Playtest report from a lv17 GMPC, Night of the Gray Death Chapter 2

[Falgaia]

Howdy howdy, Animist Board! This Saturday, I recently ran a party of e through a truncated run of Night of the Gray Death, Book 2. We ran 3 encounters (1 modified) from the module, utilizing expected gold for the chapter (Starting wealth for lv 16 and the war chest collected from Chapter 1), followed by a replacement final boss fight against an antiparty of 3 Lv 17 PC builds utilizing the bare minimum equipment. The party consisted of 2 Exemplars and 2 Animists, the first being a melee Sage Animist utilizing the tree stance from level 16 and a Monk Multi to Flurry of Blows, while I was running a second caster-focused Channeler Animist built by the same player as a GMPC. 2/3rds of the party played this module both on release and as part of a similar playtest for the Kineticist last year, while the third was playing blind.

I had not constructed this build, and was playing it as suggested by the player that did: by spamming focus spells ad-infinitum. Since this is a Core class, we ran it using Core refocusing rules, so with the assumption that we would be able to refocus for a full three FP between combats, time permitting.

tl;dr: It ended up being kinda disgusting.

Encounter spoilers below. Skip to the end for a tl;dr.

Fight 1

Spoiler:

Vs Guillotine Golem. Fight went about as expected for my GMPC; turn 1 I attempted to start up Earth's Bile, realized it was Ineffective, and switched to healing focus spell instead as a Chaneller on turn 2. (Other 2a turn 1 spent healing the Exemplar that had to hero point their first save vs Decapitation). Fight was mostly uneventful, but it is worth stating that resourceless continuous 9d4 x1-3 healing in a 10ft aura is incredibly goofy. Most Clerics will burn 3a to heal the x2 amount using actual resources; the fact you can do 9d4 healing in an aura as a 1a while still casting a spell each turn is insane. Related to that, out of combat healing was hand waived due to the same focus spell trivializing any and all HP damage, as this is the strongest out of combat resourceless healing in existence.

Fight 2:

Spoiler:

vs 3 Lesser Deaths. If you haven't read the Lesser Death statblock, do yourself a favor; go read it over and come back to this thread after having a laugh. Despite being a Moderate 17 encounter on the tin, this has consistently been the hardest fight in this chapter due to their auras of Misfortune, Haste spam, and 60ft range Teleporting Reactive Strikes that also trigger on a Concentrate and disrupt the action on a non-critical hit. This was definitely the easiest run of the combat we have played; while part of this was admittedly due to a very lucky Battle Cry from the Animist causing one of the Lesser Deaths to be fleeing turn 1 (somehow they aren't immune to Fear, lol), the other reason is more subtle and tied directly to the current way the Animist is built. Earth's Bile as currently written doesn't use Concentrate or Manipulate actions, meaning it doesn't provoke at all until you begin to Sustain. While this is already goofy, it's sustain also is enabling you to do cantrip damage for a 1a while most casters have to utilize a 2a cast to have a good turn. In a typical run of this fight, a Lesser Death will wait until a Caster beings to use a spell, React, and then disrupt the spell, ruining the caster's turn significantly. For Animist, since Earth's Bile x3 can be sustained multiple times off of separate castings, it eats multiple Lesser Deaths' Reactions in order to properly shut down the class, thus freeing the rest of the party to fight unimpeded or leaving the Animist to spam pseudo-fireballs constantly. We will return to this point later, but for now, know that this made me completely forego even thinking about casting actual spells due to the opportunity cost for doing so.

FIGHT 3:

Spoiler:

vs Gray Gardener Assortment. While this fight typically is vs 4 GGAssassins, I typically run it with 2, 1 Director General, and 1 Executioner, for a fight that lands somewhere between Moderate and Severe CR. This fight is intended to replicate a more "standard" combat experience, with enemies of varying CR that shouldn't be too difficult for a party to fight through. Everyone had a good chance to shine here; one Exemplar used their Thief of Moonlight Transcend to blind 3 enemies turn 1, the other was able to use a weapon transcendence to hit every enemy in the room with their throwing knife for a ton of damage as well after some clever positioning. Meanwhile, I continued to spam Earth's Bile and got the highest DPS turn out of the combat, dealing somewhere around ~200 damage to two targets on the second round due to mixed saving throws. As of this point, I still have not cast a spell other than the aforementioned Heal in combat 1 and Earth's Bile/The Healing focus spell.

Fight 4: No spoilers since it was a custom fight, vs Bard 17, Fighter 17 (Shatter Defenses Focus, Orc Duskwalker), and Kineticist 17 (Water focus with Metal and Air impulses mixed in.) Focused on the Animist's perspective, this went about as usual, using Channeler's Stance +2x Earth's Bile start to melt through the Kineticist's Wall of Ice opener.

If I was more familiar with the build and the type to metagame that this was the boss fight, I could have played more optimally; the character had Apparition's Quickening and hadn't used it yet, so it wouldn't have been out of the realm of possibility to Sustain twice, off a ghost and cast a Spell as the third action, allowing me to drop a Volcanic Eruption instead of just doing Earth's Bile x3 the whole fight (17d6 [avg.59.5] +20d4[50] +27 for 136.5 avg dmg base +Clumsy rather than 30d4+27 for 103 base) or mix in some extra utility spells, but as-is it still worked sufficiently for the combat. Additionally, having a sustain-only build meant that the Combat Reflexes Fighter with reach was unable to Reactive Strike, making it more difficult that usual to punish bad positioning (like the time I moved closer to the enemies to catch more of them in Earth's Bile x3). Even Grapple does nothing to impede this build. The best I could figure out over the combat was to Trip the Animist, as it shuts down Sustaining Dance while making them never want to stand up since Standing Up provokes and is a DPS loss over simply sustaining Earth's Bile from prone.

All-in-all, the build worked well in the fight despite literally only spamming Earth's Bile, and dealt enough damage to make the Animist into a priority target despite not using any actual spells and only being played with half my brain in between running three unique enemy characters.

Final thoughts: Earth's Bile is incredibly toxic to game health, even at high levels. Other options in the kit need to be incentivized; as-is, it is such a powerful and easy-access option that it disincentivizes active play for the Spellcaster and encourages getting into a rut and checking out mentally between turns. The Healing Focus Spell is not as bad but still toxic for similar reasons. Unless focus spell balance is getting significantly buffed in Core, the spells are just straight-up problematic. Possible suggestions would be to make it 2a, make the AoE target a set area that you cannot re-choose every turn, nerfing its damage, or making all of it persistent damage. Additionally, Apparition's Quickening is very strong, and probably should be limited to 1/hour as is to prevent the player from absolutely dumping on boss fights exclusively. As is, the class is suffering from success, most specifically in that their always-available options are too centralizing to encourage using daily resources.

I apologize in advance if any of my insights here have been already discussed in other threads; I had not intended to play the Animist for this playtest and only had the opportunity due to a fluke, so I haven't been keeping up with the discussions. I hope this is useful for furthering discussion.