[Dreamscarred Press] New Playtest: the Voyager, a psionic skirmisher!

[Deimosaur]

Big changes are incoming. Link here, as befits a new page.

Over the course of this playtest, we’ve gotten a lot of feedback on the playstyle of the voyager—how it optimally plays, and how it feels to play—and in response, we’re making some pretty big changes.

To make a long story short, the changes we’re making are about emphasizing the voyager’s duality as a speedster martial class and as a manifester. In many cases and builds, their powers seemed to be taking a back seat to parallel actions and possible full attacks, especially in the case of Speeding Strike. To help balance the class better, as well as to open up more variety in both builds and gameplay.

So let’s go over what’s changed:

Spoiler: The Additions

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The biggest difference you’ll notice in the voyager doc is the addition of a new, important class feature that replaced branching paths. Called Manifestation of Speed, this ability allows the voyager to spend both power points and momentum on a variety of different abilities in combat.

The core of the ability is the augmented attack. An augmented attack is a standard action, whose basic function is to to turn momentum into movement, or power points into teleportation, each alongside an attack with your weapon. The maximum amount of power points spent on the ability at once is equal to your ML, which is important to its later functions.

At 5th level, the most important part of the ability comes online: as part of making an [i]augmented attack[i], a voyager can manifest a single-target voyager power they know on the creature they’re attacking. This doesn’t provoke AoOs, and its attack is added to the hit itself, similarly (but not identically) to the magus’s spellstrike.

The reason for this addition is that, overall, the voyager previously has not been doing much with its psionics. It’s a manifester, more than just a normal warrior, and its abilities were meant to (but failed to) reflect that. By tying the psionics more deeply into the voyager’s mobile-skirmisher combat style, and allowing them to both attack and manifest, we hope they blend swordplay and psionics a bit better. Or bow usage, gunslinging, and the like—the power does not need to be the same sort of delivery as the attack; you can use this to shoot melee powers at people, hit people with ranged powers, and anything in-between. We’ve loaded up the voyager list with more options to help accomplish that.

Though speaking of new powers, that brings us to the next parts of Manifestation of Speed. At 9th level, the voyager unlocks lightning focus, which lets them transform momentum into psionically refocusing themselves, and can now use a personal power on themselves with power channel. At 13th and 17th levels, they unlock multitask and greater multitask, respectively.

These abilities, like power channel, are meant to help the voyager become a true combat manifester. During their augmented attacks, they allow the voyager to manifest more powers than just single-target ones, and even multiple powers at once, albeit limited: they can’t spend more power points total than their manifester level on these powers, but within that limit, they can mix and match abilities how they please. This means that a 13th-level voyager can trade a bunch of momentum for a particularly unique action economy, using their time-enhanced speed to manifest two powers at once during their attack. Then, at 17th level, the voyager can manifest three powers at once. Potentially more, if they went all-out with Quicken and Hustle powers, actually.

Our hope is that these abilities get the voyager to a place where it can be a speed-based manifesting gish class. They’re not purely martial, nor purely caster, but ideally, the options on their power list, and versatility with augmented strikes, lets them accomplish a good mix of both in any given combat.

Spoiler: The Power List

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The voyager power list, previously very small, has been expanded to a size similar to the psychic warrior’s. Our goal with this is to have a healthy mix of combat buffs/utility, debuffs and enemy-targeting effects, and noncombat utility at any given level, allowing the voyager to pick and choose how focused on any given task they want to be, then realize that focus using augmented attacks.
In addition, we’ve updated the look of the power list in the playtest doc, which should hopefully make it easier to parse. The powers now include their short descriptions and links to their effects on the d20pfsrd. The single-target powers on the list have also been marked as such, to make them quicker to skim through when looking for power channel options.

Finally, don’t forget that even with this expanded list, the voyager still has Voyager Knowledge, letting them poach powers from other lists. If you want your voyager to be focused on mind control, or elemental blasting, or some other niche, the new abilities should help you create that sort of character.

Spoiler: The Removals

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With that all said, these new changes did involve removing some of the existing abilities. Branching Paths, Kinetic Wave, Power Cycle, and Parallel Training have all be taken off of the current voyager chassis. As it was, the model used for Branching Paths encouraged a playstyle of focusing heavily on one specific trick, to the exclusion of other things. While voyagers could use other options, the question we heard a lot is “why bother?”

Fast-Forward and Speeding Strike were overcentralizing, and the effects of the other branched paths, when taken in isolation, didn’t manage to carry the class as a versatile combat-psionicist. Most of the effects of the old Branching Paths can be found somewhere in their powers list, but as far as the voyager’s progression of abilities, we wanted to tie it more on their identity as a psionic class.
Power Cycle, Kinetic Wave, and Parallel Training were all, effectively, iterations of what is now Manifestation of Speed. The goal with these abilities were to give the voyager a reason to use their powers actively and expand their combat variety, which Manifestation of Speed should now, ideally, do.

One final thing: with the changes to Branching Paths and the new abilities added to the base class, the Doomsayer and Timekeeper archetype have become incompatible and slightly problematic with the current design of the class. We’re temporarily removing them from the public playtest so they can be revised and revisited at a later date.

Spoiler: Just the changelog

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The following abilities have been removed:

• Parallel training
• Branching paths
• Kinetic wave
• Power cycle

The following abilities have been added:

• Manifestation of speed (blink, dash, power channel, multitask and greater multitask.
• The voyager power list has been greatly expanded.
• New parallel actions at 7th, 11th, and 15th level have been added, called dual threat (7th), keep watch (11th), and emergency stasis (15th).

The following abilities have been changed:

• Momentum has been changed slightly; you can now split up how much momentum you spend on any given attack, keeping some in reserve.
• The fast-forward parallel action has been nerfed; it no longer includes the teleport-attack option. Instead, that can be found in manifestation of speed. It also no longer has the “discharge speed bonus to teleport,” which turned out to do way too much for its cost.
• The parallel manifesting parallel action now has a ML-boosting effect, in addition to the current abilities.
• Look both ways (moved up one level to 6th, and granted expanded utility).
• Fate in flux now allows the voyager to change which parallel actions she knows.
• The elf and dwarf racial favored class options have been revised to be less focused on damage. The orc one has been removed for the time being.

Finally, the doomsayer and timekeeper archetypes have been removed from the public document so they can be reworked to account for the new voyager abilities.