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I know the playtest isn't over, but I think enough time has passed that I can give a comprehensive list of things that me and my friends saw, along with the general consensus of the internet and the other forum posters here, to give a pretty good idea of what we want to say about the playtest. If you haven't seen it, Ronald the Rules Lawyer did an entire combat with an all Animist party on youtube and he had some stuff to say. So, given what I've seen everyone say, along with my own thoughts and experiences, here are my hopefully non-knee-jerk-reaction thoughts.
General) Unlike previous playtests, its seems like these classes are just on average way too powerful compared to other classes. I'll go over some issues in general below, but for the most part, vessel spells and Exemplar abilities just blow what other classes can do out of the water. Unless the remaster is going to give other classes a significant power boost (which would be problematic without boosting enemies) than these classes just seem to to come out as S-tier classes.
Animist)
Sage vs channeler) Apparition's Possession does very little: There are no mechanics for non-spell rank controls like Harpies/kelpies, plus a lot of creatures get access to control spells super early like vampires and succubi . . . and control spells tend to have the incapacitation trait anyway so if they are at a spell rank below half your level your saves are treated as one better anyway. And while the Free sage feat is super flavorful and I love the idea . . . 90% of the time it is worse than Channeler's stance. You can use Channeler's stance in almost every fight, Apparition Sense is very situational. Combined with the fact that the ability to switch up your primary spirit in battle depending on what the party needs is SUPER useful, and the sage just falls flat.
The fix: Give Sages a special extra ability that only they get when their primary spirit is active (like the Witness to Ancient Battles giving them martial weapon proficiency even when they aren't in their vessel spell). Fix Apparition's possession to work off of enemy Creature level (immune to control effects from creatures up to your character level+3 or +2 or something). Make Channeler's stance just a normal feat anyone can take, and make apparition sense a class feature.
Sustaining Dance: Seems like a MUST pick for a class based on throwing out a lot of sustaining spells. If you meant to make the vessel spells more powerful by making them all sustaining (and thus cutting down your action economy) then remove this feat. If it's meant to be in there as an offset to all the vessel spells, then make it a class feature. Otherwise it is just a 'must pick' feat and basically feels like a feat tax . . . and no one likes a feat tax. It's like how every rogue in existence chooses Gang Up at level 6 . . . it's a no brainier, might as well not even give rogues a level 6 feat.
Groves and Gardens) The Spirit of Groves and Gardens is by far the best healing we've seen in the game. It outstrips just about any other out-of-combat healing, making things like the leaf druid's Goodberry almost laughable. If combined with Channeler's Stance it gets even crazier. It's also good in combat especially if you have a chokepoint so you can prevent the enemies from benefiting from the healing, or if you are fighting undead/constructs. Most other resource-less healing pales in comparison: Lay on Hands, Hymn of Healing, Lesson of Life, Restore the mind . . . all are a pittance compared to this. Plus, most of those are options you have to choose, feats you have to take . . . you can just grab this when needed and on days you don't need to heal, can grab another apparition.
The Fix: Limiting the healing to in combat might cut down the utility of it a bit but . . . it's still really good. Plus a lot of players hate combat-only abilities because it doesn't make sense in story. (See most GMs allowing emotional acceptance psychics to heal out of combat just to handwave out of combat healing). Maybe reduce the healing to 1 HP per spell rank per round? Or 2?
Stalker of Darken Boughs) So the Vessel Spell here is good for doing some recon by resource-less pest form, but I might give it sustained up to 10 min? Animal form and Elemental form are okay but then . . . there's no reason to take this as your primary spirit based like, level 11, because any combat form you assume will just be merced. Oh, and also, spell ranks 2-5 is a pretty big null space where the best combat form they can assume is an animal but they will get wrecked if they try at say, level 8, making this spirit pretty bad for most of your career.
The Fix I assume you will eventually give this apparition more options and better combat forms passed just 2 of them?
Steward of Stone and Fire: Like, best way to do spell damage in the game. Full Stop. Resource-less (well, focus point) AoE damage that effectively scales by a d4 every spell rank (or, technically 2d4 every two spell ranks) only costs an action, you can reposition it when you sustain it, and with sustaining Dance you can move, blast, and still cast a 2-action spell on your turn, and with channeler's stance you do even more damage. I know a lot of people have been complaining that casters are too weak, but having this good spell here just means everyone is just going to play nothing but Animists and no other spellcasting class.
The Fix I honestly don't know on this one. Anyone have any ideas?
Vanguard of Roaring Waters: Unlike a lot of the other vessel spells, this one seems pretty darn tame. To use it's special ability, you have to use up two actions (one to sustain, one to move) and a small bonus to AC and +5 ft move speed are pretty weak compared to near-infinite free healing and throwing out two damaging spells a round.
The Fix Play with the numbers, maybe a straight +2 circumstance bonus to AC (as if you had raised a shield) and +10 ft movement bonus might straighten it out. Then it would be a pretty good combat buff, competing with the witness to ancient battles?
Witness to Ancient Battles: The problem with this one is that your damage isn't going to be competitive really with your spellcasting to justify this one. Either remove the sustain so you can do more attacks, or increase the damage to make up for the fact that your sacrificing action economy. Also, making you proficient in martial weapons ONLY while on in the vessel spell is pretty limiting, as you have to decide weather you spend your hard-earned gold for a better martial weapon that you are only proficient in part of the time, or ignore the partial weapon thing and just grab a simple weapon.
The Fix: Increase the damage boost to make up for the fact that you don't get to start with 18 strength or get higher levels of weapon specialization . . . maybe +1 to hit and +2 to damage, then at 4th +2 to hit +3 to damage, and seven +3 to hit +4 to damage. Also, instead of making you proficient in martial weapons, just make simple weapons increase one step in damage die, so your longspear does d10 damage anyway.
Exemplar:
Base Class: One thing a lot of people have asked for is a side bar or optional rule to remove the 'demigod baggage' from the class in order to make it Non-Rare. I've said this in another thread, but I like the idea of a psychic channeling their energy into their body and weapons instead of spells to do extra stuff . . . or a monk using their ki to infuse their weapons. (If anyone has seen One Piece or HunterxHunter, a lot of this could be flavored as Haki/Reinforcement Nen). I understand that you want these new Demigods to be roaming Golarion in the wake of the War for Immortals, and I don't want to take that away. But a lot of us would like to make our own story about how we got these powers. Seems like there is room for both within this class.
The Fix Like I said, optional rule to make the class non-rare and remove demigod baggage, mechanics don't change.
Base Class pt 2) The Livestream promised the ability to make an unarmored hero, but the game doesn't really allow for that. Even Skin Hard as Horn isn't going to save you from being crit to kingdom come and back if you don't have enough armor.
The Fix Introduce two subclasses, one gets armor (maybe up to medium?) and one gets no armor proficiency but some way to deal with that (perhaps something like the Dragon Disciples Dragon Scales ability. Or like Nagaji Titan Scales but it counts as unarmored?)
Base Class 3) A lot of people have been calling for an unarmed build. Lots of folk heroes were good at unarmed combat, such as Heraclese (killed a nearly indestructible super-lion with his bare hands), and Beowulf (Killed Grendel by ripping off the monster's arm).
The Fix Add a 'weapon' ikon for fist wraps. I know unarmed strikes aren't weapons, but I'm sure you can add some wording in there like "You treat natrual attacks as weapon attacks for the purpose of Weapon Ikon abilties" or something like that.
Skills) The few amount of skills really limits role-playing for a lot of characters. I know you are trying to limit the power of the class by reducing their skills, but what you have done is made the stereotypical combat monster who does not participate in anything other than combat. What are the two skills they are going to choose? Athletics and acrobatics probably, which means during most skill challenges or meeting with the king or whatever they are not going to do anything, because if they open their big mouth they will most likely crit fail the skill check and cost the party. Sure you get a 4th skill at level 3 . . . but that one is chosen for you and by then you've already suffered through 2 whole levels of not doing anything.
The Fix Reduce the power of the class a bit and give them one more starting skill
Ikons) From what I have seen, most players just either put their spark in the weapon Ikon, or shift between the Weapon and Body Ikon, basically using their weapon Ikon's transcendence ability, and then getting their divine spark back to the weapon as soon as possible, never even touching the worn Ikon. This increases damage by a huge amount, and also, I don't think it's what you were looking for.
The Fix Maybe reduce the damage of the weapon's eminence ability to 1 per damage die? Also buff the worn ikon abilities slightly to make them more tempting.
Gleaming Blade)The transendence ability here is just redonculus. It's better than Twin Strike because you can do it with two-handed weapons (and it doesn't require two weapons), it's better than power attack, and you can do it with thrown weapons as long as they are in the Knife Group. And the damage is all spirit damage which bypasses a lot of resistances (basically only constructs are immune as far as I know.)
The Fix Either get rid of the spirit damage thing, or make it work like power attack but all damage is converted to spirit damage or . . . something.
Well, there you go, those are my thoughts as well as the thoughts of those I game with (I hope I did their comments justice) and I hope this feedback is taken in the matter it was intended: as a love letter to paizo saying "Thanks for all your hard work, I know you've had your nose to the grindstone for a long time and might appreciate an outside perspective. here you go."
Steward of Stone and Fire: Like, best way to do spell damage in the game. Full Stop. Resource-less (well, focus point) AoE damage that effectively scales by a d4 every spell rank (or, technically 2d4 every two spell ranks) only costs an action, you can reposition it when you sustain it, and with sustaining Dance you can move, blast, and still cast a 2-action spell on your turn, and with channeler's stance you do even more damage. I know a lot of people have been complaining that casters are too weak, but having this good spell here just means everyone is just going to play nothing but Animists and no other spellcasting class.
The Fix I honestly don't know on this one. Anyone have any ideas?
Make it a 2-action non-sustained spell like Telekinetic Rend or Elemental Blast. Or even a 2-action sustained, immovable spell like Wildfire.
This mirrors a lot of my own experience. I might share my thoughts on the Exemplar in a separate post, but my assessment of both them and the Animist is that they have an absolutely brilliant premise, but in both cases I find their implementation to be really messy and oftentimes way too strong, while also carrying lots of information overhead that needs to be managed pretty often.
The Animist in my opinion I think suffers from having too much piled on at once: I love the class's theme, and love the potential each apparition has of letting the class fit into a role, but right now it feels like the class effectively has between three and five subclasses, most of which can be swapped out on a daily basis, and most of which also have excessively strong focus spells on top of all the versatility they provide. The class is easily able to overshadow others at what they do best, but on the flipside the Animist's turns are really overpacked, as Sustaining the vessel spell is way stronger than almost any alternative and so makes for repetitive turns. Sustaining Dance, as you said, is a must-have, especially for the gish-enabling vessel spells.
The Exemplar, meanwhile, I think sets a fun notion for what makes a demigod of legend: you get epithets added to you, plus ikons filled with your divine spark. In theory, the idea of immanence and swapping it around through potent transcendence effects should enable focusing on a smaller number of really powerful self-buffs, but in practice, the Exemplar mostly just juggles between two out of three ever-growing lists of buffs, which makes it a pain to constantly track which of them are active and which of them aren't. Despite the separation between body, weapon, and worn ikons, it's very difficult not to just pile on lots of weapon ikon effects and therefore want to switch back to the weapon ikon as quickly as possible, usually by way of the body ikon. Some of the transcendence effects are also busted, which puts the Exemplar in a predicament where those effects can either be made tamer, which hampers the class's theme, or have their action cost increased, which would likely make them unusable to many players. I just didn't really get a sense of what the class was meant to be especially good or bad at, and I agree that the class could easily expand to be exceptional in more diverse ways, including ways that involve Intelligence, Wisdom, Charisma, and even Constitution.
In both cases, I feel the classes just have too much going on to have a clear identity, and having to manage a ton of subsystems at a time didn't actually feel all that fun for me. I don't anticipate each class staying this way, and I'd like both to be streamlined quite a fair bit: the Animist I think could be perfectly good with just one, static apparition that would give it a more defined role, with feat options to let you stack extra apparitions and swap them around quicker if you so wish. More action compressors to their Sustain action and potentially a rework to their vessel spells I think would also help out their turns in encounters significantly. The Exemplar I feel needs a redo to their ikon and epithet system, where instead of having all these epithets and ikons of different types collide, the class just gets one, two, and ultimately three immanence effects to manage at any given time. These effects should be incredibly powerful, and I think their transcendence could do well with variable-action costs to accommodate both the super-strong version of an effect and its tamer, yet more economical alternative. They should still switch between buffs each time they transcend, but selecting those should be more about accruing additional freeform options, instead of just piling on more buffs.
Make it a 2-action non-sustained spell like Telekinetic Rend or Elemental Blast. Or even a 2-action sustained, immovable spell like Wildfire.Steward of Stone and Fire: Like, best way to do spell damage in the game. Full Stop. Resource-less (well, focus point) AoE damage that effectively scales by a d4 every spell rank (or, technically 2d4 every two spell ranks) only costs an action, you can reposition it when you sustain it, and with sustaining Dance you can move, blast, and still cast a 2-action spell on your turn, and with channeler's stance you do even more damage. I know a lot of people have been complaining that casters are too weak, but having this good spell here just means everyone is just going to play nothing but Animists and no other spellcasting class.
The Fix I honestly don't know on this one. Anyone have any ideas?
Don't let the areas overlap and trigger more than once a round. Then you at least have to find some way to move an enemy out of the area if you want to hit them with a second casting in the same round.
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How does Gleaming Blade compare against a Magus's Spellstrike? Or a fighter just using a greatsword twice?
Like, I understand that Gleaming Blade is tempting, as two big Strikes with one at only a -2 instead of -5. But it still needs to "reload", which makes me think that it behaves more similarly to how a magus needs to reload their spellstrikes.
The class also only seems to have bonus damage exclusively while it is using a Weapon Ikon, which is usually +1-2 per weapon die. There's no rage, hunted prey, thaumaturge's two damage boosts, etc.
If you have to do anything other than stand still and whack, you can't do Gleaming Blade two rounds in a row. And when I compare Gleaming Blade to a normal fighter attacking with a greatsword twice (at a +2, then a -1 relative to Gleaming Blade), it seems okay to get a little bonus damage in exchange for needing to "reload", but it doesn't seem too strong in a vacuum. Especially since, until you do reload, your damage per Strike is only on par with monk (who seems to have more benefits going on to balance that out).
I haven't had a chance to playtest yet, so I'm asking y'all who have tested it how it actually worked out.
Mostly, my suspicion is that it'll work out that people will over-value DPR again and end up with a selfish exemplar who traps themselves into a specific damage rotation.
The Worn Ikon abilities were actually the ones that seemed most exciting to me, and seem to be perceived as very underwhelming by most other folks. I personally wish I could just cycle through 3 worn ikons instead of dealing with the others.
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The thing is how Gleaming blade interacts with brave, and then it allows for once every other round while moving and giving you AoO’s to boot.
The way I saw it used was in combination with brave and the sharp eyes body ikon.
The rotation was to gleaming blade, then next round use the body ikon transcendence ability which, due to the brave epithet let’s you move half your speed (and put your spark back in your weapon for the damage boost, meaning you always hit with your damage boost). Then you attack twice, then next round gleaming blade again. And with hurl at the horizon, you could actually gleaming blade every round by planting yourself in one spot and hurling d6 throwing daggers (which our guy did).
I haven't had a chance to playtest yet, so I'm asking y'all who have tested it how it actually worked out.
You are right that at early levels, the ikon juggling meant that an Exemplar couldn't use their big burst effects every turn, though that was more than made up by their other ikon effects. Free Archetype is particularly beneficial to this class, because it means they can also pad out their actions with other good attacks in-between transcendences.
Additional Ikon is where things get screwy, though, because at that point you can get an additional weapon ikon and spam the same transcendence effect. It's not terribly good with Gleaming Blade, because the effect is at its most busted when wielding a two-hand weapon, but with something like Heaven Blades Celestial Arrow at 14th level, you can spam massive ranged AoE just by dual-wielding two thrown weapon ikons. It's fairly restrictive and overly focused on DPR, but if you can deal that much damage every turn, why wouldn't you?
The Worn Ikon abilities were actually the ones that seemed most exciting to me, and seem to be perceived as very underwhelming by most other folks. I personally wish I could just cycle through 3 worn ikons instead of dealing with the others.
Out of all the Exemplar's feats, only two buff your worn ikon specifically, and the large majority buff your weapon ikon instead. Thus, in nearly all cases, it just generally feels more effective to alternate between body and weapon ikons, or two weapon ikons if you get Additional Ikon. I agree that it's disappointing, though, because it'd be nice to output more effects beyond just varying flavors of damage, and overall I feel the whole ikon system is a bit half-baked at the moment.
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It would be great to have an option to remove the demi-god baggage.
A character who gets their abilities from a story the person playing it creates is infinitely more interesting to me than a "fragment of divinity" is in your character along with the heavy narrative toward being a demi-god among mortals. Some of the media characters they mention aren't actually harboring divine energy exactly.