[DSP/PF] Magic of Incarna Playtest Open

[Psyren]

With their Psionics conversion knocked out of the park, and their ToB conversion well underway (the excellent Path of War), the DSP crew have set their sights on retaking another 3.5 subsystem. I refer of course to Incarnum. This project is being headed up by the talented Ssalarn from the Paizo boards.

Shape your soulmelds Weave your veils and bind them to your chakras in the free playtest (http://dreamscarredpress.com/dragonfly/ForumsPro/viewtopic/t=3270.html), announced today. And of course, discuss.

My one disappointment so far is that the word "blue" does not appear anywhere in the document :tongue:

EDIT: Since I ended up being the OP post-merger, I'll go ahead and post links to the dropbox docs/DSP threads for ease of location:

Vizier Playtest (http://dreamscarredpress.com/dragonfly/ForumsPro/viewtopic/t=3270.html)
Guru Playtest (http://dreamscarredpress.com/dragonfly/ForumsPro/viewtopic/t=3311.html)
Daevic Playtest (http://dreamscarredpress.com/dragonfly/ForumsPro/viewtopic/t=3288.html)

EDIT: Adding link to Akashic archetypes for playtesting: https://www.dropbox.com/s/7i7aqqibmfb8pgz/Akashic%20Archetypes.pdf
EDIT: Changed thread title to reflect the official system name change.

[Zweisteine]

I didn't read it yet, and I might never, and I don't play Pathfinder, but

OH MY GOD YES.

They should do something silly, like making it green/emerald/jade/whatever.

OH MY GOD YES.

[Gemini476]

My one disappointment so far is that the word "blue" does not appear anywhere in the document :tongue:
Are there any synonyms for "Blue" in the document?

[Psyren]

Are there any synonyms for "Blue" in the document?

Sapphire: 0 hits
Cerulean: 0 hits
Cobalt: 0 hits
Indigo: 0 hits
Azure: 1 hit! Yes! I am appeased.

[Piggy Knowles]

So, I've never played Pathfinder, but I love incarnum and have a place for it in my campaign setting, and would like to do more to incorporate it. I'm at work and can't check the details right now, but how much work would it take to adapt its content to a 3.5 game?

[Ziegander]

This is exciting. Although I am somewhat sad that I did not work with DSP years ago when I had the chance. :(

[Person_Man]

I'm deeply disappointment, because I've been trying to get my heavily reworked and rewritten version sold to Paizo. Oh well. If it ends up happening, I'll just post it online.

[Psyren]

So, I've never played Pathfinder, but I love incarnum and have a place for it in my campaign setting, and would like to do more to incorporate it. I'm at work and can't check the details right now, but how much work would it take to adapt its content to a 3.5 game?

I haven't read it in surpassing detail yet. So far it's just the one class (the Vizier, who I assume is the Incarnate analogue despite the 3/4 BAB and 4+Int skills.) Though I do see two others being referenced at points, the Daevic and the Guru.

Adapting it would be as easy as any PF class; pay attention to the skill and CMB/CMD references, but otherwise it should fit in fine.

The document is scant on information regarding the actual meldshaping veilweaving process itself. I would definitely need more detail on that to comment on the system as a whole. (For example, unless I'm reading it wrong it seems that veils are enhancements you stick onto your equipment, as opposed to soulmelds, which are standalone blue constructs that function as pseudo-items in their own right.)


I'm deeply disappointment, because I've been trying to get my heavily reworked and rewritten version sold to Paizo. Oh well. If it ends up happening, I'll just post it online.

Yeah they do tend to squeeze out the little guy. One of the side-effects of becoming a big name 3PP I suppose...
I'd be interested to read it if you go that route :smallsmile:

Also, feel free to participate in the playtest, I'm sure your expertise with incarnum will be helpful to them.

[Snowbluff]

Sapphire: 0 hits
Cerulean: 0 hits
Cobalt: 0 hits
Indigo: 0 hits
Azure: 1 hit! Yes! I am appeased.

Don't forget any references to midnight, too.

EDIT: No hits! impressive! :smalltongue:

EDIT2: Seer Vizier sucks. Teamwork feats are bad enough, but having to invest essence in granting them to others is really painful.

[Dusk Eclipse]

DSP is quickly becoming one of my favorite publishers right now. Their products are converting me to PF.

[stack]

And all the time I put into giving BelGareth feedback for the flowshaper was now wasted. Oh well. I'll give it a read.

[Snowbluff]

Vizier Seers should be able to share ALL teamwork feats withing 30 feet per essence invested, or the essence should increase the bonus of the feats.


DSP is quickly becoming one of my favorite publishers right now. Their products are converting me to PF.

You could just as easily backport them to 3.5. :smalltongue:

[Psyren]

EDIT2: Seer Vizier sucks. Teamwork feats are bad enough, but having to invest essence in granting them to others is really painful.

Agreed, but given that we have new Teamwork Feats coming out (e.g. in ACG) there may be better ones to choose from soon.

Will Path of War have any? I confess I haven't been keeping up with that project.


DSP is quickly becoming one of my favorite publishers right now. Their products are converting me to PF.

They had me at hello psion.

[Ssalarn]

Hello all!
For anyone who's interested, Dreamscarred press is helping breathe new life into a familiar subsystem from 3.5 with "Magic of Incarna"!

Check out the playtest forums on Dreamscarred here (http://dreamscarredpress.com/dragonfly/ForumsPro/viewtopic/p=39472.html#39472), or feel free to talk about the first playtest release, the Vizier (https://www.dropbox.com/s/co2i27hemdi9kg8/MagicofIncarnaPlaytest.pdf).

Thanks all!

[Coidzor]

Nifty. :smallbiggrin:

[Particle_Man]

I like! A well-edited version of this magical system would be very cool!

[Seerow]

Please tell me you're dropping or heavily simplifying chakra binds.

And that the Incarnum feats will be actually useful.

[Ssalarn]

Please tell me you're dropping or heavily simplifying chakra binds.

And that the Incarnum feats will be actually useful.

Chakra binds are now basically just a "power-up" for Veils that you unlock as you progress in levels. They do not interfere with magic items occupying the same slots any more. And the feats should be decent. But feel free to check out the playtest document and tell me what you think, and what you think we could be doing better!

[CyberThread]

I feel really twisted up by this , and will try and make a balanced post.



Is this a fan creation or a 3rd party publication? If a fan creation then good for you, if this is getting released for money by Dreamscarred, AND you do not have the original creators of Magic of Incarnum on your team, then this seems like it breaks copyright laws and runs roughshod over another persons published creations.

[Psyren]

Hey there Ssalarn! I had actually started a thread (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=325776) for this earlier. I'll see if the mods can merge them but if not, I'll encourage folks to post in this one to make seeing any feedback easier on you.



Is this a fan creation or a 3rd party publication? If a fan creation then good for you, if this is getting released for money by Dreamscarred, AND you do not have the original creators of Magic of Incarnum on your team, then this seems like it breaks copyright laws and runs roughshod over another persons published creations.

This is being fully published/supported by DSP - they made the announcement on their forums as well as their facebook page and on the Paizo boards.

The name is worrisome to me too, however DSP are pretty well-versed with the OGL. If anybody knows how not to get sued it's probably them.

[Vanitas]

I hope that name is not set in stone.

[Particle_Man]

I think the major problem with the feats was "locking in" those essentia points for 24 hours, when the whole point of them was that they could easily be moved around. So fixing that would help a lot.

[Ravens_cry]

Getting over its fixation with the colour blue would also be nice, if only for fluff reasons.

[Psyren]

Getting over its fixation with the colour blue would also be nice, if only for fluff reasons.

As I noted in the thread I started, there is only one synonym for blue in the entire playtest doc :smallbiggrin:

[malonkey1]

Hrm... I am keenly interested in this. I may even use some of the rules changes in my Incarnum Update, linked to in my sig. :P

[Feint's End]

Well I really hope DSP won't **** that one up (unlikely but possible) since I always loved the flavour and basic playstyle of Incarnum but the 3.5 approach was just too clunky and the classes were terrible. You have no standard meldshaper in the book who can be a "generalist".

The Vizir looks like it actually might do the job of the "wizard" of Incarnum (or Incarna ... whatever). I'll be watching the project with great interest.

[Zweisteine]

I desperately hope that this comes out balanced and 3.5-compatable-ish, so I can use Incarnum and not have a sucky class that isn't Totemist.

Also, if I may make a suggestion, use many synonyms for the color green or red, just to annoy people.
Magic of Incarna
Magic of Incarna But take them out and rename everything before publication, of course.These words have the color they say they are.
Emerald
Ruby

[stack]

If I read that right, you can get a 24 hr, auto-respawning lantern archon at level 1. Seems a bit strong for the level.

[Ssalarn]

I hope that name is not set in stone.

I've had some... concerns with the name as well, though Andreas assures me that it is not an issue and it will let people know exactly what the project is about.

For the time being, it'd be great if everyone could focus on the mechanics and the classes as they roll out and see if they work, if they do what you want them to do, and if there's something missing that you'd like to see.

I'll keep working with Andreas to ensure that we don't break any laws or anything while we get this product developed and out the door for you all to play with.

[Ssalarn]

If I read that right, you can get a 24 hr, auto-respawning lantern archon at level 1. Seems a bit strong for the level.

Avatar of Light is going to be undergoing some..... debuffing. The archon will probably be available from level 1, but will have its abilities broken up and distributed based on the amount of Essence invested in the ability.

[Ssalarn]

I haven't read it in surpassing detail yet. So far it's just the one class (the Vizier, who I assume is the Incarnate analogue
Adapting it would be as easy as any PF class; pay attention to the skill and CMB/CMD references, but otherwise it should fit in fine.

The document is scant on information regarding the actual meldshaping veilweaving process itself. I would definitely need more detail on that to comment on the system as a whole. (For example, unless I'm reading it wrong it seems that veils are enhancements you stick onto your equipment, as opposed to soulmelds, which are standalone blue constructs that function as pseudo-items in their own right.)


Couple notes:
I'll be expanding on the base rules in the playtest document tonight to make clearer all of the little things (like what the actual process for binding is and such).

One of the big things: Vizier's are very focused on the trappings of their position, and their chakra binds are actually tied in to their Arcane Imbuements, which enchnat or enhance the physical items worn in those slots, so that Veils actually make their magic items better. This is a mechanic of the Vizier class, and not a staple of the subsystem itself. The Daevic and Guru will have more traditional binds.

The Vizier is kind of the "wizard" of the incarna world, with more control and AoE binds than the other classes. We bumped his skills and BAB a bit because
a) He should be able to accomodate some more "in the mix" builds and
b)2 + Int skills isn't a curse I'd wish on anyone. More than that though, skills tend to taper in usefulness as you go up in levels, and I'd like the Vizier and Guru's facility and adaptability with the skill system to have some time to shine

The upcoming classes are:

The Daevic, a full BAB class who gains his Incarna and veilweaving powers by allowing himself to be possessed by a daeva, a powerful being of pure Incarna. The primary class feature of the Daevic is their Passion, which gives them oodles of scaling bonuses in line with their choice (Dominion, Desire, or Wrath). The Daevic is the primary user of natural attack related Veils.

The Guru is a class that (and bear with me here) focuses on dealing non-lethal damage and inflicting status effects with his Gentle Touch ability. He also chooses a Philosophy which enhances things like fighting style, defensive styles, etc. His Veils are the best at skill enhancing and hp and status recovery.

[Dusk Eclipse]

Vizier Seers should be able to share ALL teamwork feats withing 30 feet per essence invested, or the essence should increase the bonus of the feats.



You could just as easily backport them to 3.5. :smalltongue:

Maybe, but currently I lack a d20 group so everything is wishful thinking and there are tons of PF-only stuff that I really want to try (Hexcrafter Bladebound magus and DSP soulknife being at the top of that list).

Edit: Add Daevic to that list... I just read SSalarn post.

[Ssalarn]

Quick question on Arcane Imbuement:

It seems like people aren't feeling the static bonuses too much, is that accurate, or are the people who don't like it just the most verbal?

Follow up question: Once upon a time this class had a whole "Sorcerer's Apprentice" trick where it could animate all of it's Arcane Imbuement items to create an army of tiny veil wearing companions. That proved troublesome and had some of the same issues as the master summoner when they had their own actions, and was actually just plain terrible if the Vizier had to spend his own actions to command each one individually.

So what if your Arcane Imbuements could be assembled into a kind of Incarna Golem that you could attach your Veils to? The Seer path would give enhanced bonuses for the abilities shared with your golem, and the Crafter path would make your golem more durable and combat capable.

Thoughts?

[danzibr]

I see some stuff I like, but overall, unlike their very cool Path of War (or whatever it's called), I'm not very impressed. Certain soulmelds (or whatever they're called) are cool, like Hand Cannon and Horns of the Minotaur to name a few, but unless there's something like a Totemist, I don't think I'll care much. At the moment it seems like a bad rip off (Incarnum->Incarna? Essentia->Essence? And why didn't they alter the freakin' capacity? C'mon).

I was sort of joking with the, "whatever it's called," by the way.

[Ssalarn]

I see some stuff I like, but overall, unlike their very cool Path of War (or whatever it's called), I'm not very impressed. Certain soulmelds (or whatever they're called) are cool, like Hand Cannon and Horns of the Minotaur to name a few, but unless there's something like a Totemist, I don't think I'll care much. At the moment it seems like a bad rip off (Incarnum->Incarna? Essentia->Essence? And why didn't they alter the freakin' capacity? C'mon).

I was sort of joking with the, "whatever it's called," by the way.

The Daevic is going to fill a slot similar to the totemist as far as a combat focused class that uses lots of natural attack veils goes. The reason the names for some of the mechanics are so similar is... well, they were supposed to be, so that people recognize the subsystem for what it is.
Much like Path of War, this subsystem should be similar enough to the original that inspired it that it's easy to port and transfer materials between the two, so instead of replacing the original, new people have access to something they may have missed out on, and people who have the original Incarnum book and liked it can now draw from two sources of material.

[Ssalarn]

Quick changelog note:
Any feat that had a 24 hour hold on the Essence that didn't absolutely need it has had said hold removed. Essence should be fluid and easy to transfer to where you need it most.

[danzibr]

The Daevic is going to fill a slot similar to the totemist as far as a combat focused class that uses lots of natural attack veils goes. The reason the names for some of the mechanics are so similar is... well, they were supposed to be, so that people recognize the subsystem for what it is.
Much like Path of War, this subsystem should be similar enough to the original that inspired it that it's easy to port and transfer materials between the two, so instead of replacing the original, new people have access to something they may have missed out on, and people who have the original Incarnum book and liked it can now draw from two sources of material.
I'm sold.

I do really like what they did with Path of War, in particular the sneaky initiator. The thing which immediately turned me off for this Magic of Incarna business is the naming (which you commented upon). I see that it's supposed to be similar so people know what's going on, but by changing a letter or two, it just seems tasteless. I guess they can't use Incarnum for copyright reasons? Or essentia? It just seems... low brow. I'm probably just being picky.

For the Vizier (and presumably the others will follow similar rules), I see they kept the stinginess of being locked in with your veils. Veilshifting makes that a bit better, but still, I'd like to see more flexibility on the fly.

I did a bit more reading. I gotta say, I'm really liking their veils. A big complaint I have about MoI is the soulmelds not being good enough, so to speak. There were a few exceptional soulmelds which everyone used, then some things which were rarely good, then a bunch of rubbish.

Avatar of Light gives an awesome companion, comes back after an hour if you lose it. Pump essentia into it, gets even stronger, though I see Shared Veil doesn't work with it :/. One problem which remains from the original MoI (how are we going to distinguish Magic of Incarnum from Magic of Incarna?) is the lack of any benefit of more essence for some veils and binds. Take Coward's Boots bound to feet. Mobility, that's it, never gets better as you level or for invested essentia. Seems wasteful.

I have thoughts on most of the veils, but... nothing worth saying. If nothing else, I'm looking forward to taking this stuff back to 3.5.

[Ssalarn]

So Avatar of Light is getting a bit of a revamp: You will get to use Share Veil with it, but it's inherent abilities (SLAs, DR, Aura) are going to get chopped up and distributed based on the amount of Essence invested to keep it from being too powerful during the first few levels of play.


I'm really trying to get people to learn to enjoy the Vizier, but I have feeling the class a lot of people are going to fall in love with is the Daevic: Full BAB, Heavy Armor, lots of natural attack Veils, and a bitching ability called Passion that's granted by the Incarna outsider (called a daeva) he allows to possess him which grants a slew of scaling bonuses. The Daevic is also the "set and forget" class; it has the ability to move Essence around if that is what the player wants to do, but it's honestly perfectly capable if you just max out your Passion Bond's Essence and divvy up the rest of your Essence into your favorite attack Veils.

Since the Vizier is the only class to get binds for every slot, and who has the greatest capacity for utilizing Veils, we want to hard test the system on him first before we start bringing in the other classes. The Vizier is the veilweaving class; the Daevic and Guru are guys who use Incarna, and know how to use Veils, but the Veils sit on top of the real juicy bits of the class, serving more to enhance and show off the things that make them unique, kind of like the way druid's can cast spells, but most of the time they use them to showcase how awesome they are when they buff up their Animal Companion, Wildshape, and eat faces.

[Ssalarn]

Changelog note:

Essence of Movement feat added to feat catalogue

Coward's Boots bind changed to grant Essence of Movement instead of Mobility. This should allow for the ability to scale better and be more in line with the flexible nature of the Essence investment subsystem

Polar Snowshoes change to affect "all creatures other than wearer" instead of "all enemies". This makes more sense thematically, and is more in line with similar Veil abilities.

Eldritch Insight changed to allow Vizier to invest Essence into magic items, allowing him to meet that items use requirements and granting it a pool of temporary charges.

[stack]

For the record, I really like the class feature of the vizier. Definitely not just an incarnate clone.

[Ssalarn]

For the record, I really like the class feature of the vizier. Definitely not just an incarnate clone.

Thank you!

While he's supposed to fill a similar niche to the Incarnate, I definitely wanted him to be something new and unique, and to come at the system from a bit of a different direction. I also wanted to shave out a good chunk of that alignment stuff from the whole subsystem and replace it with fun goodies that are going to enhance your gameplay, rather than restrict it.

[Ziegander]

I definitely like where the Vizier is going, and I imagine it will be my favorite class of the three.

I am leery of the Daevic, because it sounds so similar to Soul Binding, although that might not necessarily be a bad thing, just be mindful of stepping on the toes of DSP's other property, the Occultist.

[Ziegander]

I definitely like where the Vizier is going, and I imagine it will be my favorite class of the three.

I am leery of the Daevic, because it sounds so similar to Soul Binding, although that might not necessarily be a bad thing, just be mindful of stepping on the toes of DSP's other property Radiance House's "Binder" property, the Occultist.

(Crossposting).

[Eldaran]

just be mindful of stepping on the toes of DSP's other property, the Occultist.

Not DSP, Radiance House made the Occulist.

[Ziegander]

Not DSP, Radiance House made the Occulist.

Oh, wow, my bad. Still, could be awkward to have two classes that bind things to their souls, especially if it's from another publisher.

[Ssalarn]

I definitely like where the Vizier is going, and I imagine it will be my favorite class of the three.

I am leery of the Daevic, because it sounds so similar to Soul Binding, although that might not necessarily be a bad thing, just be mindful of stepping on the toes of DSP's other property, the Occultist.

No worries there. I am familiar with Radiance House's Occultist (inspired by the Binder from Tome of Magic, I believe) and the Daevic looks nothing like that, and definitely doesn't play that way. Rather than picking a mish-mash of Outsiders to draw powers from, the Daevic picks one particular entity whose prime motivation reflects his innermost drives (Dominion, Desire, and Wrath currently). His bond with this entity slowly transforms him over time, making him a more and more perfect physical representation of his chosen Passion.

On a side note, given the heavy combat focus of the system used by 3.5 and Pathfinder, you have no idea how many times I had to rewrite the Desire Passion before the abilities lost the, ummm..., I'm going to go with "sexual assault-y" vibe. Turns out, there is just no way to combine the phrase "carnal conquests" with a mechanic that improves grappling without it being VERY offensive. Designers take note.

[Ziegander]

No worries there. I am familiar with Radiance House's Occultist (inspired by the Binder from Tome of Magic, I believe) and the Daevic looks nothing like that, and definitely doesn't play that way. Rather than picking a mish-mash of Outsiders to draw powers from, the Daevic picks one particular entity whose prime motivation reflects his innermost drives (Dominion, Desire, and Wrath currently). His bond with this entity slowly transforms him over time, making him a more and more perfect physical representation of his chosen Passion.

On a side note, given the heavy combat focus of the system used by 3.5 and Pathfinder, you have no idea how many times I had to rewrite the Desire Passion before the abilities lost the, ummm..., I'm going to go with "sexual assault-y" vibe. Turns out, there is just no way to combine the phrase "carnal conquests" with a mechanic that improves grappling without it being VERY offensive. Designers take note.

Is the Daevic going to be able to do anything resembling "traditional" weapon-based combat? Could it forsake natural attacks, without losing mechanical potency, and wade into battle as a sword-wielding crusader for... for... Wrath?

And, so does that mean that the Daevic's Desire Passion is more along the lines of, oh, romantic desire, we'll say, and less about greed/envy? I hope so. A romantic warrior type with actual features to expound mechanically on his romance sounds like a lot of fun.

[Ssalarn]

Is the Daevic going to be able to do anything resembling "traditional" weapon-based combat? Could it forsake natural attacks and wade into battle as a sword-wielding crusader for... for... Wrath?

And, so does that mean that the Daevic's Desire Passion is more along the lines of, oh, romantic desire, we'll say, and less about greed/envy? I hope so. A romantic warrior type with actual features to expound mechanically on his romance sounds like a lot of fun.

The Daevic has an excellent facility for wielding weapons, and also gains a special Veil called "Armory of the Conqueror"... You know what, here's a sneak peek:
Armory of the Conqueror
Descriptors: none
Class: Daevic
Slot: Hands, Wrists
Saving Throw: none
A gleaming weapon of hardened Incarna appears in the wearer’s hands, thrumming with the power of his Essence.
When you shape this Veil, choose one of the following damage types: bludgeoning, piercing, or slashing. You form either a light or two handed weapon (chosen when you shape this Veil) that deals damage of that type. This weapon has the following statisitics: damage- 1d6 critical threat range- 20 critical threat multiplier x2
Essence: For each point of Essence invested in this ability, the weapon gains a +2 insight bonus to damage. For every 2 points of Essence invested in this ability, increase the critical threat range by 1 (so 2 points gives you a threat range of 19-20, 4 points gives you a threat range of 18-20, etc.). For every 3 points of Essence invested in this ability, increase the critical threat multiplier by 1. These abilities are cumulative (for example, a weapon with 4 points of Essence invested would grant +8 to damage, and crit on an 18-20 x3). This weapon can be summoned or dismissed as a free action as long as this Veil is shaped.
Chakra Bind (Hands): Binding this Veil to your Hands slot allows it to overcome DR/Magic.
Chakra Bind (Wrists): Binding this Veil to your Wrists slot allows the weapon to punch through certain types of DR as though it were made of rare and potent materials. It is treated as a magic weapon with an enhancement bonus equal to the total Essence invested in this ability for the purposes of overcoming damage reduction.



The Desire Daevic is designed to be able to represent either greed and lust; or prudence and love. So you could very much create a romantic hero.

All of the Daevic passions are two-fold. Wrath could be a murderous psychopath, or a stern bringer of justice. Dominion could give rise to a benevolent king or an iron-fisted tyrant.

[Ziegander]

The Desire Daevic is designed to be able to represent either greed and lust; or prudence and love. So you could very much create a romantic hero.

All of the Daevic passions are two-fold. Wrath could be a murderous psycopath, a stern bringer of justice. Dominion could give rise to a benevolent king or an iron-fisted tyrant.

I AM LOVING EVERYTHING YOU'RE SAYING.


The Daevic has an excellent facility for wielding weapons, and also gains a special Veil called "Armory of the Conqueror"... You know what, here's a sneak peek:
Armory of the Conqueror
Descriptors: none
Class: Daevic
Slot: Hands, Wrists
Saving Throw: none
A gleaming weapon of hardened Incarna appears in the wearer’s hands, thrumming with the power of his Essence.
When you shape this Veil, choose one of the following damage types: bludgeoning, piercing, or slashing. You form either a light or two handed weapon (chosen when you shape this Veil) that deals damage of that type. This weapon has the following statisitics: damage- 1d6 critical threat range- 20 critical threat multiplier x2
Essence: For each point of Essence invested in this ability, the weapon gains a +2 insight bonus to damage. For every 2 points of Essence invested in this ability, increase the critical threat range by 1 (so 2 points gives you a threat range of 19-20, 4 points gives you a threat range of 18-20, etc.). For every 3 points of Essence invested in this ability, increase the critical threat multiplier by 1. These abilities are cumulative (for example, a weapon with 4 points of Essence invested would grant +8 to damage, and crit on an 18-20 x3). This weapon can be summoned or dismissed as a free action as long as this Veil is shaped.
Chakra Bind (Hands): Binding this Veil to your Hands slot allows it to overcome DR/Magic.
Chakra Bind (Wrists): Binding this Veil to your Wrists slot allows the weapon to punch through certain types of DR as though it were made of rare and potent materials. It is treated as a magic weapon with an enhancement bonus equal to the total Essence invested in this ability for the purposes of overcoming damage reduction.

This is cool, but, IMHO, has some issues. Obviously, it's your class, design as you wish, but I would make the following changes:


Give the two-hander either a dice-size boost OR reach (player choice). I know they already get Str and a half to damage and improved Power Attack, but I still think it affects some sort of fantasy verisimilitude that the two-hander has the exact same stats and tactical purpose as the light weapon. Feels off.
Make the invested Essence just bump the weapon dice up one step (d6 > d8 > d10 > d12, etc). It feels more like the weapon itself is getting stronger this way, but also flat bonuses are stronger on crits and multiple attacks.
I am leery of crit modification, but I don't feel strongly about it either.
Enhancement bonus doesn't matter when overcoming damage reduction. Either way, I would actually give the enhancement bonus part to the Hands bind, and make it an actual enhancement to attack and damage rolls, so that way it can scale with purchased magic weapons.
The wrist bind is vague on what it actually does. I assume you mean it allows the Daevic to overcome things like DR/silver or DR/byeshk?

[Ssalarn]

So, remember, while I definitely want 3.5 players to be able to take advantage of it, this is really designed for Pathfinder.
The note about it having an enhancement bonus for the purposes of overcoming damage reduction refers to this table (http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/glossary.html#_damage-reduction). So a Daevic with 5 points of Essence invested in Armory of the Conqueror would overcome the following types of DR: magic, cold iron, silver, adamantine, and alignment. It's actually pretty good.
And I'm considering changing the damage progression from a flat bonus to a boost in die size; they're going to have the potential to be very good at crits and it might need some reining in. I try to err on the side of awesome, and then scale back if it's an issue.

[Eldaran]

I agree on increasing the dice number or dice size rather than a static bonus. Static bonuses are great, and obviously are a core part of Incarnum, but rolling a 2d12 is more exciting than a d6+9, even if they average out about the same.

[Ziegander]

The note about it having an enhancement bonus for the purposes of overcoming damage reduction refers to this table (http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/glossary.html#_damage-reduction).

Whoa. That is something I had no idea existed. I keep learning that Pathfinder is more different from D&D 3.5 than I thought. So strange.


So a Daevic with 5 points of Essence invested in Armory of the Conqueror would overcome the following types of DR: magic, cold iron, silver, adamantine, and alignment. It's actually pretty good.

Totally gotcha. So why not just allow the Wrist bind to grant an actual enhancement bonus? Maybe with the caveat that the Daevic can't bind it to his Wrist unless he has also bound it to his Hands?


And I'm considering changing the damage progression from a flat bonus to a boost in die size; they're going to have the potential to be very good at crits and it might need some reining in. I try to err on the side of awesome, and then scale back if it's an issue.

I just don't like crits all that much, but as I said, I really don't feel too strongly about the crit issue. I do think the die size boost just feels more appropriate, which is important to a lot of players I think.

[Ssalarn]

You guys have sold me. Armory of the Conqueror is getting two changes made before the Daevic playtest goes live:
1) initial damage will be 1d6 for the light weapon option, 1d8 for the two-handed option
2) static damage increases are being replaced by boosts to the die size.



Seriously though, I would love some more feedback on the Vizier (https://www.dropbox.com/s/co2i27hemdi9kg8/MagicofIncarnaPlaytest.pdf), since my bosses at Dreamscarred are not going to let the other classes see daylight until this guy is fully vetted.

So, you've been teased a bit with what's coming up next, but I'd love any feedback you guys can give me on what's here now :)

[Raven777]

What if they make it... *shudder*... purple?

OH MY GOD YES!

[Ssalarn]

What if they make it... *shudder*... purple?

OH MY GOD YES!

We couldn't come up with enough adjectives and synonyms for purple to make this a direction we felt we could pursue.

Keep an eye out for the Dinomancer though, odds are good we'll get some solid purple in there. And polka-dotted purple.

j/k

[Mithril Leaf]

Since PF Psionics are DSP owned, you could make an official Aegis/Daevic hybrid PrC. That's 100% what I'd want to play for a melee build in Pathfinder. If not, I suppose I'll have to brew it myself.

[Vanitas]

Are there any plans for a PoW/Incarna (god I hate that name) crossover?

[danzibr]

So Avatar of Light is getting a bit of a revamp: You will get to use Share Veil with it, but it's inherent abilities (SLAs, DR, Aura) are going to get chopped up and distributed based on the amount of Essence invested to keep it from being too powerful during the first few levels of play.
I was thinking about that, lying in bed last night. Having a Lantern Archon at level 1 is a very powerful asset indeed. By dropping a feat on Shape Veil, anyone can get this. At level 7, pick up Access Low Chakra Slot, you get beefier buddies.

Speaking of Access Low Chakra, does it give you a chakra bind? If so, does it work differently for veil-weavers v. non-veil-weavers? There's tons of debate involving Open <whatever> Chakra, and it doesn't appear the wording improved.

[angellis_ater]

Once both Path of War and Magic of Incarna gets fully published and their "feet wet" so to say, we will naturally introduce ways to "cross over" between them. There will be a psionic discipline, ways to have an Aegis or Soulknife with veils, mystic warriors who draw upon ancient maneuvers and weave veils.

But before that happens, we need to actually finish what we are already doing, which is playtesting things (here) and publish them (here and PoW).

While at the same time creating more awesome psionic material for those that enjoy that. :)

[Feint's End]

As I've mentioned already in the other thread I'm especially impressed with the Vizier since it is the first really "flexible" Incarnum class (or Incarna). I always loved the flavour and mechanics of Incarnum but my problem was that there is no really flexible class in MOI. You have the Incarnate, true, but first of all it is alignment locked (and this alone makes it unflexible playstyle wise) and the low skillpoints were annoying too.
From what I've seen so far DSP adresses those issues extremely well with making some Melds Alignment locked without forcing the Player to actually play the alignments leaving you the choice to play your character as an Incarnate of an Alignment or a Neutral explorer of Incarnum. So for those things alone two thumbs up.

The other two classes sound pretty promising too ... especially the Guru. If it really works as described here it would bring some great fresh wind and interesting class concept in. I only hope the Daevic allows for several different playstyles because while I thought the Totemist was awesome there was no good way of playing a weapon wielding (and offensive) Incarnum user. So a weapon path (which works offensively out of the box) would be much appreciated.

[stack]

Regarding static bonuses: i consider them necessary but boring. Something they may be all you can get to work with a basic level veil, but the binds should do something cool to compensate. Haven't read enough to see if there are any examples. For example, the one you just posted - gives something cool (a summoned weapon), then the other abilities improve it. I consider that good design. If it just gave flat bonuses to melee attacks it may be good, maybe even over powered depending on the numbers, but its not INTERESTING.

Another example that I like is the one that gives an archon. As you noted, it needs toning down at lower levels. I haven't checked its scaling at higher levels, but its COOL. Also thematic for a LG visier. You could even impersonate a paladin, bind melee and save boosts and have an angel following you around. This is great. +2 vs web effects or sonic damage? Meh. Situational and small, too corner to ever be used for its own sake.

[Psyren]

Since PF Psionics are DSP owned, you could make an official Aegis/Daevic hybrid PrC. That's 100% what I'd want to play for a melee build in Pathfinder. If not, I suppose I'll have to brew it myself.

Any generic Incarna/Psi PrC would work actually - Astral Suits are progressed (like Mind Blades) by "+1 psionic class level" PrCs.

I'll give detailed feedback on the playtest later this weekend.

[Ssalarn]

Since PF Psionics are DSP owned, you could make an official Aegis/Daevic hybrid PrC. That's 100% what I'd want to play for a melee build in Pathfinder. If not, I suppose I'll have to brew it myself.

This is VERY much a distinct possibility (as in, there's already a couple different ideas for blending those classes in development, as well as a possibility of expanding this project into reviving DSP's Psicarnum project that kind of got dropped by the wayside a while back).

[Ssalarn]

Are there any plans for a PoW/Incarna (god I hate that name) crossover?

This is something I would absolutely love to work with Chris and Jade on, but it's going to involve this project reaching a certain level of success, and both teams having the time and opportunity to make it happen.

If we reach the level of interest where I get the opportunity to add the PrC's I want to this book, and Chris is okay with me playing in his yard, I really want at least one PrC for veilweaver/initiator characters. Something involving binding Veils to your weapon and investing Essence in maneuvers. I've got plans, yo.

[stack]

Quick question on Arcane Imbuement:

It seems like people aren't feeling the static bonuses too much, is that accurate, or are the people who don't like it just the most verbal?

Follow up question: Once upon a time this class had a whole "Sorcerer's Apprentice" trick where it could animate all of it's Arcane Imbuement items to create an army of tiny veil wearing companions. That proved troublesome and had some of the same issues as the master summoner when they had their own actions, and was actually just plain terrible if the Vizier had to spend his own actions to command each one individually.

So what if your Arcane Imbuements could be assembled into a kind of Incarna Golem that you could attach your Veils to? The Seer path would give enhanced bonuses for the abilities shared with your golem, and the Crafter path would make your golem more durable and combat capable.

Thoughts?an incarnation golem ability sounds awesome.

[Ssalarn]

The other two classes sound pretty promising too ... especially the Guru. If it really works as described here it would bring some great fresh wind and interesting class concept in. I only hope the Daevic allows for several different playstyles because while I thought the Totemist was awesome there was no good way of playing a weapon wielding (and offensive) Incarnum user. So a weapon path (which works offensively out of the box) would be much appreciated.

Every Passion available to the Daevic supports at least two different combat styles, at least one of which involves the use of manufactured weapons. Natural attacks are going to be a very sweet option, but you will definitely be able to swing a sword, dagger, or shield with an equal level of effectiveness.

The Guru should be VERY unique, and I'm looking forward to introducing him to everyone once they've gotten to know the Vizier and the subsystem a little better. One thing that's always bugged me is that there aren't a lot of ways to create a character who believes in subduing enemies without killing them without dragging down the party, getting caught up in alignments and codes that severely hamper your ability to be part of any group that isn't entirely composed of pacifists, etc. Since the Guru directly attacks an opponent's chakra, you can be a redemption giving pacifist, or you can be a life-draining vampire who drags out his enemies suffering to punish them for their sins.

[Ssalarn]

I was thinking about that, lying in bed last night. Having a Lantern Archon at level 1 is a very powerful asset indeed. By dropping a feat on Shape Veil, anyone can get this. At level 7, pick up Access Low Chakra Slot, you get beefier buddies.

Speaking of Access Low Chakra, does it give you a chakra bind? If so, does it work differently for veil-weavers v. non-veil-weavers? There's tons of debate involving Open <whatever> Chakra, and it doesn't appear the wording improved.


Next week I will be giving the core system language an overhaul to make sure binds and veils are clearly defined and delineated. Access Low Chakra should basically be the follow up feat for Shape Veil. First you learn a Veil, then you unlock its bind to get its next level of power.

[Seerow]

Chakra binds are now basically just a "power-up" for Veils that you unlock as you progress in levels. They do not interfere with magic items occupying the same slots any more. And the feats should be decent. But feel free to check out the playtest document and tell me what you think, and what you think we could be doing better!

Reading through it now, going to use this post as a general stream of thought as I read. Apologies if it gets incoherent at any point, or if anything I mention gets addressed later in the packet.



It seems like you kept everything I don't like about MoI. I was commenting on it in another thread recently, but MoI has some major flaws. Most notably is it's over complicated for the sake of being over complicated. Having bonuses for Shaping, Investing, and Binding the same soulmeld just seems extraneous. The first class we're given a peek at seems to have an extra mechanic where you gain a separate bonus from essence invested based on body slot. If the goal is to appeal to people who thought MoI was the best thing ever, you're on the right track. If it's to make something a broader audience might appreciate... it could use some streamlining.

At the very least drop the separate body slots for chakra binds. You already have a limit to how many soulmelds you can shape. You've also got a limit to how many you can bind. Do we need to have a bunch of different combinations of "Yes you can bind this" and "No you can't bind that"? Seriously consider just making chakra binds a number (ie you can shape 6 soulmelds and bind 3 of them), rather than tying to body slot.

Okay still early in the Vizier, and already we've hit another sticking point from Incarnum. While Essence is supposed to be juggled freely as a big feature of the system, here we have a class feature that requires you to lock in your essence for 24 hours to use. Do not want.

Shoulder slot arcane imbuement seems really gimp compared to others. Bonuses to attack rolls, saving throws, movement speed, skill checks... vs +10lbs carrying capacity? 10lbs falls into the realm of "I couldn't care less" whether you're the 8strength caster type or the 50 strength hulking brute. Bonus effective strength when determining carrying capacity might be more worthwhile, but even there it's still carrying capacity. The only people who will really care are hulking hurlers. This just needs something that's going to be more generally useful. ESPECIALLY under the current design where different slots are supposed to be meaningful, and thus unlocking Shoulders specifically is your 9th level ability.

Veilshifting is kind of cool. The description of it also led me to thinking "What if a veilweaver did something similar without immediately reshaping the soulmeld?", the description of reshaping unleashed energy just made me think of a veilshaper going nova by detonating all of his soulmelds on enemies.

Is it my imagination or is the Seer path the poor man's Tactician? Maybe I need to go look at it again to see how they compare, but I seem to remember the Tactician having a much easier time sharing his teamwork feats around.

Okay just got to the table. Remember my complaints from before? Yeah, still in effect. Except it's even weirder. You have a limit to how many chakras you can bind in addition to what chakra slots are available? And the number of chakra slots available is lower? I get that Chakra binds provide more powerful abilities, but unless you've dramatically improved them from the original MoI, there is no way they are worth this many restrictions. I should not need a spreadsheet to figure out what my character is capable of!

Table of soulmelds is fairly useless because it gives only a general overview of the ability... which is fine for a feat which has one use. But here we literally have 3 different effects for the soulmeld. Should really make this table provide a different entry for each effect so someone can tell at a glance what they're getting out of it.

Avatar of Light-At level 16 I get a 14th level Cleric Cohort with bonus special abilities as a minor class feature. I am having trouble finding words for this.

By comparison the very next Soulmeld has a chakra bind that doesn't seem to scale with level at all. 1d4+essence slashing damage for free is cool at level 1. Unfortunately the Wrist Chakra unlocks at level 7, meaning it comes online 2 levels later than your Lantern Archon pokevolves into a Hound Archon, and destroying any thought I may have had about you balancing these chakra binds based on the level they come online (which brings me back to: Just get rid of them). Seriously this could be 1d4+1 per essence invested and it still wouldn't be particularly meaningful given the restrictions on its use.

Bloody Shroud is cool, but for some reason gets smacked with the evil descriptor. Why? No idea. Apparently cutting people to death is fine as long as you don't make them bleed.

Bralani's Brooch seems on the weak end of things. Your shoulder chakra bind is a 1st or 2nd level spell buff, and the neck chakra bind unlocks at level 13. At which point 17+essence spell resistance is so low as to be insulting. Seriously even with max essence investment you're pulling off SR23, which is the minimum you should be getting at level 13, not the maximum at level 20 (by which point this amount of SR is completely useless).

Once again I'm seeing no correlation whatsoever between the level a chakra unlocks at, and the actual power that chakra grants. If you're not going to have that kind of correlation, then there is no justification at all for having chakras limited by slot.

Circlet of Brass seems like it will mostly be useful for a character to pick up with a feat unless there's more fire themed soulmelds around. That said, the chakra bind gives us with max essence investment a 8d6+16 with a save DC of 24+int mod for half, which makes it a better scaling ability than several I've seen so far. I'd probably bind this just to have a solid fallback. Note: This doesn't actually state the range on your attack from the chakra bind, unless Pathfinder has specific range limitation for eye beams that I am not aware of.

Collar of Skilled instruction: The shaping and the essence bonuses are cool, but the chakra bind seems completely redundant with the Seer capabilities. If I was interested in this, I'd have picked Seer instead of Crafter and had the same net effect without wasting a chakra bind. If I'm not interested in this, why do I care? I can't imagine this ever gets bound.

Cowards Boots give 5+5/essence. The Foot bind gives 5+5/essence. So I'm assuming if I bind these as a Vizier, I end up with like +80ft movement speed? I'm okay with this. Also does the chakra bind get you the bonus essence normally granted by the feat, or just the bonus to AC against AoOs?

Daevic looks like you only gain any bonus for essence invested if you pick Wrath. The Desire Bind should probably either be set to your base land speed (so you can get benefit from your Feet binds) or have a speed that scales with essence invested. 30ft fly speed is pretty sub-par. On the other hand Dominion granting immunity to daze is a huge deal, as daze is a condition that is typically nearly impossible for a PC to become immune to. Immunity to Paralysis/Stun is fine, but Daze is what gets used for stuff like Celerity, making an easy way to gain immunity to it is probably a bad idea.

Ditchdigger's armlets sound awesome, but then turn out to be pretty lame. The Create Pit spell is extradimensional space so it isn't permanent landscape altering (taking away any fun non-combat uses), so what you get is a weak aoe attack with a secondary that ceases being useful around level 8 or so when most enemies start flying/teleporting/burrowing/anything that is not regular ground movement. Unfortunately you unlock the Chakra for the bind at level 7, right around the time the ability becomes obsolete.

Forcestrike knuckles are kind of cool in giving you another at-will offensive option. But that chakra bind is insulting.

Skipping ahead a bit because this is running long and I'm getting bored, Horns of the Minotaur... shape it I gain a secondary natural attack. Okay. Essence gives +1 damage, not even a bonus to hit? Ehh... okay. The Bind increases it from a d4 to a d8 and let's me use it as a primary attack? Who cares. Seriously this is a head chakra bind, competing with the very first veil in the packet, the ability to get a pet Hound/Lantern Archon. This isn't even on the same playing field.

Horselord's Greaves should really have the Mount's move speed scale up with your own bonuses to move speed. Otherwise this is a dead bind. Why summon a horse with 60ft move speed when I can move 110 on my own with a different bind?

By comparison I dig the Lavawalker boots. The resistance seems on the low end compared to other veils with similar capability, but the ability to charge over an open gap is cool, and brings to mind the Hover Boots from Zelda.

I was really interested reading Vestments of Majhara... and then I saw limited to 1 hour per character level. Really, this is a high level bind with a strict hit dice cap, and I can't even keep a bunch of minions around indefinitely, with an ability specifically tailored to do just that?

What happens if I invest more than 4 essence in Waistband of the Wealthy? Can I not gain more storage space than a Type 4 bag of holding? Even just giving +50% for each essence invested past 4 would be nice. Side note: Something like this might be a better reward for the Shoulder Arcane Imbue. Extradimensional storage space is much more useful than just plain extra encumbrance, and this scales so much nicer as well.

Oh boy feats. And apparently Neck/Belt are considered high chakras. Body/Chest are unobtainable through feats. Now I'm curious, what is your Veilweaver level considered if you only use these feats? 0? Doesn't that mess with a lot of veils that use your veilweaver level as a basis?

Also, the Vizier had a limited number of Chakras he could bind, based on level. Does a non-veilweaver have a limited number of binds? Or if I blew through 8 feats to get all of the chakras, could I bind a soulmeld to each chakra?

Body Bound Mind is a feat that requires 24 hour investment, and grants a limited amount of PP. Awesome at low levels (when 2-4 PP can make a huge difference), and a waste of a feat and essence by mid-high levels. If this is going to be a thing there's several different ways you could go about it to make it more useful: 1) Make the PP scale more as you increase in level 2) Make the investing instead of being an all day thing a psionic focus expenditure that burns that essence for a minute or so. 3) Make the essence invested act as a buffer for your PP, say reducing the cost of your powers by essence invested (but not raising the cap)

Looking at the following feat, at least all feats don't seem to require all-day investment.

Chakra enhanced fortitude is straight up worse than Great Fortitude until mid levels. I see no reason to take this besides the bonus point of essence. I assume there are other feats for the other two saves. This applies to them too.

Chakra Power on the other hand is nice. Bonus essence and an investment ability that applies to several things that are generally useful.

Daevic Rage on the other hand feels like something that should wait for an actual hybrid prestige class.

More feats with daily investitures. Seriously any feat that says "My essence is tied up in this for a full 24 hours" needs to be reworked to something that is not. Investing essence as a daily resource takes away pretty much the entire point of the Incarum system.

Why are there literally 3 different feats all about boosting HP? Seriously, we have gain HP = Max Essence; gain HP per essence invested; gain HP per incarum feat. Do we need this many different ways to represent incarnum giving extra health?

Shared Veil lets me share all of my veils with my pet Hound/Trumpet Archon? Excellent. Also, this seems more like what the Seer should be doing instead of fuddling about with Teamwork feats.

Veilbound Metamagic is going to be capital Broken if you have a prestige class that gives any sort of decent caster progression alongside essence progression. Seriously, this sort of metamagic reducing is a bad idea, especially since spells in general are already so much more powerful than anything you let any of your veils do. All this does is encourage people to ignore the majority of the system, dip it to gain a bunch of essence, and utilize that to break the game with free metamagic. I see no way this can be implemented and be a good idea. At all.

[Suddo]

I swear these guys are going to get more of my money than Paizo.

[Eldaran]

Why is the brow slot the headband now? I know the 3.5 head slot was split into headband and head in Pathfinder, but previously brow was eyes, and many of the soulmelds, and now the ensuing veils, seem to be eye related.

Edit:
Some feedback on the Vizier. I like it overall, it's a lot more wizardy than the Incarnate, but still has that Incarnum taste to it.

I definitely like Arcane Imbuement, but in some campaigns having to spend 24 hours doing nothing can be quite difficult. Maybe make it so you can just change one every 24 hours such as when you rest, or make it so you activate the process and 24 hours it takes effect. Because as written it seems you have to sit there for 24 hours doing nothing, and I've played many campaigns where you're rushing around saving the world and have no time to do such things.

For the Seer path the range on the feat sharing isn't clear. If someone moves more than 30 feet away does the effect end? If so, that's awfully restrictive in combat, I'd at least make it Close range, so there's some scaling, and clarify exactly how it works.

Essence capacity is great, +3 is really great. Two problems I see, the essence you get is the same as the Incarnate, but with +3 capacity rather than +2 you'll have even more trouble filling your veils. On the other hand, having to make tough strategic choices could be good... The other is, +2 capacity comes at level 12, when you also get increased capacity from hit dice. This makes so there's a huge jump in power at level 12, maybe bump up improved capacity to level 14? And then lower Veilshifting 2/day to level 12.

Lastly, why does Chakra Rebirth use Wisdom? I'd think it would use Intelligence since that's your main mental stat, Wisdom is used nowhere else.

[CyberThread]

How about the magic of blue stuff

And we can call the stuff blue thingy binding points

[Ssalarn]

Chakra Rebirth should use INT, I'll fix that for the next update. The Vizier's going to get numerous small adjustments, primarily in the areas of fluff and when he acquires some of his abilities. Stay tuned for that.
Path of the Crafter is going to be getting some additional perks to allow more on the fly manipulation of items he has crafted himself, and to make crafting more accessible to a broader array of campaign types.
Path of the Seer is getting a bit of a boost in range and effectiveness so that you aren't waiting until 12th level to be able to affect enough allies for it to be useful.
Both paths "capstones" are getting shifted up to be more accessible at the most commonly played levels (i.e. Transfer the Essence will be available by 12th at the latest).

[danzibr]

Next week I will be giving the core system language an overhaul to make sure binds and veils are clearly defined and delineated. Access Low Chakra should basically be the follow up feat for Shape Veil. First you learn a Veil, then you unlock its bind to get its next level of power.
Out of curiosity, are you going to make it function like this?

When you choose Access Low Chakra Slot, choose head, hands or feet. Let's say you choose head. If you have no veilweaver levels, you can bind a veil to that chakra (like giving you +1 to max chakra binds, but *only* head). If you're, say, a Vizier, you don't get any additional chakra binds, merely open that slot.

Similarly for Shape Veil. Not a veilweaver -> get one veil to shape, but only for the one you learn. A veilweaver -> nothing extra (other than knowing it).

[Ssalarn]

Out of curiosity, are you going to make it function like this?

When you choose Access Low Chakra Slot, choose head, hands or feet. Let's say you choose head. If you have no veilweaver levels, you can bind a veil to that chakra (like giving you +1 to max chakra binds, but *only* head). If you're, say, a Vizier, you don't get any additional chakra binds, merely open that slot.

Similarly for Shape Veil. Not a veilweaver -> get one veil to shape, but only for the one you learn. A veilweaver -> nothing extra (other than knowing it).

That's pretty much accurate, yeah. The biggest reason for a veilweaving class to take Shape Veil would be to dip into Veils that would normally be locked to another class.

[Ssalarn]

Changelog:

Avatar of Light updated to scale better through low levels.

Arcane Imbuement changed to Essence Bond to more accurately reflect the Vizier's power source and abilities. Numerous small changes made to granted bonuses, and several bonuses now granted as auras to emphasize the Vizier's nature as an advisor and a manipulator of Essence.

Mystic Bond changed to Mystic Attunement and level progression changed to 1st level and every 4 levels thereafter.

Veilshifting ability updated to provide more uses and be available starting at 3rd level.

Improved Essence Capacity acquired at 3rd, llth, and 19th level, allowing earlier access and distributing bonuses a little more evenly.

Constitution requirements removed from Veilweaving, reducing MAD.

Transfer the Essence now available from 1st level for characters who choose Path of the Crafter.

Path of the Seer updated to allow inherent sharing of all Teamwork feats granted by the ability with affected allies, and clarified that allies do not need to meet prerequisites of feats granted this way.

[LibraryOgre]

The Mod Wonder: Merged a couple threads. May be some double posting or whatever before this point. It's cool.

[Ssalarn]

The Mod Wonder: Merged a couple threads. May be some double posting or whatever before this point. It's cool.

Thanks Mark!

[danzibr]

May I ask why you're keeping base essence how it is? Is it simply because you feel it works fine? It's better than Incarnate not only because there's more Improved Essence Capacity, but also the veils are downright better. Still, the DC is 10+modifier+essence, as before... gives me concerns. I'd like to scour the veils with a more critical eye before commenting on this more.

I also saw no mention of epic essence. Rather, do you plan on doing epic stuff for MoI? If so, please tell me it won't be the abysmal 1/10 levels.

EDIT: Would you consider having the flight speed as well as maneuverability increase on Gorget of the Wyrm? Also, are all these abilities (Su)? Or are some (Ex)?

EDIT EDIT: Actually, I was hoping to do something like what Seerow did. Strangely, I almost always agree with Seerow, perhaps because CT is one of the best games of all time.

I do, however, disagree with the do-away-with-chakra-bind-slots idea. Casters have their spell levels and initiators have their maneuver levels. Veilweavers have their chakra bind levels. So *if* new and cool and, perhaps most importantly, progressively more powerful powers became available with higher level chakra binds, so to speak, I'd be all for it. My current concern (and this seems to be the case, to some extent) is that the power level is all over the place. Magic of Incarnum has the same flaw: some *awesome* abilities early on, some absolutely underwhelming abilities later on. Of course there's no easy fix for this, only careful scrutinizing and comparing.

Or, if you take Seerow's advice, I guess you could key everything off of invested essence, which scales with level.

[Ssalarn]

I'm going to spend a little time on normalization of the Veils to make the binds a little less "Magic of Incarnum" and a little more "logical progression". That being said there are going to be some binds that have base abilities which seem a little bit better than others, but the goal is to ensure that you have all the resources to make a well-rounded character. Scaling skill bonuses probably aren't quite as cool as defensive or offensive options, but they're necessary and important to a lot of campaigns.

I think the base Essence system scales well as is, so I probably won't make any changes to it unless there's a really solid reason to.

The class itself probably won't see any more major changes for at least the next week or so to give players time to get some solid playtesting in without everything changing overnight on them, but watch for small adjustments: Gorget of the Wyrm's flight will scale better based on Essence investment, and I'll try to make every ability share the scaling nature of the system. "Always on" abilities like Stare of the Ghaele will have use activation/deactivation triggers built into them so you don't send every villager you encounter running in terror because you wanted a cool debuff that day.

[genericwit]

Maybe I missed this but... Well, this class seems to be an amazing generalist, in most aspects. I think this has been noted, but while there are ways to boost accuracy for ranged attacks, there doesn't seem to be much to add to melee damage. And there are definitely things that seem to add options to boost damage, but nothing to boost to hit.

That said, this seems like a really cool class to play. I look forward to seeing the others.

[Ssalarn]

Maybe I missed this but... Well, this class seems to be an amazing generalist, in most aspects. I think this has been noted, but while there are ways to boost accuracy for ranged attacks, there doesn't seem to be much to add to melee damage. And there are definitely things that seem to add options to boost damage, but nothing to boost to hit.

That said, this seems like a really cool class to play. I look forward to seeing the others.

Currently I'm only making very minor "ease of use" changes to Veils, either to bring them more in line with the expectations of the subsystem, or to repair obvious issues. The class is going to spend at least the next week largely unmodified to allow a couple ongoing playtests to complete and get me their feedback.
Which means this would be an excellent time to take the class for a spin and see what you think!

[Ssalarn]

Changelog:

Ditchdigger's Armlets changed to deal bludgeoning damage

Polar Snowshoes damage reduced to d4's

Gorget of the Wyrm's fly speed ability changed to scale for both speed and maneuverability.

Standard action "on/off switch" added to Stare of the Ghaele to limit frightened-peasant syndrome.

The word "magic" has been removed from Hand Cannon's attack description to re-emphasize that the point for including damage types in a spell effect is that they should be impacted by appropriate DR (see FAQs and discussions on abilities like the Bardic Weird Words on Paizo forums for relevant info).

Shape Veil clarified to indicate that it does not allow a veilweaving class to exceed their normal number of Veils per day.

Requirements for Enhanced Veil Capacity raised to 7th level.

[Mithril Leaf]

Why specifically does Shape Veil not allow you to shape above your max number of veils? It means that characters that multiclass into an Incarna class after taking the feat get shafted, while letting those that only get veilweaving through through feats get extra bonuses. Taking levels should not be an inferior option to taking a single feat. Might I suggest limiting it to only one veil at time from Shape Veil, no matter how many times you take it?

[Ssalarn]

Why specifically does Shape Veil not allow you to shape above your max number of veils? It means that characters that multiclass into an Incarna class after taking the feat get shafted, while letting those that only get veilweaving through through feats get extra bonuses. Taking levels should not be an inferior option to taking a single feat. Might I suggest limiting it to only one veil at time from Shape Veil, no matter how many times you take it?

If someone wants to spend all of their feats to get one less Veil than a true veilweaver, and have no Essence to spend on those Veils, they totally can. That doesn't mean that a veilweaver who has an Essence pool being able to dip into another classes veils is an inferior option. Both sides will get varying effects; veilweavers get versatility and access to options they otherwise wouldn't have, non-veilweavers get to dip a toe into the subsystem without committing to it. If anything, I think the veilweaving classes will still be getting more out of this feat than non-veilweavers.

[Person_Man]

@Ssalarn

So do you work for DSP and/or did you create the rewrite? Or are you just an enthusiast?

[Ssalarn]

@Ssalarn

So do you work for DSP and/or did you create the rewrite? Or are you just an enthusiast?

I am the lead designer on the project, and the one who created the new classes, Veils, design direction, rewrite, etc.

[danzibr]

@Ssalarn

So do you work for DSP and/or did you create the rewrite? Or are you just an enthusiast?

I am the lead designer on the project, and the one who created the new classes, Veils, design direction, rewrite, etc.
I absolutely do not mean to be rude, but based on the answer provided, I still don't know the answer to Person_Man's question.

[Ssalarn]

I absolutely do not mean to be rude, but based on the answer provided, I still don't know the answer to Person_Man's question.
Sorry! Yes, I am working for Dreamscarred on this project, and yes, I created the rewrite.

[Perseus]

As much as I don't like Paizo or Pathfinder I do like what DSP have done with Psionics within the confides of the system.

I might try this out, I've always loved Incarnum...

[Psyren]

This is (or will be) a full-blown DSP product. Both Jeremy and Andreas have made announcements about this playtest through various channels.

I'm not a spokesman for the company by any means, but I have seen the announcements firsthand (which is why I made this thread to begin with.)

[Prime32]

When I tried rewriting incarnum myself a while back, one thing I did was remove the Chakra Bind mechanics from the introduction and instead make them a class feature of the incarnate. Other classes got stuff like "Chakra Binds (Su): At 4th level a totemist gains the Chakra Binds class feature as an incarnate. His effective incarnate level is equal to his totemist level -3. If he has levels in multiple classes which provide this class feature, his effective incarnate levels stack.". I hoped this would make things easier to parse, since I've seen a lot of people get confused about when exactly chakras come into things.

Alternately, on the issue of having to keep track of both chakra slots and maximum binds at once... what about making chakra slots a function of character level? It would help out multiclass characters a lot. Heck, you could even merge it with the essence capacity progression into four named tiers - e.g. a level 1-5 character is a Novice meldshaper; Novice meldshapers have an essence capacity of 1 and access to the Head/Feet/Hands chakras. Again, this would make the essence capacity rules more visible, especially since you can reference the tiers elsewhere in the document to draw attention to them.


If we reach the level of interest where I get the opportunity to add the PrC's I want to this book, and Chris is okay with me playing in his yard, I really want at least one PrC for veilweaver/initiator characters. Something involving binding Veils to your weapon and investing Essence in maneuvers. I've got plans, yo.I figure you're in the right thematic space for astras (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astra_%28weapon%29), though maybe that would work better as a soulknife or even cleric hybrid.

Lastly, there's some fluff in the vizier Paths which refers to "the flow of chakra(s)" where it should be referring to the flow of Essence. This isn't Naruto. :smalltongue:

EDIT: Mechanics I'd like to see
Expanding on how 3.5's essentia damage converted to Wis damage if you had no essentia, let characters sacrifice essence to absorb ability damage (i.e. convert any kind of ability damage to essence damage). While not a huge benefit it gives essence more fluff weight, and helps any characters who end up with more essence than they can use.

A Defensive Roll type class feature which lets you survive lethal attacks by blocking them with one of your veils, causing it to unshape. Because fighting on even as your weapons and armor shatter to pieces is badass.

[danzibr]

With all this talk of completely removing chakra bind slots, I wonder... could this work well?

Assuming you still want to get cool new abilities as you level up and all that, the only way to do this would be either keying it off of essence or veil weaver level. And in fact, there's already some of this going on.

[Seerow]

With all this talk of completely removing chakra bind slots, I wonder... could this work well?

Assuming you still want to get cool new abilities as you level up and all that, the only way to do this would be either keying it off of essence or veil weaver level. And in fact, there's already some of this going on.

I'm curious how they're going to change it to remove the bind slots as well. Will it also involve removing the soulshaping slots? Are there still going to be different levels in chakra binds? (The feats indicate there's at least 4 distinct intended power levels of chakra binds, even if the bind effects themselves weren't consistent).

Also, is "Get a Trumpet Archon at level 16" still a thing? Because I want to reitterate just how silly getting a 14th level Cleric through a low level chakra bind is. The hound archon isn't so bad, and I could see it remaining viable if it got some sort of scaling bonus from meldshaper level in addition to essence investment, but right now the way it goes is you can shape the meld at level 1, and it's okay for a couple levels. It then becomes useless for a while. Then you gain the ability to bind it, and it becomes awesome for a couple levels. Then your essence bonuses stop keeping up and it falls behind again for a half dozen levels. Then suddenly it's awesome again all the way to 20 (because even at 20 a trumpet archon with some essence buffs is useful, and 14th level cleric casting is always handy to have).

[danzibr]

I'm curious how they're going to change it to remove the bind slots as well. Will it also involve removing the soulshaping slots? Are there still going to be different levels in chakra binds? (The feats indicate there's at least 4 distinct intended power levels of chakra binds, even if the bind effects themselves weren't consistent).

Also, is "Get a Trumpet Archon at level 16" still a thing? Because I want to reitterate just how silly getting a 14th level Cleric through a low level chakra bind is. The hound archon isn't so bad, and I could see it remaining viable if it got some sort of scaling bonus from meldshaper level in addition to essence investment, but right now the way it goes is you can shape the meld at level 1, and it's okay for a couple levels. It then becomes useless for a while. Then you gain the ability to bind it, and it becomes awesome for a couple levels. Then your essence bonuses stop keeping up and it falls behind again for a half dozen levels. Then suddenly it's awesome again all the way to 20 (because even at 20 a trumpet archon with some essence buffs is useful, and 14th level cleric casting is always handy to have).
Oh, I don't think it's actually going to happen. A few people suggested it, and I was wondering how it could be carried out.

As for the archon business, it is currently op. How do the other like veils compare?

Edit: I can't check for myself atm.

[Psyren]

Note that Ssalarn has said on the DSP boards that he prefers to start powerful and scale down than the reverse. So the angel and some other stuff may get nerfed.

[Seerow]

Oh, I don't think it's actually going to happen. A few people suggested it, and I was wondering how it could be carried out.


Basic current problem is: MoI is needlessly overcomplicated. Magic Item body slots can be used to connect the fluff to the crunch sometimes (ie a claw granting veil being bound to hands, that sort of thing), but other times they simply don't make sense. In addition to this, they don't contribute meaningfully to balance. A few of the high-slot chakra binds are powerful, but the most powerful one by far that I found in the doc is available as a low level bind. What they do is create more fiddly things to manage and keep track of, and make it more annoying for a character to pick out what they want to be capable of doing at the start of the day, as they are balancing body slots, limited number of shaped melds, a different limited number of bound melds, and only being able to bind melds to certain chakras. Throw in the Chakra binding locations being different from the shape slots (to facilitate the ability to bind a single meld to multiple different chakras), and things just get weird really fast.

DSP has toned that down a bit, by making the Chakras/Veil locations the same, and also correspond with the relevant magic item slot, but it is still a convoluted mess. It is a functioning system, and balanced, but it's roughly as intuitive as a game of chess where player moves are determined by a roullette wheel.


As for how you could make it work without having a bunch of different bind slots? In order of keeping closest to original MoI to furthest away:

-Soulmelds retain a slot where they are shaped. Binding is now divided into 4 categories, which unlock at appropriate levels, in addition to gaining more bind slots. You gain 1-3 lowest, then 1-3 of the next, then 1-3 of the one after that, then 1-3 of the highest (probably ending at 2 across the board, but possibly 3s for the lower ones). A single soulmeld can have multiple binds at multiple levels, but most still only have one bind option.

-As above, but soulmelds can be shaped to any slot desired.

-As above, but rather than tracking each chakra category separately for how many you can bind, you just get a flat number of bound chakras, and as you unlock new categories you can bind as many of that category as you once.

-As above, but binding higher level chakras costs multiple chakra binds. This is combined with gaining more binds overall, so a character could have a handful of high level binds, or a bunch of low level binds.

-As above, but instead of having different levels of chakra bindings, a bound chakra scales more as you invest more essence. So a high level character who can invest more essence gets much more effect from a bound chakra than a lower level character (possibly even unlocking new abilities for a chakra bind at certain essence points)



Probably several of these suggestions wouldn't work. I'm certain objections could be found to all of them by someone who wanted to poke at it. But in general the trend from top to bottom is to make the system easier to grasp and use for a new player, instead of fiddling about so much with item slots (especially since the veils no longer block you from using a magic item, and the only class we've seen so far actually explicitly mixes them for greater effect).



As for the archon business, it is currently op. How do the other like veils compare?

Edit: I can't check for myself atm.

The other veils are basically along the same lines of what you'd expect from an Incarnate. Nothing anywhere near as impressive. Even if you stripped the Trumpet Archon's casting, it's still probably more powerful than most binds. I mean seriously, among the competition for that exact same slot is the ability to improve a gain/gore attack. A different option is gain some skill bonuses (Sense Motive and Perception. I'd have to check but I think the Archons have those trained). The last option is to turn a shaken debuff into staggered, which is actually pretty nice, but still nowhere near on the same level.

edit:

Note that Ssalarn has said on the DSP boards that he prefers to start powerful and scale down than the reverse. So the angel and some other stuff may get nerfed.

This concerns me, because while the Angel is clearly way overboard, a large portion of these abilities are fairly weak by the standards of Magic or Psionics. Or even what I've seen of their new Path of War material.

I mean look at Vestments of the Maharaja. This is an ability that doesn't come online until level 16. It lets you mind control 100hit dice of creatures. Which is really cool and awesome. But if you give them a command that violates their nature it instantly breaks and they're immune to the effect. Then it only lasts for 16 hours.

Seriously at this level Dominate Person has been online for 7 levels, lasts literally 24 times longer, has no hit dice limits, and at best gives the target an extra save if you go against their wishes. Similar comparisons can be made for Create Undead, and other forms of minionmancy.

Similarly, almost all of the damage dealing powers in here are on a scale that makes the Warlock look like a great damage hero. Average typically capping out around 9d6 as a standard action at level 20. And the last update I saw referenced nerfing damage on an ability.

Or how about the Spell Resistance, that comes online as a 13th level bind granting at best SR22. That ability ends at level 20 with at best SR25. Meanwhile the Shoulder binding (coming online 4 levels earlier) gives you a miss chance against Ranged attacks that scales up as high as 65%, which is pretty great.


Yes, I called out the Archon companion thing because it's very obviously too strong. But there's a whole lot in here that's on the very weak end. If this is "Starting strong then whittle down" I'm not sure I see the point.

[malonkey1]

Well I'm gonna weigh and say I think the Chakra binding should be kept, but it shouldn't lock out magic items.

[stack]

Well, a master summoner at level 17 can summon plenty of trumpet archons for a pretty long time, so having one all day (and thus not getting a new set of spells) doesn't seem ridiculous at 16. Powerful, certainly, but not crazy.

[Psyren]

I mean look at Vestments of the Maharaja. This is an ability that doesn't come online until level 16. It lets you mind control 100hit dice of creatures. Which is really cool and awesome. But if you give them a command that violates their nature it instantly breaks and they're immune to the effect. Then it only lasts for 16 hours.

This thing is effectively Mass Dominate Monster, so yeah, I actually would call that powerful for level 16.

Also, for a lot of monsters, fighting each other is very much in their nature; animals, magical beasts, evil humanoids, giants, dragons, monstrous humanoids, aberrations etc.

I think the immunity should be 1/24hrs rather than forever and I'd also like a HD limit on a single target so you can't walk up and dominate the BBEG or a deity's avatar or something.

[Eldest]

Once both Path of War and Magic of Incarna gets fully published and their "feet wet" so to say, we will naturally introduce ways to "cross over" between them. There will be a psionic discipline, ways to have an Aegis or Soulknife with veils, mystic warriors who draw upon ancient maneuvers and weave veils.

But before that happens, we need to actually finish what we are already doing, which is playtesting things (here) and publish them (here and PoW).

While at the same time creating more awesome psionic material for those that enjoy that. :)

Ok, the potential cross-over things made me mentally start geeking out a lot. (I'm in physics, so if I started to physically geek out I would disrupt the lecture. >.>)

And adding to the chorus of people asking for you to please change at least Incarna to something else. Preferably something that doesn't start with an I.

[Seerow]

This thing is effectively Mass Dominate Monster, so yeah, I actually would call that powerful for level 16

If it were actually Mass Dominate Monster, sure.

The problem is the shorter duration and all of the other restrictions that dominate monster doesn't worry about. Also the HD limit. A Wizard who prepares lots of dominates can have a ton of dominated minions effectively indefinitely. A character who uses this gets their targets for less than a day, at which point they all break out and aren't going to be happy about being mind controlled.

The duration alone makes the ability's utility very limited. Add in the "Can't make them do anything against their nature" and it's downright sad.


I think the immunity should be 1/24hrs rather than forever and I'd also like a HD limit on a single target so you can't walk up and dominate the BBEG or a deity's avatar or something.

For that just specify it is a mind-affecting effect. That's the sort of thing that will likely get houseruled in on the fly anyway ("I don't care if it's not tagged as mind-affecting, you're literally getting mind control!"), and stops those issues dead in their tracks.

[Psyren]

If it were actually Mass Dominate Monster, sure.

The problem is the shorter duration and all of the other restrictions that dominate monster doesn't worry about.

Does it really matter that you don't have them in your pocket for days on end? It's still an autowin if you land it, and a two-point swing per failed save in any fight. (Their side loses a combatant, yours gains one.) Yeah you don't have a pet demon/hydra for weeks or whatever, but for a T3 class this is still pretty impressive. And if you're using it on 1-3 targets the HD limit might as well not be there.


Also the HD limit. A Wizard who prepares lots of dominates can have a ton of dominated minions effectively indefinitely. A character who uses this gets their targets for less than a day, at which point they all break out and aren't going to be happy about being mind controlled.

Eh, just command them to fall asleep - sleeping is in almost anything's nature, if they have a mind to begin with - and have the beatstick CdG them.

And I agree it should be mind-affecting.

[Ssalarn]

This thing is effectively Mass Dominate Monster, so yeah, I actually would call that powerful for level 16.

Also, for a lot of monsters, fighting each other is very much in their nature; animals, magical beasts, evil humanoids, giants, dragons, monstrous humanoids, aberrations etc.

I think the immunity should be 1/24hrs rather than forever and I'd also like a HD limit on a single target so you can't walk up and dominate the BBEG or a deity's avatar or something.

These things you speak of.... They are in the works.

As to Vestments of the Maharaja- the ability is based on the effects of a Rod of Rulership, which has a CL 20 requirement and crumbles to dust after 8 hours of use, soooo...... If I made it any more powerful, it would definitely be stepping into an area where people would be telling me it's OP, and they would be right. I am going to fix the reset rate on it though, and cap the max hit die of any single creature it can affect.
I also do not agree that Avatar of Light is OP (except maybe at 1st and 2nd level, there is an argument to be made there). If anything, I'm concerned it doesn't keep up well enough compared to what a Summoner, Cleric, Druid, or Wizard/Sorcerer can put on the field at the same levels.
Damage-dealing Veils are getting a re-tweak. The system for progression was based on the original materials, but I absolutely agree it starts strong and then piddles out way too early. The most likely fix for this though, is going to be that most damage-dealing Veils do nothing until Essence is invested, and Essence investment scales at a somewhat exponential rate ( 1 Essence = 1 damage die, 2 Essence = 3 damage die, 3 Essence = 5 damage die, 4 Essence = 7 damage die, 5 Essence = 9 damage die, 6 Essence = 11, 7 Essence = 13, 8 Essence = 15). That matches up with the systems fluid nature, and 15 damage die for abilities that are all pretty much at-will at that point is solid. Not earth-shatterlingly amazing, but it won't run out on you, and serves as a solid addition to the other available abilities.

[Seerow]

As to Vestments of the Maharaja- the ability is based on the effects of a Rod of Rulership, which has a CL 20 requirement and crumbles to dust after 8 hours of use, soooo...... If I made it any more powerful, it would definitely be stepping into an area where people would be telling me it's OP, and they would be right. I am going to fix the reset rate on it though, and cap the max hit die of any single creature it can affect.

The CL requirement isn't particularly relevant. It's a 60,000gp item. And it's made using a 3rd-4th level spell (Charm Monster). More importantly, that's an item I've never heard of anyone going out of their way to make.

Once again, I'm comparing it to what a mid-high level caster is capable of. And in those terms, it's horribly weak. I'd rather see the hit dice limit come down more and some of those other restrictions get lifted/reduced, to make it more generally useful. At 16th level getting say 40hd of dominated creatures is comprable to a Wizard memorizing Dominate a couple times a month, or using Create Undead.


I also do not agree that Avatar of Light is OP (except maybe at 1st and 2nd level, there is an argument to be made there). If anything, I'm concerned it doesn't keep up well enough compared to what a Summoner, Cleric, Druid, or Wizard/Sorcerer can put on the field at the same levels.

The main issue with the Avatar of Light is that you get a full blown Trumpet Archon. If your plan is to use the Archon as a beatstick, then yes, it's going to be weak.

But you cannot overlook the fact that at level 16 you are getting a full blown 14th level cleric's casting, with a better base chasis and higher stats, as a minion. That's a really big deal. Taking away the spellcasting from the Lantern Archon might be okay. Alternatively, keeping it as a Hound Archon after binding it, but have it scale better with essence.

On the other hand though, you are right. I am being hypocritical here. If I was going to compare to a caster (like I did with Maharaja), at level 16 Planar Ally gets you a Lantern Archon plus some other 4hd creature thrown in the bargain. But that has the cost of 9,000gp for to get them for a day, compared to having one all the time for free.


Damage-dealing Veils are getting a re-tweak. The system for progression was based on the original materials, but I absolutely agree it starts strong and then piddles out way too early. The most likely fix for this though, is going to be that most damage-dealing Veils do nothing until Essence is invested, and Essence investment scales at a somewhat exponential rate ( 1 Essence = 1 damage die, 2 Essence = 3 damage die, 3 Essence = 5 damage die, 4 Essence = 7 damage die, 5 Essence = 9 damage die, 6 Essence = 11, 7 Essence = 13, 8 Essence = 15). That matches up with the systems fluid nature, and 15 damage die for abilities that are all pretty much at-will at that point is solid. Not earth-shatterlingly amazing, but it won't run out on you, and serves as a solid addition to the other available abilities.

This would be better (though I will note that progression isn't actually exponential, an actual exponential increase would probably be too much). Though I would like to see some more that are more like the Ditch-Digger gauntlets, with a moderate cooldown period but more effective in general.

Also I'd definitely start with at least 1-2 dice. Remember you're only getting 8 essence invested if you blow a feat on it, so for the most part you're capping out at 13d6. Starting with 2d6 with 1 essence at level 1 and scaling up to 14d6 isn't going to break the game. Even 3d6/15d6 would be reasonable. And someone who wants to blow a feat to get up to 17d6 is welcome to it, they're still going to be below even a casual caster's blasting spells, but will feel like they're getting something out of that investment.

[danzibr]

Damage-dealing Veils are getting a re-tweak. The system for progression was based on the original materials, but I absolutely agree it starts strong and then piddles out way too early. The most likely fix for this though, is going to be that most damage-dealing Veils do nothing until Essence is invested, and Essence investment scales at a somewhat exponential rate ( 1 Essence = 1 damage die, 2 Essence = 3 damage die, 3 Essence = 5 damage die, 4 Essence = 7 damage die, 5 Essence = 9 damage die, 6 Essence = 11, 7 Essence = 13, 8 Essence = 15). That matches up with the systems fluid nature, and 15 damage die for abilities that are all pretty much at-will at that point is solid. Not earth-shatterlingly amazing, but it won't run out on you, and serves as a solid addition to the other available abilities.

This would be better (though I will note that progression isn't actually exponential, an actual exponential increase would probably be too much). Though I would like to see some more that are more like the Ditch-Digger gauntlets, with a moderate cooldown period but more effective in general.

Also I'd definitely start with at least 1-2 dice. Remember you're only getting 8 essence invested if you blow a feat on it, so for the most part you're capping out at 13d6. Starting with 2d6 with 1 essence at level 1 and scaling up to 14d6 isn't going to break the game. Even 3d6/15d6 would be reasonable. And someone who wants to blow a feat to get up to 17d6 is welcome to it, they're still going to be below even a casual caster's blasting spells, but will feel like they're getting something out of that investment.
Right. That's linear progression.

But this is *essence* we're talking about. Presumably for 1 essence this is an extra die on top of the base damage.

[Seerow]

But this is *essence* we're talking about. Presumably for 1 essence this is an extra die on top of the base damage.


Read his post again. Specifically this line:


The most likely fix for this though, is going to be that most damage-dealing Veils do nothing until Essence is invested

[danzibr]

Read his post again. Specifically this line:
My bad. Yeah, I absolutely agree with you then.

[Ssalarn]

I realized as I was typing that exponential progression was going to be waaaaayyyyyy too much and changed it to a linear scale on odd-numbered bumps without going back back and changing what I'd already typed :P

Currently I've gotten a lot of feedback indicating that the Vizier's damage veils are too strong at 1st level and too weak at levels past 12, so I'm trying to spread that potential out a bit.

[Ssalarn]

Changelog:

Gorget of the Wyrm damage progression and neck bind changed to scale better with level.

Heart of the Wight Chakra Bind changed to grant Channel Resistance equal to Essence invested.

Horns of the Minotaur Esseince investment now increases damage by +2 instead of +1.

Stare of the Ghaele changed to only affect any give creature once every 24 hours. Duration increased to 1d6+1 rounds.

Storm Gauntlets damage-scaling adjusted to be more relevant over all levels of play.

Vestments of the Maharaja adjusted to prevent affecting creatures with hit die greater than the wearer's, and ability can now affect a previously affected creature after 24 hours.

Nomenclature added to indicate what levels binds are gained for all Veils ( for example, [V6] in a veils bind entry indicates that that bind is gained at Vizier level 6).

[Person_Man]

Having read through it, I just have to say that I wholeheartedly endorse your work, and look forward to ordering it as soon as it's available.

[Ssalarn]

Having read through it, I just have to say that I wholeheartedly endorse your work, and look forward to ordering it as soon as it's available.

I take that as absolutely the highest compliment. Thank you!

And, on that note, let me introduce you to round 1 of the second veilweaving class, the Daevic (https://www.dropbox.com/s/n7go8mal47o4nd3/Daevic%20Playtest.pdf). Let me know what you think!


***EDIT*** You may notice that he's got all of one Body Veil right now. That's because I've gone back and forth on him getting Body Veils at all, and how powerful his capstone should be. After chatting with a few peeps I decided to bring them back in, so expect to see some more Veils, particularly 3 additional Body Veils, as soon as I finish re-tweaking them.

[danzibr]

Exciting!

At a glance... Cha? Sort of fits them thematically, I guess.

And if this is supposed to replace Totemist, I don't see it. A mere 2 veils which grant natural weapons?

I'll have to take a closer look when I can.

EDIT: Alright, I got to read some more. I'll go from the top down. Disorganized and all that.

Flavor: Neat. Binder + Incarnum.
Essence Capacity unchanged. I still disapprove, but no matter.
They get the feet bind first? I find that strange. A primarily melee class getting what you imagine would increase mobility (then again, I haven't read the veils yet, of course). Interesting. Bad, good, I dunno.
Not as much Improved Essence Capacity as Vizier. That's okay, they each have their shtick.
More fluff stuff. Okay, I'm confused about Daeva (not uniformly capitalized, btw). Seem sorta like... angels, except not necessarily good. So there are only three types? Or three types, each with two subtypes (like good wrath, bad wrath, etc.), and all, "Daeva have natures that seem almost dualistic but are really just manifestations of the same emotion taken to different extremes"? Like a wrath Daeva could be angry or not. I suppose it's not important mechanically, j/w.
Again, Charisma for the saves. And they're a melee class. M'kay...

You can only shape a certain number of Veils per day (see table below). The Veils granted at 1st, 4th, 12th, and 17th level must be selected from the list of Veils associated with your Passion. The Veils gained at 2nd, 6th, 9th, and 15th level can be selected from any marked as available to the Daevic class, but you cannot shape a Veil whose alignment opposes your own.
Whoa. This means they don't know all their veils, unlike Vizier? That blows. Or my reading comprehension really sucks. It's the "gained" and "granted" that are throwing me off. Plus, in Vizier the text makes it crystal clear they know all of their veils.
I think it's a neat idea, but at the same time, it sort of feels like unnecessary restrictions. Or perhaps they're so powerful they need some restrictions?
For alignment stuff, you say they're "usually" so-and-so alignment, but earlier you say their alignment is determined by their passion (sorry, I can't bring myself to capitalize that for religious reasons).
Typo: 8th level for Wrath. Incarna invested?
Not really a typo and I hate nitpicking about commas, but I'd insert one between "justice" and "none" in the 20th level ability for Wrath.
Overall impression of Wrath: Sweet abilities. Totemist was definitely missing something like this. A class feature worth maxing out, Essence-wise, and I imagine most every Wrath Daevic will.
Jumping down to Veils, Essence and Chakra Binds... what's with that Essence progression? Seems really weird. Looking at the table overall, it looks like they'll peter out in higher levels. Should be getting more power at those levels.
Jumping back to Desire, neat stuff here. Seems a little... well, the theme isn't as strong as it was with Wrath. Plus, competence bonus?
Dominion: Hmm, tanky Daevic. But bleh, competence again. The other abilities seem cool, but underwhelming for their levels. 17th and 20th in particular. Perma Blessing of Fervor is nice, but then again, that's a fourth level spell, and you get it at level 20.

He gains the ability to bind to slots in the following
order: Hands, Wrists, Shoulders, Belt, Neck, Chest.
Text v. table.
Looking back, they can bind to feet at level 1, but have no binds until level 4. ...?
Blood Bind: I like it, mostly. See my comment on Apotheosis, though.
Apotheosis: Love this word. Become an Outsider, yawn. Hour meditation to redo all veils, neat. Access to body slot... got that 8 levels ago with Blood Bind, albeit with damage.
Again... that progression.
Armory of the Conqueror: I've always had a thing for summoning weapons. It's nice to see size increases for Essence rather than the boring +1 attack and damage. The Hands bind seems kind of weak.
Bloody Shroud: I just realized this ability makes you *worse* at fighting stuff immune to bleed damage.
I see some Con going on in these Veils. MADness!
Daevic Aspect: The Wrath one seems out of place.
Embrace of the Old Ones: Ah-ha! More natural attacks (presumably; they're not stated as such).
Missed the Succubus one under Blood in the table on p. 10.
Spiked Pauldron's: Ha, I like these a lot. The text is confusing, "to grappling creatures to all creatures ..." Not sure I'd ever use that ability, but it's a nice mental image.
Extra Essence: Prereq of lvl 6 seems totally random (other than is surviving from MoI).

Just my 2cp. I still need to do a more thorough reading.

[Ssalarn]

Danzibr,
Thanks for looking it over. There were a variety of changes taking place in the Daevic, I'll go through and clean up the text to remove discrepancies and clarify anything that's ugly.
Daevic got Charisma as his veilweaving stat because:
a) It was fairly thematically appropriate
and
b) we wanted the system to be open to as many races as possible, so each race got a different mental stat governing their access. The Guru will be Wis based.

I'll also touch up Embrace of the Old Ones, which, yes, should give tentacle attacks. Currently the Daevic should be able to get claws, a gore, and tentacles (as well as a breath weapon). He's got some more veils on the way, including one that'll give him a rake attack, and one for a tail sting. I was working on a special Blood Bind for Gorget of the Wyrm that would give him wings and a fly speed similar to the shoulder bind, but instead of scaling speed and maneuverability he'd get a flat speed and maneuverability but a pair of wing buffets with scaling damage die. So you could potentially find yourself with some interesting tactical choices there.

Vizier and Daevic are both getting about a dozen new Veils this coming weekend as I introduce some Veil "sets". While several of the Veils released so far have been intended to complement other veils to a certain degree (like the Bloody line) these are going to be a little more obvious and a little more focused. The Vizier will be getting some construct-themed veils to expand on hand cannons, giving him kind of a mobile artillery option, as well as some outsider-themed goodies. Daevic is getting a Veil-set I've affectionately been referring to as "Elephant Armor", as well as some Veils designed for underwater combat I've dubbed "Water Dragon". These Veils, while being built as part of thematic sets, will offer stand-alone bonuses and don't need to be tied in with the other set pieces, though the abilities of all pieces will be complimentary.

[Seerow]

I realized as I was typing that exponential progression was going to be waaaaayyyyyy too much and changed it to a linear scale on odd-numbered bumps without going back back and changing what I'd already typed :P

Currently I've gotten a lot of feedback indicating that the Vizier's damage veils are too strong at 1st level and too weak at levels past 12, so I'm trying to spread that potential out a bit.

I guess I can kind of see too strong at level 1 if I squint my eyes a bit. An at will power that's 2d6 base + 1d6 (base essence alotment) + 1d6 (extra essence alotment from Enhanced Veil Capacity), is kind of strong. But 2d6 or even 3d6 I don't really see a problem with. Maybe consider bumping the level requirement on Enhanced Veil Capacity?

I'd go with something like:
Enhanced Veil Capacity comes online at level 8 instead of 1.
1d6 + 1d6 per essence invested. Every point of essence above 3 grants 2d6. Each point above 6 grants 3d6.

So you have:
0 essence: 1d6
3 essence: 4d6 (min level 6)
4 essence: 6d6 (min level 8)
6 essence: 11d6 (min level 12)
7 essence: 14d6 (min level 18)
8 essence: 17d6 (min level 20)

Just a thought.


I'll have to redownload the vizier to see all of the changes.



I am just now starting to look at the Daevic, but the biggest thing that stands out is the weirdness of the Chakra binds. I harped on this a lot with the Vizier, but as danzibr already pointed out, it's even weirder with the Daevic, because you straight up don't gain access to a bind until 4th level, despite the chakra for feet opening up at 4th level. Why is this a thing? I assume just a mistake in editing, but the better question is why is it even possible for this to be a thing? I still have yet to see an explanation for why there needs to be a limit on number of chakra binds that is separate from the number of chakras you have access to and the number of veils you can shape.


That being said, I love the Daevic fluff now that I've gotten a chance to read it. It actually reminds me strongly of the Stormlight Archives (seriously spirits of an ideal seek out somebody who embodies that ideal and gives them special powers? If you haven't read [U]The Way of Kings, you really should, because it's clear your tastes fall along the same lines).

Daevic essence seems like it's going to be really tight between the Veils and the Passion. I know you're keeping this close to the totemist baseline, but bumping up to Incarnate/Vizier levels of essence investment would be nice.


Wrath spell resistance is potentially very nice, it really depends on how much charisma a Daevic can get away with. Right now they seem very much like a Paladin, lots of MAD going on and likely to be midling all around in their attributes for it. Other class features may fix that. Honestly though Cha is simply going to vary so much, why not 10+1/2 meldshaper level+2*essence? That lands you pretty much exactly into useful territory without ever becoming untouchable.

The fluff of the Wrath damage resistance seems to imply fast healing rather than DR. May want to reconsider how that's described.

Bright side, that Wrath capstone is really nice. Especially with what you described in your last post for providing extra natural attacks. I will note however the capstone is the only ability there that doesn't scale with essence investment. I assume that's intentional, but it does stick out that way.

I'm kind of curious why Desire gets so awesome at grappling of all things. It gets a sizeable boost there, and while steal makes sense, grapple is kind of weird. Any fluff justification for it?

Wow, Desire gets Dominate Monster at will plus the ability to effectively mindrape them into permanent thralls. That is huge. And you were worried about Vestments of Marajaha being considered overpowered if you buffed it? This is possibly the best minionmancy effect I've seen in any source. Like seriously you could drop this from at will to Cha mod/day, and only allow 1-3 permanent thralls, and this would still be an excellent ability on par with most caster forms of minionmancy.

I love the Dominion passion, and see no real major issues with it. The 14th level ability not having anything to scale with essence is a bit sad, maybe roll that together with the AC bonus and give something new at level 17? It'd also be cool if Dominion somehow got Leadership for free/triple number of followers if you already have it, because that'd be incredibly fitting. Maybe just tack that on to the Dominion Capstone? Dominion has the weakest capstone of the three, giving a Dominion Daevic an army is in flavor and helps bring it up to par with the others.

Bloodbind's penalty seems too lenient and too harsh at the same time. If you get a decent source of DR or Fast healing (if DR doesn't work), then the penalty isn't a penalty at all. If you don't have those, then trying to use a veil other than the Blood veils seems like a waste of time and energy. Why not just straight up give them a con penalty, or penalty to max HP, or something like that, rather than hp every round? Straight up saying "Lose 2 hp per character level for the day after binding that veil" is a penalty people will notice, but can much more easily accounted for than a constantly ticking damage.


Edit: Formatting suggestion- Could we get it noted in the veil descriptions if they're related to a Passion, in the same way spells get tagged if they're part of a domain? (ie Vestments of the Maharaja Class: Vizier, Desire)

[danzibr]

Oooh. I look forward to these new veils. One thing MoI botched was Totemist soulmelds: power and utility all over the place level-wise, wasted potential with lack of essentia bonuses, quantity over quality with the natural weapon melds, many insipid static bonuses. These veils are much better, especially when we get more natural weapons. Plus... I like their flavor more.

[HunterOfJello]

A new and improved version of Tome of Battle might possibly push me over the edge into trying out Pathfinder material.

[Lord_Gareth]

A new and improved version of Tome of Battle might possibly push me over the edge into trying out Pathfinder material.

Hi, Path of War freelancer here, how can I help you?

[Ssalarn]

Changelog:

Daevic Desire capstone changed to limit the abilities power, while still being appropriate for the level and tier of the class.

Bloody Shroud adjusted to reflect correct bind acquisition level annotation.

Cincture of the Dragon adjusted to remove Con-based durations and effects.

Courtesan's Cloak changed to an insight bonus to saves to be more in line with the general bonus types granted by Incarna abilities.

Essence of the Succubus changed to a competence bonus to be more in line with the general bonus types granted by Incarna abilities.

Immaculate Touch changed to do 1 point of healing +1d6 per point of Essence invested.

Grammar error corrected in Infernal Blood.

Thurston's Bladewards fixed to grant DR/Bludgeoning.

Level requirement removed from Extra Essence.
Level requirement (7th) added to Extra Essence Capacity.

[Ssalarn]

I'm kind of curious why Desire gets so awesome at grappling of all things. It gets a sizeable boost there, and while steal makes sense, grapple is kind of weird. Any fluff justification for it?

So, funny story there. The Desire Daevic was supposed to be able to encompass physical love or lust in addition to the lust for material things. What I discovered during class design? There are like, 1,000 different ways to combine intimate references with grapple that all come off with a vibe that, well....
Leave it that my fiancee' consistently sent me back to the drawing board for the good of my reputation and Dreamscarred's enough times that I just gave up on trying to tie fluff to that mechanic in anything more than the most vaguely implied way. I wanted Don Juan Demarco, I kept getting John Wayne Gacy. I even had another writer take a look at it and he was like "Wel, maybe if you said the Daevic becomes talented at taking control of intim.... Okay, I kind of see the problem here."


It'd also be cool if Dominion somehow got Leadership for free/triple number of followers if you already have it, because that'd be incredibly fitting.

So, here's the thing. This was actually in the original write-up (or something very close to it) and several of my other 3pp designer friends go "Dude, you realize that you are aiming to make GM's hate you, right? Tha Dominate Monster thing is bad enough, but at least there's a few ways around it. Leadership is like the most widely banned feat in existence."

So I left his ability to acquire minions as something that could be thematic or picked up mechanically in campaigns where the GM felt it was appropriate, so that there'd be a good leader class that didn't introduce the issues that free followers can bring in. At the end of the day, I want as many different gaming groups as possible to be able to use as many options as possible.

[Seerow]

So, funny story there. The Desire Daevic was supposed to be able to encompass physical love or lust in addition to the lust for material things. What I discovered during class design? There are like, 1,000 different ways to combine intimate references with grapple that all come off with a vibe that, well....
Leave it that my fiancee' consistently sent me back to the drawing board for the good of my reputation and Dreamscarred's enough times that I just gave up on trying to tie fluff to that mechanic in anything more than the most vaguely implied way. I wanted Don Juan Demarco, I kept getting John Wayne Gacy. I even had another writer take a look at it and he was like "Wel, maybe if you said the Daevic becomes talented at taking control of intim.... Okay, I kind of see the problem here."

And suddenly I understand why I didn't make the connection. Fair enough.

[Ssalarn]

Changelog:

Daevic Feet Bind moved to 2nd level.

Daevic Chakra Binds updated to match up with acquisition of binds and expected power progression better.

Armory of the Conqueror updated with text to clarify that it cannot be targeted by Magic Weapons or similar effects, nor is it a valid target for weapon specific feats

Whirlpool Lash and Sea Drake’s Talons added to Veil list.

[Mithril Leaf]

I am rather curious about why Daevic Aspect got nerfed. It was one of the better ways to keep up in attack bonus the veilweavers had. Plus it used to give double the damage to essentia.

[Ssalarn]

I am rather curious about why Daevic Aspect got nerfed. It was one of the better ways to keep up in attack bonus the veilweavers had. Plus it used to give double the damage to essentia.

Several reasons, really.
1) Andreas thought it was weird for classes other than the Daevic to have access to a Veil that was thematically and mechanically modeled for that class, and... it was a valid observation.
2) General toning down of some abilities in general. While quite a few things have needed to be shored up, there have been a few concerns about the overall power level of some of the abilities, so those are getting adjusted as appropriate. As always with my materials, actual playtest results get the most weight when I consider whether something needs to get toned up or down, and half-assed theorycraft gets a nod and a smile before I move on. That's not directed at anyone here, by the way, you guys have all been awesome and very thorough, just a comment on how things get considered and acted upon.
3) While some of the abilities got toned down, the accessibility of Daevic Aspect did get notched up, with the binds now available to the Daevic at 12th level without the hit point cost of it being a body bind.

[Ssalarn]

Changelog:
Immovable Boots burrow ability clarified to only work in soft earth and sand.
Bloody Shroud bind changed to only deal negative levels on a critical hit.
Wrath bonus to attacks now only triggers when below ½ of total hp.
Spell Resistance removed from Wrath Daevics Passion abilities, replaced with improved facility to Bull Rush / Overrun.
Wrath Daevic’s DR ability replaced with Fast Healing which activates whenever he drops below 50% of his total hit point value
Desire Passion’s bonus to-hit limited to off-hand and iterative attacks.
Bonus granted by Essence of the Succubus changed back to circumstance bonus, but limited to creatures of the opposite gender. (Creatures who would be attracted to her causes too much argument and hassle at the table in my experience, or I would have done that. I try not to enforce sexuality and leave that open to the player and GM, but I also don’t want to be responsible for that one idiot who thinks every chick is secretly bi-sexual so they should all be attracted to his elven seductress).
Desire’s capstone no longer at-will, but useable Cha mod / day.
Dominion’s to-hit bonus now only applies to shields and iterative attacks with weapons with the Blocking property.

[Mithril Leaf]

Please, continue with killing my remaining interest in playing a daevic.
It's for the best balance wise, but it does ruin it for me.

[Seerow]

Please, continue with killing my remaining interest in playing a daevic.
It's for the best balance wise, but it does ruin it for me.

I'm not even sure it's for the best balance wise.



But what does it matter? Ssalorn will look at anything we say, smile, and move on and proceed to listen to people "playtesting" and complaining that the class feels too strong next to a fighter and a blaster wizard.

[Ssalarn]

I'm not even sure it's for the best balance wise.



But what does it matter? Ssalorn will look at anything we say, smile, and move on and proceed to listen to people "playtesting" and complaining that the class feels too strong next to a fighter and a blaster wizard.


I want to assure you that this isn't the case. I have actually been fighting really hard to keep the nerfs to the Daevic at a minimum, because I honestly don't believe that all of the people screaming OP are actually looking at the complete picture. And I've straight up told people on the Dreamscarred forums that I'm not trying to create a Daevic that performs at the same level as a fighter, I'm trying to build one that gives Paladins, Barbarians, and Magii a run for their money. To this end I actually started putting together a "playtest challenge", with builds using existing material to really put some pressure on people to prove that the class is out of balance before anymore downward turns are taken. I'm also looking at removing the Passion Veil restrictions or opening them up substantially to keep the class performing where I want it.

All of that being said, I had to make a very difficult decision last night to let go of my pet and very dear friend, so I'm going to be taking a couple days away from the forums and the project just to regroup and get centered. Please continue to review the materials, please continue to give me your insights and advice, and please keep talking about the project and what you'd like from it. I'll be back in the swing of things in a few days here and I'll be going over everything that comes up while I'm away, as well as getting the next set of feats and the playtest challenge released. Thanks for all of your insight and contributions, and thanks for understanding if I don't respond with the same efficiency I normally strive for.

[danzibr]

Sorry to hear about your pet. I got a kitten when I was 10, and I'm now 26. I'm afraid he doesn't have much time left.

As for the changes, while it creates more of a hassle, I think leaving the Essence of the Succubus to work on creatures which could be attracted would be better. As for you being responsible for that one dude, you couldn't be. It's on that one dude.

[Ssalarn]

Okay guys, I'm starting to get my feet back under me and am going to start working on the project again, though my response time may still be a bit slower than normal.

I've got a release coming up here with the new feats, and I'm going to try and drop the Guru at about the same time so that all three core classes will be available.

Another thing I'm working on is the release that will be following that one, which is going to start introducing prestige classes and archetypes. While a lot of these are already kind of mapped out there's a few ideas that I've been playing with that I'm less certain about, and I wanted to know what you all thought. Let me know what you think of the following ideas:

An advanced class for the Magus that gives up spellcasting for Veils and uses a unique mechanic that blends their Essence Pool and Arcane Pool into something a little bit new. Spellstrike, Spell Combat, and most of the other Magus staples will stay, but likely with adjustments to accomodate the changed system (don't worry, I have a really good plan for how to execute this).

A Bard archetype who can animate Veils with his Bardic Performance to create a combat pet. He'd burn spells to obtain Essence to enhance the creature.

An Oracle mystery that allows you to count some or all of your oracle levels as veilweaver levels (I'm thinking level -3 currently), a limited list of Veils, and a small Essence pool instead of Revelations.

A cavalier archetype that sacrifices Tactician and Banner abilities to instead grant allies the use of Veils he'll gain from a limited list. Essence will likely be tied into the Challenge ability (essentially giving him a temporary pool of Essence that activates at the same time as his Challenge and goes away when his Challenge ends).

Anyways, those are the four that I'm on the fence about, so let me know what your thoughts are.

@Danzibr
I think you're right. I'll make the adjustment to EotS as part of the next update.

[Ssalarn]

Opposition to the current power level of the Daevic has been... Vehement on the Dreamscarred forums. So-

Changelog:
Activating/dismissing Armory of the Conqueror is now a Full Round action.
Armory of the Conqueror’s critical threat expansion clarified to not work with other effects that improve critical threat range, bringing it in line with other such effects.
Verbage added to Armory to clarify that it is a valid target for Sunder attempts. (This verbage will likely be removed when the full expanded ruleset for Veils is available)
Base damage die for Armory of the Conqueror no longer changes between light or two-handed, reverting back to an earlier iteration of the ability. Base damage die progression capped at 2d12.
Armory of the Conqueror now requires 4 points of Essence for each bump to the Critical multiplier.
Radius of Bangles of the Jealous Seductress changed to 5’ +5’ per point of Essence to match the standard for aura-based Veil effects.
Collar of Skilled Instruction base radius of effect reduced from 30 to 10 feet. Essence investment now increases radius of effect in addition to prior bonuses.
Essence of the Succubus changed to affect creatures who would be attracted to the wearer, rather than creatures of the opposite gender.

[Seerow]

Having just gone over to DSP's forums to check what people are saying, I hope you aren't taking analysis like this seriously:


20 Essence at level 20. 2 Essence = 1 feat. That means 10 feats at level 10. That'd be roughly balanced against a Fighter's bonus feats... but doesn't begin to balance the 8 Veils and 6 Chakra binds.



Let me propose this to you: start with a Fighter. Explicitly swap out feature for feature - for example, for every feat you swap out, the Daevic gains 2 Essence, OR access to a Veil, OR access to a chakra bind - not all three at once.

Because by that standard nobody could ever have anything decent. That sort of thinking is why the Soulborn wound up being a crap class that nobody ever actually played.

There are individual things that needed addressing (Passion's level 20 ability was a big one), but I honestly think you are being swayed to push the overall power level down too far by listening to a very conservative section of players who feel the Fighter is an appropriate balance point to maintain. When even in Pathfinder, it really is not.

[Ssalarn]

Don't worry, I rebutted that pretty strongly. That is not a thing that will be happening.

[Seerow]

Didn't expect a response that quick, was in the middle of editing a little more in.

But fair enough. I just worry that you are pushing things too low due to people having a need to see all full BAB classes be balanced against the Fighter, and thus be very weak. Your Daevic in the initial version I read was very cool fluff wise, and had the mechanical capability to be all of the things a Fighter really should have been, and the constant rollbacks have me concerned.

Anyway I'm going to avoid commenting until I've had time to read through the rest of that thread, and generally get caught up, but things on my end have been busy for the last 3 weeks or so, and probably will be for another 2, so I don't know when I'll be able to contribute anything meaningful.

By the way, I am sorry for snapping in my earlier post. Been a long week and your comment had rubbed me the wrong way. My post was out of line, I hope I didn't unduly offend you.


Edit: It occurs to me. Is Syonique the same guy I saw posting a while ago that Aegis should not get access to Pounce because it is a very high level ability that should never be available to a low level character cheaply?

[Ssalarn]

Didn't expect a response that quick, was in the middle of editing a little more in.

But fair enough. I just worry that you are pushing things too low due to people having a need to see all full BAB classes be balanced against the Fighter, and thus be very weak. Your Daevic in the initial version I read was very cool fluff wise, and had the mechanical capability to be all of the things a Fighter really should have been, and the constant rollbacks have me concerned.

Anyway I'm going to avoid commenting until I've had time to read through the rest of that thread, and generally get caught up, but things on my end have been busy for the last 3 weeks or so, and probably will be for another 2, so I don't know when I'll be able to contribute anything meaningful.

By the way, I am sorry for snapping in my earlier post. Been a long week and your comment had rubbed me the wrong way. My post was out of line, I hope I didn't unduly offend you.


Edit: It occurs to me. Is Syonique the same guy I saw posting a while ago that Aegis should not get access to Pounce because it is a very high level ability that should never be available to a low level character cheaply?

No worries, I'm typically pretty thick-skinned. And yes, I do believe that that is exactly who you are thinking of.
Do me a favor when you get the chance, flip through the Daevic again and point to some specific areas where you have some concerns about it being nerfed too far. I know that a big one I'm trying to sort out right now is the to-hit bonuses from the Passion. They may have been a bit too strong before (but only by a narrow margin) and I feel like I've brought them to a point where not only are they not great, they're maybe not even good. But I could be wrong.

For ease of reference, here's the Vizier (https://www.dropbox.com/s/co2i27hemdi9kg8/MagicofIncarnaPlaytest.pdf) and here's the Daevic (https://www.dropbox.com/s/n7go8mal47o4nd3/Daevic%20Playtest.pdf). I know it's been a bit since those links were posted and it's probably best if we don't have to thread skim to find them :)

[Seerow]

No worries, I'm typically pretty thick-skinned. And yes, I do believe that that is exactly who you are thinking of.
Do me a favor when you get the chance, flip through the Daevic again and point to some specific areas where you have some concerns about it being nerfed too far. I know that a big one I'm trying to sort out right now is the to-hit bonuses from the Passion. They may have been a bit too strong before (but only by a narrow margin) and I feel like I've brought them to a point where not only are they not great, they're maybe not even good. But I could be wrong.

For ease of reference, here's the Vizier (https://www.dropbox.com/s/co2i27hemdi9kg8/MagicofIncarnaPlaytest.pdf) and here's the Daevic (https://www.dropbox.com/s/n7go8mal47o4nd3/Daevic%20Playtest.pdf). I know it's been a bit since those links were posted and it's probably best if we don't have to thread skim to find them :)


Well I've read through the rest of the thread, didn't find much that I found compelling in the way of their arguments. It seemed to be mostly crying about Armory, of all things. I really don't get their hard-on for that but whatever. Honestly at this point I'd just change it to be a ripoff soulknife to shut them up. Make it a 1d6/1d8 weapon with 19-20x2 crit, and when you shape the weapon pick a number of enhancements equal to your max essence invested. For every point of essence put into the veil, you get one of those enhancements. I actually think it's stronger than what Armory was even before you nerfed it, but it would probably attract less crying because it's something more familiar.

That said, I have been thinking and there are a few things highlighted that may be worth looking into. For example, there may be a point in the Daevic's flexibility being too broad vs comparable characters.

I mean, I actually like the flexibility. My first complaint on reading the Daevic was that it wasn't as flexible as the Vizier. Less essence, lower caps, fewer melds (half of which you don't even get to pick), etc. But when comparing to the Aegis or the Paladin (which are the two most comprable classes IMO), the Aegis gets a limited number of recustomizations starting at a moderate level, and a Paladin I'm pretty sure has prepared spells like a Cleric. It may be worth considering making the Daevic function closer to those lines, where essence is something you don't get to swap around every round. Maybe include an archetype that gets back unlimited swapping in exchange for something else (no ideas on what).


I'm also wondering the more I think on it what benefit there is to having Passions as an Essence sink. While there's a lot of talk on that thread about how much essence the Daevic has compared to the Vizier, fact is every Daevic ever is going to have his maximum essence invested into his Passion at all times. Just straight up the passion bonuses are so much nicer and more numerous than any other veil, there's really no compelling reason to change out of them except for utility when out of combat. (And even then you can typically pull the essence from elsewhere in such a situation).

You could just straight up make the Passions class features, reducing the Essence some more (which would again go towards shutting up their crying while not meaningfully affecting the power level of the class in any way). Alternatively, you could do something similar to the Vizier, where each passion bonus is affiliated with a body slot, and activates upon having a chakra bound to that slot, and improves when essence is invested into it (but this method is a lot more book keeping and a overall nerf to the class, I don't like it as much).

Anyway, that's about all I have time for now. I'll look over things again when I have more time, and maybe make a few character sheets up to use as a character comparison (though they'll likely be suboptimal, I'm not as familiar with Pathfinder feats/items as with 3.5). But this probably won't be until a week from today at the earliest unless I finish several things much earlier than anticipated.

[Ssalarn]

Well I've read through the rest of the thread, didn't find much that I found compelling in the way of their arguments. It seemed to be mostly crying about Armory, of all things. I really don't get their hard-on for that but whatever. Honestly at this point I'd just change it to be a ripoff soulknife to shut them up. Make it a 1d6/1d8 weapon with 19-20x2 crit, and when you shape the weapon pick a number of enhancements equal to your max essence invested. For every point of essence put into the veil, you get one of those enhancements. I actually think it's stronger than what Armory was even before you nerfed it, but it would probably attract less crying because it's something more familiar.

That said, I have been thinking and there are a few things highlighted that may be worth looking into. For example, there may be a point in the Daevic's flexibility being too broad vs comparable characters.

I mean, I actually like the flexibility. My first complaint on reading the Daevic was that it wasn't as flexible as the Vizier. Less essence, lower caps, fewer melds (half of which you don't even get to pick), etc. But when comparing to the Aegis or the Paladin (which are the two most comprable classes IMO), the Aegis gets a limited number of recustomizations starting at a moderate level, and a Paladin I'm pretty sure has prepared spells like a Cleric. It may be worth considering making the Daevic function closer to those lines, where essence is something you don't get to swap around every round. Maybe include an archetype that gets back unlimited swapping in exchange for something else (no ideas on what).


I'm also wondering the more I think on it what benefit there is to having Passions as an Essence sink. While there's a lot of talk on that thread about how much essence the Daevic has compared to the Vizier, fact is every Daevic ever is going to have his maximum essence invested into his Passion at all times. Just straight up the passion bonuses are so much nicer and more numerous than any other veil, there's really no compelling reason to change out of them except for utility when out of combat. (And even then you can typically pull the essence from elsewhere in such a situation).

You could just straight up make the Passions class features, reducing the Essence some more (which would again go towards shutting up their crying while not meaningfully affecting the power level of the class in any way). Alternatively, you could do something similar to the Vizier, where each passion bonus is affiliated with a body slot, and activates upon having a chakra bound to that slot, and improves when essence is invested into it (but this method is a lot more book keeping and a overall nerf to the class, I don't like it as much).

Anyway, that's about all I have time for now. I'll look over things again when I have more time, and maybe make a few character sheets up to use as a character comparison (though they'll likely be suboptimal, I'm not as familiar with Pathfinder feats/items as with 3.5). But this probably won't be until a week from today at the earliest unless I finish several things much earlier than anticipated.

Thanks for the insight!
I think ratcheting back the action required to shift Essence for the Daevic to like a standard or full round action may be the way to go there, but I'll toy around with it a bit. I'd have to change some things elsewhere as well since swift action Essence shifting was pretty much just the baseline for everyone.... Maybe Daevics and characters who gain it from feats do it as a Move Action default but I toss a feat out there to speed it up to a swift? Or a 1/encounter-hour-minute-or something free action Essence shift?
Hmmm......

[Ssalarn]

Changelog:
Waistband of the Wealthy now grants bonuses to Appraise and Bluff rather than Bluff and Sense Motive
Armbands of the Irked Elephant and Behemoth Hide Veils added to Daevic.
Deathchannel Ring and Pestilence Cloak Veils added to Vizier.
Essence Focus, Pistolero’s Bind, Treewalker, and Life Bond added to feats.

[danzibr]

Bring the Daevic down to the Fighter? That's absurd. The standard should be the PoW classes.

[Person_Man]

Bring the Daevic down to the Fighter? That's absurd. The standard should be the PoW classes.

+1

Daevic may need some balance re-jiggering. But my belief is that it does not need to be dragged down to Tier 4.

[Ssalarn]

Changelog:
Thurston’s Bladewards starting DR reduced by 1.
Deathchannel ring limited to total uses per day of 1 + primary veilweaving modifier. Minor grammar fix.
Pestilence Cloak changed to grant partial concealment; scaling adjusted as well.
Treewalker wording changed for clarity.

[Ssalarn]

I need to know guys, what are your thoughts on Armory of the Conqueror. As this is actually the thread (or the thread that was merged with the one) where the curent incarnation of that Veil was born, I'd really like your feeback, thoughts, playtests, anything, because this is positively becoming a distraction over on the DS forums and it's getting to the point where it's interfering with the project. AotC is kind of a GitP baby, and one that I actually think is pretty cool and much better balanced than it's getting credit for.
For reference, here's the thread (http://dreamscarredpress.com/dragonfly/ForumsPro/viewtopic/p=39963.html#39963) where the Daevic is being "discussed".

I've got some other peeps taking a look at the math as well, but here's my concern: if this is too out there and too unfamiliar that people get scared off, it's going to prevent them from buying the finished product. If however, there's just 2 or 3 very vocal people who are concerned because they don't understand how the math scales or the class performs but the core idea actually does work, I don't want to take away a good thing that other people, maybe less vocal or public about their opinion, might be interested in.

[Ssalarn]

Changelog:
Chakra rules expanded to Chakra and Veils; Veil interactions with Sunder and Dispel effects expounded upon in playtest documents.
Daevic-
Wrath’s Natural armor bonus changed to +1 / 2 Essence
Bonus type to Bull Rush granted by Wrath changed to competence for consistency with existing mechanics.
Dominion bonus to-hit only applies to shields
Dominion bonus to Intimidate checks clarified to be a competence bonus.
Dominion bonus to saves vs. AOE effects now limited to Reflex saves.
Dominion deflection bonus now +1 / 2 Essence.
Dominion Blessing of Fervor ability now limited to 1+CHA times/day.
Small changes to Wrath’s to-hit bonus.
Wrath’s bonus to Bull Rush and Overrun reduced to 1 / Essence. Scaling vs. size increased from 1:1 ratio to 1:2.
Desire’s bonus to-hit now only works against creatures she has successfully performed a Steal or Feint maneuver against.
Desire’s 5th level ability now grants bonuses to Feint checks, and improves Feint’s action economy.
Desire’s 11th level Passion bond ability now useable 1 + Cha mod times/day
Minor grammar changes in the Chakra Binds ability.

[Seerow]

The complaints seem to be focused heavily on the crit boosting, which as far as I could tell from this thread, was something nobody leaned heavily on. Your initial preview already had the crit scaling, the only thing contributed from us was Ziegander recommending increased die size instead of flat +2 to damage.


Personally, I don't see what the fuss is all about, especially with the weapon specifically not working with normal feats/abilities that boost weapons. But like I said in the other post, if you want to change it to basically a soulknife ripoff to shut them up, I won't complain (and it'd likely be stronger regardless). It's not a veil I would expect to see much use from people who want something different anyway, it's more there for someone who wants the magic sword paladin archtype via incarna.

[Ssalarn]

It's not a veil I would expect to see much use from people who want something different anyway, it's more there for someone who wants the magic sword paladin archtype via incarna.

Right!?!?!?!? I can't believe we're so stuck on it when it really isn't even the best option out there!

I swear, you try to do something non-traditional.....

[Seerow]

Right!?!?!?!? I can't believe we're so stuck on it when it really isn't even the best option out there!

I swear, you try to do something non-traditional.....

Honestly your best bet would be to put Syonique on ignore. Is he a part of DSP at all, or is he just a very frequent poster on your forums? Assuming the latter, just place him on ignore for being disruptive, and focus on other topics of discussion. Eventually he'll get the hint.

[Ssalarn]

The complaints seem to be focused heavily on the crit boosting, which as far as I could tell from this thread, was something nobody leaned heavily on. Your initial preview already had the crit scaling, the only thing contributed from us was Ziegander recommending increased die size instead of flat +2 to damage.


Which was awesome. And the moment I finally got to be friends with the GitP folks and started having real conversations.
I'm all emotionally attached to the bonding the Veil represents :smallbiggrin:

I just worry that if I nix the crit enhancement, we're left with..... a crappy Veil that no one's going to use, and which will eventually be that joke everyone tells, like Elephant Stomp or Prone Shooter (feats from Pathfinder that did nothing, like literally nothing, for anyone who hasn't heard of them).

Ah well, I can't have it being a thing that bogs down the rest of the project. I need feedback from all three forums to move forward, and can't let one get bogged down over a single Veil. It's been changed to enhance a currently wielded weapon.

[Seerow]

Hrm. I should have refreshed before making my post over on DSP.

Oh well. I feel better having posted it. Now back to more productive things.

[Ssalarn]

In addition to the Vizier (https://www.dropbox.com/s/co2i27hemdi9kg8/MagicofIncarnaPlaytest.pdf) and the Daevic (https://www.dropbox.com/s/n7go8mal47o4nd3/Daevic%20Playtest.pdf), I now have the third class the Guru (https://www.dropbox.com/s/w4kb4ofomf51jdu/The%20Guru.pdf).
I'm having some issues with importing his Veil list, but please feel free to look over the base class and let me know what your thoughts and opinions are. I should have the Veil issue fixed and the full Veil list imported into the document before the end of the day.

**Edit** Guru's formatting issue has been fixed, and he now has Veils and feats added to his playtest document.

[Seerow]

For the new AotC consider stealing some wording from the Greater Mighty Wallop spell. Specifically the "up to an effective size of Colossal" line.

This way if you're a non-wrath medium daevic, you can still get up to Colossal (+1 veil, +3 from essence), wrath lets even a small daevic eventually get up to Colossal (+1 passion, +1 veil, +3 essence), while a medium or larger daevic just invests less essence and enjoys the bonus size increases.

Otherwise you end up somehow getting a Huge Wrath Daevic (Psywar/Daevic with expansion?) with a greatsword and the feat to increase essence capacity of a veil dealing something like 30d6 base weapon damage with relatively low optimization, and giving even normal people apoplexies. Meanwhile with the effective size colossal cap, you're stuck at 8d6 damage as your cap, which is giving Syonique fits, but is generally pretty acceptable by the levels that's available. Even if Pathfinder has some funky 3d6 weapon you'd end up capped at 12d6 by the end.

[Ssalarn]

For the new AotC consider stealing some wording from the Greater Mighty Wallop spell. Specifically the "up to an effective size of Colossal" line.

This way if you're a non-wrath medium daevic, you can still get up to Colossal (+1 veil, +3 from essence), wrath lets even a small daevic eventually get up to Colossal (+1 passion, +1 veil, +3 essence), while a medium or larger daevic just invests less essence and enjoys the bonus size increases.

Otherwise you end up somehow getting a Huge Wrath Daevic (Psywar/Daevic with expansion?) with a greatsword and the feat to increase essence capacity of a veil dealing something like 30d6 base weapon damage with relatively low optimization, and giving even normal people apoplexies. Meanwhile with the effective size colossal cap, you're stuck at 8d6 damage as your cap, which is giving Syonique fits, but is generally pretty acceptable by the levels that's available. Even if Pathfinder has some funky 3d6 weapon you'd end up capped at 12d6 by the end.
You're the man Seerow. Fixing it now.

**Edit** Damn Seerow, getting all hardcore up in the DS thread. I smiled at the repeated use of a word I'm not sure I can repeat in this forum. What are the guidelines on that over here?

[Lord_Gareth]

You're the man Seerow. Fixing it now.

A general note - Seerow is almost always The Man.

[Seerow]

A general note - Seerow is almost always The Man.

:biggrin:

messagetooshort

[Lord_Gareth]

:biggrin:

messagetooshort

You're going to be very busy in the other two threads, my friend. I can't get involved, but...let your voice be heard.

[Seerow]

You're the man Seerow. Fixing it now.

**Edit** Damn Seerow, getting all hardcore up in the DS thread. I smiled at the repeated use of a word I'm not sure I can repeat in this forum. What are the guidelines on that over here?

Missed your edit earlier. Pretty sure the rules here are avoid it. It gets filtered, so as long as it's not excessive or filter evading, the mods will look the other way, but I'm not a mod so don't trust my word as the final word on the rules. All rights reserved blah blah blah legalese.


You're going to be very busy in the other two threads, my friend. I can't get involved, but...let your voice be heard.


Hah... yeah.

My bigger issue than keeping up with the threads (tabbing between forums isn't too big of a deal for me, I can do that while working on other things) is keeping up with major changes. Sitting down and reading through the Guru, or mocking up a few Vizier/Daevic characters requires a couple hour block of time to sit down and actually do nothing but that to digest it properly. By comparison forums are great for reading a couple minutes here, a couple minutes there (which is why I get away with still posting casually while busy, but avoid homebrewing and stuff. Also why I mentioned it'll be like next week before I can dig into things more but am still posting relatively frequently)

[Ssalarn]

Changelog:
Vizier and Daevic-
Spiked Pauldrons changed to dealing damage to all grappled creatures, not just creatures who initiate a grapple.
Guru-
Wording clarifications made to Guru’s Gentle Touch to limit stacking.
Absorb Radiance now useable 1/day.
Guru’s Incandescent Strike limited to 2 x class level.
Minor adjustments made to Veil of Sins; various abilities clarified to require separate activation.
Reforge the Soul clarified to require a successful Atonement.
Blindness dealt by Luminosity now lasts 1d6 rounds.

**EDIT**
A note on the Akasin: There were some issues involved in this one that aren't going to be fixed as easily as I'd initially presumed, so expect a pretty thorough rewrite of this one. The basic abilities and premises are going to stay the same, but some of the abilities are going to level swap or be reworded in ways that will have some strong mechanical impact. I also noticed that some of the abilities don't reflect the same progression listed in the table, so I'll be fixing that in the next update as well. Assume that the levels listed in the table are correct for the time being, I think there may have been an issue when transferring the original documents from my word processing tools over to G-Docs, and a new table was introduced with slightly out of date class text. The error was probably related to faulty organic interfacing....

[Seerow]

And I'm done.

Seriously, Daevic is tier 1 because some of his abilities are marginally better than a comparable feat? Holy **** I've never met anyone so delusional.

[Lord_Gareth]

And I'm done.

Seriously, Daevic is tier 1 because some of his abilities are marginally better than a comparable feat? Holy **** I've never met anyone so delusional.

Don't give up on Guru! The person there seems polite and helpful.

[Seerow]

Don't give up on Guru! The person there seems polite and helpful.

I've only managed to give the Guru a once over so far, the main issue I had seems to have already been picked up on over in the Guru thread on DSP.

Either way I'm done arguing with Syonique. I caught a bad case of duty calls (http://xkcd.com/386/), but I'm done with it at this point. I trust Ssalarn enough to recognize this guy is completely insane and ignore everything he says by this point.

[Seerow]

So I've got the rest of tonight off, decided to start building a character.

I've already run into a first problem I hadn't anticipated. For the first third of the game, Essence is effectively a non-issue.

At level 1 you have 1 veil, max capacity of 1, and 1 essence.
At level 2 you have 2 veils, max capacity of 1, and 2 essence.
At level 3 you have 2 veils, max capacity of 1, and 3 essence. (1 essence wasted)
At level 4 you have 3 veils, max capacity of 1, and 4 essence (1 essence wasted)
At level 5 you have 3 veils, max capacity of 1, and 6 essence (2 essence wasted)
At level 6 you have 4 veils, max capacity of 2, and 6 essence (2 essence shy of capping. 1 feat = capped)
At level 7 you have 4 veils, max capacity of 2, and 8 essence (capped even without the feat)
Level 8 is identical to level 7 in every way.
At level 9 you have 5 veils with a max capacity of 3, and at this point onwards you have to actually manage your essence.


I realize after typing all of that I was ignoring the Passion Bond, means at least you're not wasting essence (except at level 5), but with a single feat you have all of your veils + passion essence capped from level 1 to 9, with level 6 being the only exception.


You should always have more places to spend your essence than you have essence available. Right now there simply isn't enough places for essence to be spent to give any sort of interesting choice. Basically the entire resource management scheme is meaningless for nearly half the game (and at all the levels most games are going to take place in). That's a pretty bad thing. Boosting the capacity a bit earlier and/or giving an extra veil at level 1 would go a long way to helping this.

Not sure if this applies to the other classes as well, but it very well could.


Edit: As an aside, given that Essence scales from 1 to 20, I'm curious why essence suddenly starts jumping by 2 every 2 levels at some point, rather than just being 1 per level from 1 to 20. Any particular design reason for that? It was really jarring when I noticed it, even if it makes little difference.

Edit 2: The Wrath Daevic lists "Claws of the Beast" as a veil he gets, I do not see this in any of the Incarna playtest docs. Did this get renamed to "Wrathful Claws" by chance?

[Ssalarn]

So I've got the rest of tonight off, decided to start building a character.

I've already run into a first problem I hadn't anticipated. For the first third of the game, Essence is effectively a non-issue.

At level 1 you have 1 veil, max capacity of 1, and 1 essence.
At level 2 you have 2 veils, max capacity of 1, and 2 essence.
At level 3 you have 2 veils, max capacity of 1, and 3 essence. (1 essence wasted)
At level 4 you have 3 veils, max capacity of 1, and 4 essence (1 essence wasted)
At level 5 you have 3 veils, max capacity of 1, and 6 essence (2 essence wasted)
At level 6 you have 4 veils, max capacity of 2, and 6 essence (2 essence shy of capping. 1 feat = capped)
At level 7 you have 4 veils, max capacity of 2, and 8 essence (capped even without the feat)
Level 8 is identical to level 7 in every way.
At level 9 you have 5 veils with a max capacity of 3, and at this point onwards you have to actually manage your essence.


I realize after typing all of that I was ignoring the Passion Bond, means at least you're not wasting essence (except at level 5), but with a single feat you have all of your veils + passion essence capped from level 1 to 9, with level 6 being the only exception.


You should always have more places to spend your essence than you have essence available. Right now there simply isn't enough places for essence to be spent to give any sort of interesting choice. Basically the entire resource management scheme is meaningless for nearly half the game (and at all the levels most games are going to take place in). That's a pretty bad thing. Boosting the capacity a bit earlier and/or giving an extra veil at level 1 would go a long way to helping this.

Not sure if this applies to the other classes as well, but it very well could.


Edit: As an aside, given that Essence scales from 1 to 20, I'm curious why essence suddenly starts jumping by 2 every 2 levels at some point, rather than just being 1 per level from 1 to 20. Any particular design reason for that? It was really jarring when I noticed it, even if it makes little difference.

Edit 2: The Wrath Daevic lists "Claws of the Beast" as a veil he gets, I do not see this in any of the Incarna playtest docs. Did this get renamed to "Wrathful Claws" by chance?

Yeah, Claws of the Beast turned out to be a psionic ability already. I'll fix it. Guru uses a straight 1-20 scale for Essence as, I'll make that fix for the Daevic. That'll smooth the progression a bit. I may even lower his progression or have him start from 0

[Seerow]

So yeah, actually playing around with trying to pick veils for a given day expectedly makes a lot of choices non-choices.

I've been building at level 6 (I was planning on doing a build at 6, 12, and 18). In order to take full advantage of the chakra binds, I either am forced to take Claws as my power, or need to spend both of my non-passion veils on a Hand+Feet slot.

I was also assuming a Wrath Daevic, but the more I mess with it the more I doubt that decision. After the round of nerfs, Desire has the most useful Bond abilities even before its capstone. And more fun utility veils. Dominion's bond abilities are somewhere in between, but at least the first ability is reliable, and the second one is very nice when it does kick in.


(Passion)Wrathful Claws(Hands) [Bound]
(Passion) Horns of the Minotaur(Head)
Sea Drake’s Talons (Feet) [Bound]
Daevic Aspect (Blood)

I end up with 5 attacks on a full attack (pretty impressive for a level 6 character). With no magic items it's sitting at +12 to hit with the primary claws, and +5 to hit with the secondaries, primary attack averaging 12.5 damage per hit, talons averaging 8.5 damage per hit, and Gore averaging 12.5 damage per hit (catching up with claws because the Gore's bonus damage from essence is untyped, while the Claw's bonus damage got overlapped with Daevic Aspect. Typed bonuses, they do do something!).

With this loadout, the character's mobility is effectively nil. He has standard heavy armor melee mobility (which is to say none. Especially since he is 100% reliant on making a full attack to do any meaningful damage. A Longsword Fighter is probably outdamaging him on the move). Similarly his defense is more or less unspectacular. He has decent HP, but no DR, no miss chance, and a very mediocre Will save.

Honestly this loadout disappoints me. It's can deal pretty impressive damage in a full attack (especially if equipped for such, with an amulet of natural attacks or the like), but that's about all you do, and you have no reliable way of getting full attacks (no pounce or the like). It is possible this gets better at higher levels, but since feet slot is being taken up for extra attacks, the only extra mobility you're likely to get is the flight bind at level 12 or so, and you still have no way to get a full attack on the move ever.

Minor variations on this would be replacing Daevic Aspect with Whirlpool Lash, gaining a 6th natural attack in exchange for +4 to damage on all other attacks. If you get a good source of bonus damage from somewhere else this can be good (say you go this far into Daevic then multiclass out to something with some more mobility/pounce access), but just on its own the Daevic Aspect is providing more average damage.

Another variation could be replacing the Talons with Tauric Brace bound to feet, losing two natural attacks but gaining an extra 10ft move speed. Still won't help you if forced to move, but an extra 10ft movement never hurts.


(Passion) Bloody Shroud(Body)
(Passion) Gorget of the Wyrm (Shoulders)
Armory of the Conqueror (Hands) [Bound]
[Foot Veil chosen to suit needs of the day] [Bound]


This one would probably be better off as a Dominion instead of Wrath Daevic. Gorget of the Wyrm is situationally useful at best until you can Bind it to Shoulders at level 10. It gives you something to do against Swarms at least. It was the most useful option available to the Wrath daevic who didn't want to focus on natural attacks (except maybe Breastplate of Bloody Conflict, depending on if you want to abuse that).

This build gets to hit for an average of around 25 damage per hit, which is going to end up being less on a full attack than the natural attacks build, but on a single attack will deal nearly twice as much damage. The Bloody Shroud stays maxed out, and you easily keep a 15 damage bleed up on targets at all times, which is nice. (The natural attacker could use Bloody Shroud, but probably doesn't want to waste the veil on it until he has access to another couple shapeable veils, and probably won't deal enough damage on a single attack to max out the bleed).

Pros of this build? A fair bit more flexibility than the natural attacker. More mobility choice. Less reliance on full attacks. Less investment required to do your thing. Basically everything you expect out of a two handed weapon build, except it does fall behind on damage in the straight full attack. That said, this is probably the superior overall build. And if going with the Dominion Daevic instead of Wrath, you can swap out the Gorget for a defensive veil, gaining some extra temp HP, DR, or AC, and being a pretty solid overall hybrid.

Alternates:
-As noted above, be a Dominion Daevic instead and replace Gorget with Armory. Use the extra slot on just about anything else.
-Stay as Wrath, ignore the Foot binding, giving up some mobility, and grab the Daevic Aspect for an extra +6 to damage.



(Passion)Breastplate of Bloody Conflict(Chest)
(Passion)Bloody Shroud (Body)
Infernal Blood (Blood)
Cincture of the Dragon (Belt)

Breastplate of Bloody Conflict got picked because it's the only wrath veil that has any defensive benefit. Bloody Shroud got picked after that because it's a generally useful ability.

This loadout ends up with +3 AC, 2/Slashing or Piercing DR, and anything that pierces that DR takes 3d4 points of damage for their trouble. It's not an awful setup, but again would probably be better as a Dominion, who could take the Cincture and Bladewards as Passion abilities, gaining DR6 and the +3 AC, while still having two veils with free choice leftover (probably going to Infernal Blood and Daevic Aspect to get another +3 AC and the deal damage when you get hit.).

Alternate setup (applies to both Wrath and Dominion passions):
-Replace Infernal Blood with Stone Giant Girdle, for extra raw survivability (15 extra HP at start of a fight is nice)
-Replace Infernal Blood with AotC, for some extra damage dealing capability without giving up much defensively. This is a more defensively oriented hybrid.
-Replace Infernal Blood with Immaculate Touch. This lets you take advantage of your Hand chakra binding at least, and you're healing yourself+all allies for 6d6+3 damage per day. Not enough to replace a real healer, but useful in a pinch. Getting the status effect removal from your chakra is icing on the cake.


In any case, the Defensive setup is simply ignoring chakra binds entirely at this level, because your first two chakras are linked to mobility and damage respectively.

I was working on a Utility loadout, but you honestly don't get the utility veils to make it work at level 6. On days you're certain there will be no fighting, then you can swap out for some skill bonuses to be a bit more useful. But until you have at least 5 or 6 veils and/or a couple higher level chakra binds, you're going to be using most of them on combat stuff. Because even +6-8 to a couple of skills doesn't compare to well to getting meaningful combat capability. Not in any day where you're going to be fighting, and you're expected to be the front line guy.



Anyway, tl;dr time, right?

1) The lack of pounce, swift action movement, or anything similar cripples the natural attack build. Other than that, natural attacks are very resource intensive compared. You give up so much flexibility to get lots of natural attacks, it's really painful.

2) Best bet to be pretty well balanced offensively and defensively is to go for a two handed weapon and fill in the blanks with defensive veils.

3) Passion ratings: Wrath is awful now. Desire gets the best bond bonus, veils that are great at high level but meh at low level when you can't afford the more utility veils. Dominion gets the best veil selection, level 2 bond effectively useless.

4) None of these loadouts feels particularly overpowered. The Dominion Defensive may be a bit strong due to the DR6, but the extra AC isn't much beyond what you can get elsewhere, and DR6 at level 6 is something most enemies can deal with.


I really feel like the issue here is not "We need to pull back on the Daevic, reducing his Essence availability", but rather "The Daevic needs to be able to shape more veils early on". At level 20 you have 8 shaped veils with a max investment of 6, for a total of 48 potential essence, so there's a lot of room to play around there (less than half of the potential is invested). It feels to me like the current levels of essence are about right (having the current 8 essence at level 6 invested into 4 veils provides characters with roughly the right statistics), but the amount of places to put essence into is not.

Here's a couple ways I can think of to make that work:
1) Give some bonus Incarnum Feats. I really don't like most of those feats because they feel weak to me, but getting them for free is still something, and can provide a couple extra essence receptacles early on.
2) Give more veils early on. Straight up giving 1 veil shaped per level over the first 8 levels, or 3 shaped at level 1 with 1 coming every other level thereafter (for 6 at level 6) gives more receptacles and giving more choices access to your breadth of abilities much earlier.
3) Move the bonus essence capacity to 3 and 9 instead of 9 and 15. This way at level 3 you have 3 essence and 2 veils with a capacity of 2 each (so you're not maxed out). At level 4 you're up to 3 veils with 2 capacity (8 total capacity) and 4 essence. Basically from level 3 on you can't max out.

Of the options, I think 2 is the best.
1 gives access to sub-par options that will simply be ignored in favor of the veils/passions except in emergency.
3 potentially messes up a lot of balance issues by giving people essence as if they were 3 levels higher between level 3 and 15. While having a second essence to play with earlier is nice, it could be unbalancing. (Then again since you are apparently nerfing the DR returns, that's the main thing I was thinking would be an unbalancing factor, so maybe this could work. It apparently even matches up with the Vizier.
2 has minor balance issues in the form of the benefits of extra shaped veils, but ultimately it serves to provide extra versatility, with relatively little raw power gained compared to 3.

[Ssalarn]

**EDIT** Seerow, I just saw your feedback. I figured I'd have a week before seeing it, so I wasn't looking. I'll go over it and incorporate it into the next update. **End Edit**

Changelog:
Spelling correction in sunder veils rules “Essenc – Esence”
Forcestrike Knuckles ranged attack has a range of 20 feet.
DR granted by Behemoth Hide, Snakehandler’s Gauntlets, and Thurston’s Bladewards now starts at 2 and scales by 1 / Essence.
Correction made to Wrath Passion Veil list: Claws of the Beast updated to match new Veil name “Wrathful Claws”
Sea Drake’s Talons now grant the Rake special attack necessary to function properly.
Daevic’s Essence now scales at a rate of level -1.
Minor change to the Guru’s Alignment entry to remove unnecessary and possibly confusing verbage.
Guru’s Gentle Touch now adds 1d4 per point of Essence invested, rather than increasing the weapon’s size category.
Guru can now use Stunning Fist via any weapon enhanced by his Gentle Touch ability.
Guru Bind progression adjusted correct scaling at level 13 (reflected 5 when it should have been 4).
Absorb Radiance no longer limited to 1/day, but multiple uses cannot be stacked (pool dissipates when ability is next used).
Lambent Blades use cost raised to 5 temp hp. Only grants Brilliant Energy for one round if the Akasin spends a use of Stunning Fist, otherwise grants a similar, scaled down effect.
Lucent Revivification now useable 1/day.
Devour Sin temp hp limited to 2x class level.
Veil of Sins ability to grant partial concealment now limited to 1 round duration.
Vayist discipline edited to utilize temp hp subsystem like other Philosophies.
Comma added to Leaf on the Wind.
Chakra Disruption (Hands) now only applies penalty to attacks made with hands or equivalent limbs.
Various grammar corrections to Chakra disruption descriptions.
Crack the Shell no longer specifically exempts the target from AoOs taken due to Sunder attempts.
Sever the Flow no longer affects magic items wielded or worn by the target, but instead only abilities directly dependent upon the target’s own Essence or magical energy.
Immortal Essence now grants Essence equal to the highest level spell successfully dispelled by Sever the flow, or the Essence invested in suppressed Veils (to a maximum of the Guru’s total Essence Capacity). Clarified that this ability does not stack with itself, but subsequent uses instead extend the duration.

[Seerow]

**EDIT** Seerow, I just saw your feedback. I figured I'd have a week before seeing it, so I wasn't looking. I'll go over it and incorporate it into the next update. **End Edit**

No problem. I mentioned earlier I was going to spend some time tonight making characters because I got the rest of the night off. Guess that message didn't get through fast enough.

Also been taking a closer look at Guru, I'll have commentary on that later.

[Seerow]

Love the Gentle Touch ability. Dealing exclusively nonlethal damage is really cool flavorwise, and the 1d4->8d4 + wis mod damage progression mirrors without overshadowing the rogue (though has the advantage of eventually affects everything, which is really nice)


Philosophies: First, I want to say I love the love for Polearms and the Two Bladed Sword here. Double Sword is one of my favorite fantasy weapons, even if there's rarely reason to use it. Polearms in general seem to be underused in Pathfinder (most Paizo fans I've seen focus on big crit weapons or the Greatsword).


So each philosophy has a way of generating temp HP, and spend that temp HP on other stuff.
Akasin: Spend 1 hour meditating, gain 5*level temp HP.
Sineater: Gain 1/2 of damage dealt with gentle touch enhanced attack as temp HP (max: 2*level)
Vayist: As sineater

First, I want to comment that these should really be their own resource. Let them get consumed by temp HP, sure. But don't let the Guru consume temp hp from other sources to fuel abilities. This is guaranteed to cause some sort of trick you're not anticipating, and be a massive headache. Nip that in the bud early, and make the hp generated by the philosophy what you use to fuel philosophy abilities, and balance the philosophies against each other.


Akasin's the really odd one out here. It seems like he's set up to be the more Wizardy type. He spends time to get a big chunk of points at once, and has to ration them because recovering it is a big pain. But honestly what's going to happen is you get into combat, and because you're still a melee character (Half of the Akasin's abilities are melee oriented even!) you get attacked and suddenly half those temporary HP are gone, when you'd have rather had them saved for use on abilities. Maybe that's intended, but it seems like a pretty crappy deal to me when compared to the other two philosophies that get to recharge mid-combat. This is even before considering that you can get screwed out of your powers by being stuck in a dungeon or it just being a rainy day. I love the flavor here, but this mechanic really needs to be reworked, I'm sorry.

Also, as a level 19 ability, and the capstone of the path, Travel the Paths of Light should be a straight up Teleport, or even Greater Teleport effect. Move Action Dimension Door would make a great ability at a lower level (say around 11ish), even if you made it cost temp hp/stunning fist uses, but at level 19 why not give access to some real long distance transportation?

Finally: What action type is Incadescent Strike? Given the wording, I could see a fair argument for either Standard or Full Round.

Wow, not only does he get his points way more easily, he also gets just from his Veil of Sins more useful/interesting and just straight up more abilities to spend that HP on than Akasin does from all 20 levels. I'd love to see the Akasin get a list of abilities he can use more like this under Luminosity.

Purify the unclean seems to be an infinite feedback loop, given the lack of cap currently in the document (which is weird because I could have sworn your recent post said a cap was being put on sin eater temp hp generation). I'm going to assume that limit's in place and my document just hadn't updated yet when I refreshed. But for fun: Attack someone, deal 10 damage, gain 5 temp hp. Attack again, sacrificing all 5, deal 20 damage, gain 10 temp hp. Attack again, sacrificing all 10, deal 30 damage. Continue until you run out of enemies or your temp hp is arbitrarily high and you one shot whatever.

By the way, why can Purify the Unclean get a 2:1 damage:hp ratio and be used on a single attack in a full attack, when Incadescent Strike requires it to be the only attack of the round and only gets a 1:1 ratio, while dealing with a worse recharge for temp hp? Yeah you're restricting types this works against, but damn if it isn't otherwise about 20x better while being 9 levels lower.

As written, Wages of Sin doesn't currently require you to actually hit with your touch attack.

Flowing Breeze is much better than either other philosophy's first level ability. +1-6 AC vs Detect Alignment or Light for temp hp? No contest. And we get the awesome Sineater damage dealt = temp hp.

Stunning Shurikens are awesome, but tools of the trade feels weaker than the 4th level abilities for the other philosophies.

Breeze of the East wind is similarly weak compared to same level abilities. Seriously, how often are you going to need a boosted range increment? And even in the instance you did, there's a veil for that, and there's feats/prestige classes that do it MUCH better (unless those got nerfed in PF for some reason?)

Breath of Life is cool. Faster emergency version of raise dead, fits the theme.

Leaf on the Wind is another ability that is pretty weak compared to what the others get. It's flavorful, but the slowfall thing is literally a gimped 1st level spell, and the free action stand up is a pretty niche ability. This is competing with a sizable bonus to grapple checks and a heavy strike dealing unmitigatable damage. I'm not sure what the actual intended balance point is here because these abilities vary so dramatically in power.

Roaring Gale is pretty awesome, though I wish it could be within 1 range increment (and thus making your Breath of the East Wind much more useful). I will point out that this (level 16) is the first thing this Philosophy gets to actually spend temporary hp on that he might want to use regularly.

Perfect Independence is good.

Verdict on the 3 philosophies? Sin Eater is the best, with Vayist coming in behind it, and Akisan being on the bottom. Sin Eater gets a great resource method, good things to spend it on, and powerful/interesting abilities at every level. Vayist starts out very strong, but doesn't get much in the way of good abilities to spend its HP on. Akisan gets better abilities than Vayist, but worse than Sin Eater, and gets a MUCH worse resource management method, which is what drops it to the dead bottom.

Honestly I'd consider balancing the Philosophies somewhere between where Vayist and Sineater are now. Sineater is very likely too strong. Akasin desperately needs to come up, and Vayist could use some more things to spend hp on that he cares about.



Anyway, moving on to the other features.
This is fun, and flavorful. I like them. It would also fit the flavor really well if disrupting the Chakra messed with any magic items or veils set to those body slots. You could then drop the Sunder Veil ability as it's being rolled into this.

Also, are these all usable at will? Honestly this might be something you want to tie into the Temporary HP mechanics, or even Stunning Fist.


Feet Chakra Disruption is absolutely devastating. Land that and any melee character in the game is dead (seriously at level 6 when you get that, the Guru has 3 essence to invest. You're cutting 25ft of movement off the enemy. If they don't have strong ranged attacks, you just killed them with that alone).

By comparison, Shoulder Disruption is nowhere near as devastating, making you an easier target, but not taking you out of the fight.


...okay Head Chakra Disruption, a 1 round stun? You realize this is an ability the class had access to back at level 1, right? Should go up to 1d4+1 rounds, and/or be used with my earlier suggestion of disable veils/magic items in that slot.

Seal Wounds: Ew essence invested for the day abilities.

Remaining abilities: All are cool abilities. Though I expect giving Disjunction at level 16 is going to cause you a lot of headaches from whining, even if it is in a limited form.




Veils: Just going to comment on Guru exclusive veils, not many of those yet.

Gloves of the Master Thief: This one is boring, but pretty standard utility. The Hands Slot is generally a big one for damage dealing, so I don't expect many gurus to go for using the bind, but I guess at least it's there so the Guru can fill that role if desired.

Diadem of Pure Reflection: Situational, but at least against effects you really care about. Maybe add Paralysis to the list?

Either way, those Chakra binds are awesome, and I love it.

[Ssalarn]

Thanks Seerow!
I think your views are a good summation of the consensus of the class, and I pretty much agree with all of them.
Obviously there will be a bunch of new Veils rolling out for the Guru, so that will come along shortly. Glad you liked the Diadem, that was one of my favorites. Cool, powerful, thematic, and situational enough that I don't have to waste time arguing the numbers with anyone. *knocks on wood*

To some up your opinion on the Philosophies :
Vayist needs more goodies, Sineater needs to be dialed back a bit, and Akasin needs to be able to generate his pool more reliably. Yes?

I'll work on that and get it tweaked for the next update to try and have them all at the same general power level, which should be a bit above where the Vayist is now, and a bit below where the Sineater currently is.

The temp hp thing (which I really like and Andreas actually loved) is something that I can see ending up with some weird interactions with other classes that might make it hard to regulate in a group. So, maybe like an Incarna pool that can be spent to activate abilities, with an option to allow hp damage to draw from the pool instead (in kind of a unique Fast Healing sort of mechanic)? The temp hp and various class abilities are basically to keep the Guru viable and help him avoid a bad case of SRDS (Sudden Rogue Death Syndrome). He should basically be the Incarna cross of a Monk and Rogue, so not a lot of focus on armor, but defensive abilities that are very unique and thematic.

[Seerow]

To some up your opinion on the Philosophies :
Vayist needs more goodies, Sineater needs to be dialed back a bit, and Akasin needs to be able to generate his pool more reliably. Yes?


Basically, yes.


The temp hp thing (which I really like and Andreas actually loved) is something that I can see ending up with some weird interactions with other classes that might make it hard to regulate in a group. So, maybe like an Incarna pool that can be spent to activate abilities, with an option to allow hp damage to draw from the pool instead (in kind of a unique Fast Healing sort of mechanic)? The temp hp and various class abilities are basically to keep the Guru viable and help him avoid a bad case of SRDS (Sudden Rogue Death Syndrome). He should basically be the Incarna cross of a Monk and Rogue, so not a lot of focus on armor, but defensive abilities that are very unique and thematic.

Hrm.. an incarna pool spent to activate abilities. What if the Guru had the ability to tap his essence or veils, giving up their benefits temporarily to fuel the philosophy abilities?

It might need some rejiggering for specifics(ie instead of "4 temp hp a round" it might be "Sacrifice a bound veil to gain this benefit for 5 rounds", but sacrificing a veil or essence for a period of time for an active ability opens up room to have powerful active use abilities without being overpowered. (Consider it something akin to psionic focus or combat focus).


It's a pretty different mechanic from what you have now, but it's harder to abuse, easier to work with, and unique compared to what any other veilweaver has.

[ArcanistSupreme]

The temp hp thing (which I really like and Andreas actually loved) is something that I can see ending up with some weird interactions with other classes that might make it hard to regulate in a group. So, maybe like an Incarna pool that can be spent to activate abilities, with an option to allow hp damage to draw from the pool instead (in kind of a unique Fast Healing sort of mechanic)? The temp hp and various class abilities are basically to keep the Guru viable and help him avoid a bad case of SRDS (Sudden Rogue Death Syndrome). He should basically be the Incarna cross of a Monk and Rogue, so not a lot of focus on armor, but defensive abilities that are very unique and thematic.

What about something like the Crusader's delayed damage pool fueled by essentia?

[Ssalarn]

Hmmm... There was a mechanic called "Essence Burn" that got scrapped a while back. But it might allow me to play with a delayed damage and ability activation subsystem that could be pretty neat... Let me run a few test and lay a few things out, see if I can't do something with it.

[Seerow]

Hmmm... There was a mechanic called "Essence Burn" that got scrapped a while back. But it might allow me to play with a delayed damage and ability activation subsystem that could be pretty neat... Let me run a few test and lay a few things out, see if I can't do something with it.

So basically something like the Crusader's Delayed Damage Pool, but with the option at the start of a round to burn an essence to clear the pool instead of taking the damage? And then burn essence to activate the other abilities?

I was liking the idea of burning off veils/chakra bindings, but that does make for a solid starting point to work with.

[Ssalarn]

So basically something like the Crusader's Delayed Damage Pool, but with the option at the start of a round to burn an essence to clear the pool instead of taking the damage? And then burn essence to activate the other abilities?

I was liking the idea of burning off veils/chakra bindings, but that does make for a solid starting point to work with.

So here's what I'm thinking:

The Guru (in my head if nowhere else) is kind of like, the master of Essence and Chakra points. The Vizier can use Essence to pump up magic items or empower Veils that give him near wizardly might, but the Guru is the guy who can actually use raw Essence to crack armor, disrupt magic, etc.

So I play on that idea a bit. We give him Essence Burn as a class ability, and what it does is allow him to spend Essence to negate hit point damage (something at a rough rate of 5 hp = 1 Essence). He can't use that Essence until he recovers (we'll narrow down a good timeframe for that, but I'm thinking 1-5 minutes currently). Then we adjust all of the Philosophy abilities to deal actual damage on activation, and scale them to equate to a regular progression that equates to the rough value of the Essence he would have to "burn" to utilize it. So, for example, Lambent Blades might be adjusted to a 5 hit points every 2 rounds sort of thing, or basically 1-4 Essence damage in an average fight. Sineater and Vayist will probably be adjusted so that their abilities help them recover Essence Burn in combat instead of granting temp hp, but the Akasin stays largely the same. That means the Akasin can potentially activate his abilities "for free" from the pool of temp hp he starts with, or can continue to Essence Burn when the temp hp run out. The Akasin ends up being able to support his abilities more easily in short combats while staying viable in long ones, the Sineater needs to be fairly aggressive to prevent a down-tick in power, and the Vayist fills a good middle ground in between.

Thoughts?

[danzibr]

A general note - Seerow is almost always The Man.
Ahh, much better.

[Person_Man]

So here's what I'm thinking:

The Guru (in my head if nowhere else) is kind of like, the master of Essence and Chakra points. The Vizier can use Essence to pump up magic items or empower Veils that give him near wizardly might, but the Guru is the guy who can actually use raw Essence to crack armor, disrupt magic, etc.

So I play on that idea a bit. We give him Essence Burn as a class ability, and what it does is allow him to spend Essence to negate hit point damage (something at a rough rate of 5 hp = 1 Essence). He can't use that Essence until he recovers (we'll narrow down a good timeframe for that, but I'm thinking 1-5 minutes currently). Then we adjust all of the Philosophy abilities to deal actual damage on activation, and scale them to equate to a regular progression that equates to the rough value of the Essence he would have to "burn" to utilize it. So, for example, Lambent Blades might be adjusted to a 5 hit points every 2 rounds sort of thing, or basically 1-4 Essence damage in an average fight. Sineater and Vayist will probably be adjusted so that their abilities help them recover Essence Burn in combat instead of granting temp hp, but the Akasin stays largely the same. That means the Akasin can potentially activate his abilities "for free" from the pool of temp hp he starts with, or can continue to Essence Burn when the temp hp run out. The Akasin ends up being able to support his abilities more easily in short combats while staying viable in long ones, the Sineater needs to be fairly aggressive to prevent a down-tick in power, and the Vayist fills a good middle ground in between.

Thoughts?

It's a really cool concept. But my opinion is that the fatal flaw of Magic of Essentia was it's complexity. So you should avoid having different classes treat Essence differently. It just makes it harder to explain and understand.

Might I suggest turning it around. Have the class start with 0 Essence. It gains 1 point of temporary Essence every time it takes 10 points of damage inflicted by an enemy (not by itself, an ally, a Vicious weapon, a trap, etc). The temporary Essence stacks with itself, up to some maximum number, for some reasonable amount of time (1 minute?). You can then invest it in Veils to gain bonuses.

That way Essence is always the same and isn't spent differently. It's just gained differently. Which is easier to get your head around, because there are already a bunch of different sources for Essence.

[Seerow]

It's a really cool concept. But my opinion is that the fatal flaw of Magic of Essentia was it's complexity. So you should avoid having different classes treat Essence differently. It just makes it harder to explain and understand.

Might I suggest turning it around. Have the class start with 0 Essence. It gains 1 point of temporary Essence every time it takes 10 points of damage inflicted by an enemy (not by itself, an ally, a Vicious weapon, a trap, etc). The temporary Essence stacks with itself, up to some maximum number, for some reasonable amount of time (1 minute?). You can then invest it in Veils to gain bonuses.

That way Essence is always the same and isn't spent differently. It's just gained differently. Which is easier to get your head around, because there are already a bunch of different sources for Essence.

This ends up running into the same problem I had with the Daevic though. You end up with lots of essence and nowhere to put it until very high levels. It also means stripping out most of the philosophy abilities, which I think are intended to be a big part of the class.

I agree with the Incarna is too complex thing. I hate that every power has 3+ different abilities, different body slots you have to keep track of (and base all of your veils around to use the chakras optimally). It really showed itself as an annoyance when actually trying to build a Daevic. But Ssalarn has pointedly refused to even acknowledge that complaint no matter how many times I want to make it, so I have to assume that's something that's just not going to change at this point.

That said, as noted above I don't think just bonus essence is a good way to handle this. Unless you want to also keep the bonus essence as something you can spend on special abilities, at which point the only difference between that and burning normal essence is burning normal essence is the former tends to be stronger.

[Ssalarn]

I agree with the Incarna is too complex thing. I hate that every power has 3+ different abilities, different body slots you have to keep track of (and base all of your veils around to use the chakras optimally). It really showed itself as an annoyance when actually trying to build a Daevic. But Ssalarn has pointedly refused to even acknowledge that complaint no matter how many times I want to make it, so I have to assume that's something that's just not going to change at this point.

Sorry Seerow. It's not that I'm ignoring you it's just... Well, slots and binds is a thing that is going to happen. I know that it adds a certain amount of complexity, but that complexity is accounted for in the over-all scheme of the system as well.

What I will consider is ways to make that system as accessible as possible.

Would making the Veil "sets" an official thing instead of a kind of hidden subsystem (so like, I may classify a Veil set as "Elephant Armor", and then that set includes armbands of the Irked Elephant, Behemoth Hide, and a couple more, all occupying different slots), and then having Passions give access to those sets instead of individual Veils help?

So basically, each Passion would come with one or two complimentary sets of Veils for you to choose from instead of a specific list? You'd probably have two sets of 4, so you'd end up with more total Veils to choose from, but there would be some overlap between those choices (for example, instead of having one for each slot, you might end up with some slots that have to be filled from your open choices.

A Wrath Daevic might have access to the Bloody Warlord set and the Sea Dragon set, Dominion might get the Stalwart Sentinal set and the Lord Commander set, and Desire might get the Sultan's Garb and Seductress' Veils.

[Seerow]

Sorry Seerow. It's not that I'm ignoring you it's just... Well, slots and binds is a thing that is going to happen. I know that it adds a certain amount of complexity, but that complexity is accounted for in the over-all scheme of the system as well.


The binds I can accept. The slots specifically seem to add really little for something that adds a ton of restriction. And those restrictions are things that the people complaining everything is overpowered constantly ignore. At any given time when building the Daevic, I felt like I had really very few options, especially if I wanted to utilize my chakra binds at all.


Would making the Veil "sets" an official thing instead of a kind of hidden subsystem (so like, I may classify a Veil set as "Elephant Armor", and then that set includes armbands of the Irked Elephant, Behemoth Hide, and a couple more, all occupying different slots), and then having Passions give access to those sets instead of individual Veils help?


I'm not sure how this is supposed to make anything simpler. You're reducing the word count in the passions marginally, but now from there people have to go to the set, and then go figure out what's included in each set. It just adds an extra step, without changing anything really. That doesn't simplify anything so far as I can tell.


Now what might be cool (while still not simplifying anything, because if you want simpler the way to get that is by getting rid of body slots) is if you made those sets a thing with say 3 veils, but make the entire set as a bundle being shaped count as a single shaped veil as far as your limits of how many you can have shaped go, with a limit of 1 set shaped at a time. This would help out low level daevics with their "I have more essence than I can spend" issues, and make it easier to pick up veils that suit you.

So a Daevic with a limit of 2 shaped veils could have "Elephant Armor" plus one veil of his choice, taking up a total of 4 body slots.


This way you will pick up 1 set that defines your main focus ("Elephant Armor" if you want to be really defensive "Bloody Warlord" for a strong offense, etc) and then you pick your other veils to offer support to that, and take advantage of any chakra binds not covered by your set. It also saves you from having to come up with synergies for having the whole set shaped (which I believe you mentioned was part of the plan for them earlier)

[Ssalarn]

Thanks for the feedback Seerow!

Let me ruminate on this a bit and see what I can come up with to make this more user-friendly, or if I just want to leave that piece of it "as is".

I like your idea about them picking one of the sets and just kind of getting it, I just need to get it to a place where it doesn't result in a big direct increase of power at low levels....

Hmmm... I'm kind of toying around with some ideas about Daevic Aspects (I know I'm already using that word elsewhere right now), where you assume particular Veil sets as mantles to determine your Veil-based abilities....

I've got to think on it.

[Seerow]

Hrm...

How about this: You keep slots for the other classes. All Soulmelds have a body slot associated with them. Daevic even still cares about slots for Chakra binds.

But Daevic has the ability to shape multiple veils into the same slot. However, instead of getting 4 veils from Passion, you get 2 veil sets from Passion. These sets are why Daevic can shape multiple veils in the same slot (because if two sets conflict, you still want to be able to wear both).

You could go with a rough progression that looks something like:
{table=head]Level/Essence | Sets+Veils | Veil Capacity | Total Capacity
1 | 1+0 | 1 | 3
2 | 1+1 | 1 | 4
3 | 1+1 | 2 | 8
4 | 1+2 | 2 | 10
5 | 1+2 | 2 | 10
6 | 1+2 | 3 | 15
7 | 1+2 | 3 | 15
8 | 2+2 | 3 | 24
9 | 2+2 | 3 | 24
10 | 2+2 | 3 | 24
11 | 2+2 | 3 | 24
12 | 2+3 | 4 | 36
13 | 2+3 | 4 | 36
14 | 2+3 | 4 | 36
15 | 2+3 | 5 | 45
16 | 2+3 | 5 | 45
17 | 2+3 | 5 | 45
18 | 2+4 | 6 | 60
19 | 2+4 | 6 | 60
20 | 2+4 | 6 | 60[/table]

I tried to keep this close to what you had before. You end up with two more Passion related veils before (2 sets of 3 instead of 4 you pick), but they're restricted via the sets, so it is mostly giving more options rather than letting people cherry pick what they want most.

I also shifted the first bonus essence capacity from level 9 to level 3. Simply put, without giving an overwhelming number of veils at first level, it's the only way to avoid the issue I was running into where you can max out everything. With a bonus capacity coming online at level 3 like the other two veilweavers get, this never becomes an issue.

Given more time I'd probably tweak the table a little more (a lot of times the new veil comes online at the same time as a bonus essence, making several dead levels followed by a sudden big jump), but this gives pretty much the general idea.

[Ssalarn]

I like it, but I do feel like I'd need to tone down the Passions even more to make something like that work. Or change a lot of the Veils so that they don't provide a bonus until Essence is invested. It's just hard to get around the fact that 4 Veils coming online right at level one is a lot of oomph, even without Essence invested.

[Seerow]

I like it, but I do feel like I'd need to tone down the Passions even more to make something like that work. Or change a lot of the Veils so that they don't provide a bonus until Essence is invested. It's just hard to get around the fact that 4 Veils coming online right at level one is a lot of oomph, even without Essence invested.

Maybe. I posted my opinions in depth on the Passions over on DSP, but I think Wrath has already been nerfed to the point that it's useless.

What you could do is add a "Passion" set as one of your set options, that includes a number of the Essence based things from passions converted into veils (and improved accordingly, because most of the passion bonuses are worse than a veil individually, and only really pull ahead when taken as a whole). Then just leave 1-3 passion abilities (like the capstones) that don't scale with essence.

You could alternatively rework the veils so they're weaker until you invest essence, but I'd be careful with making them have no benefit at all. My suggestion is a buff at low level, but at high levels it's not a particularly noticeable increase. And a big part of the point is to get the versatility that should be associated with a veilweaver online earlier.


The biggest issue I see is it seeming like too much put next to the Vizier, who is 1 veil behind the Daevic at low levels. On the other hand, the Daevic is very restricted on the majority of his veils. At higher levels the Vizier's advantages become clearer (between Veilshifting, higher essence, more capacity, and more chakra binds), but at low levels it would be easy to complain the Daevic and Vizier are too close together in veilweaving capability.

[Ssalarn]

I really liked your points over in the DS thread about the Wrath Passion. I'm going to look at reworking it so the abilities synergize better, and maybe shift the focus over to make him awesome when he Bull Rushes, giving him more of that synergy seen over in Desire. Similarly, I think Dominion might get a couple TWF and/or shield feats sprinkled in to his abilities to give more options than just two-handing a shield Cap style, or possibly some abilities that act like those feats for the purposes of helping him do what he does.

[Seerow]

I really liked your points over in the DS thread about the Wrath Passion. I'm going to look at reworking it so the abilities synergize better, and maybe shift the focus over to make him awesome when he Bull Rushes, giving him more of that synergy seen over in Desire. Similarly, I think Dominion might get a couple TWF and/or shield feats sprinkled in to his abilities to give more options than just two-handing a shield Cap style, or possibly some abilities that act like those feats for the purposes of helping him do what he does.

Yeah both of those sound like good steps forward. Combined with scaling Desire back and playing around a bit with the veil lists, and they should be relatively balanced against each other. Possibly a few more tweaks still needed, but it's definitely the right place to start.

[Ssalarn]

Yeah both of those sound like good steps forward. Combined with scaling Desire back and playing around a bit with the veil lists, and they should be relatively balanced against each other. Possibly a few more tweaks still needed, but it's definitely the right place to start.

I'm thinking making Bull Rush and Overrun attempts kind of Wrath's modus operandi is a pretty cool way to go, make him a spikey pinball of death throwing peeps around the battlefield. I'd probably drop the attack bonus for being under 50% hp and shift it to tie in to the Bull Rush dynamic. I figure mid-levelish when Vital Strike would be on line, I could give him the ability to take an attack action as part of a Bull Rush so you can keep your damage up (a Vital Strike combo'd up with Armbands of the Irked Elephant followed by tossing a guy across the battlefield is something I'd like to see from a level 10+ Wrath Daevic). Speaking of which, AotIE are probably going to get adjusted so that instead of granting the complete Improved Bull Rush feat, they just nix the AoO from Bull Rushing. Combined with the Veil's other bonuses that puts right where it should be and should remove any concerns about it's relative power level.

[Katana1515]

Hi, I have been following this playtest with great interest both here and on the DSP forum. I love what you are doing with the Incarnum system, its a real joy to see it get the DSP treatment in the same way Psionics did. Just wanted to comment on one thing Ssalarn said on the DSP thread about the Guru.


Instead of temp hp generation, all Gurus get an ability to "burn" Essence to negate a certain amount of damage (something at the rate of roughly 1 Essence = 5 hp). Essence burned in this way needs to regenerate and cannot be used for anything else for a set time frame (maybe like a 5 minute meditation or something similar). The bulk of the Philosophy abilities stay the same, but instead of spending temp hp, they instead deal real damage that can be negated via Essence Burn with the big change being that instead of generating temp hp, the Vayist and the Sineater instead gain a method of recovering Essence Burn (maybe whenever they crit while using their Gentle Touch they recover an amount of burn equal to their crit modifier, or maybe whenever they deal at least X damage with their Gentle Touch). Essence burn would be limited to something along the lines of allowing you take an amount of Essence burn equal to your class level in a single round.

I am not sure if this is the right approach. If the main impetus for the change is fear of abuse by using THP gaining mechanics like Vigour or the Stone Giants Girdle Veil then why not simply make the Gurus THP's into a separate pool that act like THPs but have a different name. Then make it clear that only these Philosophy Hit Points (someone might need to come up with a better name :) ) can be used to fuel the classes abilities. This just seems like a simpler solution. The essence burn concept is cool, but I am afraid you might just be adding another laying of complexity and bookkeeping to a class that already has quite a lot of unique class features and rapidly changing factors/numbers in the form of gentle touch and veils. The Essence Burn mechanic sounds like something that would benefit from its own class or perhaps an Archetype or Prestige class? Also you would need to balance using real HP as fuel for abilities just as much as THP's, as their are just as many ways to gain HP's rapidly, maybe even more?

Also on the Deavic, I was surprised when I built one. I ran into all the same issues that Seerow mentions. The lack of something like Pounce or other ways to get mobility really sets back the natural attacker build that i feel should be the classes unique selling point. Does Pathfinder really need another class were THF with a greatsword or a Falchion is the obviously optimal choice for melee? Also its sad that the Passion abilities all seem rather specific/limited at least at low levels. that the Wrath abilities only activate at below 50% seems to me to be too weak I was desperately looking for other places to put my essence.

Final tangent: someone needs to tell this Syonique guy that just because a magus can reliable outdamage a fighter at just about any level of play does not mean that the Magus is a ****ing Tier 1 class. Neither is the Deavic (indeed the Deavic as far as i can tell doesn't yet have half the all important utility abilities that make a tier 3 class IMHO)

Don't mean this to sound critical, just wanted to throw in my 2 cents and please carry on the good work.

[Seerow]

I'm thinking making Bull Rush and Overrun attempts kind of Wrath's modus operandi is a pretty cool way to go, make him a spikey pinball of death throwing peeps around the battlefield. I'd probably drop the attack bonus for being under 50% hp and shift it to tie in to the Bull Rush dynamic.

So basically like Desire gets, gain +X to hit against an enemy you have used Bullrush or Overrun on in the last hour?



I figure mid-levelish when Vital Strike would be on line, I could give him the ability to take an attack action as part of a Bull Rush so you can keep your damage up (a Vital Strike combo'd up with Armbands of the Irked Elephant followed by tossing a guy across the battlefield is something I'd like to see from a level 10+ Wrath Daevic).

Going to reitterate that Knockback from Races of Stone was a great feat, and recreating it here (much like Dominion gains the best effect of Zhentarim fighter) would be pretty great here (that is when you hit with an attack where you are using power attack, make a free bullrush attempt, except you don't move with the target)



Speaking of which, AotIE are probably going to get adjusted so that instead of granting the complete Improved Bull Rush feat, they just nix the AoO from Bull Rushing. Combined with the Veil's other bonuses that puts right where it should be and should remove any concerns about it's relative power level.

So you'd still get the extra attack on a successful bullrush, but no bonus to it? Would this still work with the Wrath ability?

[Ssalarn]

Thanks Katana,
That actually made me smile :smallsmile:

I haven't made any changes to the Guru yet, and I honestly am not sure what direction I want to go. I'm just trying to give him some options that don't create more paperwork for the player, which is what I'm worried another pool would do. Temp hp are pretty straightforward and built into the existing character sheets; something entirely new is not, and the Guru of course already has his Essence Pool to account for.

If everyone really feels like giving the Guru an additional pool to track for one half of his class abilities is easier to keep track of... Well, then that may be what we do. I just want to make sure we've really evaluated the thing and looked at it from all angles.

I, personally, liked the idea of Essence burn because it let the Guru do everything from one resource pool; bookkeeping is pretty straightforward and you're only managing one resource (I know, technically two with the hp dynamic, but every single player manages hp one way or another regardless). It also gives the Guru some play options: do I run it to the line and trust the healer to save me if something goes wrong, or do I play it conservatively and trade a little of my attacking power and utility, waiting for a moment to jump in and restore it with some well timed attacks?

I see the pros and cons of all the different options, I'm just not a huge fan of giving a class that already has a pool he needs to allocate to his different abilities yet another pool to manage the other 1/2.

[Seerow]

I've agreed with the idea of essence burn every step of the way.

What I disagree with is the idea of burning essence to negate damage, instead of burning essence to do cool stuff.

[Ssalarn]

I've agreed with the idea of essence burn every step of the way.

What I disagree with is the idea of burning essence to negate damage, instead of burning essence to do cool stuff.

Mmkay.

So that brings me to my next question, do you think the Guru is tough enough as is to survive without a mechanic for mitigating damage, whether that be temp hp or Essence Burn, or what have you?
Because I'm... less confident of that. Maybe the Sineater, but everyone's been letting me know he's a bit OP, so....

Because really that was whole point behind Essence Burn, to have a mechanic that can fuel your abilities, but can also save your bacon if things get really crazy, maybe buy you that one round you need to haul your ass over to the cleric for an emergency healing, or buy you that last ditch attempt to drop this guy who you know has to be getting close.

**EDIT** I see you addressed this over in the DS thread, and your answer was basically "Yes, the Guru is tough enough; and if you're worried, let him burn Essence for healing". I can go with that.

[Seerow]

Mmkay.

So that brings me to my next question, do you think the Guru is tough enough as is to survive without a mechanic for mitigating damage, whether that be temp hp or Essence Burn, or what have you?
Because I'm... less confident of that. Maybe the Sineater, but everyone's been letting me know he's a bit OP, so....

I think your veils are probably enough to keep you alive. If they're not, the Daevic is in just as much trouble as the Guru is, because the guru if anything has access to more defensive stuff, and a d10 hd isn't THAT many more hp than the d8.

That said, I'm not opposed to an essence burn for HP option. The issue arrises when you have the opposite as a thing. For example say a Vizier can burn up to 1/4th his level in essence(round up), and gain 5 temp hp (or damage blocked, if you prefer) per essence (increase to 10 at level7 and 15 at level 14), you can still have the HP mechanic you wanted, just without a lot of the awkwardness that would come from the way you've been trying to run it.

Edit: fwiw I'm in the middle of doing a mock write up of basically what I have in mind as far as the philosophies go. Maybe that will help you out.

[Ssalarn]

I think your veils are probably enough to keep you alive. If they're not, the Daevic is in just as much trouble as the Guru is, because the guru if anything has access to more defensive stuff, and a d10 hd isn't THAT many more hp than the d8.

That said, I'm not opposed to an essence burn for HP option. The issue arrises when you have the opposite as a thing. For example say a Vizier can burn up to 1/4th his level in essence(round up), and gain 5 temp hp (or damage blocked, if you prefer) per essence (increase to 10 at level7 and 15 at level 14), you can still have the HP mechanic you wanted, just without a lot of the awkwardness that would come from the way you've been trying to run it.

Edit: fwiw I'm in the middle of doing a mock write up of basically what I have in mind as far as the philosophies go. Maybe that will help you out.

I figured the Daevic had some direct armor buffs and better proficiencies shoring him up and making him a bit less likely to take a hit.

However, I think we've reached an accord on the thing, and I've got some ideas for the next update. We'll look at keeping the Essence Burn mechanic, but discarding the hit point cost portion of things.

[maximus25]

When will we get a good Truenamer port?

[Ssalarn]

When will we get a good Truenamer port?

This was actually on my list, but it looks like Interjection Games beat me to the punch. If you pop over to the Paizo forums and search for Truenamer, he's spitballing some pretty awesome ideas. While you're there, feel free to pop into the MoI forum and post any thoughts. Speaking of which: we're gonna change the name. Feel free to pitch your idea, I think Mysteries of Essence is the frontrunner currently.

[Seerow]

This was actually on my list, but it looks like Interjection Games beat me to the punch. If you pop over to the Paizo forums and search for Truenamer, he's spitballing some pretty awesome ideas. While you're there, feel free to pop into the MoI forum and post any thoughts. Speaking of which: we're gonna change the name. Feel free to pitch your idea, I think Mysteries of Essence is the frontrunner currently.

I like Alliteration. Essence of Eternity? I dunno.


Also I didn't see your other post until just now, so I already finished my mock ups of the Philosophies. Take or ignore these as you will, it's my attempt at converting to an essence burn plus balancing the three a bit more.


Philosophy: All Guru’s follow a particular Philosophy. Usually the tenets of this belief are passed down by Guru masters in schools or monasteries where like-minded individuals join them to discuss ideology. Guru’s gain special benefits based on their Philosophy at 1st, 4th, 7th, 10th, 13th, 16th, and 19th level. A Guru can choose from the following Philosophies:


Akasin: The Akasin believes in becoming one with the forces of righteousness, harnessing the radiance of the universe to gain powers of light and healing.

Proficiencies: bardiche, bec de corbin, falchion, glaive, greatsword, lance, longbow, ranseur, two-bladed sword

Absorb Radiance: At 1st level, the Akasin can spend at least 15 minutes meditating in the light of the sun to gain access to an amount of temporary essence equal to ½ his class level (round up). This temporary essence lasts for 1 hour per class level, or whenever the Akasin uses this ability next, whichever comes first. If the Akasin uses an ability that burns essence, this temporary Essence is lost first, and is not regained until the Akasin meditates in the light again.

The Akasin can choose to burn 1 point of essence to gain the ability to cast Light, as a spell like ability at will for the next 24 hours.

The Akasin may also choose to burn essence as a standard action to heal 5 points of damage to himself or an ally he touches. The Akasin may burn up to 1 point of essence per 4 class levels (round up) at once on this effect. At level 7 the Akasin heals 10 points per essence burned. At level 14, the Akasin heals 15 points per essence burned. You may use this ability on allies a number of times per day equal to your maximum essence capacity.

Luminosity: At 4th level the Akasin can restore light to those who have lost it. By burning 1 essence, the Akasin can cast remove blindness/deafness as a spell-like ability with a caster level equal to his class level. At 16th level the Akasin may burn 2 essence to cast Remove Curse or Break Enchantment.

Alternatively, the Akasin can burn 1 essence to fire a single potent ray of blinding energy at an enemy. This ray deals 1d4 damage per class level (1d6 vs. undead) and blinds the target for 1d6 rounds. A DC 10 +1/2 class level + Wisdom modifier Fortitude save reduces the damage by ½ and negates the blindness effect.

Lambent Blades: At 7th level the Akasin can transform a wielded Philosophy weapon into a weapon of pure light. By burning 1 essence the Akasin transforms his weapon into an object of pure light for 3 rounds. Whenever it is used to attack an enemy, a weapon enhanced this way bypasses shield bonuses to AC, and ignores the first two points of any Armor bonus to AC an opponent may have as it leaks through the cracks and seams of their protective gear. This effect does not bypass bonuses granted by armor or shields with the mirrored property. Alternatively, when this ability is active the Akasin can spend 1 use of his Stunning Fist ability to grant the weapon the brilliant energyproperty for one round. Lucent Revivification: At 10th level the Akasin can restore life to the dead once a day by inundating their body in pure, holy light. By sacrificing 25 temporary hit points, the Akasin can cast raise deadas a spell-like ability with a caster level equal to his level.

Scintillant Form: At 13th level the Akasin’s body has begun its transformation into a vessel of pure light. The Akasin is now immune to the blinded and dazzled conditions. In addition, his body radiates a constant daylight effect (caster level equal to the Akasin’s class level). This effect can be suppressed or resumed as a free action. While the daylight effect is active, the Akasin can burn 2 essence to negate the miss chance of one creature within its radius.

Incandescent Strike: At 16th level, the Akasin may make a single attack against an opponent with any weapon he wields. When the Akasin declares this attack he may burn up to ¼th his level in essence and add 10 times that amount of damage to his attack. This damage is dealt as untyped radiant energy and is not subject to damage reduction or energy resistance.

Travel the Paths of Light: At 19th level the Akasin can transport himself instantly by becoming one with the light around him. As a swift action, the Akasin can burn 3 points of essence to gain the ability to to travel between light sources as if by means of a dimension door spell as a move action for 10 rounds. The limitation is that the magical transport must begin and end in an area with at least normal light. The Akasin can burn 5 points of essence as a full round action to travel even greater distances, traveling to another light source as though by the Teleport spell.




Sineater: Guru’s of this philosophy believe that there is a finite amount of sin in the world and use their abilities to draw it out of others. Some Sineaters do this out of an inherent desire to bring peace to those they free from sin; others believe that sins contain a dark and volatile power that they can wield to their own ends, blending the wickedness of others with their own inner energy.

Proficiencies: The Sineater gains additional proficiency with the bo staff, dan bong, heavy flail, mancatcher, net, sibat, snag net, spiked chain, and tonfa. The Sineater also gains the Improve Unarmed Strike feat as a bonus feat and treats his unarmed strike as a Philosophy weapon for all abilities.

Devour Sin: At 1st level, once per round when the Sineater deals nonlethal damage with his Gentle Touch ability or a weapon granted by this philosophy to a creature with an Intelligence score of 3 or greater, he can choose to recover 1 point of essence burn, or gain 5 temporary hit points. At level 7 this temporary hit point gain increases to 10. At level 14 this temporary hitpoint gain increases to 15. These temporary hitpoints last for 1 minute.

The sineater may choose to spend a standard action to burn up to 1 essence per 4 class levels (round up), gaining temporary HP as though he had hit an enemy with Gentle Touch for each essence burned in this way.

Additionally the Sineater can burn 1 point of essence to gain Detect Alignment as a spell like ability usable at will for 24 hours.

Veil of Sins: At 4th level the Sineater gains the ability to shroud himself in the sins he has devoured, cloaking him from his enemies attacks. As a swift action, the Sineater can burn 1 essence and gain partial concealment against all attacks for 3 rounds At 16th level the Sineater can burn 2 essence instead to gain total concealment.

At 8th level, the Sineater can instead burn 2 essence to cast darkness as a spell-like ability (caster level equal to class level) centered on himself with a duration of 3 rounds. The Sineater gains darkvision 30 feet while the darkness spell is active, or increases the range of his existing darkvision by 30 feet.

Purify the Unclean: At 7th level the Sineater gains the ability to punish beings who embody sin or sinful ideas. Before making an attack roll with his Gentle Touch or a weapon granted by this Philosophy against an Aberration, Outsider (Evil), or Undead, the Sineater can choose to burn up to 1 essence per 3 class levels (round up) to deal an additional 10 hit points of damage per essence sacrificed.

Reforge the Soul: At 10th level, the Sineater gains the ability to cast atonement as a spell-like ability useable 1/day. After successfully using this SLA the Sineater gains a pool of Temporary Essence equal to 1/4th the total hit die of the creature targeted by the atonement. This essence lasts for 1 hour/level.

Inescapable: At 13th level the Sineater becomes impossibly difficult to dislodge once he has begun to draw out an enemies sins. Whenever he hits an enemy with an unarmed strike, he is treated as having the Grab special attack. For every 2 points of Essence invested in his Gentle Touch ability the maximum size category of creatures he can grapple is increased by 1 and the bonus granted by the Grab ability to start or maintain a grapple increases by +2.

Maelstrom of Sin: At 16th level the Sineater can violently absorb a mass of sin from all nearby sources. As a full round action the Sineater can increase his melee reach by 5 feet as his body becomes shrouded in tainted Incarna energy and make a single unarmed strike against all enemies within reach. The Sineater recovers 1 point of burned essence for each target damaged by this ability.

Wages of Sin: At 19th level the Sineater can draw all sin out of his opponent in a single intense burst. As a full-round action the Sineater can make a single unarmed strike attack against a targeted opponent. If the attack hits, the targeted opponent must make a Will save against this attack (DC of 16 + the Sineater’s Wisdom Modifier), if he fails his chakra flow is torn apart as the Sineater absorbs all the sin in his soul paralyzing the target and allowing the Sineater to recover 1 burnt essence for every 4 hit dice the target creature possesses. A successful save prevents the target from being paralyzed, and the Sineater does not recover any additional essence, though it still takes normal damage from the attack. This ability is useable a number of times per day equal to the Sineater’s Wisdom modifier.




Vayist: Guru’s of this philosophy believe that a person must be free to follow the direction of their own inner motivations. These Gurus are often free-spirited creatures who travel wherever the wind takes them and often seek to emulate the wind in their fighting techniques, choosing weapons and techniques that twist and flow like the wind itself

Proficiencies: bolas, flying blade, kyoketsu shoge, nine-section whip, nunchaku, rope dart, scimitar, shuriken, whip

Flowing Breeze: At 1st level, once per round when the Vayist successfully avoids an attack or starts his turn not adjacent to any enemies, he can choose to recover 1 point of essence burn. If the Vayist is hit by an attack, he may choose to spend an opportunity action to burn up to 1 essence per 4 class levels (round up), negating 5 points of hit point damage for each essence burned in this way. Starting at 7th level, the Vayist may negate 10 points of damage per essence burnt in this way. At 14th level, he negates 15 points per essence burnt.

Additionally the Vayist can burn 1 point of essence to gain Entropic Shield as a spell like ability usable at will for 24 hours.

Tools of the Trade: At 4th level the Vayist becomes particularly adept at utilizing weapons which allow him to befuddle and confound his foes, but which leave them without permanent harm. When using his Gentle Fist ability he can burn 1 essence to deliver a Stunning Fist attack via any of his Philosophy weapons, even at range.

In addition, he can burn 1 essence as an immediate action to grant his weapons the returning property for three rounds. At 16th level, the Vayist can burn 2 points of essence to have your weapons return to your hand immediately after throwing it (so you can make a full attack with just one throwing weapon).

Breath of the East Wind: At 7th level the Vayist can burn 1 essence per 6 levels (round down) as a swift action to increase the range increment of any philosophy ranged weapon he wields by 10 feet per essence burnt for 3 rounds. He additionally deals 3 additional points of damage per essence burnt with all ranged attacks using a philosophy weapon for the duration.

Revitalizing Breath: At 10th level Gurus of this Philosophy can breathe new life and energy into their companions. They gain breath of life as spell-like ability with a caster level equal to his class level useable 1/day.

Leaf on the Wind: At 13th level the Vayist has learned to keep his composure, and his feet, whenever life, or an enemy, knocks him down. By burning 1 essence as a swift action, he gains the ability to no longer provoke attacks of opportunity from making ranged attacks, and may stand up from prone as a free action without provoking attacks of opportunity.

Alternatively, he can burn 2 points of essence to gain a dodge bonus to Armor Class and Tumble Checks equal to 1/3rd his class level (round down) for 3 rounds.

Roaring Gale: At 16th level, the Vayist may burn 2 essence as part of a full round action to make one attack against each enemy within 1 range increment with a ranged weapon he is wielding. If the weapon uses ammunition, the number of attacks is limited to the number of times he could normally reload the weapon during a full attack action. If the weapon is treated as ammunition (like shuriken) he must have enough on hand to make all attacks taken in this way (unless he is using Tools of the Trade to have his weapons return to him immediately).

Perfect Independence: At 19th level the Vayist benefits from a continuous freedom of movement effect. This is a supernatural ability.



Short version:
Essence burn now instead of Temp HP usage
-Akasin meditates for 15 minutes to gain temporary essence, does not get any burn recovery in combat.
-Sineater recovers burnt essence by attacking things. 1 essence on a successful attack once per round.
-Vayist recovers burnt essence by avoiding things. 1 essence per round if he starts his turn not adjacent to an enemy or an enemy attack misses him.

Each philosophy now has a different form of damage mitigation
-Akasin can spend a standard action to heal himself or allies. Limited in times per day he can heal allies, but can heal himself as often as he wants.
-Sineater can choose to gain temporary HP instead of recovering a burnt essence. Can also spend a standard action to gain temporary HP.
-Vayist can spend an opportunity action to reduce damage from an attack

Basically Akasin's focus is on healing, so it's got the best version. Sineater gains temporary HP. Vayist is focused on avoiding damage, so stops the damage when it happens. Exact balance may be off (Vayist should probably be tuned higher than the others to make up for it being less flexible) but this is a good starting point/concept.

Vayist and Akasin both gained a couple new options, Sineater lost one or two. But the core of all 3 remained the same.

[Ssalarn]

So basically like Desire gets, gain +X to hit against an enemy you have used Bullrush or Overrun on in the last hour?




Going to reitterate that Knockback from Races of Stone was a great feat, and recreating it here (much like Dominion gains the best effect of Zhentarim fighter) would be pretty great here (that is when you hit with an attack where you are using power attack, make a free bullrush attempt, except you don't move with the target)




So you'd still get the extra attack on a successful bullrush, but no bonus to it? Would this still work with the Wrath ability?

Whoops, missed this post entirely.
Yes, just like the Desire Feint ability, only with Bull Rush (Bul Rush attempts will probably also get the bonus).

Knockback or something similar is definitely a possibility.

And yes, AotIE would be compatible with the Wrath ability, so you could smack the tar out of someone and nail them with an elbow spike for good measure.


I like some of the ideas in your mock-ups; I'll be spending some time on updates throughout the week, so expect to see the last few days feedback and anything discussed over the next couple days all to be incorporated or considered for a Friday or Saturday release.

[Big Fau]

Feel free to pitch your idea, I think Mysteries of Essence is the frontrunner currently.

The Soulwright's Apocrypha, and refluff everything to be based on binding soul energy to gemstones (ala Elemental Binding from the Eberron setting).

[Ssalarn]

The Soulwright's Apocrypha, and refluff everything to be based on binding soul energy to gemstones (ala Elemental Binding from the Eberron setting).


Unfortunately, to avoid copyright issues, we pretty much had to cut any reference to souls or soul energy out of the materials.

Thanks for the idea though!
It's actually very close to my first Veilweaving class, the Chakra Forge, who died a slow agonizing death in development before having his parts chopped up and grafted into the new classes that are currently going through playtesting.
I love Eberron, I love the Artificer, and I love the Incarnum system, and combining them together was the thing that started this whole project. The fact that what we've currently got doesn't really reflect the original influences of Eberron or the Artificer is just a result of what happens when you sell your soul Essence to the man and go from homebrew to 3pp :smallsmile:

[Seerow]

So are you just renaming the title, or are you renaming the subsystem? If so, what are you going to call it instead of Incarna? Calling the whole system of veils/essence/chakras Essence doesn't sit right. If you come up with a new name for the system as a whole, it could be easier to come up with a fitting name for the book that is distinct from MoI.

[Ssalarn]

So are you just renaming the title, or are you renaming the subsystem? If so, what are you going to call it instead of Incarna? Calling the whole system of veils/essence/chakras Essence doesn't sit right. If you come up with a new name for the system as a whole, it could be easier to come up with a fitting name for the book that is distinct from MoI.

Currently, you've got Essence, which is channeled through chakra to power Veils, which are made out of Incarna. My thought is that we change that to you have Essence, a power which flows through your chakra, which can be shaped into Veils or used for other effects. We basically just cut out the Incarna portion of things and make Essence not just the stuff that powers the stuff we're manipulating, but actually the stuff we're manipulating.

[Prime32]

Just calling it "essence" seems a bit vague and unexciting. What about calling it prana (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prana)?

(you could title the book "Power of Prana" - yay alliteration :smalltongue:)

[maximus25]

This was actually on my list, but it looks like Interjection Games beat me to the punch. If you pop over to the Paizo forums and search for Truenamer, he's spitballing some pretty awesome ideas. While you're there, feel free to pop into the MoI forum and post any thoughts. Speaking of which: we're gonna change the name. Feel free to pitch your idea, I think Mysteries of Essence is the frontrunner currently.

Thanks for the info. I'll pop on over to the forums and check it out.

I kind of like Mysteries of Essence. It's good.

[danzibr]

Just calling it "essence" seems a bit vague and unexciting. What about calling it prana (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prana)?

(you could title the book "Power of Prana" - yay alliteration :smalltongue:)
I for one really like this. MoI currently standing for Magic of Incarnum or Magic of Incarna is a hassle. Plus Path of War doesn't sound anything like Tome of Battle.

[Katana1515]

Damn, but I have to admit Seerow is the man.


Short version:
Essence burn now instead of Temp HP usage
-Akasin meditates for 15 minutes to gain temporary essence, does not get any burn recovery in combat.
-Sineater recovers burnt essence by attacking things. 1 essence on a successful attack once per round.
-Vayist recovers burnt essence by avoiding things. 1 essence per round if he starts his turn not adjacent to an enemy or an enemy attack misses him.

This is indeed a more elegant solution than mine of just labelling the THP's as something else. by divorcing the philosophy abilities from THPs/HPs and instead just focusing on the one pool any Veilweaver should be paying most attention to anyway, his Essence. Then the abilities themselves can be a source of THPs or other defenses if their is a concern that the Guru is too fragile. The Guru is definitely my favourite of the three Veilweaver classes (though I would jump at the chance to play any one of the 3).

As for the name why not focus on the Practitioners rather than the power source. Something like Mysteries of the Veilweavers? (I will admit i couldn't think of anything that was alliterative with veil weaver and was suitable :( )

A final question for Ssalarn. Are more Veils and Incarnum Feats forthcoming? because while there are currently a healthy amount for a playtest I would love to see a few more soon. I am pretty sure you don't yet have as many listed as MoI did, and many of these veils are shared between multiple classes. More veils both class specific and otherwise would be brilliant. Their are some 3.5 Melds that might be suitable for conversion. Both Deavic and Guru would benefit from something like Blink Shirt, and the Deavic in particular could use an analogue of Sphinx Claws. The vizier could use some more area effect/control abilities if he is going to be the 'incarna Wizard', this wasnt something 3.5 meldshapers were ever particularly good at (with some exceptions like the totem bind on Frost Helm) so I think its a really exciting new path for the subsystem to take.

[Ssalarn]

Yes, there are definitely both more Veils, and more feats in the works. The Vizier is getting pretty close to having all of the currently developed Veils rolled out, but the Daevic still has a few going through some local playtesting and review that haven't hit the main doc, and the Guru has about a dozen more coming his way. Feats are going to grow as well, and we're getting a few PrC's, archetypes, and possibly even an advanced class for the Magus ready for the final product. And of course, by "final product" I mean "the book that we're going to make using this material", not anything truly final, because there's definitely some plans in the works for a follow-up volume grown from some Dreamscarred material you may or may not be familiar with, Psicarnum.

I'm also pretty open to making sure that someone with a good idea gets a chance to see that idea turned into something that sees use in the final product. Anguish over at Paizo submitted a huge list of Veil ideas to me, and Armbands of the Irked Elephant and Pestilence Cloak were both ideas that I thought warranted being passed on to the community (granted, with a little spit and polish). Polar Snowshoes and Ditchdigger's Armlets were also both Veils that grew from the kernel of an idea presented by a fan.



On the subject of possible name changes, what if we left the system largely as is and just changed the name to something like "Masters of the Veil"?

[Seerow]

Masters of the Veil sounds good. And I'm kind of sad that it does because Essence being the primary thing (rather than veils) was growing on me. I was going to pitch an idea for a class that uses Essence and Chakras, but in a different, more primal, way than the other classes. Something like the Barbarian to the Daevic's Paladin.

[Ssalarn]

Masters of the Veil sounds good. And I'm kind of sad that it does because Essence being the primary thing (rather than veils) was growing on me. I was going to pitch an idea for a class that uses Essence and Chakras, but in a different, more primal, way than the other classes. Something like the Barbarian to the Daevic's Paladin.

Remember, no official decisions have been made yet, and it's all just exploring options at this point. The next update is at least a few more days out (possibly longer, we'll see).

Your idea sounds interesting. I was actually kicking an idea around
at one point for a Fighter archetype that used the Essence and chakra system completely independently of Veils (see feats like Treewalker, just as kind of a general idea).

[Seerow]

btw I was serious in the DSP thread. Just get rid of Veils being able to be picked up as feats for non-veilweavers and tell people who want to compare a veil to a feat to shut up. Or make an extra feat tax (say you need to first gain the ability to shape a veil before learning a veil), or whatever else, just to make these dumb comparisons to feats go away. I know it was awesome to be able to pick up Blink Shirt or the like on a Fighter in 3.5, but either you need to put your foot down and say "Yes it's stronger than other feats, that's intended" or get rid of the ability to get the veils as feats altogether (and then reintroduce to other classes through archetypes/prestige classes or the like).

[Ssalarn]

Just wanted to touch base with you guys again, I have kind of limited contact:

Shape Veil, in addition to a level pre-req, is going to give a specific list of the Veils it can grant. It won't be eligible for certain Veils (specifically Ring and Blood, though I'm considering limiting it even further to exclude Body and potentially one or two others). It's basically going to sync up to the bind unlocking feats. If there's not a feat for the bind, you probably aren't going to be able to access the Veil. This is going to be the best way to mitigate these feats while still keeping them in existence and staying true to the design intent of the project.

Wrath is getting re-imagined so that his Passion wraps into the idea of him throwing himself at people or throwing them around (very Bull Rush focused), while giving him reasons to choose either the THF style or the Natural Weapon style of combat, and keeping those two options in pretty close proximity to each other power-wise through all levels of play.

Desire's capstone is going to be replaced with an either/or ability that allows them to procure a permanent Paramour (basically a powerful cohort) or an equipment based ability that enhances certain types of items and makes them very difficult and dangerous to steal from the Daevic.

Guru, instead of using temp hp to power his abilities, will use Essence Burn as a direct method of powering abilities. He'll basically be able to make a set amount of Essence non-useable until he takes a rest (roughly 1 minute per point of Essence), to power his Philosophes. He may get additional Essence to facilitate this, somewhere between the Daevic and the Vizier (like 25).

Vizier will probably be dropping down to 1/2 BAB and d6 hit die, which really more accurately reflects his capabilities as a full caster type party contributor. This may result in numerous small changes to several Veils. The most notable one is Forcestrike Knuckles, which will now be two Veils:
Forcestrike Knuckles, which applies +2 force damage per point of Essence invested and will be a Daevic/Guru Veil,
and the Vizier-specific Riven Darts, which will provide a 1d4 + 2/Essence ranged touch attack with a range of 20 + 5/Essence.

Unless something really gnarly shows up in this coming update, I anticipate having PRC's and archetypes out close to the end of February or early March.

[Person_Man]

I strongly approve of all of the above. Let us know when the next batch of cool stuff comes out.

[Ssalarn]

Changelog:
Desire Daevic’s capstone now grants a paramour or guardian to serve the Daevic instead of the Dominate Monster SLA.
Wrath Daevic’s Passion Bond abilities adjusted to increase his facility with Bull Rushing and make it a complete part of his combat tactics. Multiple changes to most levels of his Passion Bond.
Guru Philosophy abilities updated to use Essence burn instead of temp hp. Numerous small adjustments made to corresponding abilities.
Vizier changed to ½ BAB and d6 hit die.
Vizier skill points changed to 2 + Int mod.
Vizier no longer has access to the Forcestrike Knuckles Veil. Forcestrike Knuckles is now a melee only Veil and the Vizier gains a Veil similar to the former ranged application called Riven Darts.
Vizier’s Hands Essence Bond now lasts ½ level rounds instead of ½ level + Int mod
Vizier’s Feet Essence Bond base range decreased to 10 feet + 5 feet/Essence
Avatar of Light must stay within 30ft of the veilweaver, requires a move action for commands more complex than self defense, and has had its transformation changed to a standard action activation.
Bloody Shroud now converts 3 + 3/Essence damage to Bleed instead of 5 + 5/Essence (or roughly the average value of a d6, rounded down).
Bralani’s Brooch Neck Bind now grants 18 + 2/Essence SR instead of 17 + 1/Essence
Collar of Skilled Instruction clarified to grant the Teamwork feat to both the veilweaver and his allies.
Ditchdigger’s Armlets area of effect no longer increases in size based on Essence invested.
Gorget of the Wyrm now grants energy resistances to the veilweaver and all allies as part of its neck bind.
Guardian Sash added to the Guru Veil list.
Hand Cannons changed to grant elemental enhancements instead of hardlocked Deadly Aim.
Horns of the Minotaur bind changed to grant bonuses to hit instead of size increases.
Light Whip changed so that activating the ability now costs one of your attacks of opportunity for the round.
Martyr’s Veil added to Guru Veil list.
Polar Snowshoes aura can now be deactivated as a free action.
Stone Giant’s Girdle clarified to require hp gained by investing Essence to accrue at the same rate as temp hp lost due to damage.
Shape Veil feat updated with new prereqs and detailed description of mechanics.

[Psyren]

Are all of the above reflected in the playtest doc? I want to sit down and give feedback too, but I'm worried about retreading ground you've already covered here and in the DSP and Paizo threads.

[Seerow]

Are all of the above reflected in the playtest doc? I want to sit down and give feedback too, but I'm worried about retreading ground you've already covered here and in the DSP and Paizo threads.

He keeps the docs hosted in drop box, and as far as I've noticed every time he posts a change log, the doc in the dropbox was already updated.

[Eldest]

Would you guys mind putting a link to the dropbox in the first post? I know the thread wasn't made by Ssalarn, but it would make me keeping up with this so much easier.

Annnnd first post of a new page. Awkward.

[Seerow]

Would you guys mind putting a link to the dropbox in the first post? I know the thread wasn't made by Ssalarn, but it would make me keeping up with this so much easier.

Annnnd first post of a new page. Awkward.

Yeah I bookmarked them. These are the links, hopefully it'll get updated to the OP:

Daevic: https://www.dropbox.com/s/n7go8mal47o4nd3/Daevic%20Playtest.pdf
Guru: https://www.dropbox.com/s/w4kb4ofomf51jdu/The%20Guru.pdf
Vizier: https://www.dropbox.com/s/co2i27hemdi9kg8/MagicofIncarnaPlaytest.pdf

[Ssalarn]

Are all of the above reflected in the playtest doc? I want to sit down and give feedback too, but I'm worried about retreading ground you've already covered here and in the DSP and Paizo threads.

I always [try to] post the updated docs into Dropbox right before I post the change logs so that you always have the latest materials available.


Also, thanks for pulling those links forward Seerow, I was just about to repost them :)

Thoughts on the downgrade of the Vizier to 1/2 BAB and d6 guys? Things seemed to be leaning towards everyone thinking this was an appropriate change, but I had barely posted the update over in the Paizo forums when I had a player chiming in that they felt this was a nerf the Vizier really didn't need.

Also, I am very aware that the Wrath Daevic's new mechanics read a little rough. I am open to suggestions for new wording that keepsthe effects but streamlines the verbage. I really wrestled a lot with how to make a mechanic that supported natural weapon Daevics and THF Daevics equally, and I came very close to just writing a 4th Passion for the natural weapon guys. The problem is the thematic territory and space considerations for the final product. Wrath, thematically, should be able to encompass both, and I'd like it to, but if it's too cumbersome, we can go another way.

[Seerow]

Quick guru philosophy feedback:
-Still hate the hour long recharge time for Akasin. Especially with the in the sun requirement. There are so many ways for this to get screwed over and make the discipline utterly useless in a real game it's not even funny. Should require no more than 10-15 minutes.

-In addition to the above, Akasin is the only philosophy with no defense bonuses at all. Sin Eater gets all the concealment and mirror images stuff. Vayist gets bonus AC and typically wants to be at range anyway. Akasin was the one who depended on those temp HP the most, and are supposed to be the most focused on healing, and you gave them nothing at all to compensate for losing it.

-Incadescent strike taking up literally 100% of your essence for a bonus to damage is too much. With low investment the damage return isn't high enough, at high essence investment it can be overwhelming, but if it doesn't end the fight the guru is now absolutely USELESS at everything because he has no veils, no more essence to burn, nothing.

-I still want Akasin teleporting at level 19. Seriously we're talking about giving him a 5th level spell for out of combat utility as a near capstone. Why not?


-Sin Eater still gets way more effects than anyone else. You made them all way more costly, but Sin Eater is now also the only path that can reliably recover essence burn in combat, and can recover as many times per turn as they can make attacks. Seriously, cut a few options here, drop the essence recovery to 1/round, and reduce the costs of the abilities to compensate.

-Purify the unclean has similar problems to Akasin's similar ability, except Sin Eater can recover that essence burn in a couple of turns where the Akasin cannot.

-Vayist recovers essence when an attack misses him, but wants to be at ranged where he's never getting attacked (he even gets bonus range increments!). This actually creates a weird thing where a Vayist who is running low on essence will run up into melee and chuck a few throwing weapons out intentially provoking AoOs to try to recover. This seems to go against the philosophy (which is why in my sample I had them also recover if they started out of reach of any enemy, and restricted to 1/round).

-Speaking of, Vayist is still the only one who gains this kind of a big benefit at level 1. Seriously, Akasin gets a cantrip 3/day. Veil Eater gets nothing. Vayist gets an AC boost. The AC boost/burn essence for doubling seems like something that would be more fitting at level 4 (fitting in as a comparison for Sin Eater's various attack avoidance abilities)

-+2 competence bonus on attack rolls doesn't really help encourage using breath of the east wind at all. Too many veils already give a competence bonus that is going to outpace that +2 by the time you get it, why would you be willing to burn essence for it? This ability is still something that will get used once in a blue moon when you need to hit something farther away than usual, but in typical play gets completely forgotten.

[Psyren]

Would you guys mind putting a link to the dropbox in the first post? I know the thread wasn't made by Ssalarn, but it would make me keeping up with this so much easier.

Annnnd first post of a new page. Awkward.

Done! (I didn't originally intend to be the OP, it just happened to fall out that way during the thread mergers.)


I always [try to] post the updated docs into Dropbox right before I post the change logs so that you always have the latest materials available.

Excellent. I have an exam tomorrow morning (yay...) but I'll hopefully have time to give feeback after that.

[Ssalarn]

Seerow,

If you double check, I did change the Akasin's requirement to bright light instead of sunlight, to help mitigate some of that.

I'll work on re-introducing the temp hp mechanics into the Akasin to give him some defensive options like the other Philosophies.

The issue with the Vayist regaining Essence when he's out of enemy reach is that he either ends up with the absolute best Essence burn recovery mechanic, or I've got to double the word count to put a bunch of qualifiers in there. What if we expanded it to include whenever he succeeds on a saving throw as well?


**EDIT**
That being said-

Changelog:

Akasin Philosophy now gains temp hp whenever he takes Essence burn.

Incandescent Strike corrected to allow the Akasin to take Essence burn up to his class level instead of equal to, allowing him to be more judicious in using the ability and making it work as intended.

Travel the Paths of Light now functions as teleport instead of dimension door.

Vayist now restores Essence burn whenever he succeeds on a saving throw or is missed by an enemy attack

Immortal Essence adjusted so that multiple uses overlap rather than extending the duration, allowing him a second option for Essence burn recovery.

[Seerow]

Sorry to hear the news that you apparently do not know the RAI of your creations Ssalarn.

[Dusk Eclipse]

Sorry to hear the news that you apparently do not know the RAI of your creations Ssalarn.

Wait wut? Let me guess a post in the DSP forum?

[Seerow]

Wait wut? Let me guess a post in the DSP forum?

Yeah. Syonique posted a Daevic build using 9 binds, on the assumption that Shape Veil gave an extra veil shaped. When Ssalarn pointed out that it only lets you get a veil from another list, not shape 1 more veil than normal, Syonique went on a rant about how Ssalarn doesn't know the RAW or RAI of his own material.

[Person_Man]

Yeah. Syonique posted a Daevic build using 9 binds, on the assumption that Shape Veil gave an extra veil shaped. When Ssalarn pointed out that it only lets you get a veil from another list, not shape 1 more veil than normal, Syonique went on a rant about how Ssalarn doesn't know the RAW or RAI of his own material.

That's hilarious.

Speaking from personal experience, I'll admit that sometimes writers mess up the details of their own RAW, especially when it comes to the interaction between what you've written and more obscure Feats/spells/etc. In fact, it happens almost all of the time when passing actual legislation. There are so many other laws and regulations that it's nearly impossible to not accidentally and unknowingly contradict something else that someone else has previously written.

But it's pretty much a tautology that a writer would understand the intent of what they write. (Unless they're insane). Oddly, I've seen this happen at more then one book reading, where a fan presses forward some theory about a character or plot point, the author gives them the real answer, and the fan disagrees. I get that literature is very open to multiple interpretations, but when the author flat out says "this is what I meant" I think we can safely assume that they are not lying in most cases.

[Ssalarn]

Sorry to hear the news that you apparently do not know the RAI of your creations Ssalarn.

Apparently I'm a mystery even to myself.

On another note-

I'm working on a way to integrate the Veils by feat option of Shape Veil and the bind feats into the core Essence system while allowing for multi-classing.
What I'm hesitant to do is have a class be able just stack up on Shape Veil and have more facility by level than it should. I also don't want a fighter who has taken Shape Veil 4 times to dip one level of Daevic and suddenly lose facility with his Veils, but I would like him to be able to shape multiple Veils as he spends feats on the subsystem.
So what I'm thinking about is giving non-veilweavers an "effective veilweaving level", equal to like 1/2 class level. That would allow us to encode a progression directly into the subsystem and integrate multiclassing. So, a Fighter could potentially have up to, lets say just as an example, 5 veils shaped at one time by 20th level, or a multi-classed Fighter/Daevic would add 1/2 his Fighter levels to his Daevic level to determine his total Veils available, or his normal by level, whichever is greater.
Thoughts, opinions, suggestions?

[Seerow]

How about an even simpler version?


Take the current Veils Shaped/Chakra Binds/Essence chart. Turn that into a baseline chart. Give the veilweaving classes bonuses to the numbers on this chart (similar to how it works for max essence capacity), while feats let the non-veil weavers gain access to these things.


Just as a quick example, your baseline chart might look something like:

{table=head]Level | Essence | Essence Capacity | Max Veils Shaped | Max Chakra Binds
1 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0
2 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0
3 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0
4 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0
5 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0
6 | 1 | 2 | 2 | 0
7 | 1 | 2 | 2 | 1
8 | 1 | 2 | 2 | 1
9 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 1
10 | 2 | 2 | 3 | 1
11 | 2 | 2 | 3 | 1
12 | 2 | 3 | 3 | 1
13 | 2 | 3 | 3 | 1
14 | 2 | 3 | 3 | 2
15 | 3 | 3 | 4 | 2
16 | 3 | 3 | 4 | 2
17 | 3 | 3 | 4 | 2
18 | 3 | 4 | 4 | 2
19 | 3 | 4 | 4 | 2
20 | 3 | 4 | 4 | 2[/table]


So from here you can have it set up like:
-Everyone can shape as many veils as listed on the list, but most don't know how to shape any veils. This is where Shape Veil comes in handy, to take advantage of that. Veilweavers have a list of Veils known they can shape to take advantage of those.
-The Daevic doesn't gain any normal extra veils, but does gain his bonus veils from his Passion. This fits in well with the flavor of the daevic, where most of his power comes from that Passion bond.
--Other veilweavers just get extra veils shaped
-All veilweavers gain bonus essence and chakra binds, much like they currently gain extra essence capacity.
--Non veilweavers don't actually unlock any chakras, but have the limit of chakra bindings so they can't just take the open chakra feat 5 times and have 5 bound veils. The feats never let you exceed this.





But honestly? At this point it's more clear, and possibly a more streamlined approach to the system as a whole, but it also assumes the system is integrated into the core, which will scare people away. The more practical approach may be something like splitting up the feat into the various use cases:

Feat 1) Veilweavers gain a veil from a different class's list.

Feat 2) Non-veilweavers gain a veil selected from a limited list, possibly with restricted access to the ability granted.

I'm mentally comparing this to the Bind Vestige and Improved Bind Vestige feats from Tome of Magic. Those feats give an explicit list of a handful of low level vestiges you can choose from, and even then you only get a single benefit from the vestige [out of 4-5 normally], with a second unlocking from a second feat.

So you have it as a two-feat chain, the first giving you access to a preselected number of veils, possibly available only at reduced capacity. The second gives you access to those veils' chakra bind. If this project gains a sequel, and you want to introduce more options, you can run it just like WotC did with improved familiar (ie reprint the feat with a different set of options from the new book).

Feat 3) Give Veilweavers an extra shaped veil. I know this wasn't intended, but it's not a bad idea for a feat. Though I'm pretty sure the Vizier at least shapes as many veils as he has body slots at high levels. On the other hand this potentially lets a Vizier use Twin Veil without losing a body slot.





Okay last point before I stop typing: Vizier shares a problem with the Akasin guru philosophy: You really seem to love 1 hour short rests. 1 hour is prohibitively long, to the point where it won't be taken advantage of in situations where it really should be. If you want a power to be daily use, make it daily use. If you want it to be encounter based, but with a time-based recharge so people don't say "OMG ENCOUNTER POWERS!" either go with dragon breath weapon style round timers (use this again in X rounds, preferably with a die roll) or no longer than 15 minutes of rest.

Why do I say this? Because the Vizier gets actively punished for using his abilities. By level 20 he can reshape his veils 7 times per day. But when he reshapes them, he loses all of his chakra bindings (you know all of the interesting powerful features that are more than just the +numbers that most of the essence benefits are). That is literally 7 hours of your adventuring day sitting around waiting for the vizier to get back up to full power, or a large chunk of play time with the vizier running around at a fraction of the power he is balanced around. In either case, it is very painful.

Akasin's meditation thing suffers from a similar problem. Yes you made it bright light instead of sunlight (and I do like that at high enough level, he supplies his own bright light at will so can just meditate wherever), but it still takes a literal hour for you to get your extra essence that you need to be remotely competitive with either philosophy. You're not going to get an hour after every encounter to rest, and the other philosophies get great passive in-combat recovery to make up for not having that extra padding of essence.

[Ssalarn]

@Seerow

I like the idea, but it has the problem of basically making the whole subsystem an assumption of the core as well (which you are aware of, I know). It really needs to be modular enough to graft onto or into a campaign on a case by case basis without a built in assumption that this opens the door for everyone (GMs tend to like that feeling of control, especially with 3pp products).

I'll look at reducing the amount of time it takes for a Vizier to rebind and an Akasin to recover his bonus Essence pool, see if we can't make this mesh a little bit better for those campaigns that have the adventurers operating under time constraints.

How do we feel about the general power level of the Vayist over the life of play? I'm in kind of a weird spot now where the Vayist comes up a lot as seeming really bland, but then my local playtesters just love him and I've had one or two GMs come to me with "Ranged stunlock OMG!!!" concerns (typically abated pretty quickly by pointing out that it's a 1/rd capability that is also used as a resource for their other abilities). Basically, on the boards I'm getting concerned that he's a bit bland and has Essence burn recover issues, and in play he seems to be both the most popular and the one having the biggest impact at the table.

[danzibr]

Can you fix the essence capacity column? Something like HD/4 round up :smallwink:

[Person_Man]

I'm in kind of a weird spot now where the Vayist comes up a lot as seeming really bland, but then my local playtesters just love him and I've had one or two GMs come to me with "Ranged stunlock OMG!!!" concerns.

The "stunlock" issue can be resolved by putting a cap on abilities. I like "a creature can only be effected by this ability once every 24 hours." It encourages the player to mix up his tactics, and prevents stunlock. Alternatively, you could put in a diminishing Saving Throw. "Targets can build up a resistance to this ability, and get a +2 bonus to their Saving Throw (which stacks with itself) for each time they have been targeted by this ability in the past 24 hours." Or you can just put a delay time on the Veil itself. I often use "you may only use this once every 1d4ish round." Any of the above prevents players from spamming a powerful ability.

On the "bland" side, I would encourage you to just pick a small number of Niches and play style that you want him to be great at, articulate that vision clearly in it's description, then then let him be great at it. Right now it's sorta a Christmas tree of a bunch of different bonuses and cool abilities. This is similar to the problem that the Incarnate has. Both classes have a ton of cool stuff, but it takes a high level of game mastery to dig through it and figure out exactly what you as a player are supposed to be doing with the class.

[Seerow]

I'm really not sure what the issue with the ranged stunlock issue is.

Why is it different for a Vayist sitting 110ft back stunning someone vs a Monk charging up from 120ft away and stunning somebody?

If you're up against multiple targets, you aren't range stunlocking the entire group in one go (as opposed to what say, a wizard can do), and if you're against a single target then a regular monk is just as effective.

It's not like the ability makes the attack automatically hit or not require a saving throw. I'm just not sure I see the big deal here.

[Person_Man]

I'm really not sure what the issue with the ranged stunlock issue is.

Why is it different for a Vayist sitting 110ft back stunning someone vs a Monk charging up from 120ft away and stunning somebody?

If you're up against multiple targets, you aren't range stunlocking the entire group in one go (as opposed to what say, a wizard can do), and if you're against a single target then a regular monk is just as effective.

It's not like the ability makes the attack automatically hit or not require a saving throw. I'm just not sure I see the big deal here.

I agree, it's not a big deal.

But speaking as someone who has DM'd plenty of games with a Warlock or Dragonfire Adept in it, you want there to be some sort of mechanic that encourages players to switch up which abilities they use, and not use the same ability repeatedly. Being able to use the same ability repeatedly encourages players to put a lot of resources into that one thing (potentially causing crippling over specialization when they fight immune/resistant enemies), and frankly it's boring to have a player who does the same thing most rounds of every combat.

Of course, the same could be said of any Tier 4-5 class, which "spams" melee or ranged attacks every round. So again, it's not that big of a deal. It's just an expression of my personal preference.

[Seerow]

I agree, it's not a big deal.

But speaking as someone who has DM'd plenty of games with a Warlock or Dragonfire Adept in it, you want there to be some sort of mechanic that encourages players to switch up which abilities they use, and not use the same ability repeatedly. Being able to use the same ability repeatedly encourages players to put a lot of resources into that one thing (potentially causing crippling over specialization when they fight immune/resistant enemies), and frankly it's boring to have a player who does the same thing most rounds of every combat.

Of course, the same could be said of any Tier 4-5 class, which "spams" melee or ranged attacks every round. So again, it's not that big of a deal. It's just an expression of my personal preference.

Which is why I'd like to see more options for the vayist. But right now the argument is "Ranged stun is so strong I can't add anything else", which turns into a cyclical problem pretty quickly.

The answer isn't to nerf stunning fist, it's to give access to other options the player will want to take instead of stunning fist. If you want something like enemies resist better if you spam an attack on them, that's really something that needs to be implemented on a system level, not just as a slapped on fix to a single ability for a single specialization of a single class in a 3rd party splat book.

[Psyren]

Okay, so I finally sat down and went through the Vizier. I have quite a bit of feedback, so I'll cross-post or at least link this to the DSP thread as well.

First, general Veilweaving commentary:

Disjunction - MD destroying veils is harsh, since MD can disjoin multiple veils at once. You could strip a veilweaver of all their powers in one fell swoop and leave them totally defenseless for the remainder of the fight or day.

Essence Capacity - Right now this uses the MoI formula of {(Character Level/6)+1}. I think it might be a good idea to differentiate the math a bit more, both for legal reasons and to open up design space - say, {(Character Level/5)+1}. It would give the tiniest boost at lower levels, while not actually changing the maximum that can be invested until the very tail-end of most builds at level 20 (5 essence max instead of 4, not counting class features and feats) so you don’t even have to rebalance all that much.


Rest - This part should be reworded to account for things like races that do not sleep, have irregular sleep cycles (e.g. resting during the day instead of at night) and have their rest interrupted. I would simply say something like “to shape his veils for the day, a vizier must have a clear and rested mind, following the same rest and preparation process as a wizard (see Core Rulebook pg. XXX)”

Second, the Vizier and its class features:

Eldritch Insight/Path of the Crafter - Though a crafter Vizier can create magic items and seems intended to use staves and wands, he doesn’t actually have the ability to craft them because you must cast spells as part of the creation process for a spell trigger or spell completion item. This requirement cannot be bypassed with the normal +5 DC increase for ignoring a requirement. If this is intentional, how can a PotC Vizier craft staves and wands? Will they have to cooperate with a spellcaster, or find an existing item to power with Essence during the crafting process?

Eldritch Insight/Transfer the Essence - The ability to use essence to activate an item instead of charges is cool, and so is the ability to transfer charges from one item to another.However, I can see both causing balance issues if allowed to work with items formed from spells that are lower-level on someone else’s list. For instance, a staff of Dominate Monster is normally out of Eldritch Insight’s reach, being a 9th level spell; however, the Summoner version is only 6th-level, meaning you could acquire a 6th-level staff and first power it with Eldritch Insight, then once that ran out and you began using its own charges, recharge it using Transfer the Essence and any 6th-level staff. Effectively you would be trading 6th-level charges for 9th-level ones.

Veilshifting - I like this ability but I think it’s confusing to have the number of switchable veils and number of uses/day on two different tracks. Plus 7/day is so much it may as well be at-will, which lessens the impact of the capstone. Personally, I would have the number of switchable veils be equal to the number of uses per day, and use the lower track for both.

And the biggest chunk, Vizier veils:


Avatar of Light: This is honestly a bit powerful at 1st level, even unbound. You’ve removed the SLAs and Aura, but Lantern Archons can still do the following: speak and understand any language, fire 2d6 damage worth of rays that bypasses all DR at will 30 ft. away, hover out of reach while doing so, see through darkness and dim light, and they’re immune to electricity and petrification. You can even command it to attack while still attacking yourself because you still have your standard action. I recommend letting the archon only fire 1 ray at 1st level, or requiring a standard action to command it until you’ve invested 2 essence. Second, binding it gets you a Hound Archon at level 6 - this is 1 level earlier than a Cleric gets one via LPA, and this one serves you completely free of charge for as long as you have the veil shaped, with all of its powers, beast shape and still getting the boons from the essence invested. I think this is a bit on the strong side as well, though it does even out over time. It’s also not clear how many times you can stabilize the link in this way; if it runs out, can you spend another standard action to get your Hound Archon back? Can you stabilize the link while it is already stable, i.e. can you refresh the duration on your Hound Archon before it runs out?

I think giving the Vizier Lesser Planar Ally at level 6 for no cost is a mistake, even if you are restricted to that one creature. Instead, I would have it give you 2 lanterns at 6 when bound (or 1 lantern + 1 harbinger) and then give you the Hound Archon at level 8 or even 9 (i.e. after an Oracle can get one.). The Trumpet at 16 I think is okay.

(Fun idea - if the bind instead gave you X archons as you leveled, and let you choose to stabilize them to merge them into stronger ones, you could have a player that either chooses to get the tougher single unit, or - when he got access to 9 archons - lets them form their Gestalt ability.)

Bangles of the Jealous Seductress: There’s an error here - you have the bind listed as “V7” but Viziers don’t get the Wrist chakra until level 8 according to the class table. Also, you should specify that the bind can only be used 1/round, because right now I could fire out NI chakrams against anyone who escapes my fascination effect simply by attacking them (i.e. so that it’s still my turn when they break free and therefore I can pour on the free actions.) But if it is only once, 1d4 + 1/e is pretty weak - I would let it be 1d4/e at a minimum. Finally, the fascinate effect should be mind-affecting, possibly even a [Pattern.]

Bloody Shroud: This one seems fine.

Bralani’s Brooch: This one seems fine, but should probably have the Electricity descriptor.

Circlet of Brass: This should definitely have the Fire descriptor.

Collar of Skilled Instruction: This one seems fine.

Coward’s Boots: Does this apply to fly/swim/burrow speeds? Otherwise it’s fine.

Cuirass of Confidence: Even with the save, line of sight is a bit much for this ability - you could walk down a city street and make every last citizen who even glimpses you Friendly or Helpful. It might even have the opposite effect, and provoke a riot as a wave of people experience the hostile tingle of their will save. I would limit it to 60ft. The bind is fine.

Dark Lord’s Ring of Essence-Binding: You need an HD limit here, otherwise a level 1 vizier can reanimate a Hill Giant if he finds one. I would let the maximum controllable HD be = your HD + essence invested. You should also remove the Cairn Wight’s ability to create spawn - otherwise the Vizier can wreck a campaign world in moments by creating an unshakeable Wight pyramid that are all absolutely loyal to him. It’s also unclear what happens if an enemy cleric Commands your wight/zombie - can he wrest control from you, and if so, for how long, and can you make another if your minion is stolen? In addition, I would actually go with a template for the bind as well, because you can paradoxically end up with a scenario where the unbound version of this veil is more powerful than the bound version. A zombie Storm Giant (humanoid) is probably going to be able to smoosh a Cairn Wight into paste.

Deathchannel Ring: I know you mean “for each point of essence invested” but right now the wording is confusing - it looks like you only ever get 1d6 and 5 ft. of increase no matter how much essence you put in. The action required for the pulse is not specified. Finally, does the ring harm or heal undead? If you have Heart of the Wight bound, can you heal yourself indefinitely?

Ditchdigger’s Armlets: This should probably have the [Earth] descriptor. Otherwise it’s fine, though I don’t think it really needs to be a full-round action.

Dreamcatcher: I would actually allow you to reallocate the essence invested in this meld. Simply require that the chosen Knowledge skills be fixed when the meld is shaped, and tie the number of chooseable knowledges to the meld’s essence capacity rather than its investment. However, the player must be proactive at shifting essence into the meld before a knowledge check is required, thus they would want to keep it full most of the time anyway, but aren’t penalized in a fight once they’ve used it to successfully identify X monster.

Eye of the Oracle: This one seems fine.

Eyes of the Archer Lord: This one seems fine. You may want to clarify whether the vision expansion applies to the True Seeing effect (which is normally capped.)

Gorget of the Wyrm: I would also let them choose a 30ft. line shape. Instead of 2 damage, I would start it off as 1d4 (rolling is more fun) and then follow the progression listed. (1d6 for the initial Neck bind.)

Hand Cannons: This one seems fine.

Hands of the Bard: This veil gives you a bonus to the save DCs of your [pattern] effects that scales with essentia invested. Does this stack with this general increase to the save DC of a veil effect that has essence invested? In other words, would each point of essence grant +2 DC to your hypnotic pattern, or +3?

Heart of the Wight: Can you benefit from helpful effects that purposely damage/burn your ability scores (e.g. Body Fuel) while this is bound? Basically, the Strongheart Vest controversy again.

Horns of the Minotaur: Essence should probably increase the enhancement bonus on this attack instead, so that it can bypass DR and you aren’t required to wear an amulet of mighty fists or similar.

Horselord’s Greaves: Typo here: it says “Binding this Veil to your Feet slot” under the Belt bind entry. Otherwise I’m fine with this.

Lavawalker’s Boots: This one seems fine.

Light Whip: Can you use the trip during your turn, or does it have to be an enemy’s turn who is moving in range of you?

Pestilence Cloak: How much concealment is “partial concealment?” By the rules, it is less than 20%, but beyond that you have to specify. 15%? 10%? Second, can this concealment be used to make a Stealth check? Third, this should probably have the [figment] descriptor (and lose that descriptor at 7 essence.) Finally, for the Shoulders bind - do they still have to make a fort save if they disbelieved the illusion initially? (Assuming less than 7 essence invested.)

Polar Snowshoes: This should have the [cold] descriptor. Also, cold AoE damage is usually a fort save for half rather than reflex. Thirdly, when you say “increase by one damage die” are you saying the 1 die of damage increases (e.g. 1d4 -> 1d6 -> 1d8 -> 1d10 -> 1d12) or are you saying the damage increases? (1d4 -> 2d4 -> 3d4 etc.)

Ring of the Abjurer: Is this a force effect, like Mage Armor/Inertial Armor? Will it stop incorporeal touch attacks? (If so, it should have the [force] descriptor.)

Riven Darts: This should have the [force] descriptor. Also, same comment as Snowshoes with the “increase by one damage die.” Finally, are you limited by your BAB? Is launching multiple darts a standard or full-round action?

Robe of the Forgotten Deity: This should say “incorporeal quality” rather than “incorporeal condition.” In addition, this should probably have the [darkness] descriptor. Otherwise it’s fine.

Sentinel’s Helm: If you already have Uncanny Dodge, does this become Improved Uncanny Ddoge?

Snakehandler’s Gauntlets: This should have the [poison] descriptor. Also, the DR should improve to Magic and Slashing over time (i.e. protects you from bludgeoning - a snake’s coils - and piercing from their fangs.)

Spiked Pauldrons: This one seems fine.

Stalker’s Tabi: The belt bind should say “dim light or darker.” Otherwise you are unable to use this in total darkness, which seems counterintuitive. Finally, this should have the [teleport] descriptor.

Stare of the Ghaele: This should probably have the [Fear] descriptor.

Stone Giant’s Girdle: An enhancement bonus to anything is useless at the level you gain the Body bind. I suggest this be made untyped or competence.

Stormcaller’s Band: This should probably be “veilweaving modifier” even if it is a Vizier-only meld, just to prevent problems later. Otherwise it’s fine.

Storm Gauntlets: This should have the corresponding descriptors for the damage it deals. Also, does the Wrists bind apply to ranged and thrown weapons as well?

Tauric Brace: The speed bonus should probably be to land speed specifically. In addition, enhancement doesn’t stack with many effects, so I would change this to circumstance.

Thurston’s Bladewards: This one seems fine.

Vestments of the Maharaja: Honestly I would just say the Chest bind works like dominate monster (except duration) to minimize questions about how to adjudicate it. Otherwise you risk starting up arguments at the table about creatures with more than one sovereign or no sovereign, creatures with no intelligence, creatures for whom merely obeying a sovereign to begin with is against their nature etc. And of course this effect needs to be a mind-affecting compulsion. As written I feel like this thing is going to be a grenade for many tables.

Vorpal Guards: I would add “and similar effects” to the Vorpal property protection, allowing this to guard against effects like Bladed Scarf.

Waistband of the Wealthy: If it is pierced while bound, will the “bag” rupture like a real one? What happens if someone places you into a Portable Hole, or you fall into an Enveloping Pit?



I’ll go through the feats after I look at the other two veilweavers.

[Ssalarn]

@Psyren
Thank you! Your analysis was very, very helpful and I'll be incorporating many of your notes into the next update.

I'd also like to apologize to everyone for not responding for the last week here. I've been moving to Seattle from Spokane and it's been a long process. I also don't have internet at home yet, so my responses will probably be a bit sporadic for a few more days.

Thanks to everyone for their support so far and I'll try and keep touching base and going over your feedback and notes.

Also, I mentioned this in another forum, but the Vayist is going to be getting more defensive capabilities and possibly a "marking" mechanic to proc his Essence burn recovery mechanic off of. Some of the Sineater's Veil of Sins abilities are going to be re-imagined as wind-based abilities for the Vayist, and the Sineater is going to see abilities that are more like DR or fast healing, or even Regeneration, so that it's less about him avoiding damage, and more about him devouring sin to repair/restore/prevent it.
Akasin is getting his meditation time cut down to 15 minutes instead of an hour.

[Ssalarn]

Sorry to post after myself guys, but I wanted to let everyone know what's going on:

First, Centurylink dropped the ball and I still don't have internet at home. There's only so much you can accomplish in the lobby at Starbuck's, especially since they've started limiting how long you can camp on a single mocha :P

I'm going to do everything in my power to get an update out to you this weekend, and that update should include the following changes:

Avatar of Light is going bye-bye. The powers that be are basically tired of hearing about it, and I can't blame them. We'll try and revisit this in a future book (assuming this one does well enough!) where we have room for maybe a small Bestiary section or at least a few pages for custom monsters so we get something that really fills this role appropriately.

Vayist is getting the evasive type philosophy abilities, and Sineater is getting DR, Fast Healing, and Regneration. Vayist is probably also going to get a marking mechanic to facilitate his Essence burn recovery by forcing someone to either hit him or help him recover.

Akasin is getting their meditation time reduced. I'd been considering rolling the Avatar of Light Veil into their class abilities since there was so much thematic overlap, and treating the Archon as kind of a portable battery for the Akasin, but that may not be an option with the directive to axe the Veil and save pets for a later supplement. Let me know if that would have been an option you were interested in so I know if its worth fighting for or letting go.

I owe you guys more Guru Veils, and they should be in this next update as well. We really focused on stuff that matched the idea of a combatant who'd rather disable an enemy and turn their own strengths against them, as opposed to the big blasts and auras of the Vizier, or the brute hitting power of the Daevic.

Vizier (and by extension some Guru and Daevic) Veils are getting overhauled to account for the Vizier's drop in BAB. This is going to mean that some Veils get minor adjustments to allow the wearer to use their veilweaver level or their BAB, whichever is higher, and others are going to get chopped up and turned into something entirely new much like Forcestrike Knuckles and Riven Darts. The good news here is that the total number of Veils will only grow because of this, and it's a good opportunity to re-introduce some ideas that were discarded along the way, not because they weren't good, but because they didn't quite fit into the old paradigm. Hand Cannons is a good example; we're probably going to make it a Daevic specific Veil (or possibly a Daevic/Guru Veil, though it feels off theme for every Guru other than maybe the Vayist to me) and then give the Vizier something that is a little more... Let's just say that if the Hand Cannons were the equivalent of a magical shotgun the Vizier's going to be getting a Veil that's a bit more like a shoulder mounted rocket launcher. Slower to fire, but with a bigger boom at the end.
I'm also incorporating Psyren's notes to ensure that Veils have all the appropriate descriptors in place.

Armory of the Conqueror is getting one last overhaul, though this one shouldn't be as extensive. It will have no effect when it isn't invested with Essence, and then it'll scale at a 1,3,5,7 (keeping the max colossal limit). That'll give it a total of 4 size increases, broken up a little more evenly throughout the level progression. This more closely matches the progression and abilities that can be simulated through core classes.

If all goes well with this update, we'll allow 1-2 weeks for additional playtesting before we start rolling out the archetypes and PRC's (which I am very excited for!).

Thanks, as always, for your support and insight guys, particularly Seerow, Psyren, and Person_Man, who have been incredible sources of insight and inspiration in the project so far (and hopefully will continue to be!).

[Psyren]

Glad to help! I'm working on feedback for the Guru and Daevic, in that order. I'll try to get them posted before your weekend release.

And please don't take any constructive feedback the wrong way - you're one of my favorite posters on the Paizo boards and I was very happy to learn you were heading up this project. Consider my pre-order guaranteed :smallsmile:

[Ssalarn]

Glad to help! I'm working on feedback for the Guru and Daevic, in that order. I'll try to get them posted before your weekend release.

And please don't take any constructive feedback the wrong way - you're one of my favorite posters on the Paizo boards and I was very happy to learn you were heading up this project. Consider my pre-order guaranteed :smallsmile:

Your support is very much appreciated, as is your criticism. While my "conversations" with a particular poster on a particular site have been getting.... heated, that's more of a sign of poor choices in phrasing and a general friction in presentation than a sign that I don't want to hear everyone's feedback and contributions.
Seerow (not the poster I was referring to in the above paragraph) has probably had as many critical insights as supportive ones, and he's getting a special call-out in the final product as one of the people I want to thank (you're in there too Psyren). At the end of the day, I want the best product, and as much cool stuff as I can possibly shove into one book, and I want GM's to feel good about having it at their table. Balance and full descriptions are one of the ways that gets done.

[stack]

On the vizier's crafters path, regarding transfer the essence: should there be some mention of cursed items? From how its written now it seems like you could, if you had a cursed +5 sword and a regular +1 sword, swap all the enchantments, milking the cursed item. I suppose it doesn't really require any additional text, just thought that a callout might head off arguments down the line.

[Ssalarn]

On the vizier's crafters path, regarding transfer the essence: should there be some mention of cursed items? From how its written now it seems like you could, if you had a cursed +5 sword and a regular +1 sword, swap all the enchantments, milking the cursed item. I suppose it doesn't really require any additional text, just thought that a callout might head off arguments down the line.

It's worth thinking about. I'll look at maybe adding something in there addressing that issue. I know that I, as a GM, have on more than one occasion let the party gain a weapon that was really too strong for them but which had some kind of nasty curse on it, and from that perspective it might be annoying to drop what you think is going to be an interesting RP tool only to have the party Vizier suck all the goodies out and throw the cursed weapon off a cliff. It brings up some similar questions about intelligent items as well that I hadn't considered. Thanks for catching that!

[stack]

Well, it would certainly be a unique niche if left in. Not sure how I thought of it, honestly. Figured it was worth mentioning since it seems like an easy thing to overlook. Good call on the intelligent items, rewarding/punishing them with enhancements would be interesting, but potentially problematic like you said.

I haven't had time to out together builds and give feedback, unfortunately.

[Ssalarn]

Well, it would certainly be a unique niche if left in. Not sure how I thought of it, honestly. Figured it was worth mentioning since it seems like an easy thing to overlook. Good call on the intelligent items, rewarding/punishing them with enhancements would be interesting, but potentially problematic like you said.

I haven't had time to out together builds and give feedback, unfortunately.

No problem Stack, you've already given me something fairly meaty to play around with....

I actually kind of like the idea of a Vizier archetype that actually plays around with storing and transferring weapon effects, including curses, but I think it's more something to head off in the base class as it can kind of show up and throw some pretty severe curve balls at a GM. I think curses will probably have to transfer with whatever the largest source of magic is and Intelligent Weapons will get a Will save or some broad GM discretion to allow them the ability to follow the flow of magic and occupy whichever physical item involved in the process they choose.


...


I just had a weird picture in my head of an evil intelligent item dominating a Vizier and forcing him to make lesser "clones" of it as part of a weird drive to complete whatever its purpose was.

[stack]

Straight out saying 'no' would be the easiest, but I wonder if some form of save-based system would work. Will DC 10+the items CL, success means you can move enchantments away from the item, failure means you can only increase the intelligent/cursed item's power, failure by 5 or more duplicates the intelligence/curse to both items? Even with a good will save it could be a risk you wouldn't want to take with a high CL item. Dc's might need to be tweaked.

Just an idea, haven't run any math or considered every possible implication.

[Ssalarn]

Straight out saying 'no' would be the easiest, but I wonder if some form of save-based system would work. Will DC 10+the items CL, success means you can move enchantments away from the item, failure means you can only increase the intelligent/cursed item's power, failure by 5 or more duplicates the intelligence/curse to both items? Even with a good will save it could be a risk you wouldn't want to take with a high CL item. Dc's might need to be tweaked.

Just an idea, haven't run any math or considered every possible implication.

I think just saying "no" might actually end up being the solution (at least for now). After looking it over a bit, I don't think there's a solid way of dealing with this that doesn't have very extensive ramifications. I think the default will be that the ability cannot affect cursed or intelligent items, and we'll tuck the idea of toying those mechanics away for a future archetype or expansion.

[Psyren]

I think just saying "no" might actually end up being the solution (at least for now). After looking it over a bit, I don't think there's a solid way of dealing with this that doesn't have very extensive ramifications. I think the default will be that the ability cannot affect cursed or intelligent items, and we'll tuck the idea of toying those mechanics away for a future archetype or expansion.

This is definitely what I would recommend - and disallow artifacts too, as some of them also have charges (e.g. Staff of the Magi) or enhancements.

[Ssalarn]

Quick note guys, I finally have internet, so the new updates should make a weekend release, including final adjustments to Daevic Veils and some smoothing out of some of the phrasing, additional Guru Veils, removal of Avatar of Light, adjustments to Guru Philosophies, reworking/addition of several Vizier Veils to keep him with a wide range of functional options with his reduced BAB, and addition of several important descriptors and minor terminology adjustments throughout the Veil lists.
I'm going to be reviewing the interactions between Transfer the Essence and various "special" items tonight and making some decisions about how those will all interact. At this point, I believe Transfer the Essence simply won't work on artifacts, cursed items, and intelligent items.
Feats, which I had originally planned for this release, will probably need to wait for the archetype roll-out. Since several of the feats will have a much more noticeable impact with the archetypes than the core Veilweaver classes (kind of in the same vein as how running sideways along a wall is kind of neat for a Psion but potentially amazing for a more martially focused class) I think this will give them a better and more thorough testing opportunity.
Thanks all!

**EDIT** I finished adding in all of the item Psyren addressed in his earlier notes that needed correction or address last night. Just a few more changes to the playtest documents and I'll have them updated in the Dropbox links, which I will repost here as well since we're on a new page along with the change log (which is at two pages and counting, so that is going to be a huge post, even though the bulk of the changes are fairly minor).

[Ssalarn]

Bumped into a small editing issue with the new Veils (need to get them matched up with some of the changes worked into the current Veils in addition to a weird formatting issue that keeps cropping up when I try to add them to the gdocs), so there will be a follow up release very shortly adding those to the playtest document.
In the meantime though:
Changelog:
Immortal Essence adjusted so that multiple uses overlap rather than extending the duration, allowing him a second option for Essence burn recovery.
Stunning Fist updated to note that recovering a use is a 1/day mechanic.
Gloves of the Master Thief corrected to grant an insight bonus.
Armory of the Conqueror adjusted so that it no longer grants a size boost until essence is invested, and size now scales at 1, 3, 5, and 7 Essence.
Wrath Passion adjusted so that both Bull Rush and Overrun options are supported throughout the life of the Passion instead of Bull Rush being the only maneuver supported past the first ability.
Clarified that a rake counts as one of the extra attacks granted by the Wrath maneuver abilities.
Horns of the Minotaur now has the option to use veilweaver level in place of BAB for gore attacks.
Bonus granted by Essence of the Succubus now scales at 1 + 1/Essence instead of 2 + 2/Essence.
Akasin now only needs to meditate for 15 minutes to gain temporary Essence pool.
Cuirass of Confidence now affects creatures who come within 60 feet instead of line of sight.
Dark Lord’s Ring of Essence Binding clarified to only grant a human zombie companion until the bind ability allows access to a cairn wight.
Clarifications made to Deathchannel Ring to remove some ambiguous phrasing.
Gorget of the Wyrm changed to 1d4 base damage with a 30 foot line option.
Hand Cannons adjusted to allow the wearer to use either their BAB or veilweaver level to determine to-hit and bonuses.
Note made to Heart of the Wight that you cannot benefit from effects normally activated by taking damage to your physical ability scores.
Light Whip is now a purely reactive ability used in place of an attack of opportunity.
Pestilence Cloak clarified in several places, descriptors added.
Polar Snowshoes now requires a Fortitude save instead of a Reflex save. Other clarifications made.
Ring of the Abjurer and Riven Darts clarified as force effects.
Darkness descriptor added to Robe of the Forgotten Deity.
Sentinel’s Helm clarified to grant improved if uncanny dodge if you have uncanny dodge from another source.
Stalker’s Tabi clarified to work in dim light or darker.
Fear descriptor added to Stare of the Ghaele.
Stone Giant’s Girdle now grants a size bonus to strength of 1 / 2 Essence. Enhanced reach requires at least 4 points of Essence to be invested.
Massive reworking to the Vayist Philosophy.
Numerous changes to the Sineater Philosophy.
Vizier's Transfer the Essence noted to not work when used on cursed, intelligent, or artifact items.

[Psyren]

Excellent - I'll take a look at the revised Guru and update my notes accordingly.

[Shinken]

Wait, wait, wait.

What about the Flowshaper? What happened to him?

[Psyren]

@ Ssalarn: Okay, I did a compare on the two versions of the Guru document and thankfully most of the changes were in areas I hadn't gotten to yet, so most of my feedback should hopefully still be useful for you. I'll try to finish it today :smallsmile:

You did get ahead of me on the Veil of Sins ability - I must say that I really prefer the new version!


Wait, wait, wait.

What about the Flowshaper? What happened to him?

That was a preliminary class from before Ssalarn took over the DSP Incarnum conversion I believe. It is now defunct, though some of its concepts may have been cannibalized for the Vizier - Ssalarn would be the guy to ask if that was the case.

[Ssalarn]

Wait, wait, wait.

What about the Flowshaper? What happened to him?

So, the Flowshaper was something that was really created with the Third Dawn product line in mind, and a lot of the steps taken as this project was developed kind of walked away from a few of the ideas behind that class. That's not to say there won't be a version of the Flowshaper in the follow up book to this release (assuming everything goes well we've already got way more material and ideas than we can fit into one release and I'm 100% down for a second book), but this time around we went a different way with everything and approached the system from the angle of the new classes presented here.
Keep in mind, that doesn't mean that the Flowshaper might not reappear at a later date in a slightly different incarnation, or that there won't be plenty of psionic support, archetypes, PrCs, etc. in both the current book and any future follow-ups, just that he's not going to be featured in this particular product.
The Daevic, Guru, and Vizier are really about showcasing the Essence system and Veils, and exploring a couple different ways to use them. One of the things we'll really be getting into with archetypes, PrCs, and a follow up book if this makes it that far, are alternative ways to use the Essence subsystem without necessarily using Veils.
One of the biggest examples of this that I'll be rolling out with this book is the Akashic Warrior, a Fighter archetype that really keeps the core chassis of the class pretty solid but deviates in how it works. The Akashic Warrior gets an Essence pool and unlocks a few binds, but he isn't granted any Veils by his class. Instead, he adds the Incarna feats to those he can selet with his bonus feats and Weapon Training, Armor Training, and Bravery all become valid options for him to invest Essence into instead of scaling by level. So where a normal Fighter would end up with +4 Armor Training, +4 Weapon Training, and +5 Bravery (think of that as effectively 13 points of Essence that he can't move around) we'll give him 10 points of Essence by the same level and give all three features a capacity of 5 or 6, so he can boost them a bit higher, but can't maintain them all simultaneously. Since he'll also get the Incarna feats as bonus feats, he'll have the option to use that Essence to shore up other areas as well, perhaps deciding that he'd rather spend a feat on Will of the Daeva and invest his Essence there to shore up his Will saves instead of investing it in his Bravery class feature (or potentially investing in both if there's something seriously scary that he has to deal with).

So the Flowshaper may be reimagined a bit and appear in a book like that where we're playing with alternative ways to use the system. I'd been playing with some ideas for a psionic class that used Veils but didn't get an Essence pool, instead powering them temporarily with power points and getting some pp "recycling" abilities, and that's something the Flowshaper could be a good fit for.

[Shinken]

The Akashic Warrior sounds insanely cool. Excellent design choices there.

[Ssalarn]

The Akashic Warrior sounds insanely cool. Excellent design choices there.

Thank You!

One of the things that kind of hit me about the Fighter is that few people think he's actually bad at doing what he does; it's just that generally, any given Fighter only does one thing well. By shifting him to the Essence system, we get to address all of the concerns with the core chassis while opening up his versatility-

Bravery is too conditional: Now it's an abililty you can invest in when you need it, or divert resources from to something more useful when it's unnecessary.

Armor Training doesn't scale unless I max my Dex, making me even more MAD!: Same as Bravery. You can scale your Armor Training as high as is appropriate for your character when you need to, controlling pretty exactly the benefit you get and need from this ability.

Fighters have poor skills and nothing they can do effectively outside of combat: By giving them the Essence system to work with and the options to choose Incarna feats with their bonus feats, we create a whole new world for the Fighter. If he wants to step more fully into the veilweaving system, he can grab the Shape Veil feat and actually have the resources to use it effectively, potentially grabbing a Veil that boosts a few key skills, or grants a special movement mode, or gives him unique tools to utilize in social situations. Basically the Fighter still retains that "build your own fighting man" element that is really core to the class, but he gets a chance to grab the missing pieces as well, so at the end of the day you have character who looks and feels like a Fighter, but who is fully integrated into the Essence subsystem.


Enough about things to come though! Here's a little update on where things are at and where I expect them to go moving forward:

I think I've got a solution to the formatting errors with the missing Veils and I should get them integrated in tonight, completing the Guru Veil list and plugging a few holes in the Vizier and Daevic.

Assuming all goes well, this will be the last major update to the playtest documents. I've got someone doing some editing now so there should be more information in the final Veil list summaries. I apologize for not getting that accomplished during the playtest, but **** got real for a while and I just wasn't able to make it a priority. My goal is to start getting archetypes out to you (including the Akashic Warrior) next week, with prestige classes the following week, with a goal of wrapping up the playtest in/by April. I'll try and leave the playtest docs available on all forums until we actually start selling finished .pdfs.
Andreas and Jeremy will have a much better idea of the timeline surrounding layout and distribution, but one of the big things I will say: the more people who preorder any or all of the .pdfs or the final product, the more likely that I get to do a second book, and that's something I'd love to do. I'm looking at maybe bringing in some materials from one or two other writers that have pitched to me in a preliminary manner (Alchemist class with Essence-addicting formulas anyone?), and we've already got a few nearly complete base classes that didn't make the cut here (including a martial artist who can infuse Essence directly into his chosen element, manipulating it without using Veils, and an advanced class version of the Summoner whose Eidolon gets Veils and an Essence Bond instead of Evolutions, amongst other things).

So, if any of that interests you, or if there's something you haven't seen yet that you'd be interested in seeing, let me know. In the mean time, please keep playtesting, please keep giving me feedback, and as always, thanks to everyone here for your insight and support.

[Psyren]

More numbers - even mutable ones - will not be sufficient to help the fighter. To truly boost the Akashic Fighter, it should also be able to spend its bonus feats on veilweaving feats; hopefully that is the case.

General question about veils; are their effects subject to SR/immunity? I know that melds in Incarnum were ("Soulmeld-magic Transparency", MoI 52) but it's not mentioned in veilweaving anywhere I could see. Could a creature with SR potentially be protected from Circlet of Brass' fire ray or Immaculate Touch's positive energy attack?

[Ssalarn]

More numbers - even mutable ones - will not be sufficient to help the fighter. To truly boost the Akashic Fighter, it should also be able to spend its bonus feats on veilweaving feats; hopefully that is the case.

General question about veils; are their effects subject to SR/immunity? I know that melds in Incarnum were ("Soulmeld-magic Transparency", MoI 52) but it's not mentioned in veilweaving anywhere I could see. Could a creature with SR potentially be protected from Circlet of Brass' fire ray or Immaculate Touch's positive energy attack?

SR should still function against Veil abilities yes. That'll be in the final product and I'll try and get it noted in the playtest as well.

On the Akashic Warrior: They add the Incarna feats to their bonus feats class feature, so any feat with the Incarna descriptor is a valid option for them. Shape Veil, which does not have that descriptor, would need to be taken separately, but most of the save-boosting feats, bind-based feats, etc. will be readily available to them, and should they choose to grab the Shape Veil feat with one of their feats by level, they will have the Essence and potentially even the bind (depending on slot) to use it effectively. I've got a playtest group who were running through the Dragon's Demand module last night which included a Guru, a Vizier, an Akashic Warrior, and a Bard, and no one even realized the AkWar was anything other than a particularly competent Fighter until he ran vertically up a tree to scout out the area around them. And that's kind of what I was going for. I don't want him to stop being a Fighter; I just want him to be a Fighter who isn't constantly falling in pits, getting charmed, dominated, confused, etc., and who doesn't stop being useful when the fight ends and the exploration or social game begins.