Problems with the Redirection Faculty


Nanocyte Class


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Upon read-through, and with a bit of mock combat, some notable issues with two abilities of the Redirection Faculty have become apparent.

Seeking Strike
Actually setting up Seeking Strike is a lot harder than it would appear at first glance. Because your cloud is relatively small, it's easy for an enemy to simply walk away from it, preventing Seeking Strike from being used.

Reconfiguring your cloud is possible, but that eats up the move action that Seeking Strike requires. What's more, in many cases, you are forced to move with your cloud so as not to cause it to end prematurely, meaning your whole turn is spent setting up your next turn's Seeking Strike, and you have to hope your enemy doesn't just move again.

It seems that Seeking Strike as written is only particularly useful when engaged in melee with an enemy, but in Starfinder, that's not a particularly common occurrence.

Bend Bullet
Bend Bullet is a cool ability, and I can think of lots of applications for it, but it's held back by Seeking Strike's limitations. It turns on when you use Seeking Strike, but does not seem to have any clause requiring you to actually target your nanites' focus. This means it's technically usable to snipe more distant enemies behind cover, but, because it still require some target to select for your nanites' focus, you run into the same limitations above.

This is further exacerbated by the fact that Bend Bullet only applies to weapons formed with your Gear Array. Because Seeking Strike also requires your Cloud Array, you're obligated to use your manifold arrays in order to use Bend Bullet. It's unclear if the effective Nanocyte level reduction has any impact on your Gear Array, but if it does, one would need to make their Gear Array their primary array to keep pace in damage. In such a case their Cloud Array would be even smaller, making it yet harder to use Seeking Shot.

A Final Observation
Overall, there seems to be a pattern in some (but by no means all) Nanocyte mechanics of significant restrictions and complexity for little payoff. I think the class would benefit greatly from a pass-over with the explicit goal of streamlining mechanics and bringing them into closer alignment with existing Starfinder paradigms. Conceptually, the Nanocyte is really interesting, but I think it's currently held back by mechanics that, while flavorful, ultimately make out to be solutions in search of problems.

I also hope none of this comes across as mean-spirited. That's not my intention at all! I really appreciate that Paizo continues to hold these public playtests, and my criticisms of the Nanocyte are by no means intended to be criticisms of the Starfinder team.

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