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Each Conscious Mind gets a unique surface psi cantrip, and each can acquire one and onely one from a different Conscious Mind with the 6th level feat Parallel Breakthrough. Using these, with an amp, is probably going to be a major part of your combat routine throughout your career, so knowing which you want as part of your whole Conscious Mind package and which extra one you may want to spend a feat on is important.
Let's discuss/compare.
Distant Grasp provides you with the Telekinetic Rend cantrip. This is a an AOE with modest damage, and you also have an amped Telekinetic Projectile cantrip for slightly higher single target damage. In fact, this Conscious Mind has both of the significant damaging options (LMAO, Daze) until Silent Whisper has a choice to purchase one with an 8th level feat. I don't love Telekinetic Rend, but it seems like a good pickup with Parallel Breakthrough if you're one of the others and want some physical damage.
Infinite Eye is fairly terrible as a Conscious Mind (you are unlikely to ever use Detect Magic and Guidance amps), but the unique Mental Scan has an excellent amp effect and party boost. For one action you can Seek in a 30' cone, pick a target, and automatically, no check required, know the highest and lowest saves (something that those crit succeeding on a Recall Knowledge usually have to bet their GM to give them half of!). But wait, that's not all! Everyone in your party gets a +1 circumstance (not status!) bonus to attacks and damage against it. There's also an aid reaction option to boost one ally's attack by +2, but it's unclear exactly how you do this aid. A spell attack roll? Good luck, it might happen. Overall excellent, and definitely something I could see using multiple times in a combat to help focus spells and attacks on tough targets. I'd take this as a Parallel Breakthrough from either of the other Conscious Minds.
Silent Whisper has the strongest overall package (good bonus spells, great Message single action cantrip amp effect, and situationally useful Daze amp for some party builds), and Nudge Intent is a decent but somewhat fiddly unique cantrip. Tell a target to either cast a spell, strike, or use a skill action, and if they choose not to do it (potentially wasting an action or doing something suboptimal) they basically suffer from Fear with an amp rider of stunned 1 on a fail or crit fail. Pretty great debuff and potential action denial/limitation (few spellcasters want to make a strike, and few anythings want to take a skill action in combat).
I honestly feel that all three of these are pretty useful and defensible. Telekinetic Rend is probably the weakest, but if you have a bunch of scrubs you need to deal out consistent chip damage to without blowing spell slots it has its place, and not everything is a single tough foe to be debuffed and let your allies do all the work.
It is weird, though, that two of the three conscious minds have no real 1st level boosted damage cantrip (again, I don't take amped Daze seriously as a common option), so I imagine Telekinetic Rend does get taken more than I expect.
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A spell attack roll to aid wouldn't be the most terrible thing in the world - by level 8 you'd have +16 (+8 level, +4 expert, +4 stat) to aid, which would be 85% to give the +2 to your whole team. Eventually it would scale to giving +4 to one ally 95% of the time and +2 to the rest. Worse than One For All at helping a single ally, but much better at helping the whole team.
Now if it used your normal attack roll, that would indeed be pretty awful.
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Telekinetic Rend is pretty terrible. Unamped it is much worse than scattering spree, with a similar chance to hit two targets and much worse than EA. Even Amped it is only slightly better than EA and falls behind heavily every 2 levels, if you consider hitting 2 targets, since imo 3 will be rare.
What is interesting to me is that the amped version gives you 2x 5' bursts that do not have to be near each other [unlike scattering spree which is 2 single squares that are adjacent]. This at least give you a better chance to get multiple creatures in the attacks. Add to that that it does 2 types of damage to hit weaknesses and it seems ok.
The base cantrip also seem ok as it's the only cantrip that hits in a burst [9 squares]. It's not as good as electric arc most times but it's a different save [fort] and the other fort cantrips are at most 5' in range and single target.
The guidance one is pretty good, fighting creatures +3/4 means that you have high chance of critically failing the saves that you forced to make, this amp negates that chance completely. Normal fights you defaults to mental scan.
Detect magic one could totally use a change though.
A spell attack roll to aid wouldn't be the most terrible thing in the world - by level 8 you'd have +16 (+8 level, +4 expert, +4 stat) to aid, which would be 85% to give the +2 to your whole team. Eventually it would scale to giving +4 to one ally 95% of the time and +2 to the rest. Worse than One For All at helping a single ally, but much better at helping the whole team.
Now if it used your normal attack roll, that would indeed be pretty awful.
I think the aid bonus is just to one ally, not your whole party.
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guidance is good, but i wish the amp overrode the 1 hour cooldown between uses
This, this, this.
If we're making guidance part of the Infinite Eye, I want the amp to remove the once per hour restriction.
Wait, 9 squares? As far as i know a burst is centered on a corner, so its 4 squares. 9 squares would be an emanation.
Yep, I was thinking of the wrong area.
Guidance is useless, guidance is 1/hour and only lasts a single round, you're not going to predict crit fails that well and unless there's a crit fail it's literally no better than normal guidance.
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Can someone explain Nudge Intent to me, as I see no practical use for it whatsoever? There is no reason for an enemy to decide against just taking the suggested action, since said action can be performed at any time during the turn and you cannot select an action the enemy cannot make. So he just takes the action whenever with no downside whatsoever, resulting in wasted actions and possibly a wasted Amp.
Has someone a practical example for me in which this cantrip is ever useful?
Making a caster with only melee attacks take Strike for example could mean that they need to Stride+Strike or eat the penalty.
IMO the bigger problem is that it triggers on their turn, which means frighten penalties will immediately go down at the end of turn (your team can’t capitalise on them), so in all cases its a worse Fear 1 which is already not an amazing spell merely passable.
The stunned 1 can be nice, but again because it triggers on their turn its not denying reactions - just a single action.
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Can someone explain Nudge Intent to me, as I see no practical use for it whatsoever? There is no reason for an enemy to decide against just taking the suggested action, since said action can be performed at any time during the turn and you cannot select an action the enemy cannot make. So he just takes the action whenever with no downside whatsoever, resulting in wasted actions and possibly a wasted Amp.
Has someone a practical example for me in which this cantrip is ever useful?
It's a terrible version of Command that gives the enemy the choice to take whichever option is least bad for them. It's not lost on cast like Command is, but the 1 minute per foe lockout and the lack of many great targets in most fights make it unlikely you'd want to cast it more than once or twice per day anyway.
Making a caster with only melee attacks take Strike for example could mean that they need to Stride+Strike or eat the penalty.
More likely they throw an improvised weapon as a third action or waste an action Striking an empty square to see if there is an invisible foe there. The only time I'd expect a Stride+Strike would be something like an animal/beast.
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Making a caster with only melee attacks take Strike for example could mean that they need to Stride+Strike or eat the penalty.More likely they throw an improvised weapon as a third action or waste an action Striking an empty square to see if there is an invisible foe there. The only time I'd expect a Stride+Strike would be something like an animal/beast.RAW, you cannot strike thin air or even an object, see: https://2e.aonprd.com/Actions.aspx?ID=89
So he would still need to either strike an ally, stride and strike or pick up a pebble and throw it. But as mentioned, since he is a caster, he just eats the Will save and shrugs off the Frightened 1 like nothing happened.
Undetected: "A creature you're undetected by can guess which square you're in to try targeting you. It must pick a square and attempt an attack." So, YES you can attack a square and attack what might be an undetected creature or might be thin air.
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That's Olympics levels of rules stretching. Who or what exactly is undetected that you are looking for with those strikes, if no-one even hides?
You stated you can't attack "thin air" [squares]: I proved you can, no stretching needed. It doesn't matter if there is a creature or not: all that matters is that there COULD be one. It'd be no different than hearing ghost sounds in a square next to you and you taking a swing: the fact that there is no creature is meaningless. Nudge intent JUST requires an action, A Strike, not that the action is likely to be effective. What if the person using nudge intent is invisible [heightened 4th]? The target isn't allowed to attempt to strike back by swinging at squares?
The fact you can't swing wildly by raw is frankly dumb and I would allow it. Nothing would physically stop you from doing so. This isn't a video game and your character isn't an automated missile guidance system. You can swing a sword into an empty space if you'd like
Just have them attack one of the doubtless thousands of microbes and virii within any given 5ft. cube of air. It meets every requirement and requires zero stretching of the rules.