and based on the amount of burn you've accepted/accumulated so far that day. Elemental Overflow is one such ability, it increases based on the total amount of burn you've accepted for the day. If you've accepted a total of 3 burn so far for the day, then you get a +3 bonus on attack rolls, and a +6 bonus on damage rolls. It doesn't matter what you accepted the burn for. It just matters how much burn (and therefore, how much non-lethal damage) you currently have in the "pool".
Many of the defense wild-talents require "investing" burn into them. You accept however much burn you want to power that ability, and it keeps granting you that benefit for the whole day. It goes away when your burn is removed (typically when you rest for the night, as detailed in the class entry).
For example, at the start of the day, an 8th level Geokineticist might want to increase their DR from Flesh of Stone because they're expecting to do some dungeon-crawling. By default, they have DR equal to half their level. In this case, DR 4/Adamantine. They accept a 2 points of burn (taking 2 points of non-lethal damage per hit-die), and now they have DR 6/Adamantine from Flesh of Stone. They've also taken 2 points of burn for the day, so now they've got some bonuses from Elemental Overflow already.
It's common practice to invest a few points of burn into your defense wild talent at the start of the day, so you can head straight into the first combat with your Elemental Overflow bonuses ready to go.
The Kineticist is a pretty mechanically unique class, and it certainly requires going through with a fine-toothed comb in order to make sense of it.
Okay, a kineticist can only take as much Burn equal to 3+Constitution modifier.
Note: this limit is mostly because anything more could cause you to instantly pass out.
Each point of burn effectively cancels out 2 con when it comes to HP before being knocked out. You are a d8 class, so you get an average of 4.5 hp per level.
If you max out your burn, adn you don't have things like toughness or favored class bonus, then you would only have 1.5 hp per level. IE- a level 20 character would have 30 hp (...level 2 or 3 barbarians can outclass that).