PF Occultist class

[Kazuel]

I’ll be running a PF game soon and I’m not familiar with this class. Is there anything as a DM I really need to know about or any class pitfalls I need to warn the player about?

[Segev]

It needs a lot of build planning. The focus powers can overlap heavily with the spells provided by the same implements, and the fact that they get one spell per implement per level means there is a lot to consider when picking your implement schools.

There are way too many highly situational spells on their list for the limited spells known they get, and so it can be tricky to pick good spells and keep you focus options open.

If the player has a highly focused build capitalizing on some key abilities and synergies, it can work very well. But getting scattershot about it can spread it thin very fast.

The focus powers are much more important than the spells, in general, too.

[Gnaeus]

It appears to be designed as a nerf to wizards. If your team is relying on the occultist to pull out the answer to every problem from magic hat it will fail. If you have been struggling to deal with T1 casters it is an improvement.

[Kris Moonhand]

The Occultist can be kind of confusing. Luckily, I have a simple explanation that always seems to help people understand how the class works.


You start each day with 3 hippos and 10 hippo foods. You can choose to feed the hippos at the beginning of the day, which is easy, or in the middle of the day, which is about twice as hard and will make your hippos not love you as much. If you feed a hippo a lot at the beginning of the day he'll love you more and give you gifts, like see invisibility or increased spell damage. A hippo can do cool things, like make skeleton minions, but when they do it'll make them hungry, and hungry hungry hippos can't make skeletons. However, just because they're hungry and can't make skeletons anymore doesn't mean they love you any less for feeding them at the beginning of the day, so you get to keep the gifts they gave you.

Your hippo choice is very important. They come in lots of different colors, each of which gives you different gifts, can spend hippo foods on different things, and teaches you a different school of magic. Magic works pretty much the same way a Bard's magic does, but instead of having a spells known table you have your hippos whispering magical secrets to you. You get to know a spell of each level you can cast for each of your hippos, which means that as soon as you turn level 7 and get access to 3rd level spells you immediately learn 4 different 3rd level spells. This is the reason why you might want to have multiple hippos of the same color. They don't give you different gifts so there's not much point in feeding them but they do whisper different magical secrets to you.

Now you know the basics of being a Hippo Wrangler. Or an Occultist, if you replace Hippos with Implements and hippo foods with Focus.