Just realized whirling grindstone can be used by enemies if they happen to be carrying weapons lol
They can even use it while you're hitting them with it. I mean, if you use it to attack them, then it ends your turn next to them... which means that they're near-certain to be right next to it at the start of their own turn.
Gives the amusing image of the guy who's getting his face ground in by the stone, but is sharpening his axe at the same time because he's not goign to let a bit of excruciating pain stop him from grabbing every advantage he can out of an unpleasant situation.
The sharpening also lasts a minute, so you can include it on your list of pre-battle buffs if you know that you're about to initiate and you have time and space to prep in that will allow for an enormous whirling top of doom.
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Desert Wind looks like it can bring Air damage up nicely for blasts... hmm. Fire/Air might be able to stack up a LOT of buffs to their blasts?
Yeah fire/air/earth (earth just to qualify for Desert Winds) can have a Two-Element Blast at level 20 that is doing 5d6 (Base) + 16 (Desert Winds stance) +10 (fire junction weakness aura). Average is 43.5.
Add on Furnace Form and one sustain of Ignite the Sun, and you're adding another 2d6, now we're up to 50.5
Melee? 54.5 with a reasonable +4 bonus. You could have +5. Could even have +6 via a different Earth ability, but then you'd lose your Desert Winds stance, so not worth it.
Two action blast? 57.5 ranged, 61.5 melee.
For ranged single action that's 288% a basic 5d6 air blast with no optimization. Get in flank, melee with agile to taste.
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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.
Run the numbers again with crits.
Double Boomerang goes even further ahead than blast-boomerang even for single target.
Run them even with considering enemy perma off guard, and Blast still is worse.
There's no reason to use blast if you have all your 3 actions available for damage even vs a single target.
Blast has its place, and that place is when you can't spare 3 actions for damage (recall/blast/something else).
(putting average AC and Ref for lvl appropriate enemy)
(also yeah, if you want damage, you go fire. Air has nothing on it.)
No de/buffs, high AC, moderate ref
Oh. Well that's an unexpected result to be sure.
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If you're just looking at level 20 numbers, air also has a mono-element stance later on in the tree that adds lightning to its blasts. It's jsut that it kicks in a bit late in the process.
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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.
Run the numbers again with crits.
Double Boomerang goes even further ahead than blast-boomerang even for single target.
Run them even with considering enemy perma off guard, and Blast still is worse.
There's no reason to use blast if you have all your 3 actions available for damage even vs a single target.
Blast has its place, and that place is when you can't spare 3 actions for damage (recall/blast/something else).
(putting average AC and Ref for lvl appropriate enemy)
(also yeah, if you want damage, you go fire. Air has nothing on it.)
No de/buffs, high AC, moderate ref
Oh. Well that's an unexpected result to be sure.
Notice also that keep 2 boomerangs against more tactical GMs probably don't work too much. Many GMs will notice this and will opt to move it's creatures try to prevent to returning boomerang, specially if is possible to put one of your allies between the boomerang, monster and you.
But this is also good to force action consuming. Some enemies will try to get away from boomerang line of effect consuming precious actions to Stride or Step while you can simply abandon the last boomerang and blast instead and see if worth to try another boomerang.
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If there are no walls to stop an aerial boomerang behind a target and you're in a one on one combat, go ahead an launch it from the air to have the floor stop it under your target. Either they move or you get bonus damage.
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If there are no walls to stop an aerial boomerang behind a target and you're in a one on one combat, go ahead an launch it from the air to have the floor stop it under your target. Either they move or you get bonus damage.
Combine with difficult terrain (oh man, a use case for earth's aura junction) to prevent just stepping out of it too for the reaction triggers. Huge+ size are similarly in trouble. The damage is also super good. Thanks for pointing this out.
also, not sure how you got your routine to get to suich a numbers:
the stance+blast(2 action blast?)/boom+blast/boom+2xblast has way lower numbers than what your graph show for me.
are you sure you had your modifiers correct?
https://imgur.com/iwuQqCA
this is with desert winds (1-8 damage bonus for boom, 2-16 bonus for blast, 3-5 bonus from strength, caps at 5d8 dices)
still indeed shows a the cycling build to be bit higher than pure boomerangs, but it's only at the later levels that it is noticably higher. and it never reaches the numbers you show in yours.
Let me see...
+1 damage at each even level, 2-11 damage dice, caster DC scaling with apex for the boomerang
+2 damage at each even level, +1 item bonus at 3 and 11, d8 damage dice, caster proficiency scaling, 1-5 dice at 1,5,9,13,17, base 16 str up to 20 for blast
Everything looks like it's in order on my end.
also, not sure how you got your routine to get to suich a numbers:
the stance+blast(2 action blast?)/boom+blast/boom+2xblast has way lower numbers than what your graph show for me.
are you sure you had your modifiers correct?
https://imgur.com/iwuQqCA
this is with desert winds (1-8 damage bonus for boom, 2-16 bonus for blast, 3-5 bonus from strength, caps at 5d8 dices)
still indeed shows a the cycling build to be bit higher than pure boomerangs, but it's only at the later levels that it is noticably higher. and it never reaches the numbers you show in yours.
Let me see...
+1 damage at each even level, 2-11 damage dice, caster DC scaling with apex for the boomerang
+2 damage at each even level, +1 item bonus at 3 and 11, d8 damage dice, caster proficiency scaling, 1-5 dice at 1,5,9,13,17, base 16 str up to 20 for blast
Everything looks like it's in order on my end.
It can't be.
Those are my parameters as well and I'm way below you. (for the blast, our boom damage is the same)
You made certain the bonus damage starts at 6 and not at 1?
I did find an issue in mine. I left in some damage from when I was experimenting with other things. Thanks for setting me straight.
Though considering the numbers you pull with Xenocrat's "boomerang the ground" strategy, there's no more need to actually use your blast to pull single target damage and, now with the correct numbers, pulls more than cycling boomerangs and blasts would do anyway.
Hmm start Fire with Impulse Junction and grab Earth or something with d8s and then Two-Element Infusion. Might be better to start dual and grab the Impulse Junction at 5, not sure. Combine the elements for a blast with 60ft range and d8 damage dice, half fire half bludgeoning or what have you. Maybe grab the Fire Aura option as well when you can but that might be 9th before you can get all that.
Now the question is what exactly happens to the damage? Do the dice become d10s with half and half damage? Do half the dice increase? If you have the Aura it should add the same amount of extra damage because it doesn't matter how much of the damage is fire to trigger it, just that you are dealing fire damage.
Kind of sad some of these things don't work on a Cold damage Fire Blast and that the Fire Aura Junction won't increase the Cold damage on a variant Fire Blast either.
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Yes this is the limitation of Fire only Kineticists. You may get stronger impulses with the combination of fire weakness, stances, save impulses and blasts but vs non-fire trait opponents with fire immunity or a strong fire resistance, you will be restricted to cold and/or piercing/bludgeoning/slashing damage to blasts only. It's a trade-off of versatility to literally fire-power.
But as I was pointed in another post. Face opponents that reduces the damage effectiveness due some resistance (usually some physical resistance) is the normal risk of martial classes. Kineticists still have more options to try to avoid this, not so much as a caster or an alchemist but still way more than a fighter.
The currently weakness of golens is alchemists. Is one of fewer scenarios where alchemists shines.
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I'm hoping golem rules get reworked, because as written it would seem that you're just screwed if you can't use an energy type that causes damage to them.
I think there's a good chance. While the Golem of Prague is Jewish mythology the concept that Golems are animated by elemental spirits and immune to magic is 100% DnD original. So a rework for Pathfinder Golems to distinguish them more was probably strongly considered given they're the company mascot.
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Yeah, I think the pivot for golem antimagic is that specific golems on Golarion are immune to most magic, like how specific dragons on Golarion are Gold (Mengkare) or Red (Choral). It's just not a property of a "type" of being.
Like Nex's golems in Quantium should be largely immune to Magic since Nex is one of the leading magical minds of his era, and he built two singular golems in order to aid in his war against another archmage. "Random Iron Golem in Evil Wizard #48171's tower" probably is safe to blast away, since that guy isn't Nex.
But the Kineticist who branches out can get a really impressive number of damage types. Like Fire/Metal/Wood with versatile elements can do Bashing/Piercing/Slashing/Fire/Vitality/Cold/Electric/Poison.
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Yes this is the limitation of Fire only Kineticists. You may get stronger impulses with the combination of fire weakness, stances, save impulses and blasts but vs non-fire trait opponents with fire immunity or a strong fire resistance, you will be restricted to cold and/or piercing/bludgeoning/slashing damage to blasts only.
They do have one non-blast option that isn't fire: Thermal Nimbus can do cold instead of fire damage. It won't get the aura weakness, but if they're weak to cold at least you have that going for you.
Fire kineticist looks awesome until you realise that the second a devil shows up you go from doing damage good enough to replace a martial to plinking away with a puny d6 blast and maybe doing a tiny bit of automatic damage with Thermal Nimbus and are therefore borderline irrelevant, at least that Nimbus damage incentivises you get up close, so enemies might waste a turn or two attacking you rather than someone useful.
This would be easily fixed by allowing extract element to work on any immunity, but that won't ever happen.
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It doesn't seem that costly for fire to spread out into another element by the time that fire immunities become more common. Fire does have, for my money, the coolest composite impulses so like going fire+earth+water for lava leap and steam knight is an awesome character because earth is going to get you that heavy armor to handle close quarters (and want people to be in range of your aura once you get the fire aura junction.)
Those composite impulses are mostly fire damage, but you're still going to be able to like "throw rocks at" anything you can't burn.
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Fire kineticist looks awesome until you realise that the second a devil shows up you go from doing damage good enough to replace a martial to plinking away with a puny d6 blast and maybe doing a tiny bit of automatic damage with Thermal Nimbus and are therefore borderline irrelevant, at least that Nimbus damage incentivises you get up close, so enemies might waste a turn or two attacking you rather than someone useful.
This would be easily fixed by allowing extract element to work on any immunity, but that won't ever happen.
So, first, it's not "the second a devil shows up". It's "the second a devil is the only useful target on the field".
Second... pretty much everyone has bad matchups. "Golems and also devils" isn't a particularly harsh set to have bad matchups against, and "you'll be limited to only your elemental blasts and maybe one or two other things" isn't all that terrible as far as "this horrible thing happens when you have a bad matchup" goes.
Side note: Molten Wire offers another impulse for dealing non-fire damage. Sure, it's a level 8 for you rather than a level 6, and you have to spend a feat on it rather than getting it as a junction freebie, but that doesn't make it bad, and even without the ongoing fire damage, the "clumsy until you free yourself" still applies. Basically, it's good enough that I'd probably take it on any mono-Fire kineticist I built, and it offers another useful option in those cases.
Fire kineticist remains a very solid option.
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Second... pretty much everyone has bad matchups.
I mean to some extent, but there are differences here. My fighter will be less happy against enemies with high AC or physical resistance, but they're still a fighter.
Against the wrong kind of golem or non-elemental source of immunity the kineticist can become almost or entirely nonfunctional.
Which is why hopefully remaster is doing away with golems as is because that's just trash design.
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Earth and Wood are going to get hit by devil physical resistance. Water has a weak cold AOE but the rest is bludgeoning.
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Generally speaking, as a kineticist, being reduced to just your blast as a damage source isn't going to make you nonfunctional. It's still a meaningful level of damage contribution (even if it isn't huge) and pretty much everyone other than Fire has access to non-damage ways of contributing that still work just fine.
Like, if you're wood? Man, get Timber Sentinel. tossing out a well-placed Protector tree every round may not be as much as you want to do, but it's sure not nothing.
That said... yeah, devils pretty much make a fair number of kineticists sad. They've got resistance or better to every blast type available to fire or wood, and immunity to fire.
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Second... pretty much everyone has bad matchups.I mean to some extent, but there are differences here. My fighter will be less happy against enemies with high AC or physical resistance, but they're still a fighter.
Against the wrong kind of golem or non-elemental source of immunity the kineticist can become almost or entirely nonfunctional.
Which is why hopefully remaster is doing away with golems as is because that's just trash design.
Animal Barbarian vs flying opponent.
Bard vs immune to mental.
The top Kineticist damage dealer being really worse in a very specific kind of encounter feels like a feature rather than a bug.
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Animal Barbarian vs flying opponent.Bard vs immune to mental.
Definitely suboptimal situations, but usually there's something you can do, the bard in this case is still an excellent party buffer even if some of their kit is negated... though I'd also frankly just agree that those are also examples of poorly designed encounters.
That's probably the reason why Paizo rarely puts inaccessible flying enemies as a sole or primary threat in low level encounters, because it's both awful and boring to be put in that situation.
The top Kineticist damage dealer being really worse in a very specific kind of encounter feels like a feature rather than a bug.
I mean it's not just the pyrokinetic, they actually might have the best flexibility here since between fire and cold there are a lot of golems and other enemies they can still deal with (though there are still some fights that are going to be miserable).
But I just ran a Paizo module for a friend playing an aerokineticist and when they encountered the wood golem in the basement he had exactly zero actions that could contribute to the combat in any way. Not "suboptimal" or "less good than he'd like" I mean he literally had nothing on his character sheet that could affect the golem at all.
There's no way someone is going to sell that to me as good game design.
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Affect the golem and affect the combat aren’t the same thing. He can still use four winds.
Also this is a remastered rules class and I think there no way golems stay in their OGL form.
I also think the same. In ORC version bestiary the Golems probably will be removed and other constructs will be place instead and new APs won't use the old OGL monsters (they will stay compatible but no more officially used).
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I hope we keep the golems. I also hope that their antimagic abilities are replaced with something more interesting and less problematic.