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The psychic is a really cool class!
The infinite Eye power of mental scan is awesome. A human starting with versatile heritage to pick up Expert perception and Cooperative Nature has a nasty evil eye to unleash on round one, with a +1 circumstance bonus to attacks and damage rolls against one enemy, for everyone in the party, and learning its weakest save and strongest automatically, AND getting a free seek check rolled into the mix! Oh, yeah, and if you succeed on aid check with your beefed up perception, you give a +2 circumstance bonus to both the attack roll and the damage roll for one ally!
Circumstance bonuses stack with status bonuses meaning that a psychic, a bard and gunslinger or magus walk into a dungeon room, and one boss creature is going to be seriously feeling the pain.
All of this only costs the psychic one action on the first turn, meaning they can intimidate (if they are charisma based) and also probably tack on -1.
I am getting really strong mesmerist vibes out of this build and I really want a chance to playtest. If only time was an object, and I had any of it.
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If I wasn't so immediately drawn to Distant Grasp - Telekinesis is love, telekinesis is life - I'd take Infinite Eye for that cantrip alone. The best on in the playtest by a mile - great action economy and great effects. So good in fact that I could easily see this in the final product completely unchanged.
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I personally wish the esp amps actually felt like esp; mental scan matches this fantasy really well, but the detect magic and guidence amps feel very eh.
Like, if I'm playing an esper, I want to like be able to track people based on their thought signature and such.
Of the base amps out currently, the main ones that stand out is mental scan and message, the other ones just dont scale well or feel super inspiring to me
Mental Scan is awesome, I'd definitely pick it up with a feat at level 6. Just not sure it's worth being saddled with those other psi cantrips and the granted spell list.
The Infinite Eye Psychic is going to be someone that everyone wants hanging around and being the stand up friend. It will probably join the cleric as greatest PC-built NPC ally to have hanging around.
Guidance that takes away crit fails is pretty good.
Status bonuses to saves vs spells is maybe a little situational, but getting it for 3 rounds out of a cantrip, and getting it up to +2 by 5th level is pretty good too.
I think that people might just feel like being limited to having no amp-able offensive spells is too limiting but the Infinite Eye is near bard level of support power...that stacks pretty well with bard support, especially if the bard knows there is an infinite eye in the party.
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Yeah, but you can pretty easily get 5 uses of them every encounter, starting right at level 1.
Physchic focus powers are much more usable than other classes.
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If I'm playing a character with esp, I want to do cool stuff with esp. I'd like stuff like being able to track a specific thought pattern with my esp, or get an imprecise sense or something. Amped detect magic is basically a much more limited lingering inspire defense. The amped guidencr is kinda neat, but still has the 1/hour limitation.
My general preference would be having mind scan basically stay as is, Amped guidence removing the 1/hour limit and increasing the bonus as a heighten effect, and amped detect magic to give you extra senses.
I actually dont really care about infinite eye not having attacks; I just want guidence to have a more dramatic effect then negating a nat 1, and for detect magic to actually feel like esp and not an okayish defense boost
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The psychic is a really cool class!
The infinite Eye power of mental scan is awesome. A human starting with versatile heritage to pick up Expert perception and Cooperative Nature has a nasty evil eye to unleash on round one, with a +1 circumstance bonus to attacks and damage rolls against one enemy, for everyone in the party, and learning its weakest save and strongest automatically, AND getting a free seek check rolled into the mix! Oh, yeah, and if you succeed on aid check with your beefed up perception, you give a +2 circumstance bonus to both the attack roll and the damage roll for one ally!
Circumstance bonuses stack with status bonuses meaning that a psychic, a bard and gunslinger or magus walk into a dungeon room, and one boss creature is going to be seriously feeling the pain.
All of this only costs the psychic one action on the first turn, meaning they can intimidate (if they are charisma based) and also probably tack on -1.
I am getting really strong mesmerist vibes out of this build and I really want a chance to playtest. If only time was an object, and I had any of it.
Are you sure you use a perception check to aid? I've seen people say its an attack roll or a spell attack roll (seeing as it aids an attack roll) but perception check is new.
Are you sure you use a perception check to aid? I've seen people say its an attack roll or a spell attack roll (seeing as it aids an attack roll) but perception check is new.The psychic is a really cool class!
The infinite Eye power of mental scan is awesome. A human starting with versatile heritage to pick up Expert perception and Cooperative Nature has a nasty evil eye to unleash on round one, with a +1 circumstance bonus to attacks and damage rolls against one enemy, for everyone in the party, and learning its weakest save and strongest automatically, AND getting a free seek check rolled into the mix! Oh, yeah, and if you succeed on aid check with your beefed up perception, you give a +2 circumstance bonus to both the attack roll and the damage roll for one ally!
Circumstance bonuses stack with status bonuses meaning that a psychic, a bard and gunslinger or magus walk into a dungeon room, and one boss creature is going to be seriously feeling the pain.
All of this only costs the psychic one action on the first turn, meaning they can intimidate (if they are charisma based) and also probably tack on -1.
I am getting really strong mesmerist vibes out of this build and I really want a chance to playtest. If only time was an object, and I had any of it.
The description of the power, and the fact it grants a seek action made me read it that the power triggers off perception for the aid.
The description of the power, and the fact it grants a seek action made me read it that the power triggers off perception for the aid.
The seek counts as the prep for aid action: that said I could see it being used as the roll much like using the normal roll [an attack roll] also could work. Personally, Perception sounds the best, though you'll need Canny Acumen if you want your Perception to get above Trained.
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Mark Seifter was talking about how you know class design has worked when something *is* balanced but looks 'broken and amazing' (paraphrasing here)
An obvious example would be class feats that allow a draconic barbarian to *become* a dragon.
The issue with the Psychic is that the 'broken' wow factor draw of the class needs to be in its amp cantrips. Because they are picked as a set you give up a *lot* of choice, power and utility for your conscious
mind selection.
...and as it stands a 1d8/spell level version "telekinetic projectile" that's incompatible with metamagic and requiring a spell attack roll doesn't seem like its worth 1-2 level 1 spell slots let alone an 8th or 9th level spells.
The description of the power, and the fact it grants a seek action made me read it that the power triggers off perception for the aid.The seek counts as the prep for aid action: that said I could see it being used as the roll much like using the normal roll [an attack roll] also could work. Personally, Perception sounds the best, though you'll need Canny Acumen if you want your Perception to get above Trained.
Canny Acumen becomes an incredible general feat for the psychic because it is always useful to them, from level 1 to level 20 for perception, but I do think that is probably a mistake.
I like that the infinite eye conscious mind has the most to gain from trying to increase their perception abilities. As people talk about wisdom based psychics, I think the Infinite Eye would push pretty intensely into the OP category if it could just choose Wisdom as its key stat.
The aid action could also probably use a little more explanation in this case because if the DC for the check remains always at 20, human psychics are going to be smashing critical successes pretty consistently by level 7 or 8. If it does key off something that goes to legendary (like their spell attack roll), that is going to turn into quite the bonus.
Mark Seifter was talking about how you know class design has worked when something *is* balanced but looks 'broken and amazing' (paraphrasing here)
An obvious example would be class feats that allow a draconic barbarian to *become* a dragon.
The issue with the Psychic is that the 'broken' wow factor draw of the class needs to be in its amp cantrips. Because they are picked as a set you give up a *lot* of choice, power and utility for your conscious
mind selection....and as it stands a 1d8/spell level version "telekinetic projectile" that's incompatible with metamagic and requiring a spell attack roll doesn't seem like its worth 1-2 level 1 spell slots let alone an 8th or 9th level spells.
The folks at paizo are pretty on top of their math. Getting 5 "better than a cantrip blasts" per fight is probably a pretty close DPR over an adventuring day as a sorcerer blowing throw spell slots at a similar pace. I could see a flat number bonus to all damaging Amped cantrips in the form of something like dangerous sorcery or weapon specialization, but I don't think it needs to be built into the spells themselves.
Adding a +1 damage to psychic cantrips every couple of levels will probably be enough to make enough folks happy without doing anything as obscene as changing the dice of telekinetic projectile to a D10 or D12.
The psychic is interesting because it doesn't nova right away. It really needs a few rounds to build into the combat. A lot of psychics are going to want to focus on being able to evade the enemy for a round or two before unleashing, rather than lead with their powerhouse moves.
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Getting 5 "better than a cantrip blasts" per fight is probably a pretty close DPR over an adventuring day
The issue is less pure math on a blast vs blast ratio and one of choice, agency and cost.
For example say I have to pick between say a Druid and a Psychic.
The Druid can tailor their cantrips to hit every save with a couple left for utility, they get better hp, armour, shield block. They can have an animal companion and have enough spell slots to keep some for things like general healing and Utility. By level 4 they can have 3 focus points.
The Psychic gives all that up for having the option to (initially) tank their AC and cast up to 5 of their comparatively weaker focus powers.
Now compare the Psychic to what Bards get as a package and see if any bard would ever give up their class features, composition cantrips, and 1/3rd of all their spells for the chance to cast an amped 'daze', 'mage hand' or 'telekinetic projectile' an extra 2-3 times per combat?
The folks at paizo are pretty on top of their math. Getting 5 "better than a cantrip blasts" per fight is probably a pretty close DPR over an adventuring day as a sorcerer blowing throw spell slots at a similar pace. I could see a flat number bonus to all damaging Amped cantrips in the form of something like dangerous sorcery or weapon specialization, but I don't think it needs to be built into the spells themselves.
Adding a +1 damage to psychic cantrips every couple of levels will probably be enough to make enough folks happy without doing anything as obscene as changing the dice of telekinetic projectile to a D10 or D12.
This is what Unleash Dark Persona does, but unfortunately that's not available until level 10. If Unleash Focused Intent also applied half it's typical bonus to cantrips, this wouldn't even be a question, buuuuuut it's spell slot only, which for the baked in? Doesn't feel that great when you have A SINGLE spell slot at level 1. Which also sorta precludes them from Wellspring Mage, now that I think about it..... SADNESS!