Hope everyone had a good holiday! Here’s hoping for the new year to be a bit better for all of us. In today’s Paths of Magic update, I’ll be going into one of the new classes to be featured in the book, the Shaper! The shaper was playtested last year, so if you want a more in-depth read of the class’s abilities you can check out the playtest document.
The shaper is a master of time and space. She “shapes” reality by moving around and controlling the empty space underneath, referred to as the void. Despite its magic-heavy theme, it instead focuses on its martial capability first, gaining full BAB, d10 hit die, and full weapon/armor proficiency. She uses her planar magic to instead supplement her combat ability, primarily in the form of hindering enemies and protecting herself, though as you can guess having control of time and space magic nets her some key utility and support like haste or teleport.
So what gave us the idea for this class?
The Shaper, by Miguel Angel
The shaper is a class theme/design I’ve long wanted in Pathfinder, and if I had the time I would have tried to include it in the original run of Path of Shadows. The primary inspiration comes from the Void Knight concept in the MMO Rift, which was a tank class that focused a lot around anti-magic capabilities (though the “void” theme was more eldritch/pact-based than planar magic). At its core, the main desire for the class was to lean heavily into this anti-magic idea to act as a potent anti-mage without having to be a full caster itself.
Doing that concept in Pathfinder is…hard. Or at least hard to do well as a martial character. The closest mechanical approximation to anti-mage martial with a smattering of magical power is a primalist arcane bloodrager (for that sweet Spell Sunder), but very little of it is effective at proactively stopping magic, aside from, ya know, bashing the caster’s face in, and like most martial capabilities it’s limited to melee range, where the spellcaster is already at its worst. The best anti-magic characters were typically other full-casters, especially the arcanist with counterspell exploit, since counterspelling is normally such a poor strategy compared to just readying a magic missile. So I aimed to create my ideal anti-magic martial.
This came down to essentially a wish-list of abilities, including:
Full BAB, d10, with good armor/weapon proficiency.
The ability to force concentration checks outside of melee range.
A way to counterspell as an immediate action, like an arcanist can
Able to take both Disruptive and Spellbreaker, and preferably feats that chain off of those
Access to as many anti-magic spells as possible, including arcane sight, dispel magic, greater dispel magic, silence, spellcrash, globe of invulnerability, spell resistance, and antimagic field.
If you’ve read the shaper playtest, you can see that all of these items made it, in one way or another, primarily as choices for the class’s distortion ability. But making a character around only “no wizards allowed” doesn’t make for a very compelling character class; an archetype, perhaps, but it’s too thin for an entire class. Not to mention the obvious problem of having not much to do if you’re fighting anything that doesn’t use magic.
With that in mind, a few concepts got tossed around. One of the early designs of the class was the “Revenant” and was themed around pure entropy. This very edge-lord interpretation had a themed “emptiness”, such as Life, Light, or Magic that it would consume, along with a passive aura that would drain or counter those effects. For example, being near a Life-based Revenant would have absorbed healing effects, while being near a Heat Revenant would absorb energy from nearby to constantly inflict cold damage and sap strength. While that design was eventually retired, many of the ability concepts were carried over into the shaper’s distortions, with the main take away being the shaper’s signature “void” ability for a big debuff/effect field centered on the player.
Another design was one that didn’t have spellcasting, and worked more like a kineticist where it had several ability categories to get as it leveled up. Distortions messed with the effects of the void debuff field, while essence powers worked like utility talents. This was scrapped pretty quickly, though, once it became apparent that many of the essence powers were just replicating existing spell effects.
Eventually the current shaper design was decided upon, thanks to giving a lot of room for interpretation and flexibility. Being able to shape reality obviously gives a lot of breathing room as to what sorts of abilities you can make, but I still wanted to keep it a bit more tightly themed than that. As such, many of the old themes from revenant were used to focus the abilities of the shaper: namely, creating abilities around countering/negating either Magic, Light, Life, Space, or Time. That provided plenty of space (heh) to work in while keeping the overall direction of the class more unified.
With that wall of text out of the way, what new is coming for shaper in the final release?
Surprisingly, very little is changing in the shaper’s core abilities since the playtest closed. Most of the major revisions (such as base effects of the void) were done during the playtest period. However, the improved void power got a pretty hard nerf from being difficult terrain to simply “move at half speed”, since it was bit too oppressive of an ability. I’m also considering adding a few new distortions to fill out the class (right now there’s like…40% of a page just empty at the end of the class description that could be used). “Essence” has also been renamed to “quintessence” to avoid confusion with akashic magic systems.
Archetypes, of course, will be made for the class (though they haven’t been fully written yet). The original concept of the Revenant is coming back as an archetype focused around death and negative energy effects, replacing the default void with a damaging field of negative energy and substituting the class’s eldritch sight with undead detection and lifesense. The Void Caller archetype lets the shaper create her void around a point in space, rather than around herself, to better enable an archery/ranged build for the class. I’m also toying around with a Chaos Mage that gets to generate wild magic surges all over the place, which should be interesting, to say the least.
Magic items are also being included for the shaper, just like any good class should get. The shaper’s fold is a not-quite blindfold that doubles the range of his eldritch sight and lets him see interplanar/phasing creatures, like ethereal foes or those under blink effects. There’s also the ring of quintessence mastery, which is sort of like a ring of ki mastery for shapers that gives a handful of abilities and can cheapen some of the more expensive distortions she has.
That’s all for today. Stay tuned for further development updates!