Kinetic Aura Balance

[siegfriedliner]

Kinetic Aura especially damaging kinetic auras are mostly pretty weak and situation until 8th level when suddenly they are incrediable with the shape aura ability.

That feels like weird balance to me anyone played auras before and after the feat ?

[Dubious Scholar]

I think we're pretty much all in agreement that Aura Shaping is extremely powerful and basically mandatory for auras. A few auras are basically unusable without it as well... and are available at level 1.

[YuriP]

I made a suggestion in other topic about put it in class chassis.

[Thaago]

Before level 8 the Auras, with the exception of Air's fantastic one, all require being 10 ft away from allies. That can work but is tough and stops flanking for melee characters, which is annoying.

A weird thing is that while Aura Shaping works perfectly with the level 1 auras, it does not work well with the level 4 auras. Because all targets of Aura Shaping have to have the same effect (IE ignore downside or ignore upsides), you can't both exempt allies from the downsides and exempt enemies from the upside at the same time.

Like if you exempt allies from the damage of Dessert Shimmer, enemies are still concealed from your allies (but not from you).

[Unicore]

Earth’s level 1 aura doesn’t require keeping away from allies. There are multiple ways the rest of the team can build to take advantage of rocky difficult terrain. The bigger issue is that it only works against enemies on the ground, for both the difficult terrain and the tremor sense. Invisible enemies seem to fly a lot in PF2.

Fire’s level 1 aura is wonderful for allies. It can be annoying for fighting enemies in melee if you are trying to protect your allies from fire. Desert Shimmer’s damage is low enough to be covered by any variety of ancestry resistance or a second level spell. I’d probably rather get concealment and take 2 points of damage at levels 4,5, and 6 against a solo boss than be excluded.

Water’s 1st level aura is rough for allies only because the damage is so good. It exceeds what allies will keep up with from ancestry resistances, but is still a very good aura.

So when would aura shaping get built in as a class feature and what would it replace? I think it is not universally needed on the current kineticist class to be something mandatory and not a choice.

Obviously, that could change if auras generally get built into the class more, but that pushes the whole class into pretty close range.

[Gaulin]

Some auras can definitely be a pain. Making them 10ft is going to make a lot of kineticists think twice about using them if they're in melee as your flanking buddies might not appreciate them.

Aura shaping raises some questions with how it interacts with some auras as well. Most are straight forward but for things like concealment, I'm not sure if that would count as a benefit you could remove from an enemy?

[Dubious Scholar]

The concealment ones are... awkward, yes. Talk with your GM ultimately, but I think they may need to take a pass on wording those and Aura Shaping to be more clear.

I figure concealment is either a detriment to allies or a benefit to enemies though, so you just need to figure out which mode your GM wants you to use to make things work?

[Sanityfaerie]

Best interpretation: "Being concealed from your enemies" is a benefit. "having your enemies be concealed from you" is a detriment.