Review: The Chemist

Here is another ARMR free class. This is the one that got me to take a look at the series to begin with. So what do we have here?

On it's most basic level its an Alchemist/Paladin hybrid. It has the full BAB d10 HD chassis with four levels of  extracts. It gets an Elemental Smite; a butteloade of energy damage on melee attacks. It gets bonuses to saves against poisons and alchemy craft checks. It also gets bonus feats that can be used to access a limited number of alchemist discoveries. Their mundane alchemical items have higher DCs and they get a scaling energy resistance.

The chemist gets access to it's own exclusive discovery, and the pdf comes with three alchemical weapons. The weapons themselves are awesome but the weapon table is rather minimalistic so you're missing whether they are simple, exotic or martial and small weapon damage.

Well like the Zephyrus before this is mostly a big chunk of potential that feels like it doesn't go very far. Out of all the casting types Alchemy feels like it's in its own little niche, even with the Investigator around. Having a warrior alchemist is intriguing and the Chemist can certainly handle itself. Out of all the series the Zephyrus and Chemist are the only ones that have seen some play and the Chemist can get pretty tough since mutagen is involved. But of course this is a small pdf and so it gets only one exclusive discovery so mostly comes off boring after the first go around. The limited space for flavor doesn't help in that regard since the Alchemist can already be built to be a bit more fighty, disregarding that the Mutation Warrior Fighter exists.

That said if you don't have a product that covers it, the Chemist does come off as a satisfying alchemical elementalist that can utilize those crappy alchemical weapons you forget about by level 5, and it has a window of opportunity with it's discoveries for those kind of class features. It's technically a new play experience since you can use extracts on a much tougher character. Plus it settles my grid-filling instinct when it comes to casting types.

In the end the Chemist is a fun gimmick class that works and fills a mechanical niche but it has way more potential than actual substance. I would rate it as a 3 out of 5 star product for being so minimalist, but since giving it access to third party alchemical gear makes it far more interesting and it is free I'll push it up to 4 out of 5 stars.

You can find it over on Paizo.com here.