 Long ago, three and a half editions lived together in harmony, then everything changed when 4E attacked. Only Pathfinder, master of all the fiddly little rules text, could stop it, but when the world needed it most, the rulebook just did not have a very good index. A hundred Splatbooks passed, and Paizo discovered a new attempt at recreating the warlock, and a cult class called the Kinetisist, and although its damage output and narrative agency options are great, we still have a lot to learn before we're ready to blast anything, but I believe there's rules for that. You may remember that I promised in last week's video on how to build your very own avatar in 5E that I'd be trying to tackle that same idea in Pathfinder this week. Or hey, maybe you don't. Who even knows when you're watching this? Not me. And so here we are doing just that. But along the way to that goal, let's take the opportunity to demystify the particularly challenging collection of charts, lists, and sub-tables that Pathfinder calls the Kinetisist. Mechanically speaking, the Kinetisist may be the single most cohesively full-featured class in all of Pathfinder. Damage output, narrative agency, exploration utility, battlefield mobility, attack adaptability, check, check, check and check. It's all there. If you can figure out how to put it all together. Building one sometimes feels like you're trying to put back together a pin that you borrowed from a friend. You saw it working a second ago and you're pretty sure you still have all the parts, but somehow it's just not working right. And this definitely isn't a problem for everybody. I've seen plenty of people build a Kinetisist just fine. But I've also definitely heard a lot more about people's frustrations with this class than I have any other. So if that sounds like you, hopefully some of this will help. All right then, to kick it all off, what actually is a Kinetisist? And the answer is story time. Back in the days of 3.5 before Dungeons and Dragons had gone through quite so many reincarnation cycles of its own, certain kinds of players started thinking that while using magic and imagination to get through encounters was totally cool and all, wouldn't it be even cooler to use it all to just blow stuff up every day? These players eventually got their heart's desire in the form of the Warlock, a class whose main shtick was the ability to cast something called an Eldritch Blast, which does exactly what it sounds like. Just, you know, eldritchishly, completely at will with no per day limits. Tragically, however, the 3.5 Warlock was not part of the OGL content that Paizo was allowed to pour over into Pathfinder. And despite occasional attempts over the years to reclaim some of that same feeling, the sad truth was that Pathfinder had a conspicuously, all-day blaster caster shaped hole in its heart. Inter occult adventures, debuting five classes based on 19th century fascinations with spooky, creepy psychic occult magic stuff and also the Kinetisist. Unlike normal spellcasters who gracefully sculpt magical essence into polished spells, a Kinetisist has a direct line to the energies of one of the planes of the great beyond. And by letting those energies course through them with reckless abandon, they can channel some of that planar power into useful manifestations called wild talents. Now, you might presume that the first step in building our own personal, boiling font of elemental enthusiasm would be to pick exactly which element it is that they're boiling over with. But actually, well, no, I mean, there's no reason we could do that first. Nah, stats. First, since Kinetisists route their roiling energies straight through their own living bodies, our key class attribute is, believe it or not, Constitution. Our wild talent save DCs are calculated with it and will even add it as flat damage on some of our blasts. Speaking of, all these kinetic blasts we plan on making are ranged attacks. So we should have dex followers our second highest stat. Also, lest we forget, we're on a mission to restore, I mean, to recreate a build that faithfully reminds us of the Avatar. To that end, nothing gets across the message, I'm a wise, intelligent, reincarnated being who will draw on the experiences of my past lives better than playing as one of the Sam Sarn, who happened to be a race of wise, intelligent, reincarnated beings who draw on the experiences of their past lives. Works out pretty well, right? Anyway, we'll get bonuses to whiz and int, which is great, but alas, we will have to take a minus two to con. But hey, it's not like Aang wasn't known for a debilitating spinal injury now and again. Plus, thanks to their shards of the past racial trait, Sam Sarns can pick any two skills and not only gain a plus two bonus on them, but also treat them as class skills too. Luckily, it looks like our past dead self was way better at, say, diplomacy and sense motor than we are. Thanks, dead me. Okay, good. Now we can go back to that whole element picking thing again. To be a little bit more specific, at level one, we get to choose an elemental focus that will determine just what kind of attacks, abilities and defenses we'll have to abide by and work with all the way into level seven. We can pick from, surprise, surprise, the four elemental plane elements of water, fire, earth or air, ether, which represents not bending, but telekinesis actually, and wood or void, which, through some mild shenanigans, match up to positive and negative energy. Our immediate payoff for this decision will be a matching basic manipulation talent specific to our element, which amounts to something like a specialized prestidigitation and our element's basic kinetic blast, or one of them at least. These basic blasts come in two flavors, physical and energy based. Some elements only have one or the other variety, in which case that's what you get, but air, void, water and wood all have one basic blast of each type to their name. You'll have to pick which one to take now and which one to maybe come back for level seven. Both energy and physical blasts will scale and damage every other level, but physical blasts have a very clear edge on damage output. Energy blasts, however, get to target touch AC instead of full, and that extra accuracy will almost certainly make up for the lost damage. As an example, in the case of our under construction avatar, let's look at the two basic blasts offered by air. There's the physical air blast, which will target normal AC and can roll for 1d6 plus five damage, or there's the energy based electric blast, which only needs to hit a touch attack, but also only rolls 1d6 plus one. Given Aang's history with lightning, it seems the safer bet to go with air blast here. Before we get into the rest of what makes a kineticist tick, we should look at the class feature that not so secretly runs the entire rest of our decision-making, burn. Of all the somewhat tricky little parts of the kineticist, burn is the one that will have to keep the closest eye on. The basic premise is that while we can handle drawing enough elemental energy to make our basic attacks without difficulty, we have to push ourselves to take an actually painful amounts of energy to try anything fancier. Thus, to use or add on almost any ability besides our basic kinetic blast, we must take on as many points of burn as it lists in its cost. The kicker is that every time we take a point of burn, we take one non-lethal damage per character level as well. So for example, taking one burn at level three means we take three non-lethal damage, but taking two points of burn at level five means taking 10 non-lethal damage. And it'll all act and track just like normal non-lethal damage, except there's absolutely no way to cure or recover from it until we sleep for a full night. The wear and tear of overextending ourselves accumulates throughout the day. At first glance, this seems like a pretty easy thing to live with. Let's just, you know, never use anything that requires burn to work and keep all of our precious body meat fresh and unspoiled. I mean, this is the obvious play, right? Not doing the thing that causes us physical harm? And I mean, yeah, theoretically we could do it like that, but we will in fact be left with only our basic kinetic blast left to use. And that is such a waste of a kineticist. Here, let's look at the progression of our other two main class features. On odd levels, including first, we pick up an infusion wild talent. These are abilities that we can add to our basic kinetic blast to alter their effects, substance infusions, or method of delivery, form infusions. Let's say we pick up this pushing infusion, a substance talent. Now, when I add it to my air blast, I get to make bull rush checks against people I hit. Ah, but only if I take a point of burn to do it. Aside from infusions, we also get utility talents on even levels. These are class abilities that are not related to kinetic blasts and often even work out of combat, like this here, airs leak talent. Unlike infusions, there are a decent number of utility talents that won't bother you for burn to use them. But clauses such as this one that allow you to take on a point or two of burn for extra effects are pretty common. While we're looking at this talent entry, every utility and infusion is posted with both a level and one or more elements listed beside it. As you might expect, the element list tells you what utility talent or infusion is compatible with. However, the level listing is a little trickier. It actually represents an effective spell level. And just like actual magic spells, it scales only from one to nine. To pick up a talent of either kind, your kinetic list level must be double the listed effective spell level. So all those super nifty level three utility talents strictly forbidden until we get to level six. Between the unintuitive level gating and the struggle of picking our way down a list, just to find a talent that matches our element at all, it seems fair to say that the utility talent and infusion listings are kind of miserable to use. As a bit of a side tip, instead of using these frankly miserable walls of text to find wild talents, you can always use an online talent sorter like this one, which was made by the piezoforms user She-Roy. It's helped me a bunch, so I put the link to access it in the description below. Just switching to sortable online lists for ease of picking through talents, solve 70% of the confusion associated with making a kinetic system, I swear. So the idea that we might be able to avoid taking burn by simply not doing burning things really won't cut it, I'm afraid. There's just too much to gain from it. However, there are a number of ways that we can stave off burn temporarily. The first and easiest is by using a feature called gather power. If on our turn we use our move action to stand dramatically still and whip our element of choice around us in a stylish and furious frenzy, we can reduce the total burn cost of a kinetic blast we make that same turn by one. If we DBZ it up for longer, say for a whole round, we can reduce the blast by two burn even. And heck, we just waited a whole round, so we probably won't mind gathering just a teeny bit more power with our move action again to bring our total burn discount to minus three, right? That's completely fine as long as we go for our kinetic blast with that one remaining standard action this turn. Otherwise, we lose all that power and have to start gathering again. Starting at level five, we also get infusion specialization which reduces the burn cost of an infusion added to a blast automatically. And that scales to higher discounts every few levels. The one last bow to tie on burn as a mechanic is its surprising benefit payoff elemental overflow. Starting at level three, as long as you've taken at least one burn, all of your attacks get plus one for the day and all of your damage gets double that bonus. Going above one burn won't give you more bonuses yet, so just think of it as a participation threshold. By using one burn ability early on, you actually hit like a full BAB character all day. And the upper bound of this threshold then scales by plus one every three levels. So at level six, as long as you've taken a minimum of two burn, you can sit at plus two attack and plus four damage. Not bad, right? Well, that was all a little bit exhausting, but hey, bringing elemental justice to the world isn't a slacker's job. Now is it? Oh right, we've got one more finishing touch to put on our avatar. The bit where he learns how to manipulate more than just air. You know, the avatar part. No worries, we've got a utility talent for that. Past life evoker once a day, we can take one point of burn to learn and use any single basic blast from any single element for a minute. A far cry from a full blown avatar state maybe, but I believe that I can make this joke work a third time. Ta-da! Howdy everybody, and this is the part of the video where I talk about the last video because that's what people do. The last video was how to be the avatar in fifth edition and we went with the monk of the four elements route there. And y'all had a lot, a lot of suggestions on what to do instead and apparently it was literally anything. So this has always been a problem. So I started off in Pathfinder and apparently it's still kind of the same in fifth edition. Monks, man, just never really get the right into the stick. Like it's just so hard to make a monk that's optimal or whatever. I liked a lot of y'all's suggestions. What I was thinking about when going for the monk was just thinking of all the super cool choreography and just like how much martial arts kind of meant to avatars more of a franchise, I guess then to Aang necessarily specifically, but it kind of does it all. It's definitely about the idea of just having like all four elements under the control of your discipline. But no, I liked a lot of your ideas. I think I haven't ever played a sorcerer in 5e. I don't know if they're good or not. A lot of y'all have been suggesting druids as alternate builds on a lot of these videos. I've never played a druid in anything ever. So I should probably look into those at some point. I've also been enjoying y'all's extra comments on things to do and other videos like a speed build for Pathfinder, like a speedster kind of character that'd be kind of fun. Somebody suggested doing crafting rules in Pathfinder and that's, oh, that's not fun, but it's probably very useful. I'm definitely gonna do that one at some point. Anyways, yeah, guys, thanks for your ideas. Keep them coming. Always love to hear what different ideas you have, even if they are better than mine, because hey, that's how it works, right? Next time you see me sitting in this chair like this, I will be listening to all of y'all, tell me everything I did wrong with the kineticist. So that'll be fun. Actually, I think the kineticist would just be very good. It will be. It's great. I promise, myself.