Ardande Geniekin Heritage Handbook: PF2 Remastered Ancestry Guide – RPGBOT

Introduction

The Ardande Geniekin’s feat options are thematically interesting, but there are no feat chains or clearly-related mechanics to build around. That said, since none of the feats require another ancestry feat as a prerequisite, it’s easy to take as much of are little as you want without cutting into your Ancestry’s feats.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Disclaimer
• Ardande Geniekin Heritage Traits
• Ardande Geniekin Heritage Feats
  • Level 1
  • Level 5
  • Level 9
  • Level 13
  • Level 17

Disclaimer

RPGBOT uses the color coding scheme which has become common among Pathfinder build handbooks.

• Red: Bad, useless options, or options which are extremely situational. Nearly never useful.
• Orange: OK options, or useful options that only apply in rare circumstances. Useful sometimes.
• Green: Good options. Useful often.
• Blue: Fantastic options, often essential to the function of your character. Useful very frequently.

Ardande Geniekin Heritage Traits

• Senses: Like many Versatile Heritages, the Ardande Geniekin grants Low-light Vision, or Darkvision if you already get Low-Light Vision. This makes it among several heritage options which are outright better than a Heritage which grants you Darkvision as its sole benefit.

Ardande Geniekin Heritage Feats

This section does not cover Geniekin Feats, which are also available to the Ardande Geniekin.

Level 1

• Ambersoul^RoE: Consistently useful for front-line characters, especially if your AC is relatively low so you’re being hit frequently.
• Elemental Eyes^AG (Geniekin): Darkvision is really good, but this does lock you out of Lineage feats, so it’s not an easy go-to option.
• Elemental Lore^AG (Geniekin): The skills are fine, but not great.
• Genie Weapon Familiarity^AG (Geniekin): The only Geniekin weapons are the Wish Blade and Wish Knife, which are notable for their Resonant property. Resonant is appealing for the Kineticist and the Magus, as well as other builds that have elemental actions which they consistently rely upon. Unless you want to use a Wish Blade or Wish Knife, this isn’t worth the feat.
• Grave-Harbored^RoE: Only situationally useful. The stuff about plants will rarely matter, but poisons are common across the level spectrum, so the benfit for succeeding on saves again poison will be useful occasionally.
• Moldersoul^RoE: 1d6 damage as a 2-Action Activity once per day. The damage doesn’t scale.
• Springsoul^RoE: Tangling Vine (formerly Tanglefoot) as your choice of Arcane or Primal innate spell. It’s a decent cantrip, and getting to choose the tradition is fantastic.
• Sunlit Vitality^RoE: Very thematic, but mechanically borderline useless. Pathfinder is not a survival game, and there are abundant options to mitigate the need for food, including low-level spells.
• Woodworker^RoE: There aren’t many all-wood items, especially beyond low levels.

Level 5

• Genie Weapon Flourish^AG (Geniekin): Critical Specialization effects are excellent, and not all weapon-using classes get them.
• Read Roots^RoE: Tremorsense is really good and hard for players to get, but 2 Actions for an imprecise sense is a lot, so you may find it hard to use this consistently, especially on spellcasters since so many spells take 2 Actions to cast.
• Treespeech^RoE: Woody plants are common in a lot of places where humanoids live and travel, but plants also usually don’t know much about the world, so talking to them is dubiously useful. I assume that this will work similarly to Speak with Plants, but that’s left entirely up to your GM.

Level 9

• Flowering Path^RoE: This could be a very interesting way to provide some battlefield control on a class that otherwise couldn’t produce it, but you don’t get to pass through this terrain unimpeded and you only get to use it once per day.
• Kizidhar Magic^RoE: Depends on spells that we don’t have a description for yet.
• Skillful Tail^AG (Geniekin): Almost useless and totally dependent on how permissive your GM is. Even if your GM is fairly permissive, it’s only useful in combat because any other time you’re not tracking the Actions to clasp/unclasp weapons or other items.

Level 13

• Genie Weapon Expertise^AG (Geniekin): If you’re using one of the affected weapons, you need to be advancing your proficiency normally, or you’ve gone through a huge chunk of your career without advancing beyond Trained.
• Summon Wood Elemental^RoE: Summon spells are fantastic, in part because they allow you to summon an ally that meets the needs of the moment. Limiting you to exactly one creature makes the spell much less useful. Even if a Wood Elemental would work for you, you’re summoning a level 3 creature at level 13 or higher.
• Wooden Mantle^RoE: Some decent buff options. There are enough choices here to appeal to any build, but it’s 1 minute once per day, and this spell alone won’t win fights for you.

Level 17

• Wood Ward^RoE: Once per hour you can try to block an attack, either negating it or reducing a huge amount of physical damage, then leaving a difficult terrain obstacle for up to 3 rounds.