If it does come, it won't be for several years most likely!
In the meantime, I feel like you can get a close enough substitute with either a witch or sorcerer with Occult tradition.
If you wanted to try your hand at homebrew, using magus chassis, with Occult spontaneous spellcasting, and adding a mix of focus cantrips & focus spells from other classes that seems appropriate, maybe?
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I'd say the features that most contributed to the lack of focus in the mesmerist were Painful Stare and Touch Treatment. Painful Stare is on the list because it's a much larger bonus if you use it - but it's a 3/4 BAB class with no attack boosters, and the damage isn't enough to build around it in most cases (like sneak attack is, the easiest comparison). You definitely can focus on it if you want to make a damaging mesmerist, but for the most part it just comes up if you do happen to attack, otherwise you give the bonus out to someone else, and it feels tacked on (at least in my experience). Touch Treatment feels out-of-focus for a different reason - it's not that it doesn't fit thematically, but it doesn't function off of the stare (like most of the class), and doesn't come in at 1st level like Mesmerist Tricks do. I've never seen anyone build around Touch Treatment - if it happens to come up, it's a cool little bonus. If you were re-writing the 1e class, that'd be where I put my effort in - either incorporating them more closely, or removing them and adding something to the existing features instead.
That being said, 2e is a very different game from 1e. I don't think any of the features discussed above are bad for the mesmerist concept, they just felt a little off in the 1e implementation. As almost all of these would be chosen via Class Feats (I'd imagine Stare would be the main thing that is a class ability, likely as a 1-action focus cantrip), the lack of focus isn't much of an issue. You can have feats - or even class paths if you think they're that thematically weighty - for tricks, touch treatment, painful stare, etc, and let people pick which way they want to go. I think personally I'd probably go with a class feat or two at each option for these, and make it a Class Archetype for Bard right now. The bard chassis is very close to the mesmerist's, and 1-action stare cantrips replacing the compositions would be rather effective, I think.
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I'd say the features that most contributed to the lack of focus in the mesmerist were Painful Stare and Touch Treatment. Painful Stare is on the list because it's a much larger bonus if you use it - but it's a 3/4 BAB class with no attack boosters, and the damage isn't enough to build around it in most cases (like sneak attack is, the easiest comparison). You definitely can focus on it if you want to make a damaging mesmerist, but for the most part it just comes up if you do happen to attack, otherwise you give the bonus out to someone else, and it feels tacked on (at least in my experience). Touch Treatment feels out-of-focus for a different reason - it's not that it doesn't fit thematically, but it doesn't function off of the stare (like most of the class), and doesn't come in at 1st level like Mesmerist Tricks do. I've never seen anyone build around Touch Treatment - if it happens to come up, it's a cool little bonus. If you were re-writing the 1e class, that'd be where I put my effort in - either incorporating them more closely, or removing them and adding something to the existing features instead.
That being said, 2e is a very different game from 1e. I don't think any of the features discussed above are bad for the mesmerist concept, they just felt a little off in the 1e implementation. As almost all of these would be chosen via Class Feats (I'd imagine Stare would be the main thing that is a class ability, likely as a 1-action focus cantrip), the lack of focus isn't much of an issue. You can have feats - or even class paths if you think they're that thematically weighty - for tricks, touch treatment, painful stare, etc, and let people pick which way they want to go. I think personally I'd probably go with a class feat or two at each option for these, and make it a Class Archetype for Bard right now. The bard chassis is very close to the mesmerist's, and 1-action stare cantrips replacing the compositions would be rather effective, I think.
Although the bard seems like the path of least resistance, the whole point of the mesmerist is you were doing the things that you do with a bard without the music and all that. You were like a magical cult leader for example. So the closest builds I've done is through cleric and mystic(in starfinder). I think they could maybe add some feats to a class but architypes have seemed underwhelming to me. I'm not sure why.
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Although the bard seems like the path of least resistance, the whole point of the mesmerist is you were doing the things that you do with a bard without the music and all that. You were like a magical cult leader for example. So the closest builds I've done is through cleric and mystic(in starfinder). I think they could maybe add some feats to a class but architypes have seemed underwhelming to me. I'm not sure why.
To be fair, if you traded out composition spells as a class archetype, and didn't take any bard feats related to performing, you would have no performance-related class features. Though if you're not able to take a good chunk of the base Bard class feats, I definitely do acknowledge it's weird to be based off of the bard, but for a homebrew it's just so much easier than writing the entire class from scratch :P
I'm not sure why archetypes have been underwhelming for you - I've rather enjoyed the variety of capabilities the archetype system (especially the APG archetypes) can add to a character without significantly impacting the effectiveness of their base capabilities. But to each their own!
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Although the bard seems like the path of least resistance, the whole point of the mesmerist is you were doing the things that you do with a bard without the music and all that. You were like a magical cult leader for example. So the closest builds I've done is through cleric and mystic(in starfinder). I think they could maybe add some feats to a class but architypes have seemed underwhelming to me. I'm not sure why.To be fair, if you traded out composition spells as a class archetype, and didn't take any bard feats related to performing, you would have no performance-related class features. Though if you're not able to take a good chunk of the base Bard class feats, I definitely do acknowledge it's weird to be based off of the bard, but for a homebrew it's just so much easier than writing the entire class from scratch :P
I'm not sure why archetypes have been underwhelming for you - I've rather enjoyed the variety of capabilities the archetype system (especially the APG archetypes) can add to a character without significantly impacting the effectiveness of their base capabilities. But to each their own!
Maybe I just don't get how they work.
The potential existence of a psychic spell list is reason enough for Mesmerist to be its own thing - "reverse bard" can definitely be expanded upon enough to be more than a reverse bard.
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The potential existence of a psychic spell list is reason enough for Mesmerist to be its own thing - "reverse bard" can definitely be expanded upon enough to be more than a reverse bard.
Please no. I would even go so far as to say "nonononononono please don't ever do this."
Adding a whole new Spellcasting Tradition/Spell List would be a massive disruption not only of class balance but also the lore. I personally hope we NEVER see psychic powers from Paizo, leave that to 3PP to support.
Psychic powers, I feel, if they're ever published for PF2 should be supported with Focus Spells and Cantrips and NEVER a Spell Slot/Points system, they're thematically too different to play by the same rules and the prospect of creating a whole new Spell list would entail writing 50+ pages of content of Spell Lists and Descriptions alone. That's just WAY too much space taken up in a single book to support at MOST three new Classes, the Sorcerer, Oracle, and Witch. This doesn't even touch on the amount of hassle it would be to try and work this into the core rules governing Magic at large, much less Crafting and also Skill systems.
If they added Psychic Magic as a bolt-on modification of how other existing Spellcasting Traditions/Spell Lists function, I could get behind that as it would be as simple as including rules that have a similar footprint as the various Component Substitution rules that already exist.
Obviously it's just my 2c that I wanted to share and as they say, to each their own.
Uh, I'm not talking about psionics, I'm talking about psychics, which existed in PF1 and are part of the lore. The psychic spell list would simply be an essence pair that isn't in use yet. I'm not gonna argue it wouldn't be a lot of work to bring psychics back but given that they are actively in the setting I'd expect Paizo to have a plan for them the same they have a plan to bring back guns.
I don't think they're thinking about adding a new tradition.
The whole point of us including an occultism wing of magic was to build in room for the occult classes from 1st edition, such as the psychic, even though we knew we weren't going to be putting them in the Core rules. We might tinker and change how some of those classes work if/when we update to 2nd edition, but turning them into a point-based system like psionics isn't something that's really on the table.
From this post.
Anything is possible, but I think it more likely a class might simply access two different traditions than combine two essences into a new tradition.
Uh, I'm not talking about psionics, I'm talking about psychics, which existed in PF1 and are part of the lore. The psychic spell list would simply be an essence pair that isn't in use yet. I'm not gonna argue it wouldn't be a lot of work to bring psychics back but given that they are actively in the setting I'd expect Paizo to have a plan for them the same they have a plan to bring back guns.
It was said by the developers that the plan is to use the Occult list and tradition for when/if they bring psychics classes.
I don't think they're thinking about adding a new tradition.
The whole point of us including an occultism wing of magic was to build in room for the occult classes from 1st edition, such as the psychic, even though we knew we weren't going to be putting them in the Core rules. We might tinker and change how some of those classes work if/when we update to 2nd edition, but turning them into a point-based system like psionics isn't something that's really on the table.From this post.
You know, I could have sworn I remembered the devs teasing about unused essence combinations in the playtest but I guess I was making that up. Fair enough.