What does the Divine Mind need?

[Extra Anchovies]

So the divine mind is bad. Not enough power points, not enough powers (and it learns them too slowly). Everything it does, someone else can do better. How would you fix it?

The first few things off the top of my head are full BAB, 4+Int skills, powers known/pp progression of PsyWar/Lurk. What else would the class need, if anything, to crawl its way out of tier 5?

I'm posting this here because it's not so much homebrew as it is a discussion about what the class needs to be worth playing.

[Chronos]

Give its auras a larger radius. Yeah, they expand eventually, but they're what, 5' at first level? That's useless. You can't even share that with a flanking partner.

[Vhaidara]

Decent fluff. Currently it's "I'm psychic, my powers come from my mind. Because of my god. Because gods totally give out inborn psychic power."

[Extra Anchovies]

Decent fluff. Currently it's "I'm psychic, my powers come from my mind. Because of my god. Because gods totally give out inborn psychic power."

Huh. That's a good point. I've always thought a good refluff would be akin to the PoW:E Zealot, that of a warrior fiercely devoted to some cause or another. Ties in with their intended purpose as a gish and with their use of the Mantle subsystem.

[ExLibrisMortis]

Gestalt it wholesale with soulknife, give it Tashalatora as bonus feat, fix both classes?

You get medium bab, three good saves, d10 hit die, 4 skill points per level, auras, limited powers, funky psychic weapons, flurry of blows, wis to AC.


For anything with party-buffing auras, I like White Raven maneuvers. Maybe refresh them by expending psionic focus or somesuch.


You can go (at least) two ways: you can give them decent manifesting, and essentially build a psychic warrior/ardent's cousin, with auras in place of 9th level powers or a lot of bonus feats. Or you can build them into a powerful marshal-type class, with strong auras, White Raven stuff, Inspire Courage, and the ability to spend power points to buff these auras. Powers as a utility sideline, and otherwise spend x PP to double your aura bonus for x rounds. I feel like the ardent/psywar side is covered plenty, so I'd go the other way.

[Karl Aegis]

What do they do now? From what I can tell whenever they meet a problem their only solution to that problem is to puke out a giant, ectoplasmic frog, tell said giant, ectoplasmic frog to rush at the problem, shoot arrows at the problem and hope it goes away. They target AC and deal hit point damage. Their giant frog targets AC and deals hit point damage or it targets touch AC and the enemy grapple modifier to deal hit point damage.

I feel like if you improved the Ectopic Ally ability to the point where your giant frog can either breath fire, shoot electricity out of an electrostatic cannon, fly around at high speeds, or sacrifice itself to turn into a piece of terrain. An ability that lets the divine mind take direct control of the giant frog to see through the frog, manifest powers through the frog, change the shape of the frog into a humanoid form and speak through the frog so it can be used as a scout or a spy. Being able to be the corpse or the big stupid fighter guy and being able to switch between them is better than only being able to be a zen archer/knowledge devotion build.

[Grod_The_Giant]

To be ignored in favor of the near-identically-fluffed Ardent?

The main problem is that their manifesting is too stunted. If we copy the powers known/power points/highest level power progression from the PsyWar, and the mantle progression from the Ardent, that solves that. Let the aura start at the standard 30ft range and that gets better too. Behold, a marvelous gish.

[CyberThread]

Honestly you could throw the divine mind abilties into the ardent, and the class would still not be really all that OP. You would get a very nice melee character.

[Segev]

I read somewhere (so take this with the same grain of salt you would if I'd said "A friend told me his friend was told by the writer") that, until editors decided they needed an extra class in Complete Psionic, the Ardent and Divine Mind were the same class, and mantles always gave you auras.

I get the impression that the intent, when they split them up, was to make a "psionic cleric" and a "psionic paladin" out of what was originally a sort of "divine psionic marshal."

Were I to try to fix the Divine Mind, I'd do it by removing the class and giving its aura progression and powers to the Ardent, with the mantles the Ardent knows determining the mantles the new class features give him auras for. (This would take a bit more work than just this line, but that's the first-order approximation of how I'd approach it.)

Alternatively, it might be interesting to take the conception of combining Divine Mind and Soulknife, and also mix in Soulborn (the Incarnum Paladin class, which suffers from many of the same awful design decisions that make the Divine Mind stink). I like, personally, the idea of a hybrid incarnum/psionic class, and would probably try to design some tighter binding between essentia and power points.

(In fact, if I had more time to spare on creative works right now, I'd be working on developing a fan version of 5e psionics that literally combines the mechanics of psi and incarnum. The idea is that you know a smaller number of powers than spellcasters know spells, but that every power has a slightly broader suite of things it does. You invest power points into your powers known the way incarnates do essentia into soulmelds to gain greater static benefits, and have the ability to "burn" power points out of those stored in a given power to manifest a greater expression of those powers.

A Mindlink-based power might, for instance, let you create the friendly version of mindlink with willing targets based on how many power points you invest. Unwilling targets might be able to be forced into it with a higher investment per unwilling target. Expending power points could let you activate Suggestion on those whose minds you've connected to.)

[Psyren]

To be ignored in favor of the near-identically-fluffed Ardent?


Honestly you could throw the divine mind abilties into the ardent, and the class would still not be really all that OP. You would get a very nice melee character.

This. Leave it at 3/4 BAB, but give its proficiencies and auras (larger ones) to the Ardent. And for Ilsensine's sake, strip out the falling bit. Contemplating religion/philosophy is more than enough, it shouldn't be beholden to them. And get rid of the name, Ardent is fine.

[Prime32]

Decent fluff. Currently it's "I'm psychic, my powers come from my mind. Because of my god. Because gods totally give out inborn psychic power."What about "I'm psychic, my powers come from my mind. Because I'm a god."?

[Vhaidara]

What about "I'm psychic, my powers come from my mind. Because I'm a god."?

That's called Spell to Power Erudite. Or rather, a Thrallherd Psion with a StP Erudite for a thrall.

[mabriss lethe]

I'd say that one thing it needs is more coherence and a single direction. It doesn't really matter what that direction is. Their fluff and crunch are both all over the place.

[Pluto!]

If it's supposed to be a psionic buffing class, it needs to be able to do that in a competent and interesting way.

Step 0: Discard everything strong about the current Divine Mind. It's sometimes called T6, but it has access to all sorts of strong or broken stuff. But all of it - from Synchronicity abuse to Metamorphic Transfer abuse to Over-augmented Ectopic Ally - comes from outright ill-conceived or badly worded rules, not anything that belongs in a healthy game.

Step 1: Give it an actual power progression. Starting level 1. With powers that can affect its allies.

Step 2: Auras are boring, but they don't have to be. Give the auras temporary augments and bonuses for expending psionic focus. Even if it makes the baseline DM weaker, an offensive aura that gives +2 attack/damage with a +1 per 4 pp augment with a bonus of granting Haste for a round with expended focus is infinitely more interesting than flat passive numbers.

Step 3: Strip the fluff. It's redundant but worse than the Ardent.

Honestly though, it's not a project I think is even worth doing, simply because the Dreamscarred Press Worldthought Medic/Vitalist exists and is even more widely available due to the wonders of OGL.