It is also an infinate source of money if your party wants to start a lumber consortium 🙂

You said this wasn't in your plans, but sooner than later, you absolutely have to have a conversation with that kineticist player about a plan b for his character, that either changes Timber Sentinel, were they redesign the character to not use that ability (hell, maybe even the entire party gets potential respecs In light of the ripple effects to everyone). If it has literally made every fight as auto win as you're saying, I don't see any point in delaying.

My take is, it's not something that needs to be banned, but if you find that it's being too disruptive for your specific table, giving it the Overflow trait or making the effective spell rank progression of protector tree scale more slowly is a more reasonable step than outright banning it. A couple things I disagree with on you: A kineticist creating a tree and chopping it down for lumber is really no different from taking the time to Earn Income by, say, being a lumberjack. The player is still using a craft and taking the time to sell the goods that come from it. If I were to be asked I'd allow a Survival or Nature check to Earn Income that way. You also mention that it could in a pinch feed their party- this is a bit of a moot point because of how easy it is to feed a party in the first place. Heck, the Fresh Produce ability does exactly what you described more effectively. The Forager skill feat trivializes almost all need to acquire food while traveling. But more to the point: the spell protector tree (and by extension, timber sentinel) does not specify the tree can actually have ripe, edible fruit sprout from it. It just says a tree. A GM can just as easily say that the tree could be an apple tree, but that doesn't mean it actually has any apples on it. All this being said, I have a 6th Air/Wood/Water kineticist player in the campaign I'm running who has really been focusing on support, terrain manipulation, and damage mitigation/healing. I have not needed to nerf or ban protector tree. For my campaign, it's not a problem for the following reasons: 1) my players are a party of 6 which makes it exceedingly difficult for them to stay grouped around the tree. 2) Enemies who have a brain and can think will quickly see that if the protector tree is mitigating a lot of damage, they could easily dispatch it by Striking at the 10 AC tree that isn't immune to critical hits in order to just get rid of it. 3) I often throw enemies that do not rely purely on Strikes to hamper or harm the players. Whether it's AoEs, spell attacks, or athletics checks, or just other abilities a monster has that isn't a Strike, there are plenty of opportunities for my enemies to hurt a player next to a tree. 4) There is an opportunity cost on the kineticist for doing so; if they are planting a protector tree is it basically all they are doing that round; if they didn't need to use a Move action or something similar they might also do a 1-action elemental blast, but that's relatively low damage. That's not to say their contribution that round isn't effective, but they are generally dedication their whole round for it rather than trying to harm an enemy to down them faster, which can often lead to more damage mitigation than a tree.

Level 8 and the GM isn’t doing way more than 40 damage per round? At our table, that little twig wouldn’t survive past the first round.

waitttt there's a new mlp show??????

You're not a necromancer, but summoned a dead fandom with this one

i don't know, never saw it on table but looks like one AOE spell will blow up the plant and everyone huddling next to it. or one can always shove then strike if they must

we know that "stock footage" is just you

Like many commenters, I haven’t had the unstoppable bastion party with the sentinel tree ability against moderate to severe encounters. And the fresh produce impulse feat gives healing and feeds people unlimited also. I guess depends on how survival heavy the adventure is whether that’s unbalanced or not. Creating young forests on the fly is a bad use for this feat. And is something I don’t annoy my party or gm with. Albeit that is a player choice, RAW…

1:59 ahh protector tree. I was like i know no such cantrip like that. Yeah protector tree for kinnectis is something else. 4:46 nedt way to get around is aoe, and other save effects. Protector tree only interceot damage from Strikes

There is nothing else to say. It is completely broken and must be banned for the fights to be fun.

I agree it's broken, but... - Have enemy characters use this technique. - Have an intelligent npc adversary recognize what they are doing, and specifically design counters to it when sending others against the party or the caster.

One of my players is using this right now. They are only level 3 so far, but we'll have to keep an eye on this. I didn't even realize till a few sessions in that it was mimicking a ranked spell, that's honestly pretty messed up. If it becomes an issue, I might add the manipulate trait to it, or add Overflow so it's harder to chain. I'll leave it for now though as I'd rather not tweak anything at all if I can avoid it.

There's a lot of weird rulings here. It's overpowered, for sure, but it can't feed your party. How on earth would this give infinite money? No more than any of the other millions of things your players can do.

Nah. If the party is constantly grouping up around the tree that's literally what area affect spells are for. For a champion their reaction goes out to 15 feet, for the tree they have to be adjacent. That's a very small grouping so even a 5 foot burst spell should get 3 or 4 of them (including the tree). Martial enemies don't have spells, but it's perfectly reasonable for a martial enemy to have a few bombs. The tree has AC 10. 10! This does not scale. At level 8 it's nearly impossible for a martial enemy to fail to crit the tree. This will either destroy the tree in one hit or make the remaining damage mitigation trivial. Trading the kineticists 2 actions for some mook's 1 action. A bomb thrower will always hit, usually crit, and get splash damage on those around the tree. An intelligent enemy can also just walk away after a round or two when they decide the tree is bullshit. Usually the enemy didn't burst into the party's house, the party is invading their space. The party needs to defeat the enemies to progress. If the party won't leave the shelter of the tree the enemies can either easily escape, or walk into the next room and activate the additional enemies there. There is also some shenanigans possible around the word "ally" in the spell description. Is ally the tree's ally or the kineticist's ally? If it's the latter the tree might not protect the kineticist at all, because you are not your own ally. I'd say a druid using the spell could choose the type of tree, but a kineticist using the spell-like ability could not. She is channelling the power of elemental plane of wood, not "magic". It is summoning an existing tree, not creating a new tree. You don't get to choose which individual tree you get. When you summon a lava otter you don't get to say "Sharlene the 16 year old lava otter with blue eyes" and you don't even get to say "a lava otter with blue eyes" you get a random lava otter. For this ability what you get is "tree" not "tree of your choice". I played a wood kineticist in a few drop in games because I thought it was funny to summon trees and heal people by making them eat raw broccoli (it's good for you). I got pretty tired of the tree after a while. It doesn't change the outcome of fights, it just makes the fight take longer. Having one party member doing no damage or nearly no damage every round feels bad.

Protector Tree is only overpowered against really bad DMs.

Can this be OP? Yes. But you can easily fix it. 1) It needs an empty space. So once it grows in a spot, it cannot grow in it again. This means you would force your team to reposition to keep making use of it. 2) It doesnt specify the tree so the DM can decide. Make it an alien tree to your setting that is unable to survive on our soils, whos wetness makes it very hard to burn or even dry out to burn, and doesnt grow food. Problem Solved. 3) If they want to sell the lumber, give it the same clause as most feats letting players "make items", in that they have no sell value. Its clearly not natural and it doesnt work for the vast majority of woodcrafting uses. 4) If your setting allows, an alien tree in the wrong area can harm nature badly, pissing off many druids and maybe even witches. This can be used as a story hook and also be a way to make your Kineticist think before using it in a certain area. Dont get me wrong. 2 action cost mitigatr 10 HP in damage per spell rank from a strike is pretty insane. Compare it to shields and shield block and see how strong that actually is. But you can balance it with some cleverness. If you are fighting 4 enemies and one uses an action to kill the tree, that disables it for the rest in that turn. With 10 AC and vulnerabilities to crits, swipes and the like can also destroy the tree while still doing damage to the original target.

I have already thought of ways around this. 1. It uses the Concentration Trait. Break it and the spell is lost. 2. The trees only protect against strikes. A cantrip attack would go through, or even a shove to move characters out of reach would suffice. It's not as OP as this video is saying. It's stupidly strong, yes, but there are ways around it. A smart enough enemy would even take the party's tactics and use it against them. 3. Target people outside of the Tree's range, or if they are group up overconfident that their tree will protect them, massive damage aoe. Of course, unintelligent animals or random intelligent enemies who haven encountered this tactic before would have a harder time. But your BBEG or villian group, they will definitely learn from their battles.

As someone who plays a wood/water kinetcist the point about feeding the party and infinite money are sort of redundant since you can do that with base kinesis, the infinite money like wise can be done with base kinesis if the gm allows it which they never would since you can grow expensive poisonous plants or herbs. Focusing on just the spell, it doesn't protect the kinetcist themselves so targeting them works, aoes work incredibly well since it decimates the tree, everything h That attacks the tree auto crits it by level 8 so it goes down fast in that area but yes it's particularly effective if you are against a single melee big bad. So i would suggest not designing those encounters at least as cap stones. Further more any mobile encounter basically negates the tree. Say you have a monster capable of doing a short 30 foot teleport every turn as a move action and he's sniping the party from different locations. The party can hide by the tree but the melees will have nothing to do but leave the area to try and attack them, mean while the sniper can shoot the kinetcist.

“Whenever an ally adjacent to the tree is hit by a Strike, the tree interposes its branches and takes the damage first.” So, it has to be a strike but more importantly the tree takes the damage and at early level it only has 10. I have a Druid who uses this spell often and the tree rarely makes it past the first strike against an adjacent player. It’s not infinite damage reduction as stated in the video. If the player casts this every round at early levels they are just using two actions to negate 10hp across the entire party. Thats good, yes, but not broken.

- It's blocks only strikes, not spells. - You don't decide what kind of tree, and it's a medium tree that doesn't block movement. - It only protects adjacents targets. - The tree doesn't disappear unless it's ruled by the DM, meaning once you put a tree on a square, you can't put another one (it need to be an empty square.) So, your players frontline must stay right next to the tree to benefit from protection, and everyone need to be glued to it. Making your players vulnerable to say, a breath fire for 2d6 damage that the tree will take in full since it can't save, and that hit everyone in your party. Then your frontline is basically useless since they need to get stuck to the tree, and they are vulnerable to anything ranged. Or... I don't know, dehydrate ? Take 1d6 or get away from the tree. At level 7 your tree has 40 hp ! But also your team is stuck to it and could be attacked by a fireball. For the fruits and food, the player doesn't decide what kind of tree (it doesn't say they can) and also it's a medium sized tree, that is around 2m tall at best, and small enough to not block movement. So, it's a twig. Also it doesn't give infinite money, tree are anything but rare, and if you want to make money by cutting trees, adventurer might be a wrong career, try being a lumberjack. A hint : Lumberjacks don't get "infinite money", cutting trees take time. this spell is far from op. It's a nice temp HP boost but very situational. Any competent opponent would just find a way to get around it.

I think this feat is definitely on the strong side. Specially because it needs some specific circumstances to leverage its weaknesses. However, I don't think the feat is that broken, specially when it can be attacked and deleted by strong foes (and presumably automatically damaged by AOE). Definitely needs a bit of an errata, though. I think it being an Overflow Ability would be a small tweak that might make a difference without nullifying much of its upside and enabling recharge mid fight.

It's not broken, the Dungeon Master needs to increase the monster rating or give them the lumber trait 😂. Sentient trees fail Reflex save or destroy by damage shatter into splinters. All players in 60ft emination take 2d6 damage based on their reflex save. Regardless of the save, all players need to speed 1 action removing splinters for 3 rounds or take additional 6d6 damage (untyped) per round.

I love this spell. My lvl 1 plant summoner has it.

I've played quite a few Pathfinder Society scenarios with my water/wood kineticist leshy. Timber Sentinel is quite powerful in some combats and utterly useless in others. If the encounter has some mobility requirements as things you need to do in particular places or enemies that use ranged/spell attacks from a distance, hugging the tree is a sure way to fail. Also, if the enemies have aoe effects the tree might be a bad idea. The tree I have seen GMs using one of the enemies focus on the tree and kill it with one or two critical strikes because of their lousy AC of 10. I have only seen the impulse dominate in a couple of encounters against solo enemies with no reach where the party could position themselves forming a line in front of the tree having a wall covering one of the flanks. I wouldn't be surprised if Paizo were to apply some errata to adjust it like adding overflow or reducing the hit point value for the impulse version.

Yeah. There are a decent amount of thing that can be kinda exploited. It you think about it Kineticist's Base Kinesist is also technically can create infinite value. In the game I play Metal Kineticist was providing raw metal for a gunslinger to make ammo.

I have only played a couple scenarios with it, all in organized play. To clarify what i'm about to say, it's not a bad feat but there are downsides and counterplay. To me it felt pretty limiting to force everyone to huddle around a specific 5 foot square. A big part of pf2 is positioning, and if everyone needs to stay next to the tree, you can't properly do that. If not everyone is next to the tree the enemy can simply ignore the protected people and attack someone else. If you want to protect the frontline, this lack of positioning means they won't get to flank.

Im no expert but would the overflow tag (combined with reducing the rank of the spell by -2) not be enough to at least balance it out a bit.

I saw that Rules Lawyer also covered this ability, so I'm sure it's going to get fixed by someone at Pazio if people keep making videos about it. That's what happened with other abilities or rules.

Way to tell on yourself, mate. Nine levels of gameplay where all the enemies ever do is Strike sounds boring af. It does nothing against things that aren't Strikes, it's easily crit to death by even low level creatures, and you have to clump around it to make it effective. It absolutely stops being good once minions reliably crit it, so maybe level 5. My party has it, they hit level 3 two sessions ago and it hasn't been an issues yet. It is strong in the right encounters during the first three or four levels, but that's about it. It also comes at a great opportunity cost: one class feat and two actions on every turn. It's a bit like a Cleric who spams heal: It keeps you alive, but it doesn't get you closer to winning, so it's often better to do something else. If your Kineticist has a high Str, maybe because they use Hardwood Armor, going into melee and using a two action blast can deal as much as 1d8+7 damage at maximum accuracy at level 1! This tends to one-shot the kind of enemies that are helpless against Protector Tree, just to name one example of what else you might to with your actions. Your out of combat complaint is even more wild to me, a tree that doesn't even obstruct a 5ft square provides barely any lumber, unlike base kinesis which doesn't even cost a feat. It also doesn't say it holds fruit (and such a small tree probably wouldn't hold more than one or two tiny and barely edible ones), so if you don't want it to, it doesn't. Easy as that.

If at level 8 GM still just resorts to stride->strike x2 or strike x3 enemies then they have only themselves to blame that a tree is stopping them. I won't deny that it is strong in solo-boss meta, which is part of the solution - don't rely solely on solo monsters for "challenge". Then again if you throw like +4 then guess what, unless you pick the most vanilla statblock they will likely have extra abilities that would circumvent the tree (spells or just aoe ability on cooldown and likely flying already so they can kite), the vanilla block ones as well can either just maul the kineticist to stop the reforestation (you are absolutely in-ability to rule that the tree isnt a separate entity but extension of kineticist's ally range and thus they don't fall under the reduction themselves), and even if forced to hit the tree directly or indirectly they have enough stats that any agile strike is still roughly as accurate as PCs first strike while not reducing the damage. As for mooks, a lot of martial mobs have some degree of proficiency in athletics for the sake of grabs, and that would still let you reposition or grab and reposition the players to then gang up.

I think the worst part about this ability is how borin it is to use. You'll spend all your combats just repeatedly planting trees. I also don't think it's as problematic as people say it is. It doesn't trivialize any encounter that a cleric in the party wouldn't. Sure, tree kineticist can do it infinitely many times per day, but I have never had infinity encounters per day in any of my games.

Wonder if the Protector Tree will be in the Remaster?

Additional way to nerf this feat is to adjust Protector Tree spell generated by this feat. When cast as a impulse tree could have only 3HP/rank instead of 10/rank it gets when cast as a spell.

While I agree that combat effect is clearly OP outright banning it is overreaction. Simply nerfing the feat by limiting number of uses could be sufficient. For start you could make it focus spell when cast with this feat, this would limit number of uses per ecounter. Also you could make it require 3 actions to use. As for out of combat use i don't think it is OP because spell explicitly states tree disappears if it cant survive in that environment. That means it provides same benefit that could be achieved with some foraging of that environment. If your players are in inhospitable environment where foraging is hard or impossible, like dungeons, ice covered mountains, deserts, darkland caves, or even temperate climate but during hard winter, that spell simply provides no out of combat benefit.

I never ban anything. I just use it over and over against my players until they complain and ask to ban it. By level 3 I would have had about 50% of the combats have the enemy with this spell. Because it’s so good the coming of the land would have everyone using it. Just like everyone uses a bow instead of a sling. After about 4 hours of a combat where no one on either side gets hurt the players will ask you to ban it. Then you have to act like you don’t want to ban it and let them talk you into it.

This feels like something that just was overlooked. If I had to guess, they will change it to x times per day. For a level 1 feat, that usually is something low like 1. Even at 1, it would be pretty good. Basically a once a day shield.

I think one way I'd nerf it without making it useless... is just make it a focus spell. It is still REALLY good as a focus spell, but not brokenly so.

Funny thing. I'm currently running Kingmaker and I have a player with this feat, but the party is level 5 and until now the infinite trees never bothered me. I can understand the concerns but I think just using the same action again and again and again is boring, so I dont think this is a problem in every group.

I don't think it needs to be banned, just limited in its usability. For example the overflow trait exists, this impulse should definitely be overflow. That alone would make a you think twice about spamming it every turn as it would basically use all your actions (I suppose you would still get the free impulse from channel elements). If that's not enough make it a three action overflow, that would make it only usable every other turn and cost your entire turn that round.

I knew EXACTLY what ability you meant lol, I would personally change it to have thr overflow trait.

I'm gonna look into AoE stuff to see what they do in this situation. That or maybe Magic Missile?

I had a player who did the same thing. I have banned this ability in all my future games - I might eventually get around to just reworking it as a houserule.

Powerful ability, yes, but 1 Two actions to use 2 Tree is attackable with practically a auto crit ac 3 enemies of the level should be doing roughly more damage than the tree blocks 4 Rule that the tree created is the same as the most common tree of the area. Im curious what enemies your throwing at the party bc in most my games (and i currently run 4 a week), while a good ability, it would at most burn the equivalent of 1 action from one enemy of equal level. Which is the same as a successful trip, shove ect ect. Yes its automatic but its one more action than those. Also have you tried having the enemy use reposition? Just move them away from the tree.

Im pretty sure all impulses inherently have the manipulate trait so would provoke reaction attacks but still a powerful ability.

Should probably be a lv 4 feat and downgrade the spells rank to a quarter of your level. Or it should be bound to a cooldown.

The thing about trees is they have no reflex saves, so smart opponents capable of dealing aoe damage will include the tree in a spell area. The other thing about the tree is it has 10 AC. If an opponent catches on that it keeps blocking damage on the players, they may just attack the tree first outright and crit it to death. The 'other' other thing about these trees is that GMs are perfectly capable of saying "okay, you make an apple tree, but it doesn't immediately pop up with fruit, and it will take time for said fruit to grow. If you want to feed your party, take the Fresh Produce feat."

Something I'd like to point out: a Kineticist doesn't need a Protector Tree to make infinite money - Base Kinesis alone creates an almost infinite amount of wood, particularly with the Advanced Kinesis add. Simply summon a twig with Base Kinesis, then use Advanced Kinesis to turn it into a 5x5' block of wood. Anything created by Base Kinesis is PERMANENT. Think about it. Same goes for Metal Kinesis: sure, the metal it manifests is rusted and pocked and generally low quality - but it's permanent, and can be smelted to obtain base grade metal. Ditto for the stone from Earth Kinesis: it may not be worked stone (although Advanced Kinesis might beg to differ) but it CAN be worked. Basically drops the cost of the average Crafting check BIG TIME. So, yeah. A way to stop the abuse of Protector Tree is simply to point out that chopping down "normalized" Protector Trees is literally killing young trees. Why is that important? Just ask the dozen or so VERY angry Leaf Druids that showed up at your doorstep.

Just attack the tree. You crit it by level 5 on