Talos Geniekin Heritage Handbook: PF2 Remastered Ancestry Guide – RPGBOT

Introduction

Metal-themed geniekin, the Talos Geniekin is all about being made of metal. You get damage resistance as part of the Heritage, which is uncommon. The Ancestry Feats offered are all clearly metal-themed, but there are almost no mechanical through-lines to build around, and the Talos Geniekin gets few feat options. Your best bet is a front-line martial character, but there are a few interesting options to pick and choose if you just need a few more feats than what your Ancestry offers.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Disclaimer
• Talos Geniekin Heritage Traits
• Talos 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.

Talos Geniekin Heritage Traits

• Damage Resistance: Damage resistance is always great. Electricity isn’t as common as cold, fire, or poison, but it’s still a helpful resistance.
• Detect Metal: Only situationally useful. This would be amazing for miners and prospectors, but for an adventurer your best hope is to detect hidden treasure.

Talos Geniekin Heritage Feats

Level 1

• 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.
• Ferosoul^RoE: An easy go-to option for unarmed strike builds. Most comparable options will give you a trait like Grapple or Shove, but the ability to change damage types without switching to another unarmed strike option is helpful.
• 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.
• Gildedsoul^RoE: Helpful for a Face, especially if you’re short on skills at level 1.
• Quicksoul^RoE: The persistent damage is fine, but it only works once per day and doesn’t scale, so as you gain levels, this will be quickly forgotten.
• Reflective Defense^RoE: Dazzled imposes a 20% miss chance, and since you use this when you’re targeted, you can potentially deflect the attack. The attacker does get a save against your Class DC, so spellcasters (who typically don’t advance their Class DC past Trained) may struggle to use it. Other options in the same book explicitly specify when you can choose your Class DC or your Spellcasting DC, and this may be an intentional Exception.

Level 5

• Conductor’s Redirection^RoE: You have damage resistance, so redirecting damage at an enemy will typically hurt them more than it hurts you. Still, the 10-foot range is extremely limited so you’ll struggle to use this consistently unless you’re having your allies intentionally target you with lightning damage. You might do things like have an ally cast Lightning Arc to target you and your target, then use Conductor’s Redirection to get even more damage on your enemy. But that’s a lot of risk for a relatively small amount of damage. It’s also unclear if the damage is redirected before or after applying your resistance, so having resistance to lightning damage may actually make this worse.
• Genie Weapon Flourish^AG (Geniekin): Critical Specialization effects are excellent, and not all weapon-using classes get them.
• Precious Alloys^RoE: Great for exploiting vulnerabilities, but it’s also be difficult to predict which metal type will be heflpul unless your campaign has a consistent, recurring type of villain. At high levels, adamantine makes it easy to smash objects with your bare hands. This feat is fantastic for monks.
• 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 9

• Natural Magnetism^RoE: The magnetic spells are interesting, but only situationally useful since they require enemies to be using or made of metal for the spells to have any impact. If you only want one of the spells, consider a wand instead.

  If you took Gildedsoul, you can replace one of the two spells with Enthrall. Enthrall is great crowd control, but it depends on a saving throw so it’s only useful if you’re a Charisma-based primal spellcaster.

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 Metal 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.

Level 17

• Metallic Skin^RoE: A decent buff for a front-line melee character, but it’s 1 minute once per day, so you can’t really build around it. Consider the Fleet feat to offset some of the speed penalty.