Zealot instinct

[Staffan Johansson]

Over in one of the other threads, some people expressed a dislike for the "tanky" Champion, and expressed a preference for a Champion that's more about going into places of evil and delivering divine justice than about protecting things - more of a sword than a shield, as it were. It occurred to me that looking past the superficial bits and the name, that actually sounds more like a Barbarian than a Champion, what with "holy fury" and all. So I made up a barbarian instinct for those who like that sort of thing:

Zealot Instinct

Proficiencies
Instead of being trained in Athletics plus 3 + Int skills of your choice, you are trained in Religion, your deity's skill, and 2 + Int skills of your choice.

Anathema
Your anathema depend on the deity you worship. Your alignment must also be one that's appropriate to the deity.

Zealous Rage (Instinct ability)
When you are raging, you can increase your damage from Rage from 2 to 4 and deal damage of an alignment type associated with your deity (so a zealot of Sarenrae could deal good damage, and a zealot or Rovagug could deal chaotic or evil damage). If you do, your Rage action gains the divine and evocation traits as well as the appropriate alignment trait.

You may cast focus spells gained from barbarian feats and abilities while raging.

Specialization Ability
When you use zealous rage, you increase the additional damage from Rage from 4 to 8. If you have greater weapon specialization, instead increase the damage from Rage when using zealous rage from 8 to 16.

Raging Resistance
You resist slashing damage, as well as damage of an alignment type opposed to your deity (chosen when you gain raging resistance).

Healing touch (Feat 6)
Prerequisite: Zealot instinct, good alignment
You learn the lay on hands focus spell. If you don't already have a Focus pool, you gain one.

Deity's Domain (Feat 1) and Advanced Deity's Domain (Feat 8)
As the Champion feats.

Thoughts?

[Samurai]

Not bad, but it seems to me the Spirit Instinct Barbarian could work about as well, and be more generally useful. Spirit Inst. can choose to do Negative or Positive energy damage with a free Ghost Touch ability while raging. That should be very useful against most undead, and can still do negative damage vs living creatures too. The Zealot does alignment damage (something I'm not fond of anyway), which means that non-evil targets would basically be immune to the good Zealot, unless he chooses not to rage against any non-evil targets. And that could take a round or 2 to figure out, depending upon how the GM's descriptions are. I would suggest one of that all his raging damage be multiple damage types. For instance, if he has a Warhammer and Sarenrae's Good Rage, the weapon now does Bludgeoning AND Good damage. If the target can be hurt by/is vulnerable to Good, then the attack does it's full damage with the Vulnerability bonus. If the target can't be hurt by Good damage (It's just a hungry neutral wolf, for instance), it still suffers regular damage because it's a blunt Warhammer.

Also, is this supposed to be a base class option? Id so, why do you hold back the Level 1 Deity's Domain feat to 8th level? And do you ever give the normally 8th level Advanced Deity's Domain?

[Staffan Johansson]

Samurai wrote:

Not bad, but it seems to me the Spirit Instinct Barbarian could work about as well, and be more generally useful.

Well, yes, but it doesn't have the Smiting Hand of God thing going on. The main target audience here is people who think the Champion isn't proactive enough.

Quote:

Spirit Inst. can choose to do Negative or Positive energy damage with a free Ghost Touch ability while raging. That should be very useful against most undead, and can still do negative damage vs living creatures too. The Zealot does alignment damage (something I'm not fond of anyway), which means that non-evil targets would basically be immune to the good Zealot, unless he chooses not to rage against any non-evil targets.

The idea is that it's the extra damage from the rage that's aligned, not the base damage. So if you have a greatsword, Str 18, and Zealous Rage you'll be doing 1d12+4 slashing damage plus 4 aligned damage. And against non-opposed targets, you always have the option of a regular rage instead - as far as I can tell, none of the instincts remove that option.

But yeah, the Spirit barbarian's negative damage is going to be more universally useful. That's why I went with the same damage as a Dragon barbarian instead - I figured aligned damage was more similar to elemental damage than to negative energy damage when it came to resistances/weaknesses.

Also, note that extraplanar creatures with a strong alignment (e.g. angels, devils, demons) almost always have a weakness to the opposite alignment. Dealing aligned damage thus makes the Zealot really good at killing those.

Quote:

Also, is this supposed to be a base class option? Id so, why do you hold back the Level 1 Deity's Domain feat to 8th level? And do you ever give the normally 8th level Advanced Deity's Domain?

You must have misunderstood this bit. I added Deity's Domain as a Feat 1 and Advanced Deity's Domain as a Feat 8, but I didn't want to type them out so I just put them both on the same line. Healing Touch, on the other hand, is at level 6 because most instincts have an optional feat coming online around then, and that felt appropriate.

[Samurai]

It's a homebrew so you can do what you want, but by my reading Barbarians don't have a choice of the type of rage they use.... the Instinct transforms the base rage ability permanently. I have not seen any choice of rage styles, if a Barb wants to rage they have to follow their instincts. But this could be a question for the Devs if they ever set up a Q&A.

[Staffan Johansson]

Samurai wrote:

It's a homebrew so you can do what you want, but by my reading Barbarians don't have a choice of the type of rage they use.... the Instinct transforms the base rage ability permanently. I have not seen any choice of rage styles, if a Barb wants to rage they have to follow their instincts. But this could be a question for the Devs if they ever set up a Q&A.

It varies from instinct to instinct. Looking at the ones in the core book:

Animal: "When you Rage, you gain your chosen animal’s unarmed attack" - not optional.

Dragon: "While raging, you can increase the additional damage from Rage [...] If you do this, your Rage action gains [...]" - this is clearly optional, otherwise it wouldn't say "If you do this".

Fury doesn't have a special rage.

Giant: Tied to their wielding an oversized weapon. Wielding a normal weapon they would deal normal rage damage, but when wielding their oversized stuff it would be non-optional.

Spirit: Same as Dragon. Also optional.

While four instincts (plus the non-instinct Fury) is a bit too small of a sample to be certain, it appears that those instincts which add physical damage are non-optional (animal, giant), while those who add energy damage are optional. I would also say that the choice is made when going into a rage - once the Blue Dragon barbarian charges their sword up, it is going to stay sparkly for the duration of that rage, and if it turns out they're fighting a vrock they're SOL.