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So since i will be on vacation for most of next week and will not have time to do any more playtests I want to go over my overall evaluation of the kineticists based on the playtests ive run compared to my initial thoughts here https://paizo.com/threads/rzs43nul?Collecting-my-thoughts
The class is really cool and has a lot of things going for it, but it also has some pretty substantial flaws, both overall and with certain options. going over the latter first. Flame eruption is just worse than all the other early overflows for no good reason, bad damage, bad scaling bad aoe, its just... bad compared to tidal hands, areal boomerang or tremor. also the water critical is just awful, since while splash is valuable, you can never plan for your crit so the chance of it doing more than 1-4 more damage on your target is just luck.
onto deeper problems, this class seems to want to be mobile a lot of its impulses are centered on the kineticist and ideally you want to be bouncing around the map to get into position however they don't have the action economy to do this at all, their offensive overflow impulses are all at least 2+1 actions leading to awkward gaps after you reposition since you have a remarkable lack of one action options leaving you nothing to do but blast, which leads us to the second problem.
Elemental blast kind of sucks, it is just a series of 8 unimpressive martial weapons, fire and air at least have unique attributes but earth and especially water just have nothing going for them that makes the blast interesting to use. Sure they can switch from melee to ranged but the only difference here is that melee does like 2 more damage since you cant afford to invest heavily in strength, and air, oh god that d4 hurts. Can you imagine how sad it made my level 6 players when they crit a high level enemy and got all of 8 damage out of it? The fact that they rely on the same gather elements as your impulses also leads clunkier turns than they need to be. AOO is also a concern but none of the adventure combats i used had aoo in them, so i cant comment how big an issue it is in practice.
overmore, more than any other class i feel kineticist lives or dies by the encounter they find themselves in. Are they in a moderate counter with a ton of -3s or -4s? the kineticist will feast. even if they are against a small group of on or above level characters with low reflex they can have a good time. but if they are against a small group with even moderate reflex, or any single character at all, they just feel worthless since you cannot target other saves meaningfully, and your already low damage gets halved more often then not, and if you are against a solo boss who happens to have high reflex? well at that point the kineticist cannot really do anything at all, which leads me into the biggest point
The damage across the board just isn't good enough, stunning revelation i know but past the very early levels the kineticist will struggle more and more as their damage output lags behind increased enemy hp. now this is true of all classes but the fact that in the time it takes a kineticist to gain between 2.5 to 4.5 damage when using a 3 damage impulse foes have gained 40ish hp its just a feels bad moment when you use your tidal hands, and all three enemies save, taking 9 damage each an doing nothing to actually get them killed any faster.
Now this is not to say I dislike the class, as i said in my previous review the class is cool as hell and a lot of its abilities FEEL good its just you play everything out and realize that at the end of all your cool s!@% you haven't actually accomplished much of anything.
And as for the hot button topic of blasting, in addition to the general injection of interesting that generic blasts need, i hope that we end up with a selection of single target overflow impulses so that kineticists can really go all in on blowing up that one guys face. I am concerned with the kineticist in its current state but hopeful that paizo can salvage it into something that could become one of my favorite classes.
this class seems to want to be mobile a lot of its impulses are centered on the kineticist and ideally you want to be bouncing around the map to get into position however they don't have the action economy to do this at all, their offensive overflow impulses are all at least 2+1 actions leading to awkward gaps after you reposition since you have a remarkable lack of one action options leaving you nothing to do but blast, which leads us to the second problem.
This is a good point. It's nice to have class design make use of the three action economy, which motivates adding the extra action taxes to the class. But a class that focuses on AOE effects is *already* engaging well with the three action economy by heavily incentivizing spending an action to move before unleashing an AOE.
(This also makes it clear that, as is, cone or line AOEs are a lot less attractive to kineticists then "place a burst wherever you want" AOEs. The former almost always require movement to make work, while the latter generally will not.)
A lot could be alieved if they reduced the utility ability into one action.