The saboteur’s two most important mechanics are her Marked Target and traps. Both of these are seeing some big changes in Paths of Magic, both to solve a few edge cases and to better encourage build diversity.
The saboteur’s marked target has four variations: assassin, duelist, charlatan, and informant. In the original release of Path of Iron, only the assassin’s mark provided a bonus to attack and damage rolls, which made the use-rate of the other marks fall off big time (unsurprisingly, most people need the to-hit boost on a 3/4 BAB class more than anything else). In Paths of Magic, now ALL four mark types provide their bonus to attack rolls, starting at +1 and scaling to +5. All bonuses are also normalized to the same value, both to balance the additional power of the other marks as well as for bookkeeping (so now you aren’t tracking four separate scaling values for each mark). Assassin’s mark still is the only one to increase your damage, and still has its talents for adding even more power on top of it, so it still remains the go-to for maximum offense, but now saboteurs won’t be quite as gimped in combat if they aren’t always using assassin’s mark.
Upgrades to saboteur’s mark are also now earlier for the class. Instead of being at 9th level for Improved Mark and 17th for Greater Mark, they are now at 7th level and 15th level, respectively. To compensate, Combined Arms was moved from 7th to 9th. Lasting Traps has been turned into a saboteur trick (more on that later); instead the new “Expanded Arsenal” ability is granted as 17th level, which doubles the number of traps a saboteur can have placed at once.
Saboteur traps are getting a few changes, as well. First, traps that are stepped on can no longer be controlled by the saboteur; she can only manually “aim” the trap is she detonates it herself. Since traps could be setup ahead of time, the implementation in Path of Iron could let a saboteur line of a bunch of traps and simply run over them on her turn, manually aiming all of them to, in essence, cast several times in one turn. This was obviously not a good thing, so now she can only aim them if she spends the action to trigger them (starts as a move, upgrades to a swift action later on).
Traps also last longer than they did previously. Originally they lasted for 10 minutes per level, upgrading to 1 hour per level at 15th. Traps now last for 1 hour per level from the start, so you can actually use them outside of the immediate situation. The Lasting Traps class feature is now a saboteur trick, and lets you place traps that last for 1 WEEK, rather than 1 hour per level. As a downside, a lasting trap counts a three traps against your maximum, so you can’t go too crazy with it.
Of course, the saboteur update wouldn’t be complete without some new tricks, as well. Currently she’s slated to get ten additional tricks (including the aforementioned Lasting Traps), which should open up some new build possibilities for her. To wrap up this post, I’ll include some new poison-based tricks; a build that has consistently been difficult to pull off in the past. Look forward to more updates over the coming weeks!
