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To summarize the premise: the Dark Archive changes to the Psychic got leaked, imaginary weapon got nerfed to a d6 of damage, and I'm really not happy about it. The cantrip may be popular on the Magus, but it anti-synergizes with the Psychic's extreme squishiness and is resultingly very difficult to properly use on the class it's made for. I would have been much more comfortable with the damage nerf if it had come with improvements to the cantrip's safety, such as by making it ranged or giving the Psychic better protections, and so with this in mind I'd like to offer a different take on the cantrip to suit the Tangible Dream's theme of "impossible creations".
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Traits: uncommon, cantrip, concentrate, force, psychic
Duration: until the end of your next turn
You imagine a weapon, and it materializes in the air near you, ready to launch itself at a foe. For the duration, you can launch the weapon at a target as a single action, which has the attack and concentrate traits. After you launch the weapon, the spell ends.
When you attack with imaginary weapon, make a ranged spell attack against a target within 30 feet, dealing 2d6 force damage on a success and double damage on a critical success. You can coalesce the weapon into a more specific shape, allowing you to deal bludgeoning, piercing, or slashing damage instead of force as appropriate for the weapon and trigger vulnerabilities to specific weapon types, such as an arboreal's axe vulnerability.
While your psyche is unleashed, the first attack you make with imaginary weapon gains its status bonus to damage, even though the spell has a duration.
Heightened (+1): Increase the damage by 1d6.
Amp: You muster an unending barrage of dreamt-up weapons. You can attack with imaginary weapon immediately as part of Casting the Spell, and you can keep making attacks without ending the spell as countless new weapons materialize around you. You can coalesce the weapons into impossible shapes and energies, allowing you to deal any damage type instead of force with each attack.
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The basic idea behind this take is to make the psi cantrip safer and thus much more easily usable to the Psychic, but also lean into the Tangible Dream's theme of creation to let the class trigger weaknesses and vulnerabilities really easily. Rather than make one big attack, the cantrip would work a bit closer to biting words, letting you make multiple attacks within the duration. It wouldn't be as great for burst damage, but it could lend itself much better to heavier damage output over a couple of rounds, while giving a bit of flexibility by letting you stagger the action cost of the cast and the attack across those rounds.
In addition, we should follow Ignition's example and give the user the option to make a melee attack instead.
"If the target is within your melee reach, you can choose to make a melee spell attack with the weapon instead of a ranged spell attack, which increases all the spell's damage dice to d8s."
I like this a lot; this would allow players to regain the d8 damage that was lost on the cantrip at an appropriate risk.
This actually feels like a good rework for the Psychic. On the first read through I missed it required a second action to do the attack and feared that (especially with a d8 melee damage version) it'd stay as a 'must have cantrip' for the magus. But, with it being a second action to use, it wouldn't work with spellstrike but is still a good cantrip for the psychic.
Though, the ability to do ANY type of damage with the amped version does feel... a bit too strong. Shifting it to either force or other physical damages with each attack works, but adding energy types, void, vitality, or even possibly holy/unholy to the list is... extremely strong for any spell, much less a focus spell. It would be something people might want to poach on any spellcasting class for the sheer versatility it provides.
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The intent is to prevent non-Psychics from accessing the amp, but yeah, I personally very much want amped psi cantrips to be on the level of slot spells. I think that is how you justify a class having 2 spell slots per rank: psi cantrips IMO ought to be a Psychic's bread and butter, and their slot spells ought to be for situations their psi cantrips don't cover. There are other things I'd like to do in service of this, like take out Unleash's status bonus to damage and instead make amps better, but the net result ought to be that psi cantrips are as attractive as slot spells when amped.
As for the Magus, while they wouldn't be able to put the above cantrip to use in Spellstrike due to the reactivation on the base version, I think the class is always going to be looking for attack focus spells: so long as the class can Spellstrike with focus spells, yet has to spend limited spell slots to maximize their Spellstrike damage and has no attack focus spells in their own kit, the class is always going to incentivize players to look for focus attack spells to fill in that gap and Spellstrike for more damage without attrition constraints. Nerfing imaginary weapon in the remaster I think is only going to make the Champion dedication all the more attractive, as you could just get fire ray on top of all its other goodies.
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Imaginary weapon is definitely a problem in the since of how useful it is to magi.
I really like the concept of what you're doing, in making it useful to the psychic and prevent it's use by the magus.
One question, when you used the amped version are you intended to making the duration like a concentration thing (with making an attack counting as concentration) such that the spell could be used over multiple rounds? Or simply that making 1 attack doesn't end the spell, and the duration is "until the end of your next turn" so a psychic could make up to 5 attacks (albeit with high MAP) by casting it as their first action on turn 1 and then 2 attacks on same turn and 3 more on turn 2?
I also really love that it deal force or any physical damage type. Makes a lot of sense to me.
Much appreciated! The intent is that it lasts until the end of your next turn under all circumstances, but you can make more than one attack with the amped version. The concentrate trait is there mainly for flavor reasons as well as interactions with things like stupefied or Disruptive Stance; key to this set of changes is also taking out the manipulate trait, so you don't eat a Reactive Strike as a squishy caster if you're trying to defend yourself against a melee opponent.