The shiftweaver is a specialized veilweaver that gives up actual veilweaving progression for maximum flexibility. Its core ability gives it the ability to weave any veil it needs in the moment, which is incredibly useful.
Designing the Shiftweaver
What is the Shiftweaver’s Focus?
I wanted to design an akashic class that had fantastic flexibility over and above the normal shiftweavers with the ability to rapidly weave any veil they need as they need it.
I had originally designed shiftweaver to only be available to a Vizier with the Veilshifting ability or any veilweaver with the Shift Veil feat; however, having it based on those abilities didn’t seem great to me. As a specialist class, I wanted it to be available earlier than the average prestige class, which works with Vizier but not with Shift Veil. I also dislike making specialist classes that are restricted to only being used with a single base class.
The shiftweaver class is still based on those mechanics, but it is no longer directly tied to them.
Shiftweaver now has some thematic skill ranks as a level gate and minimum veil and essence requirements to ensure the character build is the right type for entry.
The Shiftweave Aura
A shiftweaver is based entirely on its Shiftweave Aura ability. At first level, the shiftweaver gains her soul aura, but its only ability is to provide 1 effective point of essence, called an “Aura Point.” This is… suboptimal. It doesn’t progress anything except her total essence. The only real benefit is that this point of essence can’t be lost to essence damage, giving her an effective minimum she can never drop below. She gains an additional Aura Point with each level.
The first level is largely a dead level, but the benefits of the class are significant enough that I felt it needs that level to balance it. This is a similar philosophy to why almost every psionic prestige class and most spellcasting PrCs lose a casting level at 1st or 2nd.
She also stacks shiftweaver with another veilweaving class to determine her effective veilweaver level, but that’s an infrequently used number, making this benefit is negligible.
Weave Aura
The second level of shiftweaver is where the class can actually make use of her main ability. As a full-round action, she can weave her soul aura into any veil on her veilweaver class’ veil list. If she doesn’t have a veilweaving class, because she either got in with the Weave Veil feat or has racial veils, she has to pick a limited set of veils and weave her aura into veils from just that list.
Weaving her aura, of course, provokes attacks of opportunity but can’t be “cast” defensively. Weaving her aura is meant as a utility ability and should only be used in combat when absolutely necessary or at a distance from enemies.
A woven veil lasts for 1 minute and cannot be dismissed early. While woven, she loses her Aura Points, which drops her effective essence pool. So, she has to be able to make good judgement calls on when to use this ability, especially in combat. This is even more true if she has invested some aura points into a veil that gives her extra hit points or is otherwise keeping her alive. If she weaves a veil that grants hit points, when it unravels a minute later, she ends up in a similar situation to a barbarian whose rage just ended.
Bind Aura
The final class feature a veilweaver gains is the ability to actually bind her aura-woven veil to an open chakra. She can only bind to chakras that are already opened by class levels, feats, spells, etc. Shiftweaver doesn’t open chakras, so third level is nearly useless to any character without open chakras or who has already bound veils to all opened chakras.
While this is a significant upgrade in power to the weave aura ability, it’s also limited by things the class has no control over. It’s definitely more useful to higher level characters with more open chakras, but it simultaneously becomes less flexible as more of those opened chakras have normal veils bound to them for the day. Since this class also delays opening chakras by 3 levels, it’s partially self limiting.
I can see a higher level veilweave with levels in shiftweaver taking the Twin-Weave Chakra feat at least once or twice for their most useful chakras but weaving and binding only a single veil there just so that it remains available for the Bind Aura ability.