Oh boy, my favorite (shifter) archetype!
As a Weretouched Shifter I lose access to the second, third, fourth and fifth additional forms. But I keep Chimeric Aspect and Final Aspect? Is there some Errata I can't find or is the archetype just dead?
They "forgot" to replace those class features. So Chimeric Aspect and your Capstone does nothing.
Someone pointed out to me that it replaces ALL of the Aspect improvements, including the Chimeric ones, but the trade off seems pretty lackluster. A bit of DR that most higher level enemies can bypass easily, only one animal form and then Hybrid form. Seeing as the only things I'd get from 6th to 18th is Shifter's Claw, Shifter's Fury upgrades(which are base)and the DR Half lvl/Silver.
The archetype says "alters", not "replaces" when it refers to the Aspect improvements. So you'd still get your Major and Minor form improvements at lv 8 and 15.
The DR/Silver is horrible though. Better to just take the Planar Wild Shape feat as a neutral Shifter to get DR/Good or DR/Evil and energy resistance.*****
The archetype is honestly a design failure. You get everything worth staying for at level 4, which means you should just multiclass the moment you get your Hybrid form. Speaking of, the Hybrid form is amazing. Armor and items doesn't meld, you can still benefit from Use-activated magic items, and you can wield weapons with your opposable thumbs.
What you do is choose Falcon or Deinonychus as your Aspect, and either gain Fly speed or Pounce at level 4 with five natural attacks as you can use Shifter Claws in hybrid form. Then with a moderate wisdom score you should have six uses/hours of Wild Shape per day which is more than enough.
Well, a Weretouched Shifter 4 who multiclasses into any pet class could take Boon Companion as their 5th level feat and get a fully leveled Animal Companion. It's pretty cool to transform into your Hybrid Bear form while riding a Bear companion into battle.
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The archetype is honestly a design failure. You get everything worth staying for at level 4, which means you should just multiclass the moment you get your Hybrid form.
I disagree. It's not the archetype that's a design failure, but the class! Because while it is true that Weretouched is dead after 4th level, vanilla Shifter is dead after 5th level, so the archetype doesn't really change much there. You don't need more than two major aspects unless you expect aquatic combat (one combat form with pounce, and one flying form), and everything else is small numeric bonuses. The next level where you actually gain something that changes how you play (and not just how high a bonus you add to some roll) is 15th level (14th with retraining), when you can take Chimeric Master.
*takes a very deep breath*
There's a section in the ACG about designing classes. Some extracts and how Shifter breaks them:
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Every single Shifter class feature was copied from another class (mainly Druid, Hunter, and Monk), and it's supposed novelity of spell-less shapechanger was already done by Metamorph Alchemist and Beastkin Berserker Barbarian - the later even has the exact same "select one form each at 1st/5th/10th/15th/20th level" feature.
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Shifter is completely overshadowed by Druid (plus the two above mentioned archetypes).
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Without a single new class feature in sight, it's no big surprise that the answer is "neither".
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Half the levels only grant increases to small bonuses, and sometimes nothing at all, so plenty of dead levels.
The problem is not power level - Shifter is already doing relatively well when it comes to raw damage - but it's versatility. In short, what the Shifter is lacking is what I call Character Shaping Choices™.
Such character shaping choices come in three forms:
1) Daily: Mostly spell preparation and the Medium's spirit.
2) On levelup: Spells known, rage powers, etc., doesn't have to be every level up
3) One time: Domains, bloodline etc., mostly done at first level
I don't count feats, skills, and equipment because it should be obvious that options that literally every class can take have to be relatively weak (otherwise almost every character would take them, cf. Leadership for what happens when this rule is broken). I also don't count choices that don't affect playstyle and only grant minor numeric bonuses, such as a Fighter's weapon training.
Archetypes are technically one time choices as well, if these are included depends on what we want to compare.
Naturally, the more choices you can make, the more you can (in general) shape your character. Also, the more often you can make choices, the more flexibility the character can have. Daily choices don't add power over on levelup choices, but they add a lot of flexibility.
The following classes are generally accepted to be the weakest ones in Pathfinder: Fighter, Brawler, Rogue, Cavalier, Samurai, Gunslinger, Swashbuckler, Monk.
Apart from the Rogue *, you'll notice that none of these classes have a daily or on levelup choice **. Cavalier and Samurai have a one time choice at first level, while the others don't get to make any character shaping choices at all. It's also noteworthy that there are no classes lacking daily or on-levelup choices that are generally considered good.
Now, choices don't automatically contain strong options (few rogue talents are better than feats), some fixed class features are fairly powerful as well (like rage), and there are options that offer choices to make on the fly, like wildshape or a Summoner's SLA (not character shaping by definition, but can be very powerful). But if you look at both power level and flexibility, there's almost no getting around having class features that allow character shaping choices fairly often.
*) Whoever thought that a pure martial with medium BAB, no accuracy increasing abilities, d8 HD, and the worst possible saves a PC class can have was a good idea?
**) Fighter got on levelup choices with AAT and AWT, while Monk got on levelup choices with UnMonk's Ki Powers and Style Strikes.
The Shifter get's to make one such choice every five levels, and quite frankly, it's just not enough. Since many aspects are very similar, after the second (combat form + flying form), you basically only get the minor form bonuses, and those aren't even remotely character shaping. The class description say the Shifter can "fuse [forms] together with devastating effect", so where is the class feature for that? A limited use Skill Focus is not helping me be devastating!
We already have "can turn into one type of creature all day long" with Druid and Metamorph (and Agathiel Vigilante), and "can turn into one of the few previously selected animals multiple times per day" with Beastkin Berserker.
On a side note, the oft heared 'solution' of "just give it Druid style wild shape" leads to a class that is a strict downgrade from Druid, i.e. a class that completely breaks the other class design guidelines quoted above.
It is possible to turn the Shifter into a powerful, flexible, and interesting to play (all for a martial, of course) class that abides by the "designing classes" guidelines even with keeping the current chassis (of pre-selected minor/major aspects). One of the biggest complaints about the Shifter is that it's basically a Druid focussed on Wild Shape, but then Wild Shape got nerfed, without gaining anything in return.
That means that if the choices for Wild Shape are limited for Shifter, the individual choices should be stronger, i.e. granting things not normally aviable to a wildshaping character.
Step 1: Make something cool and unigue out of every major form (like Wolverine's rage+powers).*** There's no reason to limit the major forms to what the Beast Shape spells grant.
Step 2: Make the minor forms worthwhile. Can mostly be done by granting a slightly limited form of the unique thing the major form grants.
Step 3: Grant some cool class feature that aren't copy pasted from the druid to increase versatility.****
***) Abilities could be something like Blindsense (short range for minor, larger range for major) for Bat, Pounce for Tiger's minor form, unique poisons (that are actually worth it) for Snake, and so on. Minor forms could also grant movement types.
****) Example: "At 12th level, the Shifter can turn into a major form not selected once per day. Staying in such a form expands one hour of wild shape as normal, after which the Shifter reverts back to her base form. At 17th level, she can use this ability twice per day."
One could specialize their Shifter according to their campaign, and the new ability can help out for that moment where you really need a burrow speed or something. Might even have a lower version for minor forms granted at 7th level.
There are a lot of levels that could use new class features once you stop counting crap like "+1 average damage to one of your attacks". Even the new Shifter's Fury explicitly made to fill dead levels is useless to multiple forms and builds.
I planned on taking a two level dip into Barb or a single level into Furious Guardian for the lesser Atavism Totem for the extra improved bite damage.
That doesn't work, because both Lesser Atavism Totem and Improved Natural Attack are what's called effective size increases, and multiple of those don't stack according to this FAQ.
Other than that I can't really see other many other multiclassing working.
Why not? I can see dozens of classes working, depending on what you want to develop your character into. Multiclassing doesn't have to increase your damage per round, there's plenty of other things that can be gained from multiclassing (like being better at non-combat stuff).
I think you're over looking the ability to be a goblin were-elephant shifter and carry medium creatures on your back as a mount while being a small creature. Surely there's some way to make that as useful as it is silly.
Is the line " A weretouched also counts as being in her natural form for the purpose of determining whether she can extend her shifter claws." meant to imply that natural weapon attacks granted by the hybrid creature shape don't replace their arms? Getting a couple of extra claws on your tiger is probably worth the minor aspects ability.
Is the line " A weretouched also counts as being in her natural form for the purpose of determining whether she can extend her shifter claws." meant to imply that natural weapon attacks granted by the hybrid creature shape don't replace their arms? Getting a couple of extra claws on your tiger is probably worth the minor aspects ability.
Shifter's Claws says "At will, a shifter in her natural form can extend her claws (...)", the bolded part is what the hybrid form thingy refers to. If you have two front limbs, you can only have two claws, that doesn't change. Thus it's only really useful for forms that a) don't occupy the front limps, or b) have alternate natural attacks not possessed by the major aspect. Deinonychus and Falcon are the noteable ones because they can have 5 primary natural attacks this way.
Stag apparently as well with a gore and two hooves. Wouldn't falcon need 2 talons and a bite to get the two bonus claws?
Lion apparently gets no attacks, that's sort of weird.
Stag apparently as well with a gore and two hooves. Wouldn't falcon need 2 talons and a bite to get the two bonus claws?
Stag can get five natural attacks, yes. But two of those (the hooves) are secondary attacks.
The reason why the Falcon can get five natural attacks is because they have "Talon" listed under the "Alternate Natural Attacks" list (from the Wilderness Origins book). So they can choose to get two Talon attacks with their Shifter Claws instead of... Claws.
Lion apparently gets no attacks, that's sort of weird.
It's a newer addition to the Aspects, and they forgot to specify what natural attacks you get. I'd guess that you'd get Bite/Claw/Claw, as the Tiger.
Oh, interesting. I thought this line from alternate natural attacks:
"These alternate natural attacks modify only the damage type of the shifter’s natural attacks and otherwise function exactly as the shifter claws class feature."
meant that it only changed the damage type and you weren't actually making that type of natural attack. And that they still used your hands rather than growing a stinger or wings or what have you.
If it changes the type of natural attack, that makes going fear id rager as a werelephant a pretty good deal. It also makes a 1 level dip in the class pretty potent for natural attackers looking for some odd ball natural attacks like wing strikes or two tails or something.
Oh, interesting. I thought this line from alternate natural attacks (...) meant that it only changed the damage type and you weren't actually making that type of natural attack. And that they still used your hands rather than growing a stinger or wings or what have you.
What I presume they meant is that you still use the damage dice from the class feature, not any other damage dice based on form or the natural attack rules.
Growing a bite attack on your hand (or both hands!) would just be too weird.Lion apparently gets no attacks, that's sort of weird.
Yes, once again, the lack of editing shows. Multiple of the spects in WO omit natural attacks, because apparently Paizo hires writers that don't even read the FAQs for the class they're writing for, and because Paizo stopped giving a f$*# about 1st edition almost two years ago, they don't use content editors anymore.
Bear, Lion, Monkey, Tiger, and Wolverine are the only forms not gaining additional natural attacks in hybrid form compared to animal form, by the way.
If it changes the type of natural attack, that makes going fear id rager as a werelephant a pretty good deal.
I have no idea which body part the slam is supposed to come from. Trunk? Front legs? Bodyslam? It might be possible to get three slams on a Weretouched elephant (and thus elephant would be one of three forms with four primary attacks, the others being owl and, presumably, peafowl).