Here is the Alpha Release for the Psionic Feats section of Psionics Unleashed.

Please note: Racial feats have not yet been included and will be included in beta (and possibly released in posts for an Alpha review, as well, once they are ready).

Nice!!!

A couple things thou.
Deepp impact, most maneuver like attacks on PF (vital strike as an example) require an attack as a standard action. was the intent of this feta to be used with any attack during a full one or with Aoo?

Greater Manyshot. It would seem tha changes made to Manyshot were not taken into consideration.

Psionic Fist. The low requirement makes it perfect for monks. However natural attack centered warriors might make it too good. The non psionic equivalent would be weapon specialization, and that one has a level requirement. Shouldnt this one have it as well? (specially since it is slightly better). Something like REQUIREMENT: Improved Unarmed Sttike Class feature or lvl 4 would make it perfect for me.

Psionic Weapon/Shot. Same as avobe, lvl 4 requirement would be nice for everyone except monks.

Wounding Attack. Same as Deep Impact.

Besides those nit pics all these look purely amazing, some of them are not completly psionic related, just cool for any random character.

Psionic Fist / Shot / Weapon have always been available at 1st level.

If the "maintain focus" aspect of the feat is the concern, I'd be more interested in hearing changes to it, rather than changes to the feat prerequisites, as we want to keep them available at 1st level.

Good points on the Deep Impact style of feats and Greater Manyshot.

Okies ... first thoughts:

Aligned Attack: I like it - much more useful this way!

Burrowing Power: Walls of Force are listed in the PFRPG as having a hardness of 30, not 20.

Craft Cognizance Crystal: There is no XP cost associated with item creation in Pathfinder.

Power Specialisation & Greater Power Specialisation: The bonus damage seems hardly worth a feat compared to the amount you would be doing ordinarily with an energy power, and expending the focus ... meh. I think this would be better if it was more like the Privileged Energy feat - a +1 per die for a given type of power, for example.

Monastic Warrior: Love it, but the level requirements are too high. The old Ascetic series of feats had no level requirement, you just had to have both classes. Remember some campaigns end at tenth level ...

Psionic Fist/Shot/Weapon: the bonus damage while focussed is worth it.

Student of the Mind: I like it, but I am not sure that you should stack the two levels for powers known. I would rather see them stacked for unarmed damage, myself, and not have the level requirement.

Wildblood Power: Like it, but again I think the level requirements are too high. Also, any wilder/sorcerer is likely going to have levels in Cerebromancer as soon as they can, making this feat fairly useless due to inaccessibility until they are very high level.

Wilden Warrior: Like it, but again I think the level requirements are too high.

Wild Sorcery: Love it.

Fair enought.
To make it simple, right now the best lvl 1 feat to increase damage is power attack, and when using it with let´s say 2 claws for a psy war it adds 2 damage to each hit by diminishing your chances to hit. Psionic Fist does the same but without any penalty, and it has the chance of dealing much more if needed. There is something wrong with that.

Same thing with Deadly aim and psionic shot. All this do what other feats do, just much much better.

And of course the biggest offender would be psionic weapon, which makes weapon specialization (a fighter´s staple feat) mediocre in comparison.

Right now I can´t see a melee character not taking one of these (even ray focused casters).

However something as simple as reducing the bonus damage to 1 for all of them might do the trick

That is a problem with psionic fist/shot/weapon. However, weapon specialisation has a whole stack of feats that escalate it up nicely, and it doesn't depend on psionic focus. I think the +1 damage is a good option there for maintaining focus, maybe increasing it to +2 for Greater Psionic Fist/Shot/Weapon?

Quote::

Craft Cognizance Crystal: There is no XP cost associated with item creation in Pathfinder.

That is in error. There should be no XP cost.

Keeping it at +1 and upgrading it to +2 with the greater ones sounds good.

Points of clarification:

If you expend focus while making an aligned attack (to deal extra damage), that one attack is still considered aligned, correct?

Does Focused Sunder to attack unattended objects work all the time, or only when you expend focus? Given the preliminary statement that some feats would have one benefit for holding focus and another (more potent) for expending it, wasn't sure if this was supposed to be an example of that or not.


Mental Leap seems rather underpowered to me, to be honest. Someone with Speed of Thought is getting a constant +4 bonus to Jump checks, just for holding focus, and that bonus increases to +12 if focus is expended. Now, if someone is wearing heavy armor and going for high Str rather than high Dex, then sure, Mental Leap will be more useful for them... but remember, in Pathfinder all Jump checks use the Dex-based Acrobatics skill (unlike 3.5, which used to be Str-based Jump skill). Someone in full plate probably isn't investing 10 Ranks into Acrobatics just to get good Jump checks, either.

So, who'd take Mental Leap?
1) Someone who is going for the high agility approach. They'd take Speed of Thought first, then Mental Leap second as a lesser (but stacking) benefit. When they expend focus, however, they'd be better off expending it for Speed of Thought rather than Mental Leap! (Expending for Speed of Thought would increase the +4 bonus to +12, but you'd lose the +2 from Mental Leap, for a net +6 increase. Expending for Mental Leap would increase the +2 to +10, but lose the +4 from Speed of Thought, for a net... +6 increase! At least you'd get +30 movement for the turn with Speed of Thought) Once you hit 10 Ranks in Acrobatics, THEN Mental Leap becomes more useful... but otherwise, it's nigh-worthless for the early levels. You'd be better off taking Skill Focus (which works for ALL uses of Acrobatics) or the Acrobatic feat, at least until level 10 (and even then, Acrobatic or Skill Focus would grant a +4 or +6 bonus by that time, which stacks with the boost from Speed of Thought! +12 from Speed of Thought & +6 from Skill Focus = +18, vs. +20 from Mental Leap). Not to mention, Acrobatic and Skill Focus don't have Str 13 and Jump 5 Ranks as prereqs (assuming that should be changed to Acrobatics 2 Ranks and perhaps Dex 13?).

2) Someone with medium or heavy armor (so they can't use Speed of Thought). Str 13 shouldn't be a problem, and a couple points into Acrobatics isn't that bad, so by expending focus they can... well, their armor check penalty is going to interfere somewhat, and they probably don't have the highest of Dex, but they should be able to get a decent leap going then. Nothing to ooh and aah over like a monk doing flips, but at least they can keep up with their lighter comrades. In that case, you could almost make an "Armored Leaper" feat that negates armor check penalty for jump checks and lets you use Str on jump checks.

So... Mental Leap is pretty much only useful if you cannot take Speed of Thought. +10 (and later +20) sounds cool, but the actual breakdown turns out to be pretty meh unfortunately. I would suggest a +10 passive bonus if you hold focus, and an increased bonus for expending focus (perhaps +20 base, increasing to +30 at 10 ranks of Acrobatics). If a level 1 wizard's spell can do it, or a monk using 1 ki... just make sure the bonus is an Enhancement bonus, so it doesn't stack with anything similar (such as the Jump spell).


Was hoping to see a soulknife/monk multiclass feat, but I don't see one... either I'm blind, or 'darn!'. If one were included, I think I'd advocate something like the following:
Ascetic Blade
Prerequisite: level 5 soulknife, level 5 monk
Benefit: Add your monk level to that of your soulknife level to determine your mind blade enhancement bonus. Add your soulknife level to that of your monk level to determine your AC bonus and Movement bonus. Your mind blade is treated as a special monk weapon for flurry of blows.

I believe Sidestep Charge was changed to be a General feat, and not a Psionic feat, in WotC's errata. Did you change it back, knowing what was in the errata? If not, and you haven't checked the errata, you may wish to. Of course, that doesn't mean you can't keep it as a Psionic feat ...

Some of these are definitely cool, I especially like the change to Speed Of Thought. The level requirement on the multiclass feats are way too high; all of the 3.5 were generally available to take at around 6 level, so I would say changing them to be available at either 5th or 7th level would be good.

About Psionic Weapon and it's equivalents- If a fighter has power points (psionic race and just take the favored class benefit to gain 1, then put ranks into Autohypnosis since cross-class skills are much more lenient) then they can take both Psionic Weapon/shot/fist and Weapon Specialization. It gives other people a similar option, but the same option is still easily available to fighters as well. The requirements seem rather lax, but because it is a psionic feat it means that you must either A) be playing a naturally Psionic Race; B) take a level in a psionic class; or C) Take the Wild Talent feat. I think that makes up for it

What it does is give psionic character an advantage over any other non psionic melee class, and psionic melee classes ARE NOT weaker in any way so that they need acces to better feats.

And even if they were non psionci feats, it is so good that it would be almost a must have for any melee class. As I stated before, Power attack s the staple extra damage dealing feat, and psionic weapon (the one that will apply to most characters) leaves it in the dust.

Honestly I am running a combined playtest of the psionic classes with the APG classes on Saturdays, and I can´t see any of the melee guys not taking at least one of the psionic weapon/fist feats. They are just so damn good for the Feral Psy War, Monk, and even Cavalier.

On top of that the cavalier and monk player feel somehow cheated that for them such a great feat is harder to qualify for while the Psy War (who has never been outshined in combat in a way that it would require him to get better feats) can just take them.

Well, why are the monk and cavalier feeling cheated about the psionic feats, but not the fighter feats?

Because a better comparison would be Psionic Feats to Combat Feats (which are the ones fighters get for free), and they can be taken by anyone.
Also the Fighter needs its Fighter Only feats in order to actually be uniquelly better in at least some ways than the other melee classes.

I do not think that is the case for Psy wars and Soulknives, they are pretty damn strong and unique through class features, they do NOT need exclusive feats in order to compete (unlike the fighter). And that is what these seem to be, special amazing feats for an exclusive group.

Frerezar - then I would recommend for your group to change the bonus damage from maintain focus for Psionic Weapon / Shot / Fist to +1 instead of +2 (since Andreas and I have already discussed that as the most likely change for the Beta release of this document) and let us know if it's still viewed as "too good".

And change the bonus damage for Greater Psionic Fist / Shot / Weapon to +2 instead of +4.

I think the the new versions of Psionic Fist/Shot/Weapon are fine. Maybe using Rage or Power Attack should cause characters to automatically lose focus.

Also, I have 2 questions:
1) When you expend your focus using Aligned Attack ,does that attack count as good/evil/lawful/chaotic with regard to damage reduction or not?

2) Do Psionic Item Creation and Metapsionic feats count as Psionic Feats with regard to the Psionic Body feat?

Hynaman wrote:

1) When you expend your focus using Aligned Attack ,does that attack count as good/evil/lawful/chaotic with regard to damage reduction or not?

Yes, and we'll explain that better for the Beta.

Hynaman wrote:

2) Do Psionic Item Creation and Metapsionic feats count as Psionic Feats with regard to the Psionic Body feat?

Hrm. I'll have to discuss this with Andreas. In 3.5, by a strict reading, they did not.

Thanks for the feedback, I will do so.
A couple quick questions, what are going to be the requirements to be able to take psionic feats? Will they remain the same as 3.5?

Frerezar wrote:

A couple quick questions, what are going to be the requirements to be able to take psionic feats? Will they remain the same as 3.5?

that's answered in the doc

Alpha Psionic Feats wrote:

Psionic feats are available only to characters and creatures with the ability to manifest powers. (In other words, they either have a power point reserve or have psi-like abilities.)

I was sad to see that Psionic body is still the way it was in 3.5, because as it is it's basically a gimped version of toughness and only benefits if all of your feats are Psionic feats. Look at it this way- Toughness gives 1 hit point every level. Psionic Body gives you 2 hit points, then 2 hit points every time you take a psionic feat (which is every 2 levels). When toughness was still a flat 3 HP this was a really cool feat that rewarded players for specializing and planning out their characters, but now it is actually less powerful than toughness, which is regarded by most (including myself) as being one of the most underwhelming feats in existence (even with it's increase in usefulness). I would say making it an extra 3 hp per psionic feat would be appropriate, because it puts it above toughness if you specialize in psionic feats, but at toughness's level or lower if you don't want to completely focus.