Armorist questions

[astrerouge]

Hello all.

I recently discovered the awesomness that is the sphere of power supplement for pathfinder and I loved it, especially the armorist, like the title may have implied. I was wondering if sphere and the armorist in particular could easily be port to 3.5 and your opinion on the worth of this subsystem and the class in a regular 3.5 setting (meaning that there is still vancian casting, psionic, soulmeld and all). Also, has anyone played an armorist that would be kind enough to share the experience?

Also, I feel like the list of enhancements is quite small and I was wondering if it was a common thought or a personal feeling. Do you have any suggestion of houserules to use to enlarge that repertoire? I was thinking of creating a feat or an arsenal feat that let them destroy a magic weapon or armor a bit like how artificier do to add exp in their reserve, but to gain the magical property in their repertoire. Does it seem like a good idea? Any other idea?

Also, I had the extravagant idea to be able to summon artifact with this class as a capstone, wouldn't it be cool? The mechanic of this is really eluding since artifact vary greatly in power and don't have price, but still, being gilgamesh can be nice XD

Anyway, thank you for reading this and have a good day!

[Chronikoce]

I love spheres of power but my group doesn't want to learn the rules so I've only made characters but not played them. As a result my opinion may not be accurate but I think it fits nicely on the same power level as pathfinder. You don't ramp up to reality altering cheese machine like in 3.5 but I think you could still stay relevant in a mid op game. Plus the flavor is totally worth it, armorist is one of my favorites.

[AmberVael]

Most of Spheres of Power stands well on its own, so its only a few little pieces here or there that would need to change if you wanted to port it back to 3.5. I don't think you'd have a problem.

The main things I can think of are that you'd probably want to shift them to using the Concentration skill for well... concentration checks and that Pathfinder's skill consolidation relative to 3.5 does affect some talents (like Listen and Spot being just Perception in Pathfinder, and similar stuff), but those are easy enough to correct just by changing them to cover the right skills. There are a couple of talents that use Pathfinder's combat maneuver rules, which might be a little bit trickier to handle, but reworking them should be doable. There's also few enough of them that you could just ignore them and probably not suffer much if at all.

There's probably a few other pieces here or there (Domains and Turn Undead/Channel Energy are notably different in Pathfinder, which would affect the relevant Incanter specializations), but its not so much that it can't be handled.


As for the Armorist enhancement list, I've definitely heard the complaint before. Among other things, it doesn't encompass the many, many special abilities that might be brought in from other 3rd party sources or more recent sourcebooks. What I might tentatively suggest is trying out the option to let people build their own list of available special abilities that add up to the same amount available to the default Armorist, and allowing additional special abilities to be added in through arsenal tricks as normal. Destroying existing magical weapons is also a quite interesting idea, though I might suggest there that taking say, a +1 flaming longsword and breaking it down to get the flaming special ability (ignoring the fact that by default Armorists have flaming already) may be too expensive. Perhaps a mechanic or cost similar to scribing new spells into a spellbook might be better? Maybe you could research a weapon you have access to, rather than destroying it.