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Continuing my playtest experience analysis level by level now in lvl 3 and last chapter of Plaguestone.
Its still a speedrun playtest of Fall of Plaguestone because we already have all the things done and I want to test the Soldier too and because the soldier's playtest only goes up to level 5, we chose to play a low-level adventure.
I won't describe the full adventures here because its too much to be written and instead I will go directly to my impressions and observations.
This playtest will focus into exemplar only. For other classes I will post my impressions in their respective forums.
Party composition
A human Animist
A half-orc Exemplar
A half-elf Soldier (from SF2 Fieldtest)
A hobgoblin Alchemist
Build
At this level, in addition to the general feat and the skill increase, I needed to select my Root Epithet.
I honestly found this quite strange. The Root Epithet in practice is an addendum to your Body Ikon, but in practice it has no relationship with it, which makes things strange because you activate the transcendence of your Body Ikon and receive a Root Epithet ability that can be completely not related to it.
In my case I ended up choosing Cunning because it helped me hit my next attack and because due to the limitations of the animist's Earth's Bile it ended up being the best way to leave my target off-guard (which made me invest in Deception even though I didn't have placed no points in Cha). I even considered getting Radiant to match my build (and because it doesn't need Cha), but the 10-minute immunity put me off, Mournful also seemed interesting to me (as it doesn't need Cha either) but I wanted something more offensive, while Brave just felt really meh to me.
Honestly, I know that there will be people who don't like what I'm going to say here, but I would prefer that the Epithets were not a choice, but rather related to the Body Ikons that the person chose. This would help to value these Ikons during your choice and reduce the feeling of confusion that this ability gives when you put it together with an Ikon with an unrelated theme.
As a general feat I took Orc Ferocity (in fact I reversed the order putting Armor Proficiency here, and Orc Ferocity as a level 1 feat) and as a skill I improved my Athletics.
Impressions
At this level, due to inattention, it took me a while to realize that my Body Ikon was considerably better than my Weapon Ikon and I had some trouble for nothing because of this, as I normally started a fight with my Worn Ikon and then switched with Trancendence to Weapon and stayed alternating with Body. But due to the considerable improvement of Scar of the Survivor with an extra healing die at this level + Root Epithet and the fact that when using this I Feint as a free action, I started using my Body Epithet as my main Ikon after the At the start of combat, this considerably increased my survivability while I did not obtain at least one Strike Rune to improve my damage and consequently the effectiveness of my Weapon Ikon.
That said, little has changed in my gameplay other than improving my survival and leaving some opponents off-guard eventually. Making my experience very similar to the previous levels, just putting less pressure on the party's healers lol.