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CUTTING WITHOUT BLADE FEAT 20
EXEMPLAR
While tales of your divine ikons have spread far and wide, you’ve realized that as they are all manifestations of your soul, the object itself is unnecessary. Your ikons disintegrate into golden light. You can place your divine spark into any object in your possession, even a nonthreatening object like a single strand of grass, to transform it into a fully functional copy of your ikon made out of pure divine radiance. You can do this as a free action immediately before or after Striking with or otherwise using the ikon.
The only way I see it's useful is you can apply it to any weapon at will, or if you lose your physical ikons... which I don't see coming up in most adventures.
Is there something I'm not understanding?
A PLACE BEYOND MORTALITY FEAT 20
EXEMPLAR
Prerequisites Claim Advanced Domain
Frequency once per day
Requirements You have at least 1 Focus Point in your focus pool.
Your domain is not just a representation of your power but of your divine essence and the potential immortality that essence represents. You cease aging. When you would die for any reason, you can immediately expend all your remaining Focus Points as a free action that can be taken at any time and regardless of your current condition to survive at 0 Hit Points, purge yourself of any negative conditions. When you do, you heal yourself for half of your total Hit Points, stand back up in your current square, instantly summon your weapon ikon to your hand, and Shift your Immanence to any of your ikons.
Definitely has Cool Factor, and never aging is always cool, but you have to DIE for it to come up. Not just go down to 0 hit points, but DIE. So it seems less useful (and will come up less often) than a Level 20 feat seems to warrant.
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Definitely has Cool Factor, and never aging is always cool, but you have to DIE for it to come up. Not just go down to 0 hit points, but DIE. So it seems less useful (and will come up less often) than a Level 20 feat seems to warrant.A PLACE BEYOND MORTALITY FEAT 20
EXEMPLAR
Prerequisites Claim Advanced Domain
Frequency once per day
Requirements You have at least 1 Focus Point in your focus pool.
Your domain is not just a representation of your power but of your divine essence and the potential immortality that essence represents. You cease aging. When you would die for any reason, you can immediately expend all your remaining Focus Points as a free action that can be taken at any time and regardless of your current condition to survive at 0 Hit Points, purge yourself of any negative conditions. When you do, you heal yourself for half of your total Hit Points, stand back up in your current square, instantly summon your weapon ikon to your hand, and Shift your Immanence to any of your ikons.
Well, I believe it would work vs Death Effects which is neat at least. Worst case scenario you can tell your allies to include you in AoEs whenever you're bleeding out I suppose.
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Yes, both are obviously level 20 feats in what they actually do, but neither has the power level of a level 20 feat. Especially Cutting Without Blade seems to be entirely missing any tangible benefit. There is some minor hand juggling you can do with two-handed weapons and you'll always have a weapon, but that is extremely fringe and weak.
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I must be reading Cutting Without Blade very differently to other people, as it seems to be me its function is to effectively be the equivalent of the Quicken feats other classes get at 20, in this case for Shift Immanence- it allows you to move your spark before or after every relevant action, so you always have access to both the Immanence and Transcendence you want without having to plan it out. I don't know how powerful that is having not played the class yet, but it seems it may fundamentally change how you can play.
I must be reading Cutting Without Blade very differently to other people, as it seems to be me its function is to effectively be the equivalent of the Quicken feats other classes get at 20, in this case for Shift Immanence- it allows you to move your spark before or after every relevant action, so you always have access to both the Immanence and Transcendence you want without having to plan it out. I don't know how powerful that is having not played the class yet, but it seems it may fundamentally change how you can play.
It has no interaction with Shift Immanence whatsoever. All it does is allow you to transform random objects into your ikons as a free action before/after Striking with them or using their transcend ability.
That is an extremely liberal and flawed interpretation. One, such an ability would without a doubt mention Shift Immanence by name, because that is how PF2 works. Two, Spark Immanence has a 1/round frequency, which this wouldn't override.
And three, you forgot to highlight the important last part of that sentence:
While tales of your divine ikons have spread far and wide,
you’ve realized that as they are all manifestations of your
soul, the object itself is unnecessary. Your ikons disintegrate
into golden light. You can place your divine spark into any
object in your possession, even a nonthreatening object
like a single strand of grass, to transform it into a fully
functional copy of your ikon made out of pure divine
radiance. You can do this as a free action immediately
before or after Striking with or otherwise using the ikon.
That is what "placing your spark" and the last sentence refer to, nothing else. It literally tells you the effect and Shift Immanence is not mentioned. There is absolutely no way your interpretation is correct.
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CUTTING WITHOUT BLADE FEAT 20
EXEMPLAR
While tales of your divine ikons have spread far and wide, you’ve realized that as they are all manifestations of your soul, the object itself is unnecessary. Your ikons disintegrate into golden light. You can place your divine spark into any object in your possession, even a nonthreatening object like a single strand of grass, to transform it into a fully functional copy of your ikon made out of pure divine radiance. You can do this as a free action immediately before or after Striking with or otherwise using the ikon.The only way I see it's useful is you can apply it to any weapon at will, or if you lose your physical ikons... which I don't see coming up in most adventures.
Is there something I'm not understanding?
Definitely has Cool Factor, and never aging is always cool, but you have to DIE for it to come up. Not just go down to 0 hit points, but DIE. So it seems less useful (and will come up less often) than a Level 20 feat seems to warrant.A PLACE BEYOND MORTALITY FEAT 20
EXEMPLAR
Prerequisites Claim Advanced Domain
Frequency once per day
Requirements You have at least 1 Focus Point in your focus pool.
Your domain is not just a representation of your power but of your divine essence and the potential immortality that essence represents. You cease aging. When you would die for any reason, you can immediately expend all your remaining Focus Points as a free action that can be taken at any time and regardless of your current condition to survive at 0 Hit Points, purge yourself of any negative conditions. When you do, you heal yourself for half of your total Hit Points, stand back up in your current square, instantly summon your weapon ikon to your hand, and Shift your Immanence to any of your ikons.
I mean, both of those have niche uses.
First one is essentially protection against being disarmed or having weapon broken(like by balors).
Second one is basically something like nanocyte's capstone from starfinder, its additional death protection that allows you to stay in the fight, which can be useful against death effects and such, which isn't too unusual with 20+ level foes.
Like stuff like high level enemy with "on crit fail you instea die" or having aura that deals damage and has death trait is where stuff like that is nice.
nope.
per RAW, when you put your spark into anything, it gets the benefit of it.
per RAW, you only have that one single spark and you move it around.
Yes, you CAN transform something to your Ikon, I never said you don't, but when you do so, you by definition HAVE to move your spark into it, hence you Shift.
It simply can't be more RAW as it's specifically written that in order to transform something you first MOVE YOUR SPARK into that something.
That is not how PF2 does things. Under any circumstances. Ever. Flavor text never has mechanical effects. There is no RAW here whatsoever. I can't stress that enough. If the devs want you to know that something does something, they write it in, they don't nebulously describe it. Unless a feat literally says you can do something like this, you can't.
Yeah the immortality feat is very much useful, you basically have a free second life per fight with the only cost being your focus points.
Animist has a betterish one at 18 but eh, that's a max 4 per day.
This one is 1/day so I don't know how the other one is worse ^^.
The problem is that it only does anything when you actually die, which is beyond rare in my experience. In contrast, almost all other level 20 feats are really good at not allowing you to get to that point in the first place. Which in my eyes is just a lot better.
That is not how PF2 does things. Under any circumstances. Ever. Flavor text never has mechanical effects. There is no RAW here whatsoever. I can't stress that enough. If the devs want you to know that something does something, they write it in, they don't nebulously describe it. Unless a feat literally says you can do something like this, you can't.nope.
per RAW, when you put your spark into anything, it gets the benefit of it.
per RAW, you only have that one single spark and you move it around.
Yes, you CAN transform something to your Ikon, I never said you don't, but when you do so, you by definition HAVE to move your spark into it, hence you Shift.
It simply can't be more RAW as it's specifically written that in order to transform something you first MOVE YOUR SPARK into that something.
So... you havent aswered the question (which you cleverly tried to edit out):
is "move your spark to an Ikon" a flavor text in Trancendence as well?
Why is the same exact text treated differenently (in your opinion) here?
Per RAW, it literally says "move your Spark into the item" So it does.
P.S.
That's exactly how PF2 does things. It says in clear english what it does.
I didn't see a question when I quoted you, that wasn't intentional on my part ^^. To answer it, though, you are right, this makes it a lot less clear and your interpretation definitely a valid option. Well spotted!
The phrasing is still unacceptably vague, though. Shift Immanence works fine, because it says what it does. In Transcendence, we have to (reasonably) presume that shifting the spark will immediately grants us that Ikon's immanence ability, but never actually says so. So both Transcendence and Cut Without Blade will need clear phrasing.
I think having a not die button with A Place Beyond Mortality is really good especially since once you're at that point you're dealing with incredibly dangerous and lethal encounters, it is a feat that requires you to die yes but it is also the kind of feat you want on hand when your 20th level party goes to have a showdown with Treerazer.
Cutting Without Blade is incredibly flavorful I do love it, but it also doesn't feel useful at 20th level who is going to lose all their gear suddenly? It kind of feels like the Witch's hut, super flavorful but not super useful. If it came with an extra spark or an extra transference or transend that'd be super nice.
It does stand out to me with the playtest there isn't away to get multiple sparks, trasends or shifts.
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Honestly a clarification will be required in this feat to avoid you have to enter in a long discussion to understand what it does mechanically based in what is written.