What would t1 Incarnum look like?

[Morphic tide]

Within the confines of the existing core mechanics of the subsystem and the three class's themes, what would be the most reasonable emergence of Incarnum being Tier One capable like Vancian casting and Psionics, in the context of 3.5's design standards? Keeping Chakra unlocks and per-receptacle Essentia limits where they are, "tier" wise, as well as Essentia investment remaining stated per-point values rather than breaking out tables, but what you're doing with that being unbounded within the limits of what other classes can do by the same level on the relevant resource schedules.

For instance, passive investiture being no better than at-wills, dailies being no better than spells, encounter or similar timeframe effects being no better than Tome of Battle. Do note Meldshaper level exists, so Xd6 pie-plates of Mook-B-Gone, if deemed a necessary function, can be done without Psionic-like scaling investment. Of course, making Essentia itself the daily rendering the spell-alike functionality like a chunkier Manifesting is fine if you think that'd go well in practice.

I find this an interesting question because Incarnum has some of the best capacity for going Tier One of the "weird" subsystems on the back of not having locked-in choices, it enjoys the Cleric style of preparation where you just pick your toolbox from everything printed. But then 3.5's design doesn't really do dramatic problem-solver abilities outside spell-alike frameworks of daily uses. Tier One sounds impossible with the caveat of working the same way as printed and sticking to 3.5 design trends.

But that's why I think it's worth a thread. Just how far do at-wills go in 3.5? Just how trivially do you have to solve problems to be Tier One? Going by Artificer, triviality isn't actually an in-play concern. Needing to pick an exact full suite of your Soulmelds for 80% of Tier One tasks wouldn't disqualify because the Artificer has to plan out multiple sessions in advance for an enormous amount of problems, and we specifically consider Druid and Cleric Tier One because they could prepare a near-perfect answer to the vast majority of problems.

The two big things are working out the use of secondary resource constraints, like Essentia expense alongside unbinding and unshaping Soulmelds, as well as careful minimization of redundancy. The former allows more powerful abilities within the subsystem, vital to really allow major abilities like long-range transportation and other major answers at appropriate levels, while the latter is important to actually have the abilities in question within the "one book and done" situation.

So, what would you think in terms of specifics?

Personally, my own favorite sub-challenge would be keeping Soulborn as having a Paladin-type "half-progression starting at 4th" on its class table, yet manage to be Tier One anyways. By all normal optimization sense, this should be impossible. But then we've free reign to mess with Soulmelds and Feats and Class Features in this hypothetical, with the bound being not strictly overpowering anyone else's level-appropriate options. So between the usual "better effects for weaker progression" thing and the ready ability to turn your feats into your missing progression, including accessing effects on the full progression timing... Well, there's room to pull it off in that case!

[sreservoir]

Artificer is frankly an awful benchmark that doesn't really belong in tier 1, except insofar as getting double WBL would raise you from tier 4 to tier 1 by itself. Which, I mean, isn't completely wrong, but by that standard getting full WBL in the first place probably should've already put you in tier 1.

[Particle_Man]

Well tier ones can do anything so switching out your souldmelds at will instead of having them locked in for the day would be a good start. Also being able to break your essentia out of incarnum feat jail as part of the swift action essentia allocation rather than locking them up for 24 hours. That would particularly help the soul born, who gets incarnum bonus feats.

Speaking of bonus feats, maybe give out double chakra bonus feats liberally too, for greater versatility.

[RandomPeasant]

Maybe I'm not getting what OP is asking, but this doesn't really seem like an interesting question to me. Getting Incarnum to T1 is pretty much a matter of taking spells and stapling them onto soulmelds. Like you have a Cerulean Sleep Crown that gives you an at-will sleep that scales the HD cap with Essentia, and that's an AoE SoD effect that can play with the big boys for most of the game. Or your Azure Bracers of Interplanar Alignment allow you to summon monster at a level based on your Essentia investment, and if bound you get a planar binding type effect.

Basically, I don't think this:


Just how far do at-wills go in 3.5?

Is actually a meaningful thing to ask. At-wills go as far as you let them go, unless you mean "keeping with the standards 3.5 sets", in which case the answer is trivial in the opposite direction.

Having your abilities at-will is strictly better than having them on any other resource management system. The reason the classes that are T1 are on top isn't because Vancian Spellcasting or Spell Points are the most powerful resource management systems you can have, it's because those classes get abilities that are very good, and because they get much broader access to those abilities than other classes do. The Sorcerer's spellcasting mechanic of "cast any spell you know whenever you want" is, in reality, much better than the Wizard's "guess which spells you think you'll need each morning". It's just that when the Sorcerer is getting his first 5th level spell, the Wizard is getting his fourth, and that's without taking advantage of any of the ways Wizards have to learn more spells.


I find this an interesting question because Incarnum has some of the best capacity for going Tier One of the "weird" subsystems on the back of not having locked-in choices

I don't think this is true either. The Binder is almost exactly a Cleric, just with weird resource management. If Vestiges happened to make you very good, instead of "kind of okay", the Binder would easily be competitive with the Wizard or the Druid. That's practically the exact same thing that would have to happen for the Incarnate or Totemist to be competitive with them. The Shadowcaster is basically a Wizard that has a weirder resource management setup and a more limited spell list (the Shadowcaster is seriously uninspired for a Shadow Mage -- take a look at the crap people pull with Night in A Practical Guide to Evil and tell me that you can't hit T1 just off shadow magic).

Frankly, I think any class gets to T1 if you write them abilities that are powerful enough. It's true that all the existing T1s have a high degree of flexibility, but that's a contingent result of 3e making the most powerful classes also the most flexible. It's easy for me to imagine an alternate timeline where Skip hated Wizards instead of Sorcerers, and they were the ones with less spells known, less class features, slower spellcasting progression, and worse magic. And in that timeline I think it's pretty easy for the Sorcerer to come out on top, even though he'd still be stuck with the same spells every day.

[Efrate]

Essentia needs to either scale better or have a psycarnum infusion type of trick where you can get more/infinite. I would start by doubling incarnate essentia, triple totemist, and like x5 soulborn. Make extra essentia grant 2x the number of times you take it without limit. Have more/easier access to increased capacity. Binds needs to unlock a LOT earlier, like soul no later than 10 for anyone.

You should always have enough essentia to fill to the brim all shaped veils, and be able to to fill extra stuff such as feats or race or class abilities as well. At least as an incarnate. Mayhaps not 100% for the non meld/non combat options but enough that its worth. You could potentially just make all melds scale perfectly to their max for the class, so when your capacity is say 3 all your melds have effectively 3 essentia all the time. At least all combat relative ones. Essentia needs to not be trapped as well in stuff. Eliminate all alignment restrictions on melds. A good incarnate should be able to spit acid if he wants no problem.

Binds and magic items fully function without interfering with one another. An attacking maneuver does not somehow eliminate your weapon, why should a hand meld mess with magic gauntlets?

Incarnate to 3/4 bab and d8 HD, they are pseudo gishy so why hurt them when they kind of want to mix it up a fair bit.

Reshaping everything and redoing feat investement etc. should be something like once per every X levels a day. 2/3/4 incarnate totemist soulborn. Bonus incarnum feats at simar intervals.

Melds need to have better scaling benefits for higher binds. Something like teleport self 10 ft hands, self or ally 30ft. wrists, dimension door that can act after shoulders, teleport heart, greater teleport soul. No 1x a day. Shadow hand stuff for the more tactical range is like every other round, so effectively at will. Maybe 1or 3x a day greater teleport, 3x or 5x regular, etc.

DSP's vizier class from pf1e is a much better incarnate, capturing the more casteryish feel and having more options that resemble tier 1 stuff, though its generally tier 2 iirc. The way they do their melds works better, with most say attacking melds taking the hand or wrist, most mental melds taking head, etc.

[Lans]

Take the zombie meld and allow it to make additional zombies per essential invested, additional undead types for soul or heart binds.

Incarnate avatar could do a summon monster effect or grant SLA based on represented creature- blue salad, nycaloth astral deva or marut, soul spark familiar could be buffed to be an outsider with HD equal to meldshaper level with abilities based on where it's bound.

Lucky Dice also gives a reroll 1/round

[Efrate]

Making spell equivalents so you are wizard or cleric but blue soul like is the easiest obv. Hit the caster benchmarks, flight at 5, good shape change at 7, teleport and planar travel at 9, add incarnum summons like the astral construct line starting at 1 etc.

Sadly natural attacks and damage (totemist) and really high skills (incarnate), which is a LOT of both those classes, just is not enough.

[Lans]

Incarnate Weapon also gives magical weapon special abilities equal to essentulia invested, fellmist robe makes fog effect. Cerulean Sandals make te speed increase 10 +10 per essentia, change the total teleport to 10*(meldshaper level cubed). So at 4th a total of 640 feet, 80000 feet at 20th.

Bluesteel Bracers gives enhancement bonus to armor, as well as armor special abilities equal to invested essentia.

Riding Bracers gives ridden creature special mount abilities similar to paladin.

Lifebond vestments give the dragon shamans touch of vitality ability based off wisdom

Lightning Gauntlets arcs out damaging a chain of enemies no more than 10 feet further from closest also damaged creature, they must make a save vs being stunned

[Morphic tide]

Well tier ones can do anything
Counterpoint: CoDzilla. The entire premise behind putting them in t1 is that they are never "locked out" of their much more modest answers and bundle of harm-removal, as well as kinda lunatic efficiency at dealing with combat. And also Artificer literally taking multiple days to prepare for a whole lot of things. Tier One's definition is how many things a given character could do, not how much they have on hand.


Also being able to break your essentia out of incarnum feat jail as part of the swift action essentia allocation rather than locking them up for 24 hours. That would particularly help the soul born, who gets incarnum bonus feats.
Maybe just as a Soulborn thing, because it otherwise adds a bit much complexity for pure feat access. Or as a thing tied to being able to Shape Soulmelds, so it's opened by actually particularly caring about the issue.


Speaking of bonus feats, maybe give out double chakra bonus feats liberally too, for greater versatility.
I was actually thinking having Soulborn get floating bonus feats as part of managing it despite a "gutted" Incarnum progression, basically using feats to bludgeon the progression back in shape.


Maybe I'm not getting what OP is asking, but this doesn't really seem like an interesting question to me. Getting Incarnum to T1 is pretty much a matter of taking spells and stapling them onto soulmelds. Like you have a Cerulean Sleep Crown that gives you an at-will sleep that scales the HD cap with Essentia, and that's an AoE SoD effect that can play with the big boys for most of the game. Or your Azure Bracers of Interplanar Alignment allow you to summon monster at a level based on your Essentia investment, and if bound you get a planar binding type effect.

{scrubbed}


Basically, I don't think this:

Is actually a meaningful thing to ask. At-wills go as far as you let them go, unless you mean "keeping with the standards 3.5 sets", in which case the answer is trivial in the opposite direction.
...Are you seriously going to just ignore Warlock's pile of spell-like Invocations without useage restrictions? Incarnum as already printed? Yes, they're not as campaign-buggering as high-level spells, but they are not remotely pathetic space . It's the "mundanes" that are screwed out of any real versatility, not the at-will resource schedule. And the extremely vast majority of spells are just bigger numbers than at-will abilities, especially once you're counting Invocations since those are very specifically designed as at-will spell-likes.

Am I incorrect in recalling the benchmark for t1 being the capacity to answer all problems with one build? Because a Spell to Power Erudite is specifically made to be incapable of answering every kind of issue in one day, yet was originally specifically deemed eligible for t1 when most other forms of Psion weren't, entirely on the basis of having a lot more of the "iconic" carte-blanch answers courtesy of getting to use the Wizard list.

And yet when you drop into a game with the realities of play, the gap between Wizard and Psion has far more to do with the spellbook and far larger pile of feats and PRCs, not spell selection, because Psionics does a remarkably good job filling the t1 needs in a single book without totally open-ended answers. There's basically just Wish-alikes and Metamorphic Transfer for that, otherwise it's on the fact that the vast majority of it comes down to like a dozen distinct effects that screw with plots while being able to handle just about every kind of fight. And an Egoist or Nomad can pretty much do that, thanks to Expanded Knowledge allowing the looting of one or two missing major answers from another specialist Psion, or even another Psionic class.


You should always have enough essentia to fill to the brim all shaped veils
Why's that required? It's all of a Swift Action to shift the Essentia around, you only need enough to fill the set needed to answer a problem to the point of managing that answer. Because you can switch it around instantly, all but mid-action. Just make the individual Soulmelds enough stronger that you don't feel particularly pressed in that fashion because you can get all your combat numbers in an actively good place with room for utility left over.


Binds and magic items fully function without interfering with one another.
Pre-existing core rule, with feat workarounds, and can be made class feature workarounds more befitting their themes. It isn't actually crippling, particularly when you're specifically eying wide-ranging problem solving in the Soulmeld abilities. And, of course, one can have an inversion where you can run the Soulmeld off the item, where its GP value is translated into Essentia while it's suppressed.


Incarnate to 3/4 bab and d8 HD, they are pseudo gishy so why hurt them when they kind of want to mix it up a fair bit.
Alternative: De-gish them for variety, because Totemist and Soulborn are also melee. I'm not asking full-bore TO extravaganza competition here, I'm talking meeting the benchmarks for t1 when talking theoreticals but not actually stepping outside existing bounds of each resource usage method. The sort of theoretical capacity that has the days-to-months preparation Artificer be there.


Melds need to have better scaling benefits for higher binds.
Definitely agreed that they need better effects at higher levels, but I'd greatly prefer keeping the oddly "scattered" effects. Never have the "same thing but better" Bind like Pegasus Mantle or Soulspark Familiar, always do something different.


No 1x a day.
Wizard starts at 1/day for each spell level, and daily restrictions are kinda necessary to preserve "playability" of 3.5. Though I'd mentioned use of Essentia expense, unbinding, and unshaping as alternative costs specifically to have resource variance so that it isn't artificially imposed in the Soulmeld description as an awkward "catch", but instead pointing at another entirely-sensible rule confining the usage frequency. So rather than being awkwardly spelled out as 1/day, those extreme burst outputs like long-range teleportation use up Essentia or unshape the Soulmeld, to be recovered the next day.

Again, remember Artificer's placement, the tiers are a categorization of theoretical build capacity vastly more than on-hand in-the-field options.


Take the zombie meld and allow it to make additional zombies per essential invested, additional undead types for soul or heart binds.
I mean if we're talking more options out of Necrocarnum, it's not a stretch at all to have full ability retention reanimation.

The line between Incarnum reanimation and Necrocarnum enslavement is a rather fine one, in the underlying fluff. Because if you can grab the soul to put it back in the body, what's to stop you from twisting it beforehand to bind to service?


Incarnate avatar could do a summon monster effect or grant SLA based on represented creature- blue salad, nycaloth astral deva or marut, soul spark familiar could be buffed to be an outsider with HD equal to meldshaper level with abilities based on where it's bound.
The Incarnate having literal Outsider summoning and the Totemist some variety of open-ended SLA looting are both well fitting with their themes, and are major sources of problem-solving for all Psionics shows us we could perfectly well manage it single-book without needing to use such measures.


Making spell equivalents so you are wizard or cleric but blue soul like is the easiest obv. Hit the caster benchmarks, flight at 5, good shape change at 7, teleport and planar travel at 9, add incarnum summons like the astral construct line starting at 1 etc.
In this case, these Big Utility Pushes where you actually need the burst output only seen in top-level spells should be daily expenses, just as they are with casters. Is it better to unshape the meld, unbind it, or burn the Essentia involved? Probably the last since it reduces simultaneity of answers and eventually scale, rather than raw variety of problem-solving as appears the dominant t1 distinction.

However, note when the Warlock or Binder or the ToB classes get things like this, and where t1 options don't really do such things themselves. Cleric runs on self-buffs, not shapeshifting, for example, and Druid's strategic mobility is just barely there, while Wizard is to my knowledge literally required to use summons for any serious healing or condition removal.


Sadly natural attacks and damage (totemist) and really high skills (incarnate), which is a LOT of both those classes, just is not enough.
Big Think: Give Totemist baseline Natural Weapons, then the pile of Totem effects currently granting instead give other, more significant, properties modifying combat capabilities. That way you end up not truly needing more Soulmelds chosen for combat past 5th level (so perhaps two or three shaped atop the Totem bind), for all you might be able to go Full Blender for a day just to see what being an Ubercharger feels like, and in-between allows a nice breeze instead of just meeting basic technical competencies to engage in the WotC approved slugging match.

[AvatarVecna]

Artificer can whip out spell effects as needed on-the-fly via infusions, and can get longer-term items capable of basically anything if they've got the downtime and resources to make them. Artificer is fairly versatile in regular play, and when they get that downtime the wealth advantage they give themselves or their party members can be quite significant even at low levels. Even with no custom items or cost shenanigans and "only" double WBL, that's a lot of extra item power. That's enough for you to get your basic numbers to useful levels, while still having plenty of money left over for scrolls and wands and smaller buff spells that are still highly effective. Combined with using infusions for bigger buffs, even a relatively low-op artificer can still be a force to be reckoned with.

[Harrow]

You know, at first I kind of scoffed at the idea. Tier 1 incarnum? WITHOUT changing any of the design principles behind it? Incarnum has always interested me, but there's just so little room for exploitation. The bonuses gained from investing essentia are always linear, the cap on essentia investment is so low with so few ways to improve it. But, thinking on it more, having access to magical abilities and being able to change your loadout every day is prime real estate for T1 nonsense.

If a character is asked "Can you solve this level appropriate problem?" the answer needs to be "Yes*" for them to be Tier 1. It's fine if there's a little footnote reading "*Tomorrow". So, in order to answer your question, we would have to ask first "What problems does a T1 character need to be able to solve?" That's a long list, but the broader our solutions the fewer answers we need to cover for larger amounts of problems.

Probably the most prevalent problem across D&D's history is "I want that thing to be dead before it makes me dead". Being such a common problem, a wide variety of methods have been developed to solve it. Our T1 incarnum class is probably going to want a couple of them. Direct damage could be made viable without too many changes. Either alter Soulspark Familiar or make a feat so that Share Soulmeld works with it. At the cost of possibly just a single feat and all your daily resources, dissolving spittle would get 2 touch attacks at 2d6 acid damage each at level 1. Just by using more daily resources, this scales up to 2 touch attacks at 4d6+3 (average 17) damage each at level 6. Looking at a few random CR 6 foes, the annis, chain Devil, and girallon all go down in an average of about 4 hits, easily possible in 2 turns solo. A young blue dragon takes an average of 6 hits, which means that, if the rest of the party is keeping up with your damage, it would have to get lucky on some rolls to survive the end of the first round. It starts to fall behind in damage after that point, but if you add on sighting gloves, that should carry your damage output until you hit level 9, where you could slot in another change, a shoulder bind to be able to full attack with your dissolving spittle. With just those changes, at level 20 you're easily looking at 4 attacks (2 from Bab, 1 from Haste, 1 from Rapidshot) with an additional 2 from your Soulspark familiar (until it gets killed), hitting for 7d6+7 (average 31.5) damage both at the time of the hit, then again the following round. You're level 20, why not compare this to the Tarrasque? At 6 hits a round, you're doing an average of 189 dpr the first round, then double that on each following round. Big T regenerates 40 per round, so doing this solo (assuming some kind of defense so you don't get eaten the first round) it would take about 3 rounds to get it unconscious. It's no ubercharger, but it gets the job done.

But then, that brings up a relevant point. Uberchargers are not Tier 1. Just doing damage isn't enough. You would need to add melds and binds for buffing, debuffing, and improved minionmancy. Open-ended stuff like polymorph and planar binding effects that let you cherry pick through monster statblocks to grab any abilities you don't get natively. You need some "just win" options equivalent to stuff like Knock and Glibness that completely bypass non-combat encounters, and equivalents to Freedom of Movement, Mind Blank, and Death Ward that give you flat out immunity. You need flight, tactical and strategic teleportation (including between planes), you could use some mind control. Divinations are always useful. You don't need these exact effects or copy-pasted spell descriptions for most of these, just options in the same vein.

Overall, I'd say that, yeah, with enough extra support Incarnates and Totemists could be Tier 1, just like Wizards and Druids are. What's that? Soulborn? Look here, buddy, I'm not some kind of miracle worker. I have no idea what it would even take to make a half caster Tier 1 without making some serious changes to design philosophy, much less a half meldshaper. You're on your own for that one.

[RandomPeasant]

Well tier ones can do anything so switching out your souldmelds at will instead of having them locked in for the day would be a good start.

How is that remotely necessary? The ability to pick new soulmelds every day is already exactly analogous to the ability to pick new spells every day, which is how the Wizard, Druid, Cleric, Archivist, and Erudite all work.


Essentia needs to either scale better or have a psycarnum infusion type of trick where you can get more/infinite. I would start by doubling incarnate essentia, triple totemist, and like x5 soulborn. Make extra essentia grant 2x the number of times you take it without limit. Have more/easier access to increased capacity. Binds needs to unlock a LOT earlier, like soul no later than 10 for anyone.

I don't think that follows. You don't need to change the amount of essentia people get to make soulmelds scale better. You just need to give better scaling per essentia. Similarly, you don't need to move the chakra unlocks forward, you just need to make the earlier chakras unlock stuff people care about. Indeed, you don't want to move them forward, because you need something to unlock whatever the Incarnate's answer to 9th level spells is going to be, and I'm skeptical that just "scaling up your 1st level spells more" is ever going to do that.


...Are you seriously going to just ignore Warlock's pile of spell-like Invocations without useage restrictions?

Which makes them T3. There's not a single T2 or higher class whose primary abilities are at-will, so if you want to maintain the existing constraints the system puts on what at-will abilities can do, you can't go higher than T3. The question you're asking is just not as interesting as you seem to believe. Either we're constrained by what existing at-will abilities can do (and at the end of the line, that's "be in T3") or we aren't (and can simply write whatever abilities are necessary to be in T1). And I didn't ignore the Warlock's SLAs, I proposed the exact same thing for the Incarnate, but apparently that's not an acceptable solution.


Am I incorrect in recalling the benchmark for t1 being the capacity to answer all problems with one build?

The benchmark for T1 is "more powerful than any T2". It happens that all the classes that do that do so by having any extremely high level of versatility, but claiming that's fundamental to the definition is confusing a contingent truth for a fundamental one.


Wizard starts at 1/day for each spell level, and daily restrictions are kinda necessary to preserve "playability" of 3.5.

Daily restrictions are necessary for strategic abilities like fabricate and teleport, because the ability to do those things at-will has a dramatically different effect on the setting and the story than the ability to do them a few times a day. But combat abilities don't need daily caps at all. Past very low levels (either character or optimization), Wizards are constrained by the number of combat actions they have rather than the number of spell slots they have for fireball or stinking cloud or finger of death. If they weren't, celerity would be a garbage spell.


Artificer can whip out spell effects as needed on-the-fly via infusions

That's pretty limited though. The Infusions list is quite short, and while spell-storing item lets you get around that a bit, it's limited in its own right. A character who just got Infusions as their ability set would be maybe T3.

[Lans]

How

Which makes them T3. There's not a single T2 or higher class whose primary abilities are at-will, so if you want to maintain the existing constraints the system puts on what at-will abilities can do, you can't go higher than T3. The question you're asking is just not as interesting as you seem to believe. Either we're constrained by what existing at-will abilities can do (and at the end of the line, that's "be in T3") or we aren't (and can simply write whatever abilities are necessary to be in T1). And I didn't ignore the Warlock's SLAs, I proposed the exact same thing for the Incarnate, but apparently that's not an acceptable solution.



That's pretty limited though. The Infusions list is quite short, and while spell-storing item lets you get around that a bit, it's limited in its own right. A character who just got Infusions as their ability set would be maybe T3.

The Binder is considered T2 on it's at will Summon Monster


Spell storing item by itself makes artificer T1 for the first 8 levels

[RandomPeasant]

The Binder is considered T2 on it's at will Summon Monster

I always felt like that was a bit of a bogus assessment. It's like having a separate ranking for Sorcerer With Planar Binding and calling that T1. Every class can be optimized up (or down), the Summon Monster vestige isn't really a uniquely large power spike.


Spell storing item by itself makes artificer T1 for the first 8 levels

Not really. The UMD check is not trivial to make at low levels. It takes significant investment to get even a +10 bonus as a 1st level character (including high CHA and Skill Focus, neither of which you want long term), and even if you pull out a +15 bonus you're still failing your check to store a 1st level spell about 35% of the time. Which makes you a bit like a Wizard walking around in full plate, which is not remotely a T1 character. Eventually you can make yourself a +UMD item and stop worrying, but that doesn't happen immediately.

[Lans]

I always felt like that was a bit of a bogus assessment. It's like having a separate ranking for Sorcerer With Planar Binding and calling that T1. Every class can be optimized up (or down), the Summon Monster vestige isn't really a uniquely large power spike.



Not really. The UMD check is not trivial to make at low levels. It takes significant investment to get even a +10 bonus as a 1st level character (including high CHA and Skill Focus, neither of which you want long term), and even if you pull out a +15 bonus you're still failing your check to store a 1st level spell about 35% of the time. Which makes you a bit like a Wizard walking around in full plate, which is not remotely a T1 character. Eventually you can make yourself a +UMD item and stop worrying, but that doesn't happen immediately.
There is precedent, healer and truenamer being T2 once they get gate

Good point, I still feel like its on the precipes of single handidly making it tier 1. It's any list, and any spell.

[Darg]

There is precedent, healer and truenamer being T2 once they get gate

Good point, I still feel like its on the precipes of single handidly making it tier 1. It's any list, and any spell.

I can't agree that gate is such a reliable enough spell for this, planar ally and planar binding are the same. It requires DM fiat to make them broken as all of them tell you that anything unreasonable is never agreed to. If a person wants a wish, it would be unreasonable to command or bargain for it with 100gp.

[RandomPeasant]

There is precedent, healer and truenamer being T2 once they get gate

But that doesn't show up in the Tiers, which is my point. There's not a separate "Truenamer After Gate" entry. Outliers don't get counted separately in any other case, just this one. I have no idea why that is, but I suspect it was either "there was some ongoing heated debate about that Vestige when JaronK compiled his list" or "JaronK was a big Binder fanboy".


Good point, I still feel like its on the precipes of single handidly making it tier 1. It's any list, and any spell.

Only for a pretty small window. At low levels, you can't make the UMD check reliably enough. At high levels, 4th level spells don't cut it (you can extend that a bit by dumpster-diving, but then you get into comparative optimization questions). There's a window between, say, 4th and 8th where you can do a decent Wizard impersonation. But that's a really small window, and outside that window (frankly, outside of specifically spell-storing item) I've never seen anything you can do with Infusions that sounded all that impressive.


I can't agree that gate is such a reliable enough spell for this, planar ally and planar binding are the same. It requires DM fiat to make them broken as all of them tell you that anything unreasonable is never agreed to. If a person wants a wish, it would be unreasonable to command or bargain for it with 100gp.

Yes, your DM can screw you over. But your DM can always screw you over. It doesn't mean planar binding isn't broken.

[Darg]

Yes, your DM can screw you over. But your DM can always screw you over. It doesn't mean planar binding isn't broken.

Being reasonable as the RAW dictates is not screwing anyone over. If you want a wish, paying for the service as it were a casting of the spell wouldn't be unreasonable, nor would paying in another form of equivalent exchange. The one screwing everyone over is the player demanding a wish for pennies.

[RandomPeasant]

Being reasonable as the RAW dictates is not screwing anyone over. If you want a wish, paying for the service as it were a casting of the spell wouldn't be unreasonable, nor would paying in another form of equivalent exchange. The one screwing everyone over is the player demanding a wish for pennies.

So the "reasonable" effect of the spell is that it allows you to buy castings of wish for the price you could already buy them for?

[Particle_Man]

How is that remotely necessary? The ability to pick new soulmelds every day is already exactly analogous to the ability to pick new spells every day, which is how the Wizard, Druid, Cleric, Archivist, and Erudite all work.

Cleric, druid, wizard get lots of spell slots. Incarnate has very few soulmeld slots. Cleric, druid, wizard have extensive spell lists spread over many books. Incarnate has a small soulmeld list spread over two books and one mind’s eye article. Cleric, druid, wizard have access to Wands and Staffs for extra spell slots, and spells not prepared that day. Incarnate, not so much. So incarnate needs versatility. If the OP is not going to grow the number of soulmelds or the number of essentia, or the soulmeld list, or grant equivalents to wands, then the options for versatility include a faster way to switch out the soulmelds.

I suppose it is less necessary if you make every spell into a soulmeld.

[Darg]

So the "reasonable" effect of the spell is that it allows you to buy castings of wish for the price you could already buy them for?

Why wouldn't it be? There isn't normally a magic mart in the middle of a battlefield. And you could possibly end up paying with something other than gp.

[RandomPeasant]

Cleric, druid, wizard get lots of spell slots. Incarnate has very few soulmeld slots.

True, but a lot of those spell slots are low level ones that aren't worth very much. A 10th level Cleric gets three top-level spell slots (though they'll probably have enough WIS for another one). A 10th level Incarnate gets six soulmelds, can can invest each of them fully in the situation where they're used. Plus Chakra binds that unlock additional abilities. And those soulmelds aren't expended when used.


Cleric, druid, wizard have extensive spell lists spread over many books. Incarnate has a small soulmeld list spread over two books and one mind’s eye article.

But those classes were plenty powerful when they had only one book worth of spells. The Wizard is still perfectly capable of being T1 if they only ever cast PHB spells.


Cleric, druid, wizard have access to Wands and Staffs for extra spell slots, and spells not prepared that day.

So does the Incarnate. There's even a UMD Soulmeld for you to use them with. Casters are somewhat better at using magic items, but it's far from unique to them.


Why wouldn't it be? There isn't normally a magic mart in the middle of a battlefield. And you could possibly end up paying with something other than gp.

Why would it be? "Unreasonable" doesn't mean "anything your DM doesn't like". "Fight for me against people you hate" isn't an "unreasonable" request to make of an outsider that is pro-murder (such as, I don't know, demons). And that's totally game-breaking.

[Efrate]

Incarnates as a soul bind gets gate 1x/week and if you call something its 1k xp. Your standard t1 that can cast gate gets that several times a day if they want. Plus all the other 9ths. Thats the gap to bridge.

[Morphic tide]

Which makes them T3. There's not a single T2 or higher class whose primary abilities are at-will, so if you want to maintain the existing constraints the system puts on what at-will abilities can do, you can't go higher than T3. The question you're asking is just not as interesting as you seem to believe. Either we're constrained by what existing at-will abilities can do (and at the end of the line, that's "be in T3") or we aren't (and can simply write whatever abilities are necessary to be in T1). And I didn't ignore the Warlock's SLAs, I proposed the exact same thing for the Incarnate, but apparently that's not an acceptable solution.

How many times have I mentioned alternate expense mechanics? I'm not disallowing the introduction of common expenses that provide daily or per-encounter-ish abilities, whatever the form that takes, because Incarnum does have three separate "parts" you can turn into fuel for this. Making Chakra Binds per-encounter is one idea I apparently pruned out of the OP, but would simultaneously greatly expand in-the-field versatility and offer a middle-ground expense for things that get silly as outright at-wills like most varieties of summoning.

And as for t1s being more powerful, I'm going to need a pretty big pile of citations on how exactly Wizard has meaningfully more raw in-your-face power than Sorcerer, as base classes. Because the only fundamental difference they have, internally, is how many spells they get, with the usual examples being endurance or versatility tricks, not actual momentary output.


Cleric, druid, wizard get lots of spell slots. Incarnate has very few soulmeld slots. Cleric, druid, wizard have extensive spell lists spread over many books. Incarnate has a small soulmeld list spread over two books and one mind’s eye article. Cleric, druid, wizard have access to Wands and Staffs for extra spell slots, and spells not prepared that day. Incarnate, not so much. So incarnate needs versatility. If the OP is not going to grow the number of soulmelds or the number of essentia, or the soulmeld list, or grant equivalents to wands, then the options for versatility include a faster way to switch out the soulmelds.
Psion doesn't get that many Powers, and StP Erudite explicitly has fewer yet got rated higher because of better problems-solved from the larger number of broad carte-blanch answers. Staves and Wands are a very good point! I mentioned overhauling the feats right in the OP, didn't I? Why not throw in more items that replicate a lot of the in-play versatility options? I'm against just slapping giant number boosts and a huge pile of more powerful content because that doesn't at all fit with how 3.5's subsystems got designed. Note that Psionics is also t1 off the 90% or so of it in "two books and Mind's Eye", and Artificer's t1 off its home book and how a single class feature lets it loot from nearly every other book in the game.

So when you start taking a hatchet to typing permutations and other forms of effect redundancy and specifically look to have as many parts independently answer situations as possible, you can pack down t1 outputs to a single book. Even without looting from others, for all that's supremely helpful to managing it and rather iconic to the execution, since Psionics, again, manages to be t1 without. Because they saved page space with Augments and bundling energy types.


Incarnates as a soul bind gets gate 1x/week and if you call something its 1k xp. Your standard t1 that can cast gate gets that several times a day if they want. Plus all the other 9ths. Thats the gap to bridge.
See, that's a good case to tackle! Making it daily, on an actual daily resource, wouldn't at all be overstepping bounds, so long as it's on a Greater bind or otherwise confined to 17th or higher like Gate itself is (underleveled 9ths are Bad Juju, and unstandardized progressions are torture). The main way of doing so, to me, would be having Rapid Meldshaping drop its simultaneous unshaping requirement, while having effects like this unshape the Soulmeld used to do it. Then, for Incarnate, they can just Rapid Meldshaping it back if they need it again, or grab a different effect for what they're doing after using Gate. Like diplomancy to guarantee the loyalty of the thing they Gated in.

[RandomPeasant]

Incarnates as a soul bind gets gate 1x/week and if you call something its 1k xp. Your standard t1 that can cast gate gets that several times a day if they want. Plus all the other 9ths. Thats the gap to bridge.

Eh. The game gets stupid when people have 9th level spells. The Healer gets gate as a 9th level spell, but that does almost nothing to move the needle on the class as a whole because gate is cheesy to the point it doesn't matter in most games, and almost no one plays at 17th level. It's not worthless, but if you approach the problem from the perspective of "how do I make this class the equal of an optimized Wizard at 20th level", you're not going to get much useful stuff done. The issue with Incarnum is the middle range of the the game. The classes are pretty good at very low levels, because you can frontload your progression really hard and get surprisingly big damage numbers and giant skill bonuses at a level where people still care about skill bonuses. The issue is the midgame, because the classes fall off hard there, and it's something people use.


How many times have I mentioned alternate expense mechanics?

So your question is "if we add a bunch of mechanics that aren't Incarnum to Incarnum, can we make it better than Incarnum"? Again, how is that remotely a theoretically interesting question? Obviously if you can write up a bunch of daily abilities that are as good as the Wizard, they did that and it's called the Wizard. Maybe it's a practically interesting question if you want to go out and do it, but as far as discussions go "can you write a bunch of abilities that are themed around blue soul magic that are level-appropriate for a party of a Wizard, a Cleric, and a Druid" is not some challenging topic.


things that get silly as outright at-wills like most varieties of summoning.

summon monster at-will only gets stupid if you're allowed to stack them. One summoned mook is honestly not a big deal. The list of things summon monster gives you is not an impressive list.


And as for t1s being more powerful, I'm going to need a pretty big pile of citations on how exactly Wizard has meaningfully more raw in-your-face power than Sorcerer, as base classes. Because the only fundamental difference they have, internally, is how many spells they get, with the usual examples being endurance or versatility tricks, not actual momentary output.

And the fact that for half the game the Wizard has access to higher level spells than the Sorcerer does. That matters, especially because the Sorcerer doesn't really have any compensating advantage at the even levels. It doesn't (after accounting for ACFs) get more spells per day. It has a quarter the spells known, before considering the Wizard's ability to expand their spellbook for gold. It even has worse metamagic, because lord knows the possibility of a class whose nominal value comes from greater flexibility would be broken if it could customize its spells. If the Wizard and the Sorcerer were on the same spell progression, they'd be balanced in the overwhelming majority of games.


(underleveled 9ths are Bad Juju, and unstandardized progressions are torture).

Many, perhaps even most, 9th level spells would be fine at a lower level. You're not breaking anything by giving out meteor swarm or soul bind or refuge at lower levels. In fact, if you did that it might even get people to use those spells. I would go so far as to say you're leaving opportunities on the table if you're not down-leveling spells when writing new material, as it allows you to give characters novel play patterns without having to write any new mechanics.

As far as standardization goes, that ship has sailed a long time ago. Core alone has four different progressions just for spellcasting. Even among the T1s, the Artificer has its own special progression.

[Particle_Man]

True, but a lot of those spell slots are low level ones that aren't worth very much. A 10th level Cleric gets three top-level spell slots (though they'll probably have enough WIS for another one). A 10th level Incarnate gets six soulmelds, can can invest each of them fully in the situation where they're used. Plus Chakra binds that unlock additional abilities. And those soulmelds aren't expended when used.


I disagree with that. Low level spell slots are great for utility spells, divinations, and the like. So it is nice to have them "on tap". Also there are feats that can use up low level spell slots to do other stuff, if one is so inclined (and even reserve feats that make having low level spell slots useful even if you never cast those spells that day). Meanwhile, the incarnate has a handful of soulmelds. They are on all day, but the Warlock has stuff that is at-will all day too and no one says the Warlock is Tier 1.

Oh, and this would not get the Incarnate to Tier 1. If all of my recommendations were taken, the Wizard, Cleric, Druid, etc. would still out-class the Incarnate. This is just to get the Incarnate, Totemist, SoulBorn, etc., out of the starting gate.

[RandomPeasant]

I disagree with that. Low level spell slots are great for utility spells, divinations, and the like. So it is nice to have them "on tap".

Sure. You get value out of having low level spells. But you also get value out of having more top-level abilities (potentially several more, depending on what you have Chakra binds doing), and out of having your abilities at will, and out of being able to customize your abilities on a round-by-round basis. You're confusing the contingent fact that spells are better than soulmelds with some fundamental truth about the possibilities of the two resource management systems.


They are on all day, but the Warlock has stuff that is at-will all day too and no one says the Warlock is Tier 1.

That's because Invocations are mostly not very good. WotC was incredibly afraid of the prospect of someone getting to adventure effectively all day. I'm not really sure why they were, because as far as I know there's only one published adventure that really cares about keeping the PCs on a timetable (Red Hand of Doom). Everything else is just "clear the dungeon", a task that doesn't really care whether you do it in one day or ten.

[Efrate]

Invocations are actually a really good thing to look at. There are some gems there that could be inspiration. At will dispel magic, flight, charm monster, skill boneses that start higher than what incarnum can, some minionmancy, these are all things that you could design melds around, add scaling so while they might start worse they eventually get better. But thats basically psionics. Worse than spells spells that you can put a resource into to make almost as good as spells. Or just use spells. Flexibility is good but t1s need power as well.

[Darg]

Why would it be? "Unreasonable" doesn't mean "anything your DM doesn't like". "Fight for me against people you hate" isn't an "unreasonable" request to make of an outsider that is pro-murder (such as, I don't know, demons). And that's totally game-breaking.

Except asking the demon to go murder hobo is not the same as granting you your wish. They have different values and that demon knows how valuable a wish can be. Why does it have to be "anything your DM doesn't like"? Why can't it be "doing something appropriate to the table"? Being reasonable is not a jab. PAO can technically turn you into jupiter sized planet. Will it ever happen? Maybe, but saying no would be reasonable.

[RandomPeasant]

PAO can technically turn you into jupiter sized planet. Will it ever happen? Maybe, but saying no would be reasonable.

And that's the point. planar binding isn't unique in that it will be, in practice, restricted to what is appropriate for the table. But that's not what the Tiers ask, because the goal is to be something that is useful across a range of tables. If your answer to "how are imbalances handled" is "the table doesn't allow imbalanced things", the whole point of the Tiers becomes meaningless.

[Morphic tide]

So your question is "if we add a bunch of mechanics that aren't Incarnum to Incarnum, can we make it better than Incarnum"? Again, how is that remotely a theoretically interesting question? Obviously if you can write up a bunch of daily abilities that are as good as the Wizard, they did that and it's called the Wizard. Maybe it's a practically interesting question if you want to go out and do it, but as far as discussions go "can you write a bunch of abilities that are themed around blue soul magic that are level-appropriate for a party of a Wizard, a Cleric, and a Druid" is not some challenging topic.
The constraint of Soulmelds as number of available effects, which places an inherent limit of 11 on-hand if I recall my slots correctly, makes for a fairly significant limitation. As does having most of them be mutually exclusive with item slots. Alongside Essentia allocation. Soulmelds getting unshaped is already a thing, even, it just isn't used as a cost. Hell, it actually already exists on one Soulmeld, the Bloodwar Gauntlets. Which is 9d6 damage in a 20 ft. burst on a 9th level ability, increasing to 12d6 at 12th, 15d6 at 15th, and 18d6 at 17th, purely by class features. Between the Foci and Expanded Soulmeld Capacity, you can tack +6d6 on, matching Empower at 12th level for no lasting additional cost (unless I missed something about Essentia in destroyed receptacles being lost) and you have passive bonuses for having it ready to go off.

Terrible by blasting spell standards, but not actually by critically much in terms of being worth comparing, and the Incarnate manages to have its scaling roughly on time within the constraints of the chunkiness of Essentia. Make that damage based on Meldshaper Level instead and render its area scaling in those 20 ft. increments per Essentia, and I do believe we have a usable blasting spell-alike, as it'd be 60 ft. radius at 9th level. Twice the area of a Fireball, and getting dramatically larger over time. Using Meldshaper Level instead makes it a far smoother comparison for these things.

Not being particularly willing to comb through over 200 pages past 11 PM to try and find an example, what I'll say on Essentia expense is that the core rules establish a default of recovering as ability damage does, including Restoration resetting the total amount, and it's a much more sensible way of modeling how Cerulean Sandals works than its depletion of the teleport limit having absolutely no effect on the movement speed bonus despite actually running out that teleport limit unshaping the Soulmeld altogether.

[Darg]

And that's the point. planar binding isn't unique in that it will be, in practice, restricted to what is appropriate for the table. But that's not what the Tiers ask, because the goal is to be something that is useful across a range of tables. If your answer to "how are imbalances handled" is "the table doesn't allow imbalanced things", the whole point of the Tiers becomes meaningless.

Planar Binding is extremely versatile. I just don't think that gate alone is enough to really put truenamer and healer into T2. It's a versatile spell, but is extremely limited by resources and character commitments depending on services rendered. Casting Wish as a spell is extremely versatile, but that 5000 xp cost per cast extremely limits how many times you could ever cast it during an adventure. Gate also has a 1000 xp cost per cast in addition to the cost of service.

[Lans]

Even if it increased the truenamer to tier 3 the point would still stand
But that doesn't show up in the Tiers, which is my point. There's not a separate "Truenamer After Gate" entry. Outliers don't get counted separately in any other case, just this one. I have no idea why that is, but I suspect it was either "there was some ongoing heated debate about that Vestige when JaronK compiled his list" or "JaronK was a big Binder fanboy". It wasn't in the list, but if you read the discussions it was brought up and largely agreed that healer and truenamer jumped to T2 for those levels.




Only for a pretty small window. At low levels, you can't make the UMD check reliably enough. At high levels, 4th level spells don't cut it (you can extend that a bit by dumpster-diving, but then you get into comparative optimization questions). There's a window between, say, 4th and 8th where you can do a decent Wizard impersonation. But that's a really small window, and outside that window (frankly, outside of specifically spell-storing item) I've never seen anything you can do with Infusions that sounded all that impressive.
at level 2 you can hit 9 from feats, 5 from skill points another 3 from an infusion, then charisma bonus for 17-21. Before flaws or traits

[weckar]

I think the main thing locking incarnum out of higher tiers is a lack of options. More support throughout more books would have easily lifted it a tier at least. Otherwise, it is difficult to ever see an incarnum user to be better than a binder, as at their core they have the same mechanical schtick. Except binder abilities scale automatically and incarnum abilities require investment to scale.

Further, the class is built around daily versatility. In practice, your feat choices and skills will lock you in to just a few options.

[pabelfly]

Planar Binding is extremely versatile. I just don't think that gate alone is enough to really put truenamer and healer into T2. It's a versatile spell, but is extremely limited by resources and character commitments depending on services rendered. Casting Wish as a spell is extremely versatile, but that 5000 xp cost per cast extremely limits how many times you could ever cast it during an adventure. Gate also has a 1000 xp cost per cast in addition to the cost of service.

Remember that Truenamer doesn't have to pay any XP cost and gets to cast gate once per minute. And since you would have spent a decent amount of resources upping your Truespeak check, you should get to cast it a fair amount of times per day.

[Psyren]

There are two ways to make a T2-T0 incarnum user:

- give it actual spellcasting or psionics through a soulmeld (e.g. "Archmage's Accessory" which grants access to X spell slots depending on essentia investment, and tie the max level of those spell slots to the chakra you've bound it to, up to and including 9th-level spells.)

- give it access to a specific but extremely versatile spell or ability (e.g. Shadow Conjuration, Gate, or Polymorph/Shapechange) with a high number of uses/day, again likely tied to essentia invested.

[noob]

There are two ways to make a T2-T0 incarnum user:

- give it actual spellcasting or psionics through a soulmeld (e.g. "Archmage's Accessory" which grants access to X spell slots depending on essentia investment, and tie the max level of those spell slots to the chakra you've bound it to, up to and including 9th-level spells.)

- give it access to a specific but extremely versatile spell or ability (e.g. Shadow Conjuration, Gate, or Polymorph/Shapechange) with a high number of uses/day, again likely tied to essentia invested.

You mean two main ways?
You can actually write different abilities with powers comparable to spells(like "go through the monster manuals and pick something cool" and "create tons of different stuff" and "this soulmeld makes your friends awesome and immune to attacks in general") each associated to a soul meld but that would take a lot longer.
You could also make magic item soul melds (like you meld in magic items with equivalent cost proportional to the invested incarnum)

[Lans]

What is the 'weakest' tier one? The one that just barely gets over the line.

[Analytica]

Not reading the above really, but just vibing speculatively:

- Ability to cast spells (from any list perhaps, or unlocked by feats or features) as rituals. As in, you can cast any spell by a 10 x level min ritual, as long as you allocate its level in Essentia to having access to spells from a class that can cast it. This ritual casting lets you do out of combat utility as you please. Basically Sha'ir spellcasting I suppose.

- That... might be enough, actually?

[Lans]

There are two ways to make a T2-T0 incarnum user:

- give it actual spellcasting or psionics through a soulmeld (e.g. "Archmage's Accessory" which grants access to X spell slots depending on essentia investment, and tie the max level of those spell slots to the chakra you've bound it to, up to and including 9th-level spells.)

- give it access to a specific but extremely versatile spell or ability (e.g. Shadow Conjuration, Gate, or Polymorph/Shapechange) with a high number of uses/day, again likely tied to essentia invested.

What do you think about my idea of making Incarnate Avatar with a soul bind give the abilities of blue salad, astral deva, marut or nycalyth?

[RandomPeasant]

One thing that I think is interesting is thinking about how the mechanics in Magic of Incarnum should be divvied out between classes. Because Incarnum stacks a couple of different concepts on top of each other, and that ends up with a confused mess.

Probably the best-known aspect of Incarnum is Essentia. You get a pool of points and you can power up different abilities by moving those points around. That's honestly entirely sufficient for a class without any of the extra stuff about Chakra Binds and tradeoffs with magic items and all the class-specific stuff that gets layered on top. Moving points between abilities makes for a very flexible character, with an interesting gameplay dynamic. Stuck at long range? Power up your ranged attacks or gap-closers. Enemy closer than you want them? Move points to melee, defensives, or an escape ability. It's also a very elegant mechanic for a minion-based class, as it gives a natural tradeoff between the summoner and any summons that can mitigate some of the issues mooks often cause.

But the Chakra Binds are also an interesting system. It's over-done, with entirely too many Chakras, meaning there's rarely a relevant tradeoff about where you want to put your Soulmelds and no real identity for any given Chakra. But a simpler system, where you had maybe four or five Chakras, could be interesting. Done right, you could allow a very wide variety of characters off a deceptively small list of powers.

And while Chakra Binds as a whole are interesting, the Totemist takes it even further by having what is effectively a single "super" Chakra. You can be channeling the Winter Wolf, Displacer Beast, and Girallon, but which one of those you put in your Totem chakra determines the primary focus of your character. That's interesting for a Binder-like class, where the same abilities can provide major and minor sources of character differentiation.

Finally, there's the thing where Soulmelds trade off with Magic Items. Frankly, I think as-written it's too much of a pain to be worth it. The amount of flexibility 3e allows with magic items means it's mostly an increase in accounting rather than a real tradeoff, and it's a bad thing to have just for a small subset of classes. But in general, the idea of some class abilities trading off with magic items seems like it has the potential to solve a lot of problems. No more worrying about not getting the right things from the Magic Mart, because you can backfill with buffs and come out okay. It becomes much harder for divine power or Wild Shape to allow you to replace a frontliner, because those things would actually put you behind relative to the Fighter.


I just don't think that gate alone is enough to really put truenamer and healer into T2. It's a versatile spell, but is extremely limited by resources and character commitments depending on services rendered. Casting Wish as a spell is extremely versatile, but that 5000 xp cost per cast extremely limits how many times you could ever cast it during an adventure. Gate also has a 1000 xp cost per cast in addition to the cost of service.

Except none of that is really true, particularly for the Truenamer. Using gate as an absurdly overpowered version of summon monster explicitly doesn't require payment ("you need not make any agreement or pay any reward for the creatureÂ’s help"), and neither does the Free Vacation: No Save. The XP cost is avoided by the Truenamer, and doesn't matter all that much anyway, as by the time you hit 20th level you're getting more than 1k XP per fight.


It wasn't in the list, but if you read the discussions it was brought up and largely agreed that healer and truenamer jumped to T2 for those levels.

Sure, but I have to imagine those discussions include a bunch of class-specific caveats. Like how a Stalwart Battle Sorcerer is probably only T3. Or how a Sorcerer with all the stupid Dragon/Kobold cheese is probably T1. Or how any number of other classes move up by some margin if you do someone's favorite trick, or down by some other margin from trap options. But the nominal idea is that all those individual things balance out to a single ranking for each class. You can disagree with that theory, but I think making a special exception specifically for the Binder is bogus, especially because the summon monster Vestige is far from the single most powerful character option in the game.


at level 2 you can hit 9 from feats, 5 from skill points another 3 from an infusion, then charisma bonus for 17-21. Before flaws or traits

But that's a lot of investment, and gets you into discussions about comparative optimization. How does the 3rd level Archivist whose build has completely maxed out their UMD compare to, say, a Warmage who's abusing an Ancestral Relic Runestave as far as it will go?


Except binder abilities scale automatically and incarnum abilities require investment to scale.

Again, I don't think that's really an accurate assessment of the tradeoffs between the two resource management systems. The Binder's abilities scale automatically, but they get less of them than the Incarnate gets of theirs (roughly half as many Vestiges as Soulmelds, and one less Vestige than Chakra bind). It's true that an individual Vestige does more than a Soulmeld, but there's an element of diminishing returns there, since you can only use one active ability at a time. I haven't done the math on how many Soumelds you can keep fully powered at once, but overall it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that being able to keep up the best three of your six Soulmelds (or whatever the numbers are) could be competitive with having four fully-powered Vestiges at once (again, whatever the real number is).


What is the 'weakest' tier one? The one that just barely gets over the line.

According to this list (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?600635-Why-each-class-is-in-its-tier-2019-update!) the bottom of T1 is the Spontaneous Druid, and conversely the top of T2 is the Death Master. That said, I don't think looking at the rankings is all that useful, because they're based on people's subjective assessments and you can't go back and ask everyone who contributed to those rankings to assess your Incarnate fix. You're better off figuring out more concrete guidelines for what you expect T1s to be able to do at some level of optimization and iterating against that.


- Ability to cast spells (from any list perhaps, or unlocked by feats or features) as rituals. As in, you can cast any spell by a 10 x level min ritual, as long as you allocate its level in Essentia to having access to spells from a class that can cast it. This ritual casting lets you do out of combat utility as you please. Basically Sha'ir spellcasting I suppose.

That sounds like an unsatisfying, and honestly kind of lazy, solution. Yes, you could get the Incarnate up to T1 by just doing a find/replace of "Soulmelds" and "Spells", but then you really don't have a T1 Incarnate.

[sreservoir]

at level 2 you can hit 9 from feats, 5 from skill points another 3 from an infusion, then charisma bonus for 17-21. Before flaws or traits

You have four infusions per day. Spending one on 20 minute +3 Skill Enhancement is usually a worse deal than just casting Spell Storing Item. A +9 from feats look something like Azurin picking Shape Soulmeld +6 and Skill Focus +3, and is spending some of most valuable build resources just to prop up borderline competence in something with a 1 minute casting time. You don't normally expect more than +2 Cha even if you consider it a high priority, and UMD is pretty much the only thing you have running off Cha, it's not really doing anything else for you...

The DC you need to hit for a 1st-level spell is 23. Short of reaching into variant rules, we're looking at about +16, on a character who has dedicated significant build resources to this one trick. And it has a 30% failure rate.

Truenamers have better success chances than this, and at least their abilities are standard action and don't expend daily expenses and incur XP bookkeeping even on failure...


Again, I don't think that's really an accurate assessment of the tradeoffs between the two resource management systems. The Binder's abilities scale automatically, but they get less of them than the Incarnate gets of theirs (roughly half as many Vestiges as Soulmelds, and one less Vestige than Chakra bind). It's true that an individual Vestige does more than a Soulmeld, but there's an element of diminishing returns there, since you can only use one active ability at a time. I haven't done the math on how many Soumelds you can keep fully powered at once, but overall it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that being able to keep up the best three of your six Soulmelds (or whatever the numbers are) could be competitive with having four fully-powered Vestiges at once (again, whatever the real number is).

Broadly speaking, you can keep ~half your soulmelds filled, although that figure is a bit misleading, because it mostly only limits the number of passive effects you can have on at full power—you normally only need essentia invested when you actually use the effect. There are also a bunch of effects where you only care about the base effect or just want the chakra bind (which is also ~half as many as you have soulmelds).

Baseline soulmeld essentia load looks something like this, with Expanded Soulmeld Capacity and +1 racial bonus essentia but no essentia-boosting feats:


LevelIncarnateTotemist
1st2/02/0
2nd2/1/03/0/0
3rd3/1/03/0/0
4th3/2/0/03/1/0/0
5th3/2/1/03/1/0/0
6th4/3/0/04/1/0/0
7th4/3/1/0/04/2/0/0/0
8th4/3/2/0/04/2/0/0/0
9th4/3/3/0/04/2/1/0/0
10th4/3/3/1/0/04/2/2/0/0/0
11th4/3/3/2/0/04/3/2/0/0/0
12th5/4/4/0/0/05/4/1/0/0/0
13th5/4/4/1/0/0/05/4/2/0/0/0/0
14th5/4/4/2/0/0/05/4/3/0/0/0/0
15th6/5/5/1/0/0/06/5/2/0/0/0/0
16th6/5/5/3/0/0/0/06/5/3/0/0/0/0/0
17th6/5/5/5/0/0/0/06/5/3/1/0/0/0/0
18th7/6/6/2/0/0/0/07/6/4/0/0/0/0/0
19th7/6/6/4/0/0/0/0/07/6/4/2/0/0/0/0/0
20th7/6/6/6/0/0/0/0/07/6/4/4/0/0/0/0/0


(I'm including Extra Soulmeld Capacity and +1 feat/racial essentia because they have an enormous impact on the meldshapers' low-level power ceiling; that's not to say that things like extra +2-9 essentia you can get from more feats, the +1 capacity of an incarnum focus, the Psycarnum Infusion-like effect of an essentia helm, and a soulstone don't help, they're just not nearly as significant as the extra point at 1st/2nd-level and also what level you'd want to slot them in depends a lot on what you're doing, whereas ESC is kind of a gimme.)

[Harrow]

You know, soulmelds would make for an interesting way to design a minionmancer. They already have necrocarnum zombies and the soulspark familiar, so you could just give them another minion or two and a handful of soulmelds that buff their whole team. Then, they get to make interesting decisions, utilizing their swift action every turn to make sure the right minion has the biggest boost in the right area. And, it would naturally lead to more dramatic fights as whenever one of their minions goes down, the rest of them get stronger. In any challenging fight, there's a chance that you're going to lose at least one of your minions. When that happens, do you press on, potentially pushing your last minion past the breaking point and losing them when they were at their strongest with possibly disaterous results for you and the rest of your party, or do you play it safe (assuming that's even an option)?

[Lans]

What does it take to be T1 at levels 1-2? I put a few changes to certain soulmelds on the first page, which would let an Incarnate make a +2 flaming+shocking weapon at level 1 with a reroll a round at level 1, and would let it pull up 3 zombies at level 2.

[RandomPeasant]

You have four infusions per day. Spending one on 20 minute +3 Skill Enhancement is usually a worse deal than just casting Spell Storing Item. A +9 from feats look something like Azurin picking Shape Soulmeld +6 and Skill Focus +3, and is spending some of most valuable build resources just to prop up borderline competence in something with a 1 minute casting time. You don't normally expect more than +2 Cha even if you consider it a high priority, and UMD is pretty much the only thing you have running off Cha, it's not really doing anything else for you...

This is especially true because you don't need all that resource investment in the long run. One you can make yourself a +10 UMD item, and then again when you get to take 10 on UMD checks, you need far less investment to make your items and infusions work correctly. The squeeze low-level Artificers are in, where they need to burn permanent resources to solve a temporary problem, is something that people underestimate the impact of when discussing the class. Especially since other classes can invest those resources in things they'll want long term (I mentioned Ancestral Relic on a Warmage, for example).


What does it take to be T1 at levels 1-2? I put a few changes to certain soulmelds on the first page, which would let an Incarnate make a +2 flaming+shocking weapon at level 1 with a reroll a round at level 1, and would let it pull up 3 zombies at level 2.

First level is weird, and how strong a class is at that point has very little correlation with how strong it is in the rest of the game. A 1st level Artificer is pretty pathetic, because they don't have the UMD to do anything interesting. A 1st level Warblade is incredibly powerful, because their durability matters and maneuvers are much closer to spells. Incarnates are pretty close to the top of the heap already at 1st level, because they can get an at-will ranged attack that deals 3d6 damage, meaning they kill pretty much any opponent instantly. Looking at the T1 classes, I would say that only the Cleric and Druid are really top-tier at 1st level, with the other classes at that point being the Warblade, Crusader, Beguiler, and Incarnate (maybe Totemist, but IIRC they don't get good offensive melds until 2nd).

[Morphic tide]

There are two ways to make a T2-T0 incarnum user:

- give it actual spellcasting or psionics through a soulmeld (e.g. "Archmage's Accessory" which grants access to X spell slots depending on essentia investment, and tie the max level of those spell slots to the chakra you've bound it to, up to and including 9th-level spells.)

- give it access to a specific but extremely versatile spell or ability (e.g. Shadow Conjuration, Gate, or Polymorph/Shapechange) with a high number of uses/day, again likely tied to essentia invested.
Or have key spell-equivalent effects in the Soulmelds, via the Bloodwar Gauntlet mechanic or a Meldshaper Level scaling counterpart, while also having some decently versatile stuff at-will like short-range teleports, flight (the amount of ways there are to have it all-day by 2nd, between races, templates, feats, and weird subsystems, makes having it on a Totem Bind just "good"), and there's a good few skills that are perfectly sensible to consider useful tier granters, especially once you add some advantageous text. Letting Intimidate stack is a dramatic bit of power.

Heck, you could redesign the Totemist list around being all the best-of Magical Beast features to implement what shapeshifting does for a well-built Egoist, lot of the issue they have in terms of versatility is the staggering amount of Natural Attack granters and bonuses clogging the list that make for an enormous amount of space with zero non-combat functionality. Doubly so with a tailor-made Incarnum-based Magical Beast or two to give ideal effects we can't fish up a sensible choice for.


What does it take to be T1 at levels 1-2?
Good to look at Psion as a possible benchmark for that, as spellcasters are agonizingly limited at such low levels, but an Azurin Psion can have a decent amount of shenanigans already online. Azure Talent's great at 1st level, and feeds into Midnight Augmentation later, while the Psion bonus feat can be an Expanded Knowledge for a fourth Power from any of the lists. And you can cover almost all your 1st-level damage bases with one Power perfectly, thanks to Energy Ray being type-selecting.

Druid's another major contender with spontaneous Nature's Ally, the Animal Companion, and a pretty good list to prepare from. Cleric is a bit more pushing it right from 1st (three spell slots with one having only three options?), but spontaneous Cure does have a bigger impact on the campaign at such low levels ("popup" healing is a serious thing at this point), and they have some lovely options with Devotion feats and Domains.

And, of course, Tome of Battle's at its best with 1st-level, since they have at-will and per-minute/encounter utilities, for all they're "minor" effects.

---

To whip up a somewhat ad-hoc example of what a Soulmeld with some of the things I've talked about might look like (again, replacing stuff is fine, I'm just not accepting "print more 'Melds until all problems are solved" as an answer. So basically pull it off with maybe five more total Soulmelds):

Araneae Weave
Descriptors: Mind Affecting
Classes: Totemist
Chakra: Feet, Brow, Waist (Totem)
Saving Throw: See text

Your face and limbs are wreathed in almost-transparent filaments, hiding truths and ever so slightly adhering them to other surfaces

When working in more urban environments, Totemists often find themselves in situations the bulk of their abilities are ill-suited to. In such cases, they seek the likeness of creatures best suited to walking the streets as peers to the locals unnoticed, with the Aranea's immense powers of trickery being among the most frequent choices.

Your Araneae Weave gives you a +2 Insight bonus to Bluff and Climb checks, and you can use a Standard Action to surge the manipulative forces it's made from to use Silent Image or Charm Person as a spell-like ability, using your Constitution modifier for the save and your Meldshaper level for the caster level, unshaping the Soulmeld in the process.

Essentia: For every point of Essentia invested in your Araneae Weave, the Insight bonus to Bluff and Climb checks increases by +2, and you may use any spell of the Charm, Figment, or Pattern subschools from the Sorcerer list and a level up to the amount of Essentia invested as a spell-like ability instead of only Silent Image or Charm Person.

Chakra Bind (Feet)
The threads around your legs split and close, becoming denser as they come closer to the ground, until they seem to at once bleed together into and slide off a suggestion of solid plates

You gain a Climb speed of 25 ft., and the Insight bonus of your Araneae Weave additionally applies to Balance and Escape Artist checks.

Chakra Bind (Brow)
A veil of finely-woven silk slides over your face, carrying a faint hint of your true face framed by arachnid features as your form twists and your voice takes on an alluring quality

You gain the ability to turn into any Medium or Small humanoid at will, gaining its racial features in place of your own as if using Polymorph and a +8 bonus on Disguise checks to appear as a creature of that race, and the Insight bonus of your Araneae Weave additionally applies to Diplomacy and Disguise checks.

Furthermore, when you use a spell with your Araneae Weave, you may choose to unbind it instead of unshape it, and may use a Personal-range Transmutation spell instead of a Charm, Figment, or Pattern.

Chakra Bind (Waist)
Your hips become hidden behind a sheet of webbing, held by eight firm braces like spider-legs and lined by half-finished arcane script dancing in the embroidery
You gain a 20 ft. Enhancement bonus to your move speed, the ability to use items as if you were a Sorcerer of half your Meldshaper level, and the Insight bonus of your Araneae Weave additionally applies to Spellcraft and Use Magic Device.

Furthermore, when you use a spell with your Araneae Weave, you may use any Sorcerer spell of up to 2nd level instead of Silent Image or Charm Person, and may choose to either not Unshape it and halve the spell's effective caster level, which must remain high enough to cast it normally, or add the effects of metamagic feats that would increase the spell's level to no more than the invested Essentia.

Chakra Bind (Totem)
Chitinous plates coat your upper jaw and lower back, dripping poison and spooling webbing

Your Bite attack carries a weakening poison, causing anyone struck to need to pass a Fortitude save or take 1d6 Strength damage. This save repeats one minute later, dealing 1d6 temporary Strength damage per point of Essentia if failed. Additionally, you can, as a standard action, throw a web. This works like a net, except its maximum range is 50 ft, and the Concentration check to cast a spell while entangled, the Escape Artist check to exit it, and the Strength check to burst it are each equal to 15+your Meldshaper level+your Constitution modifier.

---

This is probably pushing it a bit far on raw power output, and is definitely a bit clunky, but this would be an example of how I'm looking at it in terms of versatility. You can push to Unshaping it for a top-level spell from a same-level Sorcerer, and in fact can easily exceed it for much of the game with the right build on the existing Totemist, but it's not open-ended high-output magic. The Soulmeld is about using specific kinds of magic, for all it's defined more than a bit broadly on purpose.

The degree of spell replication is very particular to the Aranea being a native spellcaster, though. More often, it'd be specific highly important spell effects at an appropriate level, such as Teleport on a Lesser bind (9th level), rather than broad groups like this does. If the wording weren't a torturous slog (granted, take a glance at Disenchanter Mask), I'd actually be tempted to genericize it's half-CL clause so it turns your other "low level" spell-likes into at-wills. Note that this would require level 18 to have 5th-level spells be at-will, so at-will Teleport is contrasting against 9ths. Honestly, the Foot bind could pretty much be axed, I just felt like a full "set" of binds.

Of course, if you had the ability to Bind this to two separate Chakras at once, you'd eventually be able to spam 4th and 5th level Personal Transmutations indefinitely on just this, giving you some rather noteworthy utilities like Overland Flight and fittingly enough Glibness. And we also see a reference to my suggestion of making the Totemist have the Natural Attacks passively with the Totem bind adding the poison instead of needing to specify the Bite from scratch, for all it stays quite specific to combat because I was kinda running out of ideas to pack in one Soulmeld and wanted to make the post to restart some discussion. Also sleep.

[Lans]

What if in addition to the standard scaling additional abilities would be unlocked as incarnun is invested. Like for incarnum weapon gaining shocking at 2 invested essentia, shocking burst at 3, speed at 5, Lightning blast at 7.

[Morphic tide]

What if in addition to the standard scaling additional abilities would be unlocked as incarnun is invested. Like for incarnum weapon gaining shocking at 2 invested essentia, shocking burst at 3, speed at 5, Lightning blast at 7.
Ehh... Explicit "steps" based on just Essentia investment gets weird in a number of ways, and is a pattern that gets really wordy. For that particular case, Mindblade scaling is a lot better: You get Enhancement bonus, and can trade it out for special qualities as normal. Make it a blank check and you're letting a feat-swapping Soulborn go all the way on being whatever kind of Fighter is most applicable. A lot of things like this can be done fairly well with explicit per-point scaling, since most of the space in question has very direct numeric values to its scaling, if only by referring to some subset of spells to emulate.

...Anyone know a Magical Beast with Druid casting off the top of their head? Androsphinx and Lammasu have Cleric casting, but that's decidedly more Incarnate territory than Totemist. Granted, overhauling Lammasu Mantle to reference the actual Domains it has instead of being an entire page of Protection from Evil variants would be good, as Healing and Knowledge are some wonderful design space. Pounce or Rake instead of the Half Gold Dragon breath weapon would also be nice. Least Bind healing matches up with HP recovery being pretty trivial by 5th level, and IIRC the Brow Chakra's the one with the nearest thematic ties to Divinations.

[Emperor Tippy]

Before you try and make a t1 Incarnum, try and make a t2 one.

What really separates t1 and t2 from everything else is power. And not so much tactical, in combat, power but strategic, campaign effecting, power.

Planar Binding is a good, if extreme, example. A character with that can spend a few days/weeks/months of down time and then suddenly they have a whole army of Hound Archons teleporting in to do their bidding at all times. Suddenly you are no longer DMing for a party, you are DMing for an army with at will greater teleport. Even lesser Planar Binding gets you an army of Lantern Archons, and in enough numbers those can be a major threat.

Teleport is another, lesser, example. Especially when you hit Greater Teleport and include Plane Shift. A character with those abilities either needs to be actively blocked or they just return home every night, they get to ignore all of those pesky challenges in the way, and they can easily escape any encounter that goes bad.

Once a character has the power, the difference between t1 and t2 is largely down to their versatility.

---
To make a t1/t2 Incarnum class, you need to change the soulmelds.

Give them a Wolverine soulmeld that gives fast healing +1 per point of essentia invested while it is bound. If they can get even a bit of a breather, they are suddenly back to full health and ready to fight again.

Blinkshirt? Remove the your turn ends once you use it clause. Suddenly, you get to be Nightcrawler.

Give them a Telepathy soulmeld that includes a Mindsight feature when bound. Maybe the range is 10 ft. per point invested.

Give them a Soulknife meld. Every point of essentia gets +1 to the weapons abilities, if bound then you get to pick weapon enhancements. And you can change them every round or two simply by removing and then returning the essentia.

Give them a Xorn movement meld. Shape it and you get to ignore terrain issues and maybe get some bonus to being tripped based on how much you invest. Bind it and suddenly you get an Earth Elementals Earth Glide ability with a speed of 10 ft. per point invested.

Hmm, the Feat meld. Shape it and maybe all numeric effects of feats increase by +1 per x points of essentia invested. Bind it and you gain the benefits of one feat of your choice per point invested (benefits, not the feats themselves to avoid shenanigan's). A swift action and suddenly you are rocking an entirely new feat chain to suit your circumstances.

Give them a Scholar meld. Shape it and you get +1 to a skill per point invested. Bind it and you get to take 10 on one skill per point invested.

[Morphic tide]

Before you try and make a t1 Incarnum, try and make a t2 one.

What really separates t1 and t2 from everything else is power. And not so much tactical, in combat, power but strategic, campaign effecting, power.

Planar Binding is a good, if extreme, example. A character with that can spend a few days/weeks/months of down time and then suddenly they have a whole army of Hound Archons teleporting in to do their bidding at all times. Suddenly you are no longer DMing for a party, you are DMing for an army with at will greater teleport. Even lesser Planar Binding gets you an army of Lantern Archons, and in enough numbers those can be a major threat.

Teleport is another, lesser, example. Especially when you hit Greater Teleport and include Plane Shift. A character with those abilities either needs to be actively blocked or they just return home every night, they get to ignore all of those pesky challenges in the way, and they can easily escape any encounter that goes bad.

Once a character has the power, the difference between t1 and t2 is largely down to their versatility.
Eh, the omnipresence is pretty dramatic optimization rather than so much a tier determinant. For the most part, the top-tier classes mostly just bypass up-front problems and cut down on a lot of major time sinks. Not very many campaigns have Teleport actually screw with the setting at large, you have to go up to Teleportation Circle or some pretty dramatic cheese to get transporting campaign-shaking numbers. Unless, of course, you being able to skip a few week's travel is sufficient to do so because your personal intervention dramatically alters the state of the local area.

Like, how well does a Druid do either of these? Druids are excellent take-all-comers steamrollers, but have very awkward strategic magic in nearly all regards compared to the rest of t1. Do they even have a teleport that isn't environment-dependent? Long-term minions of particular mobility like the Archon spam? They need some real work to deal with a lot of things, they're t1 because they can do this for seemingly everything with literally no exception. Except traps, because niche protection.


To make a t1/t2 Incarnum class, you need to change the soulmelds.

Give them a Wolverine soulmeld that gives fast healing +1 per point of essentia invested while it is bound. If they can get even a bit of a breather, they are suddenly back to full health and ready to fight again.
ML-per-Essentia-spent health as a Shape effect can also exist, though NI healing like this or at-will Healing domain stuff is IIRC mainly for 5th level and up, matching to Least binds. Or was it 11th level? Can't remember the benchmark for HP damage being marginal for players...


Blinkshirt? Remove the your turn ends once you use it clause. Suddenly, you get to be Nightcrawler.
Actually that'd be more a thing for a better example creature, since the reason for that is that Blinkshirt is specifically keying to Dimension Door, which has this clause. Probably a better fit for Incarnate with how many Outsiders have Teleport abilities. It's not like the list it gets put on matters that much with the ability to go looting with feats.


Give them a Telepathy soulmeld that includes a Mindsight feature when bound. Maybe the range is 10 ft. per point invested.
Spending a bit looking, I can't seem to find sources of Mindsight outside the Lords of Madness feat. Why can't this just work like what seems to be virtually every other case of telepathy in existence where you take the feat to turn the large communication range into a rudimentary perception? Or just find a Magical Beast with a large Blindsight radius to chuck in at 10-20 ft./Essentia on the Totemist list. Also, Soulsight exists, for all 5 ft./Essentia is pathetic.


Give them a Soulknife meld. Every point of essentia gets +1 to the weapons abilities, if bound then you get to pick weapon enhancements. And you can change them every round or two simply by removing and then returning the essentia.
Just a buff on Incarnum Weapon divorced from its Alignment, really, make the quality access a Hand bind if getting the Soulknife's main feature as a Shape effect is too far. There's not much need for that to be a new Soulmeld when it's a very dramatic upgrade on The Point of an existing one.


Give them a Xorn movement meld. Shape it and you get to ignore terrain issues and maybe get some bonus to being tripped based on how much you invest. Bind it and suddenly you get an Earth Elementals Earth Glide ability with a speed of 10 ft. per point invested.
The extremely vast majority of the time you should be able to substitute with hover-compatible Fly speeds and the rest is handled by Etherealness of some stripe or another. Inner Plane stuff seems to be a flavor gap for Incarnum, anyways. Though using it as fodder for esoteric Totemist effects is as good an excuse as any for "pick an energy type" compacting.


Hmm, the Feat meld. Shape it and maybe all numeric effects of feats increase by +1 per x points of essentia invested. Bind it and you gain the benefits of one feat of your choice per point invested (benefits, not the feats themselves to avoid shenanigan's). A swift action and suddenly you are rocking an entirely new feat chain to suit your circumstances.
How many hoops does a Spells to Power Erudite or Artificer have to jump to pull this sort of thing? Because this is a really out-there ability that I can't think of anything but TO tricks like the Dark Chaos Feat Shuffle or utterly cheating Psychic Chirurgery that compares.

Though feat chain swapping is my main idea on handling Soulborn's combat functions so their limited Soulmelds have minimal concern with combat math, which can go a lot further with making more feats be substitutes instead of follow-ups so they can pass up feat-taxes, like they already get to laugh at ever using Dodge on their way to Spring Attack. Azure Toughness on an Azurin is already a no-joke simply good feat, since it makes you [I]dramatically more durable at the start of a campaign while being another point of Essentia once you stop caring about its HP.


Give them a Scholar meld. Shape it and you get +1 to a skill per point invested. Bind it and you get to take 10 on one skill per point invested.
What's the issue with the current standard of skills being scattered about the Soulmelds as the way to go about this? Could chuck it on a +2/Essentia [Incarnum] feat that lets you repick each day, but... We already have Incarnum skillmonkey support.

[Emperor Tippy]

Eh, the omnipresence is pretty dramatic optimization rather than so much a tier determinant. For the most part, the top-tier classes mostly just bypass up-front problems and cut down on a lot of major time sinks. Not very many campaigns have Teleport actually screw with the setting at large, you have to go up to Teleportation Circle or some pretty dramatic cheese to get transporting campaign-shaking numbers. Unless, of course, you being able to skip a few week's travel is sufficient to do so because your personal intervention dramatically alters the state of the local area.

Using a spell as it is intended to be used is not "dramatic optimization". Planar Binding to call up an army of SRD outsiders to fight for you is pretty much entirely what that spell is for, it also has strong fluff and thematic support. The "problem" is that using the Planar Binding line how anyone with even a smidgen of a brain would use it breaks the design conceits of basically everything save t1/t2 in D&D. And thus it is one of those things that pretty much makes something t2 on its own.

Even basic Teleport dramatically alters how the individual and the party functions and interacts with the rest of the world. If a party with access to Teleport is sleeping anywhere except their highly secured base, then they are being idiots. Scry-n-Die and the one fight adventuring day are both direct consequences of Teleport existing.

Flight is a similar ability in that it changes the fundamental premises that the game is built around and that most classes are designed around. Although at least in the case of flight, it is relatively easy to get anyone flight at a reasonable resource cost.


Like, how well does a Druid do either of these? Druids are excellent take-all-comers steamrollers, but have very awkward strategic magic in nearly all regards compared to the rest of t1. Do they even have a teleport that isn't environment-dependent? Long-term minions of particular mobility like the Archon spam? They need some real work to deal with a lot of things, they're t1 because they can do this for seemingly everything with literally no exception. Except traps, because niche protection.
Druids still have strategic magic; Fimbulwinter for example. The Druid has less raw power and less versatility than most of the other t1 and t2 classes (not a ton less, but still less) but it combines it with cheap, consistent, tactical flexibility and power.


ML-per-Essentia-spent health as a Shape effect can also exist, though NI healing like this or at-will Healing domain stuff is IIRC mainly for 5th level and up, matching to Least binds. Or was it 11th level? Can't remember the benchmark for HP damage being marginal for players...
There is a substantial difference between limited daily healing (i.e. Lay on Hands), limited burst healing (i.e. Cleric spells), unlimited but minor/slow healing (i.e. using a Skin of Proteus to keep changing forms once combat is over to heal back to full), and decent healing that you don't need to spend resources or actions on. Fast Healing 1 means that the character is back to full health with as little as a few minutes down time. Fast Healing 5+ is tactically relevant healing. And used appropriately, it has strategic uses as well.


Actually that'd be more a thing for a better example creature, since the reason for that is that Blinkshirt is specifically keying to Dimension Door, which has this clause. Probably a better fit for Incarnate with how many Outsiders have Teleport abilities. It's not like the list it gets put on matters that much with the ability to go looting with feats.
The point is to make an Incarnum character that breaks into t1/t2. Giving them actually useful tactical teleportation is a huge step towards that. As it is, the 3.5 change to DD that forcibly ended your turn after using it made the spell a resounding 'meh' in most cases.


Spending a bit looking, I can't seem to find sources of Mindsight outside the Lords of Madness feat. Why can't this just work like what seems to be virtually every other case of telepathy in existence where you take the feat to turn the large communication range into a rudimentary perception? Or just find a Magical Beast with a large Blindsight radius to chuck in at 10-20 ft./Essentia on the Totemist list. Also, Soulsight exists, for all 5 ft./Essentia is pathetic.

Just a buff on Incarnum Weapon divorced from its Alignment, really, make the quality access a Hand bind if getting the Soulknife's main feature as a Shape effect is too far. There's not much need for that to be a new Soulmeld when it's a very dramatic upgrade on The Point of an existing one.


The extremely vast majority of the time you should be able to substitute with hover-compatible Fly speeds and the rest is handled by Etherealness of some stripe or another. Inner Plane stuff seems to be a flavor gap for Incarnum, anyways. Though using it as fodder for esoteric Totemist effects is as good an excuse as any for "pick an energy type" compacting.


How many hoops does a Spells to Power Erudite or Artificer have to jump to pull this sort of thing? Because this is a really out-there ability that I can't think of anything but TO tricks like the Dark Chaos Feat Shuffle or utterly cheating Psychic Chirurgery that compares.

Though feat chain swapping is my main idea on handling Soulborn's combat functions so their limited Soulmelds have minimal concern with combat math, which can go a lot further with making more feats be substitutes instead of follow-ups so they can pass up feat-taxes, like they already get to laugh at ever using Dodge on their way to Spring Attack. Azure Toughness on an Azurin is already a no-joke simply good feat, since it makes you [I]dramatically more durable at the start of a campaign while being another point of Essentia once you stop caring about its HP.


What's the issue with the current standard of skills being scattered about the Soulmelds as the way to go about this? Could chuck it on a +2/Essentia [Incarnum] feat that lets you repick each day, but... We already have Incarnum skillmonkey support.

You do realize that the entire purpose of this thread is to increase the power and versatility of Incarnum so that it his t1/t2, right? There are two real ways to do that. 1) Grab the good spells and basically staple them onto melds in one manner or another, or 2) create new abilities that nothing else does well and that have great tactical or strategic value.

"Oh, I took this one meld/spell/power/etc. and now I can out skill monkey the Rogue" is what t1 means.
"Oh, I did X and now I am a better Fighter than the Fighter."
"Oh, I do X. Do you have one of the rare solutions to that? No? Then I win."
"I do Y, your entire build and character premise is now meaningless."

An Incarnum class whose premise is "Anything a T3 class can do, I can do better tomorrow." would probably hit the t1/t2 level much like the Druid did. Need a Scout? Well then I shape/bind soulmelds to gain Mindsight, True Seeing, Earth Glide, tactical teleportation, etc. and suddenly I can go toe to toe with a decently built scout build. Need front line melee the next day? Well I shaped/bound melds that give me Fast Healing, tactical teleportation, +1 Attack/Damage per point of Essentia invested, and effectively two hundred thousand gold worth of ideal melee weapon. The next day I can be the party face. The Next I can at least hum the tune of being anti-caster. And so on.

You don't get that with one small change, you get that by jacking up the ability of soulmelds across the board so that any individual meld on its own might not be must have but so that a character can stack several of them to become brutally capable and then switch them all to be just as capable at something else the next day.

Hell, give them a meld that when bound gives you +1 to every attribute per point of Essentia invested.

[Efrate]

You cannot just crank skulls to epic, barring diplomacy, and be t1/2. Same with damage. NI damage doesn't matter if you remove an enemy from the fight to chain coup de grace to ensure death after the rest is done.

Detect thoughts is a low level spell, or an epic sense motive. It should solve most mysteries by the " do not think of the pink elephant" trick. You can charm person to get every npc you meet on good terms. You don't need teleport, rope trick, especially if the party all chips in for a lesser extend rod means even at lower levels you are always at full resources.

Abilities that can significantly alter the narrative is what you need. Spells do that. Not much else.

[Lans]

Different abilities based on invested essentia let's you keep each melds power at the appropriate level it maybe wordy, but no more than making dozens of new melds

[Morphic tide]

Using a spell as it is intended to be used is not "dramatic optimization". Planar Binding to call up an army of SRD outsiders to fight for you is pretty much entirely what that spell is for, it also has strong fluff and thematic support. The "problem" is that using the Planar Binding line how anyone with even a smidgen of a brain would use it breaks the design conceits of basically everything save t1/t2 in D&D. And thus it is one of those things that pretty much makes something t2 on its own.
No, armies of Outsiders for varied applications is not intended. Planar Binding explicitly says you get one service, and it takes 5th level slots at the least so it's not something you're going to mass-spam without deep cheese. You have to make a Charisma check to get it to listen, and you get one chance at the check each day, with a maximum bonus of +6 from the offer. Sure, you can chuck more spells at it, but the slot expenses, the limitation of one task, the Will save to catch the Outsider, and the Natural 1 failure clause all still make for some boundaries on how far you can force it with a DM who has any semblance of care for setting integrity, entirely inside the bounds of RAW.

To say nothing of how much can be shut down with "Impossible demands or unreasonable commands are never agreed to" and "Note that a clever recipient can subvert some instructions." Going full-bore Sadistic Djinn is not merely allowed, it's one of the most iconic ways to reign it in. A lot of these TO patterns actually have limitations to them lurking in the rules that cause dramatically heightened complexity of execution. Sure, you can work around them, but those things add up to limit an actual character in an actual campaign.


Even basic Teleport dramatically alters how the individual and the party functions and interacts with the rest of the world. If a party with access to Teleport is sleeping anywhere except their highly secured base, then they are being idiots. Scry-n-Die and the one fight adventuring day are both direct consequences of Teleport existing.
Rope Trick and the like are the more relevant causes of the five-minute adventuring day, and there are plenty of ways to screw with Scry-and-Die that aren't actually much in the way of game-concerns paranoia, particularly with regard to the Divination side of it since there's lots of other reasons to want to dissuade such and a pretty ridiculous breadth of ways to go about it, down to bog-standard Disguise checks in a crowd of followers to throw people off. Holding up the slots for Teleporting back and forth is in fact a pretty significant sink, and unless you go all the way to Greater Teleport you have no less than a 3% chance each way to end up off target.


"Oh, I took this one meld/spell/power/etc. and now I can out skill monkey the Rogue" is what t1 means.
"Oh, I did X and now I am a better Fighter than the Fighter."
"Oh, I do X. Do you have one of the rare solutions to that? No? Then I win."
"I do Y, your entire build and character premise is now meaningless."
...The vast majority of the time, it takes two or three things to even try to outdo the t4 specialists in their niche. Most of the time, it's bypassing their thing or doing perfectly well enough instead of grossly distending like an Ubercharger into just one thing done way better than ever needed, while having plenty to deal with everything else. The bulk of what this bit is quoting is suggesting direct alternatives that are largely mechanically better implementations or pointing out that even the t1 classes typically only do that sort of thing in TO exercises.

Hell, I literally said I was thinking of doing Soulborn as daily feat swaps for the main "bulk" going on. Because in-the-moment tactical feat overhauls like you suggested are, again, the domain of deep TO shenanigans at the doorstep of PunPun. Also, with regard to stapling spells to Soulmelds: Have you read the example piece? I typed out the sort of implementation I'm thinking of. Categories narrowly defined enough to not be blank checks, but still solving groups of problems instead of only one exact thing. Although I mixed up Figments and Glamours...


An Incarnum class whose premise is "Anything a T3 class can do, I can do better tomorrow." would probably hit the t1/t2 level much like the Druid did. Need a Scout? Well then I shape/bind soulmelds to gain Mindsight, True Seeing, Earth Glide, tactical teleportation, etc. and suddenly I can go toe to toe with a decently built scout build. Need front line melee the next day? Well I shaped/bound melds that give me Fast Healing, tactical teleportation, +1 Attack/Damage per point of Essentia invested, and effectively two hundred thousand gold worth of ideal melee weapon. The next day I can be the party face. The Next I can at least hum the tune of being anti-caster. And so on.
The thing is that you have more than one Soulmeld, so you don't need to have them be broad-spectrum +numbers effects because you can cover the same breadth with varied Soulmelds. An Incarnate going CoDzilla would, much like the actual CoDzilla, be a few different melee boosting effects to take a second-rate chassis and wreck face with it. The Wizard, Artificer, and Psion go to show that simultaneity isn't that big a deal for tier determination, it's the technical availability that matters.


Different abilities based on invested essentia let's you keep each melds power at the appropriate level it maybe wordy, but no more than making dozens of new melds
I mean, you can also go with the Bind ranks. Like I did with the Aranea example piece that somehow has seen zero discussion. And when you're talking damage or shapeshifting or summoning or transportation, the vast majority of the time there's flat numeric values you can have scale per point of Essentia or by Meldshaper level, so you can just chuck it in the Bind closest to the level it's supposed to start being available and have that scale.

[Bonzai]

I love Incarnum. So much so that I designed a whole FR campaign to introduce it to my players. I played a Soulborn up to lvl 15 (biggest grind of my life). I was really disappointed that we never got a Complete Incarnum follow up book.

In my experience the biggest problem I had with the Soulborn was their inability to swap out melds during the day pre epic. They already have a very limited number of melds, and not being able to swap out melds means that your pretty much stuck with your daily routine melds. Your utility melds go to waste, unless you have pre knowledge of what you are going against.

A feat that takes 10 minutes to reshape a meld once or twice a day would have helped a lot.

Really, more anything period would have gone a long way. Feats, melds, items, classes, etc... the more options, the more potential synergies they would have to propel them further.

That being said, Incarnum is at it's strongest when it is dipped into and combined with other things.

[RandomPeasant]

planar binding is a really weird spell, in that it's game-breakingly absurd for exactly one use (getting outsiders to fight with you in combat) and merely okay with every other usage. If you bind up some Earth Elementals to use as specialized labor to build a fortress, that's fine. Totally reasonable thing to get out of a 6th level spell. The issue is what happens when you start popping out combat outsiders that are as strong as other members of the party (or even the party as a whole) and outnumber the party four-to-one.


You cannot just crank skulls to epic, barring diplomacy, and be t1/2. Same with damage. NI damage doesn't matter if you remove an enemy from the fight to chain coup de grace to ensure death after the rest is done.

Pretty much. Most skills just don't do anything all that impressive, even if you cheese them up even to arbitrarily levels. In a world where you can just be a Raptoran or cast overland flight, there's basically no number you can put on Climb that makes it something people will care about. You could be good enough at climbing to climb a horizontal frictionless surface upside-down while fighting, and that would be slightly worse than an ability 10th level characters can just have. Damage is actually kind of interesting, because there's sharp diminishing returns. At 10th level, the only real difference between dealing 150 damage and 200 damage is whether you one-shot enemies at your level or somewhat above your level. There's never really any difference between 2,000 and 2,000,000 damage, because they're both big enough piles of damage to simply kill whatever it is you're fighting. To break through to the level of the Wizard, you need to actually do new things, not merely do old things with bigger numbers


Abilities that can significantly alter the narrative is what you need. Spells do that. Not much else.

Well, that's just because the designers didn't write any non-spell abilities that did that kind of stuff. I don't think it's really accurate to say that you "need to give people spells" to keep up with the Wizard, because you can just give them soulmelds (or vestiges or invocations or maneuvers) that have spell-like effects. They can even be novel effects in those areas if that's what you want. If you felt it was for some reason important not to simply give people planar binding, you could declare that the Incarnate gets an army of Aberrations or Constructs or something.

[Lans]

@Morphic Tide, bind ranks seem to be differently limited in what you can do with them for a lot of the incarnates soulmelds. If I make the soulmelds Sun Glasses of Night I have very few binds that would work for, crown, brow and soul. Then there is the limited number of binds that limit your available level aappropriate effects.

[Morphic tide]

@Morphic Tide, bind ranks seem to be differently limited in what you can do with them for a lot of the incarnates soulmelds. If I make the soulmelds Sun Glasses of Night I have very few binds that would work for, crown, brow and soul. Then there is the limited number of binds that limit your available level aappropriate effects.
How many distinct level-appropriate effects do you actually need to have? How many effects need to "tier up" in a way appropriate to Binds, as opposed to being perfectly well handled by purely numeric scaling from Meldshaper Level, Essentia investment, or a combination of the two?

SRD Psionics has all of twelve (teleportation) effects, and of the (teleportation) effects there are eight that actually teleport people, except one is literally just Contingent Teleport, it keeps the Greater split for removing inaccuracy, one lets you swap two people's locations, and one is a Close-range self-only tactical teleport on Psychic Warrior. For the extremely vast majority of conditions, you just need Dimension Door and Teleport.

Psionics is also deliberately second-rate at healing, with the SRD giving 5 (healing) subschool effects. Consisting very specifically of a self-heal, self-only ability damage recovery, Raise Dead (but with an XP cost instead of GP and the downsides to the target gone), Restoration, and Regenerate (in the extremity-restoring capacity). To heal others, an Egoist has to pick up a Telepathy power to take the damage off a party member, then self-heal. So six Powers encompasses the Psion's offering for the Cleric's niche.

With regard to shapeshifting, the Egoist gets it to t1 off a single 4th-level Power and a feat. Possibly taken two or three times to boost from 3/day, but still one feat.

I mention these because that's how several major task groups are handled by a t1 class, that gets there out of one book. The actual Psion class runs perfectly fine as t1 on its base allotment of Powers, taking Expanded Knowledge for the off-list access rather than just an extra Power in the vast majority of conditions. And you have the Shape effects tied to whatever else, you don't need a giant Wizard-like pile of "level appropriate" effects because the vast majority of the time the answer is a lower level effect that answers something with no real need for a higher-level version.

There are many, many things you can handle in the "power budget" of a Shape effect, including everything to do with Martial-style combat (which can itself be mostly handled by feats as normal, even if with some choice Incarnum substitutions). And with that, you can focus the Binds entirely on things with some utility if wanted, with nothing that is solely a Fight Better effect. Of course, Incarnate probably "should" retain such things as the "caster" of the lot, but then there is a lot of extra book space after tackling t1 must-haves, going by how little of XPH is needed for a t1 character.

Erudite puts the problems-per-day paradigm of this much more bluntly, with a total of eleven options allowed to be used each day. And unlike Erudite, a Meldshaping class is inherently getting anything desired from its list.

[Efrate]

Pretty sure only stp erudite is t1, psion I thought was t2. Regardless it's works out to a similar thing. You need spells or spell equivalents in line with 9th level spells to Ccrack Into that territory. Call them powers, invocations, whatever, but their effects need to be in line at the top with 9th level spells and decent at lower levels as well.

And augmentable/scaling teleport based on essentia that functions at the same level effacy or very close to it as wizard teleports at the same level is good. 1x/week locking Y essentia out for a day is not. Also not worth if you cannot access the basic teleport effect until 17th level, or gate at a similar level that only functions as better plane shift for your party traveling.

Take 10 or 20 awesome spell effects line as above with teleport, rename them, scale them so they do the same/very similar thing at the same level as a wizard can with increased binds/essentia and remove any limitations to them beyond that and you can be tier 1. That means no unshaping a veil for an effect, no locking essentia for a day (unless you rework the entire amount of each class has so you can substitute essentia for spell levels or some such), no limitations on use beyond maybe 3x a day for your highest level effect, nothing on lower stuff, and you do it.

It does break down to spells, but different, as well as modal, but that's the bar you need to reach.

[Kuulvheysoon]

StP Erudite is T0, actually, given that they have all of psionic's neat tricks in addition to the hilarious amounts of magical abuse.

Psion is T2, though.

[daremetoidareyo]

Go back and add 10-12 soulmelds with bind effects to each splat book. That’s only 100-250 more things that an Incarnum user can do, but it should tier-one the Incarnum users.

[Efrate]

As is just more melds will not do it. Options are good but they need to be good options, and powerful. Melds as is are NOT good enough. Versatility is nice but you need good options. True namers have tons of options, but few reliable good options.

[Kuulvheysoon]

You'd also want to give them free Split Chakra feats for each slot - forcing meldshapers to choose between the bind and items is a big choice, and one that spellcasters don't have to care about.

[RandomPeasant]

How many distinct level-appropriate effects do you actually need to have? How many effects need to "tier up" in a way appropriate to Binds, as opposed to being perfectly well handled by purely numeric scaling from Meldshaper Level, Essentia investment, or a combination of the two?

However many you can convince everyone else it takes. That's the thing about the tiers. There's not an objective definition where you can run some kind of test. This thing we're doing where we argue with each other is the only mechanism the system provides for arriving at conclusions.


You need spells or spell equivalents in line with 9th level spells to Ccrack Into that territory. Call them powers, invocations, whatever, but their effects need to be in line at the top with 9th level spells and decent at lower levels as well.

I think that's backwards. 9th level spells are the least important part of a T1 character, because those are the levels you play at the least. If you imagine, for example, a character that got 1st through 8th level spells early, but never got 9ths, that character would be (assuming rough parity of spell lists and casting) better than a Wizard for the overwhelming majority of the game. The key to making the Incarnate something people care about is what it does at 3rd level, or 8th level, or 12th level, not 17th level.


That means no unshaping a veil for an effect

I don't think a blanket statement like that makes sense. I would certainly prefer the mechanical simplicity and thematic cohesiveness that comes with running everything off essentia to as large a degree as possible, but the Incarnate gets more soulmelds than they can fill by a long shot. That offers you a good deal of room to pop a soulmeld to get a big effect without crippling yourself for the rest of the day, and if the effect you get is big enough, crippling yourself for the rest of the day is okay.


Go back and add 10-12 soulmelds with bind effects to each splat book. That’s only 100-250 more things that an Incarnum user can do, but it should tier-one the Incarnum users.

As is just more melds will not do it. Options are good but they need to be good options, and powerful. Melds as is are NOT good enough. Versatility is nice but you need good options. True namers have tons of options, but few reliable good options.

Look at the existing soulmelds. How many of them are on par with what a Wizard or even a Dread Necromancer can do? People focus a lot on raw options, because it happens that the classes with the most raw options are also the most powerful ones. But the power of those classes has far, far more to do with the power of their options than the number of them. The Dread Necromancer doesn't even have a dozen options for 3rd level spells, and it's still T2. The Incarnate has somewhere between dozens and hundreds of configurations available at that level (depending how you count things), and is solidly T4. You could write a thousand soulmelds, and if they were on the level of the ones that already exist, it would barely move the needle. Conversely, simply replacing the ones that already exist with ones at an appropriate power level would elevate the Incarnate to whatever level you wanted it to be at.


You'd also want to give them free Split Chakra feats for each slot - forcing meldshapers to choose between the bind and items is a big choice, and one that spellcasters don't have to care about.

Well, no, what you want to do is not use a system that layers three different things on top of each other. As you note, making one class trade off with magic items (but not others) has a big impact on that class. The solution is not to hack around that, it's to not do that. Incarnum should either explicitly and entirely replace magic items, or it should interact with them freely, just as Invocations, Spells, and Maneuvers do. You don't need the magic item stuff, the essentia pool, and the chakra slots. Pick the thing you think makes for the most interesting class, and stick with that. Personally, I'd go with the essentia pool, because I think that's the most unique thing about the system.

[daremetoidareyo]

Look at the existing soulmelds. How many of them are on par with what a Wizard or even a Dread Necromancer can do? People focus a lot on raw options, because it happens that the classes with the most raw options are also the most powerful ones. But the power of those classes has far, far more to do with the power of their options than the number of them. The Dread Necromancer doesn't even have a dozen options for 3rd level spells, and it's still T2. The Incarnate has somewhere between dozens and hundreds of configurations available at that level (depending how you count things), and is solidly T4. You could write a thousand soulmelds, and if they were on the level of the ones that already exist, it would barely move the needle. Conversely, simply replacing the ones that already exist with ones at an appropriate power level would elevate the Incarnate to whatever level you wanted it to be at.

Yeah, but serpent kingdoms 10 soulmelds would be tier 1. Savage species would have gamebreaky wordage. Phb2s spulmelds would be interesting but weak. ToBs soulmelds would be solid tier 2, and probably had a feat that bumped it.

I think my suggestion was accounting for splat power creep.

[RandomPeasant]

Yeah, but serpent kingdoms 10 soulmelds would be tier 1. Savage species would have gamebreaky wordage. Phb2s spulmelds would be interesting but weak. ToBs soulmelds would be solid tier 2, and probably had a feat that bumped it.

Would they? Think about something that shows up in every splat: feats. Did the vast prevalence of feats result in a meaningful number of overpowered ones? Not really. Most of the powerful feats are powerful because of their interaction with spellcasting, and even they aren't really better than the most busted options available to spellcasters.

[Morphic tide]

Pretty sure only stp erudite is t1, psion I thought was t2. Regardless it's works out to a similar thing. You need spells or spell equivalents in line with 9th level spells to Ccrack Into that territory. Call them powers, invocations, whatever, but their effects need to be in line at the top with 9th level spells and decent at lower levels as well.

And augmentable/scaling teleport based on essentia that functions at the same level effacy or very close to it as wizard teleports at the same level is good. 1x/week locking Y essentia out for a day is not. Also not worth if you cannot access the basic teleport effect until 17th level, or gate at a similar level that only functions as better plane shift for your party traveling.
Well, the "bars" for the current Chakra Binds seems to be 5th, 9th, 14th, and 17th, so you'd align at about 3rd, 5th, ~7th, and 9th level spells. The level 14 Greater Chakras are an interesting bit as they're placed such that you aren't out of line sticking 6th or 7th level spell effects on them, since it's only one level either way. Sucks for the sessions you're level 13 and the full caster has their 6ths, but it flips for the level 14 sessions, and it's not like all too many 6th level utilities can't fit as 5th levels with secondary costs and inconveniences or just be down-leveled because they're weird niches or fit Incarnum really well.

Granted, there's also switching the Chakra Binds to one unlocked per two levels flat with the Incarnate/Totemist difference being reinforced by different orders despite their maintained bundling, so you fundamentally can't work around some of the prioritization. Probably switching the first two of each "tier" on Incarnate/Totemist, then Soulborn leans on shuffling Open Chakra feats for a weird "chunky" progression? Maybe boost Soulborn progression to mirror Duskblade on the class table, so they can reserve the feats for the Big tools.


Take 10 or 20 awesome spell effects line as above with teleport, rename them, scale them so they do the same/very similar thing at the same level as a wizard can with increased binds/essentia and remove any limitations to them beyond that and you can be tier 1. That means no unshaping a veil for an effect, no locking essentia for a day (unless you rework the entire amount of each class has so you can substitute essentia for spell levels or some such), no limitations on use beyond maybe 3x a day for your highest level effect, nothing on lower stuff, and you do it.

It does break down to spells, but different, as well as modal, but that's the bar you need to reach.
*scrubbed* I'm not wanting to get rid of the existing Incarnum paradigm. 20 levels of spells on top of Totemist's existing combat patterns, on top of making the existing paradigm much more closely compete with Invocation utilities, on top of each Chakra Bind being able to be an effect appropriate to the level of the Bind independently of Essentia, is a very different matter from just exchanging Essentia for spells on a per-level basis.

At the extreme of the way I've been looking to go about it, the current Totemist table could constitute 53 levels of spells, between Unbinding Heart as 9th level, the two Greaters as 7th level, and two Lesser as 5th level, atop the 20 levels from Essentia. Not counting another 4 Unshape effects that don't cost Essentia, not counting what "always-on" Shape effects displace.


As is just more melds will not do it. Options are good but they need to be good options, and powerful. Melds as is are NOT good enough. Versatility is nice but you need good options. True namers have tons of options, but few reliable good options.
This is very bluntly the point I have been hammering. Just "good" options within the confines of similar usage paradigms, so the things that only full-caster slots do have to stick to daily limits. But then there's the existing Soulmelds, ToB stuff, Truenaming, some bits of Shadowcasting IIRC, large chunks of Vestiges, and most Invocations all fitting in the "broadly at-will" space of effects that don't burn daily resources.


You'd also want to give them free Split Chakra feats for each slot - forcing meldshapers to choose between the bind and items is a big choice, and one that spellcasters don't have to care about.
Since the concept is "rewrite Incarnum as t1" inside the bounds of its core Essentia/Soulmelds/Chakra Bind functionality, it's entirely possible to just... make the feat better. Like merging it with Double Chakra and/or make it scale with level, Essentia, or Constitution as to how many slots you can double up on. Also a Wilding Clasp counterpart, perhaps tied into "grading" Incarnum Lenses by such utility values instead of grading them as increasingly large amounts of Essentia bonus. Some class features when you actually get enough to care, differing in details by class.


However many you can convince everyone else it takes. That's the thing about the tiers. There's not an objective definition where you can run some kind of test. This thing we're doing where we argue with each other is the only mechanism the system provides for arriving at conclusions.
So are you expecting me to fill half the thread with explicit questions? Because this statement makes zero sense in the context of trying to arrive at any kind of answer, because you're giving zero information of where you draw it, only waxing poetic about the complexity of the task. Going back over your posts in the thread, you seem to have not a single time given any statement on where you set the bar for anything, just saying "no, that's not it" or "no, that doesn't make sense" in various ways.

Beyond suggesting throwing out two thirds of the mechanic space... because you're bothered by item replacement "being a half-measure" where specific effects take up specific slots just like items being mixed with a points-pool limiting overall bonus just like items? I can understand thinking of Shape effects as superfluous, but they serve the role of making it so the effects you have before you have items to trade off for remain so. This makes it so you have very low level effects and the tertiary effects are never tied to inappropiately-situational item substitutes.

[RandomPeasant]

Well, the "bars" for the current Chakra Binds seems to be 5th, 9th, 14th, and 17th, so you'd align at about 3rd, 5th, ~7th, and 9th level spells. The level 14 Greater Chakras are an interesting bit as they're placed such that you aren't out of line sticking 6th or 7th level spell effects on them, since it's only one level either way. Sucks for the sessions you're level 13 and the full caster has their 6ths, but it flips for the level 14 sessions, and it's not like all too many 6th level utilities can't fit as 5th levels with secondary costs and inconveniences or just be down-leveled because they're weird niches or fit Incarnum really well.

You are thinking about this in terms that are way too closely tied to specifics of the mechanical progressions of T1 classes. Look at T3. The Binder, the Crusader, the Warlock, and the Duskblade are all T3 classes, and none of them even have the same number of levels of powers, let alone getting them all at the same level.


Just "good" options within the confines of similar usage paradigms, so the things that only full-caster slots do have to stick to daily limits.

No they don't. There's plenty of caster-exclusive stuff (for some value of "caster-exclusive") that would be perfectly fine to hand out on an at-will schedule. Make things daily if making them usable more often causes problems, not simply because there aren't at-will options in printed content.


So are you expecting me to fill half the thread with explicit questions?

Yes. Before you can solve a problem, you need clearly-defined success criteria. "Tier One" means different things to different people. Make your thinking explicit so that people who do not have the exact same understanding of the terms you are using as you do can tell whether your proposals are having the effect you want or not.


Beyond suggesting throwing out two thirds of the mechanic space... because you're bothered by item replacement "being a half-measure" where specific effects take up specific slots just like items being mixed with a points-pool limiting overall bonus just like items?

Complexity is not the same thing as mechanical space. The mechanical space of soulmelds is whatever you write soulmelds to do. Adding additional accounting that encourages players to buy weird combo items doesn't make the class more interesting, it makes the game more complicated. The Crusader is an interesting class because random ability availability causes you to consider tactical options you otherwise wouldn't, increasing variety. Preparing suites of related abilities rather than individual options (as the Binder does) is also an interesting mechanic, but simply stapling the two together doesn't make for a class that's twice as interesting as it's components, it makes for something that is confusing and unfocused. As the saying goes, a design is perfect not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

[Lans]

How many distinct level-appropriate effects do you actually need to have? How many effects need to "tier up" in a way appropriate to Binds, as opposed to being perfectly well handled by purely numeric scaling from Meldshaper Level, Essentia investment, or a combination of the two?

I am actually not sure what you mean. My idea of tying level appropriate effects to essentia invested doesn't exclude the other options and is simpler for me to implement. I can look at already made melds and look for ways to crank there power level up. Every meld can have how ever many 'levels' as opposed to binds that are more limited in scaling level. It also doesn't exclude binds as additional scaling point. So you would be able to get a new level of abilities at essentia cap increases and when you get new binds


Cr



Yes. Before you can solve a problem, you need clearly-defined success criteria. "Tier One" means different things to different people. Make your thinking explicit so that people who do not have the exact same understanding of the terms you are using as you do can tell whether your proposals are having the effect you want or not.


.

Tier 1 to me is 1 mostly replacing another character like animal companions, Zombies or divine power replacing martial melee. 2 things that are punching way above your weight, like epic creatures being shut down by 1st level spells. 3 things that make a dms job 'hard' ie speak with dead

[noob]

I am actually not sure what you mean. My idea of tying level appropriate effects to essentia invested doesn't exclude the other options and is simpler for me to implement. I can look at already made melds and look for ways to crank there power level up. Every meld can have how ever many 'levels' as opposed to binds that are more limited in scaling level. It also doesn't exclude binds as additional scaling point. So you would be able to get a new level of abilities at essentia cap increases and when you get new binds



Tier 1 to me is 1 mostly replacing another character like animal companions, Zombies or divine power replacing martial melee. 2 things that are punching way above your weight, like epic creatures being shut down by 1st level spells. 3 things that make a dms job 'hard' ie speak with dead

Tier 1 is about having all of those on demand and tier 2 is about picking a few of them.
And also the ability to say "I do not like this campaign now I am going to play sim city in dnd without needing villagers to exist prior to me creating the city" and all the other plot derailing tools (like door to great evil is a cool plot derailing spell paladins gets but sadly they get it too late).

[Lans]

Letting planar chausable Summon monster, and giving it planar ally lesser to greater at roughy level appropriate binds

[Kuulvheysoon]

Letting planar chausable Summon monster, and giving it planar ally lesser to greater at roughy level appropriate binds

Might be enough to bump it up to T2 - Zceryll is the entire reason that Binders are T2, iirc, and it gives summon monster I-IX every 5 rounds.

[Beni-Kujaku]

Might be enough to bump it up to T2 - Zceryll is the entire reason that Binders are T2, iirc, and it gives summon monster I-IX every 5 rounds.

Zceryll is the entire reason Binders are T2 mostly because it single-handedly gives you resistance to 2 types of destructive energy, scaling SR, outsider type, automatic True Strike 1/day, -1 to opponents attack rolls....... Summon Monster I-IX is just an added bonus. And a very strong one, but I don't think it's the reason Zceryll is that broken compared to other vestiges. (Also, you get mindsight and a mental attack that dazes for 1d3 rds, which would be enough to make a 3rd or 4th level vestige pretty good, but here are just icing on the cake).


I agree with most people here: you don't have to change the incarnum system, just make binds more powerful. You can't really change the base effects without giving access at low level to powerful abilities, but binds are very limited and high level, they should be stronger. As it is, binding a soulmeld is interesting, but the new abilities are just on par with melding another soulmeld, most of the time. Even for Soul binds (Flight 30ft, seriously?). And maybe give more binds to soulmelds, so that you can use a soulmeld differently throughout your career without changing your playstyle too much.

In the case of Planar Chausuble, that would be : No difference on the base effect, Bind(Crown): You can SM I 1/day per essentia invested, Bind(Shoulders): You can lesser Planar Ally at-will (no more than 1 ally at a time)+1 HD per essentia invested, Bind(Soul): You can Gate 1/day.

For the Enigma Helm, you'd have Bind(Brow): If you succeed on a saving throw against a targeted Enchantment, you can make it so that the caster is affected instead of you (the variables like the caster level are the original, but you choose the specifics like the specific wording of a Suggestion), Bind(Heart): You gain permanent Mind Blank

For Claws of the Wyrm, you'd have Bind Hands: You double your threat range on your claws and gain +4 to confirm criticals, Bind Arm: Your claw gain one size category per essentia invested and you gain Rend with them; Bind(Totem): the enhancement bonus of the soulmeld is applied to all your natural weapons instead of just your claws.

You can do that with every soulmeld, and there will be some T2 or T1 incarnum

[Darg]

Part of the reason incarnum and other at-will sources of power are weaker than spellcasting is two-fold: small selection of weaker options and if given something powerful then they are given extreme drawbacks. Take blink shirt for example, a totemist that has bound it to their totem chakra can as a move action dimension door 10 ft +10ft per essentia. Sounds awesome right? The problem is the caveat that after you use the ability you can perform no other action until your next turn and it's only usable on yourself. While move action dimension door is strong, you are giving up so many other abilities for the day to receive it. Also, when you are spraying acid of a power level of a 1st level spell, but needed 20 levels to get there, that is a little too far on the "keeping power in check" scale. Spellcasters can get reserve feats stronger than the core abilities that incarnum users get.

Honestly, incarnum seems more apt as something you would use to boost the abilities of non-incarnum classes, but that is simply speculation based on observation rather than quantitative fact. Personally, it feels like an attempt to increase the power level of a concept like soulknife by separating it from the class table. This allows them to add additional abilities without being governed by an existing ruleset.

Based on this, I would probably do two things as a foundational jump off point: the power of a soulmeld is tied to meldshaper level, not essentia invested, and greatly expand the occupational slot selection that soulmelds can individually be bound to. From there I would increase the number of binds to a single chakra or just the occupied slot as another form of class progression. Using the swift action essentia reinvestment as a base, I think using essentia as a form of augmentation similar to psionic augmentation (using the blink shirt example above, essentia increases the number of targets that can travel with you or the behir gorget throat bind doing 1d6 damage per 2 meldshaper levels with a range of 5 ft per 4 levels while essentia would allow the line attack to do 1d6 additional damage for the essentia invested.)

Some things that I would also change in the abilities themselves is that I would create some swift/immediate action abilities to temper the current free form nature of essentia reinvestment without taking it away.

But, if we just wanted to increase the power level of meldshaping in the current system, identify the spell effects that meldshaping is missing and then add them into existing or new melds. Obviously, those melds would be no-brainers because the power level would be through the roof when compared to the effective power level of everything else.

[noob]

the problem is the caveat that after you use the ability you can perform no other action until your next turn

That is already a limitation of the dimension door spell.
However dimension door can also teleport allies with you.

[Ramza00]

Has anyone mentioned Akashic Mysteries from 3rd Pathfinder DSP as a comparison point, and then all the new veils that other 3rd party books who are not DSP added to that system?

I still do not think they are T1, but there are interesting things like a doppelgänger veil where it acts as another veil you can shape but with 1 less essence each time you swap abilities, and it stacks, and so on.

[Darg]

That is already a limitation of the dimension door spell.
However dimension door can also teleport allies with you.

Holy, I've been hoodwinked I say. Thanks for pointing that out.

[Lans]

Might be enough to bump it up to T2 - Zceryll is the entire reason that Binders are T2, iirc, and it gives summon monster I-IX every 5 rounds.
Incarnum doesn't do the 5 round cool down. I am thinking making it either at will with a duration equal to essentia or maybe essentia divided by 2. Otherwise maybe making it like soulspark famiar where you just get one

[Gnaeus]

Has anyone mentioned Akashic Mysteries from 3rd Pathfinder DSP as a comparison point, and then all the new veils that other 3rd party books who are not DSP added to that system?

I still do not think they are T1, but there are interesting things like a doppelgänger veil where it acts as another veil you can shape but with 1 less essence each time you swap abilities, and it stacks, and so on.

This.

Vizier is probably low Tier 2 by itself. And better at some things than most T1s. A T1 incarnate would look like a Vizier with a slightly faster veil progression and access to Guru veils and Rajah titles.



Tier 1 to me is 1 mostly replacing another character like animal companions, Zombies or divine power replacing martial melee. 2 things that are punching way above your weight, like epic creatures being shut down by 1st level spells. 3 things that make a dms job 'hard' ie speak with dead

Vizier gets an advanced Wight slave. Vizier+ could set up veils to melee effectively. But like other high tiers is better off locking down battlefield then doing massive damage with blasting options. Sure, it’s a D6 half bab class, but it can easily give itself DR and a bunch of temporary HP and make touch attacks or replace BAB with veil weaver level. Guru and Rajah veils would make this even easier.

Vizier Stare of the Ghaele is a high DC gaze attack that triggers until an enemy fails a save and staggers every failure for D6+1 rounds. This effect is like an at will quickened Slow. Given that it is the only powerful bind in slot (kind of like being the only good spell of its level) its a no-brainer that this effect is virtually always on. Followed up with massive handfuls of force damage dice, viziers can absolutely punch above weight class.

Viziers don’t exactly have a lot of utility effects. What they have is an ability that lets them craft items without prerequisites and another ability that lets them auto UMD with phantom charges. The result is a warlock/artificer like access to any spell effect if they ever found or chose to make a wand/staff of that thing.

[Efrate]

There is a lot of utility for vizier once you look at city of 7 seraphs veils. Path of the crafter is easily tier 2 pushing 1 maybe. Not sure on the other paths.

They also blast better than pretty much anyone if you choose to go that route, with the weaponlike veils taking full advantage of feats like deadly aim and the like and scaling in a way that makes a lot of sense and is better than most other options. Access to ibis for +4 int is also nice, but dsp races are generally a step above most.

[AmberVael]

Zceryll is the entire reason Binders are T2 mostly because it single-handedly gives you resistance to 2 types of destructive energy, scaling SR, outsider type, automatic True Strike 1/day, -1 to opponents attack rolls....... Summon Monster I-IX is just an added bonus. And a very strong one, but I don't think it's the reason Zceryll is that broken compared to other vestiges. (Also, you get mindsight and a mental attack that dazes for 1d3 rds, which would be enough to make a 3rd or 4th level vestige pretty good, but here are just icing on the cake).

No, it's definitely the Summon Monster ability that does it. The icing is the everything else, which is saying something given that Mindsight, Telepathy, a Daze attack, and a suite of defense abilities are indeed pretty nice and could carry a vestige on their own.

Spammable minions on their own would be a nice ability, giving you the ability to safely scout, trigger traps, cause havoc, etc. Spammable combat-capable minions is a really strong ability (especially as every single one of those minions gets a free true strike). But the real power of Summon Monster is in the versatility it gives you. Plenty of monsters on the list have spell-like abilities or unique capabilities that massively expand your range of capabilities, and you can spam the heck out of them. Want to go to the ethereal plane? Get infinite healing? Create tons of food? Translate any spoken language? Fly? Dig a massive pit? Summon Monster has all that and way more covered by the level you can bind Zceryll.

[Kuulvheysoon]

No, it's definitely the Summon Monster ability that does it. The icing is the everything else, which is saying something given that Mindsight, Telepathy, a Daze attack, and a suite of defense abilities are indeed pretty nice and could carry a vestige on their own.

Spammable minions on their own would be a nice ability, giving you the ability to safely scout, trigger traps, cause havoc, etc. Spammable combat-capable minions is a really strong ability (especially as every single one of those minions gets a free true strike). But the real power of Summon Monster is in the versatility it gives you. Plenty of monsters on the list have spell-like abilities or unique capabilities that massively expand your range of capabilities, and you can spam the heck out of them. Want to go to the ethereal plane? Get infinite healing? Create tons of food? Translate any spoken language? Fly? Dig a massive pit? Summon Monster has all that and way more covered by the level you can bind Zceryll.

Just... yeah, what she said. Amber's far more eloquent than I am. Getting free minions (at a rate way beyond any caster class, considering how it scales with your level, which is ridiculous) is nice, but it's the various SLAs that pop it to T2. Remember that there's a huge gap between T2 and T3 (and relatively small between T1 and T2).

[Ramza00]

This.

Vizier is probably low Tier 2 by itself. And better at some things than most T1s. A T1 incarnate would look like a Vizier with a slightly faster veil progression and access to Guru veils and Rajah titles.

1 Feat makes a Vizier or another Veil class into a mini Rajah but with their own veil list which is the feat Titles from Distant Shores located in the Rajah Veil. Now you can make your veils into titles and the limiting factor is you can only shape so many veils per day. You just have more choices now such as choosing you want to have another veil or give a Crusader shield to your ally so they can summon a wall as a move action, and if you use your limited chakra binds the ally can do it as a intermediate action giving a wings of cover like effect.

Or you can give your ally Stare of the Ghaele and you yourself also has it. The limit is essence, chakra binds, and how many veils you can do at once.

[Gnaeus]

1 Feat makes a Vizier or another Veil class into a mini Rajah but with their own veil list which is the feat Titles from Distant Shores located in the Rajah Veil. Now you can make your veils into titles and the limiting factor is you can only shape so many veils per day. You just have more choices now such as choosing you want to have another veil or give a Crusader shield to your ally so they can summon a wall as a move action, and if you use your limited chakra binds the ally can do it as a intermediate action giving a wings of cover like effect.

Or you can give your ally Stare of the Ghaele and you yourself also has it. The limit is essence, chakra binds, and how many veils you can do at once.

True. But the point is powering vizier up from T2-T1. A lot of the Rajah veils are worth shaping at least situationally or based on party. You could also spend one feat and steal efficient healing off the guru list. But to make it look more T1 than T2 it should have more options without spending 1 feat per option. And again, I’d also accelerate its veils to T1ify it a touch more.

[RandomPeasant]

Honestly, I have no idea why Zceryll is supposed to bump the Binder up a tier (though I suspect if there is a reason it has more do to with the "summons are permanent" reading of the ability than utility). Yes, it's a nice bit of utility, but so are things like the Beguiler taking Ancestral Relic, the Dread Necromancer abusing planar binding, and the Warlock's ability to craft any magic item. Hell, even Eclectic Learning Warmages get utility on par with "you can cast summon monster". And none of those classes have even a provisional T2 entry in the original tiers. Honestly, my best guess that Zceryll was simply a raging debate in either the CharOp community as a whole or JaronK's home table, and the ranking was included to avoid Zceryll fanboys clogging the thread with complaints about their favorite toy.

[noob]

Honestly, I have no idea why Zceryll is supposed to bump the Binder up a tier (though I suspect if there is a reason it has more do to with the "summons are permanent" reading of the ability than utility). Yes, it's a nice bit of utility, but so are things like the Beguiler taking Ancestral Relic, the Dread Necromancer abusing planar binding, and the Warlock's ability to craft any magic item. Hell, even Eclectic Learning Warmages get utility on par with "you can cast summon monster". And none of those classes have even a provisional T2 entry in the original tiers. Honestly, my best guess that Zceryll was simply a raging debate in either the CharOp community as a whole or JaronK's home table, and the ranking was included to avoid Zceryll fanboys clogging the thread with complaints about their favorite toy.

Early in the tiering thing you were supposed to not take in account things like feats and prcs(else everything is tier 1: you just can get complete wizard casting progression just with enough feats or by abusing wbl) and options not specific to the class.
Hence why the fixed list casters with spells up to the ninth level are not all tier 1 despite the fact that they do not need a lot of feat sheanigans to get to cast all the wizard spells at any moment.
Binders with at will monster summoning can possibly get to spam all day a lot of different utility spells like teleport, aid, cure light wound and also gives access to stupidly powerfull stuff like firres and so on but most importantly it is not dependant on picking non binder options.

[RandomPeasant]

Early in the tiering thing you were supposed to not take in account things like feats and prcs(else everything is tier 1: you just can get complete wizard casting progression just with feats) and options from manuals that were not the one including the class for the tier ranking.
Hence why the fixed list casters with spells up to the ninth level are not all tier 1 despite the fact that with the right feat sheanigans they can get all the wizard spells.

And "this one specific web enhancement" doesn't fall under that? My issue is not so much the fact of where those classes ended up but the inconsistency. Lots of other classes have one weird trick (and only one of those tricks I listed is a feat) that bumps them up a tier. Giving it to only the Binder is, in my view, a blatant double standard. Most obviously, how on earth is Zceryll enough to bump the Binder up to T2, but planar binding not enough to do the same for the Dread Necromancer? It's A) better and B) less obscure.

[noob]

And "this one specific web enhancement" doesn't fall under that? My issue is not so much the fact of where those classes ended up but the inconsistency. Lots of other classes have one weird trick (and only one of those tricks I listed is a feat) that bumps them up a tier. Giving it to only the Binder is, in my view, a blatant double standard. Most obviously, how on earth is Zceryll enough to bump the Binder up to T2, but planar binding not enough to do the same for the Dread Necromancer? It's A) better and B) less obscure.

The dread necromancer lacking magic circle can not do classical planar binding stuff(they can only get creatures hostile to them with it and no free slaves) unless they get a magical item and magical items are categorically out because with them everybody is tier 1 through the simplest "partially charged wands and scroll use" kind of casting.(someone calculated that if magic mart existed that you could beat all the encounter from level 1 to level 20 as if you were a wizard through only bought magical items)
The warlock probably suffered comparison with the artificer or some sad thing like that and it was basically judged as "it is an artificer but 10 times weaker".
As for warmage they only get evocation spells with their eccletic learning which are overall the poorest spells (you get some good evocation spells like Contingency but it is not an instant win at everything school).

[RandomPeasant]

The dread necromancer lacking magic circle can not do classical planar binding stuff(they can only get creatures hostile to them with it and no free slaves) unless they get a magical item and magical items are categorically out because with them everybody is tier 1 through the simplest "partially charged wands and scroll use" kind of casting.

I don't think that's correct, except under very finnicky readings of planar binding where being allowed the CHA check somehow depends on the creature being trapped. If you summon a creature without an appropriate trap, you can still negotiate with it, it's just not, you know, trapped. So instead of starting from a negotiating position of "you are trapped and cannot escape until you agree to serve", you start from a negotiating position of "you are surrounded by elite skeletons and they will kill you unless you agree to serve", which I suppose is a somewhat worse negotiating position, but not enough so to make the spell bad (particularly since the only bar we have to clear here is "as much utility as summon monster", and you can do traditional planar binding stuff as soon as you find a creature with magic circle as a SLA). I also reject the notion that "buying any magic items ever" is necessarily equivalent to "partially charged wands", but will acknowledge that as the terms the original system was operating under, even if I think it's a bad assumption.


As for warmage they only get evocation spells with their eccletic learning which are overall the poorest spells (you get some good evocation spells like Contingency but it is not an instant win at everything school).

You're thinking of Advanced Learning, which is the "we understand that we can't just put the entire school on your list" class feature common to all fixed list casters. Eclectic Learning is the Warmage-specific alternative in the PHBII, which explicitly gives you anything on the Sorcerer/Wizard list, just at one level higher. So you can get alter self at 7th level, polymorph at 11th level, and planar binding at 16th level. Which, again, all seem totally sufficient to provide as much utility as summon monster.

[noob]

I don't think that's correct, except under very finnicky readings of planar binding where being allowed the CHA check somehow depends on the creature being trapped. If you summon a creature without an appropriate trap, you can still negotiate with it, it's just not, you know, trapped. So instead of starting from a negotiating position of "you are trapped and cannot escape until you agree to serve", you start from a negotiating position of "you are surrounded by elite skeletons and they will kill you unless you agree to serve", which I suppose is a somewhat worse negotiating position, but not enough so to make the spell bad (particularly since the only bar we have to clear here is "as much utility as summon monster", and you can do traditional planar binding stuff as soon as you find a creature with magic circle as a SLA). I also reject the notion that "buying any magic items ever" is necessarily equivalent to "partially charged wands", but will acknowledge that as the terms the original system was operating under, even if I think it's a bad assumption.



You're thinking of Advanced Learning, which is the "we understand that we can't just put the entire school on your list" class feature common to all fixed list casters. Eclectic Learning is the Warmage-specific alternative in the PHBII, which explicitly gives you anything on the Sorcerer/Wizard list, just at one level higher. So you can get alter self at 7th level, polymorph at 11th level, and planar binding at 16th level. Which, again, all seem totally sufficient to provide as much utility as summon monster.
I had the feeling that planar binding was entirely centred around the assumption of a specific trap(the magical circle) they explicitly mention.
https://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/planarBindingLesser.htm

Which parsing allows you to skip the trap step and still make opposed charisma checks while they are supposed to be done "until the target is free of that specific trap"? I do not know but that kind of parsing probably also allows to use power attack to reduce the attack rolls of your opponents (which is technically not incorrect but not the common assumption players makes about power attack).
I mean it is definitively interesting and I would like to know how to do this kind of shenanigan(just like how I actually liked the "power attack to reduce opponent attack rolls" shenanigan).

[RandomPeasant]

I had the feeling that planar binding was entirely centred around the assumption of a specific trap(the magical circle) they explicitly mention.

Well then how are they doing anything at all with it? If the requirement for a magic circle is a hard requirement for the spell to function, rather than merely a requirement to keep the creature from killing you freely, Dread Necromancers can't even get "creatures hostile to them". Even if we do assume you can't do anything without magic circle, the Dread Necromancer can simply kill a 5th level Cleric or Wizard, turn them into a Corpse Creature with create undead, Rebuke them, and move on with their life. That's possible with only Dread Necromancer class features and spells.


Which parsing allows you to skip the trap step and still make opposed charisma checks while they are "until the target is free of that specific trap"?

Well, I don't see the phrase "specific trap" in the spell text at all, but I can't help you there. But the basic argument is that it only says "You can attempt to compel the creature to perform a service by describing the service and perhaps offering some sort of reward." There's no requirement there that the creature be trapped when you make the check, just that you can no longer make the check when the creature breaks free. But the Dread Necromancer's plan isn't to make CHA checks at all, they're just going to explain to the thing they've bound that the choices are "cast the SLA I want you to" and "be torn apart by undead" and hope that whatever they've summoned is smart enough to want to remain alive.

[icefractal]

Giving it to only the Binder is, in my view, a blatant double standard.The initial versions at least (maybe still) give the same benefit to the Factotum, effectively treating it as if it had the following class feature:

Factotum's Permission (Ex): The Factotum can use tricks like Iajitsu Focus, Lucid Dreaming, UMD exploitation, and so forth. Other classes aren't allowed to do this, despite that you can take skills cross-class and there are a lot of ways to add to the total bonus.

[Ramza00]

I feel a Soul Manifester / Soul Caster adaption for Binders, plus the Akashic Mystery classes / rule changes would be enough to make Incarnum Tier 1. And if it isn’t T1 it is a versatile enough T2 that it does not matter.

Especially since veil weaving levels stack for your veil weaver with the Akashic Mysteries multiclassing rules. Likewise those same rules say you can swap Ability Modifiers if you have multiple classes that are veilweaver and they use different ability modifiers. Soul Manifester or Soul Caster gives you up to 6 Chakra Binds, even if they are the weaker binds you can grab via feats. And no other class abilities like breaking the essence caps via class abilities.

[Gnaeus]

I
Especially since veil weaving levels stack for your veil weaver with the Akashic Mysteries multiclassing rules. Likewise those same rules say you can swap Ability Modifiers if you have multiple classes that are veilweaver and they use different ability modifiers.

Could you point me at a source? I believe you but this is going to come up for my character and I can’t find that rule. (In anything from DSP I mean. I find it in online source without a cite).

[Ramza00]

Could you point me at a source? I believe you but this is going to come up for my character and I can’t find that rule. (In anything from DSP I mean. I find it in online source without a cite).

I need to track it down, it may not be Akashic Mysteries but one of the later 3rd party Akasha / Incarnum books. If so sigh but that is the thing about 3rd party lots of DM adjudications.

[Gnaeus]

I need to track it down, it may not be Akashic Mysteries but one of the later 3rd party Akasha / Incarnum books. If so sigh but that is the thing about 3rd party lots of DM adjudications.

Damn. That would have helped my guru/rajah a ton. Well, fingers crossed. Was really hoping you would say some errata I missed.

[Ramza00]

Damn. That would have helped my guru/rajah a ton. Well, fingers crossed. Was really hoping you would say some errata I missed.

I am not seeing the text in

Akashic Mysteries with lead designer Michael Sayre (Dreamscarred Press) which does Daevic, Guru, Vizier
or
The City of 7 Seraphs: Akashic Trinity with lead designer Michael Sayre (Lost Spheres Publishing) which does Eclipse, Nexus, Radiant
or
Classes of the Lost Spheres: Zodiac with lead designer Michael Sayre (Lost Spheres Publishing) which does Zodiac.

Nor is it in
Divergent Paths: Rajah with lead designer Anthony Cappel (Dreamscarred Press) which does Rajah

I have not checked the following products

Stormbound, Spellweaver, Volur, Spheres of Akasha, Studio M, all of those 5 things I just listed Hal Kennette as the lead designer. I do not own those books / pdfs so I can't comment on them.

There are some other 3rd party Akashic Materials that are not done by Michael Sayre or Hal Kennette but to my understanding those are the two main game designers for this 3rd party material.

[Gnaeus]

I am not seeing the text in

Akashic Mysteries with lead designer Michael Sayre (Dreamscarred Press) which does Daevic, Guru, Vizier
or
The City of 7 Seraphs: Akashic Trinity with lead designer Michael Sayre (Lost Spheres Publishing) which does Eclipse, Nexus, Radiant
or
Classes of the Lost Spheres: Zodiac with lead designer Michael Sayre (Lost Spheres Publishing) which does Zodiac.

Nor is it in
Divergent Paths: Rajah with lead designer Anthony Cappel (Dreamscarred Press) which does Rajah

I have not checked the following products

Stormbound, Spellweaver, Volur, Spheres of Akasha, Studio M, all of those 5 things I just listed Hal Kennette as the lead designer. I do not own those books / pdfs so I can't comment on them.

There are some other 3rd party Akashic Materials that are not done by Michael Sayre or Hal Kennette but to my understanding those are the two main game designers for this 3rd party material.

Thank you for your effort. My group is pretty first party focused (with DSP regarded as first party for psionic/akashic/POW,) it’s not impossible that I could get my dm to accept a ruling from Michael Sayre after DSP folded, but sounds like I’m stuck.

[Ramza00]

Thank you for your effort. My group is pretty first party focused (with DSP regarded as first party for psionic/akashic/POW,) it’s not impossible that I could get my dm to accept a ruling from Michael Sayre after DSP folded, but sounds like I’m stuck.

Anybody else reading this I would like an answer please for I am at my limit without buy new books :smallsmile:

Here is Michael Sayre doing a FAQ in Nov 2020 and this was his multiclassing answer.

https://paizo.com/threads/rzs42esi&page=6?Ask-Michael-Sayre-ALL-your-Questions-Here#295

Please I beg anyone who is reading this :smalltongue:

[Lans]

No, it's definitely the Summon Monster ability that does it. The icing is the everything else, which is saying something given that Mindsight, Telepathy, a Daze attack, and a suite of defense abilities are indeed pretty nice and could carry a vestige on their own.
l.

Mindsight would also be a factor to get it to T2, it shutdowns the stealth game.

I believe the originally it was if online vestiges, but that got shortened to just the summoning vestige as time went by.bI don't know if any of the others would matter and I can't find them anymore.

Edit 2 Astoraths one give divination spell the other gives suggestion and magic item creation

The other tier changes were Imperious command samurai, dungeon crasher, and level 20 truenamer.