Ioun Kineticist breaking ioun stones

[Barbaferro]

So, I'm looking the Ioun kineticist for a future Shattered Star campaign, but there's something that holds me back, that being that when you use the telekinetic blast you deal the kinetic blast damage to the enemy and to the object you throw. Seeing as ioun stones only have hardness 5 and 10 hp, and the cheapest ones cost 25gp doesnt this make this archetype stupidly expensive?
Or there is something that I'm missing?

[Pizza Lord]

I looked into it and it seems you're right. Whenever the ioun kineticist uses their telekinetic blast, it will deal equal damage to the object thrown as it does to the target (in this case, they must always project one or more of their bonded stones). At 1d6+1+ (Con mod), 6 or 7 damage on average, so you'll be dinging the stones up at about 1 or 2 hit points per use.

Their hit points increase per level and their hardness by 1 every 2 levels, but you'll do another 3.5 damage on average every two levels after 1. So at 3rd, it'll be an average of 8 + Con, which is about 3 to 4 points every blast to a stone (at 4th that will drop back to 1 to 2 when the hardness increases). This process will repeat every 2 levels. Then you don't even want to consider an (un)lucky critical hit... While I'd say stones are not susceptible to crits, the ruling is they take equal damage. So that could blow and lead to wanting to not do a lot of damage.

Options to mitigate this might include the telekinetic boomerang infusion. It looks like that allows you to throw a stone and if it hits, you pull it back and it claims to prevent it from taking the damage. Normally you'd need a free hand to catch it, but a GM might rule that an ioun kineticist is a special case since those normally return and it might just return.

Or, possibly since the ability says you always fire one or more of your stones, you could speak with your GM and divide all the dealt damage amongst all the stones you did fire. So if you dealt 10 damage and opted to blast two stones, they would both take 5 damage. This would be an optimal and technically fair enough ruling, since otherwise why would you ever throw more than one. The balancing factor is that you're throwing out multiple ioun stones and risking them being caught or struck or otherwise lost, even temporarily, which is a penalty to your concentration checks, and naturally leaves you with less or none to blast with if an opponent gets lucky and will prevent a critical hit from dealing way more damage than you wanted. But it's going to be strictly GM's discretion.

[Barbaferro]

Thanks for the answer!
I'm going to present this points to the GM ton see what he likes.

[zza ni]

ranged specific casters classes (or such) which have their class's ranged weapon repair\restore itself isn't that rare.
For example
a Cartomancer thrown cards are not destroyed and get returning while an Ashiftah's veil mend it self when used to deliver spells at range.

ask your GM to be a bit considerate, as this is a major part of the class and having it breakdown on use is a big drawback.