Thaumaturge optimisation guide

Introduction

The thaumaturge is a class with roots in real world practices, especially those we consider superstition and paganism. It is a successor to the 1e Occultist, but also a class with an identity of its own, and it’s a very fun one. The thaumaturge is a wellspring of knowledge gathered from sources of widely varying reputability; They use this collected lore to empower their weaponry with magic and collected items called their Implements and Esoterica to create weaknesses or exploit existing ones in their foes.

Mechanically, the thaumaturge is often defined as a “fifth man” or a “jack of all trades,” at least at face value. They have training in a variety of skills, but no native access to many additional skill feats or permanent skill increases. They have proficiency in the standard martial weapons and a host of damage boosters, but are limited to one handed weapons or unarmed strikes and have poorer base accuracy than most other martials. They have some of the best save progression in the game, but lower than average hit points for a martial and a modest armour class. They can access a variety of actions, but have a tight action economy. They are a class excellent at filling in the gaps missing in a conventional party, but might not be able to hold their own in a specific role if built poorly.

This is a general description that can fit to an extent, but the thaumaturge is a very powerful class with access to powerful bonuses to a variety of skills and actions, as well as better ability to use magical items, and a lot of other fun features on them. They are often compared to the investigator, as they are both martials with a key attribute in a mental stat that are quite good at skills. They both have their differences and similarities and will be discussed towards the end of this guide.

This guide exists to help Pathfinder 2e players, both new and old, make the strongest, and hopefully, most fun, builds they can using this very versatile class. The thaumaturge can flex into a variety of roles using its base abilities to an extent that no other martial can really achieve without archetyping. It also has really fun flavour as a Worker of Wonders, using a mixture of your collected knowledge, various implements and esoterica and belief in your own abilities and the stories others so easily dismiss as fiction to reveal the truth that will vanquish your foes. Lastly, I want to give a huge shout out to u/Gazebomimic, author of the excellent Definitive Build Series, who graciously allowed me to use their slick formatting style and excellent generic feat reviews for certain sections of the guide. You can find their Investigator guide here, which also includes links for the other guides they’ve done. As hard as I may try to be objective, this guide is but a humble effort undertaken by one person; if you’d like to check out other sources, try John R’s thaumaturge guide too! Lastly, I’d like to thank Grell and ThomasJFoolery in particular, as well as many others who provided some fantastic insights and reviews for parts of this guide.

Now, let’s see what knowledge we can recall from here…

Colour grading system

I’ll be using the formatting system that u/Gazebomimic uses for their wonderful Definitive Build series, inspired by older optimisation guides all the way from the 3.5e era. The colours correspond to a set number of stars as displayed below for accessibility purposes.

I use Blue to determine options I think are excellent picks for your build that you can’t go wrong with, especially if you know what you’re doing. These abilities are incredibly powerful and often build-defining. You rarely have a reason to skip these outside of flavour purposes.

Green options are pretty good. You can make pretty good use of them, and they don’t really hinder your capabilities.

Yellow sort of serves a double purpose. Abilities ranked yellow are either kind of mediocre or effective but only in somewhat niche situations. Take these either if you really like them or are certain those situations will come up often and a higher rated option couldn’t do the same.

Red is bad. These options are generally just bad. Even if they work in certain situations, those either never come up or are just not that hard to overcome anyway. Only take a red option if you really want to for flavour purposes.

Colour	Stars	Power rating
Blue	★★★★	Incredibly powerful
Green	★★★	Pretty good stuff
Yellow	★★	Situational/Mediocre
Red	★	Generally avoid

Additionally, to save my fingers from withering away, I use abbreviations and acronyms for a few class features, abilities etc. that come up often. Here’s a quick guide to them:

EV - Exploit Vulnerability
IV - Intensify Vulnerability
IE - Implement’s Empowerment
thaum/turge - short for thaumaturge
castaturge - a thaumaturge that casts spells frequently
dexturge/finesseturge - thaumaturge turge builds that rely on dexterity as your secondary and attack attribute/attack attribute for melee specifically.
RK - Recall Knowledge
TMI - Trick Magic Item
MAD - Multiple Attribute Dependent
MAP - Multiple Attack Penalty

Ancestries

While you can get away with ignoring your ancestry’s features in most games, many ancestries offer powerful features that either expand the thaumaturge’s kit or improve the options they already have. I will be going over ancestries I believe to be noteworthy to the thaumaturge and ranking individual feats that I think stand out. It is my hope that I can revisit this section of the guide and provide fully detailed rankings on at least the best options in the near future.

Alternate Ancestry Boosts:

Alternate boost made most ancestral ability boosts irrelevant and centralised ancestral power. The ancestries with the best generalist features -such as elves and halflings- are now amongst the highest rated ancestries for all classes rather than just the ones their base attributes encouraged. Outside of common ancestries, androids, kashrishi and even catfolk represent other universal top-tier choices under alternate boost.

Alternate boost thaumaturges will choose to boost charisma and their choice of dexterity and strength. If you are a strength thaumaturge, you may choose to use this boost to improve your constitution rather than your charisma to improve your staying power, though I generally wouldn’t advise it. There is otherwise little deviation from this array outside of certain spellcasting/skill monkey builds.

Default Attribute Boosts:

Attribute arrays with flaws remain relevant because you can get an extra point in a more important stat by using the ancestry’s default array instead of alternate boost, provided the ancestry has a flaw in an attribute your class doesn’t care about.

Thaumaturges, especially melee builds, benefit from ancestries that dump intelligence. You truly have next to no reason to use intelligence when Esoteric Lore and Diverse Lore already exist. It provides no value to most thaums, and so ancestries that have an intelligence flaw are generally solid choices for the class.

Ranged thaumaturges also do not mind strength flaws. Propulsive weaponry is not easy for thaumaturges to use, and while strength can be nice on a thrown weapon build, the existence of Implement’s Empowerment and Exploit Vulnerability, not to mention the MAD nature of the class do little to justify investment in strength beyond a +0, aside from the armour check penalties, but those can be easily alleviated or just ignored.

A dedicated ranged thaumaturge could try using an attribute array with a constitution flaw, but I wouldn’t recommend it. The weapons you use will generally have middling ranges, which means you’ll have to be closer to enemies, and many battlemaps aren’t very large anyway. There’s also just not a lot of value to constitution flaws since that’s an attribute you’re probably looking to bump with a free boost anyway.

Generic Ancestry Feats:

This section is to provide basic evaluations of some generic feat types that many ancestries gain access to. They usually all follow the same format and so they’re ranked here generically.

Ancestry Battle Forms ★ You’re a martial who needs their hands all the time. Don’t.
Ancestry Cantrip These feats usually offer one cantrip of your choice from a specific tradition, usually arcane or primal.
- Guidance ★★★★ The cantrip of a skill monkey. The thaumaturge does have easy access to status bonuses, but few apply to their skills, save for the lantern, and it isn’t this flexible. It also interacts with the Tome neatly if you really want to use its IV ability.
- Shield ★★★★ Give yourself a bonus to armour class using a single action with the option to use your reaction to reduce between five and twenty-five damage. A great pick for thaumaturges, since you get a powerful reaction and a circumstance bonus to AC, which is not very easy to access outside of wearing a buckler.. Somewhat redundant with the Amulet implement.
- Glass Shield ★★★ Like Shield, but blocks less damage in exchange for damaging the enemy a bit. You don’t have great native spellcasting proficiency, but this is the only way for primal cantrip granters to access a reliable free hand circumstance bonus to AC.
- Detect Magic, Figment, Light, Telekinetic Hand ★★★ These ubiquitous spells don’t rely on spellcasting proficiency and provide useful utility effects. On the off-chance nobody else in your party has them, they become more valuable.
- Electric Arc ★★★ Electric arc is the best offensive cantrip. It deals good damage, has a reliable damage type, and uses a basic save instead of a spell attack. An excellent choice for a caster thaumaturge, especially with their high charisma. Other competitive options are Spout and Scatter Scree.
Ancestry Climbing and the Thaumaturge: Thaumaturges aren’t generally interested in climb speeds because it requires free hands they simply don’t have. However, ancestries that offer free-hand climbing capabilities, like the tailed goblin, vanara, athamasi kashrishi etc. are very valuable to ranged ‘turges. If you also have a climb speed, it reduces your reliance on strength for the purposes of scaling walls, and also increases your defences by making you harder to reach without ranged attacks, which most foes are weaker at compared to their melee strikes.
- Table: u/gazebomimic has created an excellent table by which climbing heritages and feats can be compared. Take these ratings with a grain of salt, as they do not consider individual class preferences. You can find it here.
Ancestry Damage Resistance ★★/★★★ Ancestral damage resistances come in one of two forms: scaling or flat. Scaling resistances equal half your level and are usually heritages. Flat resistances are usually set to five and available at level five. You will eventually outgrow flat resistances and should retrain them once your level hits the teens. Scaling resistances start out worse, but are usually attainable immediately and are always relevant. The best damage types to resist are fire, poison, and void due to their ubiquity. It is also worth mentioning that all fire resistant heritages are technically inferior to the ancestry with the ifrit versatile heritage, which provides the exact same bonuses with a vastly expanded feat pool.
Ancestry Emotion Resistance ★★/★★★ Dozens of ancestries all offer this same feat and heritage: a numeric bonus against emotion effects with the ability to turn a success into critical success. They start out rated green but are made redundant by the thaumaturge’s ninth level Will proficiency increase. At that point, the feat only provides a minor numeric bonus and drops to a yellow rating. You might wish to retrain them at that point. Heritages and some versions of this feat, especially earlier versions that don’t provide a circumstance bonus should be avoided or retrained if you expect your game to reach ninth level.
Ancestry Flight ★★★/★★★★ Ancestry flight boils down to two options. You either take a feat at 9th level to get the effects of a Fly Spell once per day and then upgrade to a permanent Fly Speed at level 17 with another feat, or you spend your 1st, 5th and 9th level feats to go from a powered leap into permanent flight, usually coupled with a heritage or native ancestry bonus that gives you immunity to fall damage. These feats are incredibly valuable to any class; anyone is able to take advantage of a permanent fly speed. There are some ancestries that don’t fit into either category, but these will likely be corrected when Player Core 2 releases. Currently, all ancestries that gain a fly speed at level 9 are rare, so they may not be available at your table.
Ancestry Lore ★ You have Esoteric Lore, and Diverse Lore. The remaster boosted this feat by making each ancestry lore have the additional lore skill feat added to it. These are yellow ★★ if the game you play in is centred around such an ancestry, or if you are looking for extra skills to pick up, such as if you want to invest in all the face skills while also pushing athletics or stealth, but you should probably be able to get those from a background.
Ancestry Unarmed Attack ★★/★★★/★★★★ The thaumaturge really enjoys free hands to hold implements and esoterica in, and unarmed attacks are a great way to solve that issue, especially once you get your second implement. The thaumaturge can use just about any unarmed attack as well as they do most weapons since lower damage doesn’t mean as much to the ‘turge thanks to IE and EV anyway, but attacks stronger than the basic fist are appreciated. Goblins and leshies are two common ancestries with access to powerful unarmed attacks.
The one exception are attacks that provide you with claws or specifically improve attacks made with only your fists (not the generic fist attack, which can be made with any part of the body). These basically require you to always have a hand free to make strikes with, even once you have 2+ implements, which means you can’t have 2 implements active at once and basically means you’re holding a weapon in your hand that’s generally not as strong as a martial weapon. You can certainly try and make it work, but there are very few claw attacks that are actually worth it.
Ancestry Weapon Expertise ★ These feats have been phased out by the remaster, but thaumaturges never needed them because their own weapon proficiencies exceed it.
Ancestry Weapon Training ★/★★/★★★ This feat’s rating is as diverse as the weapons themselves are. For the most part, ancestral weapons are not worth the feat it takes to get them. Most have common equivalents that are very similar in power, save for reach weaponry. As of the remaster, these feats also grant access to the weapon’s critical specialisation effect at fifth level, and it is likely that your GM will extend this benefit to legacy ancestries as well, which is what this guide will consider. These feats are slightly more valuable than usual to the thaumaturge because without the weapon implement they do not have permanent access to critical specialisation effects.

Common Ancestries:

The following ancestries are available in all campaigns.

Dwarf ★

Charisma flaw, horrible speed, and very mediocre feats. 10 HP and darkvision don’t mean much, especially now that the leshy and orc are core ancestries. There are certainly ancestries in the uncommon and rare categories worse than this, and you do have some alright feats past level 9, which could bump this to yellow, but as it stands it’s the worst option in the core selection by a mile.

Elf ★★★★

The alternate ability boost rules have made the elf a stand-out in optimisation guides everywhere. With 6 ancestral hitpoints, they are still on the more fragile side, but they have excellent feats and some standout heritages. You will absolutely find something useful here, especially for dexturges.

Elf Heritages:

Ancient ★★★★ Choose any multiclass dedication feat and take it. The only reason not to do this is if you are already in a free archetype game.
Arctic ★★ Standard ancestry damage resistance.
Cavern ★★★ Darkvision is always helpful. If you use versatile heritages, you might prefer picking those up instead.
Desert ★★★ Standard ancestry damage resistance.
Seer ★★★ You get a decent cantrip and a bonus to checks to Identify Magic. The thaumaturge has proficiency with all of these skills but generally poor intelligence and wisdom, so this is a solid bonus.
Whisper ★★★ The remaster reworked this heritage to reduce the flat checks required to target concealed or hidden creatures. It’s a bit redundant with the Lantern, but still a solid bonus nonetheless.
Woodland ★★ You can climb trees better than average and take cover anywhere in the woods. The climb speed is only useful out of combat, but the latter benefit is solid for dexturges if your campaign features the woodlands with frequency.

1^st Level Elf Feats

Ancestral Linguistics ★★ Gaining an extra language isn’t very helpful. Gaining every common language is helpful, even if you only “know” it after a delay. There are still campaigns where this will never come up, but it’ll usually matter at least a couple times, especially if you are the party Face.
Ancestral Longevity ★ You have plenty of trained skills and access to the Tome Implement. If you need this feat, your party is doing something very weird with their skills.
Demonbane Warrior ★★ This feat is entirely useless if your campaign does not feature demons frequently. It’s entirely possible for you to encounter fiends, but you can’t guarantee them being demons. It’s a decent damage bonus though, so if your campaign features demons in frequency this is a good pick. If you can trigger their sin vulnerabilities, even better.
Elemental Wrath ★★ You get the acid splash cantrip. You can also change the reliable acid damage type to a less reliable damage type.
Elven Aloofness ★ PCs should not be affected by the Coerce activity. If your GM disagrees, such a game may not be for you. Demoralize is very much a for-combat action; Either you or the demoralising foe ought to be defeated in a lot less time than 10 minutes.
Eleven Lore ★★ Since you are already trained in the tradition skills, this is effectively two free proficiencies in any skill. You might want to pick this up for some extra Lores.
Elven Verve ★★ This feat allows you to shrug off some severe conditions more quickly than usual. While they aren’t common, these conditions are so devastating that protecting yourself against them is at least worth considering, especially with your lower constitution.
Elven Weapon Familiarity ★ All of these weapons are two-handed. Pass.
Forlorn ★★/★★★ Standard ancestry emotion resistance.
Know Your Own ★ This is just a worse Automatic Knowledge that you can access for the price of an ancestry feat. Look at the feat directly below this. Let that inform your decision.
Nimble Elf ★★★★ Gotta go fast. Simple, but fantastic. Every turge will want this.
Otherworldly Magic ★★★ Standard ancestry cantrip. Choose Shield.
Share Thoughts ★ Absolutely not. Pick up a scroll if you really want it.
Unwavering Mein ★ The sleep resistance is hilariously situational, and the other benefit is just weird. If an effect lasts a minute, this does practically nothing unless your combat is going for 10+ rounds, and even then, that was just shaving 10% of its duration, if you somehow didn’t already shake it off. Just pick up Forlorn or Elven Verve.
Wildborn magic ★★★ Standard ancestry cantrip. Choose Guidance or Glass Shield.
Woodcraft ★★ You get a few bonuses to survival skill activities that might matter once or twice a campaign.

5^th Level Elf Feats

Ageless Patience ★★★★ Though this is slightly redundant with the Regalia and Tome implements, this only costs a 5th level ancestry feat and applies to many more effects. As you level and increase your modifiers, this basically makes you immune to critical failures. Fantastic out of combat, and still pretty good in there too.
Ancestral Suspicion ★★ Not only is this partially redundant at 9th level, the bonus is situational and also partially redundant with Ageless Patience. Still, being controlled is a very nasty effect, so if it comes up this is a useful pick.
Elven Instincts ★★★★ This feat provides the most powerful and reliable initiative boost of any ancestry feat. It may become slightly redundant if your party makes frequent use of the scout exploration activity.
Forest Stealth ★★ Assuming you are in a forest, you can hide with a big bonus from cover. The effect is powerful action compression, but region-locked. You should have a pretty good idea of how frequent forests are in your campaign by this level.
Martial Experience ★ No.
Wildborn Adept ★ Some of these cantrips are nice on a castaturge, but its too high level for its cost, on top of competing with far better options.

9^th Level Elf Feats:

Brightness Seeker ★★★ You cast augury once per day and gain a bonus against any effects involved in pursuing the course of action you specified. It’s a pretty long cast time, but the bonus lasts even longer, and if the reading says proceeding through the dungeon brings you woe then honestly the bigger bonus is even more incentive to power through anyway. Just make sure you have those Translocate scrolls handy.
Elf Step ★★★★ Just keep kiting. This unfortunately doesn’t work with abilities that include a step, but this has a completely different use case anyway. Melee foes ought to never catch you within their reach
Expert Longevity ★★ This feat is interesting. The flexible expert skills don’t matter a whole lot if you already took the Tome, but this effectively enables you to rapidly retrain your skill increases. You and your party are probably already good at whatever’s necessary for the campaign by this level, but there’s certainly some good use for this, especially when it comes to Lores.
Otherworldly Acumen ★★★★ This feat is astonishingly flexible. Gain any second level spell from the same tradition as your cantrip, with the ability to swap it to any other spell during your daily preparations. Some good choices: comprehend language, darkvision, humanoid form, invisibility, mirror image, resist energy, see the unseen, spider climb, water breathing. Leave it on mirror image when you don’t know what is coming. Swap it to one of the others if you expect to need it. You can also check out the sections in Equipment below on scrolls and other spellcasting items for further advice and a link to a useful guide.
Tree Climber ★ You gain a mediocre climb speed. The thaumaturge has no need for this sort of climbing, especially by this level.

13^th Level Elf Feats:

Avenge Ally ★★★ If an ally is dying, make a strike with the benefits of Sure Strike for one action. This is a fantastic effect, but it does require a dying ally. You may be able to cheese it depending on the definition of ally, but that’s hard to fly.
Universal Longevity ★★ You gain expert level skills on demand once per day. With this much investment into the feat path you could have probably just picked up the Tome instead.
Wandering Heart ★★ You swap your elf heritage to one appropriate to the environment. If you chose one of those heritages your campaign is probably themed around a particular terrain, but by this level travelling around the world or other planes is common or about to be common, so this can be somewhat useful; You could probably have just bought a relevant magic item though.

17^th Level Elf Feats:

Magic Rider ★★ Most Teleportation effects are uncommon, and if a teleport is relevant to your campaign it’s incredibly likely the GM will just have it work for the purposes of moving the story forward.

Gnome ★★★★

Gnomes make excellent dexturges. They have a great ability score array, with native boost to constitution and charisma and a flaw in strength. Their ancestry feats are well suited to a variety of thaumaturge builds, including those who wish to supplement their build with innate spellcasting.

Gnome Heritages:

Chameleon ★★★ A strong bonus to stealth checks; an excellent choice for sneaky dexturges.
Fey-Touched ★★★ You get a free cantrip from the primal spell list and you can change it once per day. I’d typically just leave it on guidance or Glass Shield unless I had a pressing need for a different cantrip.
Sensate ★★★ You get scent with a good range and a powerful bonus to detect undetected creatures. Pretty useful with your high perception.
Umbral ★★★ You get darkvision. Less useful if your game uses versatile heritages.
Vivacious ★★ You gain low resistance to void damage and treat your doomed condition as one lower. This can be useful in the right campaigns, especially those with undead.
Wellspring ★★★ You can get the Shield cantrip through this heritage, but would otherwise be better served by Fey-Touched for its flexibility.

1^st Level Gnome Feats:

Animal Accomplice ★★★★ You gain a familiar. The thaumaturge can make excellent use of a familiar and has feats to improve its capabilities, so this basically gives you a class feat for the price of an ancestry feat.
Animal Elocutionist ★★★You can talk to animals and gain a small bonus to doing so. This basically gives you access to the largest communications network in the right regions, assuming your GM is willing to play ball.
Empathetic Plea ★★★ You’re a very hostile person on account of being a martial, but given that the thaumaturge focuses on getting one enemy down at a time, you’ll have plenty of targets for this feat at the start of a combat that isn’t just a solo encounter, and you’ve an excellent diplomacy modifier. You don’t have many native reactions, and they won’t always apply against the targets this one triggers on.
Fey Fellowship ★★ In a campaign featuring the fey, this is an excellent bonus against the wily fellows both in and out of combat.
First World Magic ★★ Gets you Guidance. You could probably just get this from the Fey Touched heritage, which is why this feat’s rating is lower than normal.
Gnome Obsession ★★★ This feat is pretty good. Get both a scaling lore skill and Assurance in anything you want with a day of downtime. You don’t have as much reliance on lore skills, but if you’ve got an eidolon, a decent intelligence, and/or don’t want to access this through the Tome you can make good use of this.
Gnome Polyglot ★★ You learn three new languages. If you’re the party face this might be somewhat useful.
Gnome Weapon Familiarity ★ If you wanted the flickmace, you took Unconventional Weaponry for it. Decent for Gnomes using Alternate Boost though.
Grim Insight ★★ You’ve got really good saving throws, and fear is a common effect. Partially redundant at level 9, but automatically making foes off-guard is really nice.
Illusion Sense ★★ You get a bonus against illusions. Could be nice if you’re doing the scout/searcher role with a Lantern.
Inventive Offensive ★★ Meh. You can already access plenty of weapons that already have the relevant traits.
Life Giving Magic ★★ Casting an innate cantrip gives you temporary hit points. The amount is low and the duration is short. Still, it’s a reaction that gives you more durability. Surprisingly not a great combination with the (Glass) Shield cantrips, since their reactions already reduce far more damage.
Natural Performer ★ Performance isn’t a useful skill and their feats are near useless for someone with your capabilities.
Razzle Dazzle ★ You don’t have any means of blinding or dazzling a creature that would benefit from this feat. If you do, this can a good pick for those effects with a low duration, though you might want to just retrain for it once you get such a reliable feature.
Theoretical Acumen ★★★★ There is no class better suited to the use of this ability. You can invest into most of the skills the feat replaces decently, but being able to use your Esoteric Lore modifier for a whole Saving Throw is just fantastic, even if it is just once per day.
Unexpected Shift ★★★ The thaumaturge is an offensive class and will need to target hostile creatures. Becoming dazzled isn’t ideal, but the defensive bonuses are well worth it if they save your life. If you choose this feat, you’re absolutely picking up Fortuitous Shift.
Vibrant Display ★ Thaumaturges focus on one target at a time. If you are surrounded by multiple foes at once and you don’t have a more reliable means of area control/damage, Run away.

5^th Level Gnome Feats:

Eclectic Obsession ★★ This feat allows you to spontaneously gain any lore you want for ten minutes as an action. The benefit of knowing when you critically failed a check by losing this skill is a bit redundant with Unmistakable Lore though. You are unlikely to have high intelligence, but if you do (or have an eidolon) this can be pretty good if something you didn’t prepare for showed up and you really want to know what it is before (or while) you attack it.
Energised Font ★ You only need this feat if you took an archetype and have a focus pool from it. Pretty good if you do.
Intuitive Illusions ★ I would generally not advise that the thaumaturge pick up sustaining spells, especially for combat, but this can deal with that. It also requires you to cast such a spell in the first place, and while you have access to spellcasting items, this is just too situational.
Natural Illusionist ★★ Illusion spells’ effectiveness are often reliant on how your GM has NPCs react to them. These spells do scale though,which is nice.
Vibrant Display ★ If you need to disguise your armour, buy a Ring of Discretion.

9^th Level Gnome Feats

Cautious Curiosity ★★ You gain disguise magic and silence as once-per-day spells. Disguise magic isn’t very helpful, but silence can bee an automatic success on stealth checks if combined with any form of invisibility.
First World Adept ★★★ You gain revealing light and invisibility as once-per-day spells. You won’t often land revealing light without a spellcasting archetype but invisibility is a fantastic spell to cast on either yourself or allies.
Fortuitous Shift ★★★★ This is a great improvement to the Unexpected Shift feat. You gain a higher chance to activate the damage reduction, and you are no longer dazzled if it occurs, no longer hindering your offensive capabilities.
Life Leap ★★ You could probably just tumble through instead. Can get you out of flanking though, but there are more accessible actions for you to use in those scenarios.
Vivacious Conduit ★ You have better feats to pick than a bit more healing while someone else uses Treat Wounds on you.

13^th Level Gnome Feats:

Instinctive Obfuscation ★★★ Impose a powerful flat check on an enemy’s attack against you. Save this for powerful spells or a nasty attack you’ve already identified the foe to have to outright negate their ability. Depending on how you define being attacked, this might apply to saving throw abilities too, which bumps this to Blue for its sheer versatility.

Goblin ★★★

Goblins are fun. A lot of golarion lore posits them as being able to use seemingly mundane items that suddenly work in their possession, if only for a short while, which fits a thaumaturge well enough. A wisdom flaw is annoying but not insurmountable. Invest into stealth and don’t negate your will saves, and you can make use of the default boosts well enough for a hardy finesse ‘turge. Any other build will probably just use alternate boosts, unless you want some extra constitution as a midranger.

Goblin Heritages:

Charhide ★★★ Standard ancestry damage resistance and easier flat checks to end persistent fire damage. Persistent damage is dangerous and fire damage is common, so the reduction is appreciated.
Irongut ★★ You can eat and drink from consumables even while sickened. You also resist harmful toxins, but only if they came from something you ate. It’s also partially redundant with your fortitude mastery at level 15.
Razortooth ★★★ Standard ancestry unarmed attack.
Snow ★★ Standard ancestry damage resistance.
Tailed ★★★ You can climb without hands. This allows ranged weapon users to climb up a wall and shoot from safety. You’ll still need to make an athletics check to climb, so a decent athletics and some strength is encouraged, at least until you get Tree Climber at level 5. For that reason, it has good synergy with thrown weapons.
Treedweller ★★ The treedweller gains a great bonus to stealth while in the woods and to some situational survival actions. If you are in the woods often, this is nice, otherwise, pick something else.
Unbreakable ★★★ The bonus hit points lose relevance as you level, but this also has some fun follow-up feats which add good durability boosts. If you don’t expect your game to go past level 10, improve its rating by a step.

1^st Level Goblin Feats:

Bouncy Goblin ★★ On its own this is whatever, but it has a good follow-up for ranged turges if you reach level 9+.
Burn It! ★ You have no reliable spells or alchemical items with which to use this feat. If you have scroll thaumaturge this can be a nice bonus when you want to chuck a fireball, but it’s too situational.
City Scavenger ★ I like the idea of a goblin using “garbage” for their esoterica, what with one man’s trash being another man’s treasure. That idea doesn’t require this garbage feat, which is treasure to no one.
Extra Squishy ★★ Squeezing is infrequent at best. The bonuses against being shoved while squeezing are even more situational.
Fang Sharpener ★★ If you are a strength goblin you might like this feat for the free longsword attached to your face, but the tailed goblin might provide better benefits.
Goblin Scuttle ★★★ This is an excellent feat on any class. Step when an ally moves adjacent to you. Scuttle is fantastic for getting out of an enemy’s reach, getting into position for flanking, or even getting out of a potential flank. Even more solid if you are a melee build and have another melee ally.
Goblin Song ★★ You can use performance to reduce an enemy’s will saves and perception checks. You should probably just use the Bon Mot skill feat and invest into diplomacy instead.
Goblin Weapon Familiarity ★★★ You have two main choices here. The Dogslicer ★★★ is a lovely option for melee turges. The thaumaturge can make excellent use of the deception skill and has Divine Disharmony to guarantee the backstabber damage on top of just flanking, which is a nice damage boost on top of having agile and finesse. Very useful if you can get multiple attacks off in a turn. The second weapon of interest is the Big Boom Gun ★★. Generally, I don’t think thaumaturges can make good use of firearms without heavy investment that takes a few levels for them to really get going. However, especially in games that start at higher levels, the Big Boom Gun is quite interesting on Tome builds. The weapon’s gimmick is that it really hurts the user if you miss or critically miss, but can target any physical damage type and has the highest critical damage of any one handed martial firearm in the game. Most thaumaturges would turn down such a bad trade, but if you use the tome’s IV, you already know whether or not you will hit, like a pseudo Devise a Stratagem. The Big Boom Gun is a solid pick for those builds, especially when combined with Risky Reload, though you might consider retraining for it when you get to that level instead.
Hard Tail ★★★You get a tail attack with low damage and no traits, but it technically allows you to trip with no hands as part of the tailed goblin heritage’s benefits. Can be nice for a strength turge, especially with its follow up feats.
Junk Tinker ★ You can save a small amount of money while crafting. Why are you crafting?
Rough Rider ★You don’t have an animal companion.
Twitchy ★★★ You gain moderate improvements to your defences against traps and to initiative checks that occasionally receive a massive improvement if an opponent is using deception or stealth for initiative. Unless you are facing those situations, The initiative boost is somewhat redundant with activities like Scouting and feats like Incredible Initiative, but the feat synergizes really well with Lanterns and the thaumaturge struggles with access to circumstance bonuses to their defences. It also just costs a single ancestry feat.
Very Sneaky ★★★ It’s a bit harder to use for an action intensive build like the thaumaturge, but it’s just in general a strong feat and with the right build you’ll find some use of it. Seeking out cover or concealment at the start of (or before) battle should be a top priority should you choose this feat.

5^th Level Goblin Feats:

Ankle Bite ★★★★ You can bite a creature that grabs you. This feat is a fantastic offensive boost, allowing you an additional chance to get your damage boosters onto an enemy when they grab or restrain you, which is a very common ability most melee foes have.
Chosen of Lamashtu ★★★ Gain a second heritage bonus.
Kneecap ★ You make a strike that doesn’t deal damage but imposes a movement speed penalty. Wasting your damage for this isn’t a good idea.
Loud Singer ★★ Expand the range of Goblin Song and affect more targets.
Tail Spin ★★★★ Bypass the MAP on a trip attempt on two adjacent foes that doesn’t require the use of your hands, and improves your success to a critical success, thus dealing extra damage to the target(s). This feat doesn’t actually increase your MAP past the first penalty since it’s only a single athletics check. A great choice for strength thaumaturges.
Torch Goblin ★★ You don’t have any obvious means of setting yourself on fire. You might be able to convince your GM that the big boom gun counts due to its critical failure effect, in which case this is decent damage and deterrs foes from attempting their maneuvers on you. However, you must still attempt the recovery check as normal, so it might not be worth it if you have to activate this effect more than once a combat. At least your resistance will reduce or outright cancel most of the damage.
Tree Climber ★★★★ The Tree Climber feat gives you a climb speed of ten feet, enabling you to ascend most surfaces without any check. When you do need to make a check, you receive a massive bonus due to your climb speed. In any environment with walls, tailed goblins shouldn’t spend any time on the ground. Let your party trigger the traps and take melee attacks while you rain down fire from the walls: odds are they can take more punishment than you can. Only take this on a tailed goblin; the treedweller requires you to use your hands and provides no additional bonuses.
Vandal ★★ You get an extra skill and destroy unattended objects slightly better.

9^th Level Goblin Feats:

Cave Climber ★★ If you took Tree Climber, your climb speed now equals your land speed when on trees. If you are in forested environments often, that’s fantastic mobility; Otherwise this feat is useless. Only take this if you are a tailed goblin.
Cling ★★★ If your enemy moves away, you move with them. This only applies if you have a relevant unarmed attack, like jaws or a tail, because otherwise you don’t have the hands free for it. This can save you actions moving, but it does disable you from using your main unarmed strikes. Nonetheless, you still have your basic unarmed attack available, so you aren’t losing much damage.
Freeze It! ★★★★ A great pick for melee builds. This check doesn’t have the attack trait and applies a powerful debuff against the main defence you’ll target; their AC. A fantastic pick for melee turges who didn’t want to use the native unarmed attacks.
Hungry Goblin ★★★★ Get a wounding rune on your handwraps and enjoy consistent temporary HP that you can constantly refresh. A powerful durability booster for melee turges.
Roll With It ★★★ Cancel a critical hit in exchange for allowing the enemy to fling you 30 feet in any direction. The consequence is negligible to ranged characters who would rather be far away, but melee characters are more likely to benefit from it in the first place, but I would rather pick another feat for those characters. You can also use this on a regular hit but the drawbacks are too hefty to recommend. This movement also triggers reactive strikes as it is voluntary movement, so don’t use it if you’d take a hit because of it, which you ought to know with your Recall Knowledge capabilities
Scalding Spit ★★ This requires a situational feat and you investing in unarmed attacks without taking a more relevant heritage, unless you took chosen of lamashtu, which actually provides an earlier unarmed attack. If you did, this feat offers some great versatility, but it requires actions to set up and might require continuous set up depending on your recovery checks. If you wanted a switch hitting unarmed attacker, pick the leshy.
Skittering Scuttle ★★★ Flee or Flank quicker. Look for as many bonuses to your speed as possible, especially if they give you an even number; Remember to watch out for Reactive Strikes.

13^th Level Goblin Feats:

Unbreakable-er Goblin ★★★ Ten more hit points and immunity to fall damage. Neither one is that impressive by now, but both together are pretty solid. If you took bouncy goblin, you also get to bounce around more when falling, which can provide some extra mobility, and at the very least is just hilarious
Very, Very Sneaky ★★★ You can hide anywhere and move full speed while sneaking. It’s a fantastic benefit but you may consider waiting a few more levels to pick it up as a skill feat through Legendary Sneak; skill feats are generally less valuable than ancestry feats the higher your level, but this does basically give you the most important effects of Swift and Legendary Sneak.

17^th Level Goblin Feats:

Reckless Abandon ★★★ There are plenty of uses to near-total damage immunity on your turn, especially when it can be activated as a free action. This can be very useful when it comes to your action economy, enabling you to spend less actions having to avoid certain hazards and threats and just charging recklessly wherever it is you must go.

Halfling ★★★★

The Halfling has a decent default ability array. Dexterity and Wisdom are solid scores for the thaumaturge to boost, especially for a ranged build that can safely ignore strength for the most part. There’s not much that isn’t obvious to most players here; You came for Halfling Luck.

Halfling Heritages:

Gutsy ★/★★★ Standard ancestry emotion resistance. Does not provide a circumstance bonus, so useless past level 9.
Hillock ★★★ You regain extra hit points from medicine checks. Can help your party medic move to another ally faster.
Jinxed (U) ★ Absolutely not.
Nomadic ★★ You gain a few more languages that will probably never come up, but it’s nice if you’re a face.
Observant ★★★ You gain a passive benefit to your perception DC, but not your perception checks. Still useful for Lantern scouts.
Twilight ★★ Low-light vision isn’t as helpful as full darkvision. Just take a versatile heritage if those are available.
Wildwood ★★ Ignore difficult terrain caused by plants. This can be useful in nature campaigns, but otherwise it’s whatever.

1^st Level Halfling Feats:

Distracting Shadows ★★★ Use your companions to hide. Assuming your party has another ranged character who you can start combat behind, this is a nice way to make enemies off-guard to your ranged attacks, but you could probably use Divine Disharmony instead
Folksy Patter ★★★ This becomes increasingly reliable as your party levels up, and you can make good use of it with your high charisma. It’s a great way to let your party know that somebody is lying without tipping off the liar, and functions similarly to telepathy in that capacity, so it’s excellent in games of intrigue and manipulation.
Halfling Luck ★★★★ Every other feat here means nothing compared to Halfling Luck. This can and will save your life.
Halfling Weapon Familiarity ★★ The only weapon of note here is the filcher’s fork, which is identical to the starknife but exchanges versatile S for Backstabber. I don’t think that’s enough to pick this over anything else, especially the monstrosity right above it.
Innocuous ★★ The intent of the feat seems to be that all you can do is prevent people from realising your attempt to Create a Diversion was a trick on a failure (but not a critical failure). This is meh.
Prarie Rider ★ You don’t need the bonus or more trained skills.
Sure Feet ★ You don’t have the hands to make use of this in combat..
Titan Slinger ★★ You can’t make great use of reload weaponry, especially non-firearms, which most slings are. This does work with the bola though, so if you’re a thrown weapon turge it’s a nice pick up, basically giving you a trident with some extra goodies.
Unfettered Halfling ★★ You’re better at resisting and escaping the grabbed, restrained, and immobilised conditions. It’s a success to critical success effect, which usually means getting to take a five foot stride when you get grappled. It’s a bit redundant with your improvement to fortitude saves at level 15, on top of its situational nature, and in all honesty the new monster maneuver design and subsequent changes to their modifiers means that a lot of these foes have very strong athletics, so failure is infrequent.
Watchful Halfling ★★ You gain a decent bonus to noticing possession or enchantment. It might be useful, but enchantment effects aren’t very frequent. You can also use Aid to help someone’s save against an effect, but these sort of things generally don’t allow repeat saves, especially if affecting an NPC.

5^th Level Halfling Feats:

Cultural Adaptability ★★★★ This feat is incredibly versatile. Come up with a decent backstory and get some lovely feats. This is especially useful in an ancestry paragon game.
Easily Dismissed (U) ★★ I’m not sure why this even needs to be a feat. I could maybe see it as a skill feat, but the mechanics are wildly different from the idea the feat’s name evokes. I’ve only included it because it felt so weird that it exists in the first place.
Halfling Ingenuity ★★ This feature basically nets you the investigator’s keen recollection class feature. It gets more useful the more imaginative you are and the more flexible your GM is.
Shared Luck ★★★★ Use this feat when an ally fails a roll they’re usually good at and the consequences are harsh, such as the rogue critically failing a reflex save or even something like an inventor critically failing on an important crafting check. It doesn’t even cost a reaction.
Step Lively ★★ You can step around a larger creature’s space if they end their movement adjacent to you. This might be useful for breaking flanking or getting into flanking, but most large or larger enemies have reach and are unlikely to be getting all the way up in your face.

9^th Level Halfling Feats:

Cunning Climber ★ You don’t have hands free for this to matter in combat.
Dance Underfoot ★ Why? You don’t gain any actual bonus for being in the same space as a larger creature unless your GM cooks up some homebrew nonsense, and I can't rank that for you.
Fade Away ★★★ Free invisibility is always good. Unfortunately, it has a mediocre prerequisite in Easily Dismissed, which is also uncommon.
Guiding Luck ★★★ You get an extra use of halfling luck that applies to perception checks or attack rolls only; Use it if your party really needs to win initiative against some nasty foes or to get an important strike in before an enemy can act again.
Helpful Halfling ★★ If you have an archetype that lets you aid more reliably this can be nice on a support turge. However, that also means you’re using a skill you’ve invested in reliably, and it ought to be near impossible to critically fail on anything but a nat 1, and at higher levels that doesn’t even make you critically fail anymore.
Irrepressible ★ If you aren’t gutsy this feat is already redundant with your class features. If you are gutsy, it is yellow till level 13 where it’s back to red. You already have a really good will save on account of your base ancestry boosts and will progression, so this is unlikely to come up often, but fear effects can be nasty.
Unhampered Passage ★★ You can cast freedom of movement. Automatically escaping non magical restraining effects is pretty cool, and with a ten minute cast time you might want to take it before combat begins. Still, it doesn’t scale and you have better options. I might just take cultural adaptability and look for one of those ancestry feats that provide bonuses against maneuver actions to your DCs instead.

17^th Level Halfling Feats:

Shadow Self ★★★★ Free invisibility once per hour when you succeed on a hide or sneak check against all your foes, up to 1 minute or until you take a hostile action. That on its own is already great, but you also make your foes think you are hidden in another space, and this seems to be a non-magical non-illusion effect. A great capstone for stealth builds.

Human ★★★★

The alternate attribute boosts rule made humans a lot worse in most optimisation rankings simply because their free boosts were no longer such a valuable feature, alongside the increase in options that various new ancestries offer. The human still remains a potent choice for the thaumaturge thanks to their ready access to many general feats and the power of Natural Ambition ★★★★ on the thaumaturge. The ancestry peters out a bit by the end, but by that point you can just drop a slot on Adopted Ancestry.

Human Heritages:

Skilled ★★★ If you want more skills at expert level this is the best way to do it. The thaumaturge might like this to get some of their non tradition skills to expert if they want to take full advantage of their extra limited skill increases.
Versatile ★★★ You get a general feat. Armor Training, Fleet, Adopted Ancestry, Incredible Initiative and Toughness are all good choices. This heritage is quite strong, but plenty of other ancestries get features either similar to or better than just the base feat, and they didn’t have to give up any base ancestry or heritage features to get them.
Wintertouched ★★ Standard ancestry damage resistance.

1^st Level Human Feats:

Adapted Cantrip ★ You don’t have spellcasting.
Cooperative Nature ★★★ You don’t have a lot of base reactions and you might not always want to make multiple strikes due to your lower accuracy, so this is a pretty powerful bonus, especially with the remaster reducing the DC for Aid ensuring you critically succeed more often at lower levels.
Dragon Spit ★★ Ethnicity/nationality locked. Offensive spellcasting.
General Training ★★★★ Gain another general feat. Good options include Armor Training, Fleet, Toughness etc. Many humans will simply keep choosing this feat.
Gloomseer ★★ Ethnicity/nationality locked. You gain low-light vision.
Haughty Obstinacy ★★★ PCs shouldn’t be coerced. The other part of the effect applies to some nasty will saves, but those effects are quite rare and the feature is completely redundant with Resolve at level 9.
Natural Ambition ★★★★ This feat tends to rank near the top of optimisation guides, and for good reason. The thaumaturge has a lot of powerful and fun level 1 feats that open up a lot of feat chains and strong options for the class. Unfortunately, they are all competing with Diverse Lore. This feat allows you to take an additional 1st level feat in addition to that powerhouse, or if you wish to play a build that is less reliant on that feature, you still greatly benefit from having access to, for example, scroll thaumaturgy and a familiar at the same time, or taking Ammunition Thaumaturgy alongside an actual 1st level feat that’s not just a tax.
Natural Skill ★★ This is very unnecessary for a class with your number of trained skills.
Unconventional Weaponry ★★★ Poach whatever weapon you want from any other ancestry or culture. This is a great way to access one handed reach weapons for melee turges.

5^th Level Human Feats:

Adaptive Adept ★ You can’t cast spells.
Clever Improviser ★★ Being able to use this to attempt trained actions can be pretty useful, but it’s mostly for the purposes of recall knowledge and you already have diverse lore.
Darkseer ★★★ Ethnicity/nationality locked. Gain darkvision.
Sense Allies ★ The thaumaturge has few features that require targeting their allies; This is most useful for the purposes of Share Weaknesses.
Wavetouched Paragon ★★ Ethnicity/nationality locked. You gain a swim speed.

9^th Level Human Feats:

Cooperative Soul ★★ You become completely immune to failure on aid checks provided you are an expert in the skill used. Works especially well if you have a feat that lets you use a single skill on all Aid checks.
Dragon Prince ★★★ Ethnicity/nationality locked, and requires Dragon Spit. Area damage is always handy, especially if you have a reliable DC. You generally want to go for cones over lines unless your enemies enjoy the conga.
Group Aid ★★ Can be nice out of combat, but you could have also used Follow The Expert.
Hardy Traveller ★ Buy a bag of holding; Improving your overland travel speed is almost useless unless your entire party can improve it to the same (or similar) speed at once.
Incredible Improvisation ★★ Once a day you gain a powerful bonus to a skill you are untrained with. I’d sooner have taken the tome.
Multitalented ★★★★ Gain a free multiclass archetype. This is a bit late in level, so look for archetypes that offer a lot of value up front with their dedication or have some really solid late-game feats; If you have the aiuvarin heritage, you get to ignore the attribute requirements, which can be useful for some builds.
Shory Aeromancer ★★★ Cast fly once per day. Always handy.

13^th Level Human Feats:

Advanced General Training ★★ Most of the best general feats are low level, but I might pick this up for the purposes of mid-level skill feats. The thaumaturge has ready access to extra skills, but skill feats are its most limiting factor.
Bounce Back ★★★ Ignoring the wounded condition is as great as it is rare. If you went down once, you might well go down again; this provides some well appreciated insurance. You are a very offensive class with slightly less than average defences when it comes to your HP and AC, so this will be handy.
Irriseni Ice Witch ★★ Ethnicity/nationality locked. You can better resist cold damage as a wintertouched human and cast a powerful spell once a day, though it doesn’t scale. The cold resistance is the best part of this feat, but Wall of Ice is still nice to have. I’d only take it if cold damage comes up often.
Shadow Pact ★★ Ethnicity/nationality locked. You get a non-scaling creation that evaporates in bright light.
Shory Aerialist ★★ Ethnicity/nationality locked. The more flight you have access to, the better this feat becomes, and the thaumaturge has excellent access to flight from magical items. Bump its rating by one step if you can access flight more than once a day, or up to Blue if you can access it every encounter. If you only have flight from the prior Shory feat, this is still okay.
Stubborn Persistence ★★ You get a small chance to avoid becoming fatigued. Fatigue is rare as far as conditions go, and is not very debilitating one. You can probably just cast a spell to deal with it anyway
Unconventional Expertise ★ Completely unnecessary.

17^th Level Human Feats:

Heroic Presence ★★ Rather mediocre as capstone feats go, but it’s still free temporary HP (which will likely disappear immediately) and bonuses to will saves. A little redundant with the Regalia, but this does apply regardless of range and can also affect your party’s minions.

Leshy ★★★

These little plants became so popular and beloved that Paizo decided they had to become core ancestries. The Leshies have a very lovely intelligence flaw, but no native charisma boost, so you may want to use alternate boost instead if you want to maximise your charisma, but plenty of builds can live just fine with a +3. A lot of their options are just pillaged from the elf and orc lists, so you might just use them, but they have a lot of interesting options on their own, and are rather hardy for being little plants. You could draw from real world stories and treatments that involve the use of flora to describe the use of your esoterica.

Leshy Heritages:

Cactus ★★★ Standard ancestry unarmed strike.
Fruit ★★★ You get some decent healing once per day. Don’t think about it too hard; even as a thaumaturge, some things are better off being unexplained.
Fungus ★★★ You gain darkvision.
Gourd ★★★ If you are disarmed, drawing a weapon with a potency crystal attached to it is a great back up, especially since you basically get the benefits of Quick Draw here.
Pine ★★ On its own this does basically nothing for you, but it opens up access to some neat feats.
Leaf ★★★ Immunity to fall damage opens up novel and hilarious new forms of movement. Be sure to invest in jumping to make maximum use of this feat.
Lotus ★ You can walk on water. You can only do so slowly and if the water is moving you’ll need to make a check. Just get a swim speed.
Root ★★★ You get a couple extra hit points and become harder to shove, reposition, and trip. This is especially useful given your poor reflex saves.
Seaweed ★ Is your campaign nautical? Definitely pick this. Otherwise, just get swim speeds from a consumable or something.
Vine ★★ You can climb without hands. This allows ranged turges to climb up a wall and shoot from safety. However, with no native access to a climb speed, investment into athletics and a bit of strength is necessary, so thrown weapons are your best bet.

1^st Level Leshy Feats:

Ageless Spirit ★ Pillaged from the elf list. The same rating applies.
Grasping Reach ★ You can’t use two handed weapons.
Harmlessly Cute ★★★ You get a decent social skill feat 6 levels earlier than you ought to. It technically still has a requirement of being master in Diplomacy, so talk with your GM.
Leshy Superstition ★★★ Pillaged from the orc list. A fantastic and easy feat which you should use every time it becomes available.
Pyrophilic Recovery (U) ★★ This is a really roundabout way of saying you reduce fire damage on top of any fire resistances you already have. Pine leshies have access to this feat.
Seedpod ★★★This ranged unarmed attack is already fantastic with its reliable damage type and range longer than most thrown weapons, but being able to combine it with the Cactus leshy provides you a powerful switch hitter build for dexturges that leaves your hands free to use implements and activate items too. Together, they are a Blue combination.
Shadow of the Wilds ★ Incredibly situational and only useful if your party is as paranoid about this as you are.
Undaunted ★★/★★★ Standard ancestry emotion resistance.

5^th Level Leshy Feats:

Anchoring Roots ★★★ You gain powerful bonuses against reposition, shove, and trip, but you must spend an action to activate the effect. You are even better at using this feat because you can always RK on a foe to see if they have some nasty abilities that trigger when they use such effects, so you know when it’s best to activate this.
Climate Adaptation (U) ★ Pine leshies get access, but this is near useless.
Defensive Needles (U) ★★ Pine leshies get access, but your GM will probably let you use it with a Cactus leshy too. The damage isn’t a lot, but it can add up.
Leshy Glide ★★ I’m not sure why you’d just not want to jump up again really.
Ritual Reversion ★★ You become a plant. It is impossible to distinguish you from a normal plant through perception, but some enemies might be able to see through your disguise with nature or survival. Could be useful for sneaking around.
Speak with Kindred ★★ You can talk to plants. Your leshy heritage determines how useful this feat is to you, as well as how game your GM is with such an effect. In the right scenario, this can get you a very large communications network, and you have excellent capabilities as a Face.

9^th Level Leshy Feats:

Bark and Tendril ★★★ Oaken resilience is an alright defensive buff with a good duration, but it doesn’t scale at all. Entangle is very good; the difficult terrain it creates applies regardless of the creatures’ saves, so your non-existent spellcasting proficiency doesn’t hurt as much. This can entirely lock out many enemies' movement abilities.
Lucky Keepsake ★★★ Pillaged from the orc list. Still great.
Solar Rejuvenation ★★ You regain hit points over time while in sunlight unless you are a fungus leshy, in which case you shouldn’t bother because you don’t generally have a large pile of dead plants to eat. Even so, whoever’s treating wounds on you was probably going to heal you to full anyway, but if you didn’t take too much damage this is still nice.
Spore Cloud ★★ You can dazzle all creatures in an emanation around you. THe thaumaturge has a very good class DC, but this does cost two actions to use; you might consider just running away instead.
Towering Growth (U) ★★★ Large size and expanded reach is great for strength turges, especially if you have a weapon or mirror implements and some aura effects. You also get to use this twice per day rather than just once unlike most other feats.

13^th Level Leshy Feats:

Call of the Green Man ★ Standard ancestry battle form.
Cloak of Poison ★★Passively deal poison damage to any creature who damages you in the melee without a reach weapon. Poison is a mediocre damage type, but you can choose not to activate it when fighting something immune to poison. It’s only once per day though.

17^th Level Leshy Feats:

Flourish and Ruin ★★ Field of life is only practical when fighting undead or outside of combat, in which case it restores 10d8 (45 on average) to each party member. Tangling creepers can create difficult terrain in a great area; However, many enemies by this level will have flight capabilities and the spell requires your spell attacks and DCs for any further effect. Even with a spellcasting proficiency, your spell attacks are mediocre, and you should certainly have better healing by now.
Regrowth ★★★ You can cast regenerate. This spell makes one target nigh-invulnerable unless your enemies use fire or acid damage, and you should have no problem figuring that out by this level.

Orc ★★★

If you want to get into the melee, you can do much worse than the orc. It has a powerful chassis, as tanky as a dwarf without suffering a speed penalty, and some decent heritage options, as well as a fantastic array of feats. If you want to be hard to kill, the Orc can certainly help with that.

Orc Heritages:

Badlands ★ Completely unnecessary. Hustling is useless and if you really wanted to avoid environmental heat effects you could have just taken another ancestry or the ifrit versatile heritage.
Battle Ready ★★★★ Intimidation is a fantastic skill for the thaumaturge, and this saves you a skill proficiency and a skill feat.
Deep ★ Combat climber on its own is useless to you and Terrain Expertise is whatever.
Grave ★★★ For campaigns featuring the undead in droves, These features easily shoot it up to blue.
Hold Scarred ★★★ You get a couple extra hit points and Diehard. Orc Ferocity makes Diehard a bit more useful than average, and a free general feat is still nice to have.
Rainfall ★★ These are all situational and mostly apply out of combat. Combining them together is still nice though.
Winter ★ Even worse than badlands. At least this gets you an extra (mediocre) skill.

1^st Level Orc Feats:

Beast Trainer ★ Just get the beastmaster archetype.
Iron Fists ★ Your fist attacks stop being nonlethal (even if you want them to be) and gain the shove trait. I don’t understand this feat. RAW, Fist attacks mean that you could technically use this to shove with with your kick or a headbutt, but the wording and flavour of this feat very clearly intend to apply this to just your literal fists, and your hands are full constantly so all this does is make applying an item bonus on shoves easier in the best case scenario. Worthless.
Hold Mark ★★★ You get a permanent status bonus to saves against a tradition of your choice, but you are already trained in all the skills present here and it doesn’t have the usual text for substitution. Still, a passive bonus is fantastic, even if slightly redundant with some thaumaturge abilities. I generally recommend selecting the divine or arcane tradition unless you know the other two are going to come up frequently. Divine is used by many common enemies, especially holy/unholy enemies and undead, while arcane is the most offensive spell list. Pity it’s competing with that monstrosity below.
Orc Ferocity ★★★★ you’re picking this up, no questions asked. If you really want something else, pick it up with Ancestral Paragon. This feat defines the orc ancestry, and the thaumaturge will greatly appreciate this feature given their constantly full hands and the pain of picking things up. You’re also not potentially dead, which is generally a pretty good thing.
Orc Superstition ★★★ Get a circumstance bonus against magic as a reaction. It’s a pity it has to compete with the powerhouse above it.
Orc Warmask ★★ On its own this feat does almost nothing for you. It’s saved by a red rating thanks to its follow up feats, but if you aren’t picking those this is worthless.
Orc Weapon Familiarity ★★ The knuckle dagger and necksplitter are fun weapons, but they don’t do much you couldn’t manage already. You can’t use anything else.
Tusks ★★ Standard ancestry unarmed attack. I rank this a bit lower than average because you could have easily gotten this from another ancestry instead with better support for them.

5^th Level Orc Feats:

Athletic Might ★★ Just get an item or spell that gives you an automatic climb or swim speed.
Bloody Blows ★★ A mediocre critical effect for unarmed attacks. At least it can combine with your Regalia.
Defy Death ★★ Situational. If you got revived through such an effect, you likely have the time to recover from it anyway.
Mask of Power ★★★ Free Sure Strike. Good on anyone.
Mask of Rejection ★★★ A very big magic resistance bonus against spells of your mask’s tradition. Fantastic even at just once a day.
Scar-Thick Skin ★★ You become twice as likely to end persistent bleed damage, which is among the most common persistent damage types. Some other ancestries and heritages have better bonuses though, but at least this one is common.
Victorious Vigor ★★★ You’ve got some heavy damage numbers and focus on whittling down a single target at a time. You may have better reactions, but this is a great preventative measure anyway.

9^th Level Orc Feats:

Death's Drums ★★★ When you suffer persistent damage or have the wounded condition, you gain a powerful bonus to fortitude saving throws. Synergises well with Orc Ferocity.
Dragon Grip ★ You don’t have an animal companion.
Mask of Pain ★★★★ You deal some solid damage to a creature you demoralise in exchange for a reaction. This is a great way to finish off a mook or soften them up for a beating, and it’s yet another bonus that benefits from the regalia.
Pervasive Superstition ★★★ You always get a bonus to your saving throws against magic. The thaumaturge doesn’t have access to a lot of circumstance bonuses, so this is a solid pick, and gets even better if you have a reaction implement so this doesn’t compete with that anymore.
Undying Ferocity ★★ You gain a modest amount of temporary hit points. It’s most useful to prevent persistent damage from downing you again, But you ought to have enough abilities to counteract that by now.

13^th Level Orc Feats:

Ferocious Beasts ★ You don’t have an animal companion.
Incredible Ferocity ★★★ Use Orc Ferocity almost every encounter. Don’t get too reckless though; this is still a once per encounter ability, less if you’re under a time crunch.
Lifeblood's Call ★★★ Gain a damage bonus when you are wounded or doomed. Synergises with Orc Ferocity for obvious reasons.
Mask of Fear ★★ You can burn your mask to instantly remove the frightened condition. Your will saving throws are among the best in the game.
Spell Devourer ★★★ You get temporary hit points when you succeed at a saving throw. The higher your saves are, the better this gets; look for the most powerful circumstance and status bonuses you can stack often to get the most use out of this feat.

17^th Level Orc Feats:

Rampaging Ferocity ★★★★ A fantastic ability to activate as long as you are within reach of the foe who nearly downed you. Thaumaturges love free stuff, and a free strike is one of the best things you can give them. Look to maximise your reach to get the most value out of this feat.

Versatile Heritages

You lose your heritage bonus in exchange for (usually) low light vision and an expanded feat pool. Sometimes that’s worth it, sometimes it is not. These heritages can be a good way to make up the difference if the rating is reduced by a mediocre feat selection, as is the case for leshies.

The remaster has changed it such that the aiuvarin and the dromaar (what were previously known as half-elfs and half-orcs respectively) are now available as common heritages for any ancestry, not just the human. I’m not… entirely sure how this interacts with certain ancestries now becoming core, namely the leshy, but RAW nothing stops it so just work with your GM to work out a sensible explanation. Player Core has also given vague advice on the existence of Mixed ancestries, but again, it’s basically just up to you and the GM to work that out.

Additionally, many uncommon heritages have lineage feats at level 1, tying you to a specific ancestor or type of creature from which you are descended. You can only have one lineage feat and you can only pick them at level 1, and they can’t be retrained, so keep that in mind.

Aiuvarin ★★★

The elf feat list is a fantastic choice on nearly any ancestry. If your base class has a more reliable base chassis than the elf, such as the orc or gnome, this is a decent pick to improve your ability in both ranged and melee. The only reason this isn’t blue is because of the elf’s powerful base speed and easier access to the Ancient Elf heritage, but this is still a great pick. The unique aiuvarin feats aren’t much to write home about unless you can take Elf Avatism for Ancient Elf in a free archetype game.

Changeling (U) ★★★

If you really want to make your character’s mommy issues a part of their mechanics, the changeling is pretty good for it. Children of hags turning into thaumaturges to ward off the Call and hunt down evil creatures is quite fitting, and there’s some pretty good stuff here, even if you have to wade through some garbage to get to it.

1^st Level Changeling Lineage Feats:

Brine May ★ You’re a bit better at Swim checks.
Callow May ★ You get a mediocre skill feat and a situational combat bonus if you roll deception for initiative, which is incredibly unlikely to happen.
Dream May ★ Very situational. You are unlikely to face the conditions this lessens at early levels and by the mid-level mark your party can probably just buy/prepare one of the condition cleanser spells like Sound Body and Clear Mind.
Moon May ★★★ Standard ancestry cantrip.
Slag May ★ If your GM allows you to use this with your hands full (for example, using claws with your legs) this is green. Free hand grappling and applying cold iron (which is near impossible to apply to unarmed strikes unless you are a monk) to your unarmed attacks is pretty good, and the damage is respectable.
Snow May ★ Situational and mediocre.
Veil May ★★ Your perception is good, but your deception can be even better. Donning a disguise quickly isn’t fantastic but it can be useful in subterfuge missions if you’ve been made and need to escape quickly.
Virga May ★★ Electric Arc is a reliable cantrip, and it’s an occult cantrip instead of being arcane or primal, which is neat.

1^st Level Changeling Feats:

Changeling Lore ★★ Hag Lore is a lot more useful than most ancestry lores, and this also gets you Deception and a free skill.
Hag Claws ★ Just use your fists. You also likely can’t use these attacks since they require claws that likely are on your hands, which are full.
Hag's Sight ★★★ Standard ancestry darkvision.
Maiden's Mending ★★ You’re unlikely to have many of these but if you do (such as by taking scroll thaumaturgy) this can be a decent booster.

5^th Level Changeling Feats:

Called ★★★★ Name one effect that calls for a will save that doesn’t have the mental trait. I struggle to think of any that aren’t player facing focus spells or some illusion spells. This is, effectively, a permanent circumstance bonus to your will saves. You also get to turn successes against control effects into critical successes, but that’s both redundant by level 9 and utterly overshadowed by the former effect.
Cunning Hag ★★ Maybe you want to open a door mid combat.
Favourable Winds ★ Who looked at this and thought “this is a great and useful ability that’s completely balanced” and put it in the same section as the Called feat?
Mistchild ★★★ This is a useful bonus for thaumaturges who like to sneak around, and also synergises with many spells and the Mirror’s IV ability well. Be sure to keep your AC up as much as possible though.

9^th Level Changeling Feats:

Accursed Claws ★ You generally can’t use claws and the damage is too mediocre for such a high level effect.
Invoke The Elements ★★★ Requires a lineage feat; the best lineage feats are Virga or Veil May, but if you are one of the other two this is a great way to feel better about your situational choice. A powerful defensive buff for both melee and dexturges, punishing enemies for getting adjacent to you by taking some modest damage with a save against your solid class DC, and forcing concealment on reach using foes and ranged enemies who make attacks against you. The only issue is that it takes 2 actions to activate, but it’s a great defensive bonus anyway. Since it lacks the usual text saying otherwise, you are able to use this concealment to hide, but not to get undetected. Synergises well with the Mistchild feat.
Mother's Mindfulness ★ Honestly? I’d rather pick up the Bell.
Occult Resistance ★★ Requires expert in Occultism. The bonus is quite solid, but a lot of offensive occult effects force will saves anyway, and many of those have the mental trait, so you could have probably just taken Called instead for a much wider ranging effect. Still decent if your campaign is focused around occult mysteries and the like.

13^th Level Changeling Feats:

Hag Magic ★★★ I enjoy clairvoyance as a scouting tool, and augury is always a great pick up. Most of the other spells here are whatever, but you can still find something nice.
Spiteful Rake ★ You can’t use claws and you never have hands free.

17^th Level Changeling Feats:

Crone's Cruelty ★ Single Target Incapacitation spell that doesn’t heighten. Pass.
Stormy Elements ★★★ Use Invoke The Elements every encounter. A fantastic bonus to your defensive capabilities.

Dromaar ★★

The dromaar aren’t bad, I’m just not sure why you wouldn’t play a normal orc instead. You get the orc’s solid base chassis and a heritage that actually gives you something from the get-go (or even just take another versatile heritage) on top of already accessing its feat list. Maybe you’d like it on a hardy gnome?

Nephilim (U) ★★★

This new heritage takes the place of all the former planar heritages, though the aphorite and ganzi feats have not been reprinted in Player Core. As of current, it includes all the feats belonging to both the Aasimar and the Tiefling, either reprinted from the APG or changed up a bit. In general this ancestry is most powerful when accessing the fiendish feats, as they provide some powerful bonuses. PFS has ruled that you can use aasimar and tiefling feats as a nephilim, though you may only pick one or the other and can’t treat them interchangeably (though weirdly you can take something like an angelkin lineage and tiefling feats); At present, I will only be reviewing the feats presented in Player Core for the Nephilim.

1^st Level Nephilim Lineage Feats:

Angelkin ★★ Mediocre skill and some extra languages. Could be nice for a face.
Grimspawn ★★★ General feats for an ancestry feat is pretty good, and Diehard’s always nice to have.
Hellspawn ★★★ A modest set of bonuses. Free skill feats are always neat, and Lie to Me is pretty good, though not super necessary, especially with your high perception.
Lawbringer ★★/★★★ Standard ancestry emotion resistance.
Musetouched ★★ You’re better at escaping. You shouldn’t be escaping that much.
Pitborn ★★★★ Not only is athletics a fantastic skill on every thaumaturge, this gives you a flexible skill feat for it. Free skill feats are a fantastic bonus for skill monkey turges, and this is unparalleled flexibility for a non-human ancestry feat.

1^st Level Nephilim Feats:

Bestial Manifestation ★★★ Standard ancestry unarmed attacks. I’d pick the hoof or the tail for their reliable damage type.
Halo ★★★ You have a light spell affixed to you that you can activate or deactivate with a single action.
Nephilim Eyes ★★★ Standard ancestry darkvision.
Nephilim Lore ★★ This is surprisingly flexible as lore feats go. I’d give it some consideration if you’re fighting creatures from a certain plane or in that plane often.
Nimble Hooves ★★★★ Movement speed bonuses are always fantastic. Won’t stack with feats like Nimble Elf.

5^th Level Nephilim Feats:

Blessed Blood ★ Funnily enough, you can take this feat regardless of lineage; Your fiendish blood is certainly most holy. The damage is mediocre and has an incredibly situational trigger, and you’re incredibly unlikely to be the party crafter.
Extraplanar Supplication ★★ Cast bless or bane. Sustaining either is going to be a heavy action tax on the thaumaturge’s already strained action economy. You already have reliable access to magic items and status bonuses anyway. Don’t even think about picking Bane.
Nephilim Resistance ★★★ Standard flat ancestry resistance. Choose fire.
Scion of many Planes ★★ You almost never want this. I’d only take it if you wanted a lineage feat but also wanted Nephilim Eyes, since you don’t actually need a lineage feat to qualify for this.
Skillful Tail ★★ Maybe you want to open a door mid combat. Maybe you want to open a door mid combat.

9^th Level Nephilim Feats:

Celestial magic ★ Frankly, none of these spells are worth a 9th level feat. If you really want to pick this up, only choose Everlight and Humanoid Form; Everything else requires a spellcasting proficiency you don’t have or scaling the feat doesn’t provide.
Divine Countermeasures ★★ You gain a bonus on saving throws against divine effects.The Divine tradition is a common tool of many fiends and undead, as well as certain dragons. Even if it’s a bit high level, a flat circumstance bonus is quite powerful, and this is a great pick if divine enemies are common in your campaign.
Divine Wings ★★★ 9/17 ancestry flight progression.
Fiendish magic ★★★ Invisibility and See the Unseen are your best picks and they’re both solid options. Everything else doesn’t heighten at all and becomes near-useless in short order. You might like False Vitality for its long duration.

13^th Level Nephilim Feats:

Celestial Mercy ★ Why do these feats provide spells that need to scale to stay relevant and then cannot scale at all?
Slip Sideways ★★★★ Fifth rank Translocate is a powerful get out of jail free card. Break out of nearly every bad situation you’re in, be it a jail cell, a monster’s stomach, or an awkward dinner with your partner’s parents. Unfortunately locked to the fiendish lineages, which is weird given a lot of celestials can access this feat too. You might take Scion of Many Planes or retrain for it just to access this feat.
Summon Nephilim Kin ★★/★★★/★★★★ You summon creatures appropriate to your lineage. Don’t listen to anyone who tells you summon spells are bad: your summons are useless for combat, but they provide impressive utility. Many heritages offer low-level summons that can fly, turn invisible, and be effective scouts, though you must be quick with how you use them given the one minute time limit.
The best options are the Hellspawn, for their utility options and access to fifth level translocate through the zebub and barbazu, and the Lawbringer, for their archons access to translocate, flight, and healing support.
The Musetouched also provides you with the gancanagh, which empowers allies with heroism and inspiring makeout sessions; their long durations means you can summon a gancanagh, let your party get their kisses in, dismiss the azata and still enjoy the benefits in combat. They can also translate all languages. The Pitborn also has the vermlek, which can help you hide bodies and remove or fake evidence, and the brimorak can cast translocate and fireball, making them good messengers, fast couriers, and hilarious distractions.

17th Level Nephilim Feats:

Divine Declaration ★ Offensive spellcasting.
Eternal Wings ★★★ 9/17 ancestry flight progression.

Proficiencies and Advancement:

I rank these proficiencies relative to other classes. The thaumaturge’s progression means they’re good at a lot more things than you’d think.

Key Attribute ★★★ Charisma is your key attribute. It fuels just about every class feature the thaumaturge has, but outside of investing into the charisma based skills it holds little intrinsic value.
Hit Points ★★ You get eight hit points per level. Your hit points are better than most dedicated spellcasters, but worse than most frontline martial characters. You do have easy access to defensive abilities however, which can help bridge the gap, on top of your above average save progression.
Perception ★★★ The Thaumaturge’s perception progression is above average. You start at expert and increase to master at ninth level. The thaumaturge greatly benefits from going first due to their vast repertoire, so you have some incentive to boost your initiative as much as you can.
Saving Throws ★★★★★ The thaumaturge has the fastest will save progression in the game. They reach master at 7th level and hit legendary at level 13. That’s four levels before any of the other classes with Legendary Will can reach it, save for the Monk, which can choose it as their Third Path to Perfection at level 15. They also reach master in fortitude at 15th level, and reflex saves, which you hit expert in at level 3, are easy to patch up. You face the unknown and the haunting, and they must weather your resolve.
Skills ★★★ The thaumaturge starts trained in all the tradition skills, plus 4 + your intelligence modifier. You have a lot of variety in the skills you choose. The thaumaturge also has Esoteric Lore, which is an autoscaling Lore Skill that you will have constant use for, on top of implements and feats that further expand your ability to use a variety of skills, as well as a few additional skill increases. You also gain extra skill increases at levels your class DC improves that only apply to your tradition skills, and if built right the thaumaturge can move up to 4 skills to legendary permanently.
Attacks ★★★★ The thaumaturge has proficiency in all martial weapons up to master. You are mostly going to stick to one handed weapons and unarmed attacks, but if a macguffin zweihander shows up in your adventuring career and is relevant to smiting a big bad, you can certainly pick it up for a combat or two. The thaumaturge does have a slightly worse attack modifier compared to other martials due to having charisma as a key attribute, but they have two very powerful damage boosters in Implement’s Empowerment and Exploit Vulnerability and easy access to accuracy boosters through their features. The thaumaturge’s damage output is not one to be ignored.
Defenses ★★★ Medium armour proficiency is solid, and you advance to expert slightly faster than most classes. You can’t use shields very well, but you have a host of options you can select if taking damage is something you want to avoid.
Class DC ★★★ The thaumaturge has the second fastest class DC progression in the game. While you don’t make use of it much with the base class, a lot of feats and features utilise this, and your fast progression makes you quite decent at using save based abilities, especially with your unique ability to easily impose penalties on your enemies saves against such effects.

Attributes:

The thaumaturge is a little MAD, but this also means it’s very versatile when it comes to planning out your build. Diversity is the name of the game with this class.

Colour	Modifier
Blue	+4
Green	+2 or +3
Yellow	+0 or +1
Red	-1 or 0

Strength ★★★ For the heavy hitters. Strength offers a great variety of powerful weaponry and access to the athletics skill, which is still decent even for the action hungry thaumaturge. It also opens up access to heavy armour, which can help correct your pitiful reflex saves. Red for dex builds, who have better places to allocate points into.
Dexterity ★★★ The thaumaturge can make solid use of finesse weaponry, owing to its wealth of damage boosters, to compensate for the strength loss while simultaneously increasing your defences and patching your worst save. It also opens up ranged combat through reload or thrown weaponry, which can help keep you safe to an extent. Yellow for melee builds, who want at least a +1 to fill out the breastplate cap, or +0 if able to access heavy armour.
Constitution ★★★ You only have 8 hitpoints per level. If you are in melee, it is generally paramount you upgrade this as much as possible, but in the right party composition and with the right build, you can get away with a +1 at first level, though you should still upgrade this whenever possible. Turges with good range can safely rank this yellow, especially if your party has some solid control and defenders.
Intelligence ★ For a class that’s supposed to know so many things, Intelligence does nothing for you. Some Tome users may want to boost this skill if they wish to take advantage of free lore skills for reduced DCs, but in general you can just take Diverse Lore and call it a day.
Wisdom ★★ You have the best will saves in the game and very solid Perception. You are less reliant on this attribute than some other classes, but investing into religion or medicine is really nice and can be very helpful as an extra addition to your toolkit.
Charisma ★★★★ Despite the blanket blue rating, there’s a lot more to this attribute than at first glance. Charisma powers a lot of features in your class, the most obvious one being Esoteric Lore. However, you can get away with a +3 if you want to move boosts elsewhere, such as for a melee build, and it is entirely possible to get away with a +2, though I cannot recommend any lower in an optimisation guide. Charisma is a very powerful attribute and you should boost it every chance you get, because more and more features will make use of it as you level. In fact, with the right build it’s entirely possible to dump your strength and dexterity (at least until your armour cap) and rely on a spellcasting and item build using your class DC and charisma based abilities.
Attribute Boosts: Boost your charisma, your choice of strength or dexterity depending on your build, and then whatever else as per the above rankings.

Esoterica, Esoteric Lore, and Exploit Vulnerability:

Much like the inventor, the thaumaturge gains automatic proficiency scaling in a skill and uses that skill to power a variety of features. However, the thaumaturge’s Esoteric Lore skill is unique to its class, and uses its charisma modifier instead of intelligence. The skill allows you to recall knowledge on any creature, haunt or curse. This is already a powerful feature on its own, and it expands in usability greatly once combined with the Diverse Lore class feat, but it also provides one of your main damage boosters. Exploit Vulnerability.

There is not much to say about EV that is not already well explained in the class, so I’ll just go over some basic details.

Generally speaking, Personal Antithesis does less damage than exploiting a target’s Mortal Weakness unless they are significantly lower level than you. Now, per the rules as written, you cannot target multiple weaknesses on a creature if they both come from the same instance of damage, (such as if a cold iron axe hits a creature weak to cold iron and slashing, they only take additional damage from the higher weakness). It is quite possible that the same intent applies to the thaumaturge if your weapon’s damage already exploits a creature’s weakness, you cannot use Personal Antithesis to trigger another weakness. It is my personal opinion that since Personal Antithesis creates a special weakness to your Strikes and not another specific material, trait, or damage type, you should in fact be able to exploit a Personal Antitheseis of the foe’s in addition to the weakness(es) you are already triggering, because otherwise that just seems to punish your character for thinking ahead.

Esoterica is mostly just a flavour thing. I encourage all thaumaturges to make use of the various bits and bobs on their person when describing the actions they do in and out of combat, because it’s fun, and maybe even add special flourishes to your basic actions. Of course, you still need to have your esoterica on your person to activate some of your abilities, namely your EV. The implements themselves are detailed further below.

Implement’s Empowerment and Intensify Vulnerability:

The thaumaturge is generally limited to one handed weapons if they’re holding an implement, which they should be. They also generally want hands for activating special abilities on their implements and various magical items they collect throughout their adventuring career. This means that you’ll pretty much never see a damage die above a d8 in your weapon’s hands. This is where Implement’s Empowerment comes in. A flat 2 damage per weapon die just for holding in your hands what you already were going to is fantastic. This effectively puts thaumaturge weapons up to 2 die sizes higher than their base weapon die was on average. Combined with EV, you have powerful damage boosters rivalled only by certain barbarians and the inventor. Of course, this expects you to have an implement in hand and turns off the moment you have anything in them that’s not a single weapon, your esoterica, or implements.

As mentioned earlier, we’ll get into further detail on implements below. I want to highlight some important things about item juggling. When you get two implements (or when you get three implements as a Weapon user), you gain the ability to quickly swap one implement for another as long as you are wearing the implements on your person to use an action pertaining to the implement, including free actions and reactions. This may allow you to swap to a weapon to strike enemies with once you get 3 implements, but I’m not sure that’s RAI. This does mean that generally you won’t be able to benefit from two implements’ abilities at once if they require you to hold them in your hands, and wield a weapon at the same time. You can circumvent this by picking the Weapon Implement, or using unarmed attacks.

Then there’s Intensify Invulnerability. This is a one action feature that all implements have that you can’t use the same round as your EV, and both have a once per round limit. The various IVs are detailed under their respective implements. If your GM runs games uber-RAW, there’s a case to be made that your IV benefits are technically always active due to the wording of the feature.

Implements

The thaumaturge’s implements are sort of its subclass equivalent. They can push the thaumaturge into certain roles and playstyles to an extent, but in general they are an addition, rather than a definition. You can get up to 3 implements over the course of your adventuring career, with one of your first two implements eventually hitting paragon, the other at adept, and your third implement staying at initiate unless you take a feat to boost it.

Amulet ★★★

Don’t like getting hit? Why not try waving a shiny gem in your foe’s face to make it hurt less! A solid choice for thaumaturges in the frontlines who may want to try tanking a few extra hits when the main tank goes down or needs to fall back. You can also protect your allies with the ability, effectively doubling as a weaker champion’s reaction for the price of an implement. A worthy trade in my opinion.

Initiate Benefit ★★★ Grant champion level resistance against a damaging effect caused by your EV target. The only actual range requirement here is that your ally be within 15 feet of you, otherwise you and your EV target can be shooting each other from a mile away and you’ll still be able to activate this resistance if you have a reaction available. It does have the manipulate trait though, so watch out for Reactive Strikes. A simple but effective reaction, which the thaumaturge doesn’t have much of.
Adept Benefit ★★★ A very solid boost. This lingering resistance applies against all sources of that damage, which makes it very useful against enemies with multiple attacks and/or encounters with multiple enemies. Once again, a simple but very effective feature that’ll come up every round.
Intensify Vulnerability ★★★ Good Amulet builds will almost never go down. This is effectively the esoteric warden class feat but applicable every turn. It’s incredibly powerful and can basically shut down casters or other monsters who rely on saving throws given your excellent progression.
Paragon Benefit ★★★★ AoE effects mean nothing to your party anymore. With Esoteric Reflexes (no ifs about it, you took it the moment it became available) you’re able to push through most damage coming your party’s way, and your excellent save progression and powerful save boosters make you a real nightmare to beat down. A fun thing you can do with esoteric reflexes and a backfire mantle is have an ally throw a bomb or some other minor attack of a damage you believe the enemies would deal into your team just before combat begins, all negate it from the resistance, and then gain a lingering resistance to the damage the enemies might deal in advance of your first turn anyway.

Bell ★★

Just pick up another implement. The bell tries to do something I think is fun, but then expects you to power through olympic hurdles to actually achieve it. It shares design space with the amulet as a defence oriented reaction, but it can enable better offensive power for your party by applying status penalties to DCs you and your allies target. However, its base ability is quite weak and its upgrades don’t do much to make the investment feel worth it. I would probably just pick up the amulet and reflavour it as a bell if that’s what you’re interested in.

Initiate Benefit ★★ There’s a lot of things that don’t go well for the Bell here. Firstly, the reaction has the Mental trait, which means mindless creatures completely bypass the effect. It is also a manipulate effect, which means it triggers reactive strikes. It does have a better range than the amulet when it comes to directly or indirectly defending allies, but it forces the target to make a save with no effect on a success. The reaction does target a save the target likely struggles with depending on the effect, and the conditions it imposes are good. However, the duration also varies wildly in effectiveness since it ends on your next turn rather than a more consistent 1 round effect. If stupefied, the target doesn’t even have to make a flat check to avoid losing the triggering spell. Surely you could have just frightened a foe or have an ally or yourself grapple the caster.
Adept benefit ★★★ If the target fails the save, being able to automatically maintain the effect for 3 whole rounds is solid. You can also trigger the effect again on a strike to impose both clumsy and enfeebled, or otherwise fish for a critical failure since even if the target succeeds the initial effect’s duration is still in place. You could also instead be granting allies lingering resistances, gaining free recall knowledge checks and master skills, reveal the invisible etc. Sure though, ringing a little bell to maybe impose a -1 is fun.
Intensify Vulnerability ★★ This is just a worse Cursed Effigy. Sure, it doesn’t cost you an 8th level feat, but it also requires you to spend an action before actually making a strike instead of just chaining off a successful strike like CE does for the same action cost, and has to be maintained every round unlike CE which just works for all save based thaumaturge abilities you have so long as the target has your EV on it. It’s still yellow because it’s technically free and does have a nice critical success effect, but this is just scraping the bottom of the barrel here.
Paragon Benefit ★★ In a vacuum, this ability is decent. You don’t take an implement to paragon for just being decent. There is nothing much to say here, the condition values increase a bit, which is alright, to be nice about it, and you can target any creature, but the effect only lasts till your turn starts. Just pick up another implement.

Chalice ★★

Healing is something the thaumaturge can’t do incredibly well without spells and archetypes, but the chalice aims to correct that. Unfortunately, it failed the roll. The chalice does some decent healing for being a “resourceless” effect, but that’s really all it does until level 17. Just archetype into blessed one or medic or something. You are not a healbot.

Initiate Benefit ★★ You give out some okay temporary HP that stays for a round to either yourself or an adjacent ally. You can also trigger a healing effect that heals 3 HP per level you have, but it only occurs once per ten minutes. This is not great. It is an alright way to get around negative healing limitations at low levels, but you should probably just leave the healing to just about anyone else, as this is not worth the action it takes nor the reactive strike it can trigger. If your GM allows you to trigger this with Paired Link, it gets a bit better, though still not worth an implement (and Paired Link isn’t all that anyway).
Adept Benefit ★★ More healing when an ally takes critical piercing or slashing damage or suffers bleed damage. Just pick up a healing archetype by this level. It doesn’t even try to remove persistent damage. Even Root to Life does that!
Intensify Vulnerability ★★ More healing, but only if you waste effectively three actions on your turn to activate this, make a strike, and if it hits you spend an action to use the chalice. A fantastic use of your actions for the round, the enemies are sure to quake in their boots.
Paragon Benefit ★★★ More hea- oh, what? The chalice actually does something else now? It’s been so long, I forgot there were other actions! This effect is honestly a really nice condition cleanser and can even counteract other harmful effects targeting the recipient, it’s just a shame it took 17 levels to get here. You also probably have someone else who is better at cleansing these conditions than you are by this level, though it’s pretty action-efficient. Probably would be having more fun doing something else though.

Lantern ★★★

This implement is one of my personal favourites. It’s got a host of solid features that’ll find use in just about any game that isn’t the GM simply throwing bags of meat towards the players. It’s an especially potent choice in games of illusions, mystery, and secrets of the shadows, and an interesting pick given that the subclass is very much a bright shining light in the middle of the darkness. Don’t expect to be sneaking in the dark a whole lot.

Initiate Benefit ★★★ Unveil it all. This is basically free guidance on all your seek and recall knowledge checks when within 20 feet of a target, and enables you to do what is essentially two exploration abilities at once. Be sure to invest in your Perception to make the most use of this feature, and stick real close to anyone else in the party with a solid Perception bonus. There’s also no limit on the secret check, it happens as long as you are within range of a triggering effect, so if you have the time and the right space you can just walk around an area a few times to determine whether or not there are any traps in the area. If you can get your GM to accept the status bonus to perception applying to initiative, this is an easy blue.
Adept Benefit ★★★ Increased range on your lantern abilities and a free See Invisibility. A lovely automatic bonus just for taking the implement at level 1 or 5.
Intensify Vulnerability ★★★ A bit situational, and bordering on a lower rating. However, automatic concealment removal is incredibly powerful, and a -2 status penalty to stealth and deception really hinders a lot of foes that aren’t just big dumb brutes. It also applies in social situations when you need to get answers out of someone and expect them to try weaselling their way out of it. You also increase the bonus from your initial benefit, which is a lovely sweetener. Pick up Tome and the relevant feats to recall all the knowledge.
Paragon Benefit ★★ The Lantern does feel like an implement that gets worse over time. A discount true seeing is alright, and the radius expansion is okay, but it’s a really mediocre capstone for investing in an implement this long. Whatever implement you paired this with was probably what you were taking to paragon anyway.

Mirror ★★★★

The mirror’s an interesting implement. Its adept benefit is incredibly controversial, but the rest of their abilities offer some of the most freedom in the game. It’s incredible action compression, reach expansion, flank provision, at-will teleportation etc. This implement is for the creative minded players who can analyse a battlefield and want to make a real mess of a ‘turge. You might like what’s staring back at you, but your foes sure won’t.

Initiate Benefit ★★★★ There’s so much to do here than I can really explain. Get high ground, increase your effective reach, increase the effectiveness of any auras or touch spells you have, activate 15 foot two action teleports with a movement ability right after etc. Having to keep this ability up every turn for an action (yes, the mirror does go down at the start of your next turn. You can’t exploit the wording to say it remains until you move) can seem intensive, which is why i would not recommend this to new players or those looking to play a more “simple” thaumaturge, but experienced players, especially those who play combats with detailed terrain can get a lot of use out of this feat. Additionally, RAW nothing actually stops you from using up to all of your actions using Mirror’s Reflection, because it’s not listed as an effect that ends the Reflection, but your GM might justifiably rule otherwise, but if allowed this can get real nasty. The only real limits here are your imagination and the GM’s level of permissiveness.
Adept Benefit ★★★ This benefit is… weird. Many players decry this ability for forcing you to lose your mirror and having to resummon it again, but you were already going to have to resummon it anyway. The real issue is definitely losing your off-turn benefits (such as flanking a foe, having an aura up, having a vantage point, additional reach for a reactive strike you poached from an archetype or the Weapon’s Implement’s Interruption etc) but if they strike your mirror, that’s damage they could have avoided, and might deter them from striking you again. It also provides a fantastic way to break an enemy’s multiattack option (eg. Draconic Frenzy) or a Grab or Constrict ability. Additionally, remember that the foe has to be adjacent to your image when this happens. Experienced Mirror Players will know how to use this feature well, just as they have the initiate.
Intensify Vulnerability ★★★ A surprisingly simple but still effective IV for the Mirror. Concealment gets better the more AC you have, so don’t go skimping on it.
Paragon Benefit ★★★★ Free actions. Thaumaturges love free actions. Draw an item, strike a foe, seek in two different places. Deceptively simple, but a good mirror user will be an absolute monster with this. Just wait till level 19 when your EVs and IVs become free actions too!

Regalia ★★★★

Kneel before greatness. The regalia is a fantastic implement for a support geared ‘turge leaning towards the charisma based skills. You’re really good at supporting your friends, even if you aren’t all that great at the skills you’re supporting them with. The Regalia feeds into other implements especially well, finding synergies with almost every other implement in the game, really cementing it as a must-have for any thaumaturge that wants to have their allies bask in the spotlights they create.

Initiate Benefit ★★★ A permanent bonus to three charisma skills and your allies gain more benefits for following you in exploration (and perhaps even social) activities. You also gain an aura that protects you and your allies against fear and lessens its effect on them if they do become frightened. A solid bonus for a thaumaturge gearing up for a skill monkey build.
Adept Benefit ★★★★ You become even better at making you and your allies even better at doing things. The bonus increase only applies if you are master in the skills, which is a hefty investment, were it not for the fact that you can just pick up the tome to cover them whenever you please, as well as archetypes like the rogue for skill increase feats. Your aura also grows in power, providing a very powerful passive bonus against all *mental* effects. You can probably count the number of Will based saves that don’t have the mental trait on less than ten fingers. Your aura also grants a status bonus to damage rolls for yourself and your allies, and this applies to all of your party’s damage rolls, not just strikes. It also scales!
Intensify Vulnerability ★★ Just use Aid. It eats a reaction but you can survive just fine if you didn’t pick an implement that already provides a reaction, and most of those have good IVs to use anyway.
Paragon Benefit ★★★★ You’re the Party Face. You’re too competent to do silly things like critically failing on such basic tasks. In fact, you exude such confidence that even your most basic activities inspire others to follow your simple mastery.
Your aura also grows even stronger. Not only are your allies immune to flanking as long as you aren’t flanked (very powerful if you can find a feature like Deny Advantage to slap onto your chassis), They also reduce any status penalties from a wide list of conditions by 1 so long as you aren’t affected by the same. Given your excellent saving throws, that shouldn’t be a problem. Lead your comrades into the breach.

Tome ★★★★

Recall all the knowledge. The Tome Implement offers additional versatility to what is already one of the most versatile classes in the game. This is an excellent choice for any build that wants to learn as much information as possible about any situation that they are in, and be really damn good at exposing every detail of an enemy’s stat-block. It’s my personal favourite and arguably the best implement the class offers, and there’s no thaumaturge build in the game where this implement would ever go amiss.

Initiate Benefit ★★/★★★ The tome is my personal favourite implement of all time, and yet I would not recommend starting play with it. The +1 circumstance bonus to all Recall Knowledge checks is powerful and basically outshines The Investigator’s Pursue a Lead when it comes to that activity, but starting with two extra skills isn’t that big of a deal. You are already trained in 9 skills at level 1 at worst, and you are basically scrambling to find extra skills that aren’t already likely covered by your party. You will generally be better served by picking another implement that has more immediate benefits at lower levels like the amulet or mirror, and so I would advise picking the tome up at 5th level to get more immediate use of its abilities, and being able to pick its adept benefit sooner.
However, you do become expert in the skills at levels 3 and 5, and being able to swap them every day is very nice, especially for the purposes of Lore. For example, if you have to suddenly get on a boat, picking up Sailing Lore or Navigation Lore or whatever hyper specific ability you can think of can be very useful, especially with some investment into intelligence. This is especially useful if your GM uses the rules for certain skill checks using different abilities in certain situations, and is even more solid if your GM allows you to use specific lore skills to do special actions that aren’t Recall Knowledge. In games with a small party, a party that has multiple people trained in the same skills, or a party that is able to attain information about their adventures or missions beforehand, bump this ability’s rating by one step. In a game where all three of these situations are factors, this is just outright Blue.
Adept Benefit ★★★★ This is where the Tome really kicks off. Master in any two skills every day by 9th level is incredibly useful. While you can’t use these proficiencies to fulfil prerequisites, they’re still very powerful for the purposes of basic actions, using Lores to get easier DCs on Recall Knowledge, and for the purposes of feats and other abilities that require you to roll a skill check as part of activating an ability (eg. Marshal Stances, Lingering Composition). The real treasure here though, is the free Recall Knowledge. A free Recall Knowledge against any creature, not just the target of your EV, is already great for the action-hungry thaumaturge, but a +1 circumstance bonus to your next attack roll against said target is just too good. Not only is this a very powerful accuracy boost, it also means you’ll always know when you’re being fed false information, since you only get the +1 bonus if you succeed. You don’t even have to attack the target, you can just recall knowledge about the history of the kingdom’s minister , and know whether or not you succeeded because of the bonus to attack rolls. Easily the strongest adept benefit in the game.
Intensify Invulnerability ★★★★ This ability has had many detractors, myself included. It is often compared to the Investigator’s Devise a Stratagem unfavourably, but this is far more than that. Effectively this feat is an at-will True Strike that applies to any attack you make for a whole round. This combines fantastically with a variety of builds; It is the best way to make use of reload weaponry when combined with the Risky Reload feat, allowing you to decide beforehand whether or not to spend the actions firing. Additionally, with three actions available, you might decide to use the Tome to roll a d20; If you crit or roll a high number, you can make a strike with zero MAP and then use your d20 result to overcome the MAP penalty on your second attack. These are just basic applications of the ability, and they stack quite well with additional damage boosters that might cost an action to activate, such as special ammunition. This becomes especially powerful at level 19 when you can activate it as a free action and greatly eases your action economy. The Tome stays winning.
Paragon Benefit ★★★★ Let’s take it from the top:
- Legendary in any two skills every day. Fighting through the nine hells? Devil Lore has you covered. You almost certainly have abilities that rely on skill checks that this feature suddenly has you legendary in, like a Lingering Composition. Get Wonder Worker, enjoy the free spells. Sky’s the limit with this one.
- The circumstance bonus to your RK checks goes from +1 to +2. Simple, yet effective. That’s another bonus that could get you a crit on a recall knowledge, and as a Tome user, you love Recall Knowledge. Interacts especially well with my next point-
- A circumstance bonus to one attack wasn’t enough? Let’s have it apply to all of them! The thaumaturge has always had struggles with its base accuracy, but with features like this, your IV becoming a free action at level 19, and the class’s easy access to accuracy boosters, your foes are going to feel really Weak to your strikes.
- You win initiative. I don’t know if there’s a single other class with this powerful of an initiative booster, especially once you have a status and/or item bonus going on. You’ve got 17+ levels of nonsense to throw at your foes. Watch them do nothing but suffer as they wait fruitlessly for their turn to arrive someday.
- Don’t be a fool, kids. Read your books, and stay in school.

Wand ★★

Blast. The wand is another interesting implement because it’s not really supposed to be something you use constantly or to substitute your strike actions for. I would say this build is more valuable for melee builds than it is ranged, since this gives you a solid ranged pseudo cantrip, though that does mean it’s a bit niche which is why it gets a yellow rating. Gets more fun as you level it up, though I wouldn’t recommend it as an initial implement.

Initiate Benefit ★★★ Use the damage booster as frequently and as early in an encounter as possible. This became slightly stronger post remaster since cantrips lost spellcaster modifiers and the wand didn’t so it’s a bit more consistent than most damage cantrips, at least at low levels. Pick Electricity as your first damage type, it’s the most consistent and least likely to face resistances. I generally don’t recommend using the wand as your main damage in an encounter, but a critical hit recharging the damage boost is a solid incentive to use it again to target foes out of your reach.
Adept Benefit ★★★★ A solid array of debuff effects, and your Fling Magic’s range increases even further. If you have the regalia implement, Fire’s persistent damage combines quite well with the regalia adept benefit’s damage bonus. Cold is alright, penalties to movement can really cripple a lot of monsters, especially in a ranged party.
Intensify Vulnerability ★★ It’s a decent bit of extra damage, but there are better things to do than devote a whole turn to just flinging magic on one guy extra hard.
Paragon Benefit ★★★★ You get to choose between three different damage types with three different effects, and a truly extreme range increase. Oh, did I forget the ability to make 20 foot bursts?
Enjoy the discount fireballs. Remember that the failure effects apply to anyone who fails, not just your EV target!

Weapon ★★★

Hitting things till they go down is a venerable tradition in the history of table-top roleplaying. The Weapon implement is certainly one of the more popular implements, and for good reason. The thaumaturge loves additional attacks given their high damage and tight action economy, and doesn’t have a lot of native reactions. It also alleviates their hand economy by treating the weapon as an implement that you can swap around with your other implements as necessary. You don’t need it to excel as a thaumaturge, but you can’t go wrong with it.

Initiate Benefit ★★★★ The weapon implement comes out swinging with discount Reactive Strike. It’s better in some cases, given that it triggers on concentrate actions, can disrupt any action on a critical hit so long as it triggered the Interruption (except standing) and can even be used by ranged thaumaturges. You also get access to the implement’s critical specialisation at fifth level as an added bonus. A great damage booster, though be sure to have allies around who can help you guarantee that the ability activates.
Adept Benefit ★★ It’s a nice consolation prize when you miss. The Weapon definitely loses a lot of steam past its initial benefits, your main value at higher levels is being able to treat both hands as holding implements.
Intensify Vulnerability ★★★ Hit things harder. This lasts a whole round and pairs nicely with other accuracy boosters like the tome’s adept benefit.
Paragon Benefit ★★★ Disrupting actions is really good. Being able to disrupt them on a normal hit is a great help for a class that can’t boost their attack stat as high as other martials, and features like esoteric reflexes double the value of this feature. Enemy spellcasters are not going to like you.

Synergies

There are some implement combinations that really shine together, and I intend to highlight them in this section. Some of these implements also have powerful combinations when using both at the same time, even in combat; unarmed strikes that leave your hands free synergise quite well with these.You can still pick most implement combinations that aren’t on this list, they just don’t work with each other as well or at all, but that’s perfectly fine. So long as you aren’t trying to put Bell in tandem with any other reaction implement. Just don’t.

Amulet/Mirror ★★★ Expand the range of your Amulet’s reaction. You can also combine this with the Mirror’s adept benefit to reduce the damage you take while still harming an enemy. Simple, but effective.
Amulet/Regalia ★★★ These don’t actually do much with each other, but are a good combo for a thaumaturge who wants to defend and support their allies.
Amulet/Weapon ★★★ Behold, thy Sword and Board. They both have generally different triggers when it comes to reactions so it doesn’t really hurt much. Definitely pick up Esoteric Reflexes, but you’d be picking that up even if you had just the one.
Bell/Mirror ★★ This is similar to the Amulet/Mirror combo, but the bell has a much larger range so the aura expansion isn’t as effective. Also, it’s the Bell.
Bell/Wand ★★ This can make for an okay debuff build, especially since the bell can impose clumsy to improve the chances of a target failing against Fling Magic. Pretty boring though, and not that great.
Chalice/Mirror ★★ This can save you repeatedly having to move to and fro when trying to heal allies on the battlefield, but that’s about it.
Lantern/Mirror ★★★ This basically enables you to make twice the number of checks to detect traps everytime you enter a new area, and increases the radius for the purposes of your Lantern’s special bonuses. Quite fun.
Lantern/Regalia ★★★ There isn’t actually much synergy here outside of the sheer number of bonuses you can hand out to yourself and allies. This is very fun in an intrigue/mystery game and basically makes you a better Interrogator than the Investigator.
Lantern/Tome ★★★★ Put every other recall knowledge build to shame. The bonuses to recall knowledge stack, and the secret checks to detect hazards and their ilk are a useful universal benefit, as well as the lantern’s abilities to reveal concealed creatures (and even invisible and ethereal creatures with the adept ability) to provide even more targets to RK and EV on. With the right build, expect your GM to just start handing out the statblocks to you. A personal favourite.
Lantern/Wand ★★ The Lantern’s adept benefit can remove a target’s concealment for the purposes of targeting a creature with Fling Magic. Just okay, but that’s what this rating’s for.
Mirror/Regalia ★★★★ More aura expansion. The Regalia has a very powerful aura effect, especially past adept, and if your allies are a bit spaced out across the battlefield this allows you to keep them all within range of your aura at once while being a bit harder to target with area effects unless they’re quite wide.
Mirror/Weapon ★★★★ Flank with yourself or be somewhere else while still threatening your EV target with a nasty reaction. It can also make non-reach Weapons a bit better since by flanking with yourself your target can’t get out of range with a single step.
Regalia/Tome ★★★★ A very solid support combination, the regalia’s benefits involve handing out bonuses like candy to your allies, and the extra skills the tome grants synergises well with the regalia adept’s skill requirements as well as the bonuses from Follow the Expert. If you want to be a Supporturge, you can’t go wrong with these two. Another favourite of mine.
Regalia/Weapon ★★★ Not a lot of synergy but the regalia adept’s damage bonus does apply to Implement’s Interruption, so a solid bonus on top of the general power of the Regalia.
Regalia/Wand ★★ This is very much a mid-level combination, but once you get both effects to adept, the regalia’s adept bonus does apply to the persistent damage the wand’s fire damage applies. It’s whatever until then, but if you take Wand to paragon, being able to apply a powerful damage effect on every person who suffers the damage is really great area control. Still yellow because of how long it takes to get off the ground.
Tome/Weapon ★★★ A simple but reliable combination. Implement Interruption benefits from the tome’s IV effect, making it a somewhat decent alternative to striking twice. However, the Weapon’s IV applies a +2 status bonus to all strikes you make, which does stack with the tome’s adept benefit bonus, effectively giving you a +3 bonus to the first strike you make (and to every strike if you take tome to paragon, which you should). A fine choice for an offensive thaumaturge who wants to learn more about the things it is currently killing while simultaneously being better at currently killing them.

Three Implement Combinations: Generally you can just look at the above rankings and combine implements that synergise with each other. The Mirror and Regalia are excellent picks for this; The Regalia for its host of buffs for the whole party, and the Mirror because its initial benefit is just fantastic. An Amulet is also a reliable tool for a final implement. Two fun combos I like are the Tome/Regalia/Lantern for the skill monkeys, and the Tome/Regalia/Weapon for the offensive boosters.

Class Feats

1^st Level Feats:

Ammunition Thaumaturgy ★★ This is a feat tax, plain and simple. I do not personally recommend basic reload combat for the thaumaturge because reloading is a lot worse of an action tax than moving around is in my opinion, but with the right build you can pump out a lot of damage while staying safely in the backlines. Be sure to pick an archetype that improves your reload actions, and pick up the Tome for its IV ability to combine with Risky Reload in particular for an easier action economy.
Diverse Lore ★★★★ Whoever wrote the thaumaturge’s recall knowledge capabilities really hated the investigator. This feat is so strong, you can recall knowledge on any topic with a paltry -2 penalty if it doesn’t pertain to creatures, haunts, or curses. Abilities like Bardic Lore and Keen Recollection can’t hold a candle to this and Esoteric Lore already autoscales to legendary. If that wasn’t enough, you also gain the effects of a RK success or a critical success every time you succeed or critically succeed on EV respectively. Your party will love you for all the information you dole out from this feat, and your GM will hate you for constantly yelling out that you recall knowledge every time they bring up anything you deem important, trivial or otherwise.
Divine Disharmony ★★ Feint, but better. The thaumaturge loves accuracy boosters, so if you can fit this onto a ranged build it’s pretty solid. Does compete with a lot of actions though, and probably better for a class to poach from an archetype.
Familiar ★★★ The thaumaturge is weirdly good at a lot of things, and this is another one of them. Familiars are quite useful for the thaumaturge with abilities like independent and manual dexterity allowing your familiar to greatly ease your action economy when swapping out items, which the thaumaturge has a lot of incentive to do. Plus, it’s just cool to have.
Ritunn has a fantastic guide to familiars which you can find here for additional information.
Haunt Familiarity ★ Pick up a Lantern. In a game where haunts are a common occurrence, your party should be well equipped to handle such encounters without needing this feat.
Root to Life ★★ The ability to better end persistent damage on a dying ally is the only thing that’s keeping this from a red rating. Otherwise, this is just a worse stabilise, and you should have better tools to deal with persistent damage, especially as you level up.
Scroll Thaumaturgy ★★★★ You can activate any scroll. This feat is incredibly versatile, basically giving you the effects of trick magic item on scrolls without any investment into the tradition skills outside of you automatically being trained in them. Being able to hold them in the same hands as implements is a great way to sweeten the deal. You can’t make too much use of this immediately, but a lot of adventures provide scrolls as treasure along the way. Still a solid pick at later levels if you want to pick up something else (Diverse Lore) instead. Opens up a very fun feat path in Scroll Esoterica.

2^nd Level Feats:

Call Implement ★ Niche. You can already deem a new item an implement with one day of downtime, and the Called Accessory Rune, while uncommon, already does most of this ability’s job for it.
Enhanced Familiar ★★★★ More abilities for your familiar. I am certain you can find something useful for your build. The thaumaturge’s familiar progression is second only to the Witch and the Familiar Thesis Wizard. Very unique for a martial with no native access to spellcasting.
Esoteric Warden ★★★ Status bonuses to defences are not easy to come by, even if it is once per day per creature. Solid defensive bonuses, which melee builds will especially appreciate.
Talisman Esoterica ★★★ Talismans are fun. Scaling at half your level can be a bit painful, but there are plenty of powerful low level talismans that stay relevant as you level, the Predator’s Claw being a standout. Free consumables are almost never a bad choice.
Turn Away Misfortune ★ You start every session with 1 Hero Point, can hold up to 3 Hero Points at once, and are expected to gain an additional Hero Point after each hour of play. If you are suffering a misfortune effect, which is already a rare occurrence with your Will progression, you can just spend one of those to get this same effect without spending a feat slot and a reaction.

4^th Level Feats:

Breached Defenses ★ This feat is annoying when writing in British English. I could see this feat being green if the feature allowed you to ignore any resistance.
However, Breached Defenses only allows you to ignore a creature’s resistance if it can specifically be bypassed. Your grand plan to ignore the Grim Reaper’s resistance 15 to all damage has unfortunately failed. It’s incredibly situational, expecting you to be in a situation where a) a creature has a high resistance to your basic strike’s damage b) this resistance is higher than your Mortal Weakness/Personal Antithesis damage and c) this resistance is bypassable.
The benefit of learning its highest resistance on a success is also a poor ability, especially when you could use Diverse Lore for a far more Diverse Purpose. In addition to all of that, it does not interact with any further abilities like Sympathetic Vulnerabilities or Share Weakness, leaving it purely a standalone option. In the right situation it’s valuable, but it’s rarely a situation that comes up often, and if you are in a campaign where you are fighting constructs, incorporeal undead or anything else with such a feature, you ought to be able to afford the proper materials to upgrade your weapon with.
Instructive Strike ★★★ The thaumaturge doesn’t have a lot of competing metastrikes in the base class, so this is a reliable option to use every turn unless you are a ranged build. It combines especially well with the Tome implement’s adept benefit, allowing you to make what is essentially two free recall knowledge checks for one action. Your GM will probably just hand over the stat blocks to you by now, though if you have a lot of Recall Knowledge capabilities already this might be a little much. Can still be useful if you frequently face enemies with a lot of moving parts, especially with your excellent ability to use a variety of tools, even more as you level.
Paired Link ★★ This ability is not necessarily weak but more situational. In the right party composition, especially one with a lot of spellcasting, this is basically saving you or your party member a stride action every turn a touch ability must be activated. Bump this ability’s rating by one step in those parties if you and your ally make frequent use of them.
Thaumaturgic Ritualist (U) ★★ This is a fun feat, if nothing else. Rituals are a very interesting but not always useful option to add to your toolkit, and if your GM allows this feat they likely will allow the vast majority of rituals in the game. Pick up the tome implement when taking this feat to provide all the necessary skill proficiencies for the rituals you learn. Rune Trap is a fun one to pick up when combined with the scroll thaumaturgy feat chain and a spellcasting archetype. The feat also provides a powerful bonus to ensuring your ritual checks succeed.

6^th Level Feats:

One More Activation ★★★ This feat is for the magic item addicts. There are a lot of items half your level or lower that become a lot stronger with even just a single additional activation. This feat only grows in value the higher you level, and really benefits from the Thaumaturge’s Investiture and Intensify Investiture feats at levels 10 and 12 to gain extra items and make them stronger, to use this off. If your GM rules that this feat can only activate once a day (likely due to the iffy wording, though I do not see how this feat is strong enough to warrant that), this feat becomes red.
Scroll Esoterica ★★★★ Become a spellcaster. Free scrolls every day, even at 1st level, is very very solid. You get to choose a spell from any spell list, and at 8th level you get to pick a 2nd level spell. You may consider picking this feat up a bit later down the line when you’re closer to its follow up feat and can afford more lower level scrolls (remember that with scroll thaumaturgy you can hold scrolls in your implement holding hands as if they were esoterica) if you haven’t invested in an archetype or other thaumaturge feats, but free spells, even this low-level, are a solid choice. The thaumaturge has an incredibly expansive toolkit.
Sympathetic Vulnerabilities ★★★★ Use your trade secrets against more victims. This is really good for your action economy against enemies you trigger Personal Antithesis against, since it is likely that when for example, fighting encounters with humanoids who rarely have native weaknesses, they are all of the same type, and is still fantastic in encounters where there are multiple enemies with a weakness to X but of different types, even if those are infrequent.

8^th Level Feats:

Cursed Effigy ★★ This gets better the more you use scroll thaumaturgy and other features that use your class DC, such as the Wand implement. It’s also pretty good with the 12th level Intensify Investiture to get even more use out of it. Bump its rating by one step in those cases.
Elaborate Talisman Esoterica ★★★ Never turn down extra free stuff. You can also hand out talismans to your party if you think they’d make better use of them. Not really worth picking up again though, you have better competition by then.
Incredible Familiar ★★★ You may think you’d struggle a bit to fill out abilities, but now you gain access to a lot of very cool specific familiars which makes this feat worth the pick. A reliable choice for just about any thaumaturge.
Know-It-All ★★★ Your GM isn’t just handing out the stat block anymore, they’ve just given you the Monster Core. Thumb through it at your pleasure.

10^th Level Feats:

Share Weakness ★★★ Share your 11 herbs and spices with your fellow martial. Increase or decrease the rating of this feat depending on the frequency of creatures who have a Mortal Weakness you can exploit in the campaign thus far. This pairs especially well with a Fighter or Gunslinger in the party, but any combat focused PC who’s got a higher attack bonus than you is worth picking this feat up for. It also enables a more support-oriented thaumaturge who can give up frequent attacks by letting the other murderhobos in the party deal with the threat at hand for them. Useless if you’re the only strike-using martial in your party, but that’s incredibly unlikely.
Thaumaturge's Investiture ★★★ Most classes do just fine with 10 invested items or less and can call it a day. The thaumaturge isn’t one of those classes. Invest all the items. Activate all of them. This feat is blue if you take the feats that increase item activations, use your class DC for their abilities, and activate magic items easier. Your character is certain to look ridiculous with the amount of equipment hanging off your body by this point, to say nothing of your esoterica.
Twin Weakness ★★ The thaumaturge has two damage boosters. Implement’s Empowerment, and Exploit Vulnerability. It is the combination of these two features that make the thaumaturge such a powerhouse of damage, rivalling that of the inventor and the barbarian. This feature lets you guarantee the application of the latter ability at least once a turn, but it’s rather action intensive. If you really hate missing, you might like this feat, but you could probably spend the same action cost activating an ability that provides a powerful accuracy booster (like the IVs of certain implements) for a benefit that’s easier to use and didn’t cost a 10th level feat. On a basic reading, this feat seems to do about the same damage as Vicious Swing, which is a 1st level feat. That fact alone almost makes me want to bump this down to red.

12^th Level Feats:

Elaborate Scroll Esoterica ★★★★ Behold, more free stuff. At this point low level scrolls are a bit cheap, but this is effectively giving you a wand you can’t overcharge each day for spells all the way up to 5th level. Invest in abilities that put stuff in your hands for you for maximum combat efficiency. You’re guaranteed to find something useful across the four spell lists here.
Intensify Investiture ★★★ The thaumaturge has a very fast class DC progression, second only to the kineticist and the commander. This synergises really well with prior feats that give you more items and more activations of them, allowing you to gain great use out of cheap low level items each day. You basically never run out of resources.
Shared Warding ★★ The effect is good, but too high level, especially for a follow up feat, for my taste. This is still very useful in fights against enemies who use AoE effects, granting the effects of protection to everyone in your party for a round. The first round of combat is the most important one, so if you’re using this, invest in going first as much as you can.
Thaumaturge's Demesne (U) ★ This feat’s requirements are hilarious to me. It requires you to already own the area or otherwise have it uncontested, you can’t ever reassign it or transport it elsewhere if it's destroyed or you lose access to it, and it just… Doesn’t do much. Adventurers are called adventurers for a reason. There’s a joke about capitalism here I can't be bothered to make.

14^th Level Feats:

Esoteric Reflexes ★★★★ You’re taking this feat because you’re a Weapon user, an Amulet user, or both. You may also take this as a Bell thaumaturge but you probably should have one of the other two anyway (and probably just anything but the Bell). The thaumaturge loves reactions, and this feat loves giving you extra reactions, effectively doubling your output with those implements every round.
Grand Talisman Esoterica ★★★ You love free stuff, and the free stuff loves you so much it lets you use them more often per combat. Two talismans on an item at once can be really potent with the right combinations. A fitting end to this road.
Trespass Teleportation ★ This class has a bad habit of the last feat choice in a level either being really strong or really weak. This ability is already situational enough as is, but smart enemies can game this by teleporting to places dangerous for you (such as the sky, underwater, or the Nine Hells) and splitting you from the party, especially if the feat requires you to spend the reaction before you see the target’s end destination. If you know you are fighting an enemy with teleportation effects, find other ways to lock them down with your team members through feats, magic items, or spells (A personal favourite of mine is Inescapable Grasp).

16^th Level Feats:

Implement's Flight ★★★★ It’s flight. Everyone loves flight. I expect every thaumaturge who takes this to provide a verbose and hilarious description of how their implement suddenly lifts their character through the skies. You may also try spinning, as that is a good trick.
Seven-Part Link ★★ Another reliable effect, but just a little too high level for me to rank it any higher without incredible teamwork from your party. Once again, incredibly solid in a larger party, possibly with summons, that saves you and your casters actions moving in and out of range to get potent buffs off, like Heal, Heroism, Lay on Hands etc. It seems that per the text RAW you can’t apply your thaumaturgic abilities with a range of touch (of which there aren’t many anyway) to more than one ally who you Paired Link with, but this is probably unintended.
If your GM allows you to count items you’ve invested as thaumaturgic abilities (likely due to taking feats such as thaumaturge’s investiture, scroll thaumaturgy etc) this feat becomes a lot better and a lot more fun.
Severe Magic ★★ Enemies with access to spellcasting are not infrequent at these levels. Your spellcasting allies are probably better at doing this than you will ever be, but it’s resourceless outside of the action cost and you can repeat it every turn. A solid choice for melee thaumaturges or repeating weapon users.

18^th Level Feats:

Grand Scroll Esoterica ★★★★ Cast even more spells. Even at this level scrolls of 6th-7th level are a bit too expensive to buy every day, and this provides you with more free stuff that you get to swap out every day for another spell you have access to. Remember that you can also heighten lower level spells with your scrolls, and there’s a lot of good options at these levels. The sky’s the limit.
Implement's Assault ★★★ This feat is stronger than it looks, and it looks pretty good. The game in general suggests that combat encounters feature as many or more foes than there are PCs, and this feature does very well compared in those cases compared to having to constantly activate EV, especially if you didn’t take Sympathetic Vulnerabilities (which also works well with this feat!). If you can get into range (perhaps by having an ally transport you, using haste etc.) of at least 3 enemies this feature is incredibly worthwhile. If your GM allows this to work with reload weaponry, since it lacks the text that features like the inventor’s Devastating Weaponry do, this is even more incredible. It also pairs well with Sweep, Backswing and Forceful weapons. Enjoy your custom death blender.
Intense Implement ★★ Some implements have powerful adept benefits. I don’t personally think they’re powerful enough to warrant an 18th level feat, but niche builds do exist that can take advantage of this feat to some extent.

20^th Level Feats:

Ubiquitous Weakness ★★★ At this level, you should know if your big bad(s) and their minions have exploitable weaknesses. You probably already have items that exploit such a weakness, but if you don’t, this feat is a very powerful damage booster. If your party is also heavily martial with an emphasis on making multiple attacks, bump the feat’s rating up a step. Enjoy your final murderous rampage with the power of friendship.
Unlimited Demesne ★ Just cast the actual spell. Irori knows you already can by this level.
Wonder Worker ★★★/★★★★ You have enough skill increases to invest at least one of the four tradition skills to legendary, in which case, this feat is still nice for basically giving you an at-will scroll. However, this feat becomes insane with the Tome Implement’s Paragon Benefit. You can use it to become legendary in any two skills of your choice, and as long as you are already legendary in one of the four main skills (which is quite easy given the thaumaturge’s extra increases), you can cast the Wonder Worker spell from just about any tradition. This is what has to cement the thaumaturge as the most versatile martial in the game, if nothing else. You can basically get the effects of Manifestation without having to expend a 10th level spell slot. Combined with feats that give you extra magic items of all kinds, you truly are a Thaumaturge, Worker of Wonders.

General Feats:

General feats are among the worst designed features in this game. There are clear winners you’ll want immediately upon access, and then there’s just absolute garbage. The thaumaturge will want classics like Fleet and Incredible Initiative. Toughness is a near-must pick for most melee turges. I’m only going to highlight certain feats. Anything that isn’t covered is usually just Red and never better than Yellow. You might just pick up strong skill feats instead.

1^st Level:

Adopted Ancestry ★★ If you desperately desire another ancestry’s feats and aren’t willing to use the mixed heritage, this is how you have to get it. I only recommend this feat for the most precise builds that need two feats from different ancestries to pull off. If your backstory is just “raised by kobolds” but you don’t actually need their feats for anything, you’d usually be better off without it.
Armor Proficiency ★★★ Get scaling proficiency in heavy armour. This is an excellent choice for strength thaumaturges in low level campaigns who don’t or can’t get the champion archetype
Canny Acumen ★ This feat has little use for thaumaturges. You already become an expert in reflex saves at level 3. You might retrain for it or pick it up at a higher level to become master in reflex at level 17.
Diehard ★★ This benefit is the definition of situational, applying in the rare scenario that you have been left unconscious for several turns or pissed someone off enough that they start stabbing your unconscious body while your allies are still around. Still, it applies in the situation with the greatest possible consequence for your character, or if you’ve been getting up and getting knocked back down and racking up a high wounded score, so it doesn’t hurt as an insurance policy. I’d be more inclined to retrain for it once you meet the prerequisites for its follow-up feat, Numb to Death. It’s better if you can get it more cheaply from an ancestry feature.
Fleet ★★★★ This is the best general feat in the game. Faster movement is always useful.
Incredible Initiative ★★★★ You gain a bonus to all initiative checks.
Pet ★ You can at least get Manual Dexterity, but you should probably just take Familiar.
Shield Block ★ You don’t use shields. Cast Shield instead.
Toughness ★★★ Take this on melee builds, especially if you don’t have a Defender.
Untrained Improvisation ★ You generally have enough skills that this feat does very little for you; However, if your GM is flexible with the use of lore skills for purposes other than recall knowledge, this can be very useful to pick up, especially with some investment in intelligence.

3^rd Level:

Ancestral Paragon ★★★ There are usually some good ancestry feats available to you. If nothing else appeals to you, all the more reason to take this.
Keen Follower ★ You’ve fantastic skills. Other people follow your expertise.
Prescient Planner ★★ Get whatever standard piece of adventuring gear you need. This is handy for producing manacles, shovels, and ropes on demand.
Thorough Search ★★★ Pretty useful if you are the party’s scout, and their bonuses stack with the lantern’s. Speed in exploration mode rarely comes up anyway.

7^th Level:

Expedious Search ★★ Generally speaking, time and speed in exploration mode isn’t the most important or frequently tracked, but if it is in your game this is a neat pick for the party scout.
Numb to Death ★★★ Once per day, you don’t get wounded and get extra healing when brought back up from unconsciousness. Between this and its prerequisite diehard, you’ll be pretty tough to kill. Of course, the other prerequisite for this feat is that you must have died first.
Prescient Consumable ★★ You can summon up whatever consumable you need. You’re not for want of many such items, given your easy access and use of them, and this doesn’t help you in combat anyway, but it has its uses.

11^th Level:

Incredible Scout ★★★ Incredible initiative for your entire party, provided your party actually uses exploration activities like this.

Skills:

The thaumaturge can take on the role of a skill monkey quite easily, given its incredible access to skill bonuses and proficiencies. Your easy access to magical items also helps greatly.

Varying Skill Feats:

A large number of varying skill feats are based around various knowledge skills, typically those of the four magic traditions. You don’t really care about them for the purposes of Recall Knowledge, but they have other decent uses, especially Religion and Arcana. Religion is the skill the thaumaturge can make best use out of due to scaling off wisdom and having access to some neat feats. However, the details of your individual campaign will vary wildly, and you should make your own calls in accordance with your knowledge and preferences.

Armor Assist ★ A useless feat. You can shave thirty seconds off of putting on your light armour. That’s still five rounds of combat.
Assurance ★★★★ RPGbot has a great guide on Assurance, which can be found here. I recommend using this feat for athletics, the four tradition skills, and esoteric lore. Using it on athletics allows you to ignore MAP and the dexturge’s mediocre strength, especially since you can identify the lowest saves of enemies with ease. Intimidation serves the same function, though it never needed to worry about the multiple attack penalty regardless. Assurance in Esoteric Lore grants you reliable successes on your RK and EV effects against lower level enemies, removing the worry of critical failure. Because crafting and medicine both have fixed DCs, Assurance allows you to guarantee success, though you might not have invested in those well enough. Finally, it can be applied to one of the four magic tradition skills (arcana, nature, occultism, religion) to use the Trick Magic Item feat with great reliability. Every thaumaturge can find a use for Assurance.
Assured Identification ★★★ A great versatile knowledge skill which prevents you from critically failing checks to identify magic. It even partially protects you from misidentifying a cursed item, which is a rare benefit. Be suspicious of anything you can’t identify if you take this feat.
Automatic Knowledge ★★★★ You probably took assurance in Esoteric Lore. This is a great follow up to that, especially in encounters with lower level mooks.
Break Curse ★★ You can attempt to counteract a curse with your occultism or religion skill. It takes eight hours and only applies when you have a cursed ally, so you should probably just use spellcasting instead.
Consult the Spirits ★★★ A great fit for thaumaturges looking to boost their nature or religion. Occultism might fit the flavour of the class more, but it keys off your intelligence which serves nearly zero purpose to the thaumaturge compared to wisdom. This feat synergises fantastically with the Lantern and Tome implements.
Discreet Inquiry ★★ This isn’t the greatest skill feat, but it's very useful in games of sleuthing and mystery.
Eyes of the City ★★★ Use diplomacy to track people through cities. This is a solid thematic and mechanical match for the thaumaturge. The rating may be a bit generous for a situational feat that merely saves you the need to invest skill boosts into survival, but there are few classes that can make better use of this.
Half-Truths ★★/★★★ You can request using deception and lie using diplomacy. You have to be an expert in both just to take the feat, so you gain nothing from it until seventh level when you boost one to master. At that point, between this and Charming Liar you’ve completely replaced diplomacy’s default functions. The thaumaturge’s main hindrance when it comes to being a skill monkey is its average number of skill feats. This greatly improves your social skills out of combat and reduces your need to further invest in both at once.
Quick Identification ★★ Most of these “activity speed enhancer” skill feats are about as worthwhile as they sound. At least this one eventually reduces it to an activity you could theoretically perform in combat; by the time it is a single action, this feat is green. I also consider it to this feat’s credit that it does not lock the benefit to any one of your knowledge skills. You do have great skill proficiencies with the tradition skills.
Quick Recognition ★★★ A nice bonus which turns Recognize Spell from a reaction to a free action. It works particularly well if you have reaction implements or an ancestry feat which boosts saving throws as a reaction because you know which spells you’ll need to use your reaction on, and which ones you can handle.
Recognize Spell ★★ You can use a reaction to attempt to recognize a spell being cast. Typically, you can tell what spell is being cast when something goes boom. However, you don’t have many inherent uses for your reaction without using an implement, and knowing that the dragon that was summoned to the battlefield is actually an illusion can be very helpful. You can also use this spell to tell whether your foe turned invisible or teleported. There are many scenarios in which knowing exactly what the enemy cast helps you dramatically. Unfortunately, you aren’t very good at using the tradition skills due to your lower relevant modifiers, but if you invested into the right skill depending on your campaign this is still a solid bonus. Otherwise, Arcana and Religion are the two standout options since the arcane spell list has the most offensive options and the divine list is common amongst holy/unholy creatures and undead.
Skill Training ★ You don’t need every skill. The only reason to take this feat is if you want to brag about having every skill. Humans have a better version of this feat available as an ancestry feat, as do some other ancestries, and you can just take the Tome.
Slippery Prey ★★★ You can reduce or outright ignore the multiple attack penalty when using the escape action depending on your proficiency level in acrobatics or athletics. Very solid for the thaumaturge with their lower base accuracy.
Trick Magic Item ★★★★ A valuable addition to your skillset. Few classes are better qualified to use it than a thaumaturge thanks to their automatic training in all four tradition skills and additional skill increases. It works wonders in tandem with the Tome Implement and the Assurance feat in a spell tradition. With all of them, you can draw any wand and cast any spell of your level or lower on the fly. As there is no bonus for critically succeeding, using the Assurance feat to guarantee success is eminently practical.
As Trick Magic item takes an action to activate, using a wand will usually take your whole turn. It is mostly useful for out-of-combat buffs. Check the wand subsection down in equipment for a review of useful items.
Needless to say, if you have spellcasting from any source you are unlikely to need this feat. Thaumaturges in particular already have native access to Scrolls and can access all the spellcasting traditions through archetypes incredibly easily. Nonetheless, this is still a valuable tool for the purpose of activating wands of spells that aren’t already on your spellcasting tradition and/or are so valuable you want to cast them everyday.

If a common skill feat isn’t covered in the lists above or below, consider it red or yellow at best.

Acrobatics ★★★

This skill isn’t nearly as important as athletics is. Uneven terrain is much less frequent than the pitfalls that athletics can get you past. It is still helpful to be trained for the rare occasions it shows up.

Cat Fall ★★★ and Steady Balance ★★★ are solid first level feats. Steady Balance is quite situational, but it’s fantastic when it comes up. Dexturges who push acrobatics to legendary will greatly benefit from either feat. From 7th level and above, Aerobatics Mastery ★★★ is great if you have a fly speed, but Kip Up ★★★★ is a fantastic choice; Reflex is your worst save and you are very prone to getting tripped, and between its first level feats and this even strength turges can do a lot to compensate for their poor Reflex.

Arcana ★★

Arcana is usually a powerful skill, but the thaumaturge has little use for it. You are already automatically trained in it, and almost all of its feats are shared between it and the other skills associated with spellcasting traditions. The only real value it has on its own is Unified Theory, but that’s not worth much on someone with your capabilities.

Athletics ★★★

Athletics is a reliable skill every adventurer should at least be trained in for the purposes of climbing and swimming. The strength turge can make good use of it, especially with a whip, but any thaumaturge with assurance and recall knowledge investment can find it an excellent action to use against lower level mooks whose DCs can be reliably targeted with the skill. You do struggle with maneuvers unless your weapon or unarmed attack has a relevant trait though.

1^st Level:

Combat Climber ★ Thaumaturges can’t make good use of climbing in combat unless their ancestry or another source provides them a hands-free version of it. Many of those sources basically provide this feat’s benefits alongside it anyway.
Hefty Hauler ★ A Spacious Pouch costs just 75 gp and can carry 25 bulk. Only take this feat if your GM doesn’t allow you to purchase magic items, but I’m not sure why anyone, even a thaumaturge, would play such a game.
Quick Jump ★★★ If you have high strength, intend to continue increasing athletics, or have Assurance in athletics, you should choose Quick Jump instead of Powerful Leap. The higher your level, the more preferable Quick Jump becomes.
Titan Wrestler ★★★★ If you want to use athletics in combat, this feat is mandatory. Use it to gain the benefits of your athletics skill on huge and larger targets. You almost never see huge monsters until after fifth level, so try to pick it up or retrain for it around then, unless you are small, in which case pick it up immediately.
Underwater Marauder ★★ This feat is only useful if you are in a nautical campaign. Otherwise, just move your runes over to an appropriate weapon when you hear that you’re heading to the local water dungeon.

2^nd Level:

Powerful Leap ★★★ If you have a movement speed of 30+ feet, a low strength, or no intention of raising your proficiency in athletics past expert, choose Powerful Leap instead of Quick Jump. At higher levels when your athletics modifier eclipses the distance of your leap, you might choose to retrain into Quick Jump.
Rapid Mantel ★★★ This feat allows you to swap the Grab an Edge reaction from a reflex saving throw to an athletics check. Regardless of whether or not you use that benefit, you can instantly pull yourself up as part of the same reaction. It is nice for strength thaumaturges with their poor reflex saves.

7^th Level:

Quick Swim ★★ See Underwater Marauder.
Wall Jump ★★★ Wall jump is a very cool and practical ability. The more jumping or leaping feats you have, the better it gets.
Quick Climber ★★ Some ancestries offer hands free climbing but with a mediocre climb speed or just no climb speed at all; This is a must-pick if you wish to make maximum use of their abilities. It does provide you with one of the fastest climb speeds in the game at 15th level though, which is pretty cool.

15^th Level:

Cloud Jump ★★★★ A great enhancement to your mobility. You are a hero of the realm, and no cliff, pit, or wall is going to stop you any longer.

Crafting ★

You don’t care about intelligence and you don’t use shields. Leave this skill to anyone who uses those instead. You may want it to craft magical items, but that’s a hefty investment for very little value in most games.

Deception ★★★

Deception has two mid-combat functions: feinting and diversions. Feinting only works in melee, only on a single target, and doesn’t get any skill feat support. It makes an enemy off-guard. Creating a Diversion has skill feat support and works on every creature in range. It gives you the hidden condition, which also makes enemies off-guard to your next attack. It can also be used to sneak into cover if your stealth proficiency is high. Creating a diversion provides a great way to use your stealth bonus on maps with limited cover. Diversions are only likely to work once per fight because it gives creatures a big bonus against repeat attempts.
While making enemies off-guard is fantastic to any character, the thaumaturge has less reliance on the skill thanks to feats like Divine Disharmony, which lets them effectively feint at range using Intimidation against any but the most militant of atheists. If you don’t care for deception’s out of combat uses, you may instead choose that feat and invest into the far stronger Intimidation skill, or even just take neither and push Intimidation anyway, especially if your team has reliable off-guard generation. It’s still useful by virtue of the thaumaturge’s high charisma, and has some fun social feats. It’s a solid choice for dexturges in particular, to couple with stealth.

1^st Level:

Charlatan ★★ You can hide a magic item on your person and convince people you are a spellcaster. It’s not a bad fit for the thaumaturge thanks to their easy access to magic items. That said, you have little reason to pretend to be a spellcaster in the first place. It’s very fun though.
Charming Liar ★ Just invest in diplomacy if you want to make friends. You have the skill increases for it anyway.
Lengthy Diversion ★★★ Make your diversions last longer. An especially solid pick for dexturges who like to sneak around.
Lie to Me ★★★★ It’s not hard for your deception to be higher than your perception. Great pick if you have a wisdom flaw.

2^nd Level:

Confabulator ★★★ Fantastic if you’re invested into Create A Diversion; makes it very easy to use multiple times in an encounter.
Fleeing Diversion ★★★ A fine feat that enables you to use your reaction to move in response to a critical success on a diversion check. Sometimes you just have to get out of dodge.
Quick Disguise ★★★ This feat got a much-needed boost from the remaster. You can assemble a disguise much more quickly. When you hit master proficiency at seventh level or later, you can assemble a disguise within a single turn.

^7th Level:

Doublespeak ★★★ This feat is basically a fallible version of telepathy. Your party automatically understands what you mean when you say something completely different. Everyone else has to make a perception check to figure it out.
Slippery Secrets ★★★ Circumventing magical lie detection is useful for late-game deception, especially in a game of espionage and stealth, depending on how frequent such an ability is.

15^th Level:

Reveal Machinations (R) ★★★★ This is a rare feat locked behind the very first AP in the game, but i just couldn’t ignore it; It’s a hilarious capstone feat that provides you the benefits of RK on top of a Deception Check to frighten a target, which is basically two different skills’ skill actions at once using another skill. It was me, Barry!

Diplomacy ★★★★

Some of the rules on diplomacy are a bit gamey and inorganic, even post-remaster, so check with your GM to see how rigidly they will adhere to rules-as-written regarding diplomacy; Nonetheless, it remains a helpful skill in all campaigns on its own merits. As the nice-guy social skill, it is the only common way to convince NPCs to do what you want without making enemies down the road.

1^st Level:

Bargain Hunter ★ Instead of using this feat, you can get income the normal way using your esoteric lore. The only bonus diplomacy offers over this is easier access to item bonuses.
Bon Mot ★★★ This is a good use of your diplomacy in battle if you or an ally are frequently using either stealth or effects that target wisdom saves. Otherwise, Demoralize is probably a better opener, especially in encounters with multiple foes.
Group Impression ★★ Most GMs allow diplomacy checks to apply to crowds when you are giving a big speech. On the off-chance your GM actually insists “only one guy in the crowd starts cheering” after you get up on the podium, you’ll need this feat. The remaster buffs don’t change that.

2^nd Level:

Glad-Hand ★★★★ Get an instant check to improve the attitude of any NPC you so much as greet. If you fail, you can try again the normal way. This is like getting a permanent fortune effect on all checks to make an impression. As of the remaster, it no longer penalises the initial check. A must-pick in any game with heavy focus on social mobility and keeping allies, and still solid in the average campaign anyway.

7^th Level:

Evangelise ★★★ If you have Bon Mot, you’ll probably want to trade it out for this. Stupefied hits the same stats Bon Mot does while simultaneously making a caster’s life worse. The numbers are slightly smaller, but vastly more versatile, and the flat check that can make them lose a spell is greatly valuable. You must be following a deity to access this option, but that isn’t hard. Pick a deity with the knowledge or truth domains for basic flavour.
Shameless Request ★★★★ You become immune to the effects of critically failing a check to make an impression.

15^th Level:

Legendary Negotiation ★★★★ Use your whole round to get enemies to stop fighting. If you succeed, you’ve ended the fight. If you fail, you’ve wasted your whole turn. It is the ultimate gamble, but if you pull it off you can completely change the direction of the story. Check with your fellow player before you commit to this feat; some of them come to the table to hit things, and will be annoyed if you always try this turn one. You can also use EV and RK checks in the conversation that follows to get more information beforehand and save some actions in the chance that combat resumes.

Intimidation ★★★★

Intimidation is a highly valuable skill because demoralising is so strong. Unlike the feint action, intimidation has skill feats that support demoralisation. It even gains extra power through the Divine Disharmony class feat, which allows you to gain a powerful accuracy boost against most enemies even after they’re immune to your Demoralize. You will likely have multiple members in the party boosting this, but you’re the best at using it thanks to your key charisma, and you can take turns scaring foes one after the other anyway.

1^st Level:

Group Coercion ★★ GMs are more likely to be literal about intimidation rules than diplomacy. As such, this is a handy way to threaten a group of people into obedience.
Intimidating Glare ★★★★ This feat is not optional for anyone interested in demoralisation in combat. Take it so you can intimidate a grizzly bear with a stern look. Note that the loss of the auditory trait probably means that you can’t use it to frighten targets who can’t see you. I once had a fighter jumping in all action hero and trying to critically demoralise a kobold who wasn’t looking at him.
Quick Coercion ★★ In a tense situation, you’re more likely to want intimidation than diplomacy. For those situations, quick coercion has you covered. Again, this is assuming your GM adheres to rules-as-written and insists that your quick threat or desperate plea takes the full listed duration.

2^nd Level:

Intimidating Prowess ★★★ A solid boost to intimidation just for boosting strength. Don’t take this if you have regalia or use dexterity.
Lasting Coercion ★★★ Your threats are effective much longer. At legendary intimidation, the target has to comply with your demands for a month. Once you’ve got everything you need out of a thug, tell them they don’t want to sell death sticks.
Terrifying Resistance ★★★★ A powerful bonus to your saving throws against targets you successfully demoralise. Even if most spellcasters have high will DCs, you’ve got a high modifier and not much access to circumstance bonuses that are this widely applicable. Becomes even more useful the higher you level, so you may want to take this later or retrain for it once you’re a high enough level.

7^th Level:

Battle Cry ★★★★ At the start of battle, you get a free action to demoralise. Thaumaturges love free stuff.
Terrified Retreat ★★★★ You are already very likely to critically succeed at the Demoralize action, especially against lower level enemies. You can use this in a variety of ways mid-combat, such as using it to trigger your Weapon reaction, spending three (and free) actions to target multiple mooks at once to get them all running away, force an enemy to break flanking by fleeing etc.

15^th Level:

Scare to Death ★★★★ This skill feat provides you with an upgraded version of the Demoralize action, assuming you are targeting a creature with a level lower than or equal to yours. Even so, this is very reliable against higher level foes with low will DCs, as even a failure effect is equal to the Demoralize action’s success effect, and you can still use both actions against targets since this isn’t actually a Demoralize action (though that means it doesn’t interact with feats that improve Demoralize).

Lore ★

The only lore skill you really care about is Esoteric Lore. Everything else requires investment in your least favourite attribute. Still, since that is an automatically scaling lore skill, you do get access to all the lore feats.

Additional Lore ★★ In campaigns designed around a specific concept or creature, this is a decent choice, even with your usually low intelligence. Can easily be replaced by the Tome though.
Experienced Professional ★★ You’ll make most of your money adventuring, not earning income. If your GM provides large swathes of downtime, this might come in handy.
Unmistakable Lore ★★★★ This works with Esoteric Lore. Combine this with all the other RK bonuses you have access to, and your GM will just start handing out monster statblocks directly to you. This is a little worse than normal because you have Dubious Knowledge which means that you won’t exactly know if you’ve failed, but it’s still incredibly useful.
Legendary Professional ★★ The same as the Experienced Professional feat.

Medicine ★★

Medicine is an incredibly valuable skill, but it only becomes great if you take several feats. The thaumaturge isn’t as good at using it due to its tight action economy, but with decent wisdom and/or the assurance feat you can fill in healing duties in a pinch. Could probably just use your scrolls of heal though. You don’t actually care much for battle medicine since it requires free hands, which reduces its value greatly. The skill’s still useful for resourceless out of combat healing, but someone else in the party ought to be better suited for it. You can replace the condition and persistent damage cleansers with spells decent enough anyway.

Nature ★★

As a wisdom based skill, Nature is a bit more reliable than its int-based siblings when it comes to the tradition skills. However, the feats that require nature are generally quite mediocre outside of the generic multi tradition feats. Your host of bonuses to RK coupled with diverse lore can fill in for the skill decent enough against creatures like the Fey anyway. You’re also automatically trained in it for the purposes of TMI.

Occultism ★★

While it fits the class flavour excellently, the reliance on intelligence and the thaumaturge’s base class features don’t do a lot for it. It’s got some fun low level feats though.

1^st Level:

Deceptive Worship ★ Use Deception.
Oddity Identification ★★ Some neat little extra info, though a well built RK build can probably discern this well enough anyway.
Read Psychometric Resonance (U) ★★ This is uncommon, but it fits your flavour excellently and has some fun bonuses that don’t actually require any investment in occultism beyond training in the skill, which you get automatically.
Root Magic ★★ It’s a decent once per day bonus to give an ally against a spell or haunt. If you are increasing Occultism, perhaps to qualify for occult spellcasting archetypes, bump its rating a step.
Performance ★ You aren’t a bard, and even if you have its archetype it isn’t necessary to push this skill unless you take certain feats, and even then you should just pick it up with the tome. Just invest in Diplomacy, given that’s basically what most of its skill feats try to emulate anyway.

Religion ★★★

This is a wisdom based tradition skill with some really solid feats, which is why it gets a higher rating than the other skills. Your faith is relevant to some feats, but being faithful is fine unless you also invested in medicine and want access to the Mortal and Godless Healing feats, which are both solid options that require you to be an atheist.

1^st Level:

Pilgrim's Token ★★★ This provides a bonus roughly equivalent to a +1 to initiative. It stacks with every other initiative enhancer due to its nonstandard design. You have a decent perception, so if you tie with an enemy this likely means you’ll go first or amongst the first in combat, which is very powerful if you invest in the right options and plenty of magic items.
Student of the Canon ★★ You can’t critically fail knowledge checks about religious symbols, rites, practices, and organisations. This can provide some decent value, especially in cities who are especially devoted. Bump it up a step in those cases, especially if the faiths they’re devoted to include those you follow.

7^th Level:

Sacred Defense ★★★ If you invested in religion at least up to master this is a neat bonus, especially if you don’t have other reliable sources of temp HP. That’s not very hard to do as a thaumaturge though.

15^th Level:

Divine Guidance: It’s entirely up to your GM how valuable this feat is. I can’t provide an objective rating on it.

Society ★

Mediocre. You aren’t automatically trained in this skill, but that’s because it provides little value to you. Many of its feats just substitute the effects of Diplomacy but with Society, which is useless for you. Leave this to the investigators.

Stealth ★★★★

Stealth is always a handy skill to have. Every dexturge will want to invest in it, and you can also use it to replace initiative, which is especially handy if you have a wisdom flaw. It also provides an excellent pair of actions in hide and sneak to use on turns you don’t want to be an obvious target.

1^st Level:

Experienced Smuggler ★★★ Many weapons a dexturge would use would qualify for this feat. You might even smuggle some of your allies’ lighter weapons into situations where weapons are banned. This is still quite situational though, and as you level higher you can probably just buy rings of discretion or even get a raiment rune on a runestone.
Terrain Stalker ★★ This is a funny feat because you’re suddenly incentivised to get into difficult terrain as often as possible, though your allies might not enjoy that. Underbrush is probably the most common option you’ll frequent.

2^nd Level:

Armored Stealth ★★★ This is quite solid at lower levels when your dex isn’t good enough for lighter armour and you don’t have the strength to ignore the check penalty, but still want to use stealth for initiative, especially if you have a strength or wisdom flaw. Combines well with the chain shirt to basically ignore any check penalty. You’ll want to retrain it at higher levels depending on your strength and dexterity modifiers.
Quiet Allies ★★★ When the whole party makes stealth checks, there are several points of failure. Sneaking as a group is almost impossible without this feat. If your whole party is decently stealthy, this feat is extraordinarily valuable.
Shadow Mark ★★ Get a decent bonus the rare time you tail a target. It is a debuff on the target’s perception, which means it stacks with any other stealth bonuses you might have. It’s still quite situational and you don’t have much reason to shadow a target anyway, especially since you aren’t reliant on features like Pursue A Lead, and Recall Knowledge doesn’t require you to constantly have the target in your sights.

7^th Level:

Foil Senses ★★★★ This feat is basically mandatory by the mid-levels. Every monster and their mother has a special sense to detect you with, so bypassing them with a single mid-level feat is a great offer.
Swift Sneak ★★★ If you want to maximise your stealth, doing so quickly is very useful. It is ideal for moving between points of cover when targets aren’t looking, or just getting out of dodge after your failure alerts a guard without completely revealing you.

15^th Level:

Legendary Sneak ★★★★ You can hide without cover. You get some other extra goodies, but none of them compare to that bonus. A fantastic capstone.

Survival ★

If you’re not playing in a survival themed campaign, this has little value to you. Otherwise, there are some useful feats, but you can accomplish a lot with just spells anyway.

Thievery ★★★

As a thaumaturge, you are likely to be the party’s trap finder and disabler. Thievery is a useful skill to pick up for that, but in general it’s a decent choice for dexturges. You don’t even actually need to steal anything, since adventuring is more reliable anyway, but in a campaign focused around espionage and stealth, having a reliable lock picker and trap finder is great, especially when coupled with the Lantern and Tome implements.

1^st Level:

Concealing Legerdemain ★ It’s weird that this isn’t just a base effect of the thievery skill. You most likely have stealth proficiency anyway, so just pick up Experienced Smuggler.
Pickpocket ★★ When the party needs to steal something, the odds of you getting within arm’s reach of the guy carrying it without being in active combat is unlikely.
Subtle Theft ★★ Observers get a penalty to spot you stealing from your primary target. It is a handy bonus, but the scenario remains uncommon. A bit more useful in crowded urban environments.

2^nd Level:

Wary Disarmament ★★ You get a decent bonus to your defences against traps you failed to disarm. You hopefully won’t have to rely on this feat, but it’s a handy safety booster when it comes up, especially given your poor (though better than other thaums) reflex saves, which a lot of traps target.

7^th Level:

Quick Unlock ★★ Speed up your lockpicking. This is a bit better than other feats that speed up an activity because lock picking is actually a risky activity; This gives you more time before someone wises up to you and your party’s activities. Still a bit costly for a 7th level skill feat requiring master proficiency.

15^th Level:

Legendary Thief ★★ I would like it a bit more if you were able to use at least a worse version of it as even a 3 action activity. It doesn’t really have much use in game other than for boasting about your talents in the thieves’ guilds and the things you’ve stolen under bizarre and impossible circumstances.

Equipment:

PF2e offers a wide variety of tools for the adventurer, both mundane and magical, or sometimes neither. The thaumaturge’s equipment choices are mostly informed by their emphasis on one handed weaponry and having their hands occupied. They also make excellent use of a variety of consumables and items that would have otherwise lost their value long past their initial level.

Armour:

Pick whatever armour fills out your dex cap. You may sometimes find your build either struggling to fill out your armour cap or having to overcome check penalties depending on your attribute array. Dex builds can somewhat circumvent this issue since they have less reliance on stealth and acrobatics compared to most other dex martials, but otherwise it shouldn’t be too much of a problem.

Explorer's Clothing ★★★ Dex builds will switch to this at level 15 once they’ve got dex to +5. You can sleep in it, ensuring you’re always prepared defensively for an ambush.
Chain Shirt ★★★★ This is the best starting armour most dex builds can get. If you haven’t invested points in strength, and don’t plan to use stealth often at least up to level 5, this is your armour of choice. Swap to leather if you don’t have a strength flaw, otherwise stick with this until level 15. You might just hang onto it anyway out of respect for all the good times. Combines well with Armored Stealth.
Padded Armour ★★ If you really want to make stealth a big part of your kit, take this until you can swap to something better. The point of armour loss can hurt a bit less if you sneak often or emphasise defensive abilities, whether from your ancestry, class, or somewhere else.
Studded Leather ★★★ If you can start with +3 dex and +1 in strength, it’s a solid choice, and it also adds a little extra damage to your strikes. I would probably just wear a chain shirt though.
Breastplate ★★★ The armour of choice for most strength builds. You will live in this your whole career unless you choose to invest into heavy armour. You’re as strong of mind as the thaumaturge to resist such a temptation.
Full Plate ★★★★ You may not be as strong of mind, but you certainly are stronger. Heavy armour builds will put this on as soon as their strength hits +4. You lose a bit of speed in exchange for higher AC and better reflex saves, especially if you can access the Mighty Bulwark feat. You’re a thaumaturge, you’ve plenty of features to circumvent the speed penalty real easy anyway. Use a mirror, cast tailwind, get ancestry speed boosts etc.

Weapons:

The thaumaturge can make decent use of simple weaponry if they have relevant traits, such as agile or free-hand. However, most traits really don’t matter to the thaumaturge because of how tight your action economy is. With the right build though and proper action management, you can certainly make use of them, and making strikes is how the thaumaturge most easily makes its impact in combat anyway.

Melee:
I have divided the following section into finesse and strength weaponry. The thaumaturge is surprisingly solid at using finesse weaponry, since you’re not going to max out dex or strength, you don’t have a free hand or the actions to use maneuvers frequently outside of certain builds, and your IE and EV boosters help compensate for the lower damage dice and lack of strength. Unarmed attacks are detailed in their respective ancestries and archetypes, but remember that everyone has a basic fist attack they can use with any part of their body. At low levels, especially before you have a striking rune, feel free to kick a foe in the shins to benefit from the agile trait or if your hands are occupied. Fatal and deadly weapons aren’t the greatest unless you can get reliable accuracy boosters, which the thaumaturge can manage by itself past the very early levels. If a weapon is not rated here, it is likely not worth considering or an uncommon option.

Common Finesse:

Exquisite Sword Cane ★★★★ If you don’t care for Deadly or Versatile, which most finesseturges won’t, it’s hard to do better than this. Even though you can’t benefit from its twin trait, the weapon has a great list of traits that any dexturge can make use of, as well as just being really cool. It’s a bit pricey, being a level 4 item, so you’ll have to use something else first, like a normal sword cane. It’s also just cool as hell. Exhibit class while you’re demolishing your foes.
Flyssa/Shortsword ★★★ Near identical to each other barring the flyssa’s critical specialisation, which scales a bit worse. A decent option for multiattack builds.
Main-gauche ★★ Thaumaturges can make decent use of Parry. The lower damage isn’t as much of an issue thanks to IE, but disarm really means nothing to the dexturge. Entirely outclassed by the
Rapier ★★ If you can guarantee crits reliably this is decent damage. Otherwise, pick something else.
War Razor ★★★ Once again, if you can reliably get your foes off-guard and get crits in, this is a decent option and can push out some decent damage on top of your other damage boosters. An optimised party will always have several sources of off-guard anyway. Be especially nice to your maneuver-using party member.
Whip ★★★ I don’t love the whip on dexturges, but it feels wrong to rank the only common martial finesse one hander with reach any lower than this.You’re probably better off with a thrown weapon though, since none of the other traits really matter to you unless you took assurance in athletics and the enemies you face are consistently lower level than you or you’re fighting a monster who’s exactly 10 feet from you and can Reactive Strike within that range, but even then it’s a hard choice. Non-lethal also really sucks against constructs and undead, so if you’re facing those often switch to another weapon or get a shifting rune. If you can somehow access and be proficient with a Chain Sword ★★★★ go for that instead.

Common Strength:

Avoid sweep weaponry unless they have some really solid traits you couldn’t pick up elsewhere. The thaumaturge can make good use of maneuvers like trip, especially if you have reactive strike and/or the weapon implement. Versatile has less value on the ‘turge if your GM rules that you can’t trigger Personal Antithesis on a foe that is already weak to one of your versatile weapon’s damage types. Agile, backswing and forceful weaponry are all nice to have if you can manage multiple strikes a turn. The strength turge’s main power over the dexturge is its access to maneuvers and easier utilisation of reach weaponry. I also do not recommend weapons with the two-hand trait. The thaumaturge can’t utilise them well enough to matter.

Gaff ★★★ Reliable damage type with the ability to Trip and Versatile P. A respectable choice, given the thaumaturge’s ability to target multiple saves and impose status penalties anyway.
Lance ★★ This is only of note to small strength turges who are mounted. You can use this to get a one handed reach weapon with a bit better damage than the whip, but it requires heavy outside investment in an archetype to get a mount in the first place, and you might just stick with a whip anyway for the maneuver traits.
Longsword ★★ Highest damage of a one handed melee weapon, with a middling Versatile P. Meh.
Light Pick ★ Low damage in exchange for fatal. I do not understand why a fatal weapon has the agile trait on it, outside of being created exclusively for Double Slice builds. Just use a Pick if you really want to crit fish.
Maul ★★★ Longsword damage with a much more reliable damage type and the shove trait. Shove is useful for repositioning enemies and combines well with certain ancestries.
Pick ★★★ This is the weapon of choice for most melee critfishers, unless you can access a falcata. If you and your party can guarantee accuracy boosters reliably, bump this up a step.
Scimitar ★ Forceful is neat, but sweep means nothing to the thaumaturge until you get Implement’s Assault, a 16th level feat. Weirdly, Treasure Vault released an item called the panabas which is the exact same as the scimitar but has the two-hand trait added to it. You should honestly just pick that if you’re eyeing the scimitar, it even has the exact same price.
Whip ★★★★ The only common one handed reach weapon, but the thaumaturge can get some real use out of this. Two maneuver traits and reach are a powerful bonus and the d4 damage is negligible given your damage boosters. The only real spoiler is the nonlethal trait, which can really suck against certain enemies, but in those cases you still have the weapon’s maneuver traits to fall back on and can always just pick up a shifting rune. Even if you have access to other reach weapons, keeping a backup whip with a potency crystal attached for those reach trips (and disarms wherever relevant) is a solid choice.

Ranged:
All your common and non-advanced one handed options require you to reload. The Thaumaturge has no real in-class support for reload weapons outside of Ammunition Thaumaturgy if you don’t use capacity weapons, so if you go down this path you’ll want to archetype into the gunslinger or the Unexpected Sharpshooter. The Tome is of interest to many firearm builds since their IV ability pairs nicely with Risky Reload, since the IV lets you roll a d20 beforehand that you can use for any strike you make before your next turn. If you know you’ll hit, Risky Reload. If you won’t, do something else on your turn. This build takes a while to get off the ground though, and I wouldn’t recommend this unless you’re starting close to or past ninth level. Get a reinforced stock and some potency crystals for when you’re caught in melee. Keep in mind that these ratings apply relative to each other, as in general I consider reload weaponry to be yellow. Additionally, I’d consider a gunner’s bandolier to get more variety in your weapon choices, since it’s the same amount of actions you’d need to reload anyway.

Common Reload:
There are only 2 noteworthy options here. Pick the Gauntlet Bow ★★ if you intend to make use of items frequently, especially scrolls, and would like a defensive boost every now and then. Otherwise, pick the Rotary Bow ★★ for its solid damage. The capacity trait also reduces your reliance on picking up Ammunition Thaumaturgy. You can’t combine these with Risky Reload, but something like Running Reload and Crossbow Crack Shot works decently enough.

Uncommon Reload:
You’re mostly here for the firearms. The thaumaturge’s base accuracy is a bit lower than the average martial and far worse than a fighter or gunslinger’s, but they can access powerful accuracy boosters quite easily and are very good at imposing status penalties on their enemies. You can certainly make fatal weaponry work if you know what you’re doing. As a general rule, I don’t recommend weapons with less than 30 feet of range unless you’ve got a strong frontline and really want to pop off on those crits. Otherwise, just pick up a thrown weapon.

Double-Barreled Pistol ★★★ Not a bad choice. You can get two shots in before having to reload. If you know you’ll crit (such as by using a Tome) and don’t have access to a big boom gun, this is a decent alternative.
Other One-Handed Firearms ★★ Most of these weapons are pretty similar to each other. One handed firearms generally have more value when dual wielding or two weapon fighting, neither of which the thaumaturge can do well. Pick whatever you want as long as it doesn’t have 20 feet of range, unless you’re going for a Big Boom Gun crit fish build.

Thrown:
This is mostly for midrangers, especially dexterity builds that manage to fit in a strength boost or two (through some miracle I am unaware of). You’ll want to purchase a returning rune as soon as possible, unless you can access Quick Draw and a Thrower’s Bandolier. The latter build deserves some more attention, because you can store up to 20 weapons in the bandolier, all with a variety of traits that can apply to just about any given situation, and you can certainly double up if required. Use Quick Draw (probably through the rogue archetype) alongside the item to imitate the Moon Knight meme as often as you can while simultaneously freeing up a rune slot.

Common Melee:

Starknife ★★★ I’m only putting this here because it is the only common thrown weapon with finesse that can reliably be used in melee to avoid reactive strikes. You most certainly do not have both the strength and dexterity to reliably use other melee thrown weapons in melee, so they’re going in the ranged section. A decent pick for switch hitters.

Common Ranged:

Hand Adze ★★ You can make it work. Forceful and Agile are nice to have, but a 10 foot range is pitiful, and will only get worse as you level and face bigger baddies with reactive strikes.
Rungu ★★★ The Grippli use an odd amount of strength weapons for being small frogs. Nonetheless, this is basically a better javelin with a decent trait that with some investment into strength or assurance you can use to push foes who get too close away from you.
Light Hammer ★★★ Solid damage, decent range, and the agile trait.
Chakram/Trident ★★★ The only real difference to dexturges here is the damage type. If all you want is reliable damage, you can’t do much better than this.
Bola ★★ On its own the weapon doesn’t do much for dexturges. However, it’s a valuable addition for Quick Draw Bandolier thaumaturges, especially assurance users, offering you a powerful control option.

Items:

The thaumaturge has a lot of in-class support for making the most use out of a variety of special, especially magical items. I can’t possibly cover every single item in this expansive system, but I’ve noted some that synergise well with the class, some classic standouts, and traps to avoid.
Additionally, certain magical items can count as implements for the purposes of holding them in your hands and using all your features that require said implements, such as specific magic weapons for the Weapon or Wands for the wand.

Adventuring Gear:

Weapon Siphon ★★ This is for the Tome builds. Load it beforehand to gain some extra damage you won’t have to waste since you’ll know if you miss. It does increase your MAP’s numerical penalty, so it disincentivizes making multiple attacks, but as a melee thaum you might not have the actions for that anyway.
Alchemical Gauntlet ★★ This also combines decently for tome builds, and has some extra appeal to strength turges since you can use the hand to hold an implement or to attempt maneuvers with when your tome attack misses. The lower damage die doesn’t hurt as much when combined with all your flat damage boosters anyway.
Injection Reservoir ★★ A similar option to the weapon siphon, but poisons are a bit harder to use and as you level a lot of non-humanoid foes will have resistance or outright immunity to them. It also increases the penalty that MAP imposes, but there’s a lot of good poisons and you activate this after making an attack instead of before.

Armour Runes:
The thaumaturge is a bit squishy, so boosting your fundamental armour runes is important. Armor property runes are a different story, and unfortunately almost all of them are mediocre. The thaumaturge can support them a bit better though, thanks to feats like One More Activation and Intensify Investiture.

Shadow ★★★ You get an item bonus to stealth. At just 55 gp, the shadow rune is incredibly affordable, and the cheapest item that provides a permanent stealth bonus. If you want to be stealthy, be sure to pick up this rune, as it is a skill you will always want to maximise.
Glamoured ★ This armour rune allows you to change the appearance of your clothing. You should probably just pick up a Ring of Discretion.
Ready ★ No. Invest in Comfort armour if you’re really paranoid.
Energy Resistant ★ Buy a ring of energy resistance, or get it from an ancestry.
Invisibility ★★ The thaumaturge has better options thanks to easy investment in Trick Magic Item and Scroll Thaumaturgy. If you have the slots for it though, not a bad choice to save resources elsewhere.
Fortification ★★ Critical hits are certainly nasty, but the random chance feature of this rune isn’t worth the gold, especially if you invest in AC increases, not to mention how easy it is as a thaumaturge to access damage negaters whether directly or indirectly.
Winged ★ There are better options available, such as winged boots. This has the other options beat in style, but not mechanics. Made especially worse by the increase in flying options since Howl of the Wild, as well as the thaumaturge’s easy access to spells like Fly.

Potions:
Surprisingly, Thaumaturges can’t make good use of potions. As one time only consumables that require a free hand, their action economy is really messy for the turge, so in general most potions are yellow ★★. There are still some decent options you can keep on hand every now and then.

Potion of Emergency Escape ★★★ A potion of emergency escape is an early-game escape hatch. You get a huge bonus to all your speeds, but become fleeing. Exactly what you are fleeing from isn’t clear. It might be hostile creatures, the creatures you see when you drink the potion, or all creatures. Check with your GM to see how they rule it. At just three gold a pop, your whole party ought to buy one. If you need to run from a fight or partake in a Chase, this virtually guarantees your success.
Potion of Retaliation ★★/★★★ You might walk into combat holding a potion in hand so you can chug one of these, draw your implement and/or your weapon, and activate EV. The lower versions border on a red rating since unarmed attacks are infrequent unless you are in a nature campaign, but punishing enemies for attacking you is a great deterrent given your low HP, especially the higher level options.

Scrolls:
Thaumaturges love them scrolls. Thanks to Scroll Thaumaturgy, you can use these items offensively quite reliably if they force a save. Feel free to buy some fun toys like a Vision of Death ★★★ or a Heightened Fear ★★★★. Scrolls that you buy are especially useful for spells that don’t come up often, but are useful when they do. Classic picks include See the Unseen ★★★ or Comprehend Languages ★★★. You might also stock up on scrolls of Heal ★★★, since they’re cheaper and more effective than healing potions, but it you’re going to cast them more than 10 times, especially if it’s only once or twice a day, buy a wand to TMI or cast with, though with scroll thaumaturgy you still have the option of getting out a three action heal when necessary. You can also hold scrolls in the same hands as your implements, ensuring your abilities still remain active while casting your spells. As you level, Translocate ★★★★ (especially once heightened to 5th) becomes a powerful tool as an emergency escape hatch. Funnily enough, RAW you can’t hold scrolls in a free hand and benefit from IE, even if you took an unarmed attack or the Weapon, since the scrolls you buy only work like your esoterica, but don’t count as esoterica. I don’t think this applies to the scrolls you get from Scroll Esoterica since those feats have the Esoterica trait, but talk to your GM nonetheless. I’m fine with hand waving this away because it doesn’t seem intentional and it’s weird that you can hold scrolls in the same hands as your implement and benefit from IE but not if you’re only holding the scroll.
When it comes to your scroll esoterica options, you’ll want options that come up often, since you lose them at the end of every day. I can’t provide an extensive analysis on all the options available, but I recommend checking out Gortle’s Sorcerer Spell Guide. It provides solid analysis on nearly every spell in each tradition and I generally agree with their ratings, though I’d avoid any spells that require a spell attack roll.
I also want to shout out Pocket Library ★★★★. This spell is fantastic for the thaumaturge and its bizarrely long duration enables you to rest cast this spell. I would generally advise picking this up as a wand, however at higher levels once you’re past Elaborate Scroll Esoterica this is a solid pick for some of your lower rank scrolls. It provides a powerful bonus to one recall knowledge check a day (more at higher ranks), which I’m certain you’ll be able to make great use of, additionally protecting you from critical failures. You might also just buy tons of scrolls of this to activate frequently, though at that point you should probably also just get a wand of this. If your GM allows it, it’s possible that you can leave multiple castings of this spell up at once, so you can activate this a hideous amount of times a day thanks to casting it just before sleeping. Don’t get too obnoxious with it though, or your GM may choose to revert their generosity.

Specific Magic Weapons:
Most of these are not worth the gold, especially since they often lose relevance by about 2 levels past when you get them, especially if they rely on a DC. The thaumaturge can somewhat circumvent this issue thanks to their One More Activation and Intensify Investiture feats, but in general you’re probably just better off using a custom weapon with your own runes. I will revisit this section when I am more aware of any items that specifically pop out to me. One notable exception is the Auspicious Scepter ★★. This technically can count as Regalia, which enables you to have a weapon and two implements up at the same time without one of them having to be a Weapon. It also has some nice bonuses to RK checks and basically does Breached Defenses’ job for it if your GM agrees with you on its identity as an implement, which bumps its rating up a step.

Spellhearts:
Thaumaturges can make decent use of these items, especially with a spellcasting archetype. They’re effectively permanent talismans that give you a passive bonus and some free spells.

Enigma Mirror ★★★/★★★★ This is a pretty neat item on its own, but if your GM allows you to treat it as a Mirror it’s even more fun. Be sure to take the usual magic items feat when picking this up.
Flaming Star ★★★ This spellheart should be affixed to armour, as fire damage is common among enemies as both a damage type and resistance. Giving yourself fire resistance with the option to occasionally cast crowd-favourite spells like Fireball is great; at just a handful of gold more than an energy resistant rune, it is a bargain.
Grim Sandglass ★★★ This is a solid choice for either armour or weapons. Some of the spells don’t have a new remaster variation, such as restoration, but are still solid options anyway. You also get access to some light healing capabilities that you can use more frequently with the right feats.
Phantasmal Doorknob ★★★★ No surprise here. Slap this onto a weapon and don’t look back. The thaumaturge has a host of accuracy boosters to ensure you can land a critical hit, and once you get this to 10 and beyond, being blinded on a critical is just wild. Expect your GM to ban this. If they haven’t already, they sure will once you get it. You can also cast Phantasmal Killer/Vision of Death, which is a solid spell that you should absolutely Intensify Investiture on.
Warding Statuette ★★★ You’re probably going to affix this to your weapon. Handing out status bonuses to your allies is pretty cool, even if the spells are very mediocre. It also offers resistances against weapon damage if affixed to armour, but you should probably just swig a potion of retaliation just before a big fight starts up.

Staves:
If you have a spellcasting archetype, You can make decent use of staves. They do require the use of at least one of your hands, though the ability to double as a staff that you can etch basic runes on is quite solid, especially if you’re only making one attack a turn. I wouldn’t recommend using the two handed staves unless you’re a bard who plans to use codas. Even so, if you don’t plan to use staves/codas as weapons, you can use a combination of your Familiar’s abilities, retrieval prisms, and the retrieval belt to reliably juggle items about and cast some decent spells, so long as you have the spell slots to match their level. I would probably just buy some extra scrolls though.

Talismans:
Absolutely shocking, the thaumaturge can make excellent use of talismans too. Talisman Esoterica already gives you two free talismans a day, and even at half your level you’re certain to find something good. If you have the Tome IV, you can combine it pretty well with talisman effects reliant on a hit, especially since you can save them for a critical hit. If you take Grand Talisman Esoterica at level 14 you can have two talismans on the same weapon and choose to activate whichever depending on the situation.

Owlbear Claw ★★★★ Thaumaturges can only access critical specialisation effects with the weapon implement, and only for that weapon. The owlbear claw takes care of that for just three gold. Even better, you only need to use the claw on critical hits where your weapon specialisation would matter. If you are using a dagger to fight an enemy immune to bleed, using a hammer to fight an enemy whose turn is right after your own, or using a club to fight an enemy and wouldn’t shove the enemy anywhere useful, you can simply keep your talisman for the next time you critically hit. It only costs three gold, so if you don’t plan on picking up other weapon talismans you should always grab a six pack of these for use over the course of your campaign, or spend one of your free talismans to get one at lower levels.
Potency Crystal ★★★ Slap this onto a whip. Thaumaturges can’t really use gauntlets to avoid being disarmed since it prevents IE from working if you’re also wielding another weapon, but the extra damage is real nice, and if you’re about to fight a tough encounter you might buy this at certain level breaks to get some extra damage before you’re actually able to access an upgraded fundamental rune. It being level 4 in the remaster is just a typo, though might interact weirdly with talisman esoterica.
Feather Step Stone ★★★ Ignore difficult terrain when you have to. You can usually work around difficult terrain, but the thaumaturge has a tight action economy and this enables you to power through it when you really need to. Damage now is better than damage later.
Venomous Cure Fulu ★★★ The thaumaturge has decent fortitude progression, but it’s a tertiary stat at best and poisons are quite common.
Retrieval Prism ★★★★ You instantly summon a selected item to your hand. If your GM won’t let you have a Retrieval Belt due to its uncommon trait, this is a close second. Even if you do have a retrieval belt, you might just use these anyway. This is fantastic for magic item builds. With a Familiar with the right abilities, these and a retrieval belt, you will almost never have to waste actions drawing and stowing items.
Dragon Turtle Scale ★★★ Rather than investing in a feat or magic item for underwater battles, get this scale. Getting a swim speed inherently mitigates many difficulties with fighting underwater, but you usually only need to do so a couple times a campaign. This talisman won’t cripple either your build or your wallet, and you can prepare it as a free talisman if you know you’re getting on a boat.
Dragonbone Arrowhead ★ Get a returning rune or a thrower’s bandolier. If you are using a weapon with the thrown trait, you intend to be throwing it often.
Emerald Grasshopper ★★★ Funny as hell. Pretty good for covering long distances quickly, and the thaumaturge loves free movement.
Iron Cube ★★★ You get the Slam Down fighter feat. not bad, but if you miss you’ve wasted two actions.
Grim Trophy ★★★ You have an excellent charisma modifier. This is simple, but incredibly effective. However, you are unlikely to target both targets in the same turn unless you are using spells, so you might prefer to save the Demoralize after you’ve finished beating down the first, but a status penalty now might mean an attack that misses you.
Murderer's Knot ★★★ An easy damage boost and you keep the target off-guard for as long as they’re suffering the bleed. They don’t even need to take damage from it, they just need to keep bleeding. A solid choice against boss fights, use it as soon as possible to guarantee maximum value. A bit worse if your party already uses bleed reliably and can generate off-guard with ease.
Gallows Tooth ★★ You don’t often have the actions nor the base accuracy to justify this. Your allies are unlikely to benefit from it either.
Stormfeather ★★ This is a relatively early flight ability, but it gets outclassed quickly, especially if you want to be making frequent use of it. Scroll thaumaturges will just buy or prepare scrolls of Fly.

Wands:
If you took the Trick Magic Item skill feat or a spellcasting archetype, these wands are clear standouts. They lose a bit of value since thaumaturges can already access scrolls pretty easily, but you also have feats like One More Activation and Intensify Investiture to get some more juice out of them. If you have a spell scroll that you’re going to cast more than 10 times, especially if it’s only once or twice per day, buy a wand instead. You can also obviously treat wands as a wand implement, so some specific wands might be worth checking out.

Alarm ★★★ This wand is a great pick for the paranoid/”well-guarded.” It is very cheap, and you can cast it every time you go to sleep.
Darkvision ★ You don’t need a wand of darkvision, because obsidian goggles do the same thing, cost less actions, are cheaper, don’t require a check, and provide an item bonus to perception checks.
Translocate ★★★★ The ultimate get-out-of-jail-free wand. The 1,500 gp fifth rank version allows you to travel up to a mile and through walls. The 700 gp fourth rank one can only teleport you one hundred and twenty feet to a space you can see. That’s still enough to get you out of grapples, pits, and other simple hazards, but only one of them can get you out of a monster’s stomach, out of bow range, or out of a dungeon. That said, the fifth rank version is also a good choice as a 150 gp scroll if you’d like to save some money, or as an option for your Scroll Esoterica.
Fly ★★★ A wand of fly nets you five minutes of flight for 700 gp or one hour of flight for 6,500 gp. While casting fly before entering the dungeon is tempting, it isn’t quite worth the cost. I strongly recommend purchasing the cheaper version. If you are worried you might need flight multiple times a day, you can buy a second or third wand and still come out ahead in price. Doing so also provides the utility of casting fly on multiple party members or breaking up your flight time across the day, rather than forcing you to meet all your flying needs in the same hour. That said, purchasing a potion or scroll of flight is significantly cheaper, especially with scroll esoterica, and usually suffices for the rare moments you need flight twice in quick succession. I’d only consider it in a party with heavy melee bias. You also need to compare wands of fly to winged boots. Winged boots grant fall damage immunity, a minor speed boost, and don’t require a check to use. You never need to spend an action drawing them, and they have double the duration. Conversely, the fly wand can provide a faster fly speed if you have an incredibly swift walking speed, you can use the fly wand on an ally, and it is 150 gp cheaper.
Invisibility ★★★ It costs you 160 gp for the stealth bonuses of invisibility, and 700 gp for the combat benefits. The latter works for a far shorter duration than the former, so buy for the scenario you intend to use invisibility for.
Tailwind ★★★/★★★★ The first rank version costs just 60 gp and lasts for one hour, which is great. However, the second rank version costs 160 gp and lasts for eight. Bop yourself with the wand at the start of the day and watch your movement issues evaporate. This wand is more valuable if you are a melee turge because you need a distance-closing tool. If you are a thaumaturge with heavy armour, it becomes even more important due to the speed penalty.
Force Barrage ★★ Cheap guaranteed chip damage. It doesn’t scale unless you upgrade the wand, but sometimes your enemy has a feature like ferocity that leaves it with one hit point. In those circumstances, dealing 1d4+1 guaranteed damage is very helpful. You can draw, trick, and fire it in the span of three actions, making it solid to use in combat with Trick Magic Item. If you have a hand free to hold it ahead of time, all the better.
Mountain Resilience ★★★ You gain resistance to all physical damage for twenty minutes, but each time you take a hit the duration drops by a minute. That’s still generous enough to cast ahead of entry into a dungeon, but the timing might get tight on occasion.

Weapon Runes:
If you find your build only makes one attack per round in general, you may prefer to ignore the runes that grant a damage bonus when you hit (eg. the Flaming rune). You also can also already trigger weaknesses very well anyway. You can safely consider these runes yellow unless you’ve got the actions to attack frequently, in which case i especially recommend the Thundering ★★★ rune, which is a damage type that foe are rarely resistant or immune to.

Extending ★★★ Your melee weapon gets extreme reach, but the strike takes an extra action. The effect is pretty strong, especially since most strength turges don’t have the dexterity to invest in thrown weapons anyway. Most of your abilities don’t have a range limit on them anyway, at least when it comes to affecting you personally, so in battlefields featuring dangerous terrain or expansive distances, this is a solid choice over just moving around.
Ghost Touch ★★ A must have if incorporeal undead feature heavily in your campaigns. Breached Defenses can somewhat bypass the need for this rune, but then you took Breached Defenses.
Returning ★★★ A rune tax for most throwing builds. If you take an archetype that gives you Quick Draw, you can ignore this in exchange for a Thrower’s Bandolier, especially since the thaumaturge doesn’t have a lot of metastrikes.
Shifting ★★ The thaumaturge can make decent use of the shifting rune if it invests into strength, or if you need to target a different damage type or certain other trait. This is especially useful for turges with slashing or piercing weapons, since resistances or immunities to one of those usually apply to the other too.

Worn Items:
Unfortunately, there are very few item bonuses to Lore skills, and almost none that can apply to Exploit Vulnerability. Still, the turge is a decent skill monkey, and like always, can make great use of a host of magical items. Items that provide bonuses to skills you use frequently are generally green, but I’ve highlighted a few that are especially solid for the turge. Additionally, items that provide an item bonus and activations with a set number of uses are surprisingly better for the thaumaturge in ABP games, since you can use feats like One More Activation and Intensify Investiture to effectively use lower level versions of these items at higher levels.

Boots of Bounding ★★★ These boots give you a bonus to your movement speed and to your jumping or leaping ability. They’re a good pick on just about any class. Ranged characters can use them to kite, melee characters can use them to make sure they get into the melee.
Brooch of Inspiration (U) ★★★★ A fantastic choice for the thaumaturge. Bribe your GM to get this if you must.
Diplomat's Badge ★★★★ No one is better suited to using this item than you are. A fantastic choice for Face characters, especially with the Regalia implement.
Eternal Eruption/Frozen Lava ★★★ Throw fireballs around. Simple as.
Obsidian Goggles ★★★ These goggles are useful even if you already have darkvision because they provide an item bonus to perception checks involving sight. Synergises especially well with the Lantern.
Handwraps of Mighty Blows ★ Thaumaturges using unarmed attacks will consider these blue, as you need them to get runes on your unarmed strikes. Everyone else will ignore them.
Thrower's Bandolier ★★★ Worth picking up for any thrown weapon warrior, but combines especially well with Quick Draw. You don’t have many competing metastrikes native to the class anyway, so additional versatility in your weapon traits is a solid bonus, as well as just being pretty fun to throw up to 20 weapons at your foes in a single combat.
Winged Sandals ★★★ At 850 gp, these boots remain one of the cheapest and easiest ways to regularly take flight. You probably could just use scrolls or wands instead if you took the relevant feats, but you can also combine this with One More Activation and the passive Gentle Landing is a neat bonus.
Ancestral Geometry/Open Mind (U): These are the only way you can get item bonuses to Esoteric Lore that don’t require you to only recall knowledge or consume a mutagen. Ancestral Geometry is near worthless if your GM doesn’t allow you to apply the changing lore skill to Esoteric Lore; In that case, you must wait till level 10 to get the Open Mind tattoo, which requires you to a regional worshipper of a nerdy demon lord, and provides a +1 item bonus to Esoteric Lore and a free hypercognition once per day. If you can get these items, they’re very solid. Otherwise, look to stack status and circumstance bonuses on your EV checks however possible. You might also just bribe/ask your GM to use Automatic Bonus Progression instead.

Archetypes:

The thaumaturge greatly benefits from the Free Archetype variant rule, since it simultaneously has a lot of fun feat options while also having dead levels where it’d prefer to pick an archetype or lower level feat instead.

Multiclass:

Be sure to take a multiclass archetype as soon as possible if you have a mind to do so. At higher levels, you should be very reluctant to give up your base class feats for those of a multiclass archetype. Choosing a second level feat at fourth level is no great loss; choosing an eighth level feat at sixteenth level is a much more significant loss in power. To save myself some time, I’d like to get some general reviews out of the way.

Resiliency ★★★ If you are fully committed to an archetype, the resiliency feat of martial classes is great. It is particularly noteworthy in free archetype games. Improve its rating by one step if you are using free archetype.
Basic, Expert, and Master Spellcasting The rating of these feats is contingent on the attribute used to cast them. All thaumaturges should favour charisma-based spellcasting.
- Charisma = ★★★★
- Wisdom = ★★★
- Intelligence = ★
Even with a high charisma, You generally want to rely on buff spells and those that take single actions to cast. Once again, I highly recommend this guide for more in-depth spellcasting advice than I can currently offer, but some classics have been discussed in the items section, alongside useful spells like Enlarge, Sure Strike, Protection etc. Castaturges can make decent use of save based spells when complemented with their easy access to and use of various magic items, especially at the early to mid level ranges.
Spellcasting Breadth More spell slots are always a valuable option. They are also competing with other archetype feats on top of your normal pool. I rate these green by default, so compare this to other feats the archetype offers to decide which one you’d like to pick.
Cantrip Expansion ★★★ A first level feat for most spellcasting classes which provides two additional cantrips. True members of these classes rarely need this feat, but an archetype only grants two by default and can benefit from a couple extra. If your ancestry already provides an innate cantrip, you can bump this down a step.

Alchemist ★

Alchemical items are fun, but thaumaturges are generally too dumb to meet this class’s attribute prerequisites. If you took an ancestry with an int boost (especially the elf), and/or are willing to take a hit to charisma, alchemical items are a fun addition to your toolkit, and you can bump this archetype’s rating to green. You don’t have the actions or hands to use most of their items well in-combat, but Quick Bomber + a thrower’s bandolier can suffice, and mutagens are very powerful. Just prepare a bunch that you’ll use frequently out of combat or to hand out to allies. There’s far too many items for me to properly rank, but this is a useful guide. Some personal recommendations are the silvertongue and cognitive mutagens, and the bloodhound mask can also be a solid pick, especially if you didn’t take the lantern, but it combines well enough with that too. You’ll want Expert and Master Alchemy pronto to keep your items relevant, especially since you can’t use Intensify Investiture with these.

Barbarian ★★

Would a barbturge be fun? Absolutely. I think every class becomes funnier if you add a barbie to it. Unfortunately, Rage costs an action to activate and imposes a heavy -1 to AC for a middling damage bonus, middling temporary hit points and the inability to use concentrate actions that aren’t Seek. The thaumaturge doesn’t actually have many native actions that require concentration, save for IV. However, Rage means losing complete access to Recall Knowledge. This is very harsh for the vast majority of thaumaturge builds. You can technically circumvent this by using Diverse Lore, funnily enough, and using EV as a substitute recall knowledge. Nonetheless, it’s possible to make this work, especially in a free archetype game. Barbarian offers you access to powerful instincts like the Elemental ★★★★ and Dragon ★★★ instincts, as well as the Giant ★★ instinct if you really want to risk the permanent clumsy 1 on top of the rage penalty. You also get access to powerful feats like Sudden Charge, which for all intents and purposes doubles your movement, Fast Movement, Raging Athlete, Reactive Strike etc. You can certainly make this somewhat effective, especially in the right team composition, and you can put out some bonkers damage numbers, but it’s tricky and there are better archetypes to serve you. I do think this works well enough the other way around.

Bard ★★★★

Bust a move. The occult spell list offers a variety of self buffs and utility, and the bard caters to a variety of thaumaturge builds. Everyone loves composition cantrips, even if the thaumaturge can already provide some status bonuses on its own. They also provide fantastic support for recall knowledge on top of all their other goodies. I generally recommend that players pick Enigma as their initial muse, and Warrior, Maestro, or both through Multifarious Muse. While composition cantrips are fantastic, especially Courageous Anthem, the thaumaturge’s tight action economy and access to native status bonuses might not make it as appealing; However, these cantrips apply to a wide array of rolls all at once and effect all allies in a wide emanation. You can still make fantastic use of them on turns where an implement’s IV ability might not be as better situated, for example, and you can also take the feats that extend the cantrip’s duration.

Basic Muse’s Whispers:
- Loremaster's Etude ★★★★ Loremaster’s Etude grants a focus spell that allows you to roll twice on a recall knowledge check and take the higher result. Utterly fantastic through and through, you’ll almost never fail a recall knowledge check again.
- Martial Performance/Lingering Composition ★ Strike a foe or roll a performance check to extend a composition cantrip’s duration. Not very useful when you don’t have any composition cantrips. Bump each to blue when you access your first one, especially if it's Courageous Anthem.
- Song of Strength ★★ AoE Guidance but for Athletics, which is decent but it’s unlikely that more than two people in your party make use of the skill. The wording seems to imply that it goes for all athletics skill actions but then excludes Grapple. You may want to bump it down a step if that’s the intent, especially if it applies to both your DCs and checks.
- Uplifting Overture ★★ Reliable Aid. A solid third action if your party makes frequent use of skill checks.
Advanced Muse’s Whispers:
- Courageous Advance ★★★ Your melee allies will love you. Once more, into the breach.
- Ralling Anthem ★★★ A powerful defensive bonus that will be very useful, especially if your party has a lot of frontliners.
Counter Perform ★★ Bump this up a step if you took or plan to take Lingering Composition, since you’ll already have incentive to boost performance. Your will saves are already quite strong, which most auditory and visual effects target, but performance keys off charisma and this applies to your allies too. It’s a solid defensive reaction, and it nets you an extra focus point.
Inspirational Performance ★★★★ A fantastic party wide status bonus to your offences and defences. Slightly redundant with certain thaumaturge features, but this is still a solid choice nonetheless.

Champion ★★★★

The champion is far more generous than most multiclass archetypes. The dedication alone gives you trained proficiency in heavy armour, which improves your armour class by one until level eleven and allows you to use the bulwark trait of full plate. You can get powerful healing actions and protective reactions at affordable levels.

Basic Devotion ★★★★ The first feat you choose from the champion archetype is likely to be Divine Grace. It provides a helpful bonus to your saving throws as a reaction. Once you gain your champion’s reaction at sixth level you might retrain this for the first level feat associated with your cause, such as Ranged Reprisal for paladins, Weight of Guilt for redeemers, or Iron Repercussions for Regalia tyrants . You could also use Advanced Devotion to pick up both without much trouble.
Healing Touch ★★★★ Lay on Hands is fantastic healing, especially out of combat, and is a solid pick me up if you’re really low and need to get up quick, though its manipulate trait makes it weak to Reactive Strikes.
Advanced Devotion ★★★ While there are some good mid-level champion feats, I recommend choosing another first or second level feat instead. Desperate Prayer is a great choice if you chose Healing Touch and need some urgent healing stat. Deity’s Domain can be an excellent choice depending on the domains offered by your deity, and nonetheless it provides an extra focus point with which to use Lay on Hands. If you are unholy and have an intimidation build, Aura of Despair offers fantastic power with the right items. At higher levels, it’s hard to go wrong with classics like Reactive Strike in a Free Archetype game.
Champion's Reaction ★★★★ A champion’s reaction provides you with a powerful reaction. The paladin is a solid pick. You can make extra attacks against creatures that strike your allies, triggering your powerful damage boosters. This feat complements the weapon implement rather than competing with it, as they both have pretty different triggers anyway. You might not need both because you only have one reaction a round, at least until you get Esoteric Reflexes, but the thaumaturge has such great damage that it is hard to argue with getting more potential attack triggers. The reactions of the tyrant and desecrator are also excellent for the thaumaturge; their relatively low HP and moderate defences means they’ll get hit more than the average champion, getting more use of the features (the regalia’s adept bonus also interacts nicely with the tyrant’s damage, especially with Iron Repercussions). The redeemer’s reaction is still useful, though you’d rather prefer if you weren’t the main target, so it is green. The liberator’s reaction is also green, but you’d probably prefer the mobility and movement options on yourself instead. Avoid the antipaladin at all costs; you are too squishy to make use of its reaction.
Divine Ally ★★★ You can gain a free disrupting, returning, or shifting rune for your weapon with a blade ally. Returning and shifting can redefine your playstyle. Returning is a great boon for thrown weapon thaumaturges, freeing up your slots, and shifting allows you to target a host of traits to better suit your current combat. Don’t bother picking the other two allies; You can’t use shields and the champion’s companion progression will suffer horribly on an archetype.
Divine Armour Expert ★★ This feat is worse than it should be because the thaumaturge reaches expert in armour at level 11 instead of level 13. You had to slog through 3 levels of a lower armour class than most other thaumaturges. I would probably recommend picking up the Sentinel or Stalwart Defender archetypes at around level 10-12 instead; The Sentinel especially works well at the higher levels since you have access to more of its feats, such as Mighty Bulwark.

Cleric ★★

Wisdom casting on the divine list. The cleric offers one exceptional bonus: your deity’s spells. Virtually any deity with the knowledge domain is likely to have spells relevant to your interests as a thaumaturge, but you can make use of a variety of deities anyway. The thaumaturge’s MAD nature means that investing in wisdom can be a bit of a struggle, especially when options like the divine sorcerer exist; However, the cleric archetype does offer you divine spells and automatic access to their deity’s spells, unlike the sorcerer who has to take a feat for it.

Unfortunately, outside of spellcasting and access to a host of domain spells, there’s not much here that interests the thaumaturge. Its feat list is especially poor, given that many of their best feats require doctrines you don’t follow and divine fonts you can never have. You can make it work, but it’s not going to be fantastic. Even the usual strength of the class, its ready access to spells without having to learn them or deal with a repertoire, is somewhat redundant with the thaumaturge’s easy utilisation of magic items and Scroll Esoterica.

Druid ★★

Wisdom casting on the primal list. The druid’s feats don’t do a whole lot and primal casting is probably the worst choice for the thaumaturge since it’s so offensive, especially when it’s not charisma based. Pick up a primal sorcerer if you really want to or just invest in Scrolls and Trick Magic Item.

Fighter ★★★

The Fighter has a fantastic array of feats and metastrikes for the thaumaturge to pillage, but has a terrible start, requiring a +2 in both dexterity and strength to access a dedication that offers nothing save an extra skill. If you take the fighter, you expect to start with either very low constitution or a charisma modifier of potentially +2. Nonetheless, the fighter offers fantastic options for the offence-minded thaumaturge who doesn’t want to focus on charisma much outside of EV.

Many of the fighter’s best feats are melee-exclusive. Between that and the strength prerequisite of the archetype, I expect most who take this archetype will use either a thrown weapon or a melee attack. Finesse thrown weapons like the starknife get the best of both worlds, using the fighter’s melee feats without sacrificing ranged damage, but other builds can work too.

Basic Maneuver:
- Combat Assessment ★★ This is just the Instructive Strike feat. It’s a bit worse since you’ve got lower charisma and likely won’t invest much in recall knowledge.
- Exacting Strike ★★ If you somehow have a full three-action round to burn on offence, this feat helps you land your damage boosters twice. If your second attack misses, you can try again at the same multiple attack penalty. This has obvious synergy with backswing, agile, and reach weaponry, but you may just want the Tome instead.
- Lunge ★★★★ You can strike or make athletics checks with improved reach. This feat has amazing potential on the thaumaturge chassis, with your various damage boosters and tight action economy. Does not interact well with Reactive Strike or the Weapon Implement though.
- Point Blank Shot ★★★ Add a couple extra damage to your strikes this encounter in exchange for an action. It’s generally easy enough to assume a stance at range. The thaumaturge doesn’t make much use of volley weaponry, but also doesn’t have many circumstance bonuses to damage; gets more valuable the more strikes you make in an encounter.
- Vicious Swing ★★ A two-action strike that adds an extra damage die, more as you level. The thaumaturge’s low damage weaponry disincentivizes this feat, on top of their preference for multiple attacks so as to apply their damage boosters more frequently.
- Sudden Charge ★★★★ Double your movement speed whenever you want to strike a foe in melee. A must-pick feat if you are using a melee weapon.
- Intimidating Strike ★★★ Two action strike that inflicts one of the best conditions in the game. Useful, considering that your charisma is likely far lower than the average thaumaturge.
Reactive Striker ★★★★ The earliest way you can access this reaction without being a fighter. While it does have some competition with the Weapon Implement, you can easily choose to forgo it for another implement, and even with the weapon implement this feat has more targets than that one does, so if your EV target hasn’t triggered it someone else in your reach still might trigger RS.
Advanced Maneuver: Unfortunately, there aren’t a lot of fighter feats that cater to single handed weapon users that always have their hands full. Two standouts at the earlier levels are Parting Shot, especially for ranged weapon throwers, and Slam Down, which bypasses the MAP for strength turges. If you invested in Double Shot and stuck by the near dead feat till level 12, Triple Shot is a solid damage booster against a single target; However, you almost never want to use its three action version. Most other feats applicable to the thaumaturge have the press trait, which you aren’t great at using. If you are using free archetype however, level 20 gets you fantastic capstones. Pick your poison from feats like Agile Grace, Certain Strike, Crashing Slam, Tactical Reflexes etc. These specific feats are at least green or higher.
Diverse Weapon Expert ★ I truly don’t know who this feat is for. Spellcasters were getting any weapon proficiencies they wanted from their ancestries or a general feat anyway.

Gunslinger (U) ★★

Like the class it is based off of, this archetype is uncommon. The gunslinger archetype also notably does not give you access to guns. It just gives you proficiency in them, which you already have. Much like the fighter, the dedication is just extra skills though with an easier prerequisite. You practically require this or the Unexpected Sharpshooter archetypes if you intend to use reload weaponry effectively.

There’s not much you really want from here in Basic Shooting at first. Fake Out and Hit the Dirt! are two solid choices at this level. You likely picked the Pistolero or Sniper as your Way; You can pick up their initial deed in a free archetype game if you don’t want another gunslinger feat at level 6.

Level 8 is when your build finally starts coming together. Pick Risky Reload immediately. You won’t make much use of it before this level, so if your GM is lenient with retraining or you know there’ll be a decent break before your next adventure once you hit level 9, pick Running Reload and retrain it upon reaching level 9. This is when your tome’s IV ability comes online, and you will be using this almost every turn but your first. Use the IV to determine your attack result. If you’ll miss with the IV, do something else. If you hit, Risky Reload for the action compression. You can probably just leave the archetype at this point, if you didn’t just take Unexpected Sharpshooter instead. This is probably the best way to make reload weapons competitive with other forms of combat; turning into a pseudo investigator.

There is also a potential build here for bomber turges. You can take munitions crafter and munitions machinist for a bomber + quick draw thrower’s bandolier build, since the items do scale faster than they would with an alchemist past level 12, and you can also craft alchemical ammunition for use with feats like risky reload and the Tome IV. You don’t get the benefits of Expert Alchemy so you won’t really make good use of the items in the mid-levels, but at least you didn’t have to invest points in intelligence.

Inventor (U) ★

Once again, the +2 intelligence is a big ask for a mediocre answer. There are some really interesting feats and initial modifications for your weapon or armour is cool, but it’s just not enough. If you’re dedicated to the idea you can make it work a little, but I don’t recommend it at all. Stick to your magical stuff.

Investigator ★

Horrible attribute prerequisite and everything this archetype does you either already do better or can pick up elsewhere. Additionally, picking this archetype earns you the disrespect of every other thaumaturge player in existence.

Kineticist ★★

You can’t make good use of the kineticist’s combat impulses, even the ones not reliant on your class DC, because you don’t have the free hands for it, as well as many requiring you to spend action to sustain them, which is untenable. Still, there are some useful low level impulses that automatically heighten to max because it uses your class level to determine impulse effects. You can use this archetype to access heavy armour level defences on a strength build, for example, and you get some decent stances like Geological Attunement, grab a familiar, or even get some solid out of (or in if you’re desperate enough) combat healing capabilities. You can certainly find some interesting tools here.

If you are an unarmed thaumaturge, you might find more value in this archetype since you have easier access to a free hand. If you also have an implement combination that doesn’t benefit from being active at the same time (like a Mirror/Amulet combo) you will have easier access to a free hand for the use of certain impulses in combat, and I’d bump this to green ★★★. If your GM will straight up just let you use your thaumaturge class DC for the impulses too this is an easy blue ★★★★ for the free-hand builds.

Magus ★

These ratings might seem harsh, but the main draw of Spellstrike is not really that worth it to the thaumaturge. Their base accuracy isn’t fantastic and they much prefer making multiple attacks over one single big one that only works once per minute, and you’re only taking the magus archetype because you want spellstrike. Also requires +2 intelligence to really worsen the deal.

Monk ★★

Another mediocre option for the thaumaturge. You don’t have the action compression and mobility boosters the monk does to make up for constantly devoting an action to enter a stance, and the ki spells, while nice, are nothing irreplaceable. Flurry of Blows, while neat as an additional chance to strike a target for a single action, suffers MAP and combines the damage if both attacks hit for the purposes of determining weaknesses. This doesn’t even get into the double prerequisite you’re required to take for the archetype, on top of most stances requiring you to be unarmoured. Either take the Martial Artist archetype, or use the Aiuvarin versatile heritage and take multitalented to get Flurry of Blows at level 10, but that’s a lot of hoops to jump through for a rather meh ability on your class.

Oracle ★★

Being a charisma class, the thaumaturge can make good use of the oracle. If you want to access revelation spells, there are some mysteries that can work well enough; The only one you want to outright avoid is ancestors, otherwise most minor curses are manageable depending on your build. However, avoid the moderate curse effect whenever possible, as being permanently off-guard is very dangerous, especially combined with other effects of your minor curse.

The main draw of Oracle is Bespell Weapon ★★★, especially for multiattack ‘turges, but you can also access it from the Sorcerer class. Divine Access ★★ might be nicer if it wasn’t so easy for you as a thaumaturge to get access to a lot of these spells anyway, especially with the introduction of spellhearts. Once again, you can certainly do worse, but you sure can do a whole lot better.

Psychic ★★★★

Always set the psychic’s spellcasting attribute to charisma unless you are a masochist. The psychic provides reliable means for castaturges to contribute to the party’s damage output in the form of amped cantrips. You only get one cantrip with a restricted selection, but it’s a better than average cantrip since it can -practically speaking- be converted into a focus spell. No other multiclass archetype offers a focus spell on the dedication alone. This archetype does lose steam in free archetype games since there’s not a whole lot of options outside the spellcasting and cantrips, but you can almost never go wrong with more spells.

Conscious Minds:
I’m only highlighting the ones I think are solid choices to pick. If you are a castaturge some of the saving throw options will entice you, but attack roll spells aren’t worth it, as they have lower accuracy, cost more actions than a strike and don’t benefit from most of your damage boosters.

Infinite Eye: Guidance is already a fantastic cantrip. The amped version removes temporary immunity and can be cast as a reaction. A fantastic supplement to the thaumaturge’s skillset. Pick up Detect Magic if you want to be a dedicated scout alongside your lantern.
Oscillating Wave: You can pick this up for Frostbite if you really want to.
Silent Whisper: Daze isn’t a very good cantrip, and the amp is situational unless your party heavily favours mental damage. Message has a fantastic amp, but its base cantrip is situational. Neither option has the broad optimisation appeal of the other conscious minds, but the base buffs to message would make it very useful in a political or thievery-focused campaign, and enabling your party members to use a variety of actions for a reaction is very strong.
Tangible Dream: Both cantrips provide useful sustained effects, but they can be tricky to fit into the thaumaturge’s action economy. Still, the thaumaturge can make excellent use of either effect due to their natural strengths. Solid on mid-ranger.
Unbound Step: Phase bolt is whatever, but Warp step is an impressive movement bonus, and when amped it takes just one action. It’s a fantastic pickup for a melee thaumaturge and from 7th level onwards provides you a powerful teleport option for just a single action and a Focus Point.

The psychic archetype is the only multiclass spellcasting archetype to lack a breadth feat. It’s likely intended to simulate the psychic’s own limited spell slots, but you can just take another feat at that level. There is little practical loss as far as the archetype is concerned. Still, it’s something to consider if you want your thaumaturge to emphasise spellcasting, but you do have the powerful amped cantrips to fall back on anyway.

Basic Thoughtform ★★ Your main options here are Cantrip Expansion and Psychic Rapport. Cantrip Expansion can get you extra cantrips, and Psychic Rapport provides a decent circumstance bonus to most charisma checks and Sense Motive. This feat is a bit redundant with regalia, but if you have access to mental cantrips from the archetype or elsewhere it’s a decent circumstance bonus to keep active, especially in social scenarios. You only ought to take this feat if there’s some other higher level psychic feat you really want.
Advanced Thoughtform ★★ Psi Strikes is the only feat to stand out at first. It can add a decent amount of damage to your strikes following a one-action cantrip. It’s a bit high level for its cost, though, and given that you often have to devote actions to using EV, RK or an implement ability it may not be worth it for non-ranged builds, unless you took warp step, but that costs you a focus point. At higher levels, Strain Mind can let you cast amped cantrips more often. However, Psi Development can get you an extra focus point and cantrip. Unless you find a need to use more than two amped cantrips per fight, you shouldn’t need Strain Mind.
Psi Development ★★★ Get an extra psi cantrip; you’ll probably just pick the other base cantrip since most amped cantrips don’t suit martials. You also get an extra focus point with which to use it, which is arguably the bigger draw.

Ranger ★★★

The dedication gives you access to the hunt prey action. Without the benefits of an edge, it provides only extra range with ranged weapons and circumstance bonuses to tracking. The latter is situational, but useful when it comes up. The former is a lot more helpful; this greatly expands the effective range of ranged turges, and is especially useful to thrown weapon builds. An initial turn consisting of EV/Stride/Strike can now become EV/Hunt Prey/Strike, which is far safer.

This makes the ranger a surprisingly solid option for thrown weapon turges. They have a lot of good feats that improve your effective range and give you access to Quick Draw, which combines well with a Thrower’s Bandolier. The range increase also applies to reload weapons, but most feats that support that are either two actions or work better with two handed weaponry, and so don’t combine well with the thaumaturge’s tight action economy or kit; unless you had tracks to follow before combat started, and that only applies against one target, you should stick with Reload 0 weapons.

The ranger also has some nice support for RK builds, which is most thaumaturges. It’s quite solid in a free archetype game so you have extra space to pick it apart for all the goodies. Its ability to support both thrown weapon combat and the thaumaturge’s RK specialities makes it blue in Free Archetype games.

Basic Hunter’s Trick: I’ll be reviewing the Initiate Warden spells separately if I think they stand out.
- Crossbow Ace ★★ Probably the best way to use crossbows as a thaumaturge. Reload & Take Cover or Create a Diversion. You were likely investing in at least one of these options as a dexturge anyway. Neither weapon has the backstabber trait unfortunately, but this is still decent action compression.
- Gravity Weapon ★★★ I guess gravity is pretty natural? Weird theming aside, this is solid additional damage, if a bit redundant with some class features, but that’s alright.
- Hunted Shot ★★★ If you want to invest in a single weapon, you might pick this feat up. It’s decent action compression, through it requires you to have marked a target with Hunt Prey; However, you were probably going to have to stride in anyway, so this is technically a whole additional action on your first turn. Combining damage for the purposes of determining weakness sucks though, that’s a good chunk of your damage booster gone, though if you hit twice that’s still good damage and one more chance you got to strike.
- Monster Hunter ★★★★ Add a Recall Knowledge check to the action used to hunt your prey. This is honestly hilarious for the Thaumaturge. With the right build, you can make around 5 recall knowledge checks a round, or even 11+ with spells. An excellent choice to really rat out every bit of your enemy’s statblock. The critical success effect is mediocre once you get the tome’s adept implement, though it can apply to allies.
- Quick Draw ★★★★ A must have for thrower’s bandolier builds. You save yourself a rune, can also add alchemical bombs if you want to, gain incredible variety in your weapon choices, and are neatly prepared for ambushes.
Advanced Hunter’s Trick: Only take the higher level feats with free archetype.
- Animal Feature ★★★★ A one-action focus spell that grants a fly speed with some other effects if you happen to need them instead.
- Far Shot ★★★ Double your range. The thaumaturge’s tight action economy makes this extra useful. It’s a great feat to slap atop a light hammer or chakram; between that and hunt prey, you’ll have no trouble hitting opponents as far as 80 feet away. Have fun laughing away at the firearm users from all the way back.
- Favoured Enemy ★★ This feature makes it much easier to use hunt prey in a themed campaign. If your campaign is themed around a particular creature type, its rating increases appropriately.
- Hunter's Luck ★★★★ Roll twice on your RK check and take the better result. Combines well with the Monster Hunter feature and its follow up feats.
- Running Reload ★★ Assuming that the remaster will make it compliant with bows, you should get this from the archer archetype instead, or even the gunslinger if you’ve access.
- Additional Recollection ★★★ When you succeed on a knowledge check against your prey you can immediately recall knowledge about a second creature. Recall all the knowledge.
- Skirmish Strike ★★★★ If you have a weapon in hand, this is a fantastic way to get away from melee foes.
- Dazzling Display ★★★ I’m not sure why rangers get this feat, but thaumaturges love it. Fantastic way to set up your allies too.
- Master Monster Hunter ★★ On its own this feat is useless, especially if you took Tome, but with Monster Warden it’s not bad. A circumstance bonus to your entire party’s defences against a hunt prey target, even if just for a round is pretty good, especially if you’ve got stuff like the tome on you, or your allies have other defensive boosts.
- Terrain Transposition ★★★ Two action teleport that’s triple most PCs speeds. Pretty solid if you need to get somewhere quick.
Master Spotter ★ You got this three levels ago.

Rogue ★★★★

The rogue archetype is arguably the strongest MC archetype in the game when it comes to versatility; There isn’t a single class in the system that can’t find something good from it.

Unlike many other rogues, the thaumaturge is quite solid for ranged weapon users; Divine Disharmony provides a reliable source of off-guard to proc Sneak Attack damage with. Combined with the rogue’s Strong Arm and Quick Draw feats, the rogueturge has some solid ranged firepower. It is also well used with agile/finesse melee turges, and has a host of feats supporting these combat styles. It also provides the powerful Skill Mastery feat for skill monkey turges.

Basic Trickery:

Nimble Dodge ★★★★ You can use your reaction to improve your armour class. It is equivalent to the powerful bonus of a shield but you don’t need to spend your action raising it first and can keep your hands free. Very solid for a class with few native reactions and as hungry for actions as this one.
Minor Magic ★★★ You can pick up both shield and guidance through this feat. Shield serves a similar function to Nimble Dodge. The bonus to armour class is lower and takes an action to set up, but it can shave off damage with a reaction and applies for a whole round instead of a single attack, though using it means not being able to cast shield again for 10 minutes.
Mobility ★★★ You don’t trigger reactive strikes when you move less than half your speed. A handy option for thrower builds looking to escape melee more efficiently. Boost your speed as much as you can to gain maximum value from this feat.
Quick Draw ★★★ A bit worse than if gained through the ranger archetype since your range increments aren’t as strong without further feat investment instead of working right from level 4, but still useful.
Strong Arm ★★★ Increase the range of all thrown weapons. Thrown weapons have very short range increments and benefit greatly from the extension, saving you actions moving into range instead of attacking. It’s inferior to the ranger’s thrown weapon support, but is less action and feat intensive, especially if you don’t pick up a thrower’s bandolier.
Underhanded Assault ★★★ It’s a good way to enter melee combat after using EV. Maximising it means becoming as fast as you possibly can, which the thaumaturge can somewhat complement with their easy access to spells. Fast ancestries like the Elf, Centaur or Goloma are recommended, or the use of versatile heritages for similar speed boosts.
You're Next ★★★★ Reaction Demoralise your next victim after downing your first EV target. Great action compression, especially when you’re legendary in the skill and can do it for free!

Sneak Attacker ★★★ Deal extra precision damage to off-guard creatures. The thaumaturge doesn’t always have the actions to strike multiple times, but this is still a solid damage booster, and you can make decent use of it at range thanks to high skill proficiencies and access to Divine Disharmony. An athletic ally or Dread Striker are also great supporting options.
Advanced Trickery: In addition to the feats outlined in basic trickery, the following might be of interest to you.
- Dread Striker ★★★★ All frightened creatures are off-guard against your attacks. You are very good with basic demoralisation as is, and with the right spells and items you can proc this on your own reliably, to say nothing of allies who can impose this condition too. Excellent for ranged turges.
- Reactive Pursuit ★★★ When an enemy flees, you can move with them.this should come up with reasonable frequency unless your GM just throws meatbags at you. It can be helpful for melee turges looking to get sneak attack through flanking, since it helps you avoid wasting actions on movement. If you have the Weapon implement however, you could just attempt a strike and then stride up to it next turn and make another strike that wouldn’t suffer the MAP; this is yellow to them.
- The Harder They Fall ★★★ Works well with the whip (and sickle) users or a weapon with the hooked rune. Another feature that interacts with the regalia’s adept benefit.
- Gang Up ★★★★ Flank without having to flank, just have a foe within reach of you and an ally. It also benefits the ally too in the remaster.
- Blind Fight ★★★ If you have a lantern and the Uncanny Dodge feat, this is yellow since it’s a bit redundant. Otherwise, a solid pick up, and invisible enemies are not infrequent this late into the game.
- Sly Striker ★★ As an archetype rogue, you deal the same precision damage whether or not the target is off guard to you. However, you probably want the target off-guard anyway, and by this level you and your party most certainly have a host of options to keep them off-guard, so there’s not much point to this feat.
Skill Mastery ★★★ You gain extra expert level and master level skill, as well as an extra skill feat. This is always a good pick, especially if your game tends towards non-combat encounters. While you can select this skill multiple times, it becomes a worse trade as you level and must spend higher level archetype or class feats to get it.
Uncanny Dodge ★★★ You can’t be flanked and don’t suffer defensive penalties from hidden creatures. Combined with the lantern you’ve got a solid array of defences against sneaky foes. A solid choice, especially in free archetype games and for melee turges.
Evasiveness ★★★★ Improve your reflex saving throws to master. You can’t turn successes into critical successes, but this was your worst save and a +2 bonus is very solid.

Sorcerer ★★★★

Charisma based casting to every spell tradition. This is the best way to access the arcane and primal traditions with full archetype casting. Though the majority of the sorcerer’s feats are mediocre, you can do well enough with just the basic spellcasting feats anyway. You can generally just pick whatever bloodline you want since the tradition is the main thing you’re after. Most of their focus spells don’t do much unless you’re a dedicated castaturge. However, Diabolic Edict ★★★ is a fun pick. Entice an enemy to leave the combat by offering them promising rewards for a whole round; Even if they refuse, they take a penalty to all their attacks and skill checks (including DCs). You can also use this as a pseudo guidance out of combat, or even combat in a pinch. When it comes to feats, most options are whatever. You do get access to Bespell Strikes ★★★ which can be nice, especially for multiattack turges, but if you take this feat be prepared to invest into the spellcasting feats to the fullest, as well as your magical spellcasting items.

Swashbuckler ★★★

The swashbuckler has quite a bit to offer finesse turges. You get panache from the dedication feat, which improves your movement speed when active. If you don’t want to take a spellcasting archetype, or invest into Trick Magic Item and/or scrolls of tailwind, this is a reliable status bonus to your speed.

Most of the styles are fine, though Battledancer and Wit will lag a bit behind the others because their panache-generating skill actions aren’t as intrinsically useful, though they do have good class feats so they can be worth the investment. I don’t recommend the Gymnast because you’re far too MAD to make use of that style efficiently, especially since its panache action affects your MAP.

Alternatively, you could avoid using melee combat at all. Just avoid taking finishing precision and use panache purely to improve your movement speed. The swashbuckler still has a host of feats that improve your defences and skill actions anyway. You don’t benefit from a lot of the duelling combat feats since you don’t have a free hand anyway, and you can actually just take Flying Blade ★★ if you still want those finishers.

Basic Flair:
- Nimble Dodge ★★★★ You can use your reaction to improve your armour class. It is equivalent to the bonus of a shield but you don’t need to spend your action raising it and can keep your hands free. You could have gotten it through the rogue archetype.
- After You ★★★ Guaranteed Panache just for going last. Ranged builds will definitely like this a lot, since this automatically grants you a movement speed bonus. Melee builds might not appreciate this as much, but it’s still solid for the automatic bonus, though you’re already quite good at generating panache thanks to your high charisma anyway.
- One for All ★★★★ The wit style can give themselves panache incredibly easily owing to the low fixed DC of the Aid action and your high charisma. Aiding is also a lovely reaction for supporturges since you don’t spend as many actions attacking and most implement reactions are defensive in nature. This is also a great pick out of combat to add a powerful circumstance bonus to many skill checks trivially.
- Charmed Life ★★★★ As Nimble Dodge, but for saving throws. The thaumaturge doesn’t have a lot of native circumstance bonuses, so this is quite solid, especially if an effect is really nasty.
- Flying Blade ★★ Finishers aren’t really all that, especially on an archetype. Better feats out there, even for throwers.
Finishing Precision ★★ You deal a bit of extra damage on every hit while you have panache. You might prefer to hold your panache for the bonus movement speed and any benefits from your swashbuckler feats rather than spend it.
Advanced Flair:
- Flamboyant Athlete ★★ You unfortunately don’t benefit from this feat a whole lot. You only benefit from the climb speed in combat when you have your hands free or have combat climber, which is not something the thaumaturge does. The DC reduction can help you better cross longer distances with your likely low athletics, but that’s not worth much.
- Leading Dance ★★★ Control enemy movement, gain a free step, and get panache. Wonderful.
- Swaggering Initiative ★★★ You gain a bonus to initiative and can draw your weapon as you roll it. Solid, especially when ambushed.
Swashbuckler's Riposte ★★ Your armour class is unimpressive, but your damage isn’t. If you don’t have better reactions, this might be somewhat useful.
Swashbuckler's Speed ★★ If you couldn’t get this elsewhere, might as well pick it up here. Movement Speed bonuses are always good, but this is a bit high level for my taste, especially when you already get a decent bonus from the dedication itself.
Evasiveness ★★★★ Improve your reflex saving throws to master. You could have gotten it through the rogue archetype.

Summoner ★★★★

Too many people decry the archetype due to its lack of Act Together and the Eidolon’s poor generic combat capabilities. There’s far more to this baby than just that. Eidolons share all of your skill proficiencies, including Esoteric Lore. This basically means that out of combat, your eidolon provides you what is effectively an at-will fortune effect on every recall knowledge check you make, or any skill check in general. Furthermore, once one of you fails a check, especially on RK, the other can continue to make checks. The best eidolon for this purpose are the eidolons with +2 intelligence; Namely, the Cunning Dragon and the Scribe of the Dead Psychopomp, who also have decent Wisdom.

You can’t use the eidolon well in combat, given your tight action economy. Nonetheless, it is an excellent tool to any thaumaturge’s kit, especially if you wish to be a skill monkey.

Basic Synergy:
- Dual Studies ★★ You might want this for some extra lore skills relevant to your campaign for your eidolon to use.
- Expanded Senses ★★ If your eidolon has a decent wisdom modifier, this isn’t a bad pick, especially for scouting purposes.
- Glider Form ★ Pick this if you want Airborne Form, though you might probably just retrain for it once you actually reach that level.
- Unfetter Eidolon ★★ Just get a Collar of the Eternal Bond. I will instead talk about the Stampede Medallion and how if you have Intensify Investiture and an eidolon with higher strength than you it’s a decent option for maneuvers in combat with a decent AoE effect, but maneuvers do progress your MAP so you should probably have taken an animal companion instead.
- Magical Understudy ★★★ Your eidolon can cast spells. It isn’t going to be very helpful in combat, but you can use it to pick up utility spells like detect magic and guidance. If you have a Fey, you should probably take the Initial Ability feat for it instead if you have another feat choice in mind or if you don’t care for Advanced Synergy feats. If you took this before taking the spellcasting feats your eidolon isn’t actually even trained in spellcasting, which is funny but not generally important.
Initial Eidolon Ability ★ You can’t use most initial eidolon abilities well because they’re usually combat effects that rely on the eidolon’s middling attacks and your mediocre spellcasting DC, which you might not even have access to depending on the level you took this feat. If you took the Fey Eidolon you might take this for Fey Gift though.
Advanced Synergy:
- Lifelink Surge ★★★ Give your eidolon fast healing. It’s a simple and effective healing spell with which to restore your shared hit points. The spell doesn’t actually require your eidolon to be manifest; It just requires you to have an eidolon. This potentially means you can have your eidolon tucked away safely into whatever plane it is they belong to and just give yourself fast healing for one action and a focus point for a good duration. That’s incredibly strong and bumps this to blue. Might open up weird questions about what your eidolon actually does while unmanifested though, and what happens if they get hurt or healed there, so talk with your GM first.
- Reactive Dismissal ★★ If you are ambushed and you have your eidolon up this is a useful way to get a liability off the field, since it does very little for you in combat.
- Skilled Partner ★★★ Your eidolon likely has better Wisdom and Intelligence than you do. You can also take feats like Assurance and Unmistakable Lore; since it does not have Dubious Knowledge, you don’t have to worry about getting false information on a failure. You can let your eidolon roll the check first to understand what information the two of you glean is true and false. This also enables you to better utilise the tradition skills, which have some fun choices your lower int couldn’t accommodate as well. This combines especially well with the tome, creating a powerful skill monkey build rivalling that of the rogue or investigator.
Basic Summoner Spellcasting ★★★ You get less spell slots of lower levels requiring a higher level class/archetype feat. This is still good since it counts as a spellcasting class feature for the purposes of items for example, and you can access any tradition depending on your eidolon using charisma.
Expert Combat Eidolon ★★ You don’t want your eidolon in combat generally, but at least this provides it some extra staying power if that does happen.
Expert Summoner Spellcasting ★★★ As Basic Summoner Spellcasting, though it has the same level requirement as normal spellcasting archetypes.
Signature Synergy ★★★ Your eidolon gets some extra features. Airborne form is the obvious choice, but if you have Free Archetype Ever-Vigilant Senses is also decent. Master Summoner Spellcasting ★★ As Expert Summoner Spellcasting.

Witch ★

Worse Sorcerer for the most part. If you wanted prepared casting that bad you could just pick up Scroll Esoterica. The dedication does give you a familiar, but you could already get that one too. If an archetype requires intelligence, it’s generally not for you. At least it’s better than the wizard.

Wizard ★

You are better than an Intelligence archetype. You are better than an Intelligence archetype. You are better than an Intelligence archetype.

Other:

Unlike multiclass archetypes, generic archetypes tend to have decent benefits right out the gate, but less versatility. I won’t cover every archetype, but I will cover ones that are appropriate to the thaumaturge’s flavour or exceptionally useful, as well as highlight some traps you should avoid. Archetype feats you access at higher levels are generally only slightly below par compared to most thaumaturge feats you can access. Be sure to compare the rankings for feats here to the feats your class actually gets when picking and choosing from an archetype.

Acrobat ★★★

A surprisingly decent pick for dexturges, acrobat advances a skill you were likely going to invest in anyway. Tumbling Through is decent enough to deal with moving around foes without spending extra actions, with a solid critical success effect; as a thaumaturge, you are very good at finding out which foes you’ll want to use tumble through on most often. It’s not the greatest choice for a free archetype, but still some decent pick ups here and there. I wonder what sort of acrobat picks up monster hunting as their new (side?) gig. Maybe your travelling show was hunted by werewolves and now you have sworn revenge on all creatures of evil.

Contortionist ★★ Squeezing is so situational that those benefits might as well have been removed to save on word count. Leaving a foe off-guard when you escape is pretty neat, but since you’re suffering the MAP you might prefer to make some other attack instead.
Dodge Away ★★★ Spend a reaction to gain a bonus to AC and step away from the foe if the attack misses. The higher your AC is, the stronger this feat becomes, so don’t slack on it. This is a powerful mobility tool that can completely break enemy attack routines, completely turning off Frenzies and Grabs and Constricts and the like.
Graceful Leaper ★★★★ A solid mobility booster that only costs a skill feat; a must pick for any acrobat.
Tumbling Strike ★★★ Make an acrobatics check to move behind an enemy you are adjacent to (without triggering reactions) and strike them for one action. If you critically succeed, the foe is off-guard against the strike. Great action compression, and can be used to get out of being flanked.
Tumbling Opportunist ★★ You don’t have free hands to trip with. If you are wielding a weapon with the trip trait like a whip, or your GM allows you to trip them with your hands full, this is an easy blue.

Beastmaster ★★

Even with your tight action economy, an animal companion is a great pick. Many of them have useful support benefits and advanced maneuvers that don’t even require them to actually strike a foe, and can provide extra skill support, especially in the form of maneuvers, which is a great choice for a dexturge. If you are looking for a mount I’d sooner suggest cavalier, but you can still make this work.

Additional Companion ★★ Get a second animal companion. You can only have one active at a time. I wouldn’t really want to spend a feat for this; you generally ought to know what companions will be useful for your adventures, but you might appreciate the versatility in movement speeds, especially if you’re looking to use mounts.
Heal Animal ★★★ Heal as a focus spell, but only for your animal companion. This is a decent pick up if you use your companion as a mount.
Magic Hide ★★★ A solid boost to your companion’s armour class. You might wish to use your companion to tank a bit in battle, and this can go a long way to keeping them alive while still taking hits that would have gone to you
Mature Beastmaster Companion ★★★★ Feat tax. Advance your companion and gain the ability to make them use a stride or strike even on turns you don’t command them. Always useful.
Wild Empathy ★ If you wanted to speak with animals this bad you’d pick up a spell, spec into druid, or just play something like a gnome. Don’t waste feats on this garbage.
Beastmaster's Trance ★★ A decent improvement to your scouting ability. This works better the more conspicuous your animal companion is, but as you level it’s gonna be a bit harder to explain how your human sized pigeon is able to just perch by a window inconspicuously. Still, since you can see targets, this is an alright way to get an EV off on a target before actually fighting them. Becomes more powerful as you level, allowing you to command your animal and communicate telepathically
Companion's Cry ★ Never pick this up. Your actions will always be more valuable than giving your animal an extra stride or some nonsense.
Incredible Beastmaster Companion ★★★★ Feat tax.
Beastmaster Bond ★★ Communicate with your animal telepathically. If you are legendary in nature it gains planetary range. Another handy option for those interested in using animals as remote spies.
Enlarge Companion ★★ Make your companion a bigger target but improve its reach and damage. This is most useful for strength based companions, reducing their need to move around and especially useful since it increases the effective area of certain companion abilities.
Beastmaster's Call ★★ You can quickly gain the support benefit of a non-active companion. You can do this every turn if you want to, but it’s a hefty continuous action cost; at that point you might as well have had that companion active. Also requires you to have had other companions in the first place.
Side by Side ★★ You are always considered to be flanking with an animal companion as long as you are both adjacent -not within reach of, adjacent- the enemy. This can help reduce the amount of movement you need to use, but it’s not the greatest use of a feat slot. By this level you should be really good at generating off-guard anyway.
Specialised Beastmaster Companion ★★★★ Feat tax. Never miss these. You might choose it again in a free archetype game for more specialisations, but it’s not necessary.
Lead the Pack ★ You have two animal companions active at once. Extra bodies on the field can be nice, but you simply do not have the action economy to make this rather overpriced feat worthwhile.

Cavalier ★★★

If you are running a melee build, the cavalier has notable advantages over the beastmaster, though even ranged turges can make excellent use of the archetype. Mounted builds compensate for the flaws of melee; you spend far less actions moving into melee and, thanks to certain cavalier feats, can quickly move yourself out of danger after striking. Your mount isn’t as good at attacking because you both share MAP, but there isn’t any reason you’d sacrifice a strike for your mount to make one anyway.

Some important notes to remember when fighting while mounted. You don’t benefit from the reach trait on most weapons when on a mount that is Large or larger. Additionally, large mounts might not work very well in many urban and underground adventuring environments, such as dungeons, but you should just talk with your GM about this beforehand. It’d be an asshole move to force you to lose access to many of your feats frequently nonetheless.

Cavalier's Banner (U) ★★ You must follow a faction to access this feat. You give your allies a bonus against fear effects. A bit redundant with the regalia’s basic aura; it has a much larger area, but a nasty backlash if your banner is somehow destroyed.
Cavalier's Charge ★★★★ Move your mount twice and strike with bonus accuracy at any point. The accuracy is a bit redundant with the Tome implement, but this is still fantastic. This is one of the few actual hit and run abilities in the game, enabling you to do things like striding in, striking a foe, and striding back to safety. This may trigger reactions, but no one is better at finding that out than you are, and a hit to your mount may be worth it if it’s not a hit to you. Even so, you can just take a medium mount and carry a whip to avoid attacks from most humanoid foes; It’s even great for ranged turges because you can make an attack within your weapon’s first range increment! It’s so powerful that you might actually choose to just take this over Impressive Mount at 4th level (though you really should still take Impressive Mount anyway).
Impressive Mount ★★★★ You need this feat to improve your mount. As usual for companions, you should always take this feat. This is especially useful for melee turges because your companion can take an action to stride even if you do not command it, which is fantastic for your action economy.
Quick Mount ★★ You can mount and command your mount using the same action. It’s helpful, especially in an ambush, but it’s got competition it can’t stand up to on top of requiring expert in nature for whatever reason.
Defend Mount ★★★ Thaumaturges don’t have the most hit points but their mounts have even less, to say nothing of their AC. Your mount can certainly take a hit, but you’re gambling with its life past that.
Mounted Shield ★ You can’t use shields.
Incredible Mount ★★★★ You continue to advance your mount. Feat tax.
Trampling Charge ★ An incredibly mediocre AoE effect for someone of your capabilities. Your mount is not the offensive, you are.
Unseat ★ You can’t use jousting weapons well and even so this feat is incredibly situational. You are very unlikely to be facing other mounted combatants by this level, and if you do they are usually some magical foe who have some annoying teleportation effect back to their mount or something.
Specialised Mount ★★★★ Feat tax. Make your companion even better.
Legendary Rider ★★★ You are permanently quickened and can only use the action to Command an Animal. This does not interact with special abilities like Cavalier’s Charge, but free actions are still great.

Herbalist ★★★

You can use nature to treat wounds. More importantly, you gain access to alchemical healing items. If you want to fill in as a healer but don’t want the investment of the medic or being locked to the Chalice, this is a solid archetype to pick up, requiring minimal investment for some useful healing capabilities. You play similar to an alchemist, handing out your healing items to other people who can use them better or need to use them more frequently, especially given your lack of free hands. It’s especially great in wilderness games, as it doubles the amount of infused reagents you get to make every day, as well as boosting your ability to use nature, which is far easier to manage than crafting for most turges. It’s also very thematic.

Fresh Ingredients ★★ Boost the treat wounds action when using Natural Medicine. In all honesty, you aren’t likely to actually boost nature unless you really want to craft herbal items; Natural Medicine was simply a feat tax. You could also have just spent these reagents on creating a normal elixir of life instead, which will generally heal more on average than critically succeeding on a treat wounds check, especially once you get Expert Herbalism. The only reason this isn’t red is because it’s a skill feat.
Gravelands Herbalist (U) ★★ Knights of Lastwall can access this feat. It gives you a neat item that’s pretty good if you’re facing undead, but otherwise you can ignore it.
Poultice Preparation ★★★ Cover yourself in oils. There is literally no downside to turning your elixirs into poultices, because this basically just gives them an extra bonus on top of whatever effect they were already going to do.
Endemic Herbs ★★ Get bonuses vaguely themed to the environment you’re in. Most of these only last a minute so despite the solid bonuses they’re quite paltry. I’d rather spend the batches on more herbal items than rely on buffs that usually only apply to combat where you are very unlikely to have a free hand for such work.
Expert Herbalism ★★★★ The elixir of life formulas are redundant with the remaster’s changes to formulas, but you also improve your advanced alchemy level so that you can use them and other powerful items like soothing tonics and the like. A must-pick for any Herbalist, because without it all all your items do is wake up allies from being downed.

Marshal ★★★★

The thaumaturge makes fantastic use of the Marshal. It is fantastic for a more support oriented turge who still wishes to maintain their offence and synergises very well with some implements.

The Marshal, especially its initial benefits, inevitably draw comparison to the Regalia implement, which offers many similar or outright stronger bonuses. However, the Marshal is an archetype and the regalia is an implement, effectively a subclass. It could as easily be construed that the Marshal gives you an extra implement for the price of a few low level class feats and some additional powerful benefits. Nonetheless, they both work with each other well enough, and the archetype still offers plenty of goodies for any thaumaturge build.

When building around the aura, remember that unless you take a marshal stance and critically succeed at the skill check your aura isn’t the largest. Thus, build your character around what most of the offensive characters in your party do in combat; a ranged turge for ranged offensive, or a melee turge for melee offensive. In general the archetype does provide more support for melee combat, but it isn’t mandatory by any means.

Additionally, the dedication gives you an extra skill at expert proficiency, just to really sweeten the deal.

Dread Marshal Stance ★★★★ The thaumaturge has fantastic proficiency in intimidation. With enough bonuses, you can easily critically succeed to widen the stance. The damage bonus is a bit redundant with the Regalia’s adept benefit, but it comes online at least 3 levels earlier and also provides a great source of frightened when you or your allies critically hit, which is especially solid if you have a fighter or gunslinger on the team.
Inspiring Marshal Stance ★★★★ As Dread Stance when it comes to your proficiency and critically succeeding. The bonus against mental effects is once again redundant with the regalia, but once again, this comes online up to 3 levels earlier and also provides your allies with a status bonus on their attack rolls. I might skip this if there’s already a bard in the party though.
Snap Out of It! ★★★ The worse your party’s will saves, the more frequently this comes up, but the better they are the more useful this ability becimes. Combines especially well with the inspiring stance or the regalia’s adept feature. It only costs a single action too.
Steel Yourself! ★★★ Boost an ally’s fortitude saves for a round. It also gives them some modest temporary hit points, but this is mostly for the fortitude saves. Use this to protect your rogue against whatever noxious aura the poisonous swamp monster your GM stole from Dark Souls is emitting.
Cadence Call ★★ Use this feat to end fights, or to charge across the battlefield if there’s a large gap between you and your foes that an extra stride could get you across, or if your allies just need a stride to get in range before using a powerful ability. Being slowed on your next turn can be hefty, but getting more damage in the first round can dictate the pace of the rest of the encounter. It also has more value if you’ve a very large party or have plenty of minions active. Using it towards the end of combat also basically nullifies the downsides since it’s already over. Has a fantastic follow up feat though, so you might retrain for this to pick it up by level 14.
Rallying Charge ★★★ Stride, make a melee strike, and give all your allies modest temporary hit points if you hit. This is a bit worse on the turge since it might incentivise foes to attack your relatively squishy PC instead of someone else, but this still provides a solid bonus to an activity you were likely already going to do anyway.
Attack of Opportunity ★★★★ Reactive Strike in the remaster. Excellent in any game, and this provides an additional chance to get your damage boosters in. You might not want it as much if you are using the Weapon implement though.
Back to Back ★★★ A handy defensive benefit that makes you and your allies immune to flanking when you’re adjacent to them. You’re already a bit squishy, so extra defensive bonuses are great.
To Battle! ★★ You spend one of your actions to make an ally stride or two to make them strike. Your damage is generally far better than your allies and your action economy is too tight to spend two actions on; granting an ally a stride can be useful, but it might also put them out of range of your aura.
Topple Foe ★★★ If your attack has the trip trait this is a great use of your reaction, giving you a maneuver bypassing the MAP. Remember that this requires both allies to be adjacent to the foe, so this is less useful if either you or your melee ally/allies use reach weapons.
Coordinated Charge ★★★★ Do what you were already going to do, but if you hit your allies also get a free stride action to move closer to the foe you hit as a reaction. This is a bit less useful if your allies are mostly ranged, but if that was the case you are likely a ranged turge anyway so this feat doesn’t apply to you. A fantastic bonus for following your usual modus operandi.
Tactical Cadence ★★★★ For one action, you give your party a 7th level haste for one round. Even though this doesn’t apply to you, it is fantastic. You might even consider using this every round just for the sheer power it gives your team, especially if they’re a larger party or use minions.
Target of Opportunity ★★★ It’s really weird that the otherwise melee focused Marshal ends with a feat for ranged turges. This is still a fantastic reaction for them, although if you are using Share weakness or otherwise having both attacks trigger the same weakness combining the damage can hurt its value. Still a great use of your reaction, especially if you didn’t take a reaction implement.

Martial Artist ★★★

If you want to use unarmed attacks but don’t want to use one from an ancestry, this is the archetype for you. Stances are a bit harder for melee turges to make maximum use of because you usually want to EV, stride, and then strike, but the dedication itself improves your base unarmed attacks well enough so you can always enter a stance on your second turn. However, a lot of stances require you to be unarmored, which greatly reduces your armour class given your lower dexterity, at least until level 15 when you can get it to +5 for dexturges. There are still enough goodies here that it’s a viable pick for a free archetype game, at least at the earlier levels, and in a normal game you still have excellent pick ups at certain points.

Powder Punch Stance (U) ★★ You must be from Alkenstar or the Mana Wastes to access this feat. I’m not sure if it’s a typo or something because AP content is weird like that but you don’t actually need an action to enter this stance, and all it does is add a little fire damage and make your shoves better on a critical success. Has some fun feats though, and is accessible right from level 2.
Brawling Focus ★★ The thaumaturge is one of the only classes to never get access to critical specialisation for unarmed attacks, but I don’t know if it’s valuable enough to spend a 4th level feat on, unless you’ve got really good accuracy boosters going on.
Crane Stance ★ You must be unarmoured to benefit from this stance. I might pick it up in a higher level game, but even so the benefits aren’t the greatest.
Dragon Stance ★ You must be unarmoured to benefit from this stance.
Gorilla Stance ★★★ A strength-based stance that doesn’t require you to be unarmoured. The flavour might seem like the gorilla pound attacks require your actual fists, but RAW nothing actually requires this. If your GM rules it as such, this is red. You don’t care about the climb speed bonuses unless your ancestry has hands free climbing, but if they did they probably already gave you such benefits.
Mountain Stance ★★ You must be unarmoured to benefit from this stance. This feat might be nice for strength based turges who want that unarmored flavour, but you had to wait 4 levels to get it, it reduces your movement speed and the benefits require entering a stance; I would only pick this up if you could guarantee a high initiative and speed boosts, but even so this is incredibly risky. RAW it also turns off if you ever leave the ground, so you can literally never do actions like jumping again. You should probably just take another stance and look for heavy armour elsewhere.
Stumbling Stance ★★★★ This stance doesn’t require you to be unarmored, though it requires training in deception, which you were probably going to pick up anyway. In exchange, you get one of the strongest unarmed attacks in the game; a d8 bludgeoning attack with agile, finesse and backstabber. If any enemy attacks you in the melee, they are off-guard to your next stumbling swing attack, which is a fantastic bonus. Finally, you receive a bonus to feint checks, which is a neat little ribbon but not something you’re likely to be doing often, as well as it being redundant with the regalia. Still, this is a powerful and fantastic effect for any martial artist, and one of the most powerful attacks thaumaturges can access. Even strength turges should consider picking this up.
Of course, it faces the issue all stances do, in that you are unlikely to benefit from it in the first turn unless you are already face to face with an enemy. You’re probably going to activate this on your second turn, but that’s fine. You might also seek to invest in scouting out enemies beforehand, so you can use your EV ability before combat actually breaks out and enter this stance on your first turn. A familiar with Share Senses is a great way to carry out such an operation.
Tiger Stance ★ You must be unarmoured to benefit from this stance.
Wolf Stance ★ You must be unarmoured to benefit from this stance.
Follow Up Strike ★★★★ If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. If you have two actions to spare this is a great way to spend your last attack if your first one missed, to ensure you land your damage boosters onto a target.
Crane Flutter ★ You must be unarmoured to benefit from this stance.
Dragon Roar ★ You must be unarmoured to benefit from this stance.
Gorilla Pound ★★★ Demoralise a foe and then strike them for one action with a powerful damage bonus. Fantastic action compression for a class with too many actions. The climb speed doesn’t matter unless your ancestry has hands free climbing; if so, it’s a nice bonus if you don’t want to spend an ancestry feat to get a climb speed, and most of those aren’t as fast as this one is anyway.
Grievous Blow ★★★ Vicious Swing that also powers through resistances. Your damage dice are a bit lower than average compared to the usual weapons you’d use vicious swing with, but this is still good damage and pairs nicely with either Follow-Up Strike or the Tome Implement’s IV ability.
Thunder Clap ★★★ Requires Powder Punch Stance. The damage is modest and the cone is alright, but this is still great area damage for a class that can’t do that well. Fights with multiple enemies usually feature foes with low fortitude, so the damage is a bit more reliable, and your class DC is quite solid.
Mountain Stronghold ★★ If you took mountain stance this is mandatory. It continues to improve your AC to heavy armour level and gives you the benefit of effects like Dueling Parry, which is really nice on classes like the thaumaturge with low access to circumstance bonuses, though it does cost an action. The dexterity requirement shouldn’t be hard to achieve by this level.
Stumbling Feint ★ Why is this feat even here? You can only use it alongside Flurry of Blows, which this archetype doesn’t grant and isn’t that great on thaumaturges anyway.
Tiger Slash ★ You must be unarmoured to benefit from this stance.
Wolf Drag ★ You must be unarmoured to benefit from this stance.
Black Powder Flash ★ Single target two action ability that maybe dazzles or weakly blinds an adjacent foe. Pass.
Path of Iron ★ A three-action activity that splits your damage amongst multiple targets. Not worth it, especially for a class as focused on a single target as you are.
Mountain Quake ★★★ This is modest AoE damage,but it costs one action and can even knock foes prone. It is hindered by the requirement that all foes be on the ground, and the fact that you had to take mountain stance for this.

Mindsmith ★★★

You can generate a “mind weapon” to use in battle. The flavour is quite fitting for most thaumaturges, being so resolute and firm in your beliefs and knowledge that you materialise your own instrument of death. Choose any of the one handed weapons, depending on your build I would generally suggest picking the club for its reliable damage type and solid critical specialisation effect, if you can access that.

The dedication itself doesn’t offer you much. You’re trading weapon traits for what is basically the best weapon for concealing or smuggling. It’s a good boon, but not something great. To make maximum use of the keepsake, you could declare it as something like your undergarments to ensure maximum safety. Most thaumaturges will probably choose something more flavourful like something on their esoterica (such as a pendant or necklace) or even a non-magical implement.

However, the archetype offers fantastic customizability to your weapon if you spend more class feats. This is a reliable pick for free archetype games and even in a normal game there are great picks at various levels.

Malleable Movement ★★★ As a skill feat, this enables you to build out of the archetype sooner if that’s what you want to do. A great movement booster for dexturges, and it even stacks with the Powerful Leap feat. Even strength turges can make good use of this.
Ghost Blade ★ Spend one action to give your weapon ghost touch. Ghost Oil costs 18 gold a pop and if incorporeal enemies are that common to your campaign just buy the ghost touch rune.
Just the Tool ★ Get any normal tool you need. RAW, nothing actually stops you from using this to create a ladder or other large equipment, but this likely isn’t the intent. That still doesn’t make this feat too unbalanced, given it cost you a 4th level class feat to take. Still alright if you just need a shovel or crowbar from time to time, or some other mundane equipment. The more creative you are, the better this feat becomes.
Mental Forge ★★★★ Give your weapon grapple and trip. This is fantastic for either the 1d8 weapon, or for strength based users who’d like to benefit from the 1d4 weapon’s agile trait. This is a fantastic increase in your utility mid-combat. Dexturges can consider this feat yellow. Modular is alright, but even with assurance grapple or trip on a weapon is a great choice if you know what save to target (which you easily can).
Mind Shards ★★★ The damage and range of this cone are both modest at best. On the flipside, it can be used at-will and provides some decent AoE capabilities to the otherwise single target focused thaumaturge.
Malleable Mental Forge ★★ You can swap the traits from Mental Forge at the start of each day. In general you already chose the traits you wanted, but sometimes you need to take enemies alive or are fighting on an airship with no railings and want to shove people off or something.
Mind Projectiles ★★★★ You can use your weapon to make ranged attacks. A dexturge will deal about the same damage in range or melee with their mind weapon, and will almost always favour using their mind weapon for ranged combat. This makes for a fantastic switch hitter. Look for any vertical mobility you can reliably access; if your ancestry provides hands-free climbing or a fly speed, those combine very well with this. Even strength turges with modest investment in dexterity can benefit from this to get their damage boosters off on a foe they can’t reach.
Runic Mind Smithing ★★★ You get a free energy damage rune for your weapon. Choose thundering for best results unless you know that another rune will be more suitable for the day. The thaumaturge’s tight action economy means that you won’t always make the best use of these runes, but it’s still a good feat.
Metallic Invisionment ★★ Your mind weapon counts as silver or cold iron. This feat is rather high level for its effect, but you might need or want it if your campaign is themed around specific foes, which you should be able to ascertain by this point.
Advanced Runic Mind-Smithing ★★ The holy and unholy runes are alright, but the other two are useless with the removal of alignment in the remaster. You also get to pick the greater versions of the energy runes, which are particularly useful for powering through resistances (take that Breached Defenses!). You additionally get to swap out the mind smithing rune once per day out of combat, which is useful if your party makes good use of scouting. Even so, this is still very meh for being such a high level feat. I’d only deign to pick this in a free archetype game.

Pactbinder (U) ★

Excellent thematic compatibility aside (because this archetype actually existed as a feat chain for the thaumaturge in playtest) this archetype is unfortunately rather underwhelming. The dedication is pretty good because it allows you to advance two useful skills to expert, but Binding Vow is very much just flavour stuff to work with your GM with.

In fact, that’s a problem with a lot of the feats here. They’re all mostly flavour stuff until you get to the higher levels. This is an especially weird pick for free archetype because that means you are just making random pacts wherever you go. There’s also the issue of some of the pacts in this archetype requiring you to do stuff that might clash with the adventure’s demands or the goals of your party in return for very mediocre bonuses. I’d recommend just reflavouring your base abilities or another archetype or something like that instead.

Sentinel ★★★

The Remaster has made the sentinel slightly less valuable ever since the Armor Proficiency general feat provided scaling to expert at level 13; unless you know for a fact that your game is going to level 19, you should probably just stick with that feat. However, the thaumaturge can still make decent use of sentinel over the Armor Proficiency feat since the archetype proficiency scales to expert in armour at level 11 instead of level 13, and this archetype will provide that same scaling to heavy armour at level 11 and 19 unlike the general feat. Heavy armour is a great choice on any strength thaumaturge, especially thanks to the full plate’s bulwark trait, which provides a great bonus to your very poor reflex saves.

However, the thaumaturge cannot make good use of full plate until level 5, when they can bump their strength to +4 (or use the gradual ability boost rules). The dedication is still a great pick for the powerful scaling benefits, but you might prefer to take it at level 4 instead and take a more immediately useful feat. It’s also incredibly middling in free archetype games; if you are playing in one, I would advise just picking up the champion archetype or the armor proficiency (and retrain it later) feat before taking sentinel around levels 8-12. You might also like the Stalwart Defender archetype if you have access to it.

Steel Skin ★ A skill feat that requires training in a mediocre skill. Resting in medium armour does literally nothing for you since you took this for heavy armour, and you don’t get master proficiency in that till level 19. Maybe in ABP games or if you can somehow manage two sets of armour at once you might take it so that you are never defenceless if ambushed while sleeping, but that’s just too situational, and at that point just buy some scrolls or a wand of Instant Armor.
Armor Specialist ★★ The damage resistance is incredibly minor, even if slashing is a common damage type.
Armored Rebuff ★★ Shove as a reaction to crit fails on Strikes against you. Shoving as a reaction is a solid bonus to disrupt multiattack routines and force enemies to waste actions moving around, but your AC is nothing special and many foes have decent reach.
Mighty Bulwark ★★★★ I genuinely don’t know why Paizo thought this feat was alright to publish; A flat +4 to all reflex saves is incredible value, even this late in the game. This greatly empowers your defences and greatly increases your effective hit point and how well you can tank for the party.
Sacrifice Armor ★★ The damage reduction this provides can be incredibly valuable and save your life, but it also renders you incredibly fragile after the fact. Never use this in the first rounds of combat, and invest into Quick Repair (or bribe one of your smarter allies to do) as much as possible.
Greater Interpose ★★ As Sacrifice Armor. The new feature is the ability to negate critical hit’s double damage and use the ability against reflex saves (and critical failures on reflex saves). It’s a decent durability booster, but it’s still situational and too high level for my liking.

Recall Knowledge, Power Creep & the Thaumaturge:

This felt worthy of its own section of the guide, because there’s a lot to go over here. Recall Knowledge is somewhat of an outlier in the PF2e system because it’s one of those rules elements that actually doesn’t have a lot of specific rules in it. It leaves a bunch of information up to the GM and the players to work out how they want to implement it, even after some of the steps undergone to reduce a reliance on “GM fiat” post-remaster. This isn’t unintentional, and it isn’t really a bad thing either, but it does mean that it’s an important thing to discuss with your GM, even the table as a whole as to how you are implementing this skill action.

Recall Knowledge, as written, allows you to ask one question, after which the GM rolls a secret check, tells you the answer (to an extent) on a success, tells you the answer with some additional information or context or even just allows you a follow up question on a critical success, does nothing on a failure, and the GM can choose to feed you false information on a critical failure. This question does have limits, like generally being unable to ascertain the exact mechanical value of a creature’s will save modifier or their AC, but you can probably work around this limit by asking questions like “does this monster seem easier to charm than the fighter”?” to gain a better understanding of a creature’s abilities. The example questions provided in Player Core are a useful base to build upon.

Another important factor is the section on Additional Knowledge in GM Core. The text on preventing further RK checks on a target you have failed a check to RK on does hurt the thaumaturge in combat a fair bit, especially if you use the Tome, so be sure to get as many bonuses to your lore skills as possible. While item bonuses to specific lore skills are not easy to come by, the thaumaturge offers a variety of circumstance and status bonuses to RK checks through its implements, and you can invest into archetypes to gain spells like Loremaster’s Etude to further consolidate your unquestionable superiority in the field of Recalling Knowledge. You can also bribe your GM into using the superior Automatic Bonus Progression System to enjoy a powerful potency bonus to your Esoteric Lore checks at no cost. Spend the extra gold you’ve saved buying towels for your investigator to wipe their tears away with.

That brings me to my point about the Thaumaturge likely being the best user of Recall Knowledge in the whole system. Esoteric Lore is already a fantastic skill since it automatically scales and lets you recall knowledge on any creature (something Rangers have to wait till level 10 to access) while also applying to haunts and curses. The Lantern and Tome offer fantastic action compression, bonuses, and additional targeting ability for victims of your inexplicably vast reserves of knowledge (I have always maintained that Recall Knowledge is a silly name and idea for a game that doesn’t expect you to actually know what every monster you know is. Something like Analyse is a much more fitting and actually descriptive term), and of course, Diverse Lore.

Before we get into Diverse Lore and the topic of power creep, I’d like to talk about Lore. If you look at creature stat blocks in Archives of Nethys, you’ll notice that there are lower DCs to RK on a creature for using unspecific or specific lores. This isn’t actually applicable to every creature RAW and is supposed to be given out discretionarily by the GM, but it’s a useful tool that a lot of PF2e GMs use anyway, and is what makes lore meaningful for being so niche. Technically, Esoteric Lore does benefit from at the very least being an unspecific lore and qualifying for the lower DC, but talk with your GM first, because Recall Knowledge is still a messy activity. Assurance does become even more valuable here though.

Additionally, the thaumaturge also gains Dubious Knowledge as a bonus skill feat. I personally think Dubious Knowledge is a fun ability and adds some nice flavour to the class, but many GMs who don’t use false information dislike the on-the-spot nature of the feat and prefer to just ignore it. Some consider the skill feat to also be a sort of nerf since you gain false information and can’t always tell which is which, but this is just something to bring up with your table. I don’t personally see either of these are huge issues, but I think a solid homebrew rule is to just allow Dubious Knowledge to be opt-in, with you declaring beforehand whether or not you want it to affect the roll.

Back to the elephant in the room. Many players decry Diverse Lore as an obvious example of “power creep” in the system, given its “blatantly obvious” superiority to similar abilities like Keen Recollection and Bardic Lore, as mentioned above. I do agree that the feat, and the thaumaturge’s RK related features in general, are stronger than other options, at least on paper. At the same time, I do not see this as Diverse Lore being too strong as much as it is a potential issue with the thaumaturge’s main competitor in the field of recalling knowledge, which is the Investigator. Even so, I do not think the Investigator’s niche has been entirely overtaken by the thaumaturge. The investigator still enjoys easy access to skill increases and skill feats unmatched by any but the rogue, and keen recollection allows the investigator to target specific lores that significantly reduce the DCs for any RK checks that they make, at will. The investigator’s real issues more relate to its struggles with the action economy and general frailty, which the thaumaturge can more easily supersede thanks to better in-class support (familiar, scroll thaumaturgy, talisman esoterica etc) and easier usage of items like retrieval belts and prisms. Nonetheless, Recall Knowledge is not a game breaking activity in anything but the most niche of circumstances and requires a lot of things to go right in that case anyway. If anything, investment into such abilities should be encouraged on a mostly martial class as a way to further work together with your team and support them with additional information regarding the topic at hand.

Then there’s other features, such as the Outwit Ranger, Enigma Bards, Loremaster archetypes and more. These classes can’t really do much compared to the power of esoteric lore, but that’s fine. They aren’t supposed to specialise into the skill action as much as the thaumaturge or even the investigator is anyway, and they still get some fun investment and feats for it. It’s more of an additional part of their toolkit that they can utilise decently enough, just not as excellently as the Thaumaturge.

All of this goes to say, Recall Knowledge is a valuable tool for the Thaumaturge. It is common to hear the class being described as a “jack of all trades, master of none” or a “fifth man” that covers the gaps that a four man party can’t. I myself have mentioned these concepts in the guide earlier above, and while I don’t disagree on it being an apt general description of the class, I think it really underrates the actual specialisation ability this class offers, or even the strength of its sheer versatility. This class is fantastic as a specialist in Recall Knowledge. While in general that might not seem like a fundamental role in the party, its various abilities that improve RK whether by providing additional information, provide bonuses to defences and attacks directly or indirectly, or just simple numerical bonuses to the action make it a solid choice to devote an action to every turn you can (and with the right build, you don’t even need an actual action for it!). Pathfinder 2e, (unlike certain other d20 systems) emphasises the fact that it is a team based game, and even if you can’t take advantage of the information you gather, which is incredibly unlikely, given your whole schtick, your party certainly will find some use for it.

Final Notes

The Thaumaturge is a really fun class. I hope this guide encourages you to play it, and I hope the advice here enables you to have a fun experience with it.

Also, here’s a secret. Pick up a scroll of Inside Ropes ★★★★★★★★. Tell no one except maybe the GM. When the situation calls for it, cast the spell as subtly as possible. Make no reference to it, and never use it again.