Read over the playtest classes last night. Going into it I was most excited about the necromancer as a sorta ultimate summoner. After reading though it feels more like just sorta a casting mcguffin as the thralls can’t really do anything independently but take up space. It makes sense given the rules and balance but then it would seem it could get annoying as the necromancer could like fill a room with thralls. Its like they have a really crappy never ending wall of flesh spell that they can channel effects into. The runesmith though. Wow. Its a martial with magic that makes it less versatile but I feel more powerful than the magus. My rp class is druid but for quick and easy to play that have a huge effect I have like grabbing bard, ranger, and magus before but runemaster as it stands would be a new choice in the mix. punch an enemy and set a rune then activate it followed by raising a shield with a special blowback rune and get a better ac than a normal shield along with a magical retalitaion to the block. medium armor so grab sentinel and then bastion for the shield.
I’m not really interested in either of them. They’re both outside my niche. But if I were going to try one of them, it would probably be the Necromancer. I really don’t need dead bodies to move – I’ll just spawn a new one where I want it to be – and I think the idea of undead just crawling out of the ground to get in the way of things is a more interesting idea than “boatload of minions”. I know it’s not the fantasy that people may have, and maybe in practice it won’t be as interesting , but right now my curiosity is piqued, and my imagination can work with this.
I also think it makes more sense from a ludonarrative point of view. PF2’s zombies still move pretty quickly, and can have a somewhat explosive action economy (shamble, shamble, multiple strikes, shamble, shamble). Thralls, instead, are moving and reacting more slowly than once every 6 seconds. It’s very easy to forget that a round is only 6 seconds when actually playing, but the “army of undead” that appears in the mind’s eye is often moving around at less than a foot per second, so they kind of fall beneath the threshold for… well, for play.
I can see that but still its not quite what I was looking for but I do like the idea of being able to block off a hall while retreating.
I like the runelords in PF, they’ve always been kinda goofy being wizards with big polearms though. Having an actual class to back up their aesthetic makes me happy. Also, one of my group’s members pointed out the similarity to Deathknights in Warcraft, and I kinda wanna make that happen.
