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So... I'm again trying to dive into the "how do we give the blaster-kineticist fans what they want without taking too much away from everyone else?" and I'm realizing... well, kineticists really do care about their feats, don't they? Like, feats on a kineticist are kind of a big deal, and I'm sure that the full version is going to be even more that way, so why not try to come up with a feat-based answer? In particular, sinking a bunch of your feats into making your elemental blasts cool inherently limits your ability to throw around other impulses, because you don't have as many feats to buy impulses with.
Initially I was shying away from the idea of direct blast-buffing feats, but it's not like they're unprecedented. Alchemist has a bunch of feats that buff bomb-throwing, and there's plenty of other math feats out there.
Of course, there's the classic "just add my conmod in damage" to play with, but it might be interesting to include more interesting stuff in there too. Have a feat for each element that adds a trait/effect/rider for blasts of that element. (Water gets splash damage?) Have metablast feats (some as free actions, some not) that toss useful effects on there. Possibly rebuild some/all the existing blast multiattack feats as metablast feats so that the balance is more maintainable. In general, make space for reasonable builds that spend about half of their class feats on cranking their elemental blasts specifically, primarily as single-target attacks, and wind up actually satisfying the "direct damage elemental blaster" fantasy.
...and the bit where archetyped feats come in at twice the level will help deal with the potentially feelsbad "fighters are better elemental blasters than kineticists are" issue, too.
So... thoughts?
The alchemist has an advantage when using this concept of blast-buffing feats that's the fact the Advanced Alchemy reagents system gives it a independent source of different "blasts" without consume the char's class feats. This give free space to use feats to do things like Calculated Splash.
But kineticist doesn't have such free space. It's feats slots dispute space with Elemental Impulses and bonus/modification Feats. A good example is Stoke Element that dispute the level 6 feat slot with others Elemental Feats of the same level.
In order to add boost feats the class will need to give extra impulses in some other way to prevent an excessive dispute for feat slots or the inverse, these boosts need to come from chassis directly allowing feats to be used more freely to take Elemental Impulses.
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The alchemist has an advantage when using this concept of blast-buffing feats that's the fact the Advanced Alchemy reagents system gives it a independent source of different "blasts" without consume the char's class feats. This give free space to use feats to do things like Calculated Splash.
But kineticist doesn't have such free space. It's feats slots dispute space with Elemental Impulses and bonus/modification Feats. A good example is Stoke Element that dispute the level 6 feat slot with others Elemental Feats of the same level.In order to add boost feats the class will need to give extra impulses in some other way to prevent an excessive dispute for feat slots or the inverse, these boosts need to come from chassis directly allowing feats to be used more freely to take Elemental Impulses.
I think SanityFaerie's point is that choosing to focus on blasting should be possible, but only at the cost of not getting to do much else with the Kineticist feats. Since all of the utility powers are self-contained in a single feat, it defeats the purpose of making a choice if a kineticist can pick up as many utility feats as they really want, but otherwise be the best blastiest blaster in the game.
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The alchemist has an advantage when using this concept of blast-buffing feats that's the fact the Advanced Alchemy reagents system gives it a independent source of different "blasts" without consume the char's class feats. This give free space to use feats to do things like Calculated Splash.
But kineticist doesn't have such free space. It's feats slots dispute space with Elemental Impulses and bonus/modification Feats. A good example is Stoke Element that dispute the level 6 feat slot with others Elemental Feats of the same level.In order to add boost feats the class will need to give extra impulses in some other way to prevent an excessive dispute for feat slots or the inverse, these boosts need to come from chassis directly allowing feats to be used more freely to take Elemental Impulses.
No, you're missing it. That resource strain is exactly the point.
WE have two images for the Kineticist. One wants to be effective as a (largely single-target) elemental blaster. The other likes having lots of utility and area effect and controllery powers. For balance reasons, we don't get to have both.
So we open up a number of feats for directly augmenting the elemental blasts. If you take all of them, you wind up with nice, beefy elemental blasts that primarily focus on a single target and maybe occasionally have nice riders. On the other hand, you've given up a lot of that utility, because you don't have the feats to take all that many non-blast impulses, and you certainly don't have enough to take both the impulses and the feats that support them and make them efficient. If you take none of them, you can get a decent stack of utility and control impulses, and you can get the support feats to really make them shine, but your elemental blast winds up being a bit anemic - something to use when you happen to have a free action that you're not using otherwise, rather than a major part of your rotation.
We're not allowed to have All The Things. Asking to have everything all at once isn't going to get us anything at all. The idea here is to work with the designers, to come up with ways to get the things that are going to make the class fun and satisfying to play for a variety of people while *not* just grabbing at cool stuff until all the other classes start looking weak by comparison.
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We're not allowed to have All The Things.
Which is a reasonable point if the kineticist is already in a perfect place to begin with. Is kineticist blasting at a baseline in a perfectly solid pace is? I don't really think so.
Beyond that, I'm not sure how practical this type of solution is. You're describing a character spending a significant chunk, if not almost all, of their feats on blasting. How strong are you willing to let a character like that be?
A kineticist who spends all their feats just to end up on par with everyone else would feel terrible. But it doesn't seem reasonable (or likely for Paizo to even try) to make this 'dedicated baster' outpace both spellcasters and martials either, even if that would be more 'fair' to what's being proposed.
It just seems kind of antithetical to PF2 feat design to make this a significant chunk of the class.
Maybe like, one low level feat, maybe a few more new blast options like barrage or chain blast, but.
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Yea fusion blast being scaled, gate agnostic, and low level seems like the most painless way to get the blasting a lot of people would want. Just gimme a lvl one power attack for my fire kineticist and I'll be quiet
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Yea fusion blast being scaled, gate agnostic, and low level seems like the most painless way to get the blasting a lot of people would want. Just gimme a lvl one power attack for my fire kineticist and I'll be quiet
Fusion blast scales better than power attack. It gets extra dice with each striking rune upgrade.
We haven’t even seen all blast types yet, and there very well could be some feats for adding some energy types or different kinds of damage still in the works.
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Initially I was shying away from the idea of direct blast-buffing feats, but it's not like they're unprecedented. Alchemist has a bunch of feats that buff bomb-throwing, and there's plenty of other math feats out there.
The alchemist is really not the best example we have of well designed class. Specially when you take one of its main issues and use it as an example of what to do with a Kineticist.
I think a good way to improve blasts is to tie it to the number of elemental gates you have. This could increase the attractiveness of single-gate Kineticists and can be controlled by granting a specific benefit. It also balances out the fact they trade the versatility of manipulating several elements (the current clearly best way of play a Kineticist).
Can we just not bring up the worst class, at all? The Kineticist doesn't deserves that and we definitely do not need yet another class designed like the Alchemist was.
Yea fusion blast being scaled, gate agnostic, and low level seems like the most painless way to get the blasting a lot of people would want. Just gimme a lvl one power attack for my fire kineticist and I'll be quietFusion blast scales better than power attack. It gets extra dice with each striking rune upgrade.
Yea I don't need it to be as good as fusion blast. Just more dice than a regular hit (like power attack) but still inferior to two strikes landing (like power attack). When I said scaled I really should have said balanced accordingly. That's all I really want from a kineticist as far as chunking boss health goes. Just a beefy two action activity would be enough for a lot of the single target crowd (imo).
We're not allowed to have All The Things.Which is a reasonable point if the kineticist is already in a perfect place to begin with. Is kineticist blasting at a baseline in a perfectly solid pace is? I don't really think so.
Beyond that, I'm not sure how practical this type of solution is. You're describing a character spending a significant chunk, if not almost all, of their feats on blasting. How strong are you willing to let a character like that be?
A kineticist who spends all their feats just to end up on par with everyone else would feel terrible. But it doesn't seem reasonable (or likely for Paizo to even try) to make this 'dedicated baster' outpace both spellcasters and martials either, even if that would be more 'fair' to what's being proposed.
It just seems kind of antithetical to PF2 feat design to make this a significant chunk of the class.
Maybe like, one low level feat, maybe a few more new blast options like barrage or chain blast, but.
I do mean "a significant chunk" rather than "almost all". Like I said before, I'm suggesting that a kineticist that went hard into this might expect to spend about half of their feats on it.
As far as the "perfect place to begin with" goes... I have faith that Paizo is going to look at the feedback they receive elsewhere and get a good idea of where to balance things at overall. I don't think I can really contribute on that front. This is purely meant as thought on how to tweak the balance that we're given.
Basically, there are two very different ideas for what people want the kineticist to be. We have people who want to be at least comparable with a dedicated fighter with a shortbow (except dealing elemental damage type of choice). We have people who would happily discard elemental blast entirely in order to play with the more interesting impulses. I was actually favorably impressed with how close the playtest came to serving both masters on that one, but it's not there yet.
As for how good would I let it be? Well, a dedicated archer ranger or bow fighter is already spending almost all of their build resources on "damage the enemy at range", and those ought to be solid, viable, not-wrong builds. There's no way that we're going to get anything that looks decent as a kineticist to be as focused as they are, so I'd say clocking in a bit under what they can pull... with the remainder made up of the various bits of kineticist utility that are going to come with even the most dedicated blaster. It'll probably be the case that their blast effects are going to be a touch heavier on the interesting controllery stuff (ongoing damage, pins, knockdowns, pushes, or whatever) and correspondingly a bit lighter on the raw hit/dam, but still getting reasonably close - close enough that you can look at them and agree that they are a single-target damage specialist.
That would be the "all the feats" version, anyway. The "half of the feats" version would be losing a bit more, because that other half of the feats would be offering extra utility/options/etc. Still, the results should be respectable.
...and no, I don't think it would be "fair" to allow the kineticist (who does get some utility on the side) to outpace or even match a dedicated all-in fighter on direct damage. It wouldn't be fair to the fighter at all. Similarly, it wouldn't be fair to let the "all-day" specialist outpace or even match a caster who was actively burning their highest-level spell slots as fast as they could. You gotta accept the downsides that go with your upsides.
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...and no, I don't think it would be "fair" to allow the kineticist (who does get some utility on the side) to outpace or even match a dedicated all-in fighter on direct damage. It wouldn't be fair to the fighter at all.
That gets to the crux of why this is a bad idea. It's instinctively 'unfair' for the kineticist to ever outpace (or probably even keep up with) a fighter or ranger.
But the kineticist in question you've described is a character who has devoted a fast chunk of their resources into just trying to keep up. Depending on how frontloaded it is, they might not have a free feat until midway through the game.
The fighter or ranger, meanwhile, can get away with spending like 1-2 feats and still be pretty much at full effectiveness as a martial. This is by design, because lengthy feat trees just to make builds work are something Paizo wanted to get away from after PF1.
The rest of those feats could go entirely into utility or archetypes or whatever they want. There's more room to invest in skills or secondary features (and frankly, better statlines for utility too since Con doesn't feed into anything outside of combat).
There's a reason why pretty much every class in the game has only a couple of critical feats and then a lot of situationally useful but not ubiquitous options surrounding that.
...and no, I don't think it would be "fair" to allow the kineticist (who does get some utility on the side) to outpace or even match a dedicated all-in fighter on direct damage. It wouldn't be fair to the fighter at all.That gets to the crux of why this is a bad idea. It's instinctively 'unfair' for the kineticist to ever outpace (or probably even keep up with) a fighter or ranger.
But the kineticist in question you've described is a character who has devoted a fast chunk of their resources into just trying to keep up. Depending on how frontloaded it is, they might not have a free feat until midway through the game.
The fighter or ranger, meanwhile, can get away with spending like 1-2 feats and still be pretty much at full effectiveness as a martial. This is by design, because lengthy feat trees just to make builds work are something Paizo wanted to get away from after PF1.
The rest of those feats could go entirely into utility or archetypes or whatever they want. There's more room to invest in skills or secondary features (and frankly, better statlines for utility too since Con doesn't feed into anything outside of combat).There's a reason why pretty much every class in the game has only a couple of critical feats and then a lot of situationally useful but not ubiquitous options surrounding that.
It is already part of the kineticist balance that their feats are worth more to them than some of the core classes. They're not alone. Summoner feats are worth more too. There are Champion builds that don't have as many feats as they'd want to finish out their builds. Fighters... fighters look pretty midrange, by that scale. They get more from their feats than, say, wizards, but they don't really compare with Summoners - not for those folks who want to really buff out their eidolons.
So the question isn't "Do I have the spare feats to take up a hobby as an Eldritch Researcher?" because you don't, and you wouldn't anyway. The question is which kineticist feats you're taking with your precious, precious feat stack. In a very real way, for the kineticist, that feat stack *is* their class, or at least most of it, just like the set of spells known and associated spell slots are most of the class of the wizard or sorcerer. A wizard who spends every class feat they can on various archetypes is still a fully functional wizard. A kineticist who does the same... isn't, really.
So for the kineticist, class feats are coin to be spent at the kineticist store. Effectively, you get to buy your class one bit at a time. Personally, I like that. I'm not saying that it's ideal, necessarily. Certainly, for parity, it might be nice if kineticists could afford to invest in archetypes just like everyone else does... but it is what it is.
So now we have two groups of people walking up to the aforementioned kineticist store. One wants to be really good at focused attacks on single targets (damage, yes, but possibly debuffs and such as well). The other is far less interested. Why *shouldn't* they be buying (or not buying) the tings that they want with the coin they're spending on the rest of what makes the class go?
Now, do I know what the exact breakdown should be on how many feats it should take and how well the result should be able to compete with a fighter with a bow and so one and so forth? No. I've never pretended to. At the same time, I look at the fundamental implied premise of the opposing viewpoint - that the people who want to focus primarily on elemental blast should be required to have nearly the same number of other impulses as everyone else (and have to pay for them in the overall balance budget) and the people who really like the other impulses and don't care about elemental blast should be required to have an elemental blast that's just as good as the elemental blasters get (and have to pay for it in the overall balance budget) and it seems ludicrous. Why should we have to dilute ourselves like that? Why not let people specialize in the direction they want on that particular matter?
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....
so what you are suggesting is that kineticists should be allowed, if they give up their utility, and aoe feats and any real hope of ever taking an archetype, to be granted the option of being a worse fighter with a shortbow and 0 bow feats, am i understanding correctly? this would actually be a somewhat amusing outcome since shortbow fighter out damaged a focused blaster kineticist at all levels post like... 3 in pf1 too
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....so what you are suggesting is that kineticists should be allowed, if they give up their utility, and aoe feats and any real hope of ever taking an archetype, to be granted the option of being a worse fighter with a shortbow and 0 bow feats, am i understanding correctly? this would actually be a somewhat amusing outcome since shortbow fighter out damaged a focused blaster kineticist at all levels post like... 3 in pf1 too
Not quite. What Sanity is proposing is a kineticist build that allows you to be slightly worse than a fighter with a shortbow that has sunk all or nearly all of their feats into an archery build. Or I suppose simply an equal number of feats. That a fighter would be able to pick up more archery feats might help ensure they stay on top if they really want to.
Which seems reasonable enough to me. Granted, I've been arguing for the same, so perhaps I'm biased.
Edit: and speaking of bias, I actually like the design of splash on the alchemist. Dealing chip damage doesn't bother me a bit; it is actually somewhat preferable for me to be constantly chipping instead of occasionally wtfpwn critting and whiffing a fair amount (this is likely related to ADHD, so I'm really, truly, not lying when I say that). And the fact is, dealing at least chip damage on a miss is the easiest way to simultaneously address both the Solo Boss issue all offstat martials face, as well as yanking up the average damage while not increasing the top end damage.
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....so what you are suggesting is that kineticists should be allowed, if they give up their utility, and aoe feats and any real hope of ever taking an archetype, to be granted the option of being a worse fighter with a shortbow and 0 bow feats, am i understanding correctly? this would actually be a somewhat amusing outcome since shortbow fighter out damaged a focused blaster kineticist at all levels post like... 3 in pf1 too
No. I'm not. If you sell off all of the utility, there's no reason (balance-wise) to play a kineticist at all. I'm proposing the existence of a build that will near (but not match) a fighter that's invested in appropriate bow feats, while retaining enough other feats to have greater utility/AOE/etc but not as much as the kineticist who's focused on such things. Stuff is supposed to balance, you know?
Let's look at what a "blaster kineticist" gets inherently, for just a moment
- They've got a melee and a ranged option (both good) that they can wield with equal skill. Having additional elements gives them more options with meaningfully different threat profiles, readily accessible. (The fighter is significantly less effective when fighting with anything other than their specific chosen weapon, and at higher levels needs to spend additional money to make it viable at all.)
- They're not as inherently tanky as a fighter, but they're not bad, and with a bit of effort they can get reasonably close.
- They have a variety of built-in kineticist advantages that show up as they level. Most of this is ribbon powers or nice little bits of utility. This also gets better as you add more elements. (fighter does nto get this sort of thing)
- To the degree they have spare feats that they're not spending on making their core combat abilities better, they can spend them on either archetypes or magical superpowers (as compared to the fighter, who can only spend them on archetypes).
Now, if you take away all of their feats, the results are... bad. Having access to the kineticist superpower store is a big part of the value proposition of the kineticist, after all. At the same time, if you let a kineticist that spends three feats on blasting nearly equal a fighter who's spent three feats on bow, that's deeply unfair to the fighter, who does not have the opportunity to buy elemental superpowers (and who also doesn't have the flexibility in attack profiles that the kineticist does).
I'm going to say it again. I don't know what the right balance point is. I have a great deal of respect for the ability of Paizo employees to create balanced character classes and I am not one of them. Still, people keep poking me for this, so fine. I'll guess. I'd suggest a situation where a blaster kineticist might want to spend about 6 feats over the course of their career on getting good with the blasting (as compared to the about 4 of the bow fighter - a stance, Double Shot, Triple Shot, and Impossible Volley) plus maybe one more for people who are not universalists. In return they should get an attack profile that's somewhat weaker than but notably more flexible than the one that the fighters are slinging around, and possibly with an extra side benefit or two. That's my guess.
Worth noting here that any given nonhuman nonhalfling kineticist will get 13 class feats over the course of their career from their core (two flexible) on top ofthe 1-3 lvl 1 feats they get from their gate. Most classes get... 10-11. 13+ gives you plenty of space to spend 6 and still have enough left over to do other interesting things.
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The core of fighting as a martial spellcaster is Striking and using a non-attack spell.
The kineticist feels like it wants to be a martial spellcaster with impulse feats instead of spells. However, it doesn't have the options and numbers to make this work. I feel so much could be fixed if the kineticist got offensive impulses with a similar power/effect as an offensive cantrip and have overflow be an optional buff.
When playing the kineticist, I kept wishing I had scattered scree or electric arc that did fire damage, instead of Flame Eruption.