ArteF
September 15th, 2016, 16:49
Returning this here, since I made progress on it, and I look forward to any suggestions.
Version: 1.1
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B8497ugfVmguNlRXcVFZdXp3UWM
I decided that some things needed a clarity and tweaking, most of the changes from 1 to 1.1 can be considered a buff as the 0.9.8 to 1 had a pretty large (but expected) effect on how the classes resources were managed.
With that said 1.1 was going to happen mainly because version 1 may as well be very hard mode. The class could function but some paths needed help; here is a list of incoming changes. The PDF hasn't been uploaded because I'm checking grammar and that may take a little bit but I hope those with interest in this class find these changes to be cool.
1. Changed the wording of Chaos Pool Recharge to just Recovery Dice.
1a. Attached this to several features that formerly used 1d6 rolls for recharging, this means they now all share the scaling benefit of chaos recharge rolls.
1b. This change affected, Chaos Trigger, Gathering Entropy, Silent Respite and Foci.
1c. Broken Echo has been given a short rest chaos recharge but still recharges fully on a long rest.
1d. Martial Echo now gives advantage on the attack.
2. Second Trigger now gives advantage and the second attack no longer exists, in its place is now extra attack; in function they are similar, I found second attack to be painfully exclusive.
2b. Changed the free action transfer of Chaos Trigger to instead be on psychic damage so any psychic damage dealt as a killing blow allows the transfer so long as a viable target is within 30-feet. Also replaced free action with reaction as that now makes more sense.
3. Inquisitor has always been the problem child for me, but this round of changes promises to be as close to what I envisioned it to be.
3a. Silent Respite now you gain 2 languages of your choice (It seemed odd to not do this and it seemed odd to do it since Tongues is in the spell list, in the end I went with adding this)
3b. Foci now recharges on a short rest, period. It can also prompt your chaos recharge for its uses when you use it. This was a hard decision for me but this is supposed to be the closest to a brawler this class gets. After doing some testing I found that its spell casting side in fact demanded a buff on its other functions. In other words I approached this path too cautiously going into v1 and this is a rewind on that to try to get it up to snuff. I'll get into this a bit more below.
3c. Scaling buff to Foci damage, now instead of the dice increasing it increases the amount of dice. The dice are now set to 1d8 and increase to 2d8 6th and 3d8 at 14th level. The level scaling was changed to match Wizards.
3d. Volitism Enlightenment has been changed so now you can gain resistance to the element you roll, this is to help clarify something that got very complicated before.
3e. Primordial Foci is now Ascended, it seemed weird to suddenly change from Enlightened to Primordial.
3f. Magisterium was where most of my feedback came from and it needed a bit of a retooling. The overall scaling increase solved half the problem the other half was more about flavor. I did this by expanding the niches and to balance that psychic has been changed.
3g. Elementalism In combat elementalism works very well or not at all, it has a lot of aoe effects, I added the detail that all aoe effects are radial unless stated otherwise like with Fire Focus.
4. Debuff to the Knowledge ability of Keepers, Knowledge itself now is its own pool, it's pretty powerful on one end but its very niche and truer to what I intended for it to be.
5. General phrasing adjustments to try to match the PHB. I'm getting better at it and I want to thank those helping me out for not being nasty about it.
So more on 3b: The main issue is that only the Keeper gets cantrips, what this meant was that in very short order the Inquisitor at 8th level became just a higher hp version of their 1st level counterpart. It wasn't too bad but it needed work. Considering Tricksters and EK both get cantrips on top of a nova while Inquisitors Nova is situational at best it needed a bump in consistency where it lacked Nova. For comparison both the Keeper and the Seeker have their own independent Nova, the Keeper also again gets cantrips and the Seeker has artifices as well as all those skills.
Bumping the amount of uses also seemed to not solve the problem here for the Foci nor did giving it the recharge even at higher levels. The only quick fix to this was to set the Foci to a short rest which is sort of against what I wanted to do... but in the end even wizards have short rest abilities.
Foci is a combat oriented ability however it no longer competes with Chaos Trigger on combat priority and never should have. While Foci is combat related Trigger can be combat related which is a difference I thought was there but this rework on Foci helps establish that.
With this change to Inquisitor the roles are back in order of the difficulty they are supposed to be in based on their rewards. Keepers despite the debuff are still the best spell caster of the 3 with Inquisitor being the easiest to play and Seeker being the most difficult with the biggest rewards.
Version: 1.1
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B8497ugfVmguNlRXcVFZdXp3UWM
I decided that some things needed a clarity and tweaking, most of the changes from 1 to 1.1 can be considered a buff as the 0.9.8 to 1 had a pretty large (but expected) effect on how the classes resources were managed.
With that said 1.1 was going to happen mainly because version 1 may as well be very hard mode. The class could function but some paths needed help; here is a list of incoming changes. The PDF hasn't been uploaded because I'm checking grammar and that may take a little bit but I hope those with interest in this class find these changes to be cool.
1. Changed the wording of Chaos Pool Recharge to just Recovery Dice.
1a. Attached this to several features that formerly used 1d6 rolls for recharging, this means they now all share the scaling benefit of chaos recharge rolls.
1b. This change affected, Chaos Trigger, Gathering Entropy, Silent Respite and Foci.
1c. Broken Echo has been given a short rest chaos recharge but still recharges fully on a long rest.
1d. Martial Echo now gives advantage on the attack.
2. Second Trigger now gives advantage and the second attack no longer exists, in its place is now extra attack; in function they are similar, I found second attack to be painfully exclusive.
2b. Changed the free action transfer of Chaos Trigger to instead be on psychic damage so any psychic damage dealt as a killing blow allows the transfer so long as a viable target is within 30-feet. Also replaced free action with reaction as that now makes more sense.
3. Inquisitor has always been the problem child for me, but this round of changes promises to be as close to what I envisioned it to be.
3a. Silent Respite now you gain 2 languages of your choice (It seemed odd to not do this and it seemed odd to do it since Tongues is in the spell list, in the end I went with adding this)
3b. Foci now recharges on a short rest, period. It can also prompt your chaos recharge for its uses when you use it. This was a hard decision for me but this is supposed to be the closest to a brawler this class gets. After doing some testing I found that its spell casting side in fact demanded a buff on its other functions. In other words I approached this path too cautiously going into v1 and this is a rewind on that to try to get it up to snuff. I'll get into this a bit more below.
3c. Scaling buff to Foci damage, now instead of the dice increasing it increases the amount of dice. The dice are now set to 1d8 and increase to 2d8 6th and 3d8 at 14th level. The level scaling was changed to match Wizards.
3d. Volitism Enlightenment has been changed so now you can gain resistance to the element you roll, this is to help clarify something that got very complicated before.
3e. Primordial Foci is now Ascended, it seemed weird to suddenly change from Enlightened to Primordial.
3f. Magisterium was where most of my feedback came from and it needed a bit of a retooling. The overall scaling increase solved half the problem the other half was more about flavor. I did this by expanding the niches and to balance that psychic has been changed.
3g. Elementalism In combat elementalism works very well or not at all, it has a lot of aoe effects, I added the detail that all aoe effects are radial unless stated otherwise like with Fire Focus.
4. Debuff to the Knowledge ability of Keepers, Knowledge itself now is its own pool, it's pretty powerful on one end but its very niche and truer to what I intended for it to be.
5. General phrasing adjustments to try to match the PHB. I'm getting better at it and I want to thank those helping me out for not being nasty about it.
So more on 3b: The main issue is that only the Keeper gets cantrips, what this meant was that in very short order the Inquisitor at 8th level became just a higher hp version of their 1st level counterpart. It wasn't too bad but it needed work. Considering Tricksters and EK both get cantrips on top of a nova while Inquisitors Nova is situational at best it needed a bump in consistency where it lacked Nova. For comparison both the Keeper and the Seeker have their own independent Nova, the Keeper also again gets cantrips and the Seeker has artifices as well as all those skills.
Bumping the amount of uses also seemed to not solve the problem here for the Foci nor did giving it the recharge even at higher levels. The only quick fix to this was to set the Foci to a short rest which is sort of against what I wanted to do... but in the end even wizards have short rest abilities.
Foci is a combat oriented ability however it no longer competes with Chaos Trigger on combat priority and never should have. While Foci is combat related Trigger can be combat related which is a difference I thought was there but this rework on Foci helps establish that.
With this change to Inquisitor the roles are back in order of the difficulty they are supposed to be in based on their rewards. Keepers despite the debuff are still the best spell caster of the 3 with Inquisitor being the easiest to play and Seeker being the most difficult with the biggest rewards.