Has anyone played an Adept?

[deuxhero]

Adepts are regularly seen as very good for an NPC class, but has anyone actually played one in a game with PC classes open? Any experiences to share?

[mabriss lethe]

Obviously, there are a lot of classes that are stronger than the adept. That said:

An adept is perfectly playable in a lower powered game, being considered a T4 class in its own right. They've got a spell list that cherry picks a lot of low level goodies from everyone else's lists. Since they're divine casters, they can find ways to armor up (via feats, dips, whatever) and not worry about ACF. They also make decent wand wielders and due to the low number of spells/day they get, they are one of the classes that can make very good use of a damage dealing reserve feats. It's also a good candidate for the "toolbox" feats that require little to no prerequisites and grant class-independent abilities. Things like Draconic Aura, bind vestige, shape soulmeld, or even the X Heritage feat chains can give an adept a surprising level of versatility.

[Jormengand]

I haven't, but someone else played it in a game where I was a truenamer, along with barbarian and rogue. The Adept was fully capable of outplaying the barbarian in most situations, and his pet cat was better at sneaking around than the rogue, especially with hefty amounts of Share Spells abuse. Deliver Touch Spells also became useful, and we ended up joking that the adept was really the kittymancer.

Even though I'd gone full-OP truenamer, even my temporal twist spam and empowered mortalbane reversed energy negation were only so useful, and the fact that the Adept actually owned some utility spells made him in some ways better than me until he, inevitably, ran out of spells.

All. The damn. Time.

Having 2 1st-level spells (due to high int) was next to nothing, and even I could go longer than that. By the time this had crawled up to 3/4/3/2 at tenth level, the party was coming to me for healing because the Adept couldn't spare the spell slots, and he was trying his damnedest not to do anything in combat either (except impale stuff on his spear) so that he could actually use his Invisibility and his Kittified Contagion (he himself would quickly drop an Invisibility on himself just after the Kitty had used Contagion so that no-one could attack the Kitty without See Invisibility).

The end result was that, while the Kittymancy was kind-of amusing, the Adept ran out of tricks up his sleeve fast, and he hadn't had that many in the first place. He could outplay the Barbarian and the Rogue until he ran out of spells, but boy did he run out of spells. He then just sat about with a spear, and I was reluctant to buff him because he didn't do a lot of damage (and I can only have one of each buff running at once).

By the time we'd hit 20th (which felt as though it took far longer than it did), he was actually fairly decent, and his 150 points of healing and all status condition removal was far better than separate utterances to Fast Heal 15 for 10 rounds and to remove each status condition. That said, Break Enchantment was useless because I'd known an utterance to do that and more since 10th level, and I had Gate in my back pocket, meaning that I had access to pretty much any spell on his list at a drop of a hat.

Adepts are great against other NPCs, but they make bad adventurers because they run out of spells too fast, and they struggle to keep up with other classes, even with their spells up and even if that class is truenamer.