| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
After playing my Witchwarper at level 1, 5 and 10, here's my final point of view on Quantum Field.
Sustainability: At level 1 (without Quantum Pulse at that time), it was impossible to Sustain, period. I've never been able to keep it more than a round and quickly stopped using the ability.
At level 5, it was really hard to Sustain, but possible for a couple of rounds.
At level 10, it was a minigame inside the game to maintain the Quantum Field. With much more Focus Spells, Signature Spells and Anchoring abilities it was now really possible without too much hassle. I had fun maintaining my Quantum Field.
Area: Let's make it clear, the area makes it unusable. It's supposed to be a form of control spell but it's so small that you can't block anything. At level 10, with Enlarge Quantum Field, I was finally able to have an area big enough to include enemies for more than a split second.
Effects: Effects are extremely light, close to useless. Some abilities, like Predictive Positioning, need the Quantum Field to function (I assumed it from the text even if it doesn't have the Anchoring trait) but I don't understand why they are so limited considering how it's complicated to maintain the Quantum Field.
Overall, the Quantum Field is not worth it and as of now should be ignored.
What I would improve to make it usable:
Sustainability: I really liked the minigame of maintaining it at high level, so I'd be sad to see a big increase in sustainability. One thing that must be changed is that Signature spells should maintain it wherever you are. I don't see why offensive use of the Quantum Field should be so hard.
Area: The big issue of the Quantum Field. In my opinion, it should be baseline for the Quantum Field to grow every time you use an Anchoring ability (like what Enlarge Quantum Field gives). It's really fun to see it growing and it makes quite some sense (and pushes you to take care of it). Still, even with that ability, the area is too small. I'd rather either remove the limitation of one growing per round, or increase the original area depending on your level. Or make Enlarge Quantum Field a passive ability that adds 10 ft. to the Quantum Field area (and maybe more at higher levels). But really, the area has to get much much much much bigger.
Effects: Effects are really light, but at the same time the Witchwarper is a 4 slot caster with light armor proficiency and 8hp per level so unless SF2 classes are balanced to be much better than PF2 ones there's not much space left to increase the Quantum Field effects. I think there should be more feats to interact with the Quantum Field and, especially at high level, much better ones. Seeing Twisted Dark Zone as a level 10 feat or the joke of Persistent Quantum Field at level 14, there's really an issue. When balancing feats that interact with the Quantum Field, they should be much better than baseline feats as maintaining the Quantum Field is really hard and asks for a lot of investment, both in terms of feats and in terms of actions.
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
The thing is, the Mystic also has the same spell slots per rank and base defenses, but has a core mechanic that actually works. I do think the class ought to have its base stats reduced, because they're too strong, but that's a fairly easy thing to do compared to having to fix a defining class feature, which in the Mystic's case I think is one of the best class mechanics in the playtest so far. The Witchwarper, by contrast, has a core class feature that's not terribly functional, which is why it's often easier to just ignore it -- and because the class has a massive number of spell slots and great base stats, they still perform really well. It's the same problem as the remastered Oracle, where their defining class feature has become fairly anemic but is easy to ignore due to their sheer amount of generic raw power. Unlike the Oracle, however, the Witchwarper is still in playtesting, and so I think there's room to make their quantum field a truly excellent mechanic before even touching their base stats or spell slots.
As for the rest, I completely agree: from my own playtesting experience, QF is a pain to manage before Quantum Transposition, and because it's often very static, its small area makes it all too easy to move out of and ignore. Before anything else, I think QF needs to be made much easier to move around: Quantum Pulse being given to the class by default will certainly help make the effect easy to lay down at the start of an encounter, and I think if nothing else giving Quantum Transposition to the class on top would add a minimum of usability.
I do, however, think we could go even further: after testing out the Witchwarper for a while, I started toying with making QF a lot more important to their playstyle, and ended up giving all of their spells the anchoring trait (and also let the Witchwarper move their QF every time they Sustained it by any means). On top of this, I basically made QF define the entirety of the class's spellcasting, preventing the Witchwarper's effects from working outside of their quantum field but letting most of their ranged spells originate from it, and having their anchor add a +1/2/3 item bonus to their spell attacks and DCs. This not only made QF a lot more impactful, but also made the Witchwarper play completely differently from any other caster, as their spells were ultra-concentrated but limited to an area. This is probably quite an extreme take on the mechanic, but it did drive unique and, in my opinion, fun gameplay that really set the class apart from anyone else in interesting ways. Because this implementation also made QF really easy to Sustain and move around as a part of their spellcasting, it felt much smoother to use as well.
I like your comparison with the Oracle.
I like the concept of having a class with general class features that are easy to use and an opt-in class feature that adds all the complexity of the class. So beginners/players with low tactical acumen/no interest in complex mechanics can play the class and be great with it while at the same time giving crunch to players who like complexity.
The failure of the Oracle is that the Curse, the opt-in part, is completely bland and uninteresting. But if they had kept the same concept than pre-remaster Oracle, ie. a Curse with both big drawbacks but some benefits, I'm sure everyone would have been happy about it.
Forcing the Witchwarper to use their Quantum Field to just work bars the class to beginners who won't be able to use the Quantum Field or forces Paizo to remove all the complexity of the Quantum Field. So you end up with the Oracle issue of satisfying one type of players but not the other.
As of now, the Quantum Field doesn't need a lot of rework. You speak about easier mobility, I must admit I prefer increased area. But both ideas go in the same direction: Allowing the Quantum Field to affect enemies through the whole fight and not just a single round. And if the Quantum Field oriented feats were worth it, I think we'd be in the perfect place.
I do think we're in agreement regarding the core of the issue: we both want the Witchwarper's quantum field to be easier to use and more useful throughout a fight. I'd definitely support any change that'd support that, even if it were just giving Quantum Transposition for free, increasing QF's area as you say, or both.
I will say, though, I personally am not a fan of the whole "opt-in" concept for caster mechanics, and if a mechanic can be described that way, in my opinion it's poorly integrated into the class. We don't really speak of the Cleric's divine font or the Bard's compositions as "opt-in" mechanics, because even though you literally can choose whether or not to use them, they're so well-embedded into those classes that the player is naturally going to end up using them. The same can be said for the Mystic's vitality network, despite the class having the same spell slots and defenses as the Witchwarper. I don't think a class should ever really be able to "opt out" of any of their core class mechanics entirely, and especially not a caster, because the end result just ends up being a generic class. If a class can be wholly generic and still incredibly strong, as is the case with both the Oracle and the Witchwarper, then something went very wrong with their design.
We don't really speak of [...] the Bard's compositions as "opt-in" mechanics
The Bard is the perfect example to me. Lots of players, me included, don't play Bard because it's boring as hell. It's just a bland caster with 2 actions left every round.
I know why I advocate for the opt-in mechanics. Without it, you'll have to choose if the class is for beginners or tactically-savvy players and the other category will either consider the class impossible to use (and in general weak) or boring as hell.
Some classes have this design in PF2. The Alchemist for example features the easy to use Bomber with the other, harder to use, Research Fields. The Starlit Span Magus is trivial to play compared to the melee Magus. I agree it's not really common and you see a clear separation of classes between the simple ones and the complex ones.
Anyway, the Mystic clearly looks like a simple class to play, so maybe they'll make the Witchwarper the complex one. Which is fine for me as the only thing I want is a complex class. But I know most players will complain if Paizo takes this route.
I’d argue that playing a caster as a generic magic-user would constitute the most boring way to play the class, but I can understand being turned off by a class’s specific mechanic and not wanting to play a Sorcerer each time for that simple-yet-powerful caster build. I do agree though that the Mystic already works as Starfinder’s simple caster, so if Pathfinder can have the Wizard as a core class, the Witchwarper potentially has more room as a more complex caster.
|
Admittedly, the old witchwarper was never my cup of tea (I never built one, and the ones I ran for/with... essentially tended to forget most class features that were not spellcasting -though Starfinder Enhanced should have helped).
Unfortunately, I have yet to see a lot of playtest players that were really happy how the QF worked out. It takes a lot of actions to maintain, set down etc. and thus far has not been very impactful.
In the first A Cosmic Birthday game, no one wanted to play the class - mostly because of the complexity, and lack of real impact, or at least that is what I heard.
I might have one in my Empires Devoured game, but we will see. Compared to the mystic who feels very synergistic (thus far the rhythm mystic has been very popular), or the operative... it feels more like a chore to maintain the QF, particularly if you end up having to move to even cast your spells.
The recent change was welcome, but I suspect that the players will try to talk their GM into allowing a PF2 class instead of trying to juggle the class features of this one - or rather more likely, totally ignore QF and spend all or most of their class features on unrelated things/archtype feats.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I wholeheartedly agree with the above, and could not have expressed it better if I’d tried. If I just wanted to play any caster, I’d have many to choose from, as Starfinder intends to be compatible with Pathfinder in part so it doesn’t have to spend much effort doing “X in space”, and can instead devote its precious page space towards content that is new and makes full use of its futuristic setting. In particular, if I wanted to play a caster that was all about being good at magic with minimal mechanical bells and whistles, I’d pick a Sorcerer, the spellcaster explicitly designed to be a supercharged spell battery of any tradition. The Witchwarper in this framework is the opportunity to fully deliver on a caster who messes with altered and parallel realities, and whose mechanics reflect this in a way that makes them distinct from any other magic-user.
I’ll probably write a separate thread for this, but when I playtested the alternate Witchwarper as described above, the end result not only functioned well in my opinion, but in a way that was wholly different from any other spellcaster in 2e, with an almost completely different paradigm and set of choices to make. Not only was it fun, compelling, and in some instances pleasantly frustrating to produce extremely powerful effects limited to just one or a small handful of areas at a time (I couldn’t easily cover two places at once, but I could control one area better than anyone else), thematically I felt it was much closer to the feel of Elizabeth from BioShock Infinite that I saw as an archetypal example of the class. I think there’s a genuine opportunity here to create a totally unique class that flips several of 2e’s spellcasting conventions on their head, and so it’d be a shame in my opinion to instead try to minimize what makes the Witchwarper stand out in favor of generic power.