The Elementalist: A Kineticist-Inspired Class for Pathfinder 2E

[BACE]

So starting off, here's the link so you can take a look at the class.

If you see any issues (grammar, math, balance, you think a feat has a stupid name), please report it here!

Now, a few words:

I wanted to make a class inspired by 1e's kineticist, but I also didn't want to fall into the trap I had seen a couple other kineticist homebrews fall into: being too faithful to the original. The main issue is that there are a number of people out there who disliked burn as a concept. To fix this, I wanted to create a few different class paths, like the rogue's rackets or the barbarian's instincts, to allow players to get that all-day blaster feel, without being forced into using burn. These paths are called wellsprings, and they are the Conduit (traditional kineticist), Empath, and Naturalist.

The Conduit uses CON as its key ability score, gets access to only a single element, and can use Burn to regain focus points in the heat of battle.

The Empath uses WIS as its key ability score, gets access to three elements, and can only use one at a time. The Empath can switch elements in the middle of a fight, however, in order to target elemental weaknesses.

The Naturalist uses INT as its key ability score, gets access to four elements, and can use two at a time. The Naturalist can choose from among its elements during daily preparations, and later on can learn to emulate features of the other two wellsprings.

I wanted to make a class that pulled a lot of inspiration from the kineticist but was still able to be its own thing, and I'm quite happy with the result. Please let me know what you think, and again, feel free to use the google form to let me know of any issues you might find.

- Infusions were a very fun part of this to design. With the way action economy works in 2e, making most infusion cost focus just feels really bad, so the solution was just to make them take an action instead. By separating out form and substance infusions and specifying that only one of each applies to a blast, there's even a sort of spellcrafting system in the class, allowing a fourth-level kineticist to use their turn doing three blasts, or doing a blast and a cone blast, or doing an empowered cone blast.

- The Elementalist's proficiency progression keeps it mostly in line with martial characters, although it is noticeably lacking any item bonus to attacks. However, getting up to legendary proficiency in spells keeps it just 1 behind a normal martial's to-hit. The versatility of the class and ability to deal various types of energy damage should make up for this though.

You may notice that some things are missing, or at least "missing," from this. These are things I know about and want to tackle in the future, but I'm gonna need time to cool down a bit first.

- Elementalist Dedication. I need to write this up, but I'd rather have the class itself somewhat finished up first. Or at least get some more feedback.

- Kinetic Knight. I believe this was pretty popular among pf1 players, and a kinetic knight archetype of some sort would be a ton of fun to play with, or at least some feats that support it better. As-is, there's no way to really pull off a kinetic knight wielding a blade of elemental energy. Sorry about that.

So yeah, I think that covers just about everything I wanted to talk about. I hope you all enjoy this class, get to use it in your games, and please leave feedback or ask questions if you have any!

[BellyBeard]

I don't see a reason for discover weakness to be secret. The info you get back tells you whether you succeeded or not, since there's no critical failure chance of false info. You also need to know the result to use the followup exploit weakness.

[BACE]

BellyBeard wrote:

I don't see a reason for discover weakness to be secret. The info you get back tells you whether you succeeded or not, since there's no critical failure chance of false info. You also need to know the result to use the followup exploit weakness.

Upon looking over Discover Weakness again, you've made me realize the wording on that was way too ambiguous. The critical failure effect is now

Quote:

The GM picks an element in your repertoire that the target doesn't have a weakness to, and tells you that it has a weakness to that element.

Thanks! That's definitely something I should've noticed sooner.

[nick1wasd]

A handful of critiques

• Drained doesn't actually change the spell roll/DC of any spells cast for anyone, and if you put that in there because Conduits use Con as their casting stat, Drained doesn't actually touch Con, it only changes HP
• I personally think you should dump all drained from the Conduit at the end of the day, and make it unhealable from the Restoration spell, but that's just me
• You don't need the "Success/Critical Success" blocks in all of the blasts, unless they do something special on a crit, since it's automatically assumed they deal double damage
• Whipping Wind can be simplified by stating "You can concealed from ranged attacks" since it's the same effect at the end of the day (and gives counterplay if someone ignores concealed, since baddies will also be this class)
• Dissolve should be blinded until the end of it's next turn on a success, and for 2 turns on a normal fail (because if it's the start of their next turn, they're only blinded when it doesn't matter)
• It would help if there was a way to do piercing/slashing damage in some way, maybe switch up what air and earth do?

With that out of the way... OH MY GOD I LOVE IT HOLYCRAPTHISISAWESOME! *ahem* I love what you've done here, I like the 3 different paths (OG, sorcerer, and wizard) it's a fascinating take on the archetypal bender and I really wanna try it out in my home game. I myself tried a hand at remaking the Kineticist, and this is similar to what I did and better! I see so much care put in to the development of this, and I really hope it gets the refinement it could use, because it's so close to release-level quality it's kind of insane. WELL DONE!

[BACE]

nick1wasd wrote:

A handful of critiques

• Drained doesn't actually change the spell roll/DC of any spells cast for anyone, and if you put that in there because Conduits use Con as their casting stat, Drained doesn't actually touch Con, it only changes HP
• I personally think you should dump all drained from the Conduit at the end of the day, and make it unhealable from the Restoration spell, but that's just me
• You don't need the "Success/Critical Success" blocks in all of the blasts, unless they do something special on a crit, since it's automatically assumed they deal double damage
• Whipping Wind can be simplified by stating "You can concealed from ranged attacks" since it's the same effect at the end of the day (and gives counterplay if someone ignores concealed, since baddies will also be this class)
• Dissolve should be blinded until the end of it's next turn on a success, and for 2 turns on a normal fail (because if it's the start of their next turn, they're only blinded when it doesn't matter)
• It would help if there was a way to do piercing/slashing damage in some way, maybe switch up what air and earth do?

With that out of the way... OH MY GOD I LOVE IT HOLYCRAPTHISISAWESOME! *ahem* I love what you've done here, I like the 3 different paths (OG, sorcerer, and wizard) it's a fascinating take on the archetypal bender and I really wanna try it out in my home game. I myself tried a hand at remaking the Kineticist, and this is similar to what I did and better! I see so much care put in to the development of this, and I really hope it gets the refinement it could use, because it's so close to release-level quality it's kind of insane. WELL DONE!

I'm kind of necroing the thread at this point, but I just came back after kind of checking out of Pathfinder for a while (I burned myself out working on this class. Oops). I'm glad you like it! I plan on making some changes at some point soon and updating the class. I'm curious, have you had an opportunity to playtest this? I haven't unfortunately, so the changes I make won't be too drastic. But I'm curious for any extra feedback you might have. To answer what you posted here...almost a year ago now (oops).

On Drained: So there are a few things here I plan to change and/or have changed in my private copy already. First, I've made the drained unhealable and I've made it stack with drained from other sources, using the Oracle as a baseline (Bones mystery, if I remember correctly). Also, weirdly drained does mess with casting for the Conduit. Link here: https://2e.aonprd.com/Conditions.aspx?ID=10. The relevant bit is "You take a status penalty equal to your drained value on Constitution-based checks, such as Fortitude saves." Which would include spellcasting. Clearing all drained at end of day is an interesting concept that I'll probably consider.

On Success/Crit in all Blast Statblocks: Yep.

On Whipping Winds: Yeah. Yeah, good point. I think originally I used a different DC for the flat check, which is why I didn't just call it "Concealed from ranged weapon attacks" or something like that.

On Dissolve: Oops, yeah, good catch.

On Piercing/Slashing Damage: Yeah, this is something I plan on doing. And maybe giving Aether more of a telekinetic p/b/s cantrip as opposed to the force dart they currently have.

Please give me any more feedback you have! I plan to give it some more love very soon!

[BACE]

Oops. I already went and started work.

For now, all I've really done is update to scribe.pf2.tools. You can check out the new, much more visually appealing version here.

[BACE]

Alright, well, I did it again. I made some more changes to make the class, I think, completely playable, including focus pool increases and other things. Hoping to get some time playtesting in September through the end of the year, and maybe beyond. I should be out of things to mess with, so this should be the "stable" version until I get either more feedback, or some playtesting time of my own!

Here's the latest version, 1.1.1.

[Temperans]

Well the idea is better implemented that the one I saw previous. And I havent seen how legendary games does it.

I will say that I do think I will try to make something a bit closer to kineticist after getting inspired by your class.

[BACE]

Temperans wrote:

Well the idea is better implemented that the one I saw previous. And I havent seen how legendary games does it.

I will say that I do think I will try to make something a bit closer to kineticist after getting inspired by your class.

Thanks for the kind words! Please PM me or something with the class at some point. I would love to see what you come up with.

As for the Elementalist itself, there are still a number of things I want to straighten out and add to the class (perhaps most importantly, a way to actually move matter, which I seem to have missed in my focus on all the combat/numbers stuff). Something like Mage Hand for aether etc.

Besides that, I'm open to any feedback you might have, and I look forward to seeing what you come up with. More kineticist homebrews will always be good in my book. At least until we get the real thing.

[Temperans]

Will do.

[Tavaro Evanis]

BACE wrote:

More kineticist homebrews will always be good in my book. At least until we get the real thing.

Good sir, what you've accomplished here is "the real thing" in my book: an exemplary case of homebrew > RAW.

[BACE]

Tavaro Evanis wrote:

BACE wrote:

More kineticist homebrews will always be good in my book. At least until we get the real thing.

Good sir, what you've accomplished here is "the real thing" in my book: an exemplary case of homebrew > RAW.

I appreciate the kind words! There are definitely things I'm not satisfied with yet, but hopefully I'll get those worked out soon enough.

And the homebrew can't possibly be > RAW, since the RAW doesn't exist yet! Or does that mean it must be better than RAW? Ah, regardless, you get my point. I'm glad you like it!

[Tavaro Evanis]

BACE wrote:

And the homebrew can't possibly be > RAW, since the RAW doesn't exist yet! Or does that mean it must be better than RAW?

Haa yes! That could have been worded more clearly. I intended to emphasize that homebrew in general is often better than published rules.

[Shandyan]

This looks super cool! A few questions:
* the signature ability of the conduit is their burn, which gives them drained in return for an in-combat refocus. While this sounds cool, I don't understand why it's particularly useful for low-level elementalists. You do damage via cantrips (i.e. they don't use focus points), and your only focus point ability is the situational wild retort. It starts helping from level 8 (when you can get the assistance powers) but I'm really not sure why it's helpful before then. Am I missing something here?

* Are the effects of the specialised infusions in addition to doing damage, or instead of? I assume your intent is that e.g. bowling infusion gives you a free Trip attempt as part of rock toss, but it's not worded very well. Does MAP apply, for example? My suggestion would be to use the wording of the fighter feat knockdown:

"Make a basic Blast. If it hits and deals damage, you can attempt an Athletics check to Trip/Shove the creature you hit. Both attacks count toward your multiple attack penalty, but the penalty doesn’t increase until after you’ve made both of them."

If you want to keep it as a separate action to the basic Blast, maybe saying:

"The next time a blast spell you cast hits and deals damage, you can attempt an Athletics check to Trip/Shove/blah the creature you hit. Both attacks count toward your multiple attack penalty, but the penalty doesn’t increase until after you’ve made both of them."

* For the infusion, form and substance traits, is the intent that the most recent form infusion and most recent substance infusion both apply to your next blast, or just the most recent infusion (of either type)?

* If I'm attuned to multiple elements, can I use the specialised infusion to boost the blast of a different element? e.g. can I use Bowling Infusion with Firebolt, or do I have to use Bowling Infusion with Rock Toss?

* If you can apply a substance and a form infusion to the same blast, and if you can apply different elements infusions to other blasts, then electricity is really good. It's the only element with a form infusion, which means you can stack it with the substance infusion for any other element for a super-powerful 3 action blast. Is this intended?

[Daranzerch]

You have done a great job on this class! I have not looked at everything yet, but from what I have reviewed so far it looks a ton more balanced than most other homebrews I have reviewed (including my own). I must agree with nick1wasd this is is basically release ready.