Immolators and burnin' stuff

[Fungi]

Hello, long time OotS reader and occasional forum lurker here.

I don't have the playing many games right now, but as a nerd I still enjoy making characters sometimes. Lately I've been interested in making a pyromaniac caster. I looked at kineticist and was a bit turned off by having to read an encyclopedia's worth of class features, some of which are kinda weird. Also looked at flame oracle but wasn't pleased that the flame mystery and blackened curse overlap (frankly this seems like such an obvious oversight I'm surprised it hasn't been errata'd).

Then I discovered the Immolator, a racial archetype of inquisitor for ifrits and it was lookin' good. Archetype's all about burning stuff, race gives bonus to fire abilities, and the Immolation judgement can reduce enemies' fire resistance. Ok cool. Except... Ifrits inherently get a -2 to WIS, which the inquisitor needs and which the immolator does nothing to address. Still acceptable as a DM might be convinced to allow an immolator to cast with CHA or to allow an ifrit to move the penalty to INT or something, and a 16 would still be acceptable anyway. But on top of that, the ifrit's fire affinity feature only grants a bonus to fire domain powers and spells. Inquisitors do not get domain spells, so basically all this ability would do is add like, 0.5 damage to fire bolt, which is... Exhilarating.

TLDR: So I have two questions.
First of all, what the heck is going on with immolators? Why would anyone make a racial archetype, knowing it's not really going to be compatible with the race required to take it?
Second question, what's a fun class for causing havoc and burning stuff (any alignment)?

Thanks for reading!

[Florian]

Fun combo: Goblin Sorcerer (Elemental Bloodline)

Immolator: Not every archetype has to be good.

[stack]

A large percentage of feats, archetypes, traits, not really suited for PCs, etc. are underwhelming, worthless, or half baked. You get used to it.

[Fungi]

Yeah I guess one glance at a feat index can confirm that. I guess what it comes down to is that I have an easier time accepting an underpowered ability/archetype/class than one that's blatantly just badly designed (which is related but different). The immolator is just one example of the many bad choices as you have both mentioned. It bothers me that it could have been addressed with one more sentence saying they can use CHA to cast or what have you, but now it's stuck clogging the SRD forever for no reason. *shrug*

[Geddy2112]

Yeah, it is not the best and while thematically cool, it is pretty terrible. There are plenty of archetypes that are really good and play to the racial stats and bonuses, and some that just fall on their face bad. This is unfortunately the latter.

If you want a pyromaniac, flame oracles are about the best when it comes to blasting with fire based attacks(better than flame sorcerers IMO) and an ifrit would be great in this case. You can swap out the fire affinity for more useful traits, fire starter and hypnotic being the more useful ones.