Playing an effective blind character?

[Fuzzypaws]

One of my players would like to play a blind healer during one of the playtest scenarios. I would happily work something up for him in any other campaign, but I'm loathe to houserule much during the playtest, because playtest. I know we don't have oracle curses and such yet, but is there something else in the PF2 rules I'm overlooking which could help enable that? I'm having trouble finding anything.

The best I can see without too much houseruling would be a handwave, saying that as long as he picks a divination cantrip like Know Direction as flavor justification, I'll let him behave as though not blind as far as knowing where stuff is.

[Fuzzy-Wuzzy]

Maybe have him take a familiar and always give it speech as one of its abilities? Stipulate that it sits on his shoulder and whispers a running account of things into his ear. He should still suffer heavy penalties in combat IMO, but I'm guessing he planned for that anyway.

[Fuzzypaws]

Fuzzy-Wuzzy wrote:

Maybe have him take a familiar and always give it speech as one of its abilities? Stipulate that it sits on his shoulder and whispers a running account of things into his ear. He should still suffer heavy penalties in combat IMO, but I'm guessing he planned for that anyway.

That could work. I figure the empathic link with a talking familiar providing accurate running commentary would be good enough to remove half of the penalties at least.

And yeah, they were primarily planning on healing / buffing. The latter being something I am concerned about being unsatisfying because of how much it's been scaled back, but we'll see...

[Abyssiensis]

That should work fine, with the minor caveat that single target effects will likely be difficult to apply as nobody can be more than sensed to you. I believe that the targeting issues that this causes also apply to heals and buffs.

You will also likely be flat footed to attacks.

This is balanced out by the immunity to visual effects.
More effective is the use of any area of effect spells as they suffer no penalty from being unable to see your target.

The familiar would work to point out enemies but you would have to spend an action to get them to point out an enemy.
Though I am not sure I believe there is a degree of assumed sensing with hearing anyway.

The familiar becomes more crucial if you decide to be deaf and blind, with some more Gm fiat likely required.