[Forrestfire Studios] Playtest: The Avowed, a 3pp warlock with a psychic bent

[MilleniaAntares]

Some upcoming changes were posted on 4chan, but not on here, so... here's hoping I don't get yelled at!

Hey, guys. After some fairly intense internal discussion, Forrest and I have sadly decided that Spirited Swordsmanship is going to be cut. It made the class far too single-attribute dependent, especially when combined with all the other things Charisma can be added to with further feat support. We know this is going to suck for a lot of people, and we, personally, were huge fans of the SAD playstyle, but it's proven to be impossible to balance. This should also make Self pact slightly less overwhelming, as they'll need to split their resources between their attacking/damaging stat and their casting/defensive stat, even with Altered Life.
Related to this, Aether Grasp will now be finessable, so as to avoid an unnecessary feat tax for dexterity builds wanting to dabble in it.

Further, we'll be reducing their damage dice to d6, like the Warlock, to try to rein in their numbers a bit. This also serves to weaken Overcharge Modulation and Merciful Pulse appropriately. How this will interact with Aspirant and Betrothed, we're not yet certain - but for reasons brought up earlier, we won't be reducing the damage dice to the awfully hard to acquire d3. We'll let you know what we work out, but we won't push this update live until we've sorted that out.

Finally, we'll be removing Steel's Betrayal for now from the document. While we love the concept, and hope to introduce something similar in the future, its current form is effectively damage with no penalty.

We're still discussing a lot of other changes, and these are all in flux - and thus, ripe for feedback. As always, we thank you for your feedback, and we are earnestly sorry for any builds we will be disrupting with these balance changes.

Yes. In fact, we'll be buffing Heart of Aether to additionally add your Constitution modifier to Spellcraft, Knowledge (Planes), and Knowledge (Arcana), to compete with Charisma's bonus to social skills.

And because I'm an idiot who forgot to include it, Embodiment of Aether is also being removed for the same reason.

As Heart of Magic only added Constitution to damage rolls with Spirited Swordsmanship, with Spirited Swordsmanship's removal you can no longer add Charisma or Constitution to attack rolls with the Avowed.

... You're entirely right. I'm sorry, I was misremembering my own feat entirely.

Heart of Aether will be rewritten to affect saving throw DCs and give a bonus to the aforementioned skills. Heart of Magic will not be changing. I'm really sorry for the mistake. ><

The changes are not implemented in the Avowed 2 page, at least.

I had an idea for turning Embodiment of Aether as an alternate class feature, which I'll include here on the off-chance it's worth bringing back:

Spoiler

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The ACF would trade out charisma for strength, vocal components for somatic, and a new weakness: status effects that reduce the avowed's attack (such as shaken, sickened, etc) would also reduce their AC, as the innate magic needs to be directed precisely by movements.

I figure that perhaps adding in easily exploitable weaknesses would help out with overcoming SAD, but who knows if that's worth doing at this point in time.