NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="KarinsDad" data-source="post: 2267918" data-attributes="member: 2011">The point is that offensive powers, just like melee and missile attacks, are not always successful.You can waste 7 PP with an Energy Burst just as readily as wasting a sword swing. Spell resistance or immunity to that energy type or even just resistance to that energy type, a bad dice roll, and a made saving throw could result in virtually no effect.Ditto for Inflict Pain.Offense is not always better than defense. In fact, it is often the opposite.Wearing armor and/or being encumbered without the armor feats limits the success of a psion.Such a character will have penalties for:1) offensive touch powers2) offensive ranged touch powers3) normal missile attacks4) normal melee attacks5) movement6) physical skillsunless he wears extremely light armor in which case with D4 hit points and low AC, he will have limited survival chances.There are five main differences between Psions and Wizards/Sorcerers:1) Psions can manifest more "highest augmented powers" per day.2) Psionic powers can be used in some situations that are adverse to arcane spell casting (e.g. areas of Silence, in grapples, etc.).3) Nearly 80% of psionic powers have a range of Close or less. Psions are close range specialists. Arcane spells average a longer range.4) Arcane spells auto-scale, psionic powers require more PP to scale.5) Psions have virtually no "minimize me from being targeted at all" powers. For example, Invisibility, Greater Invisibility or Mirror Images. Psions are almost always visible and targetable on the field.A lot of people focus on #1 and #2 and totally forget about #3, #4, and #5. Yes, psions can be very powerful: for very short periods of time. But, they are vulnerable all of the time in combat.And that is why it is critical for a successful psion who regularly gets into combat to have some form of martial capability, be that melee or missiles. Psions only have D4 hit points and sooner or later, they will die if they cannot still fight when low on PP while the other PCs are still relatively fresh.And that is precisely why the "armor without the armor feats" scenario is so lousy. Such a build hampers a psion's already limited (+1/2 BAB) melee/missile capability even more by either giving him a penalty to hit or limiting him to very light armor.Armor with the armor feats (i.e. either taking the feats directly or taking a class or prestige class that gives them) is ok, but still not great. It allows for expansion of armor without limiting a psion's combat capability.Without the armor feats, it's not a matter of it being 'my character does it this way so there's no other good way to do it'. It's a matter of survival.If you ever play a Psion, you will discover this. You cannot play a Psion like a Wizard or Sorcerer and just blast away at max PP every round. The 8th level Kineticist Psion with 18 Int, armor and no armor feats who does 9 fully augmented Energy powers in a day for an average of 36 points each will suddenly realize that the 8th level blaster Sorcerer with 18 Cha might only get 4 of his highest (i.e. 4th) level spells, but that's still 10 Fireball spells with an average of 28 points each. The Kineticist did 16% more damage in 9 rounds than the Sorcerer did in 10 rounds, but the Kineticist is totally out of PP whereas the Sorcerer still has 7 first level spells and 7 second level spells to go.In this example, the Psion gets 9 max PP powers whereas the Sorcerer gets 24 spells (not counting zeroth level spells). That's more than 2 1/2 times as many active rounds of combat.The Psion will die if he does this. Hence, he has to conserve. And if he is conserving, he isn't using heavy PP every round. That is the opposite of conserving.The only alternative to using PP is to use a weapon. If your psion does not use one, he will either stand to the side being worthless, or he will blow through his PP in one or two combats each day and be worthless in combats #3 onwards.Either way, he will die sooner or later with such a strategy unless the DM always limits it to a max of 2 combats per day.</blockquote>

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