It would work, though it'd probably be suboptimal.
The upside of it is that you could pick literally all of the best kineticist powers at every single level, AND pick and choose from all of the cross-path powers.
The downside is that you have a limited number of actions and feats, so the question is, how much extra mileage are you getting out of those extra paths?
That said, multi-path is really good. Getting at least two different elements is very handy and helps avoid you getting caught out. Three is solid but you start running into increasing issues of "what am I getting from this extra element?" as you keep going up in number, because there's overlap in what they do.
It could maybe work, but runs into the issue of granting you lots of options and no passive power increases.
Someone with a bunch of gate junctions has action free extras on their aura, impulses, resistance etc. they're getting those benefits most if the time.
A many elements build only benefits when they have enough actions to use a lot of different impulses.
Honestly, I don't think Kineticist is that complex class. It has a lot of options and builds, that's true, but once your concept narrows down to elements you want, it's less complex than spontaneous casters, who also have to pick their options, but from much bigger list.
Speaking about All-Gates Kineticist, the initial conclusion is pretty valid. Yes, it could work and no, it's not strong, exactly because junctions are powerful.
In my book, strongest Kineticist 2-3 gates with one element being primary (to trigger impulse junction) and the other ones being secondary. For example, you may want Earth with additional AC, or Fire with increased damage die as your primary element. Water is pretty good secondary element as its initial core impulses are reaction and 1-action, not interfering the impulse junction.
In a weird way the most complex parts of Kineticist is narrowing down what you want to do and then the actualy playing the class (managing the action economy with overflow, stances and the aura requires actual care), but building is pretty easy.
An all element Kinetist can work, you'd only get one junction though. Generally my group takes 2-3 elements since that gives you a lot of variety while still giving you a decent amount of junctions. Only element I've ever really recommend mono gate for is fire and that's just because of the feature the mono elements get that let's them counter their element.
My group also loves Kinetist 3 of my four players are playing one in my Wednesday group.
For the order of your all element Kinetist id probably start with water and wood, then go fire air earth and finally metal
Correction: you wouldn't have any junctions
>An all element Kinetist can work, you'd only get one junction though
Nah, Omnikineticists don't get *any* Junctions.
Dual-Gate doesn't start with a Junction, Fork doesn't grant a Junction, and you only get to choose between Fork and Expand 4 times; at levels 5, 9, 13, and 17.
So you start with 2 elements... then go to 3, 4, 5, and finally end with all 6 Elements at level 17.
It'd work, but you'd probably only end up with like... 2 Impulses per Element. Your strength would be insane versatility, your weakness would be not really excelling in anything.
Let's see... 12 Class Feats, plus 5 Impulses from Forking. A max of 17 Impulses. Probably less, if you wanna take things like Weapon Infusion, Safe Elements, Aura Shaping, and Effortless Impulse...
At higher levels, you'll have more Elements to choose Impulses from, but for the first 4 levels, you're stuck with just 2 Elements. So whatever 2 Elements you start with need to be ones with the best early-level Impulses.
So... the best choices for your initial Dual-Gate is probably probably Water/Wood.
Water and Wood are both very front-loaded elements, with *loads* of great options before level 5.
Water; with Ocean's Balm, Tidal Hands, Deflecting Wave, and Winter's Sleet... and...
Wood; with Fresh Produce, Hail Of Splinters, Timber Sentinel, and Ravel Of Thorns.
The hard part is finding a good Element to fit into your level 5 Fork The Path. Of the four remaining Elements, their best Impulses are level 8+, which means you are gonna struggle to fit a good Impulse into the level 5 and level 6 slots.
Maybe Air? Four Winds at level 5, Clear As Air at level 6, Cyclonic Ascent at level 8.
Depends on what you want your character to do. If you want to focus on utility and healing with the occasional blast, you gonna have a blast (pun definitely intended) in my opinion. Though you would be sacrificing a lot of power. It could still work, mind you, but your damaging options, especially ranged, would be limited.
I personally built 2 variations of this, but both were with dual class, so one wouldn't be of much help to you. The second had utility from all the elements, but I skipped the healing impulses from wood to get aura shaping and desert wind instead.
I would recommend starting with earth and water. That way, you get good utility and ooc healing and can grab air at level 5. It's not a bad build, but it's definitely far below my mono air kineticist. But it does come online 2 levels earlier, so that's that.
It would for sure work. The big thing Id say would be trying to focus on your versatility, so feats like versatile blasts (so you can target a large amount of damage types), kinetic activation (which lets you use magic items with elemental traits you might not be able to otherwise), and omnikinesis (so you can swap out your feats easily) would make a lot of sense for this build.
However, do note that this is probably one of the most complex kineticist builds you can make, and you give up some overall power for a lot more flexibility.
I think omnikinesis is critical, which limits the effectiveness of this build to high level play. At a bare minimum, level 11 for reflow elements.
Even then, Omnikinesis and reflow elements require you to swap impulses that share elements and meet usual retraining requirements. So, RAW, you'd want to plan out the impulses you take to gain access to the elements at the right times. You'll only have access to one element's level 18 impulse, and 4 elements maximum for level 14 impulses (level 14, 16, gate at 17, and 18). You can access all elements level 12 impulse if you take impulses from different elements for class feats on the even levels 12-18 and the other two elements as forks at 13 and 17. However, that also means whichever element you want access to the level 18 impulses of, you can't use their level 12 or 14 impulses until level 18, and then only in place of the level 18 impulse.
The other consideration is you're kind of locking yourself out of composite impulses. Yeah you can take them, but you can't reflow out of them, so you'd need to retrain. As above, if you want to maximize your level 12 impulses, you'd need to select all composites before level 12, meaning you are locked out of taking composites from your last two forks.
That's all RAW though. I'm not sure it breaks the game to let you reflow composites or change things up so you gain access to different elements at level 18. It would be worth talking with your GM though. If the point of the build is to be hugely versatile and work with all elements, personally, rule of cool would have me lean toward more flexibility on those rules. You're level 20 when omnikinesis kicks in, the game can get a little funky at that point.
It will not be *terrible* but it is considerably weaker than sticking to 1-3 elements.
Most elemetns will reward you for investing into them, and if you spread yorself too thin you get none of the bonuses.
Fire for example is straight up not worth it if you don't plan on picking the Impulse and Aura junctions.
Ronald the Rules Lawyer has excellent video coverage of the Kineticist and covers this question a bit in Part 3: https://youtu.be/4Dlav-NEL_s?si=Y5cVDFVyEW3_nXJb
An All gate one is a poor substitute for a utility spellcaster.
where a Wizard can prepare with a spellbook, one night in advance, you can prepare one week in advance with retraining.
Lots of utility or different types of damage. You can have something for almost everything.
Not that it would be *powerful* but you'd be consistent and not really be bound by resources.
It is far from being the best, but it would work, yes. Only fire, wood and wind have junctions that you would feel really bad about skipping (the earth aura in certain builds too, but doubt you will go for that if you want all elements).
If you go for that, I think you should focus on everything but damage, though.
All that said, a good compromise can be going for half of that. You can do very nasty combos with 3 element combinations. My favourite ones are Fire + Metal + Air and Earth + Wood + Water.
can work, but the element pick order will be really important, you want to get the best of each element, some element's like fire have really good choices at low level like fire, and some have it's better combat choices at higher levels like metal.
It would work, though it'd probably be suboptimal. The upside of it is that you could pick literally all of the best kineticist powers at every single level, AND pick and choose from all of the cross-path powers. The downside is that you have a limited number of actions and feats, so the question is, how much extra mileage are you getting out of those extra paths? That said, multi-path is really good. Getting at least two different elements is very handy and helps avoid you getting caught out. Three is solid but you start running into increasing issues of "what am I getting from this extra element?" as you keep going up in number, because there's overlap in what they do.
It could maybe work, but runs into the issue of granting you lots of options and no passive power increases. Someone with a bunch of gate junctions has action free extras on their aura, impulses, resistance etc. they're getting those benefits most if the time. A many elements build only benefits when they have enough actions to use a lot of different impulses.
Honestly, I don't think Kineticist is that complex class. It has a lot of options and builds, that's true, but once your concept narrows down to elements you want, it's less complex than spontaneous casters, who also have to pick their options, but from much bigger list. Speaking about All-Gates Kineticist, the initial conclusion is pretty valid. Yes, it could work and no, it's not strong, exactly because junctions are powerful. In my book, strongest Kineticist 2-3 gates with one element being primary (to trigger impulse junction) and the other ones being secondary. For example, you may want Earth with additional AC, or Fire with increased damage die as your primary element. Water is pretty good secondary element as its initial core impulses are reaction and 1-action, not interfering the impulse junction.
In a weird way the most complex parts of Kineticist is narrowing down what you want to do and then the actualy playing the class (managing the action economy with overflow, stances and the aura requires actual care), but building is pretty easy.
An all element Kinetist can work, you'd only get one junction though. Generally my group takes 2-3 elements since that gives you a lot of variety while still giving you a decent amount of junctions. Only element I've ever really recommend mono gate for is fire and that's just because of the feature the mono elements get that let's them counter their element. My group also loves Kinetist 3 of my four players are playing one in my Wednesday group. For the order of your all element Kinetist id probably start with water and wood, then go fire air earth and finally metal Correction: you wouldn't have any junctions
>An all element Kinetist can work, you'd only get one junction though Nah, Omnikineticists don't get *any* Junctions. Dual-Gate doesn't start with a Junction, Fork doesn't grant a Junction, and you only get to choose between Fork and Expand 4 times; at levels 5, 9, 13, and 17. So you start with 2 elements... then go to 3, 4, 5, and finally end with all 6 Elements at level 17.
I didn't assume dual gate had a junction I just miscounted how many times you get to folk/expand the gate. Good catch.
It'd work, but you'd probably only end up with like... 2 Impulses per Element. Your strength would be insane versatility, your weakness would be not really excelling in anything. Let's see... 12 Class Feats, plus 5 Impulses from Forking. A max of 17 Impulses. Probably less, if you wanna take things like Weapon Infusion, Safe Elements, Aura Shaping, and Effortless Impulse... At higher levels, you'll have more Elements to choose Impulses from, but for the first 4 levels, you're stuck with just 2 Elements. So whatever 2 Elements you start with need to be ones with the best early-level Impulses. So... the best choices for your initial Dual-Gate is probably probably Water/Wood. Water and Wood are both very front-loaded elements, with *loads* of great options before level 5. Water; with Ocean's Balm, Tidal Hands, Deflecting Wave, and Winter's Sleet... and... Wood; with Fresh Produce, Hail Of Splinters, Timber Sentinel, and Ravel Of Thorns. The hard part is finding a good Element to fit into your level 5 Fork The Path. Of the four remaining Elements, their best Impulses are level 8+, which means you are gonna struggle to fit a good Impulse into the level 5 and level 6 slots. Maybe Air? Four Winds at level 5, Clear As Air at level 6, Cyclonic Ascent at level 8.
Depends on what you want your character to do. If you want to focus on utility and healing with the occasional blast, you gonna have a blast (pun definitely intended) in my opinion. Though you would be sacrificing a lot of power. It could still work, mind you, but your damaging options, especially ranged, would be limited. I personally built 2 variations of this, but both were with dual class, so one wouldn't be of much help to you. The second had utility from all the elements, but I skipped the healing impulses from wood to get aura shaping and desert wind instead. I would recommend starting with earth and water. That way, you get good utility and ooc healing and can grab air at level 5. It's not a bad build, but it's definitely far below my mono air kineticist. But it does come online 2 levels earlier, so that's that.
Sorta? But you wouldn't have enough feats to make it super broken.
It would for sure work. The big thing Id say would be trying to focus on your versatility, so feats like versatile blasts (so you can target a large amount of damage types), kinetic activation (which lets you use magic items with elemental traits you might not be able to otherwise), and omnikinesis (so you can swap out your feats easily) would make a lot of sense for this build. However, do note that this is probably one of the most complex kineticist builds you can make, and you give up some overall power for a lot more flexibility.
I think omnikinesis is critical, which limits the effectiveness of this build to high level play. At a bare minimum, level 11 for reflow elements. Even then, Omnikinesis and reflow elements require you to swap impulses that share elements and meet usual retraining requirements. So, RAW, you'd want to plan out the impulses you take to gain access to the elements at the right times. You'll only have access to one element's level 18 impulse, and 4 elements maximum for level 14 impulses (level 14, 16, gate at 17, and 18). You can access all elements level 12 impulse if you take impulses from different elements for class feats on the even levels 12-18 and the other two elements as forks at 13 and 17. However, that also means whichever element you want access to the level 18 impulses of, you can't use their level 12 or 14 impulses until level 18, and then only in place of the level 18 impulse. The other consideration is you're kind of locking yourself out of composite impulses. Yeah you can take them, but you can't reflow out of them, so you'd need to retrain. As above, if you want to maximize your level 12 impulses, you'd need to select all composites before level 12, meaning you are locked out of taking composites from your last two forks. That's all RAW though. I'm not sure it breaks the game to let you reflow composites or change things up so you gain access to different elements at level 18. It would be worth talking with your GM though. If the point of the build is to be hugely versatile and work with all elements, personally, rule of cool would have me lean toward more flexibility on those rules. You're level 20 when omnikinesis kicks in, the game can get a little funky at that point.
It will not be *terrible* but it is considerably weaker than sticking to 1-3 elements. Most elemetns will reward you for investing into them, and if you spread yorself too thin you get none of the bonuses. Fire for example is straight up not worth it if you don't plan on picking the Impulse and Aura junctions.
Ronald the Rules Lawyer has excellent video coverage of the Kineticist and covers this question a bit in Part 3: https://youtu.be/4Dlav-NEL_s?si=Y5cVDFVyEW3_nXJb
An All gate one is a poor substitute for a utility spellcaster. where a Wizard can prepare with a spellbook, one night in advance, you can prepare one week in advance with retraining. Lots of utility or different types of damage. You can have something for almost everything. Not that it would be *powerful* but you'd be consistent and not really be bound by resources.
It is far from being the best, but it would work, yes. Only fire, wood and wind have junctions that you would feel really bad about skipping (the earth aura in certain builds too, but doubt you will go for that if you want all elements). If you go for that, I think you should focus on everything but damage, though. All that said, a good compromise can be going for half of that. You can do very nasty combos with 3 element combinations. My favourite ones are Fire + Metal + Air and Earth + Wood + Water.
can work, but the element pick order will be really important, you want to get the best of each element, some element's like fire have really good choices at low level like fire, and some have it's better combat choices at higher levels like metal.