I'm keeping an eye on it. Having at least one person on staff that wrote handbooks for Pathfinder says something about their mentality going in. Should be interesting to see what they come up with at the least. And that bullet point list ticks quite a few house rules boxes off for me.
Aye. Anyone got any links to their stuff? I agree with N. Jolly's comment that feat/item/spell taxes should generally be avoided when possible.
Their classes over on d20PFSRD show they really prefer the Arcanist casting style.
It's the most convenient casting style, but I'm really not fond of it. Prepared casters have their ability to tailor their kits to contain perfect answers to upcoming challenges at least somewhat impeded by the need for some exactness in their guessing games to prepare ahead when using specialized, circumstantial spells. Spontaneous casters pay for their flexibility by being pressured to avoid overly specialized spells (until optimization tricks come in, but most of those tricks at least have limited daily uses) while also having more daily spells as a compensating factor. The Arcanist can just afford to not give a fuck and prepare a solid variety of those circumstantial spells that seem like they will come in handy that day, without worrying about guessing wrongly as long as they have a generally useful spell for each spell level, and end up stomping all the fights where their counters work by using those counters exactly the amount of times needed. That sounds like a nitpicking complaint until you run into what happens when people go to town with this kind of methodology (which will probably become the new norm if you make everyone cast like an Arcanist) and start devastating all your encounters unless you go out of your way to be unpredictable as a GM maybe (which starts with stunts like "sure this
looks like a social encounter at the local castle, but in reality everyone's been replaced with mindless constructs and you have to fight them all now that you discovered the truth" and ends up with dungeons full of totally random shit or an obvious parade of "gotcha!" GM design where every encounter is probably the opposite of what it looks like and the players start wising up to your stunts anyway and can hedge their bets both ways anyhow because Arcanist casting is convenient like that).
I have a feeling this kind of design will end up causing a lot of grief as standard spellcasting playstyles and guides adapt to Arcanist spellcasting. 5E only gets away with it because it largely neutered
all spellcasting and even then it's obviously a strong benefit and in PF the biggest reason the Arcanist isn't topping the power charts is because it's got the delayed spell progression of spontaneous casters (and because there are no decent PF Arcanist guides*), but on even levels when played right it's probably the most disgusting caster you can have in your party, unless someone's playing one of those casters with entirely too many spell lists' worth of spell access (ie. Shaman).
*RPGBot's guide (
Class -
Exploits -
Archetypes) just gives you weak advice on exploit selection, skill selection, and traits (along with the one useful bit of advice that wyroot staves are a good idea for Arcanists). Thelemic Noun's "optimization"
guide (
Discuss) is severely half-assed and incomplete. Dawar's
guide (
Discuss) actually seemed to be shaping up to something decent, but he never finished it and thus never really properly covered any of it. He did, however, instantly zero in on this playstyle, which it calls the "silver bullet mage", as the Arcanist's strength. Then there are two specialized guides: a
blaster caster Arcanist guide (
Discuss) and a
counterspeller Arcanist (
Discuss) guide. The blaster guide is hot garbage and the counterspeller guide is actually surprisingly decent (and self-aware of why counterspelling is bad), with a focus on obtaining immediate action counterspelling (which is viable). But the short of it is that there is only one guide out of 5 that actually looked at the question of how you play an Arcanist and that guide is so incomplete it only mentioned it twice as the Arcanist's strength then never went anywhere.
