A proof of concept for an alternate Witchwarper

[Teridax]

We're now several months into the Starfinder playtest, and these feedback forums are pretty much dead. I figured this might be a good time to discuss how the Witchwarper could be done differently, without the risk of burying any currently active discussion focused on more direct criticism and playtesting reports.

At this stage, I think it's pretty safe to say that the Witchwarper needs some work, specifically around their quantum field. Just a cursory look at this subforum shows many, many, many, many threads exclusively criticizing its quantum field for the same reasons, and even other threads which criticize the class more broadly, including a playtest report I wrote, cite its quantum field as a key pain point. The criticism tends to be pretty consistent, too: the quantum field is hard to move as combat goes on, and is so loosely-connected to the rest of the class's mechanics that it becomes all too easy to ignore. If nothing else, this should set a pretty clear message that this part of the class needs work, and so to address those specific issues.

On my side, as I was playtesting the Witchwarper, after collecting a certain amount of data I started tweaking the class and seeing how those changes panned out. This included stuff like baking the functionality of certain "must-have" quality-of-life feats into the core class like Quantum Pulse, which the developers also implemented in the playtest's 3rd wave of errata, but also more extreme stuff like changing the way the class's slot spells worked around their quantum field. After a fair bit more tweaking, testing, and refining, I wrote down the results in a document. To make things clear: this isn't a "implement this homebrew exactly as written" thread, nor even a request to change the Witchwarper into what's listed in the document. Rather, the goal here is to offer some material for comparison, as well as break down some general concepts included in the document that I think could apply to the Witchwarper in a variety of different ways. If you do decide to try out the changes outlined there, I recommend doing so after playtesting the vanilla class so that you can get a good impression of how the two differ.

Just to list some of the ideas in the doc and explain them a bit more, with the breakdown in spoilered text:

Sustaining QF moves it too:

The most common criticism of the quantum field mechanic is that it's exceedingly difficult to move around. The above proposes to fix this by essentially baking in the functionality of Quantum Transposition and making QF much easier to move around, going even farther and allowing it to work through other effects that Sustain QF, like those with the anchoring trait. In practice, this made QF extremely easy to move where it was needed, and made the mechanic much more desirable to use independently of other changes.

Warp spells are all single-action and interact specifically with QF:

Another common criticism is that QF is so disjointed from much of the Witchwarper's gameplay that you don't really need to do anything with it, and with warp spells you could just lay it down in any random location and still use most of them to full effect. To make matters worse, many warp spells take two actions or a reaction to cast, making them (and thus several subclasses) fairly ineffective at Sustaining QF easily. To remedy this, the above reframes warp spells to all use a single action and interact with QF's area one way or the other. This I think carried several benefits: QF felt much more important to each witchwarper's playstyle, and warp spells felt good to use in a manner similar to the Mystic's Transfer Vitality action, in that they fit neatly alongside the class's slot-based spellcasting (and cantrips, of course). Additionally, because these focus spells had varied effects and were often quite strong, albeit restricted to the class's QF, this allowed the class to feel exceptionally powerful and able to do lots of things at once when leaning into their core feature.

Enable QF juggling rather than one mega-QF:

Warped infinities, while not a feature that I playtested a lot, is one that I found broke QF in a bad way, turning the effect from a localized zone of control into an area so large it may as well just cover the whole battlemap each time in an encounter. This effectively took all the gameplay out of the mechanic and broke several other effects that depended on it, such as Complete Transposition letting you teleport any number of creatures in the encounter at-will up to 200 feet away as a single action (which you can also do several times per turn, in case the enemy succeeds on their save). However, I also found the idea of being able to lay down and manage multiple quantum fields with greater difficulty to be one worth including, and so experimented with removing the one-QF limit. This enabled a few interesting plays where I could divert my playstyle towards trying to sustain two QFs at once, even try creating a third so I could cover as much area at a time, at the expense of immediate spellcasting power. It didn't outperform spellcasting with one QF under most circumstances, and was quite unstable given how easily I would've had to drop my second QF on many turns, but it was fun to spin all of those plates and did have good returns on occasion, adding to the class's agency in my opinion.

Quantum benefits are zones instead:

This is much more minor than the rest, but one annoyance I had in my playtests was that the quantum benefit of each paradox, in addition to often not really feeling all that impactful, had no real interaction with the zone trait made specifically for the class. Adding zones I found also tended to add a bit of extra tracking as multiple effects started piling on. To remedy this, I changed quantum benefits into 1st-level zone feats: at 1st level, you get a zone feat based on your paradox, and you automatically apply that zone to any QF you create. This in practice made each different QF more consistent and simpler to track, and I expanded warp terrain to allow the inclusion of an extra zone for those looking to keep that gameplay. I also amended the base zone trait so that instead of locking yourself out of future zone effects, applying a new zone effect to a quantum field merely ends any zone effects it currently has.

Anchors as freeform feats:

Although the flavor of anchors themselves is largely interesting in my opinion, in practice I found they took up a lot of space without feeling particularly bespoke as their own thing. I experimented with making anchor actions 1st-level feats and letting the witchwarper pick any 1st-level anchoring feat of their choice, and that carried a few benefits: it let me choose from a much larger variety of anchoring actions, including Anchoring Strike for a ready-made gish playstyle or even a zone effect to play with those more (this worked especially well with an anomaly paradox and warp terrain, which I updated to enable the layering of multiple zone effects), and as a result I felt more flexible, with flavor text still reinforcing the notion that this action I was doing also helped anchor my character to their present reality. It did introduce a degree of analysis paralysis, though I found that wasn't a huge deal on a class that's already made to be fairly complex, due to the management component of their quantum field and having essentially two layers of subclasses at present.

Spells only work within QF, but ALL Witchwarper spells have the anchoring trait, not just signature spells, and use QF as their point of origin:

This is perhaps where things start to get more extreme. The starting point for this was pretty much the same as for many other changes: try to make QF a more important part of the Witchwarper, so that it can't just be ignored. I tried this version on a QF with a few more restrictions (range is shorter, laying down a QF requires line of sight), and this completely changed the Witchwarper's playstyle from any other caster's, in a way I found was really positive overall: all of a sudden, the class became extremely focused on a specific area, and the consideration became less a matter of spell range or radius, and more of where to focus their area. Because the witchwarper's spell effects were getting suppressed out of their QF, I couldn't just move the same QF around multiple times a turn to control multiple spread-out enemies at once, but because my spells originated from my QF, I could lay it down strategically to circumvent cover and use certain spells that would otherwise have been excessively short-ranged, adding a significant element of added choice and tactical play in Starfinder's range-focused combats. This made for some completely different choices from other spellcasters, allowing me to do things others couldn't while preventing me from easily doing things other casters normally take for granted (like catch many enemies spread out from one another with the same spell, or Cast a Spell right away after being severely disrupted for an entire round). As an added benefit, the anchoring trait to all of the class's spells made it much easier to Sustain a single QF on each of their turns, and made it a bit easier to juggle two QFs without having to dip into signature spells each time. Thematically, I felt it also significantly reinforced the class's flavor, as their magic was much more localized to the pockets of warped reality that they were creating, much like Elizabeth from BioShock Infinite who I see as an archetypal example of the class.

The Witchwarper gets less HP, only unarmored proficiency, and fewer spell slots, but also a bonus to their spell attacks and DCs inside their QF:

This is probably the other big controversial change, and started from the same place as much of the above, with the added factor of Pathfinder's Oracle: following the latter game's remaster, the Oracle got changed to have 4 spell slots per rank on top of their existing light armor proficiency, while their unique curse mechanic got made less impactful, to the point where one can now easily opt out of it. This, in my opinion, made the class too powerful, but also really generic, because it was all too easy to ignore what made them unique and just rely on their strong base stats and raw spell output to succeed. The playtest Witchwarper, I think is at risk of winding up in the exact same situation, and I feel the class doesn't really need to be especially durable or have a huge number of slot spells to output, particularly when they get three warp spells just from their natural progression. When I applied these changes, they basically just reinforced what was already there with the rest: the Witchwarper felt really good for making use of their QF, and their spells felt exceptionally powerful, and while the class was an easier and squishier target, this both felt appropriate for the class and was something they could play around with their spells and QF (they had much more of an incentive to shift their QF to themselves if someone tried to rush them in melee, for instance). Similarly, their reduced number of spell slots encouraged the class to rely on their warp spells more, which I also felt was a good thing. Overall, this made the class higher-risk, higher-reward, and further concentrated their power around their QF.

Along with the above, I made some more minor changes that probably require less explanation, like letting Restorative Recollection actually work while stunned, changing Radiant Zone to work as a persistent effect like other zones, knocking the unnecessary extra focus point off of Reality's Anchor so that it works like other full FP restoration feats, and removing the RNG elements to certain damage type effects in favor of player choice. When I playtested the class with these changes, I found the class to be a bit weaker overall to the baseline Witchwarper (they were squishier, had fewer slots, and couldn't cast spells as freely across encounters), yet also significantly more fun to play in my opinion, as they had many more interesting options at their disposal and bent the rules of spellcasting in a way that made them play in new ways from other casters. I could perhaps be wrong with my assessment, and there's of course likely a degree of bias at hand, but my experience with this version of the Witchwarper was really positive, certainly a lot more so than with the playtest version.

Although there are a lot of moving parts to the document, the principles behind them I think are fairly straightforward: nearly all of these aim to make the Witchwarper's quantum field better to use and a more important part of their gameplay, and try to drive as much unique gameplay as possible on a spellcasting class whose most central feature has them lay down a localized area. Even if the whole thing or the specifics of its implementation may not wind up in the end product, I do think the principles behind them are worth at least considering, if not applying in some form or another to the class as currently written.

[Driftbourne]

Lot to go over there so just a few quick thoughts for now.

1: Just out of curiosity what adventures or scenarios did you test the Witchwarper in?

2: Did you feel QF worked better at long or short ranges?

3: I'm not sure about the HP and only trained in unarmored changes. Without armor still needs some form of environmental protection, and with the ranged meta soft target can't just stay back from the melee to be safer, HP falls in that category too. One thought I had if they go that direction is when a Witchwarper is in their own QF they get some temp HP and AC bonus or other defensive benefit.

4: My main goal in playing a Witchwarper is area control. My SF1e area control mystic uses a combination of grenades and acidic mist to good effect. It's easy to add grenades, I fear acidic mist doesn't fit the 2e spell balancing, I don't see any 1st-level PF2e area damage spells that can be sustained. Just starting to build my Palytest Witchwarper so still looking at what spells might help with area control, either from the playtest or PF2e spells. If there are some useful area spells at low level that would help a lot if you can't move your QF.

5: Random thought on QFs There's one advantage to QF having weaker effects, if the effect is good enough opponents will always move out of them ASAP forcing you to need to move your QF a lot. With a weaker effect, they might stay in the QF longer. You just need some way to take advantage of that if they do stay in your QF.

[Teridax]

Happy to answer these!

1) I tested my Witchwarper in A Cosmic Birthday, It Came From the Vast!, Shards of the Glass Planet, and some encounters from the field tests, namely Data Breach of the Dead! and Fire Team Fiasco in Field Test #5, plus some custom encounters. I haven't yet put them through the new scenarios released mid-playtest.

2) The vanilla QF I think worked surprisingly better at closer ranges given how several mechanics encourage or require the Witchwarper to be in or adjacent to it. The above implementation by contrast works really well over long ranges, as it lets you extend the range of your spells, which is why I reined in its range a little. YMMV if you're using buff spells or fighting in melee, though, as you need your QF on yourself or allies to cast utility spells on them, and can use QF to blast a melee combat zone while leaving yourself and your allies unharmed.

3) You're right that any class needs environmental protections, which is why I added a section in the doc that changes the Flight Suit to effectively work like Explorer's Clothing from Pathfinder, allowing you to wear it in combat and benefit from its environmental protections like any armor. You're right that a character can't just stay out of range in a ranged encounter, though in my tests I found that the problem point wasn't the Witchwarper, but the Solarian and Soldier, neither of whom were all that great at drawing attention to themselves. When I tested out changes that made them better at doing that, the Witchwarper had a much easier time surviving, and generally wasn't in the same imminent risk of death as in a melee encounter due to the lower damage of guns.

4) I'll be very happy to list out spells that will help you lay down area control, whether for a mobile or an immobile QF. Floating flame is a good example of a spell you can use to make an area more dangerous, and you can move it too if you use the above version of the Witchwarper and get to move your QF around a lot. Scatter scree is a neat cantrip you can use for a bit of area denial as well, and spells like doom scroll, Grease, Mud Pit, Noxious Vapors, and verdant code can all let you control an area at low level.

5) I agree with this, though I also feel you can engineer those same incentives even with strong QF effects, so long as they incentivize entering the field. The gap influenced paradox's Obfuscating Zone effect, for instance, conceals everyone in your QF from everyone outside, so you can use this to conceal allies and pressure enemies to move into the danger zone in order to bypass the concealment. Others, like the precog's Attrition Zone, may not affect certain enemies negatively at all unless they start buffing themselves.

[Justnobodyfqwl]

I have two Witchwarper characters in my upcoming game i'm running, so I will be very curious to see how they feel about the class! If either of them are unhappy about it, I just might point towards this homebrew as something to try out.

I absolutely LOVE the emphasis on Zone feats within your rewrite. I think if there's ANYTHING they could and should steal 1:1, it's that idea that Witchwarper is IMMEDIATELY presented with a candy shop of Zone options, given one for free, and is told you can get more if you eat your vegetables every day.

I think the thing I appreciate most about this very interesting idea is how you made the distinction between "this is what I think the problem is" and "this is ONE WAY I think highlights those issues and tries to solve it". A lot of playtest feedback can wrap up a genuine critique too much with their less ideal solution! I think you're entirely right with the core issue- the Quantum Field needs to be a fun part of the class that you can consistently use!

We've compared it to the Mystic a lot, but it can't be overstated how brilliant the Mystic is for giving you a single action that just WORKS. The Mystic's bond and transference abilities do for Mystics what ranged weapons do for Starfinder 2e as a whole. It's a useful, reliable option that is super customizable, yet has a really high floor of functionality. They both raise the baseline effectiveness of your class so much that you can afford to pick options you normally wouldn't in gameplay. The same way that classes in SF2E seem to have more non-combat options because everyone can fire a gun half competently, Mystics can afford to cast more strange and unique spells because of a high baseline reliable amount of healing.

I want the Quantum Field to feel like the same thing for Witchwarpers. Mystics and Witchwarpers are both clearly Paizo taking a megaphone and screaming at the audience: "Let there be no more confusion! This is not a system for blaster casters! Spellcasters are great support classes, for stuff like Healing and AoEs!". And indeed, they gave us basically the platonic ideals of healing and AoE spellcasters with these two classes!

So I really, really, just do not understand what the intent behind the current Quantum Field being both something that takes active effort to sustain, yet also often does not even provide a benefit. One of my players is an Analyst, and has expressed confusion at how often their quantum field will even come up in gameplay. The paradox spell is entirely reactive, asking you to keep your field up in case you MIGHT need it. And as a new player, they're having a hard time understanding that being able to make two recall knowledge checks at once or free recall knowledge on sustained spells is potent action compression. (By contrast, both of my operative players have expressed that the class teaches them the value of action compression very well, since the immediate aim+strike is very limiting but the class immediately offers you way to compress them. The operative is a wonderful tutorial class!)

I think the core idea of making the Quantum Field be the centerpoint of your spells makes it INCREDIBLY hard to ignore, and feel much more like a meaningful and impactful part of the game. I think I hesitations about the idea are the fact that it's SO different, that it takes it in a very different direction from the Mystic. I think there's a lot of merit to the idea of making the mystic and witchwarper both fit to that "spellcaster with a solid reliable tutorial action" mold, and maybe getting a lot more experimental with later casters in the system.

(Man yeah, these playtest forums are a bit less active than I expected. I suppose I could do more to reply to posts replying to me, but... if I am being honest, that seems to spiral very quickly into arguments on this forum, and I can't say i'm interested.)

[Teridax]

Thank you very much for the kind words! And I think we're very much on the same wavelength: although I didn't necessarily mention the Mystic a lot in this thread, they're very much the main point of comparison, because where the Witchwarper flounders in the playtest, the Mystic succeeds gloriously. The Mystic's central mechanic is incredibly simple, yet works beautifully with the class's entire gameplay and makes them immediately stand out from any other caster. While I don't know if the Witchwarper's QF could ever be made as simple as Transfer Vitality, I do think it would benefit the class to have it made significantly smoother to use.

You're also absolutely right that the above presentation is but one of many different ways the Witchwarper could change, and I fully agree that the end result should, in my opinion, offer better QF functionality if nothing else. My take was very much "The class is already fairly complex as written, so might as well lean into that", but it would be equally valid to try to simplify the Witchwarper and focus on accessibility as a starter class. Less topical, but I'm very much with you on the climate on these forums too: there's a lot of bickering and often not much in the way of productive discussion (in fact, it sometimes feel like some people deliberately bicker to stop constructive discussion from happening). From my own experience, I've found it all too easy to get pulled into those arguments, so I don't blame you either for withholding replies, as in those situations the winning move is generally not to play.

[Driftbourne]

Justnobodyfqwl wrote:

I have two Witchwarper characters in my upcoming game i'm running, so I will be very curious to see how they feel about the class! If either of them are unhappy about it, I just might point towards this homebrew as something to try out.

If you have 2 Witchwarpers in a party, they could skip sustaining. If they stagger their use of QF, then one of them could move their QF each round. Even if that's 2 Witchwarpers it kind of playtesting how freeing up the action economy and what impact being able to move a QF every round would have on the game.

[Driftbourne]

Teridax wrote:

Happy to answer these!

1) I tested my Witchwarper in A Cosmic Birthday, It Came From the Vast!, Shards of the Glass Planet, and some encounters from the field tests, namely Data Breach of the Dead! and Fire Team Fiasco in Field Test #5, plus some custom encounters. I haven't yet put them through the new scenarios released mid-playtest.

2) The vanilla QF I think worked surprisingly better at closer ranges given how several mechanics encourage or require the Witchwarper to be in or adjacent to it. The above implementation by contrast works really well over long ranges, as it lets you extend the range of your spells, which is why I reined in its range a little. YMMV if you're using buff spells or fighting in melee, though, as you need your QF on yourself or allies to cast utility spells on them, and can use QF to blast a melee combat zone while leaving yourself and your allies unharmed.

Based on your comment I'm looking forward to doing some testing at different ranges.

I haven't had a chance to play the Witchwarper yet, but I did get the stadium map used in Wheel of Monsters on the table with some pawns and made an area-of-effect template of the QF to move around. Using the stadium with all the hazards, with just one move action a Witchwarper has the range to place their QF almost anywhere in the stadium combat area. The size of the QF makes it easy to fill the gap between 2 hazards or obstacles, and in many cases, the QF area can cover the back side of 2 hazards. If you use hazards as cover, it shows how effective the are of a QF is at messing up multiple cover locations at one time.

Teridax wrote:

4) I'll be very happy to list out spells that will help you lay down area control, whether for a mobile or an immobile QF. Floating flame is a good example of a spell you can use to make an area more dangerous, and you can move it too if you use the above version of the Witchwarper and get...

Thanks, big help! Reading the Mud Pit spell it's too bad being in difficult terrain doesn't give a -1 penalty to reflex saves. I don't see Paizo updating difficult terrain rules, but adding a reflex save penalty to spells or QF effects or feat like DEBRIS ZONE that cause difficult terrain is a possibility. For example, trying to jump out of the way of a grenade in knee-deep mud is harder to do.

Doom Scroll looks great for use in a QF, but you need holo projectors, screens near by for it to work. It would be cool if you could use a QF or a Witchwarper feat to bring holo projectors, and screens from another world into your QF to use for Doom Scroll.