The more I look at the Kineticist, the more unlikely I think it is that a universal Kineticist will have access to all 6 elements. The intrinsic abilities of the class just get too broad and nebulous when you include wood and metal. I mean, even with just 4 elements, it is a little much when you include the eventual resistance and the immunity, but when you add in adapt element and its scaling and extract element, things are going to get weird and far too open to rampant exploitation without a lot of guidance. Limiting adapt element to non-magical helps, but with metal we are talking about keys, locks, manacles, just about anything mechanical for metal, and for wood, will this include all plant matter?
maybe by themselves, with restrictions about size and what it means to be "loose" (is a link in a chain loose?), it won't be too much, but I just can't imagine one universal gate getting this much narrative flexibility without GMs everywhere cursing the design and all the headaches their players are about to unleash. This is all without even getting into the feats and combat flexibility that having flexible feats that can be switched in 10 minutes between all 6 elements.
So this leaves me wondering if the final plan is for Metal and Wood to only be available as singular gates, with options that cannot really be paired with other elements? Or if there will be a hard set number of maximum gates a Kineticist can tap into? Or if all Kineticist will start as single gates and access to other gates will be restricted to feats, or abilities that take multiple actions to gather elements?
It is really hard to guess what the plan is for the gates because they tie so heavily into all the class features the Kineticist gets. Adding the Elements of Wood and Metal is really cool Thematically, but treating metal and wood as elements in world feels like it going to narratively flip the world of Golarion upside down in many ways, especially if there will now be classes that can manipulate them on a fundamental level. It is just so difficult for me to imagine that + manipulating other elements as well...
Unless I guess the elemental/terrain adaption abilities and resistances and immunities of the class get massively toned down.
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That would be kind of a let down and undermine the themes of dual/universal gates quite a bit. I'm not sure what balance purpose it would serve either.
Beyond that, part of the idea here is to expand the kineticist beyond the basic western mythology regarding elemental forces. Othering wood and metal by making them super special elements you can only use by themselves undermines that and just feels like exoticism.
I feel that metal and wood might start getting their own traits. The metal element getting resistance/immunity to all types of metal would be way too strong and a lot of gm fiat on weapons or armor that isn't very specific on what material they're made of. Similarly with wood element, a lot of weapons are made of a wood, and there a whole category of plant creatures roughly as big as the rest of elementals combined (I haven't even bothered to look to back that up, I'm just assuming).
But introducing a bunch of spells, creatures, and such that interact with those elements isn't too farfetched. Not in a book dedicated to elements.
That would be kind of a let down and undermine the themes of dual/universal gates quite a bit. I'm not sure what balance purpose it would serve either.
Beyond that, part of the idea here is to expand the kineticist beyond the basic western mythology regarding elemental forces. Othering wood and metal by making them super special elements you can only use by themselves undermines that and just feels like exoticism.
Wood and Metal are new elements to the people of Golarion though (I mean not new, new, but new to the people as they have been trapped away for a very long time).
I don't know how much of the Rage of Elements book will be dedicated to integrating Metal and wood as elements, with elemental traits that will either have to exist as something very new to the world, or else the book is going to have to go back and assign traits to spells, creatures, items and probably a lot of feats as well. Maybe elemental wood will just relate to the plant trait and be manageable, but Metal will require a lot of thought not to just completely break the game, since it was not designed before this intervention to consider metal as an elemental building block of the game or of the game world. I am not saying it can't be done, but I am confident that it will have to be done cautiously to prevent breaking the game.
The ability to gain immunity to metal is a pretty big conceptual shift that will require a lot of nuances and exceptions. Will it exclude skymetals? (It probably must).
Maybe Metal and Wood Kineticists spend a little time in world with the Rare tag, since metaphysically the planes were inaccessible until very, very recently, but I don't think many players will love that.
The purpose of this post was to question whether "Universal Gate" was something that was really going to make it into the final draft of class, and I think it could go either way. Either the class will have to shift what you get from it significantly or there will have to be restrictions on how you access all the elements.
The elemental natures side bar on page 8 of the playtest would seem to suggest that anything made primarily of metal is going to fall into the abilities of resistances, immunities, adaption and extraction. That would include a lot of things in Guns and Gears and whole APs are going to have to either ban Kineticists, one or both of these two new elemental gates, or have some pretty big issues to fix.
That is an issue regardless of single/dual/universal gate, but if every universal kineticist can just gather wood, or metal, on top of the other 4 elements they can gather, I am sure Kineticist will become the most banned class in the game very, very quickly.
I just don't think many GMs want to deal with characters that can manipulate worked metal and wood, including gaining resistance to it and eventual immunity to it, especially when there might be a version of a class that gets to pretty much switch between either, as well as every other element, with a single action.
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I feel that metal and wood might start getting their own traits. The metal element getting resistance/immunity to all types of metal would be way too strong and a lot of gm fiat on weapons or armor that isn't very specific on what material they're made of. Similarly with wood element, a lot of weapons are made of a wood, and there a whole category of plant creatures roughly as big as the rest of elementals combined (I haven't even bothered to look to back that up, I'm just assuming).
But introducing a bunch of spells, creatures, and such that interact with those elements isn't too farfetched. Not in a book dedicated to elements.
I too could see metal and wood being introduced as elements that have always been around, but can only be impacted at the elemental level in very limited ways while the influence of the two new elemental planes slowly spreads back out into Golarion. So creatures and things of those planes will strongly be infused with those elements and carry those traits, but things of the Material Plane, so long removed from those planes will not be strong enough in that elemental essence to be as easily shaped and controlled on an elemental level.
This would allow additive inclusion of the metal and wood as elements without having to back track through the entire catalog of released material for considering the balance of adding these traits and how things that interact with them will affect the game.
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There are a lot of completely baseless assumptions required to reach the conclusion you want people to reach here.
Because for all the handwringing about super-immunity, it seems much more plausible that Paizo won't do that (because why would they?) and that resistance to the metal trait or creatures made primarily of metal is actually going to kind of suck because right now that covers lke two types of golem and nothing else at all and who knows how many metal elementals the new book will print.
Aren't you usually the one warning people away from vague, white-room theorycrafting? At least when people do that they're usually references rules that actually exist. Here we're making up a rule that doesn't even remotely align with anything Paizo has ever printed to make the basis of the theorycrafting.
I am sure the goal of design will be to have balanced and fun options.
In the playtest, some folks were already complaining about the breadth of the Universal gate, thinking it was either all powerful, or too hamstrung by its own options. I am sure this was an intentional ambiguity to test in the playtest.
"How much fun do people have with this option?"
One thing missing from the playtest that lots of folks want is more damage options and energy types associated with blasts. I think it is pretty clear that some of the limit on that in this playtest was a result of building for the universal gate to have instant level 1 access to every blast type. If getting additional blasts was something that required feat investment, then what individual blasts can do breadth wise will open up a lot.
I think the playtest was evaluating a number of options and I am not sure how it will work out. The Universal gate doesn't seem to me like something that is absolutely necessary for Kineticist to get access to at level 1.
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I think it is pretty clear that some of the limit on that in this playtest was a result of building for the universal gate to have instant level 1 access to every blast type.
Based on what?
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It seemed clear to me that there would be a trade off on how versatile different blasts could be if one gate could switch between them with an action. I read the playtest as examining how players would feel about different traits with each blast instead of damage types, but I don’t think any of it is super set in stone yet.
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Hey if nixxing universal means stronger blasting then I say chuck it into the sun and be done with it. There's only one avatar and I don't need to be it