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I started putting this together as a way to organize my own thoughts and understanding about the various kineticist elements and try to get a better grasp on what they're good for overall. There's a lot to chew through, you know? I share it because... well, I figure that if I didn't have a particularly complete grasp of this stuff before I did this, then maybe some other folks didn't either. This is crude, slanted by my own biases, and limited to my own understanding, but it's a start, and I personally have found some interesting things along the way.
First, as a bit of context to help make sense of some of what I'm saying... there is a pretty clear antisynergy between overflow impulses (which take down your aura) on the one side and aura junctions (which therefore stop working until you can bring them back up) and aura stances (as above, but it also steals the free blast from your next channel elements) on the other. As such, for the most part, I advocate focusing on one or the other. If you're going to be throwing around a lot of overflow stuff, then you might want to put your junctions into non-aura things, and maybe avoid stances. If you really like your auras, then maybe not so much with the overflow. There is an exception, though, for opening moves. Having an overflow impulse as your standard opening move works just fine with aura stances, because you start out in aura but no stance, and would have to spend that action getting the stance up *anyway*. Now... on to the elements.
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- Air:
--- Gets a lot of mobility, a decent bit of intrigue-like utility, a nice bit of forced movement... and surprisingly few ways to deal actual damage. Of the 15 impulses that each element gets, there are four that deal damage. Only five of the impulses are overflow (which includes two of the damaging impulses, and one of the lvl 18 impulses, but the other level 18 impulse is a damaging stance, and the final damaging option is lvl 1.)
--- It's got a few potentially interesting stances (including one of its capstone impulses and a rather nice hybrid impulse with Earth), a solid aura junction, and relatively few overflows. If you're willing to really lean into the idea that damage is not your primary job on the team, and the rest of the team is willing to let you roll with that, then going aura-primary starts making a lot of sense.
--- Impulse Junction, Critical Blast, and Aura Junction are all solidly useful. Aura and impulse hand out even more mobility, and crit blast gives you a 10-foot push.
--- Composite impulses: Metal is terrible, fire is another overflow "mobility with damage" power (you already had one), earth is a potentially interesting aura but it requires that you get close. water is another overflow "damage plus forced move" power, and wood actually gives you a bit of healing, plus an enemy debuff.
--- Conclusion: Air gets on-demand access to a very nice version of flight (starting at level 8), a very nice version of Message, and a very nice version of invisibility. Does that appeal to you? Air is a bit light on damage-dealing, but has lots of battlefield mobility. Is that interesting or disappointing? Those two questions will pretty much give you your answer as far as whether or not to seriously consider playing an aerokineticist. The best way to take Air as a dual element is probably to use it to poach those tasty, tasty mobility and utility powers, and then use your other element to fill in your core combat ability.
- Earth:
--- 6 of the 15 impulses are overflow. That's the level 1 damaging impulse, an okay level 4 reaction, a level 6 damaging impulse, two level 12 terrain modification powers, and the level 18 Big Boom damaging power. Incidentally, those three damaging overflows? Other than Elemental Blast, that's the only direct damage impulses that pure earth gets.
--- Strong on defense, weak on attack. Level 1 gives you the best of the three armors, the level 4 overflow reaction is pretty defensive, level 8 gives you Spike Skin, which is a nice little defensive boost with some thorns attached, and the level 14 and level 18 stances both help out your defenses in their own ways.
--- 3 stances. You get one at level 1 that gives you tremorsense (Not particularly helpful in combat. Useful for early nonflying invisible enemies, I guess?), and then you have to wait until level 14 for the next one. The level 14 and level 18 stances are both pretty awesome, but they compete with one another fairly directly.
--- Has a bit of terrain manipulation (one for walls, one for crevices), and a fair stack of utility. Earth gets tremorsense, dig, creating semipermanent stone objects, and creating stepping stones to walk on to avoid hazardous terrain. Some of them are pretty niche.
--- Impulse junction is simple, useful, and adds to your defenses again. Crit is a straightforward "The enemy is prone now", which is nice by itself and combos well with Wood's. Aura... makes you marginally more sticky. It probably isn't worth it. Weirdly, neither of the two earth stances that are actually good really care about your aura size, so that's one feat you can save yourself. I don't normally mention skill junctions, but the skill junction is actually potentially interesting here. It's athletics, and the Earth kineticist already has lots of reason to both invest in strength and get within reach of the enemy.
--- Composite impulses can actually help a lot. Wood, Metal, and Fire all give extra ways of damaging the enemy and are pretty solid impulses in their own right. Fire and wood are overflow, and Wood and Metal are sustained. Air gives a stance that, honestly, is mostly useful for buffing Air stuff. It's okay, if that's what you're looking for. Water gives a non-overflow direct damaging attack. It's not a lot of damage, but it is damage, and it's got some effects that are potentially useful for sucking up enemy actions. Sadly, we don't actually know its range or area of effect at the moment, so it's kind of hard to tell how good it is.
--- General conclusion: It may be light on overflow impulses, but the fact that its aura junction isn't all that impressive and it doesn't get a good stance aura until lvl 14 means that you might well want to lean into the overflows anyway. It's clearly angling to be the designated tank of the kineticists, and it makes a solid case for itself in that. At the same time... it lacks any sort of equivalent to Opportunity Attack, which is a bit problematic, and the "what do I actually do in the fight" options are a bit limited. If you want to go mono-Earth, I expect that you'll want to invest pretty heavily in composite impulses, and which ones you pick (Air doesn't really apply, but all of the others are solid) are going to have a significant effect on your midgame strategy. In general, though, I think that Earth serves best as a solid core to personal defenses for a multi-element kineticist who intends to get right up into the fact of the enemy. Even just taking the level 1 armor impulse alone is worth a decent bit there.
- Fire:
--- First thing is that the current-meta default serious "max the damage" build for kineticist is going to start with fire element, fire impulse junction, fire aura junction, and a damage-dealing fire stance. It's probably going to want to invest in strength, too, and get up close, and consider overflow powers a bit expensive for anything other than openers.
--- It's midrange on the overflows overall. 7 out of the 15. It's just... often it seems like the overflow powers aren't the exciting ones. Admittedly, I'm generally biased in favor of aura builds, which may be causing me to discount the overflow options, but it's pretty clear that the fire kineticist was designed specifically to at least allow for a high-damage low-overflow build, and I find it somewhat difficult to consider it in any other light.
--- In addition to the wealth of raw damage, fire is notable for having a solid set of mobility powers. Like, 4 of the 15 fire impulses have a mobility component, and 3 of the 5 composite impulses do as well. Fire has a lot of support for jumping, with optional explosions.
--- Impulse junction and aura junction are both valuable. If you're planning on going with an aura build, then aura is the more important of the two. Fire's resistance junction is notable for being the only resistance junction that covers two damage types. Given that they're fire and cold, that's pretty solid. Critical blast isn't particularly impressive and also scales poorly.
--- Composite Impulses: Air and Earth are interesting "Damage and also movement" powers. Water is similar, except in stance form. Metal is a beautiful two-action non-overflow attack that cashes in some of the immediate damage for a whole lot of hassle for your target, and it slots into the standard fire/stance damage build *beautifully*. Wood is... weird. It's really not worth taking unless you have wood element blasts. If you do... it's cool if you can prep the battlefield with it, and otherwise a bit meh.
--- Conclusion: Well... do you like damage? This is the place to go to get the damage as a kineticist. It works surprisingly well for mono-fire, though you're probably still stronger overall if you branch out at some point. Starting as a dual-element, then taking fire aura at 5 and fire impulse at 9 wouldn't be a mistake. Seriously consider flames oracle archetype, though if you have a friend who's a flames oracle, that's even better. You could probably put together a pretty cool/interesting long-range high-overflow build with this element, but every time I start looking at it, I get drawn away by the way that the short-range aura build all works together so well.
- Metal:
--- Second most raw damage of all the elements, but a lot of that damage is built around hazardous terrain, and pretty much all of it is overflow. Gets a nice early wall that can stagger the enemy advance a bit, eat a few actions, and then explode for damage. Has a built-in armor with a built-in shield. Has solid ways of horking over specific kinds of enemies - metallic ones, and ones who are weak to a certain metal.
--- Impulse junction gives a nice helping of thorns. Aura junction would be really cool but only works on metallic enemies. Immunity is... okay. Blast crit is a bit of extra ongoing damage, but scales poorly (much like Fire).
--- no mobility, no heals.
--- General conclusion: The three main selling points are "horks over specific foes", "excellent damage if you can exploit hazardous terrain" and "reasonably tanky+thorns", with the metalcrafting utility as a nice-to-have that comes along for the ride. The "horks over specific foes" is going to depend on your campaign, and the "can exploit hazardous terrain" is going to depend on your party. If you don't expect to get any love from either, it's probably not worth it. Should pretty clearly go overflow rather than aura.
- Water:
--- One of two healing elements, and the one that's the most straightforward to use.
--- Uses a lot of overflow. It has 15 base impulses. 9 of them are overflow, including every non-stance past level 4, and the level 4 non-stance impulse is niche utility. For aquatic adventures it's great, but it's not something you're going to want to throw around in combat all that often..
--- Lots of area effect. Has a fair bit of forced movement, difficult terrain, and "creatures inside this area are concealed, and creatures outside the area are concealed from them". No hazardous terrain. No single-target attacks. Other than the difficult terrain and zones of concealment, it only has a single standard ice wall for terrain modification.
--- Impulse Junction is really pretty nice, if you like forced movement. Aura junction niche. Crit junction is actively counterproductive in many cases. Has one of the better spreads of blast damage types, if you're willing to invest a couple of first-level feats in it.
--- Composite impulses: metal is too niche. Wood wants to be interesting, but seems impractical, unless you're able to prep the battlefield. Fire is a stance that has a lot of mobility and area-effect fire damage... that would actually be interesting if Water wasn't so overflow-heavy. Earth is potentially cool. It does mostly water stuff but *isn't* overflow. We'll need to actually find out what the area is before we know how good it is, though. Wind is potentially nice, and also very much more of the same as the rest of the stuff that water has to offer. May well be worth investing in, but doesn't change the profile any.
--- Conclusion: I'd take this for the healing and/or forced move. One of the auras is also pretty nice from a debuff standpoint... though the heavy use of overflow (and three-action overflow specifically) makes liking it for its auras not necessarily all that great. Everything else would be something that I adjusted to because I wanted those things, rather than being a thing I wanted for itself.
- Wood:
--- The other of your two healing elements. Worth noting that the way that kineticist healing works, it can absolutely be worth taking both if you want to go heavy on the healing side.
--- It's heavy on ways to hand out temp HP, and other forms of "we're just going to have you not take that damage after all".
--- Seven out of the 15 powers are overflow, largely weighted towards the upper levels
--- Impulse junction hands out chunks of temp HP. Aura junction hands out very small amounts of temp HP to you and all your nearby friends. It doesn't seem like an impressive amount, but it might be worth more than we think. blast crit is a nice little tax on enemy actions.
--- In addition to the healing, it has quite a bit of terrain manipulation, much of it aggressive. Much of the terrain manipulation is also overflow/sustained, which limits the ability to stack very much of it at once.
--- General conclusion: I'd go with Wood because I wanted the tree, I wanted the heals, or I wanted the aggressive terrain manipulation.
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In the process of doing this, I noticed a few interesting things about potential builds.
- Metal/Water. I honestly did not see this coming, but it's two elements that are both quite fond of their overflows, one of which is big into dropping large areas of hazardous terrain, and the other of which is big into forced movement. That's a pretty solid core combo right there. Open up by dropping some largish area of hazardous terrain, and spend the rest of the fight pushing your enemies back into it and/or pushing them around in it.
- Earth/Wood. This one wasn't a surprise to me, so much, but it got reaffirmed.
Earth kind of needs a friend to give it useful things to do with its time. Wood's habits wrt healing and aggressive terrain give it useful things to do, and it also just stacks more tank on that tank. Then, too, if you've got to pick one composite impulse, jagged berms is a good one to pick. Finally, those blast crits really are two great tastes that taste great together. It's one pairing where I would absolutely grab two-element infusion (once I got both blast crits).
- Fire is funny. The Mono-Fire build almost writes itself... except that the only junctions it actually *uses* are impulse and aura. So... maybe mixing it with something else? Honestly not sure what to do with the other side of that combo, though I admit that Metal is at least a little tempting just for the joy of keeping Molten Wires, and it's not like being able to fill large blocks of the battlefield with hazardous terrain as an opener is a bad thing. Alternately, reach into Air for all of those fabulous Air shenanigans. You could be the tiny avatar of fiery death that you always were... while also being flying and invisible.
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agreements, disagreements, further insights, and other thoughts about derived build implications are all eagerly welcomed here.
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One thing about Mono Fire and the Metal composite is that you can pick up a composite at level 8 with a feat if you are single element. So you could grab any of the composites that include fire, including the very useful Molten Wire.
Hopefully those wanting some kind of blasting class are happy.
Given how P2E now relies on feats to offer abilities, it's safe to assume that if an element is falling out, they can rectify it with new feats, thus new powers.
Just trying to be optimistic here ;)
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An important point of Earth impulses that I think the OP miss in the analysis is that with Armor in Earth with an heavy-armor AC and and due the relative lower distance of earth impulses its a good option to builds that dumps Dex to boost Str and combined with Weapon Infusion this allows to get some close ranged (reach or throw) earth blasts boosted by Str bonus.
Another point interesting is that Tremor currently have an excellent heightening getting 1d10 per 2 levels (this maybe a mistake but until get errated is how currently works)
All this makes Earth Impulses probably the most stronger DPR build in lower levels while you still don't get Fire aura and gives the kineticist a very good heavy armor bonus and a free +1 circumstance AC whats a bit rare combination in lower levels.
But I agree in higher levels Earth is more useful to improve defenses to help other impulses like Fire to get the best of both.
As far as hazardous terrain goes - Wood has much earlier access to it than metal does, with Ravel of Thorns and Jagged Berms (technically not hazardous terrain but uh...)
And fire has access at 1st level (when it's bad, but the hazardous damage scaling is quite good).
Given how P2E now relies on feats to offer abilities, it's safe to assume that if an element is falling out, they can rectify it with new feats, thus new powers.
Just trying to be optimistic here ;)
Yes, they'll be published with some new swashbuckler and investigator feats.
Yes, they'll be published with some new swashbuckler and investigator feats.
Not to say they haven't done it yet, but that feat system is leagues better for patching than errata'ing the class due to poor design ^^;
Alloy of flesh and steel: um. No needle darts? But needle darts is one of the reasons to take this.
Needle darts has big overlap with Magnetic Pinions (ND is worse damage scaling, better insanely better action economy here) and Plate in Treasure. ND would also have the usual innate spell proficiency/attribute issues - you'd be trained and using charisma. Better to eliminate the confusion/tempation to use it and drop two impulses and just boost your normal blast damage.
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I think my favorite Kineticist build straight off is fire/earth. These elements complement each other really well, since Fire wants to be in your face for max damage but doesn't have the tools to really be comfortable there, earth wants to be in your face but doesn't have great auras or damage. Lava Leap is overflow, but it effectively gives "raise a shield" AC (so you don't really need the impulse junction.) Plus it's only two actions so you can channel right after and get thermal nimbus back.
Bigget problem is that this cycle really wants to start the turn with your element, so things like the overflow reactions are a bummer. Plus being down 2 AC because you couldn't lava leap this turn is a bummer, maybe carry an actual shield.
I'm trying to figure out if a close combat routine of "lava leap again, to a slightly different spot, then channel again to bring back thermal nimbus" is workable.
Then I'm only going to need a different routine for "things I don't want to/can't be close to."
IMO Earth/Fire works pretty well because most DPR of fire impulses requires that the target stays in the aura and this put kineticist is a more risky situation where Earth defensive impulses are welcome. Also during first levels where you still don't have a potent stance or some impulse that justify to not overflow the combination of 1d8 Earth Blasts and Tremor are even more stronger than early fire impulses.
I'm trying to figure out if a close combat routine of "lava leap again, to a slightly different spot, then channel again to bring back thermal nimbus" is workable.
Then I'm only going to need a different routine for "things I don't want to/can't be close to."
Well, you'll be down one of impulse junction, aura junction or earth element until level 9 which is bad. Even with all three, turret/mounted fire is doing 35~40% more damage than you are.
In exchange, you aren't losing damage to movement or feats to a mount and have better AC.
I like fire but when building a kineticist, I try to pair it with an element that can do area damage when fire isn't working well, and I sometimes find myself wondering why I'm taking fire at all of I'm just going to take back up impulses anyway that do a lot of the same stuff but less damage.
That being said I've changed my mind between earth/fire, earth/metal, and earth/fire/metal almost every day since shipping started and spoilers started dropping.
Worth noting that while fire and metal both have really poorly scaling crit junctions, Fire generates a lot of weakness making the damage significantly more respectable... so I'd rate the fire version as okay and the metal version as abysmal.
I'm trying to figure out if a close combat routine of "lava leap again, to a slightly different spot, then channel again to bring back thermal nimbus" is workable.
Then I'm only going to need a different routine for "things I don't want to/can't be close to."
Well, you'll be down one of impulse junction, aura junction or earth element until level 9 which is bad. Even with all three, turret/mounted fire is doing 35~40% more damage than you are.
In exchange, you aren't losing damage to movement or feats to a mount and have better AC.
I'm thinking of this more as a an "in-your face alternative to mono-earth" personally. Like the Earth Impulse junction is half of what lava leap gives you, so you don't really need it if you're going to be using lava leap whenever you want to hang around danger. You'll have as much AC as a sword and board fighter in plate mail until like 17th level, and you'll hurt people by standing around.
That Hell of a Million Needles is brutal. Makes me think of Hellraiser Cenobytes or something.
I'm trying a metal and wood kineticist. Sort of a support guy with some firepower. We're playing a dual class game and I made him a bard/kineticist built to be like Ebony Maw since it is for Kingmaker. I'm going to see how it plays. It looks interesting.
I find it super difficult to pass up the impulse junction for air. The extra mobility seems amazing. Also wants me to make an elf Kineticist (thank you, alternate racial ability scores!), because as soon as you regularly can get Longstrider (i.e. Tailwind, an air spell in the Remaster) on you, for example via Kinetic Activation and a wand of tailwind at lvl 3, you'll be at 50 feet regular movement (with Nimble Elf and Fleet), meaning you can half-stride for 25 feet each time you use a 2 action impulse. Without that you'll still be at a half-stride of 20 feet as soon as lvl 3 rolls around. Probably what I'm going to take into PFS next weekend.
I find it super difficult to pass up the impulse junction for air. The extra mobility seems amazing. Also wants me to make an elf Kineticist (thank you, alternate racial ability scores!), because as soon as you regularly can get Longstrider (i.e. Tailwind, an air spell in the Remaster) on you, for example via Kinetic Activation and a wand of tailwind at lvl 3, you'll be at 50 feet regular movement (with Nimble Elf and Fleet), meaning you can half-stride for 25 feet each time you use a 2 action impulse. Without that you'll still be at a half-stride of 20 feet as soon as lvl 3 rolls around. Probably what I'm going to take into PFS next weekend.
I will look at air. It looks very focused on moving and doing not much else. Metal seems focused on hammering and wood on control with some defensive abilities. That protector tree looks crazy good to me. You keep summoning them to absorb damage? Damn. That is so good.
On a side note, you were right. Wrath of the Righteous video game improved greatly after the city. Crusade Mode more fun than Kingdom management. Being mythic is a blast.
I will look at air. It looks very focused on moving and doing not much else. Metal seems focused on hammering and wood on control with some defensive abilities. That protector tree looks crazy good to me. You keep summoning them to absorb damage? Damn. That is so good.
If DPR is the most important metric, fire is probably the best, although it has to get close enough for enemies to be in its aura to really hit it off with the continual damage. I think Air Boomerang can be pretty good DPR, though, with the free movement, so that you can reposition and keep two boomerangs in the air a lot of the time.
On a side note, you were right. Wrath of the Righteous video game improved greatly after the city. Crusade Mode more fun than Kingdom management. Being mythic is a blast.
I love that game. Some people don't like it when they get to act 4, but I loved that act as well. ^^
I will look at air. It looks very focused on moving and doing not much else. Metal seems focused on hammering and wood on control with some defensive abilities. That protector tree looks crazy good to me. You keep summoning them to absorb damage? Damn. That is so good.
On a side note, you were right. Wrath of the Righteous video game improved greatly after the city. Crusade Mode more fun than Kingdom management. Being mythic is a blast.
Air gives you at-will invisibility, flight, and messages. That sort of thing can be tremendously powerful in an out-of-combat way if you can figure out how to use it right and you have a GM who will let you do stuff like that. It's also got a lot of baked-in mobility. It pays for this by not being particularly string as a damage-dealer. If the utility doesn't appeal as utility... you're probably better off picking some other element. It's very strong at what it does, but the thing it does may not be a thing you want.
Metal seems brutal. Hell of a million needles is just ridiculous.
Interesting class. I have to say first build through doing metal and wood was good. Very diverse abilities. Interesting powers that seem like they will be effective.
I still think Sanquivolent Roots should heal undead since it drains blood, but I might house rule that.
Paizo really needs to take into account undead PCs in the remaster when doing up healing and condition removal spells and effects. Some PCs like being undead.
I was a bit confused that people were talking about things as if they hadn't seen them before and completely forgot about the fact that I got the book so early because of the subscription. Whoops!
Yeah, honestly? Kineticist seems pretty dope. Even the Archetype itself gives some pretty interesting options for characters who might not otherwise have access to energy damage. It's not the best at scaling, since it hits Expert at level 12 and doesn't get any higher, but the Gate Attenuator should help keep it up to speed a bit, and you can take a feat to raise your basic blast's damage. Really, what else is new for multiclass archetypes - you gotta spend to dive deeper. But I'm not sure many other archetypes give martials such breadth of damage type options.
The Kineticist goes up to Legendary with their abilities.
Ravingdork posted a pretty interesting aerokineticist who picks up water as a second element (IOW not a dual gate character from the start). At 16th level, he seems to have one water impulse feat, all the rest being air. I'm still trying to get my head around it. :-)
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Given how P2E now relies on feats to offer abilities, it's safe to assume that if an element is falling out, they can rectify it with new feats, thus new powers.
Just trying to be optimistic here ;)
I don't think any of them fall behind, actually. It might be cleaner to focus more on overflow or aura, but it doesn't actually seem that hard or bad in any way to have a balanced spread of options. And in all the Kineticist discussions I've seen on the Pathfinder Discord server, few can seem to agree on which elements are the "best" and which are the worst, everyone has different favorites and different mono and dual and multi builds they're favoring and different things they value that the class lets you focus on — which is always a good sign.
I wonder how effective a dedicated healer kineticist is. Between oceans balm and dash of herbs, An unlimited source of heals (per 10 minutes per target) sounds damn good.
Unlimited healing is not hard to get in this edition, but for sheer convenience, you just take Water/Wood and maybe Medic or Blessed One and live the good life, I reckon! Nothing as big as two-action Heal or as convenient as, I dunno, Vital Beacon or something, but you get a nice variety of auto-refreshing means to heal with a variety of bonus effects, including help with persistent damage from Ocean's Balm (but just fire and not acid, weirdly), flat value increase from Fresh Produce, AoE and affliction healing from Torrent in the Blood, and condition healing from Dash of Herbs.
As a bonus, if you invest in Wood's temp HP junction(s), it becomes a really neat choice for Protector's Sacrifice from Blessed One, or even Life Link from the Oracle archetype. Class feats and actions are both at a bit of a premium when playing a Kineticist, but it still seems like you can make a rather fun and effective healer with it.
Given how P2E now relies on feats to offer abilities, it's safe to assume that if an element is falling out, they can rectify it with new feats, thus new powers.
Just trying to be optimistic here ;)
I don't think any of them fall behind, actually. It might be cleaner to focus more on overflow or aura, but it doesn't actually seem that hard or bad in any way to have a balanced spread of options. And in all the Kineticist discussions I've seen on the Pathfinder Discord server, few can seem to agree on which elements are the "best" and which are the worst, everyone has different favorites and different mono and dual and multi builds they're favoring and different things they value that the class lets you focus on — which is always a good sign.
I wonder how effective a dedicated healer kineticist is. Between oceans balm and dash of herbs, An unlimited source of heals (per 10 minutes per target) sounds damn good.Unlimited healing is not hard to get in this edition, but for sheer convenience, you just take Water/Wood and maybe Medic or Blessed One and live the good life, I reckon! Nothing as big as two-action Heal or as convenient as, I dunno, Vital Beacon or something, but you get a nice variety of auto-refreshing means to heal with a variety of bonus effects, including help with persistent damage from Ocean's Balm (but just fire and not acid, weirdly), flat value increase from Fresh Produce, AoE and affliction healing from Torrent in the Blood, and condition healing from Dash of Herbs.
As a bonus, if you invest in Wood's temp HP junction(s), it becomes a really neat choice for Protector's Sacrifice from Blessed One, or even Life Link from the Oracle archetype. Class feats and actions are both at a bit of a premium when playing a Kineticist, but it still seems like you can make a rather fun and effective healer with it.
It seems to be one heal per 10 minutes per person. That is insufficient for combat healing in my experience if a monster is going for the kill on a character or some martial is tanking. It didn't seem great to me.
I don't think any of them fall behind, actually. It might be cleaner to focus more on overflow or aura, but it doesn't actually seem that hard or bad in any way to have a balanced spread of options. And in all the Kineticist discussions I've seen on the Pathfinder Discord server, few can seem to agree on which elements are the "best" and which are the worst, everyone has different favorites and different mono and dual and multi builds they're favoring and different things they value that the class lets you focus on — which is always a good sign.
Good for Paizo if they managed to get the class right :)
My point still stands that with their rule system, they can add "missing" impulses via feats though ;)
Dual Gate seems better than Single Gate given you can get a Single Gate Impulse Junction later on when you start getting Gate Junctions. The only way to access Composition Impulses is being Dual Gate.
Even when you Fork the Path, it doesn't let you pick up Composition Impulses from what I can tell.
But if you get Dual Gate, you can still pick up Single Gate Impulse Junctions.
It seems to be making it optimal to go Dual Gate, so long as you going to make at least level 5.
Unless I'm missing something.
I don't think any of them fall behind, actually. It might be cleaner to focus more on overflow or aura, but it doesn't actually seem that hard or bad in any way to have a balanced spread of options. And in all the Kineticist discussions I've seen on the Pathfinder Discord server, few can seem to agree on which elements are the "best" and which are the worst, everyone has different favorites and different mono and dual and multi builds they're favoring and different things they value that the class lets you focus on — which is always a good sign.Good for Paizo if they managed to get the class right :)
My point still stands that with their rule system, they can add "missing" impulses via feats though ;)
This is a pretty well designed class near as I can tell. Extremely versatile and feels powerful. Very interesting mechanics. You can almost always find a decent feat for an element. You can change them out if new Impulses come out on a daily basis once you get Reflow Elements.
Feels up there with the bard and druid and fighter and rogue for classes. Top tier design and real power.
It seems to be one heal per 10 minutes per person. That is insufficient for combat healing in my experience if a monster is going for the kill on a character or some martial is tanking. It didn't seem great to me.If the monsters are going for the kill on a single PC in PF 2e, that PC is dead. The system cannot really deal with monster focus-fire. I've watched clerics burn their entire healing font in one moderate encounter when the GM did that. At low/mid level, to be clear (high level is much more survivable in general) but still.
The healing impulses are good because they're 1-action non-overflow. They're meant to replace 1-action blasts or turning on stances. They will not replace a primary healer like a cleric or even a primal caster with heal . They're like a better version of Battle Medicine, nothing more but also nothing less.
I monster focus fire all the time and the heal spell can deal with it. Low level is when you can't handle monster focus fire. At high level you can handle monster focus fire. Heal is a very powerful spell.
It's why I can't complain about the boring cleric. Their feats are like watching paint dry. But they have so many heals that can change fights with that ability alone even with all their boring feats if they do almost nothing else.
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Dual Gate seems better than Single Gate given you can get a Single Gate Impulse Junction later on when you start getting Gate Junctions. The only way to access Composition Impulses is being Dual Gate.Even when you Fork the Path, it doesn't let you pick up Composition Impulses from what I can tell.
But if you get Dual Gate, you can still pick up Single Gate Impulse Junctions.
It seems to be making it optimal to go Dual Gate, so long as you going to make at least level 5.
At higher level dual is often better. At lower level, you generally really want that impulse junction and often the aura junction. I've already discussed how mono-fire really wants to stay mono-gate until level 9, because the aura and impulse junction are so critical for their damage.
Dual gate means you don't get either impulse/aura junction until 5. This is painful, as impulse/aura junction are passive effects that do not take actions to activate, unlike impulses. The only benefit to dual-gate at lower level is getting more impulses.
I imagine most games in the level 1-4 range will be mono-gate, 5-8 are probably...
It seems like the tradeoff is supposed to be "early access to composite impulses" vs. "early access to junctions." Like you could make the case that the Fire/Earth character is better starting from level 1 as dual gate, since the fire aura wants you to be *very* close before you get aura shaping at 10th level, and that's something you're much more comfortable doing as someone with the Earth Armor up. Plus, if you need to do d8s on your attacks, you can use earth blasts instead of fire blasts.