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I played a level 5 Orc channeler Animist with an occult Witch multiclass. Through the playtest I participated in 5 encounters, 1 of which was a complex trap.
I dabbled with 5 of the 6 currently available apparitions: Custodian, Imposter, Stalker, Steward and Witness.
Chassis-wise, I’m glad there’s finally a wisdom based class I want to play. Survivability feels mid-tier. I can survive a hit or 2 but can’t stay in the front lines for long unless I’m properly buffed. I think the class should end up with master in will saves and REFLEX saves and expert in fortitude. The class feels like more of a mobile class than a sturdy one. This also will more easily enable the freedom to invest in strength over dexterity. As far as skills go, unless the remaster lets religion cover things like spirits and ethereal creatures, I really think the Animist should start with training in occultism or get Additional Lore (Spirits or Ethereal) for free from the start. Everything else with their current skills feels appropriate. Weapon proficiencies also feel appropriate, no complaints there.
As far as the spellcasting goes, it feels properly limited despite seeming the opposite. However, I’m worried it might suffer from high complexity and might be inaccessible for some. I could easily play with it as is but I’d elect for a simpler implementation at the cost of 1 spell slot per spell rank.
For the 2 subclass options, channeler may be balanced inside the system but in comparison to the sage, it’s incredibly broken. The issue isn’t that the channeler can swap apparitions for a single action. The problem is, it can do that AND gets better save progression and still gets expert in armor proficiencies only slightly later than the sage. Sage gets a bunch of very situational abilities and the 2 things that could make it all worthwhile are either locked behind an 8th level feat or all the way out at 17th level. Strangely, the sage gets expert in armor proficiency incredibly early yet it never advances past that (hint, hint Paizo). Without heavily reworking how subclasses work, I’d start with the classes save and armor progression being baseline and then give a bonus increase in saves to the channeler and a bonus increase to armor to the sage at the 17th level mark. I think sage needs to get Soul Synchronization by default at 1st level. If not, it needs SOMETHING that feels significant and impactful in contrast to the channeler right from the beginning; Apparition’s Possession isn’t cutting it. Maybe even let them start with 2 primary apparitions per day but not able to swap out every 10 minutes. Ideally, I think they could add another subclass or 2 and differentiate all of them based on the following qualities: number of apparitions accessible, number of apparitions attuned to for the day, speed of primary apparition swapping, number of primary apparitions.
There are a few feats that stand out for good or bad. Sustaining Dance really is a huge boon in the strained action economy of this class, especially for the channeler which will be spending even more actions to swap apparitions and more likely to be sustaining multiple spells. It’s one of those must-haves to the point that it needs to either be built into the chassis, removed altogether or equally good feats need to be available alongside it. The wandering feat trait, I love. These are a huge part of what makes the Animist unique. Do not get rid of these, please. As stated before, Soul Synchronization needs to be built into the sage practice no later than level 9 but possibly right at level 1. Wind Seeker and Fly on Shadowed Wings kinda both do the same thing so 2 of them kinda feel like a waste of page space where another interesting feat could go. Apparition’s Quickening MIGHT be broken…but you’re giving up a lot everyday though to get extra uses of quickened spell so it might be balanced still. Cardinal Guardians doesn’t seem to have an effect that matches the name of the feat, but this is a minor nit-pick. I’m not sure Soul Cycle is worth an 18th level class feat slot but most of the stance feats are 16th level so….maybe? The more I think about it, the more I feel like this would be great if the 16th level wandering feats were at 14th level so by the time you could take this at 18th, you could possibly have 2 or 3 stances to swap between and at 20th, 3-4 stances.
Vessel Spells:
Garden of Healing – I think this is perfectly fine as is. Anyone who complains that it makes out-of-combat healing obsolete forgets that the medicine skill is available to everyone and isn’t difficult to make just as reliable and not everyone is going to want to play this class. Like, if your party needs a healer, are y’all really gonna tell someone they have to play an Animist? It’s gonna be a lot easier to get someone to volunteer to invest into medicine than force a class for a single focus spell. Used in combat, it feels pretty good but might need some tweaking to make it easier to use, maybe only healing allies or something.
Discomforting Whispers – This is great. In a single encounter, this changed about 4 critical hits from an enemy into 0. In fact, it was extremely noticeably impactful when said enemy turned out to not be dead when we downed them, I had dropped the spell assuming it was dead and it immediately came back up, and crit twice, downing 2 party members. This spell made a severe encounter feel like a moderate or even low difficulty encounter. This might be my favorite vessel spell currently.
Darkened Forest Form – It seems a lot of people see this as an alternate combat form but I enjoy the utility options. The temporary HP and AC seems like you might be slightly tougher, mainly cuz the AC is about the same and you’re getting a chunk of temp HP. Attack bonuses are about on par as well. Being able to swap forms on every sustain is really cool. The biggest problem I’m seeing with this spell is that you have to take a size increase as this scaled and you don’t get to opt out of that size increase if you want it to be used for combat, making this less and less appealing in a dungeon crawl with small rooms and narrow corridors.
Earth’s Bile – Being able to sustain up to 3 of these seems problematic, especially when you can hop around with sustaining dance. I think this should be limited to 1 active casting. If so, it might need bumped up to d6s. Still, it was very effective against multiple enemies from my experience, even with a single instance each turn.
River Carving Mountains – I never got to use this one but it’s...interesting.... but it seems highly situational. The lesser cover should probably apply to all attacks against you or else don’t bother at all with that part. If you drop the cover altogether, increase the speed bonus to 10 or 15 ft. Also, I think I’d maybe add that the distance you travel over when leaping or stepping from sustaining dance also become difficult terrain. I understand how it's supposed to be used but it seems clunky and difficult to implement effectively as is.
Embodiment of Battle – I really like this. It just works. If I could change one thing about it, I would make this immune from disruption from reactive strikes when sustaining and maybe cut reactive strike from it as well to balance it out. This is going to hurt when you need to sustain but remain in melee range and have your action wasted and your spell interrupted and you are now a lot more useless in the position you are in. Then again, if you're going up against something that has reactive strike, as a full caster, you probably need to know your place and back off against a full-on martial enemy.
Additional Thought:
There is not enough build diversity in this class. I feel like, generally, everyone will be playing the same Animist when it comes to the class portion. They might be a sage or channeler but I don’t think that is going to create enough differentiation between builds considering all apparitions are available at all times and never permanently locked behind a choice.
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Apparition’s Quickening MIGHT be broken…but you’re giving up a lot everyday though to get extra uses of quickened spell so it might be balanced still.
Earth’s Bile – Being able to sustain up to 3 of these seems problematic, especially when you can hop around with sustaining dance. I think this should be limited to 1 active casting. If so, it might need bumped up to d6s. Still, it was very effective against multiple enemies from my experience, even with a single instance each turn.
I go into the issues with these two at high level play in my writeup for my Night of the Gray Death Ch 2 playthrough. Tl;dr: we generally agreed that Earth's Bile is incredibly problematic and overly centralizing to the build due to its tendency to not even provoke while doing damage per action comparable to Fireballs, and Apparition's Quickening becomes significantly less balanced due to lacking a 1/hour timer or something similar, as Animist players can and will just burn all of their spirits in the Boss Fight to spam Quicken with no repercussions in most cases.
Thanks for the writeup!
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Apparition's Quickening becomes significantly less balanced due to lacking a 1/hour timer or something similar, as Animist players can and will just burn all of their spirits in the Boss Fight to spam Quicken with no repercussions in most cases.
Yeah this is probably the biggest problem with the feat. I agree a 1/hour or even 1/10 minutes limit would be best.
Apparition's Quickening becomes significantly less balanced due to lacking a 1/hour timer or something similar, as Animist players can and will just burn all of their spirits in the Boss Fight to spam Quicken with no repercussions in most cases.
If you know that you are going into a boss fight and also know that you won't need to do anything else for the rest of the day afterwards, yeah - spamming Apparition's Quickening to cast spells faster is an option.
Not entirely sure it is a good option to burn through all of the Apparitions using that. You will want to keep at least one around for the focus spell. Maybe for the repertoire too. But dispersing two or maybe three Apparitions could be a clutch move.
But like I said, this depends on knowing that this is the boss fight and the only (or at least last) fight of the day. Otherwise you can end up with rather reduced options for the rest of the encounters that day.
So as usual, if the player knows what is coming up in the day (whether legitimately or metagaming), then Animist looks a lot stronger than if the player is being surprised by the day's encounters.