Technomancer, Sustain, and the Three-Action Hassle

[QuidEst]

I'm going to set aside overclock and jailbreak for a moment. Technomancer has some nice illusion and summons support scattered throughout, and there are other sustained spells. Once you cast a sustained spell, though, you're kind of locked out of your thing as a Technomancer. You don't have the spare action to use a spellshape- at most, you can do it once if you were able to overclock that first round.

Technomancer should probably have options other than jailbreaking to deal with the action cost of spellshapes. Meta-action feat or features like, "One action: Sustain one of your spells. You can use a one-action spellshape. You must spend focus points for magic hacks as normal." It might even be good to bundle a few options into one- "Stride up to half your speed, sustain one of your spells, or interact to draw or swap an item, then use a one-action spellshape."

As a specific example, with the illusion-friendly spellshapes available, it would be nice to cast a hardlight illusory body double and then spend the rest of combat using Incognito Spell to make it confusing about who is casting.

Something that makes it so that just using the regular, non-jailbroken spellshapes doesn't feel like you're playing a featureless caster. Spellshapes make up such a big part of the class that they could really use a little more love outside of the "spend one action now to save one later" setup.

[Lonesomechunk]

there's also the weirdness of Overclock where your most recent action has to be a spell you cast and RAW it has the same issue as Magus's arcane cascade premaster where you couldn't say, cast a 3-action spell (like Servoshell's summon robot) and then Overclock as your first action on the next turn. I feel like the action economy could use some cleaning up because theres some stuff that doesnt quite function properly and I don't think thats the intent but its still worth mentioning.

(on a related note, while I understand why Overclock doesn't work with cantrips I feel like it maybe should? Focus spells technically count for Overclock so its a bit funky that cantrips don't, admittedly this isn't that big of a deal though and mostly only gets kinda weird on Viper with some of their shenanigans with spell gems n chips)

[QuidEst]

Lonesomechunk wrote:

there's also the weirdness of Overclock where your most recent action has to be a spell you cast and RAW it has the same issue as Magus's arcane cascade premaster where you couldn't say, cast a 3-action spell (like Servoshell's summon robot) and then Overclock as your first action on the next turn. I feel like the action economy could use some cleaning up because theres some stuff that doesnt quite function properly and I don't think thats the intent but its still worth mentioning.

(on a related note, while I understand why Overclock doesn't work with cantrips I feel like it maybe should? Focus spells technically count for Overclock so its a bit funky that cantrips don't, admittedly this isn't that big of a deal though and mostly only gets kinda weird on Viper with some of their shenanigans with spell gems n chips)

Focus spells working seems to be "addressed" by the class having no focus spells that work with it; if you want to use that route, you have to go get focus spells from outside the class. "Technomancer working much better if you go outside the class for things" feels like a related issue.

[Teridax]

One of the issues that I'm starting to come up against on the Technomancer is that they're a glutton for actions and spell slots in order to access their class features. You essentially need to blow a spell slot to overclock your gear, and that takes a full turn, and if you want to access the benefits of Jailbreak Spell, that's another spell slot you'll want to spend... and all of this assumes you're using two-action spells, which doesn't work so well for ServoShell and summon robot.

I'll want to playtest the class more before doing a full write-up, but so far my thoughts on the matter are the following:

Overclocking gear feels like something that should be made directly available to the Technomancer without having to expend spell slots, both to reduce resource dependency and to bring out the techno aspect of the Technomancer a little more.

The Technomancer needs a better baseline of functionality when they run out of spell slots, as without them you can't overclock and your focus spells aren't always going to be a huge boost on cantrips. ServoShell in particular leaves you unable to use its initial focus spell at all if you're out of spell slots unless you get a minion via an ancestry.

I feel even the concept of overclocking could be generalized a bit more to just interact with technology in novel ways. ServoShell could easily use summon robot as a focus spell, as that's the basis of a lot of their interactions, and it looks like there's room for more effects that play with tech in the environment.

[Xenocrat]

I feel like DPS++ has an obvious gun build where they Sure Strike, Overclock Gear, Strike (with bonus damage) in Turn 1. Then they can Strike and do stuff like Shield cantrip for their third action until they feel like a jailbroken spell later in the fight.

At 8th level they can pick up the Viper Focus 1 spell and get double use out of Sure Strike spell gems for efficiency.

Is this good compared to just playing a martial? Probably not, but it's probably fun.