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Does magical expertise envoy not gain any other skills they can use expertise dice with?
(in general I'm kinda having hard time seeing why you would ever seriously pick magical expertise, so I'm not sure if I'm missing something ^^; You lose a lot for having extremely limited magic, I think you might be better at magic with feats than magical expertise to be honest)
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Yeah it kind of.. ends a lot of the reason for playing an envoy.
Honestly Envoys mostly got hosed in COM.
Combat Expertise Envoy can't do their signature attack with the full range of envoy skills, which blocks them out of several expertise talents.
Magical Expertise Envoy puts their insight skill bonus in direct competition with your group's casters, while gaining exceptionally mediocre spellcasting.
Motivation Expertise completely nerfs your skill bonuses in return for an amount of extra Stamina healing that means less and less as you level up.
As for Polymorphic Disguise... well it's cool, but it's not allowed in Society, so... yeah. Nevermind.
Polymorphic disguise is also doable by morphic skin. (Not sure why its banned, but its so bad people should thank them for steering them away from it)
There's no need to burn half your class abilities on 7k credits and one augmentation slot.
I wonder if its the ability to pick up expertise talents without needing the expertise dice?
The envoy has a problem of being Marginally ok, but it needs ALL of its parts to be OK.
You need skill expertise or you don't have the numbers to be good at skills.
You need expertise talents or you don't have anything unique to do with skills. Some other class with skill focus can equal you till level 8 or 9.
You need your improvisations to do anything in combat, and because the envoy follows the "buy meh thing now so you can buy awesome thing later" paradigm you need all of them (you can MAYBE give up one) to do anything before the end of the campaign or before your level 8 abilities fade intoiselessness at level 10 or 12.
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I despise the "standard action at low level and move action at higher level" thing. You get only a few improvisations, and less if you took an archetype. You often need two improvisations to get to a decent action economy. And then GEM gives envoys wonderful stuff like Perfect Insult and Quick Perfect Insult. Waste your limited number of inspirations for a chance to use a standard action to make a skill check to maybe gain a tiny bonus to two actions that are about as easy as the action required for the bonus. Perfect insult indeed. Foams at mouth.
Polymorphic disguise is also doable by morphic skin. (Not sure why its banned, but its so bad people should thank them for steering them away from it)
Morphic Skin can't give you extra racial traits, movement modes, senses, defenses, etc. Mind you, Polymorphic Disguise is still bad because it's really expensive to get alternate forms to build in flexible repertoire of abilities and you get the level bumps late, but there's plenty of good stuff you can build into a permanent polymorph form.
It's possible to get up to +6 to some skills, for example (draelik +4 enhancement bonus to stealth plus a +2 racial bonus, there may be other combos) that will also stack with skill focus insight bonuses and the size bonus polymorph can give you to dex skills for going smaller than medium.
A 20th level Polymorphic Disguise envoy can have six Polymorph 6 forms to choose from, and that gives you a lot of combat, utility, and skill flexibility. But it's not even decent until level 5 (you an have two forms of Polymorph 2, so two different racial raits) and not good until level 9 (up to three forms of Polymorph 3, each of which can have two racial traits, one of which can be SLA). Probably it's best at lower levels to focus on one PC race and get the bonus ability (check with your GM to see if this can get around the spell's cap on how many racial traits the spell normally can provide).
A Polymorphic Disguise envoy can also be a weirdly useful power armor build, since if you change into a different type than your own (e.g. animal, monstrous humanoid or fey rather than humanoid) your armor disappears from view but still gives you full benefits.
This is also why Polymorphic Serum Mk2 and Mk3 in COM is low key one of the most powerful items in the game (relatively cheap and long duration of hours) and also goes a long way to obsoleting Polymorphic Disguise without full investment at higher levels.
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Foams at mouth.
as one canine to another that tends to make people REALLY trigger happy...