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I did 3 separate playtests with the exemplar, mainly to test out ways to utilize their shift/transcendence abilities and how they seemed to interact with the action economy, as I love this games action economy, but loathe action restricted classes (so, love monk, loathe magus, as example).
my exemplar hope-being rewarded for juggling transcendence and creating synergies
realization- the actual play felt much better when I used shift sometimes more than transcend.
my issue with this- shift is a nothing burger, an action tax to justify power, nothing seems to synergize with it, there is nothing I can take to make that opportunity cost easier. While using it made my experience far better, using it also made me feel like I enjoyed the class less.
lot of the transcend abilities are not abilities you want to wait around for, they are not abilities where you transcend your weapon so next round you can transcend your worn and help your party members reroll saves.
now many of them are quite good, but they essentially become 2-3 action routines.
my feedback: id like more ways to interact or action suppress with shift, as it seems much more important to the flow of the class than i first though, while also feeling fairly isolated, making it feel like, at least, to me, an action tax akin to reload or recharge.
gunslingers get ways to interact with reload, id like more ways to interact with shift
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initially i thought the same:
shifting feeling like a tax.
but then i changed my mind:
shifting SHOULD feel like a tax.
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to clarify my position on "why" that is:
i think the intended purpose is cycling transcends.
transcend fills that niche that "adding something to reload" gives.
it basically an effect that's added to you shifting around your spark.
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so, my solution would be to better spread out the transcend abilities to make transcending from one ikon to another better, rather than having some transcends being clearly superior to others and having to continusly shift around and repeating the same transcend over and over again.
This will create a much more fluid gameplay, and imo more rewarding gameplay as well as oppossed to "keep using the same transcend over and over".
Shift should be the "ah crap i messed up" button or the "oh s$&& i need to use THIS right now!", and that should come at a cost.
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tldr:
if you add stuff to Shift, you promote the playstyle of spamming the same transcend over and over again instead of cycling through different (but useful) abilities from round to round.
currently abilities are too niche for this gameplay idea to pan out
getting reactive strike, drawing someone in, rerolling a save, etc, etc. none of these are anything MORE than *ah crap i need this now* things.
so they'd need to drastically change
id also counter that this isnt fun, because currently the option is still to just shift back and try to use weapon trascend until you need something else then just shift and use that trascend
if imanence were constant effects this would feel less bad
there is no point where im switching to vast majority of body/worn for any reason other than a oh s@## button. leaving shift to just feel like a tax
taxes are not very fun on their own, so maybe something needs to be done to make shift feel less of a tax, even if its just shuffling things around
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Ideally, transcends should have an effect that is useful most of the time, so that you don't feel bad using it. When you use one of them, you should have to make a choice about what other good thing you plan to activate on the next round.
Given that your choice of ikons is fixed, having one with a situational effect doesn't feel good. I'd say that giving some of them two possible transcends isn't something to dismiss: one could be some kind of buff that is always nice to have; the other could be a situational, but strong, effect that you have as an option, and feels good to use in the right circumstances.