Ok, this thread might be off-topic as it has nothing to do with the mechanics or maths of the class.
Some who have read some of my posts might remember me saying I give a lot of importance to "narrative" aspects of a class/character. I like describe actions and events, while staying true to mechanics. Plus we DO have Pathfinder comics and books.
So here is my question.
What does a Magus, in action, looks like to you ? If you were to see one in a comic, or even a show or movie. What kind of actions would he perform ? The things you'd want to feel you're doing when playing one.
I imagine a ruthless combattant opening the guard of his foe with a disdainful sword strike before grabbing their face and blasting the fool with a point-blank fireball.
Or a methodical master of his craft, dashing between two foes thanks to magic to deliver a Strike imbued with mind rending magic.
So, give some scenarios, scene. Just cool shit you'd imagine a Magus doing. Not the mechanics of how it could work, just the visuals, the pure idea. A lot can come from thoses, from thinking of "how could we make it possible".
a smart fighter that uses magic. casts spells by swinging their weapon. someone who has dedicated his life towards combat but done so via both magic and martial might as opposed to strictly martial the fighter uses. so combat oriented, this seems supported in the lore of the magus.
so where a fighter might be a hammer, magus would be a scalpel. just as damaging if not moreso, provided you apply it correctly.
The horrid figure in dark armor swings his great-axe down at me. I slip lightly under his blade and to the left, sinking low to let his overwhelming blow slide over my head.
Before my foe can recover from the momentum of his swing, my left hand slides over the sword in my hand. I recite a short incantation under my breath and purple arcs of plasma connects the two, charging my weapon with electrical energy.
I pivot on the balls of my feet and slash upwards from below, angling towards the gap in his armor at his armpit. I know that his steel plate will protect him from the cold steel of my sword. It doesn't matter.
His body goes ridgid as the electricity siezes his muscles. His back arcs. The gap between his plates widens and with a twist of my wrist I transform the cut into a thrust, my point slipping easily under his protective suit and into the soft flesh underneath.
A few more sparks go off, causing my foe to convulse once, twice more before the spell is spent and he collapses at my feet. A behemoth of a man brought low by my art.
The remaining two Hellknights look over me with trepidation. A glint of fear in their eyes. I have known enough Hellknights to know that, afraid or not, they will give their lives if that is what their mission calls for them to do.
I intend to make sure of it.
I raise my spell arm and begin to summon up the magics to cast Black Tentacles. They will make for easy targets for my blade while helplessly bound.
Pretty much what you all just said.
My inspiration for Magus has always been first three books Rand Al’Thor, although I guess that’s more of an Eldritch Scion...
The funny thing is that, although the Magus’s iconic ability is Spellstrike, when I envision them, I tend to lean on the dual wielding spell and weapon, which is more similar do Spell Combat, I guess?
Have to admit that now that there is the scroll feat, I added this crazy combatant that keeps asking a squire to throw them another one as they unleash scroll after scroll upon their foes.
I think both dual wielding a spell and weapon and imbuing the spell in the weapon is part of the magus aesthetic. Think Genesis in Crisis Core (tho admitedly he's more of a red mage...)
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Spell Combat was just as iconic for the Magus, Spellstrike was just a lot more flashy with it letting the Spell share the crit.
I'd disaggree, it also allowed to better mix both. Especially with spells giving you multiple spell touch attacks, having them in your weapon over several rounds felt great
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To me, the magus is the apprentice wizard who decided that a life dedicated solely to the arcane was just not for them.
Maybe it was when they realized their master was pushing 80 and hadn't left his tower in 25 years and still hadn't finished his life's work.
Maybe it was when they heard their hometown was recently attacked and realized those cantrips that their master scorned as trifles could have been used to save lives.
Maybe it was when they saw the starry wonder in their classmate's eye as they gushed about one day reaching the heights of arcane knowledge, and realizing that they didn't share that fervor.
Maybe it was that time their studies had ground to a halt and they decided to go out for a run and they realized there was a simple beauty in the way their muscles burned, and that maybe there was more to life than dusty books.
I tend to think of becoming a magus as an extremely personal journey, rather similar to the path toward becoming a monk. You can't force someone to become a magus, nor would you necessarily want to, since it's more efficient to have the wizards focus on being wizards and the fighters on being fighters. A magus is the result of a unique combination of personality traits and training.
To me, a magus is by default:
1. Hard working and dedicated, being able to apply themselves to various forms of study at once.
2. Intelligent, having the minimum faculties to learn arcane magic in the same way a wizard does
3. A pragmatic spellcaster, using their magic at the right moments as necessary rather than as a first instinct
4. A capable martial combatant, even without magic, having trained their bodies extensively.
The visuals and flavor can vary between magi, some casting with one hand while swinging with the other, some using the tip of their blades to trace magic in the air, others preferring to use magic only to augment their physical abilities, and still others preferring to switch between casting from afar and then closing in.
The most important thing is that they're not just fancy swordsmen. They are learned spellcasters, with a spellbook at their side and a years of study under their belt.
I have been playing D&D for a very long time and while the idea of a battle mage or a fighter/wizard has been a fun character concept to me for decades, there were often competing ideas about what that meant. Often times it was just about being able to harness the power of incredible magical combat buffs on a character actually capable of taking advantage of them, but that was always more of a power fantasy of the character that could do everything well, rather than feeling like a necessary niche that a game had a requirement to offer as a single unique class.
3e tried to offer ways of combining these two classes together in a functional manner with prestige classes that let you advance your proficiencies in martial combat and spell casting, (something that was always difficulty to do effectively in past versions of the game),
Then 4e had the sword mage as a single class character that literally wove magic into their martial attacks and it was a really interesting and gripping character idea that first felt worth having as a unique class. It worked well in 4e because of the way that classes were balanced, the developers there could just change the narrative around what the sword mage was doing, and letting it combine magic and martial attacking mechanically without ever really having to make the game balance the idea of martial power and multiple attacks with the mechanics of casting, because that system didn't really have those two things as separate things. Characters just had different kinds of actions, whether they were magical or martial was not especially meaningful.
Alongside this, PF1 was developing a similar idea in the form of the Magus. But the PF1 magus was never that interesting to me as a character because any diminishing of a wizards wizardliness felt like a waste of time and potential and it never really felt like the PF1 magus was anything more than a damage hack for combining damage spell casting with weapon attacking. In PF1 the mechanics of casting and martial combat were so different that the design space was there for exploring their combination, but it just never felt very interesting to me, or rather, narratively, it felt much cooler to figure it out in the form of the inquisitor rather than the magus.
PF2 has opened up the space to make me want to see this space explored in more detail. I really want the magus to do something different than just attack with a weapon and cast spells in the same round.
I want the magus to focus magic through the weapon, but not just have that devolve into a repetitive trick that mimics the 4e sword mage (a fun class, but one tied to the class based actions of that system in a way PF2 is not). I want the class to have a focus on powerful attack based magic, because defensive/buff casting gish is already something that can be done in many different and interesting ways in PF2. While masterfully attacking with a weapon and power attack magic is not something that is currently really possible.
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Ghost Rider, Spawn, Gon/Killua, Genesis from FFVII, Psylocke (ish), and maybe like Nightmare, Ivy, and Cervantes from the Soul Calibur games.
There's probably more examples, but in general someone that mixes magic and martial prowess so that they not only work together, but complement each other into a flavorful "whole" unit.
It seems like a lot of those examples would be something pretty different than a magus narratively. The magus shouldn't be the only character that access the mechanics of combining magic and martial power, but the class that focuses on having learned how to do so. That is a big part of why I want INT to be important to the class.
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It seems like a lot of those examples would be something pretty different than a magus narratively. The magus shouldn't be the only character that access the mechanics of combining magic and martial power, but the class that focuses on having learned how to do so. That is a big part of why I want INT to be important to the class.
Spawn learns how to use his suit, which is a conduit for his powers, but his chains and his axe are both combined with eldritch energy and he does have the ability to use blasts of energy.
Ghost Rider thematically uses both.
Genesis quite literally is a trained soldier that uses both, so not really sure what you mean. He even constantly holds a book, so for all we know Loveless could be a spellbook.
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But in general, "visualize" doesn't mean "perfect mechanical recreation".
"They don't use spellbooks" is hardly a good rebuttal to a visual conception of what a Magus would look like, especially when Magus is such a starkly unrepresented concept in pop culture.
Even in fantasy, most don't use spellbooks and most things aren't "exactly" like a Magus in pop culture because there just aren't a lot of magic+martial fantasy themes in pop culture.
So instead of writing 10 paragraphs about what I thought a Magus would visually be to me, I used some examples of "martial+magic" that fit a similar mold of what I would like to be able to build.
I believe all of the above fighting styles could/should be present in the Magus (at least to some degree, but particularly Genesis and Spawn).
Dr Strange and the other characters from the first one seemed pretty Magus like to me though they mostly fight unarmed.
Elric of Melnibone
A WoW deathknight
Gandalf had a pretty magusy thing going on
Gandalf feels more like a Wizard with fighter multiclass (or dual class rather) than magus, his sword is a pretty much his side-arm xD
Elric of Melnibone is a good find, I feel like he was an inspiration for the iconic magus xD
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Something I often compare Magi to is the Rune Fencer (also sometimes known as Mystic Knight) job from Final Fantasy.
I feel like they both capture the idea of someone skilled in both martial techniques and magic, who can cast a few support spells on them and their team before or during battle, but who focuses most of their time in battle on swinging a weapon with a spell imbued into it.
Something I often compare Magi to is the Rune Fencer (also sometimes known as Mystic Knight) job from Final Fantasy.
Yeah Spell Fencer fits the bill IMO.
It seems like a lot of those examples would be something pretty different than a magus narratively. The magus shouldn't be the only character that access the mechanics of combining magic and martial power, but the class that focuses on having learned how to do so. That is a big part of why I want INT to be important to the class.Spawn learns how to use his suit, which is a conduit for his powers, but his chains and his axe are both combined with eldritch energy and he does have the ability to use blasts of energy.
Ghost Rider thematically uses both.
Genesis quite literally is a trained soldier that uses both, so not really sure what you mean. He even constantly holds a book, so for all we know Loveless could be a spellbook.
_____________But in general, "visualize" doesn't mean "perfect mechanical recreation".
"They don't use spellbooks" is hardly a good rebuttal to a visual conception of what a Magus would look like, especially when Magus is such a starkly unrepresented concept in pop culture.
Even in fantasy, most don't use spellbooks and most things aren't "exactly" like a Magus in pop culture because there just aren't a lot of magic+martial fantasy themes in pop culture.
So instead of writing 10 paragraphs about what I thought a Magus would visually be to me, I used some examples of "martial+magic" that fit a similar mold of what I would like to be able to build.
I believe all of the above fighting styles could/should be present in the Magus (at least to some degree, but particularly Genesis and Spawn).
To me, Spawn really feels like something outside the magus wheelhouse since the powers are gifted from a cosmic force and feels much more like a somewhat twisted take on the champion class (or even a Starfinder Solarion). A more focus power driven martial class that had cantrip focus spells that utilized a similar striking spell mechanic could be really cool, and I am hopeful that the striking spell mechanic will be accessible through MC without a synthesis or be available through an archetype like blessed one that is specifically focused on giving other classes the same mechanical feel.
Spawn isn’t even remotely a good person in any run I’ve ever seen.
Regardless, I’d like to see a meteor hammer/spiked chain and battle axe wielding sustain Magus who funnels his energies into his “suit” body and commands many different magical powers of varying nature.