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Pathfinder reinvents D&D necromancers with a NEW CLASS! (Rules Lawyer) (www.youtube.com)

submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

re: spell schools

eh, hard disagree. The evocative name aside, Occult is pretty much all spirit and mind effects, it's more the 'Bard' school to me. I could definitely see the ghost hoarder subclass have a strong occult lean, but the whole class? nah.

Divine (and previously, the cleric list in 1e) has always been the poster child for Death magic. Void in 2e is most well represented by that tradition, even if Vitality is something it represents too.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

So I'll admit, I've never actually played Pathfinder 2e. I've been GMing it for over a year now, but I've never seen it from in front of the GM's screen. So my knowledge of things that primarily affect players, like what spells are on which spell list, is not as strong. But I did look up the official descriptions, which are:

Divine The power of the divine is steeped in faith, the unseen, and belief in a power source from beyond the Material Plane. Clerics are the most iconic divine spellcasters, beseeching the gods to grant them their magic. Divine sorcerers can use the blood of their celestial or fiendish ancestors as a divine conduit, and champions call upon their gods to grant them martial prowess through divine guidance.

Occult The practitioners of occult traditions seek to understand the unexplainable, categorize the bizarre, and otherwise access the ephemeral in a systematic way. Bards are the most iconic occult spellcasters, collecting strange esoterica and using their performances to influence the mind or elevate the soul, and occult sorcerers strive to understand the mysterious power in their blood.

Which definitely reinforces my belief that a necromancer should be occult. They don't beseech the gods anything, they learn to manipulate magic to do their bidding in strange ways.

I don't put much stock in tradition with spell schools/traditions. I have never liked that raising undead is so often treated as the same type of magic as bringing your allies back to life.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

yea, i may have made it a project of mine in the past to look at each of the spells on each list and rewrite them to set them all around the same power levels in their respective spell ranks. eg. Making Daze as useful in its niche as Electric Arc. As a result I've gotten pretty familiar with the spell lists in practice, and I really don't think Occult matches with where the imagination goes when it hears that word.

Occult doesn't even have Harm, the most fundamental Void (death energies) spell. It's like making a Electromancer class an Elementalist, despite the fact that that spell list doesn't have Lightning Bolt (or shocking grasp, or sudden bolt etc. etc.). It sounds right, but the game design falls short of the job.

Now that we're in a post-remaster world, I would not be upset to learn that Paizo's putting more void spells in occult though, I think it's more appropriate now that the old spell subschools are gone.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

Yeah, Harm's one that I feel should probably be in both divine and occult traditions. You could even make a case for primal, if you think of it more like a natural disease, though that's more of a stretch.