I'm stuck in a white room and have heard next to nothing on these, so am asking if anybody could relate their experience playing any of the Composite Invocation feats.
From afar, none appealed to me except hypothetically in setups I would avoid. But maybe an odd, delayed, or overly broad playstyle is the cost for the bonus effect? Ex. The Annihilation one takes pausing until you have four different Runes before Invoking (albeit for a tempting effect, right?).
That resembles pausing four Strikes (or maybe Focus Spells) so they can all hit at once. How often would one need even more damage on top of that (except vs. bosses where a Runesmith already excels...if they can survive).
And would enemies know after you've NOT Invoked to maybe tactically retreat out of range for a round or two? Like with most new classes, one's left to wonder how retroactively interwoven the class has been/is becoming into Golarion culture.
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These invocations are honestly pretty terrible all around from what I've seen. Even with the option to apply traditions to runes that don't already have one, composite invocations are 2 action invocations, only can be done once per 10 minutes each, and generally have very minor effects.
Vital composite invocation? At level 6 you can restore 16 or 17 HP to a single ally target once per 10 minutes. So once an encounter at most. To do this, you have to first apply two runes on them which are a minimum of one action each if they're at touch range with you, or two actions each if not. You get this feat at the same level as you could pick tracing trance, so they can't be used together unless you delay taking one of them for level 8. And if you try to cast both runes at range... you don't have enough actions to trigger the invocation due to its 2 action activation requirement. At least 1 of the runes must be applied at touch range. So stride-trace-trace on an ally within 25 feet turn 1. Turn 2, Vital Composite invocation for 2 actions and you have 1 action left. For this you get to activate two invocations of non-damaging effects at once, and heal them by enough to counteract a single enemy strike at this level, approximately.
Clashing Composite Invocation? Level 10, competes with another 2 action invocation feat of all things (chain of words) and overload ammunition... so this is generally a level you take a lower level feat or a dedication feat for. Still once per 10 minutes, takes 2 actions to trigger, but is meant to target enemies. So... again, it can't be triggered the same round you apply the runes. Both of our main damage runes that are applied to an enemy creature instead of carried by an ally are primal, so you can't change them to clash. The best way to do this might be to make a diacritic rune such as Ur- or Sun- into an occult rune and pair with the primal fire / lightning rune. Now, if you didn't bother with the vital composite above, you can tracing trance to apply both at range, but you still need to use two actions on the next round to trigger a single damage burst, either with a +int damage or it reappearing to trigger again. So at best, if you use Sun- (which is also only once per 10 minutes), you can tracing trance to apply damage rune and Sun-. Then next round, if they haven't moved out of range despite the glowing runes on them (as you need invisible ink at level 2 to not be super obvious), you can spend two actions to invoke, and then your last action to invoke again for 2 damage runes. The equivalent of what you'd have gotten for a single invoke if you just traced both fire and lightning on the enemy previous turn at range. Or what you could do in a single turn at melee. In exchange for all that... sickened 1. Sickened 2 on a crit failure, but it's a fortitude save, same as nearly everything else you do so far. And if they succeed but don't critically succeed, sickened 1 but they can remove it with a single action. In the best case scenario, you're losing two actions to do this for no other benefit... so them succeeding their save might as well be them having used their one action to delete two of yours.
Astral Composite is another to target enemies with, inflicting stupefied, but it requires arcane and occult, so it can't pair with either direct damage rune. You're giving up 2 turns worth of damage with your runesmith for a save vs stupefied 1, 2, or 3 depending on save, fail, or crit fail. But hey, it's a will save! ...Which means that most enemies you'd want to actually target with this will make their saves easier than normal, as stupefied disrupts spell casting and is useless on most enemies with low will saves. At level 12, this one asks you to give up Distant Invocation or Expanded Glossary.
And the level 18 one honestly is the most egregious. You need 4 runes on the enemy to trigger it, only one of them can be the normal damage rune. You could use Inth- for divine and stack a bit of persistent damage through it, but you'll still be without particularly good options for the remaining two for occult and arcane runes you'd like to stick on an enemy if you do that. You could use a different diacritic to cover occult or arcane and then use Rovan, Seal of the Dead Vault for Divine, but all in all, it's hard to find 4 runes you want to trigger on one enemy at once currently. In order to put all 4 on, you need to be at melee and use tracing trance both, or split it over two rounds and still be at melee for it, or have triggered Drawn in Red or Define the Canvas prior. The only good thing I can say for Annihilating Composite Invocation is that it has no action cost listed. Not even a free action... meaning it's probably a typo, and we can assume that a DM would at least make you spend 1 action for a normal invoke, possibly two. ---After ALL that... the bonus you get is 10d4 extra damage with an extra fort save against it. An effect that is less than one a single extra whetstone rune would have given you at level 10, if they weren't resistant to slashing damage.
There's no way any of these can be good in the way they're currently designed. They're weak enough that they don't warrant the extra action cost or the 1 per 10 minute restriction on them, they're inconvenient enough to set up with the current rune list (even before remembering that we have a runes known limit) to be extremely hard to trigger even then. And you give up chances to take other, better feats for these, even if the better feats are at lower levels or through dedication feats.
The only remotely good feat that is related to these is Chain of Words, which invokes runes on two different rune-bearers, ally or enemy, and then does a small damage line between them that does scale to half of your normal damage runes. It's AOE, it's flexible, and it explicitly has a base range of 60 to invoke from instead of 30, meaning distant invocation boosts it to 90. You could theoretically make a 180 foot long line of 5d6 force damage with this at level 10 when you get it, or 10d6 at level 20. It's still low enough damage and high enough action and setup cost that it definitely doesn't warrant the 1 per 10 minute use restriction, but I can at least picture situations where I'd use it. But it's also not technically a composite invocation feat, just something that shares most of the attributes of them.