#kineticist

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Conclusions

And so we’ve come to the end of our review of the kineticist, and it certainly is a fascinating topic. Ostensibly the class is meant to emulate various psychokinetic characters that either move things with their mind in general or one specific element, both in psychic-themed fiction and superhero works, but I think because of the current cultural zeitgeist it definitely feels most like an homage to the ATLA series, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

No matter whether your character is a classic bender or more akin to a Firestarter, the mechanic of accepting semi-permanent nonlethal damage as a cost for doing your coolest things quickly is fascinating and experimental.

Unfortunately, due to how experimental the class is, a lot of it’s archetypes, particularly those that change the core stat of the class away from constitution are widely considered sub-par. That doesn’t mean you can’t use them, but maybe talk with your GM about modifying them to make up for their deficiencies.

In any case, the story of a kineticist is very much about coming to understand the strange gifts they have been blessed with and coming to terms without they integrate with and change their lives. Do they consider themselves superior to those not blessed with such powers? Are they humbled by their limitations?

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Elements

It’s kinda surprising, but it’s taken us till part four to actually talk about the elements themselves, because each one helps determine the different sorts of builds you can do with the class, and each one plays different, so without further ado…

Starting off, we have aether, an element that is not, strictly speaking, an element, at least not by the 2e definition, but it is element-like enough that it counts. Naturally, aetherkineticists draw their power from the astral plane and ethereal plane, where the mysterious substance of the same name can be found.

The fact that this element focuses heavily on telekinetic manipulation is perhaps the heaviest justification for the kineticist qualifying as a “psychic” class overall. What’s more, it also works a little differently than other elements when it comes to the blast. Unlike other elements, aether actually needs ammo, since you have to telekinetically lift and toss a permanent physical object. This has it’s advantages (getting infusions to unwravel the aether envelope so that any properties like damaging weapon enchantments can be used, as well as another infusion that lets you chuck multiple objects at once, getting a force-based composite blast for hitting ghosts, but it also has disadvantages. (Again, the ammo thing, but also the fact that their “composite” blast with all other elements is just a flat damage buff to the simple blasts of other elements.

Overall, the aether element has some neat tricks. Its defensive talent is a renewing buffer of extra hp, a lot of it’s infusions let you do ranged combat maneuvers, and plenty of defensive talents, as well as healing and flight.

Next up is the element of air, which covers both wind and electricity.

As you might guess, air has a lot of mobility, and battlefield control, as well as multiple ways to punish large groups of foes. The wind blast and electricity blast are both fun, and their composite blasts tend to add bludgeoning or slashing, or just electricity to the equation.

Their defensive talent grants a nice miss chance against ranged attacks, which suits them just fine because air really rewards hanging back out of melee in the air and blasting foes from afar.

Then we have earth, which covers all earthen material, and due to 1e not separating them yet, metal as well.

Earth is a very defensive elements, creating barriers and difficult terrain, and both their core blasts, earth and the composite metal blast, are the most versatile physical blasts, able to be shaped to deal bludgeoning, slashing, or piercing as needed. Their cross-element blasts add a physical damage element to every composite blast.

Geokineticists love getting into the thick of it, both in melee and at mid-range with their many infusions and talents that turn the terrain to their advantage and hit hard and take hits in kind, especially since their defensive talent grants damage reduction. In my experience though, you’ll still want to increase your AC. These kineticists also have an advantage in the rare-earth infusion letting them bypass material-based DR with their physical blasts.

If any element focuses on raw damage dealing over any other, it would be fire.

Indeed, fire only gets one basic blast, the composite version being hotter fire, and all their cross-element options being “add fire to it”, but they enjoy perhaps the largest number of shape infusions as well as some lovely substance infusions to set foes alight or even burn away magical defenses.

They do have some utility talents though, protecting themselves and others from the elements, enhanced mobility as they rocket around, and even resurrect themselves like a phoenix. Fair warning though, their defensive talent lets them deal feedback damage to foes that touch them, but many argue it’s the least impressive of such talents since it doesn’t do anything to actually keep you alive.

Then we have the other non-element, void, representing both negative energy and gravity, both of which can be seen as consumptive forces.

Void gets a gravity blast and negative blast, though the latter is not viable against the undead. The gravity blast does increase the base damage dice size of other blasts in a composite, so that’s nice, and void adds negative energy, making them difficult for living foes to resist.

The talents of void fall into two categories, either manipulating oneself or the battlefield with gravitational forces, or being a pseudo-necromancer draining life away from the living and bolstering the undead. Their defensive talent can be handy in a pinch as it acts like a lesser form of fortification, blocking crit damage.

Next up is water, which covers both the fluid substance itself, as well as cold.

Water gets both a bludgeoning blast and a cold blast, which can be combined with piercing icicles, but it also combines well with other elements, creating freezing winds, jets of steam, and so on, but do note that not every element combines with both the cold and the water aspect.

The element of water offers an even selection of healing, damage and debuffs, and battlefield control, and it has one of the better defensive talents, creating a shield or armor of water to block attacks outright.

Finally, we have wood, which is flavored as being tied to the First World since the elemental plane of wood wasn’t written yet.

Though it didn’t have it in the original printing, wood has both an ordinary blast of plant matter, but also positive energy. The latter is a very poor choice as a first blast though, since it only works on undead foes. The combined verdant blast is fun though, and wood has a composite blast for all four of the western classical elements as well.

Wood also boasts a nice variety, being the third and final healer element (with caveats for taking kinetic chirugeon too despite coming out later than that archetype), as well as having lots of battlefield and hazard manipulation, as well as some lovely debuff options and utility talents for a very plant druid flair. Their defensive talent is nice as well, taking the form of a barkskin-like natural armor buff.

There are of course plenty of universal talents that all elements can take, such as kinetic blade, attacking elemental creatures by manipulating their elements from within, creating pseudo-elemental minions (and those that can’t take that last one have their own versions for their element), and so on.

As we can see, each element has something to offer, and the sheer variety here and the fact you can take three elements total or specialize in one means that no two kineticists will behave alike.

On that note, however, time will demonstrate that what we think of as an element can change, and in 2e, aether and void are considered element-like, but not enough so to warrant being in the kineticist arsenal, while wood and metal are fleshed out into their own elements fully. Are aether and void completely non-canon now, or do you homebrew your own 2e kineticists that use them?

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Archetypes

So let’s talk about archetypes for a bit! The Kineticist got it’s fair share, though some of them definitely suffer from the fact it was a new class with new expectations. I wouldn’t say any are counterintuitive or useless though.

While the default kineticist channels the elements through their bodies, some do so by other methods, putting the psychic vibes front and center of the class. Psychokineticists use their wisdom, but risk their minds becoming strained and vulnerable even as their mental powers improve. Meanwhile, overwhelming souls use their force of personality and charisma, able to unleash powerful blasts at the cost of having to gather power to pull off anything especially powerful.

Others use different traits, but in a sinister way. Blighted Defilers use their strength to literally pull life energy from the land itself to help fuel their power, while dark elementalists use their keen intelligence, but use the souls of the recently slain to offload some of their burn, damaging them in the process.

Some refine their control over their element to achieve specific manifestations of power. For example, Psammokineticists master the art of manipulating sand and ki, while leshykineticists demonstrate a mastery over the wood element that non-leshies cannot begin to fathom. Aquakineticists and blood kineticists master water to master the oceans and their foes respectively. Blightburners master radioactive isotopes in the earth, cinderland adepts fight with flame and blade equally, arakineticist and elysiokineticists add unearthly power to their element, and ioun kineticists fling their pet ioun stones and bring out their maximum potential. Meanwhile, elemental purists master one element so thoroughly they can shape it in ways that many would consider impossible, and terrakineticists instead tap into every element, shifting their elemental focus whenever they venture into new terrain.

Others express their elemental power in different forms. Elemental annihilators focus on smaller blasts they can chain together and use with many different combat techniques, while elemental ascetics focus instead on martial arts and enhancing them with elemental power. Kinetic Knights master turning their elemental power into melee weapons, but kinetic chirugeons instead focus on using their element to heal.

There’s a decent selection here with some variety. That being said, a lot of these archetypes, especially the ones that alter the core stat of the class, are considered underpowered to downright unplayable depending on who you ask, and even the better archetypes have their share of detractors. Making them work will require careful consideration and maybe a little homebrewing modification with the help of your GM.

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Utility and Builds

Now that we know what the basic concept of a kineticist is, let’s explore how they work.

Kineticists start out with moderate base attack progression and 4+int skill ranks… but not that many skills to spend them on (Don’t worry, their element choices give them an extra later). What is really interesting, however, is that pretty much all of their abilities use Constitution as the base stat, since the elemental power they channel has to pass through their bodies, and being healthy and hearty are required to handle that sort of power.

When they start out, these channelers choose their first element, choosing one of the basic blasts available from it, as well as gaining the basic kinesis talent for that element. Such basic kinesis abilities are essentially multipurpose cantrips, and can range from telekinetically lifting objects to sensing and bringing up items hidden in loose soil or foliage, or igniting flammable objects.

As they grow in power, kineticists gain various wild talents, which are drawn from both the list of their element as well as universal choices. Each one has an effective spell level equivalent as well as a burn cost, and each one is either an infusion or a utility power, which we’ll go over each momentarily.

First, let’s talk about burn though. Certain wild talents and other abilities of the kineticist have a burn cost. Essentially, by using their power too quickly, they tire themselves out as their bodies get overwhelmed from within, partially transmuting their flesh into the element in question, causing them to appear supercharged with that element, and so on. For each point of burn accrued, the kineticist takes nonlethal damage equal to their level, which cannot be resisted or healed until the start of the next day. This makes them easier to down as the day progresses, making them more vulnerable. However, there is a limiter on how much burn they can accept at one time, as well as how much they can have total each day.

While kineticists can wield weapons normally, their primary attack is their kinetic blast, which is a ranged projectile of elemental energy or matter they launch at foes. Most elements have at least two types of blasts, with you choosing one when you choose the element, and while energy blasts target touch AC, they deal less damage. Additionally, all blasts ignore the reduction or negation of damage from swarms, and can even be readied to counterspell spells of the same elemental descriptor, so that’s fun.

The burn cost of various abilities and talents can be difficult to work with. Thankfully, however, there is a way to negate the burn cost of their stronger blasts. By spending actions to gather power, kineticists can pull elemental energy out at a more gradual rate and thereby reduce the burn cost of the next blast they launch. However, being disrupted risks them taking burn.

Speaking of blasts, the first type of wild talent that kineticists learn is infusions, which modify the blast in some way. A blast can have two infusions applied to it, one substance, and one form infusion. The former alters the properties of the blast directly to cause different effects when they connect with foes. For example, some blasts can be made incredibly bright, blinding foes. Meanwhile, form infusions change how they target foes, turning them into melee attacks, area attacks, walls, cones, lines, that sort of thing. However, many blasts modified to deal damage over time or over a wide area deal less damage.

Kineticists also learn a defensive talent for their element, which can vary from reducing damage to preventing getting hit in the first place depending on the element, but all are useful for keeping the kineticist alive.

While burn does weaken the kineticist, they do get something in return, their bodies becoming more and more supercharged, bolstering their attributes and improving the power of their blasts as the energies overtake them more and more.

As they grow in mastery, their bodies grow more adapted to using infusions, reducing the base cost of an infused blast and letting them use bigger effects with less burn and less time spent gathering power.

Mimicking various metamagical modifications, kineticists can spend burn to boost the damage of their blasts or even repeatedly blast in a single turn, or at least blast quickly to leave actions open for other activities.

In order to bolster the number of times they can invoke powerful effects, kineticists learn to create an internal buffer. Essentially, whether it be during downtime or at the end of a low-combat day, these kineticists can expend burn to create a reserve of energy within themselves, giving them a buffer that gets expended first instead of their burn in the future.

Eventually, these elementalists expand the source of elemental power within themselves, doing so up to two times for a total of three choices. They might expand into another element, gaining access to a new blast and composite blasts combining their two elements, or they might choose to focus on one of their previously-chosen-blasts, accessing the second blast type of their element if it has one as well as any composite blasts based on choosing the element twice (like blue flame for fire or metal for earth, since this was before metal was it’s own element). Additionally, while diversifying into multiple elements lets them pick a wider variety of talents and infusions, sticking with one grants additional talent choices, and doing so all three times causes them to gain a bonus on their attack, damage, and DCs of their talents and blasts.

As they grow in mastery, they can gather even more power, covering much greater burn costs not just with blasts, but with utility talents as well.

Over time, their mastery of combining elements into composite blasts improves, reducing that base cost as well.

Their mastery also allows them to perform one type of metakinesis without costing anything as well.

Finally, true masters are able to manipulate all elements beyond their base choses to a certain extent, but it costs burn to use elements beyond their own or change existing talents.

But maybe that doesn’t appeal to you as a capstone? Thanks to Chronicle of Legends, there are alternative options. The one specifically for kineticists gives them Unbridled power, improving the damage of one specific blast they know and allowing them to overcome a certain amount of DR or resistance to it.

From the more generic capstone options, we can see kineticists whose endurance and ability to accept burn is unsurpassed with Perfect Body, Flawless Mind, those that found organizations, perhaps schools of elementalism as The Boss, improving one signature item they own into an artifact-level focus for their power with With This Sword, or becoming so one with their element that they simply Won’t Stay Dead.

The kineticist is all about careful management of burn and action economy. Do you go in guns blazing, accumulating burn to steamroll into a vulnerable and deadly glass cannon, or do you sacrifice actions to gather power to conserve that energy for when you need it?

As for what kind of builds you can do, there’s a lot of potential here. One kineticist might be back-line firepower blasting foes from afar and creating elemental allies to occupy the enemy. Another might be a tanky wall that focuses on kinetic blade blasts in melee and refuses to budge an inch, using blasts to hold off and bring down foes. Another might tap into kinetic healing and be a support and healer character that can still kick some ass as well. All are good and valid.

Ironically, the fact that burn deals semi-permanent nonlethal damage to you means that despite constitution being their most important stat, they can be somewhat easy to take down with a well-placed hit, so even tanky builds need to understand when to engage and when to hang back. In this way, the kineticist class definitely forces you to think more strategically than your average combat class.

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Overview

And so, comes the beginning of the end. The final category of classes in Pathfinder 1st Edition.

Introduced in the aptly-named Occult Adventures book, this set of classes represents Paizo’s take on something that existed in D&D 3.5, and was hinted at in Pathfinder lore, but had not been touched on before then.

Now, back in the days of 3.5, psychic stuff was treated as a completely separate system. Psionic classes had powerful abilities, but they were specifically not magic for what amounted to aesthetic reasons, had a different resource for manifesting their not-magic, and were heavily inspired by the relatively new wave of interest in psychic phenomena as new age medicine and spirituality. You know, with crystals and stuff.

Needless to say, Pathfinder rightfully decided to scrap a lot of that. Particularly since a lot of that stuff was pretty racist, tapping into “Orientals are magic” pretty heavily, as well as a lot of… Well, I know that “cultural appropriation” has been misattributed to the point of basically having no meaning for a lot of people anymore, but good lord were they ever taking cultural touchstones of other cultures and pretending it was their idea.

Instead, Pathfinder decided to lean more into Victorian-era mysticism and the psychic craze of that era instead, albeit trying to celebrate cultures rather than steal from them. Alongside the traditional psychic, this gave us two classes that can communicate with the dead, a powerful hypnotist, and today’s subject, one that draws on the idea of using psychic powers to control one’s environment (with a heaping helping of inspiration from a show I think a lot of you are familiar with).

Also they rightfully just said that psychic or “occult” magic is just another type of magic. No weird point system, no obnoxiously frustrating lack of interaction with the existing magic system, none of that bull.

In any case, I present to you the kineticist, the one class in this set that is not a traditional spellcaster!

Whether it is by heritage or by some fluke, those with the potential to become kineticists are born with a small gate to another plane inside their bodies, allowing them to draw on matter and energy of that plane for offensive, defensive, and utility purposes. Typically these are elemental planes, but there are a few exceptions, at least in First Edition.

That’s right, today’s subject is basically a bender from Avatar: The Last Airbender, but with a side scooping of more psychic phenomena and the historical studies into various “kinesis” abilities. Luckily for the kineticist class though, they don’t have to actually have the right element present to manipulate it, (though as an aside, the innovations in ATLA bending to get around that limitation for earth and water benders in the show are equal parts fascinating and horrifying, depending on the technique).

Generally, as masters of one or more elements and the combination thereof, kineticists have a limited bag of tricks they can draw on, but they can do so limitlessly if they have time to focus, with a unique mechanic limiting them when they do not have the luxury of time.

This theoretically infinite use of a limited pool of basic abilities and a few abilities that can be done rarely actually makes the kineticist somewhat similar to how the warlock class as it was when it was introduced in 3.5, albeit more refined in a lot of key ways.

Kineticists in First Edition can choose from aether (telekinesis), air, earth, fire, void, water, and wood as elements, gaining powers based on those. This list definitely leans more into the psychic vibes the class was trying to retain, though I understand why the Second Edition version of the class trimmed out aether and void to make the class more specifically about elementalism (Not to say that they might not return some day though, you never know).

The focus on elements in the class does mean that very few kineticists will play the same. A geokineticist might play more defensively, shaping the battlefield to control it, while a pyrokineticist might be all blasting all day. This means that while an individual character might be somewhat limited in what they can do, the class itself is very flexible, ranging from blasters to tanks to healers and so on. They all excel at doing reliable strong damage on targets though.

But having kinetic powers is not just having a superpower, it’s also about focus and control, and about learning to understand oneself and one’s limits, and how to push them.

Goblin Fueko

Goblin Fueko the Fire Kineticist