"Bell, Book, and Candle", "Sabrina the Teenage Witch", and "Kiki's Delivery Service" all come to mind for more recent sources. Folklore about witches is where familiars actually come from, so it's not surprising that Witch would be a class that focuses on them.What would be an example of a familiar in a book or movie?
I don't know many casters or witches that have familiars. I've seen a few having black cats or wizards having some homunculus, but where did the witch having a familiar come from? What is the literary or media source? Even in most modern witch stories, the familiar is not common as near as I can tell.
They all had familiars?
I do recall Bewitched when I was young and I don't recall Samantha having a familiar. No familiar for Harry Potter. I watched that movie The Witch with Anya Taylor-Joy and I don't recall a familiar, though the Black Goat played a prominent role.
Though one of the more horrifying familiars I can recall from a witch was H.P. Lovecraft's Dreams in a Witchouse. Brown Jenkin was the human-faced rat familiar. He was way more brutal than any PF2 familiar. Brown Jenkin was horrifying and you did not want the witch sending Brown Jenkin after you. If they made the witch familiar like Brown Jenkin, now that would be a fun familiar. Brown Jenkin was not the fun, role-play familiar of little consequence found in PF2, but a horrifying manifestation of the witch patron's power.
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Familiar flanking? What? Let the familiar get into to range to be hit, make saves against gazes and auras, and get wiped out within a round? That doesn't sound like a good idea. That sounds like a designer who doesn't grasp how the game is played because you don't want your familiar within range of creatures. The witch plays the game at range, not in melee combat where the 6 hit point caster defenses get shredded.
This sounds like more, "Sounds cool, plays badly" design, which I absolutely despise.
They need to think about how a class plays and stop getting clever with classes that should not be in or close to melee, much less their familiar being a flanking partner within range of getting killed or maimed quickly.
I really wish the designers would think about how something plays during the game rather than flavor mechanics that are going to make a class seem unintelligently designed and powers that leave you shaking your head not wanting to touch them because they'll make you less good at your class or you're a bad class.
Test these design decisions in combat against other classes and see the operational issues across the levels.
Maybe we should wait to see what they've actually come up with, instead of telling them they don't know what they're doing.
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I recently started re-reading Steven Brust's excellent "Vlad Taltos" series. Vlad is, among other things, a witch. His familiar is Loiosh, a jhereg (a winged reptile with a poisonous bite). They communicate telepathically. Loiosh has distracted attackers. He survives this by not getting hit. :-)
Loiosh is pretty smart too, and has a rather sarcastic sense of humor -- as does Vlad.
Maybe we should wait to see what they've actually come up with, instead of telling them they don't know what they're doing.Familiar flanking? What? Let the familiar get into to range to be hit, make saves against gazes and auras, and get wiped out within a round? That doesn't sound like a good idea. That sounds like a designer who doesn't grasp how the game is played because you don't want your familiar within range of creatures. The witch plays the game at range, not in melee combat where the 6 hit point caster defenses get shredded.
This sounds like more, "Sounds cool, plays badly" design, which I absolutely despise.
They need to think about how a class plays and stop getting clever with classes that should not be in or close to melee, much less their familiar being a flanking partner within range of getting killed or maimed quickly.
I really wish the designers would think about how something plays during the game rather than flavor mechanics that are going to make a class seem unintelligently designed and powers that leave you shaking your head not wanting to touch them because they'll make you less good at your class or you're a bad class.
Test these design decisions in combat against other classes and see the operational issues across the levels.
We have not much choice but to wait. I hope the design is more like post-APG caster classes that seem to have been designed with combat effectiveness in mind as part of the chassis.
They all had familiars?
I do recall Bewitched when I was young and I don't recall Samantha having a familiar. No familiar for Harry Potter. I watched that movie The Witch with Anya Taylor-Joy and I don't recall a familiar, though the Black Goat played a prominent role.
Though one of the more horrifying familiars I can recall from a witch was H.P. Lovecraft's Dreams in a Witchouse. Brown Jenkin was the human-faced rat familiar. He was way more brutal than any PF2 familiar. Brown Jenkin was horrifying and you did not want the witch sending Brown Jenkin after you. If they made the witch familiar like Brown Jenkin, now that would be a fun familiar. Brown Jenkin was not the fun, role-play familiar of little consequence found in PF2, but a horrifying manifestation of the witch patron's power.
Yep! Pywacket for Bell, Book, and Candle, Salem for Sabrina, and Jiji for Kiki.
"Witch is just a gender" Harry Potter is kinda the last place I'd look for what someone should expect from a witch.
Love me some person-faced rat familiars- I've seen at least two of those elsewhere. We'll at least have some high-level horrifying stuff available, what with the soul-snatching.
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This is probably more minor since I can reflavor it away at home games, but I sort of dislike the way the new witch is emphasizing patrons.
With hexes being explicitly a manifestation of the witch's power (per Tunu40's comments), with familiars (a direct agent of the patron) becoming much more centralizing to the class, and with new abilities that directly call upon the Patron, the witch is becoming a much less independent character thematically.
Of course, the witch has always had a patron and it's always been a centralizing component of their flavor, but the current relationship between a patron and their witch is somewhat closer to a teacher/student relationship (more complicated than that, but still). You're learning spells and hexes via your pact, but you're still essentially using your own power at the end of the day. The patron is important, crucial even, but ultimately a background element, your character is the adventuring hero here.
It seems like the Remaster witch is reversing a lot of that, with a new expectation that you will actively and regularly be calling upon your Patron to intervene on your behalf in combat for many (if not most) of your unique class features.
I feel like that conceptually just strips a degree of agency from Witch characters, which is kind of unfortunate.
The show Salem have witches with familiars.
Including the young which Anne Hale with her familiar Mouse, named Brown Jenkins.
The witches feed their blood to their familiar and cn you use them in a variety of spells.
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The show Salem have witches with familiars.
Including the young which Anne Hale with her familiar Mouse, named Brown Jenkins.
The witches feed their blood to their familiar and cn you use them in a variety of spells.
Also a better version of Witch/Patron and Familiar representation is The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.
Witch: Sabrina
Familiar: Salem
Patron: The Dark Lord
Totally agree there.
I'm ok with the patron being a heavy part of the witch because as far as I know of witches, that is their thing. Almost every witch I've seen definitely has a patron of some kind they draw power from that they pact with and revere.
The wizard is intellectual, independent magic.
The witch is magic drawn from pacting with a powerful patron. Not a deity necessarily, but very deity-like, powerful being of myth or from world religions.
If they strengthen the tie to the patron, that seems very fitting.
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Be cool if witch's could empower their magic through rites of sacrifice to their patron. Sort of like psychics empower their magic with amps. Or Thaumaturge's use Esoteric Knowledge.
A lot of movie witch's based on witch lore are always doing some kind of sacrifice to empower their magic, usually animals or people, but I'm sure they could make interesting sacrifices to empower magic.
You're learning spells and hexes via your pact, but you're still essentially using your own power at the end of the day. The patron is important, crucial even, but ultimately a background element, your character is the adventuring hero here.You are an adventuring hero, but no, witches don't have any their own power at all. Even now. At most some knowledge, and not even spells - they are in the familiar. All the magic is patron's. No familiar - no magic.
More like a cleric, actually.Yeah, I find that irritating. Back in 1e they got knowledge from their patron, not so much power. Lessons seem like a nod to that, but I'd rather it be more clearly knowledge of magic that they gain.
Though there's nothing stopping you flavoring it as knowledge right now, but if they go the more active patrons route...
In PF1, if your familiar died at mid-to-high levels, you lost thousands of gold worth of spells forever, on top of the cost to replace the familiar. In PF2, your familiar comes back with all of its spells. How is PF1 giving knowledge to the Witch instead of power?
Let's say I want to play a Rune "patron" Witch that is only getting knowledge rather than power, but I want to take all the patron abilities I can instead of just picking something else. My Witch is learning secret access to the Akashic records, mediated through a construct familiar to avoid having their mind scoured by the contact with infinite knowledge (we'll spend one familiar ability on getting a poppet, for flavor). The patron directing the familiar is instead us leaving carefully prepared instructions. The patron interfering with magic around the familiar is instead our temporary tampering with the records. The patron reaching out and grabbing someone's soul is instead stripping someone's soul away by exposing it to the familiar's unfiltered connection to the Akashic record.
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Losing the familiar meant you lost your place to store and prepare witch spells, but you could still cast spontaneous spell if you ever got those. Losing your familiar did not mean you lost your hexes or any other witch ability. Aka: Spells were tied to the patron, but hexes were tied to the witch.
I'm not sure what spontaneous spells or other Witch abilities you are talking about. Yeah, you can count the hexes as knowledge. Losing most of their spells feels way more like "loss of knowledge" to me than... not being able to refocus?
Also you are saying "oh just flavor it differently". Well we just got a thread exactly about how people don't like messing with the pre-writen flavor of the ability while others do.
For anyone who doesn't like messing with the pre-written flavor and also doesn't like the patron-heavy vibe, there are the non-patron feats. That's why they're putting it into feats, rather than making heavier patron involvement a class feature. I'm still going to suggest options for people who want the mechanics of the patron feats without the vibe of depending on their patron for everything.
Not to mention that the reflavoring you are proposing while nice is entirely about trying to eliminate the patron and explain it away. The real issue however is that the familiar or patron should not be the default focus because they are stealing the spotlight.
I think they should be the default focus of abilities and do deserve the spotlight, because that's what gives the class its difference from a Wizard, Psychic, or Cleric. I don't personally feel any need to reflavor things so that the Witch isn't asking something of their patron; that dynamic is the interesting part to me, and I'm glad to have more mechanics themed around it.
Imagine an artist who has their patron and every time the artist wants to do something they must ask the patron and the money handler to do it for them. At that point, why do you need the artist?
It's an artist who sometimes asks for more supplies, input from the patron on the work they're doing, or in extreme cases, for their patron's protection.
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I mean, if people liked the Witch because of the Hexes for the reasons stated, why does Paizo feel the need to double down on an irrelevant and mostly weak mechanic like the Familiar when the way forward should have been clear as a freshly cleaned window pane of glass?
It's not like Witches with good Hexes were something that people disliked from PF1 (other than maybe the OP-ness of Slumber or Fortune/Misfortune, for example,) or was something not feasible within the new system. Because it is.
Paizo could have easily taken a lot of the PF1 hexes, rebalanced them with the new system (they developed a lot of tools to make the problematic hexes function fun and fair within the new system, like Incapacitate), then put them out as class feats or something, but for some reason, this wasn't done; likely because they wanted the Witch to be the Familiar class and the Hexes to just be some things to do on the side, but that's largely conjecture and speculation.
It would have been different if the Witch didn't have the Familiar to begin with and Paizo felt like the Familiar was the mechanic needed to make the Witch stand out (and maybe it still can be, if they change the fundamental dynamic Familiars have within the system), but given that isn't the case and this is a Remaster, and there have been numerous threads complaining about the relevance of Hexes and the prevalence of the Familiar being relatively superfluous, I don't conceive how this should translate to doubling down on the Familiar being combat-relevant, when the Familiar is specifically designed to, you know, not be combat-relevant.
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I think the "leaning into what your patron is like" is just forward momentum from PF1, where a later Player's Companion ("Blood of the Coven") gave a witch the option to choose a more specific patron to get some abilities in exchange for swapping some class features, similar to how class archetypes worked. That wasn't a bad idea, and it still left it vague enough that it could be like "an Angel" or "a Fae" or "some part of the collective unconsciousness."
In terms of familiar, what I'm really hoping for is not a pivot towards or away from familiar stuff for the witch, but a better glimpse of "how your familiar is supposed to be useful to you" just in general.
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For anyone who doesn't like messing with the pre-written flavor and also doesn't like the patron-heavy vibe, there are the non-patron feats. That's why they're putting it into feats, rather than making heavier patron involvement a class feature.
Per earlier comments in this thread, both Hexes (a core part of witch identity) and the new patron magic mechanic (which appears to be a class feature) are direct invocations of the patron instead of witch's own abilities. From that understanding, it isn't just feats.
“People liked the witch because of the hexes”
That’s the end point of that sentiment. People liked Hexes because they were cool, strong abilities (that you could get a bunch with with Extra Hex), “who” the hexes came from was irrelevant.
Disagree. Flavor and lore matters for some people, and there's a significant enough distinction between "my patron taught me this hex" and "I can call upon my patron's power to invoke this hex" that it sours the experience somewhat, at least for me.
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They know and can use the Spells that they know/have learned, can opt into having a bonded Familiar (some have them, others don't), and can learn/manifest other new powers. MUCH if not MOST of the impactful changes on a person-to-person basis boil down to how well-trained individuals are and also what kind of magic items/artifacts they wield, some wands are more powerful than others.
Another aspect of the way it all works touches on the sort of real-world narrative that there is a kind of well-represented theme of income disparity where there are "haves" and "have-nots" in the setting whereby your power/money/influence/family GREATLY influences not only the "floor" of what you can do but to a much greater degree the "ceiling" of what you can attain with the resources/education/equipment that you possess. Even the most powerful human casters in the setting, if stripped naked without a wand and left bereft of long-lasting enchantments/buffs/magical boons would be as helpless as a normal human who has no magical talent whatsoever.
There are other minor things but I'd certainly NOT put the HP magic users as being ANY form or a prepared spellcaster at all but one thing to note is that at times, as the story dictates, characters can seem to interface with "Vancian" limited magic in that they end up exhausted from using their powers but at other times it is for all intents and purposes unlimited though, I suppose, you could chalk that up to the weaker magics they can just always use just being akin to Cantrips which makes a certain amount of sense give that it is a SCHOOL where powerful magics aren't really even taught except to the most advanced students and in other cases are simply discovered during their own research.
One could also make the case that the magic users in HP are something like a hybrid between Sorcerer and Thaumaturge given just how reliant they are on having implements that are almost always completely mandatory, a focus in the form of a wand, a magic item, or something similar is basically an always must-have at least in the case of the human characters.
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I think the HP tangents are largely irrelevant since that setting uses Witch either in a weird gender essentialist way (something more effectively lampshaded in Discworld) or just a King/Queen thing where you just use a different word for the same job. HP is clearly about Wizard magic, it's just that JKR was borrowing heavily from "The Worst Witch" so had to work that word in there somewhere.
Pathfinder is clearly a setting with male Witches and female Wizards, as well as nonbinary and agender everything.
** spoiler omitted **...
The only thing that defines Vancian magic to me is prepared casting. The idea of becoming exhausted or having limited magic per day is not Vancian. Lots of stories show magic users having limitations per day or based on various kinds of limiters. Vancian which D&D is based on was preparation casting by level. The level part I don't mind as every game and fictional magic has some kind of way to designate less and more difficult spells and levels or ranks are fine to use in a level based system. But the idea of a spell being prepared and once used, unable to cast again that day, is the essence of Vancian casting and the choice that truly creates a magic system that far too limited and not in line with fantasy story telling other than Jack Vance's stories.
In any magic system, you have to have some kind of system for limiting it or it becomes unbelievable and ridiculous. Different books use different systems, some more developed than others.
I did not notice familiars in Harry Potter unless Dobby was what was viewed as a familiar. If Dobby was a familiar, even he was far more powerful than any familiar in PF2.
Like the thing about Witch magic in Pathfinder is that it's decidedly not magic you go into formal schooling to learn. It's at the very least an individualized curriculum for the specific witch.
We're talking something closer to Diane Duane's "Young Wizard" YA novels (the magical YA fantasy of my childhood) where the protagonists are largely self-taught from a series of Magical books that arrive from mysterious sources.
Of course your patron could choose to let you in on Magic via contacting you via dreams, depositing knowledge directly into your head, arranging circumstances a la Mr. Miyagi so you learn by doing, etc.
But if your PC went to a school with a formal curriculum, you're not a Witch.
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I did not notice familiars in Harry Potter unless Dobby was what was viewed as a familiar. If Dobby was a familiar, even he was far more powerful than any familiar in PF2.
Apparently the animals that each Wizard gets are officially supposed to be pets (you can buy them at the pets & familiars shop though). But the way they seem both linked to their specific Wizard and do not really act that much like typical animals really makes me think of familiars.
Apparently the animals that each Wizard gets are officially supposed to be pets (you can buy them at the pets & familiars shop though). But the way they seem both linked to their specific Wizard and do not really act that much like typical animals really makes me think of familiars.I did not notice familiars in Harry Potter unless Dobby was what was viewed as a familiar. If Dobby was a familiar, even he was far more powerful than any familiar in PF2.
Did any of the main characters have them in the movies? I don't recall any . I only remember Dobby.
Huh. I don't remember any of them. If I watch the movies again, I'll have to keep an eye out. I did for the most part enjoy those movies, though they did not stick the landing and went for the overlong money grab in the final two films.
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I only remember Dobby.By the way, Dobby wasn't a familiar even when he was basically a slave. And anyway these (house) elves like Dobby are sentient (magical) creatures and shouldn't (can't?) be familiars. It's like making a (PF) gnome familiar.Poppet are familiars and you can play as a poppet.
Leshy are familiars and you can play as a leshy.
As I understand it, Leshy and Poppet PCs are more essentially "awakened" versions of their respective origins.
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I only remember Dobby.By the way, Dobby wasn't a familiar even when he was basically a slave. And anyway these (house) elves like Dobby are sentient (magical) creatures and shouldn't (can't?) be familiars. It's like making a (PF) gnome familiar.
familiars being sentient is one of the main thematic and narrative draws o the feature tho.
I think a good Witch that uses their familiar in both casting and RP-esc stuff is Swain from League of Legends, both old and new.
So I think a Witch who can use their familiar as an origin point for their magic to increase the amount of space they can threaten with magic, and/or specific spells that can only originate from the familiar would be pretty cool.
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Of course, the witch has always had a patron and it's always been a centralizing component of their flavor, but the current relationship between a patron and their witch is somewhat closer to a teacher/student relationship (more complicated than that, but still). You're learning spells and hexes via your pact, but you're still essentially using your own power at the end of the day. The patron is important, crucial even, but ultimately a background element, your character is the adventuring hero here.Sorta? At least based on what James Case in the Spoiler discord. Said that they’re trying to leave it open enough that it can go both ways.
He gave the example that if you wanted the patron to be the head of the magic school, it still works.
Substance for those who need it, but shouldn’t impact expert roleplayers who have great flavor skills. They’re just addressing the many many responses (even on this forum) in which you could remove the Patron and it would have zero impact on the class (the number of comments that said the Witch is just a weaker IFA Wizard). Now a Witch can be identified by having a familiar doing things in combat and calling on their patron’s power on top of the spells they’ve been taught.
Edit: And personally, I‘m not too concerned about having a familiar in combat. We still don’t know what changes are coming to familiars, how the Witch’s familiar will be different statistically, and how the Phase Familiar hex will be working. PF2e’s math is tight so we know what’s needed for something to be in the frontline and we know what stats work for a companion to be in the frontline.
The Psychic is constantly lauded as one of the best designed casters in PF2e and the person who designed it is the one working on Witch. It’s definitely not some unknown person in the background (or some developer who was searching for a job at WotC).
Well, that causes issues thematically, because this is basically saying a Wizard and a Witch are basically the same thing, and they're not, even if they are similar on a fundamental level. The biggest difference is that a Wizard is far more self-driven and the teaching is all done by themselves, to themselves. Sometimes they will glean information from outside sources, but that still requires the Wizard to take that initiative. The Witch, on the other hand, has somebody basically spoonfeeding them the power and information from beyond the veil, and it's basically up to them to do what they want with that information (with the Patron assuming the Witch will use that information for their own ends, whatever that might be). Very little comes from them teaching this information to themselves, with most of that simply being feeding spell information to the Familiar.
And with the possibility that the Patron can infact be an in-world deity, I don't blame people thinking the Witch can end up being a worse Cleric, because a Cleric effectively treats their deity as their Patron, and a Witch being no different while having far worse features means that...well...it's just a worse Cleric.
Not knowing what changes are coming to the Familiar is not really a defense for saying that it's going to work out in the Remaster, because we already know what the mechanical niche for the Familiar currently is: a non-combat "pet." Unless Paizo is willing to break that mechanical niche (this hasn't been stated one way or the other), the idea that it won't perform in combat isn't something just made out of thin air, it's the conservative interpretation of the feature since before the Remaster was announced, and it hasn't been stated that this niche will change.
As for the Psychic designs being relevant to determining whether the Witch will be made into a good class, it really isn't; designing one class properly doesn't mean they will design every class properly. We can say that the Psychic was designed well, but that doesn't translate to "This person can design this other, different class well too," because the Psychic and the Witch aren't the same thing. Heck, their only similarities are that they have spell slots and cantrips. Otherwise, completely different class.
At best, with the limited information we have, we can argue that they will design it better than the previous Witch incarnation, but given how bad the previous Witch incarnation is, and how anyone who has ever played the system before can probably write up a class better than what it currently is, that's not saying much either.