| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I am very curious to see how the new system will handle the hellknight. The Hellknight is a cool, setting specific collection of knightly orders that is tied to specific principles and not a religious affiliation. It also got tied to a prestige class in first edition and so it seems like this setting rich conception of the knight got tossed by the way side by folks picking up the banner of the paladin for mechanically sensible reasons: Making a Paladin was as easy as choosing a class at first level, making a hellknight required dedicating many levels to a build that didn't really exceed what a player would get by staying in the paladin class.
Within the setting of Golarion, the hellknight orders are organized and prevalent enough that it would make a lot more sense to me for a class to make the Hellknight aspirant as feasible and as common a starting character as a religiously driven knight. Personally, I believe this should probably be the basic template class as the paladin and not the fighter, because the hellknight is a dedicated, heavily armored champion of a specific cause, which seems well suited for its own kind of code or anathema.
If necromancer and diviner can manage to both work off of the same basic class chassis, then different versions of the powerfully armored knight should be able to handle it too.
| 4 people marked this as a favorite. |
I said it somewhere before, I think it would function best as universal archetype for PF2. Because Hellknights are not only knights they can also be summoning spellcasters and divine servants and...you get the picture.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I am hoping to see red mantis assassins, lion's blades, hellknights, and more as prestige classes in PF2. I always preferred PrC be tied heavily to flavour while core/base classes are generic. YMMV. /signed
I said it somewhere before, I think it would function best as universal archetype for PF2. Because Hellknights are not only knights they can also be summoning spellcasters and divine servants and...you get the picture.
I am totally down for this idea, I just also want to make sure that the base-heavily armored character is well suited to be what the old hell knight prestige class became, since the coolest mechanical part of that prestige class is its focus on having its own unique armor.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Hellknights rule!!! TOo bad the prestige is extremely garbage.
An archetype to be able to run them from lv1 (We did have Hellknight Armiger before, but just for fighters) would be really cool.
Overall, you only need like 2-3 abilities to get the hellknight "theme" on your char. The fancy heavy armor, Smite/Detect Chaos and something based on the Order/Obedience. Nothing you can't just stick onto a random class for some class feats.
Of course, I would like "Call Armor" to keep existing to still be a Power Ranger.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I'd like a Hellknight Aspirant universal archetype with a well designed set of Hellknight prestige classes.
Ideally you wouldn't need the archetype to get into the prestige class and the archetype would still be useful if the character decided to forgo joining up after all. It would just be the most thematic way to get in or be a former cadet who turned from the path.
I hope that what ever class is the heavy armor class gets really good feat options for punishing foes that critically miss. This seems like such an awesomely hell knight-ish way to fight.
I did read somewhere that certains themes (example was pirate) would be added as archetype which would allow a player to take certain archetype feats (instead of class feats) which would flavor a character as a "pirate".
Could work out pretty well by combining both Hellknight classes and the Fighter-archetype and making it available to a broad variety of classes. Without fidgeting too much with the core balance.
The "star knight" archetype in Starfinder is essentially that game's "Hellknight" archetype if you look at the new planets book. I bet you are gonna see the same thing in PF2E