Flex Your Talent! (Guides to Spheres)

[SangoProduction]

Preamble: Normally with talents, you select them on level up, and barring retraining, they don't change. However, there are a few methods in spheres to gain / change talents with greater freedom than normal. This guide is meant to expose them in one clear guide.
These are not ranked in terms of power of preference. They are merely in the order of which I remember / stumble past it.

Terms
Hard Flex: Lets you (mostly) freely pick and obtain talents whenever you demand it.
Soft Flex: The Wizardly method of flexing. You get to determine the talents you will have access to.
Flexible: Even less easy to flex than Soft Flex, but more flexible than normal.
Feat Flex: Just separating feat flexing (which can be used to flex talents) from true talent flexing.

Hard Flex
Surreal Feats - Shadow Magic. Lets you spend a shadow point as a free action to pretend you have a talent from several spheres, at -2 caster level. Talents gained per use scales at 1 per 5 surreal feats. Only one use at a time.
Fey Adept - Create Reality. Spend a shadow point to gain some sphere-like effects, that occasionally mimic talents. Dreamtwister makes it more restrictive.
Hedgewitch - Spiritualism. Standard action to gain the use of any one magic talent. One use at a time. More talents per use with levels.
Hedgewitch - Umbral. Gains Create Reality from Fey Adept (and Shadowmark and such)
Incanter - Battleshaping. Gain a trait from any alteration talent, even if you don't know it. A few times a day.
Alteration - Mimicry. Study a creature, and gain a mimicking alteration talent for the trouble.
Prodigy - Adaptation. Standard action to gain magic/combat talents.
Sphere Wizard - Arcane Bond. On selecting a bonded object, you gain 1 + 1/4 levels talents you can flex each day.)
Sphere Arcanist - Quick Study. 1 full round action and arcane point to change 1 moldable talent.
Wild Magic - Inspired Surge. 100% wild magic chance but add more talents to the base effect,.
Shifter - Shifting Style. Gain combat talent on shapeshift for spell point.

Soft Flex
Amiger - Customized Weapons. You gain a few weapons-sets, each of which can be assigned at least 1 talent, but you must be wielding the set to gain advantage of it, and only wield one set at a time. Archetypes tend to mess with Customized Weapons.
Sphere Arcanist - Moldable Talents. Roughly half of your level-up talents are gained as Moldable Talents, which can be re-selected each day.
Witch Hexes - Modable Magics. As moldable talents. ut just one.
Thaumaturge - Savant - Flexible Combat Training. Gains half as many talents as a full "combatant," but every 8 hours of rest, may completely change any and all combat talents from savant levels. Like a martial Sphere Arcanist, with no normal talents.
Shifter - Apex Shifter - Knowledge of Many Shapes. 1 alteration talent swapped after 8 hours rest.

Flexible
3PP feats - Harrowed Talents. Each level, you can select 6 different talents you qualify for, and use them when you draw the associated suits from your deck.
Talent Thief - Arcane Larceny. Steals one magic talent and base sphere for every 4 sneak attack damage. The target must have talents to steal. Starting at level 10.

Feat Flex
Inheritor - Martial Flexibility. Flex any combat feat... that she does not have! So if you wish to flex Extra Combat Talent, you can't have it to begin with (unless you count a particular instance of ECT as different from another, for granting different talents). Later levels flex more things, including magic talents.
Brawler / Conscript - Martial Flexibility. Flex any combat feat, as Inheritor. Does not include magic talents. Also horribly boring class.
Mageknight - Mystic Adaptation. Flex combat feat for spell point.
Fighter - Martial Master - Martial Flexibilit. You know it already. But later in levels.
(There are no doubt a ton of feat-flexers in Pathfinder. I think Fighter is one as well. Couldn't be asked to look for them, as many are hidden in archetypes.)

And that's all I can think of right now. It's midnight. I've got work tomorrow. I wish you all well. Please do inform me of any other flexors that I forgot.

[Rynjin]

Calling a Spheres-capable Brawler "horrible" is a hot take for me. Brawler on its own is a perfectly fine T4 beatstick that's better than most non-casters out there, and a Spheres Brawler has a lot of (martial) flexibility going for it. Prescient Pugilist is downright interestin', even.

A big one you missed BTW is Sphere Wizard, which still has their Arcane Bond and can flex into a new Talent once per day plus a few extra over leveling.

Savant (the Spheres of Might Thaumaturge overhaul) can change all of their Talents* after an 8 hour rest, and swap a few throughout the day as well.

*From Savant levels specifically, no extras or ones gained by multiclassing.

[Serafina]

This can all be combined in several ways to make highly flexible Sphere-Users.

A Spiritualism/Umbral Hedgewitch gets a good number of shadow points (allowing for very frequent flexing), can take Shadow Magic and further surreal feats via talents, and has Spiritualism on top of that to gain additional talents, allowing them to delve even deeper into a Sphere or go into other Spheres.
E.g. at 5th level, they could flex into any two talents as standard action for 5 minutes, or any three talents of the Shadow Magic allowed spheres for 1 minute by spending two standard actions (hardly practicable in combat, but great if you want to pull out a trick outside of combat).

Armiger really should not be underestimated in my opinion. Going 5 levels deep gives the very useful Rapid Assault, and going to 7 levels gives 3 weapons with 3 talents each on them, each of which can be changed daily. And you get to swap them for basically free. Variable Prowess allows one 10-minute flex per day, Skilled Weapon gives an extra talent to a weapon. Antiquarian Archetype allows them to have both magic and martial talents.
So that's flexing 4 talents, for no action, provided you've chosen them at the beginning of the day.

Antiquarian Armiger/Spiritualist Hedgewitch is as good to a perfect Flex-Talent-User as you can get, in my opinion.
Antiquarian has the drawback of providing no free talents from your casting tradition, Hedgewitch fixes that. Hedgewitch gives you on-the-spot flex talent, which Armiger has a hard time with. But Armiger is great for swapping between broader toolsets which you use every day (or know you need today) and just need to adapt.
Going for Armiger 5 for Mystic Assault, and then later for Armiger 11 for the 4th weapon, with a good helping of Hedgewitch on the side, is IMO the perfect combination.

Can't comment much on other options here.

[SangoProduction]

Calling a Spheres-capable Brawler "horrible" is a hot take for me. Brawler on its own is a perfectly fine T4 beatstick that's better than most non-casters out there, and a Spheres Brawler has a lot of (martial) flexibility going for it. Prescient Pugilist is downright interestin', even.

A big one you missed BTW is Sphere Wizard, which still has their Arcane Bond and can flex into a new Talent once per day plus a few extra over leveling.

Savant (the Spheres of Might Thaumaturge overhaul) can change all of their Talents* after an 8 hour rest, and swap a few throughout the day as well.

*From Savant levels specifically, no extras or ones gained by multiclassing.

By horrible, I meant utterly boring, rather than strictly bad, although I think it's pretty bad too. (And thanks for reminding me that I actually forgot to do the spheres archetypes in the review.

Added the mentioned flexors. Much appreciated.

[Ramza00]

Quick Study Sphere Arcanist exploit allows you to burn arcane reservoir points to swap your moldable talents at a 1:1 ratio plus 1 move+standard action (full-round). And since Sphere Arianism has consume spells, for 1 SP you get 3 arcane reservoir points.

http://spheresofpower.wikidot.com/sphere-arcanist

[StSword]

Combat Implementation allows Armorists to make their bound stuff count as implements, which means they can trade out the bound equipment bonus for magic talents, changeable daily. So soft flexing if I understand the categorizations.

From Sorcerers of the Spheres, by Falconian Productions, not on the wiki, I guess the admin isn't aware of it because it's third party, has the Inheritor Sorcerer that has a Brawler's martial flexibility, but they can borrow magic talents too. So hard flex.

It also has the Mongrel Mage Sorcerer, can flex magic talents daily as well. Soft Flex.

And an available mutation where you can gain the ability to duplicate effects that hit you a couple of times a day, so flexible.

[Logalmier]

An important caveat to many of the most common flex methods is that they don't let you pick any magic talent, only talents for which you already posses the base sphere. So if you were a Spiritualist Hedgewitch without the Warp sphere, you wouldn't be able to flex into Warp talents.

An incredibly cheap (and frankly notorious) source of flex that anyone can take is the wild magic feat Inspired Surge:

"When casting a sphere effect, you may increase the wild magic chance by 100% to add a single talent that you do not possess from one of the effect’s base spheres to the effect. For every 5 wild magic feats you possess, increase the number of talents gained this way by +1. You must still meet any prerequisites that the talents possesses. When gaining multiple talents with this feat, you may use a talent gained this way as a prerequisite for other gained talents."

The way this is worded implies some limitations not present in other forms of flex. Because you can only activate this feat when casting sphere effects, you can only use it to modify effects you already know. You can't use it to gain access to magic talents that let you cast new sphere effects, and you can't use it to gain access to talents that improve action economy. For example, if you already had access to the Telekinesis sphere, you could flex into the Forceful Telekinesis talent when casting Bludgeon. However, you could not use Inspired Surge to gain access to Gravity Well, because Gravity Well is its own effect, it doesn't modify anything. Likewise, you couldn't use Inspired Surge to gain access to Emergency Teleport, because you wouldn't be able to cast the immediate action Emergency Teleport in the first place unless you already had that talent.

There's a useful trait called Practiced Surge that gives you limited rerolls on Wild Magic events, which when used intelligently mitigates a lot of the risk of using Wild Magic. And there are feats that give similar effects. But basically unlimited flex for the price of a feat and a trait is silly good.

Oh yeah, and Conscript also can get Martial Flexibility.

Mageknight also gets access to Mystic Adaptation (a particularly good form of Martial Flexibility that only costs a swift action + can be reduced to a free action with Mystic Celerity).

[DrMartin]

Sphere witch has Moldable Magic hex, flex one magic talent as arcanist.

Conscript has Martial Flexibility, which works a bit like a brawler's for 2 specialization points - gives 1 talent at 2nd, 2 talents at 8th, 3 talents at 16th. So until level 8 it costs the same amount of (flex) feats as the number of bonus feats it costs.

And the Fighter Archetype Martial Master gives something like a brawler's flex, but trades in weapon training for that so it's most probably not a good idea as it locks you out of all the advanced training options.

Apex Shifter gives a moldable alteration talent (1/day at prep time like arcanist) and access to Shifting Style bestial trait which allows to flex 1 martial talent when changing shape

The Combat Feat Barrroom brawler gives anyone with bab 4+ one use of a combat feat for 1 minute.

[SangoProduction]

My hibernation has ended. I will investigate and add the mentioned flexors.

[Dr_Dinosaur]

Inheritor Sorcerer gets martial flexibility at 2nd level (combat talents) and later gets to flex magic instead. Except that Cultivate Ki is a combat feat and can give you a spheres ki power that grants a magic talent, so actually they can flex magic immediately including entirely new spheres!

[DrMartin]

Cultivate Ki says:
Prerequisites: Improved Unarmed Strike, base attack bonus +4, martial focus.

So assuming she has IUS, the inheritor needs to wait level 6 to flex into cultivate kit, and at 7th level use this trick to bypass the Inheritor sorcerer flex "in sphere" limitation by picking cultivate ki with one flex choice and any other magic talent in the sphere with the second pick.

(As a GM i wouldn´t allow it since I think that the designer intention is clearly telegraphed right there in the class abilities, but that´s just me, I´m not judging :D)

[StSword]

Cultivate Ki says:
Prerequisites: Improved Unarmed Strike, base attack bonus +4, martial focus.

So assuming she has IUS, the inheritor needs to wait level 6 to flex into cultivate kit, and at 7th level use this trick to bypass the Inheritor sorcerer flex "in sphere" limitation by picking cultivate ki with one flex choice and any other magic talent in the sphere with the second pick.

(As a GM i wouldn´t allow it since I think that the designer intention is clearly telegraphed right there in the class abilities, but that´s just me, I´m not judging :D)

Actually it's still a useful trick, just not for that.

Inheritors must possess the base sphere to flex a magic talent belonging to that sphere.

So flexing Cultivate Ki, when they qualify, would allow them to temporarily possess a new base sphere they can then flex more magic talents for with martial flexibility.

So that makes inheritor far more flexible.

[Ramza00]

I am trying to remember if Eldritch Scrapper (a Pathfinder Sorcerer archetype) and the Inheritor Sphere Sorcerer archetype stack in a beneficial way? Or they overlap in a way that is not beneficial.

[Jack_Simth]

Combat Implementation allows Armorists to make their bound stuff count as implements, which means they can trade out the bound equipment bonus for magic talents, changeable daily.Note: Changable on 8 hours of meditation per item, as you're swapping out a bound implement to do it. So the kind of situation where you'd be able to craft magic items. And note that the Magic Talent implement property is a +2 equivalent, so you're not going to be flexing many at a time.

Edit: But you can, ultimately, have a rather lot of them - At 10th, you can have three bound weapons - which could very well be a double weapon plus a boot blade or something, letting you wield all three at once - and with +5 equivalent to play with, each could have two talents invested, for a grand total of six bonus talents that you can float out over a few days. 4 weapons at 3 each at 15th, five weapons at 4 each at 20th. So a lot of talents, potentially.

[DrMartin]

Found another one:

Variable Prowess, a Prowess for the Armiger. with 10 minutes you can swap a talent from one of your customized weapons, which (I think) you can do over and over again changing the 8 hours to overhaul a customized weapon into a way more manageable 10 to 60 minutes, depending on your level.

Plus once per day you can do it as a move action, for some in-combat flexing of your flexing talents (Yo dawg I heard you liked flexing talents so i put flexing talents inside your flexing talents)

[thethird]

The veilweaving sphere gives you flex talents (limited to a sphere) too with sphereshaper talent.

The conjuration sphere can be (ab?)used to give you some flexing talents.

The mage companion archetype gains casting and casting traditions, take the "free" implement bearer for extra caster lvl. If you are using the veilweaving sphere it's a good idea for them to take it, gaining knowledge of the sphereshaper veil with their sphere of choice (this will get them full casting), and then going with flex talents.

Do your companions have more than 11 cl? In that case circle casting will allow you unbarred access to their talents. If they have less you either want to always keep them around (the familiar archetype can help in making that cheaper)... Or... You want to take control of their spells. Since they have access to casting traditions (per mage) they can take charged spells (drawback) that gives enough drawback points to buy to get bottled spells (a feat). Bottled spells gives someone else a consumable to "cast" your sphere effect.

Note that I am using companions plural. As you can have more than one companion. In fact with sphere specific drawbacks you can get several for a single dip. I personally prefer speccing each companion on a single sphere. And for the most part I am looking at spheres with long duration buffs.

Is this cheesy? Or is this a good way to make Personas? Maybe both.

[StSword]

The veilweaving sphere gives you flex talents (limited to a sphere) too with sphereshaper talent.


Is this cheesy? Or is this a good way to make Personas? Maybe both.

There's already a persona style spherecaster, I'm surprised it hasn't been listed already.

The Pact Master (http://spheresofpower.wikidot.com/pact-master).

They can form pacts with up to three entities ala a 3.5 Warlock, which allows them to summon a companion that gives them appropriate magic talents.

So they switch out talents by summoning a different pact companion.

With a one hour ritual they can break an existing pact and with an eight hour ritual they can form a pact with a new entity.

The old patron may be miffed, though, fortunately Diplomacy is on the Thaumaturge skill list.

Although what I picture is a Constantine style con mage who talked Heaven, Hell, and a Lovecraftian Horror from beyond the Stars into be his patrons. :)

The circle casting thing would be just a continuation of what the archetype has been doing since first level, really.