Kineticist + Alcohol

[AnonMD]

Would a homebrew archetype that adds to a Kineticist's Internal Buffer in the same way a Drunken Master Monk can gain temporary ki points be broken?

[The Sideromancer]

AnonMD wrote:

Would a homebrew archetype that adds to a Kineticist's Internal Buffer in the same way a Drunken Master Monk can gain temporary ki points be broken?

They would be less in control of themselves and their powers, so you could definitely up the burn cost of certain abilities to compensate. Basically, they can charge their battery easier, but it runs out faster.

[John Compton]

The short answer is yes.

The kineticist is carefully balanced around burn and the class's built-in levels of burn management. Providing additional abilities that mitigate burn or remove burn would severely threaten that balance. What you might consider, though is having this alcohol ability replace Gather Power (plus Supercharge) and/or Internal Buffer. Allow it to mitigate a similar amount of burn, but perhaps tinker a little with the timing (and minimize the abusive potential for delayed burn reduction to stack to higher values).

[Sundakan]

For a second opinion:

The short answer is no.

The Kineticist was carefully balanced, but far too restrictively so by Mark. Burn cost is across the board too high for most blasts that incorporate Infusions, particularly when it comes to maxing out your defense early in the day to get your +X weapon equivalent (Elemental Overflow) being almost required to be competitive at mid levels and up.

Dropping the Burn cost for Infusions by 1 across the board would probably do the class well, and coinkidinkily, that's basically the effect that this would have (since Internal Buffer only allows you to use 1 Burn from it per Blast, so making it easier to fill up only changes that much).

The class is solidly low-mid tier in strength, and a small boost like this will be far from unbalancing (hell, if it weren't for the very rare Talent and extra-high level Metakinesis being too strong for at-will use, removing Burn entirely wouldn't unbalance the class, at least IMO).

It also neatly fixes the issue of Internal Buffer basically only being usable every other day. Remove it entirely and replace it with this new version and you're looking at a better class all around.

[Azothath]

dang, and here I thought the answer would be "there's gonna be a hot time in the old town tonight"(drunk kineticist)...

[The Mortonator]

I would err on the side of John's answer. While damage numbers for high optimized campaigns repeatable report the Kineticist is under performing in damage, this doesn't take into account how much "cheaper" they are than damage monsters in terms of resources and their utility abilities.

I would be very careful what type of bonus drinking gives you. Cutting Gather Power for an ability to drink away the Burn from a blast would be fine. Probably even a strict downgrade. Unlimited utility wild talents would break the class though.