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I would love to get a tankier caster, a more "in the fray" caster
What would that look like?
When I think of a tanky caster I think of a spellcasting class with champion dedication or bastion archetype. Or a magus with bastion archetype. Or a warpriest cleric. Or a defense focused eidolon with the spellcasting options.
I guess my curiosity is better expressed as, what would it look like that you couldn't already build and be less tanky than a straight champion?
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I would love to get a tankier caster, a more "in the fray" casterWhat would that look like?
When I think of a tanky caster I think of a spellcasting class with champion dedication or bastion archetype. Or a magus with bastion archetype. Or a warpriest cleric. Or a defense focused eidolon with the spellcasting options.
I guess my curiosity is better expressed as, what would it look like that you couldn't already build and be less tanky than a straight champion?
You could design a caster class around giving touch-range effects with defences to help them be appropriate there without infringing on dedicated tank roles. Brainstorming is likely not going to be super balanced, but something like a 10 (or 8?) hp caster with some way to easily cap out the +5 item/dex bonus to AC, a unique mechanic around delivering curses/debuffs/etc. You could have 3 spell slots and have the power be split between spending your spell slots on it and hex-cantrip like debuffs that require touch range (you'd just need some mechanic that makes them not very good at non-touch range spells to avoid power issues I think), or go for the psychic-level 2 spell slots and have a big focus on your custom curses.
You could also go for blood magic - one that seems quite popular online, from what I've seen. Go for a more barbarian style of tanking via being able to take damage - 10 or 12 hp/level, not having an exceptional AC, ability to get some resistances maybe. When someone within 15ft of you takes damage, you can use a reaction to affect them - could have an option for support by healing/buffing allies with their blood and an option for offence by debuffing/harming enemies with their blood. Potentially could even do something like enchantment magic when you take damage as you use your blood to control them. This one definitely seems like it'd benefit from being a 2 slot/level caster (or maybe even a Wave caster?), maybe even with a reduced DC/attack roll if you've not used their blood to help with balance, and a heavy focus on the unique mechanics.
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I would love to get a tankier caster, a more "in the fray" casterWhat would that look like?
When I think of a tanky caster I think of a spellcasting class with champion dedication or bastion archetype. Or a magus with bastion archetype. Or a warpriest cleric. Or a defense focused eidolon with the spellcasting options.
I guess my curiosity is better expressed as, what would it look like that you couldn't already build and be less tanky than a straight champion?
The Oracle.
No really, hear me out.
Flame has better reflexes and constant concealment. Cosmos has damage reduction. Battle has better armor and eventually fast healing. Life has more hit points and better heals. Bones has better fortitude and strong defensive focus spells. Tempest gets a bonus against ranged attacks and the most common energy attack type.
Except for Ancestor and Lore, all of the mysteries get an immediate (level one) boost to their survivability, and in a way that isn't necessarily just the old "more AC". I think that oddly, the Oracle provides a good benchmark for spellcaster based "tankiness".
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So... tanky caster. It's a bit far off of the current discussion, but I think I see that they're saying here, and it doesn't really fit into the PF2 structure as presented - or at least not all that well.
"Tanky" means that they can take hits, and expect/intend/desire to be up on the front lines. They're more interested in locking the enemy into melee with them than they are in avoiding beign locked.
"Caster" here means that much of their power is in the form of a reasonably flexible stack of daily powers, managed with a spell slot system. When they run out of those (or when they're feeling frugal), they have cantrips to work with.
There's nothing fundamental about these two concepts that makes them incompatible, but there's a lot fo reasons it doesnt' work well in PF2.
- First, and simplest, because there's not a spell list that supports it. We have four spell lists, and they're pretty much all built for ranged/support casters. There's melee options in there, but it's not really the same, and all four of them are fully capable of being played at range. Given the flexibility of casters, that means that it's nto actually possible to hand someone a full set of spell slots and not[i] have them be a fully effective ranged combatant. Thus, one fo the tank downsides (being notably less effective at range) that helps pay for the tank upsides is just gone. At the same time, there's a lot of kinds of spell that you'd want as a caster-tank that just aren't there. Many of the self-buffs, all of the "I am suddenly a vortex that sucks enemies in right next to me and batters them", all of the "I chain this one foe to me and punish them harshly if they dare to attack anyone else" - the kinds of things that tank-casters would want to spend their really potent spells on just aren't all that well-supported by the four spell lists we have.
- Second, because the balance is off. This starts with the "we can't actually give them a full spell list and force them to be melee-primary" but having a full set of slots also means that you have a lot of out-of-combat utility. That's part of your awesomeness budget. It means that in combat, you have a lot more flexibility than martials tend to (less so in PF2 than in most, but it's still true). That's part of the awesomeness budget. The tank combo of "I attract attention and survive it" also takes a chunk of the awesomeness budget. Given that the traditional trade-off for these things is to manage it by taking points off of DPR, what you wind up with at the end is... being really kind of anemic in your ability to deal damage.
So... basically, we don't have a class for a full-on caster tank. [i]That's fixable, but to make it work right, you'd also need a dedicated spell list, with a fair number of spells that don't currently exist. That's... much less likely to happen. It's hard to see where we'd have the thematic space for a 5th major spell list, for one thing, let alone the amount of effort it would require to assemble the thing.
I think the answer is that we basically don't get full purpose-built tank-casters. I'm personally okay with this, but I can see why someone might be a bit unhappy about that.
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I'm not super stoked about having a whole subsection of classes (casters) being relegated to a specific role, and I'm not convinced that casters are so much stronger than Rangers that they need to be at deaths door if an enemy looks at them.
Part of the problem with melee casters (not necessarily even tank) is definitely the spell list. Most all Martials could choose to be ranged characters, but they generally lose out on damage. There are VERY few close range spells, and they are not generally better than ranged ones (at least not for long).
Part of it is the mechanics. Even melee ranged spells trigger AoO. Casters generally have awful saves and miniscule health pools. Maybe that's because of things like Mage armor, blur, fly and invisibility. But if casters are balanced around the flexibility of spell lists, their builds become very rigid. They have enough flexibility to be completely pigeon holed.
I'd love to see the psychic get better health scaling / saves / armor Proficiency. I know the general consensus seems to be that the Bard is overturned in part because he gets that, but I don't understand why that's not baseline. Especially if this is a all day resources caster without as many spell slots.
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I'm not super stoked about having a whole subsection of classes (casters) being relegated to a specific role, and I'm not convinced that casters are so much stronger than Rangers that they need to be at deaths door if an enemy looks at them.
Part of the problem with melee casters (not necessarily even tank) is definitely the spell list. Most all Martials could choose to be ranged characters, but they generally lose out on damage. There are VERY few close range spells, and they are not generally better than ranged ones (at least not for long).
Part of it is the mechanics. Even melee ranged spells trigger AoO. Casters generally have awful saves and miniscule health pools. Maybe that's because of things like Mage armor, blur, fly and invisibility. But if casters are balanced around the flexibility of spell lists, their builds become very rigid. They have enough flexibility to be completely pigeon holed.
I'd love to see the psychic get better health scaling / saves / armor Proficiency. I know the general consensus seems to be that the Bard is overturned in part because he gets that, but I don't understand why that's not baseline. Especially if this is a all day resources caster without as many spell slots.
So... casters get a lot. They get bigger booms, and more flexibiity with their booms. They have much better access to things like area effect than martials do. More to the point, they have quite a lot more flexibility in noncombat ways.
- Int/Wis/Cha have a much stronger set of skills for solving noncombat problems than Str/Dex/Con.
- For something like a Fighter or a Champion, their class gives them almost nothing as far as out-of-combat utility. The Champion gets a few focus spells, mostly useful for healing. The fighter doesn't even get that. On the other side of the martial spectrum, the Rogue and Swashbuckler get some... small to moderate buffs to skills sometimes. (I'll start comparing to Investigator when you do - they pay for their increased noncombat focus by losing out on a fair degree of martial effectiveness)
- Casters get cantrips. You spend one or two on useful combat abilities, and then the rest are... utility. That "utility" has actual value.
- Casters get slotted spells, and it's not likely that you'll spend all of them on combat. Much more likley that you'll keep the top few leves fo direct combat stuff, and fill the lower levels with useful buffs and utility spells. Again, having access to those utility spells has real value.
Basically, barring class feats spent on archetypes, casters can do a bunch of stuff that martials simply cannot do, or cannot do at anythign like as low a level. Martials cannot cause trees to spontaneously grow, they can't transform themselves into birds, they can't instantly clean their clothing or change the flavor of food with a moment's concentration, and they can't summon something truly disposable and have *it* be the one to walk down the innocent-seeming hallway and grab the jade idol off the altar just in case.
So let's talk about "role", then.
- Martials have... basically three roles in combat. They have DPR (generally one target at a time), they have tank/lockdown, and they have debuff (via things like trip/grapple and other skill usage). They might get some battlefield repositioning. Maybe. A bit.
- Casters have DPR, Heals, Buffs, Debuffs, and a bit of terrain control (things like summons and walls). They also often have access to a bit of batlefield repositioning (often more of it than the martials). overall, they're not as good at DPR as martials are, but they're better at debuffing,
Personally, I look at that breakdown, and "pity the poor casters, who are all locked into a single role" isn't really what I'm thinking. I'm certainly not thinking "and therefore we should give them more of the martial's toys".
As far as tying this back in to psychic... the psychic is undertuned. It's a fact. If Paizo is doing it right (and I trust that they are) the psychics have some love coming to them. We could spend some of that love on making them more durable in melee. Do we want that? I don't want that. Ideally, as far as I'm concerned, they'd sink the significant majority of it into making the amp system good - making it something where when someone asks a psychic player why they play a psychic, the standard answer is "Because amps are awesome!"... not "because they're pretty durable for a caster, and have some interesting bits of utility".
Yeah, you're never going to have a magical striker who retains the full versatility of casting without giving up something. Check out the elementalist class archetype. That gives casters buffs their raw damage and battlefield control, but it deprives them or any non-elemental spells. You could make a class archetype that grants tankiness, but you'll lose a lot of your ability to problem solve that separates you from a martial.
Also, if you just want a magical striker who lacks the versatility, Thaumaturge is right there. Everything they do is infusing their weapons with magic power, but they don't do much else.
Or for published stuff, how about the shield magus? They get 8 HP, but also get a shield bonus to saves. If you use your spell slots to focus on tanking there's a lot of ways to buff yourself.
This is getting pretty off topic, but charisma is really good out of combat. Intelligence is OK, though I would be hard pressed to say it's better than dex. Wisdom is pretty much just for healing/perception, but martials generally have higher perception bonuses. Strength martials end up in a similar place to int casters in out of combat utility (ignoring magic, which is potentially quite useful).
As far as magic goes, getting cantrips is fairly easy with non-class feats. Lots of backgrounds / heritages / ancestries get access to useful ones. Using a class feat will net you some scaling cantrips too if you don't plan to use them to attack. A lot of out of combat utility you can pick up from feats.
As for spell slots, perhaps I just don't play to as high a level as others, but if I'm saving my top "few" levels I'm not saving anything for utility until level 7?
Generally speaking, casters can do some fairly cool stuff, like make bridges from nothing, making everyone invisible, flying, making a bunch of limbs just burst out of someone, etc. Etc. And yeah, healing, buffing, de buffing and terrain control are all different and cool ways to support, but what they do feels more defined by their spell list than their class, and they aren't to concerned about their own positioning outside of, don't be next to anything. One divine caster ends up feeling like any other.
So I see where people would lump sorcerer and bard and witch together. I could see why someone might look at the psychic and say, oh, another sorcerer.
But I think the idea of focusing on cantrips is a good way to differentiate it as one of the other big hallmarks of those classes is, we fought a bunch, let's all go to sleep. If you can make a caster that can maintain some level of support / utility through cantrips alone, that's different enough for me, but I would still love to see a caster doing something like leo described.
I also take issue with the idea that 8 health per level and mediocre armor Proficiency is "something that martials do".
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What Sanityfaerie has said through and through.
And to add (and I'm sure people are tired of hearing about this character) but this PFS character is my case and point to expectations.
Without a status or circumstance bonus to AC (which he normally does end up with both), he sits at an AC of 28 at level 9...as a WIZARD. Yeah my HP is low, but I also chose not to grab extra HP options. I could easily have had 18 more HP instead of going for Cleric Ded.
Why ask for something that you can already build?
Which, getting back to the original point, and echoing Sanityfarie, these amps are awesome and have the opportunity to define the Psychic class in a good way. Yes, it will be another spellcaster. Of course it will. It was in PF1, the psionic essentially was, its concept (as stated earlier by a designer) is rooted in this. Whether or not I like that fact is irrelevant now. Constructiveness would be in helping take the new concepts that can define the new class to make it unique.
Which also gets to a previous point of mine, amps that can be applied to any spells cast. Why not allow the current message amp, for a focus point be added to a beneficial spell? Admittedly that seems strong. Maybe separate cantrip amps and slotted spell amps?
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Bard health and armor proficiencies might save me from starting monk and dedicating into psychic but I digress....... amps should definitely be the focus. It's the part of the class that's actually interesting, moreso than proficiencies or spell slots. Focus on what's new for the new class.
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I'd love to see the psychic get better health scaling / saves / armor Proficiency. I know the general consensus seems to be that the Bard is overturned in part because he gets that, but I don't understand why that's not baseline. Especially if this is a all day resources caster without as many spell slots.
I understand wanting a less squishy caster class, but I'm curious why this argument is being put forth specifically in regard to the PSYCHIC class. A Psychic is specifically based on mental discipline, so there's no reason to inherently make them tanks. While you could picture a Psychic having a force field or something, the ability to throw people around with your mind doesn't mean that you can tank much damage.
Also, I don't really feel that casters are defined too strongly by their tradition spell lists, because pretty much every caster class modifies the base spell list in some way based on other choices made during character creation. The Psychic, for example, seems to be strongly defined by the Subconscious Mind and Conscious Mind choices, as much as by the spells laid out on the Occult spell list. (Which, having played a Bard, I'll say is a pretty solid and versatile spell list.) The different spell lists, and the ways that Focus spells are utilized, means that you can easily get two casters of the same class who draw from the same spell list but are radically different in their overall abilities, let alone casters of different classes.
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I think Psychics should get another spell per level to bring them back in line with the normal casters (non-sorc/wiz). What they are currently getting from the cantrips does not seem to balance out with having a max of 2/level/day.
IMO, any change but this one. Making them more like bards is not the answer. They have solid concepts, they should just be expanded upon.