Review: CLASSifieds: The Apothecary

The Apothecary is something that I picked up because there is a glaring hole in the caster types. Namely that there's no full BAB 4/9 caster or full caster of the alchemy list. This looks like it serves as the latter. Granted it's not exactly necessary and can be troublesome to have a 'more alchemist' but I wanted to take a look.

Off the bat I'm a little irked. Normally when you present a class you get its hit die, class skills, and skill ranks per level before you get to the class features. Well I can guess it's hit die because of it's BAB but I see no Class Skills or skill ranks per level. These can be guessed given patterns from other classes but That is seriously not something to omit. That kind of thing alone gives me reason to throw this into my folder of stuff I'll never use, but for now I'll power on because it is easy to assume that it has a d6 hit die, class skills as the Alchemist, 2+INT skill ranks per level.

In a nutshell the Apothecary gets full casting alchemy including zero level extracts(!?), Discovery-like Concoctions every other level, Brew Potion, and a capstone ability.  This is simple and looks like it works okay but there are some minor things that set off alarms in my head. Due to how extracts work I'm curious as to what the heck the Widen and Bounce Ray concoctions do. That just raises too many questions. This also makes some of the choices for the spell list questionable at best and useless at the worst. Beyond that it doesn't give me much to differenciate it from the Alchemist. In fact with the loss of BAB (and presumably Hit Die) the extract list, even extended to 9 levels does not support the class enough to make it survive. It's list is nowhere near the Wizard's list so the BAB is not justified and it does not have enough abilities to support itself.

Overall the class as written doesn't work and even when you extrapolate what information should be there it is weak beyond belief and some of the abilities and the extract list show a painful misunderstanding as to how extracts even work. For me it picks at too many pet peeves for me to find useful so I'm giving it 1 out of 5 stars.

You can find this over on Paizo.com here.