Sure... but that feat doesn't kick in until level 10. It's great once you get it and all, but even after that it's not exactly an amazing reach, and before then, comparing in-aura damage to ranged damage is just telling yourself lies.
It really does feel that way, yeah. Not being able to start combat in a stance isn't great either, but at least you can start with a gap closing impulse (I keep coming back to lava leap or ash strider) and then activate it for free when you regather or just casually walk in and blast+activate.
Kinda feels like you need to spend levels 2-4 on cavalier or beastmaster to fix your action economy early. Independent stride in, overflow and activate stance. Retain away from it later if the feat upkeep feels too much or you start getting haste from an ally.
That's the build i've been looking for as well as my initial build.
thematics wise, i envision something like a desert warrior image wise (with some obvious dune references here and there) Desert elf.
Desert winds is not as powerful as i initially though since unlike everyone claiming to be like obscuring mist, it mostly separates the battlefield in zones: you have people/creatures inside the aura and creatures/people outside the aura, and between those two group there is concealment, but the group itself doesn't have concealment from each other.
It is mostly a boon vs ranged attacks so to speak, it is still a good thing to have.
also, apart from blast, i dont think air has a single target impulse.
Ash stride only hits one creature. You can either go single air and get Elemental Overlap twice or go triple element.
But it is a good candidate for picking up the dual element level 6 feat, since now you get the bonus damage on your d8 earth blasts (not a priority though)
I see the build playing mostly like a support/tank rather a damage dealer.
Me too, thing is the damage would still be solid even then. If you add fire to the mix tho the damage can go up quickly.
Above all, it thematically and visually sounds very stunning to me, I envision gusts of desert wind pickup my allies and carrying them over with four winds and the group fly, scorching blades of air cutting my enemies, domes of dense sand hurricanes concealing us from the outside world (desert winds) as I carry the group from one place to another, and me crumbling to fine pieces of sand as I turn invisible in front of my enemies.
Even the air capstone can be made like a desert mirage of an oasis where they keep thinking they go towards their salvation only to find their destination never comes closer (if they fail their flat checks).
I'm also drawn to the aesthetic, that it looks like a really solid choice is just a nice plus.
After more number crunching, our fire kineticist ends up in line with lower damage martials like the champion or swashbuckler even with some de/buffs in place. Turns out the str bonus on kineticist doesn't matter so much when you're only making one attack modified by it. Not the best place to be but you're still competitive with everyone else as well until de/buffing is accounted for meaning you're still good so long as everyone is collectively bad at the game.
That does bring up the other problem with competing with melee. Kineticist has no opportunity attack. They have a long list of defensive reactions, but nothing truly offensive. They're mostly overflow as well which is not so great. Since kinetic blasts aren't strikes either, you can't even archetype out for one. Maybe there's a world where you hurt yourself and use the metal reaction to empower a molten wire or melee range dual element blast. If you get a horse or have haste you have the option for that I guess.
Self note to run the numbers later for molten wire and oracle archetype. Oracle is cool and all but that permanent flatfooted isn't something I'm all that eager to deal with and it conflicts with cavalier so we'd need to slot it in at 6-8 and do Independent stride+stance+oracle focus spell is a really sad opening round.
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After more number crunching, our fire kineticist ends up in line with lower damage martials like the champion or swashbuckler even with some de/buffs in place. Turns out the str bonus on kineticist doesn't matter so much when you're only making one attack modified by it. Not the best place to be but you're still competitive with everyone else as well until de/buffing is accounted for meaning you're still good so long as everyone is collectively bad at the game.
That does bring up the other problem with competing with melee. Kineticist has no opportunity attack. They have a long list of defensive reactions, but nothing truly offensive. They're mostly overflow as well which is not so great. Since kinetic blasts aren't strikes either, you can't even archetype out for one. Maybe there's a world where you hurt yourself and use the metal reaction to empower a molten wire or melee range dual element blast. If you get a horse or have haste you have the option for that I guess.
Self note to run the numbers later for molten wire and oracle archetype. Oracle is cool and all but that permanent flatfooted isn't something I'm all that eager to deal with and it conflicts with cavalier so we'd need to slot it in at 6-8 and do Independent stride+stance+oracle focus spell is a really sad opening round.
A few thoughts on this.
It looks like you're leaning white-room a bit hard here, and it might serve you well to come up for air and reconsider some of the stuff you're simplifying away. Like, you're talking about how the kineticist compares in raw damage "so long as everyone is collectively bad at the game"
One of the strongest methods of gap-closing there is is to prep in place and let the enemy come to you. Spend actions bringing up your buffs and whatnot and let them spend actions on movement. If they're back-line types who don't want to be in melee... well, that's what the kineticist mobility tricks are for. If they keep wanting to wait for you to charge in spite of being melee types? Well, one of the great things about kineticist is that they're really good at switching between range and melee, regardless of which one they're specialized in... and the Fire kineticist damage-dealer is just as effective at 10 feet as they are at 5, so you even have some flexibility there.
Kineticist damage overall is heavily dependent on how many targets you can rack up. So far, blast is the only thing I've seen of theirs that actually deals damage that isn't area effect in some fashion. It's not that they're low-skill - not remotely. It's that the skills that boost them have to do with positioning and battlefield control. Now, dedicated damage-dealer fire kineticists aren't as much that way as the rest of them, but they're still a lot more that way than your average ranger or swashbuckler.
Burning two or more feats on a mount in particular feels like a waste. It's going to take two feats up front, and require a third before you can move on to any other dedication, and you're mostly doing that for a single first-turn move action? Again, it might make sense from a white-room perspective, but from a practical standpoint, I suspect you'd be a lot better off using those feats on class feats or impulses and getting a bit of that kineticist flexibility to play with. The only reason I suggest including Oracle is because it has such strong synergies with the Fire kineticist "automatically do a bit of fire damage to everyone in my aura who isn't my friend, every turn" stance.
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Anyone run the numbers on a support kinetist yet?
I really love the idea of running a support kinetist, but am having trouble making one I would prefer to have in a party instead of a druid in any circumstance but a campaign with really REALLY long adventuring days.
I feel like a support kinetist should be there, but I just can't make it work. Highest levels spells always seem to be better at healing, control, buffing, debuffing, terrain making, etc than anything a kinetist can put out.
So far, it really seems like full tank is the best use of the class.
A caster at full burn should be more effective than a kineticist. If you have adventuring days that are one encounter long, then the kineticist is not going to be the most effective character you could choose.
Kineticists aren't amazing at full tank, either. They can certainly tank up and get into the scrum and not embarrass themselves, but they don't have anything like the kind of stickiness that, say, a paladin does, and they generally wont' manage the defenses of a dedicated protection paladin either.
Realistically, if you're trying to build a kineticist by running the numbers... you're probably taking the wrong approach. A support kineticist needs to be at least as much a controller as a healer/buffer. Kineticists are really good at area effects, terrain modification, and repositioning of enemies, and you don't want to just leave that to one side just because you're focusing on support.
It's also the case that kineticists, especially support kineticists, are incredibly party-dependent. Like... let's look at Fresh Produce. It's the basic Wood element heal... and instantly it's pretty party-specific. First, the target needs to be in your aura. At the beginning of the game, that means no more than two steps away from you, and it doesn't get better until level 10. Second, it's hugely more efficient if your allies are people who, by default, keep a hand free, and notably more efficient if they aren't trying to maintain a specific attack rotation. If they've got a hand free, then getting that healign into them costs one action of yours and one of theirs. If they don't, it costs one of yours, and four of theirs. (free the hand, grab the fruit, eat the fruit, draw whatever it was they had in that hand again). I mean, in general I wouldn't suggest that as a primary source of low-level healing anyway - the scaling HP is a lot better than the base HP, the increase in aura size helps a lot, and so forth - but in the right party it's functional, and in the wrong party it's near-useless.
Similarly, consider the water impulse junction. Water gets a lot of 2+ action area attacks, and every round that you hit at least one target with one of them, you can slide a target by 1. In some parties, that's a great big bag of meh. In other parties - ones that have ways of dropping snares or creating hazardous terrain, or otherwise severely punishing foes for being in the wrong place - it can be fantastic.
Really, I would not try to create a support kineticist in a vacuum. I would talk with the rest of the party, find out what they were going to play, and then see if I could make a good support kineticist for them.
*snip*
Yeah, I'm just doing some basic calculations right now as a starting point so I have some ideas as to how to approach things and at least taking the time to qualify my statements like that "bad at the game" one. You start with the baseline and then see how things scale with different math modifiers and against enemies of different levels. It's how you see things like them not scaling well with typical de/buff regimes (only partially true since it works just fine if you just blast twice), crit spec not being particularly impactful, simple stuff.
I like the mount because after round 1, it gives us the chance to move and do our full rotation instead of striding and flying flame/blast x2 or lava leaping and restancing. At maximum buffing and damage investment, blast x2 is roughly equivalent to flying flame+blast on single target damage as it turns out.
So, we don't need the horse, it just makes getting our AoE impulses more reliable if movement is necessary, but I'm satisfied on fire for now. The theoretical damage is more than acceptable as far as I'm concerned and you can even go for 14-20 scaling instead of starting with 16 str and you don't need the crit spec either. The kineticist also scales super well with extra actions. Hasted and mounted will give you an impulse and two blasts plus any necessary movement for some funny raw damage numbers while everyone not named flurry ranger has long since started dipping into utility options. Some have higher damage numbers under full de/buffing like the imaginary weapon magus and dragon or giant barbarian at certain levels, though you do miss things like doorknob. Can definitely benefit from a level 13 earth expansion for prone spec.
I look forward to various practical tests and play reports. Think I'll start running numbers on desert wind air before seeing if I can get up to anything funny with metal.
You're thinking about this wrong. On avg, giant instinct barbarian uses 3 actions to hit for 11.55 avg dmg per turn using all actions to attack.
I'd throw in the caveat that it's almost never the right answer for that giant barb to use all three actions on attack. One of the strengths of the kineticist is their ability to get real value out of any number of actions... but for a barbarian (who is even particularly bad at using agile weapons) using that third action to make a third strike is almost never the plan. Trying to match the barbarian's first two attacks with your two-action impulse is going to be harder, and trying to match that first attack with one action worth of blast simply isn't going to happen.
That said, I'll agree that running your battle comparisons as one-on-one deathmatches is unfairly biased against the kineticist, who is, indeed, all about the area effect. Not particularly good at focus fire, but they can manage a fair bit of general depletion of enemy HP given the right circumstances.
The kineticist is an AoE specialist, yes. It's just that fire kineticist can actually reach a high level of single target on top which is great for anyone that wants to just blast but doesn't want to feel bad during solo bosses. Though I did flub in thinking you could blast with haste even after I recognized blast as not being a strike earlier when mentioning AoO. Definitely got ahead of myself a bit there.
The armor impulses are interesting. Not sure if they're worth using over just taking armor proficiency or sentinel considering the action cost. Especially for metal that might break in the middle of a fight.
Metal does seem like the weakest armor (though the "it breaks" stuff is thematic, since metal is also about rust and decay). But if you do get critted, you can just spend an action to bring it back next round. So you have to ask yourself how many attacks you are liable to face after your AC drops temporarily due to a crit?
Do we know if you can use shield block to soak some damage before your armor disappears? The strength of the metal armor impulse is you get the best scaling on your shield.
Metal does seem like the weakest armor (though the "it breaks" stuff is thematic, since metal is also about rust and decay). But if you do get critted, you can just spend an action to bring it back next round. So you have to ask yourself how many attacks you are liable to face after your AC drops temporarily due to a crit?
Do we know if you can use shield block to soak some damage before your armor disappears? The strength of the metal armor impulse is you get the best scaling on your shield.
I don't have easy access to it, but I thought that I'd read that the crit destroys the armor specifically. I think the shield sticks around regardless (unless you shatter it by blocking something with it).
Similarly... would it be possible to get both Earth and Metal armors, pop the Earth armor, and then use the Metal version for the shield alone? Again, I don't have it in front of me to re-read, but I vaguely recall thinking that you could.
I don't have easy access to it, but I thought that I'd read that the crit destroys the armor specifically. I think the shield sticks around regardless (unless you shatter it by blocking something with it).
Similarly... would it be possible to get both Earth and Metal armors, pop the Earth armor, and then use the Metal version for the shield alone? Again, I don't have it in front of me to re-read, but I vaguely recall thinking that you could.
Getting crit ends the metal impulse as a whole. Nothing stops you from using both as far as I can tell.
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Metal's ability to plate their impulses with whatever metal they're holding allows me to throw money at people. Be the gaudy golden wizard you were always meant to be!
I am... Doshman!
Actually, the fact that it would only be gold-plated somehow makes it even better. Like, you rampage your way through some bandits or something, leaving shattered chunks of gold all over the battlefield, playing it off like it's nothing (because you're fabulously wealthy, of course) and when someone comes to scavenge the battlefield they discover that it's basically worthless and you were faking it this entire time.
...and now I want to have this guy be a follower of Razmir. Well... he's not really a follower of Razmir. He's just faking it. His life is all just layers on layers of sheer fabrication, all the way down.
ive had the pdf for a few days and ive poured over kineticist nonstop
im very excited for it, probably my favorite class in the game now, with summoner and monk trailing behind it.
i do think that while stances are very powerful, its very hard for me to justify much overflow and a stance. thus i cant imagine going mono water and taking one of their stances as an example.
while water/wood seems like obvious support, im actually really excited for wood/air support
with humans natural ambition: i can have a aura range heal fruit appear in my targets hand that has very strong scaling later
a 2d4 30ft cone that scales very well, half bleed damage (persistent!)
infinite protector trees
and four winds, 2 of my actions for 4 of my party members to move up to half their speed, and it doesnt even cost their reaction? thats insane
.
the composite, tree of duality is an aoe heal that only targets my party, and auto dazzles (no save) vs enemies in it, and it DOESNT have the visual trait (only mental) wich is interesting. its 3 actions but no overflow and can be sustained, with air impulse junction i can cast it and still move half my movement
and it only gets better
I'm excited to make an earth/fire kineticist. Really seems to fill the tanky frontline battlemage niche
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With learning that a fire kineticist really wants to be up close in melee to really do their thing well (with the fire vulnerability aura), giving Brad 12 dex for 16 charisma is probably a bad idea.
I might do it anyway though.
If he dies early for it, it might be a fitting if sad ending. But if he survives long enough to actually make something of himself it'd be, well. Rad. Rad Brad. His kids might think he's cool again!
Trying to make a kineticist character, and honestly even just going for a single-gate wood one, there's so many cool options I am struggling to pick what I want to take even just at level 1 & 2. Class is really great.
What is the area of effect for Roiling Mudslide? It just says "Each creature in the area" without specifying what the area is.
It’s missing, like the Rain of Rust duration and admission that Lightning Rid is just one big joke.
Rebirth in living stone also seems weird, a stance that you have to Sustain each turn?
ive had the pdf for a few days and ive poured over kineticist nonstop
im very excited for it, probably my favorite class in the game now, with summoner and monk trailing behind it.
i do think that while stances are very powerful, its very hard for me to justify much overflow and a stance. thus i cant imagine going mono water and taking one of their stances as an example.
while water/wood seems like obvious support, im actually really excited for wood/air support
with humans natural ambition: i can have a aura range heal fruit appear in my targets hand that has very strong scaling later
a 2d4 30ft cone that scales very well, half bleed damage (persistent!)
infinite protector trees
and four winds, 2 of my actions for 4 of my party members to move up to half their speed, and it doesnt even cost their reaction? thats insane
.the composite, tree of duality is an aoe heal that only targets my party, and auto dazzles (no save) vs enemies in it, and it DOESNT have the visual trait (only mental) wich is interesting. its 3 actions but no overflow and can be sustained, with air impulse junction i can cast it and still move half my movement
and it only gets better
yeah, wood/air was also one of my very first favorites (hence if you see in my initial questions in teh AMA thread i was asking about what composite it gets)
one of my gripes now that we have numbers though is that Tree of Duality heal is very low numbers unfortuantely, healing 8ish hp, even if Aoe, at level 6 is not great for the amount of actions.
But on the flipside, it's an extremely durable tank to boot, you put out the tree to protect your allies, and if the enemies focus on you instead, you have your own renewable source of temp hps and an amazing DR reaction to boot!
---Air support is simply amazing imo.
---
my own two personal favorites so far are both tank/support:
air/wood for a more direct healing focus support, and air/earth (with champion archetype for...
Healing low sure
But it's also no save dazzle
The idea is to use Earth, Fire and Air and end up grabbing the fire aura, Desert Wind (Air/Earth composite), Two Element infusion and Ash Strider (Fire/air composite).The general plan would be to set up the composite aura and the fire aura with the first action into Fire Strider to activate both. Onwards you can proc those twice with Ash Strider into an Air/fire blast with Two Element Infusion.
I don't think every aspect of this works mechanically, the wrinkle is in the fire junction giving weakness (I assume that's what you mean by fire aura, as you can't have Thermal Nimbus and Desert Winds on at the same time).
See, Ash Strider is an Overflow impulse which eats your aura and also turns off your stance. Two Element Infusion is an infusion, which works kinda like metamagic: you can't use Two Element Infusion with the 1 action to reignite your kinetic aura. So once you've used Ash Strider, you'll no longer have the fire junction or your stance. You'd probably need to reignite with 1 action just to re-up Desert Winds.
I know it has Overflow, original plan was to do blast -> Ash Stride every other turn. After going through the numbers and thinking about actual combat tho, it's worse than I initially thought. Needing to blast before moving means that it would be hard to apply the STR mod to damage or even have a target inside the aura and while the damage for that turn would be high, it messes you up next turn, so it kinda evens out. 3 elements spreads you out a bit to thin, so I think I will go back to the drawing board. RN im interested in mono fire with Steam Knight. That feat is so cool.
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While on the mono fire jag... molten wire is *very* shiny. It's two action, no overflow. It's okay up-front damage. It's not incapacitate. If you actually land it, then they get the choice to waste actions getting rid of it or just eat the debuff and extra damage. The only two issues are that the initial damage isn't fire (and thus doesn't trigger vuln) and that it's vs AC (and thus doesn't play well with blasts). Still... a *very* satisfying little combo, especially when you add in the bit where you can have more than one instance going at a time (on separate targets).
I also notice... Kineticist has the most action efficiency boosts in the game of any class, by a fair margin.
- Channel gets a built-in blast (no infusions) or stance. Every kineticist gets this from level 1. Okay, this is more of a partial rebate from an action tax, but we're just getting started.
- Many Impulse Junctions give you some sort of action-like benefit - generally about half an action's worth. Possible to have as early as level 1.
- A variety of reactions are available. You don't need to leave your reaction sitting on the table if you don't want to.
- Effortless impulse. lvl 12 feat. Free sustain 1/round
- Imperious Aura. lvl 16 feat. Enter a stance as a free action 1/round
- Final Gate. lvl 19 class feature. If your aura is down at the beginning of your turn, you get channel (and thus also blast or stance) as a free action
- Kinetic Pinnacle. Level 20 feat. Hasted, for either blast usage or stance entry.
I am reading this correctly, right? At level 20, with the right build, you're getting a channel, an uninfused blast, a stance entry, a sustain, a second blast (this one you can infuse) and then you start your real turn?
Check the triggers for all those free actions. You can't use multiple free actions off the same trigger.
Ah. Thank you.
So... Effortless Impulse and Imperious Aura conflict directly. Both are feats, and it's pretty clearly a case where you want to only take one of them. I'm not actually sure how Final Gate interacts with either, though. EI/IA are free actions that react to the start of your turn, and FG is an automatic-unless-suppressed free action as your first action in a turn. So... I guess you get EI/IA first, and then FG? If so, it looks like IA and FG are also mutually exclusive, as you need your aura up to make IA happen, and if you have that, then FG whiffs.
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Someone noted that Molten Wire does not, in fact, have the Attack Trait, so it might not actually incur MAP?
However, it is still a fire impulse, so I believe the fire aura junction weakness would trigger.
Oh, it would trigger. It just wouldn't trigger on the initial slashing damage part. Triggers just fine on the every-round fire damage, though.
The idea that it could be vs-AC but not an attack has... interesting implications. At minimum, you'd want to throw the molten wire first.
I also notice that it means that your enemy is now covered in metal, and that this has implications for some of your other metal impulses, if you came to the power through some means other than mono-fire.
So I ran some quick numbers on air/earth/fire desert wind running boomerang+d8 air/fire blast followed by return boomerang+blast x2.
At base, you're quite a ways behind, but the greater number of basic blasts means you scale better with de/buffs and it doesn't take much to match mono fire in single target. You do need fire's weakness aura though.
Skipping fire and running air/earth d8 loses some damage, but prone crit spec is a great trade. Also leaves you open to build an oasis in your desert instead with wood and/or water if that's your thing.
Now for the bad news. Boomerang isn't nearly as good as flying flame and has positioning issues without air impulse junction or an extra source of movement. Dual element blasts also want you to be in close instead of transitioning to thrown weapon infusion with the aura size feat.
I feel like I'm missing some really obvious way to boost this more, but I'll think about it later
I also notice that it means that your enemy is now covered in metal, and that this has implications for some of your other metal impulses, if you came to the power through some means other than mono-fire.
While this is a hilarious idea and I wish there were ways to make things count as metal for the purposes of metal impulses, those always state creatures made of metal or wearing metal armor. The wire, alas, is not armor.
Excluding crits and crit rate for simplicity isn't a good idea. Without any math fixing, oops all boomerangs and boom/blast mix are roughly equal on damage, but that changes once you involve de/buffs. Those put boom/blast ahead, as should be expected.
Neither prevents access to the other so use one for single target and the other for when you need more AoE.
I think I'm sold on fire/metal. Molten wire is a great opening impulse.