Degradant & Radiant Solarians and Favoured Attunements

[Kishmo]

For reference, here is the Solarian's Attune action, with emphasis mine:

ATTUNE [One-Action]
Traits: CONCENTRATE, SOLARIAN
Frequency once per round
You steady your body and mind and attune yourself to your stellar focus. If you are unattuned or not in your favored state, you become attuned to the favored attunement of your stellar arrangement. You can also manifest any of your solar manifestations if they are currently dormant, and if you have the free hands to use them.
Special In addition to the above usage, you can also Attune as a free action when you roll initiative.

I think a lot of people haven't realized that Degradant and Radiant solarians can only attune to Graviton Mode, and Photon Mode, respectively, with the Attune action. I've pointed it out to a couple solarian players at tables I've GM'd, and it's so far been met with "....oh, that messes up my routine."

A lot of Solarian players have a default "script" for the first few rounds of combat, and one of the most common I've seen a lot is: a solarian that wants to stay in one Attunement will roll initiative, and assume that they can use the free-at-initiative Attune action to start in their non-favoured attunement, so that they can then use a Cycle action on their turn to finish in their favoured attunement.

So, for example: a tanky degradant solarian starts off in Photon mode, then uses Stellar Rush to Cycle to Graviton mode, so they can be in Graviton mode in between turns for the tanky Graviton riders on Nimbus Surge or Solar Shield. But, that is not what the Attune action does - you can't start the fight off in your non-favoured alignment. A Degradant must start in Graviton mode.

Now, solutions exists - the Attunement Control exploration action does let you begin combat in any attunement. But, this means every Solarian is going to basically always use that Exploration activity, which is kinda boring. They'll never be scouting, or sneaking, or whatever other fun stuff.
Alternatively, you can, of course, just use two Cycle actions to flip-flop and end up in the alignment you started in. But, this basically forces every solarian who wants to stay in one alignment to choose something as their lvl 1 or 2 Class Feat to reliably Cycle, which means your lvl 1 or 2 Feat is almost always going ot be Meditative Analysis or Eclipse Strike, which are the first and only one-action Actions with the Cycle trait without stringent requirements, that you'll get access to. Instead of choosing the feats you want, you have to pay the "Cycle feat tax."

Where I'm going with this: I think Degradant and Radiant solarians should just get a reliable one-action Action with the Cycle trait, that they don't have to spend a Class Feat or Exploration Activity on. Or, the Attune action should let you attune to any alignment, not just your Arrangement's favoured one.

[Mangaholic13]

Actually, you missed a minor, but important detail, Kishmo:

Starfinder Playtest page 100 wrote:

In exploration mode, you can take the Attunement Control activity to ensure that you are in constant control of what state of attunement you begin combat in, regardless of your favored attunement.

So a Degradent CAN start the battle in Photon.

Granted, I do think, in the official release, they should emphasize this in the Attune action.

[Teridax]

I've run into the same issue when I was playtesting the Solarian, and I think if we're going to introduce some cheap method for Solarians to attune to whichever state they like, we might as well remove the whole favored attunement bit and instead find a different way to encourage Solarians to enter their arrangement's appropriate state. In general, I think there are a few different problems with the Attune action:

As mentioned in the OP, favored attunements make the action really rigid and push the Solarian to constantly use Attunement Control out of combat just to get the attunement they want at the start of the encounter, which is boring and reductive.

Attune I think generally doesn't feel good to use, as it's basically an action tax just to turn on the Solarian's abilities. Contrast this to the Kineticist's Channel Elements, where turning on their kinetic aura and the rest of their kit also lets them use some other simple impulse at the same time.

The Solarian in general is currently overloaded with a lot of abilities at level 1 that are nice to have, but not necessary for the class to function, while lacking features that I think are in fact necessary for them to work (such as built-in gapclosers and mobility to get into melee range more consistently).

When I gave feedback on the Solarian and made suggestions, I proposed the following for Attune:

Change Attune so that you choose the attunement you want, regardless of subclass. Because this makes Attunement Control redundant, remove Attunement Control.

Scrap the advanced revelation on every current Solarian arrangement, and move the current initial revelations up to take their place.

Give each arrangement a new initial revelation that, as a repeatable single action, lets you Attune and then do something that makes you more likely to Strike an enemy with your solar weapon, such as by pulling an enemy closer to you (degradant), Flying a limited distance (radiant), or temporarily extending your solar weapon's reach (balanced). For degradant and radiant, Attuning in this way would attune you to one particular state, i.e. graviton for degradant and photon for radiant.

So effectively, Attuning as a baseline would be a costly action that'd let you choose whichever attunement you'd want, and Attuning with your subclass's initial revelation would favor one type of attunement in exchange for a benefit. When I tried out these changes, my Solarian ended up favoring the attunement tied to their arrangement still, and still preferred to swap attunements via cycling rather than Attuning, but had much more flexibility to swap to the other attunement or start off with it if they really wanted to.