Quote Originally Posted by hit_fido View Post
Dark Apostate is good enough for me to be choosing the archetype over plain cleric and dipping into the enhancement tree, but not good enough to use it as the main tree.

The biggest missed opportunity was to build out the cool design of a curse-based caster by providing some kind of AOE-based curse to pair with Pray for Mercy/Bane. Look at, for example, how Blightcaster's Out Break and Poison of the Hydra are able to upgrade existing spells to affect multiple enemies. Clearly the tech is there for it.

That is how Cursed Words should have worked instead of the current implementation: instead of damaging undead (why would an undead-damaging attack be thematic for a Dark Apostate anyway?), Cursed Words should upgrade Bestow Curse to affect the target plus some number of nearby enemies. The level 12 core should then be downgraded from no-fail curses to something like a +2 DC check for your curse spells. Now you have an AOE curse that demands some investment into your Necromancy DCs to maximize your two punch combo of AOE curse followed by Pray For Mercy for double damage. Now maybe the tier 5 is attractive enough versus Divine Disciple to go into for Shadows of Death so you can upgrade your double damage potential from 2d4 to 2d6 per CL.

Aside from that they need to fix the Incorporeality and Concealment stacking, at least if they were meant to stack with other sources as I thought some dev had stated.

I don't know much about the imbue stuff, to judge whether it's really weak or not. Keep in mind it's one of the fewer imbues that scale off spell power. Maybe the imbue should add +2 bonus dice against cursed enemies, which would again build up the theme of a curse-based caster and create synergies with Cursed Words, Bane/Prayer, and the curse-on-crit imbue enhancement.

Just as an FYI, the SLA for Bestow Curse WAS an aoe Bestow Curse as a Channel Divinity originally during testing and they intentionally removed it for whatever unknown and unstated reason despite the waves of feedback saying how bad that change was.

I disagree with downgrading the no save core. That's actually one of the only good things in the entire tree and makes the class feel reasonable as a concept. There's no reason to remove the save part, other comparable end game abilities don't have saves on them either. It's perfectly fine.

The concealment and incorp was stated as stacking with other sources, that it was bugged in testing. It was never fixed and we got a bugged release. But the incorp and conceal still feels bad with how reaper works. Even if it stacked, having skull negate it just doesn't feel great. And undoing the negatives or reaper as a counterbalance to reaper being harder is just an undermining to how reaper works to begin with.

We have another imbue based tree that scales off Spellpower in the form of EK, which is an incredibly strong tree that is very good, but it scales a lot better than the pitiful imbue support in DA. That's the problem with DA. You have a half melee imbue half debuff caster in a tree and neither are supported well enough to work. And melee clerics aren't exactly doing great to begin with that giving them access to DA imbue is going to enhance their playstyle.