Editing Truenamer (section)

==The Crunch==

The most infamous weakness to truenamers is the mechanics of the Truespeak skill, particularly for the "bread and butter" Evolving Mind utterances. These increase based on the opponent's CR, but said increase happens at a faster rate than natural skill investment (+2 per level versus +1), which means that unless the truenamer finds lots of outside methods to boost Truespeak, they're going to find that the longer they play, the ''less'' their abilities are going to work. For instance, the DC to affect a CR 1 opponent is 17: a truenamer with Skill Focus, max ranks, and 16 Intelligence can hit that about 70% of the time. The DC to affect a CR 15 opponent is ''45'': that same truenamer at level 15 with natural Intelligence boosts and no items is only going to hit that DC on a natural 20. This is worsened by the Law of Resistance, which means that every successful use of an utterance sticks an additional +2 on the DC for that utterance (which is also going to add bookkeeping to the mix on top of everything else). It's made especially problematic by the fact a truenamer still has to roll to affect their allies, which means that even your buff spells have a good chance of being resisted. Altogether, it ensures that a lot of truenamer turns are going to involve you screaming gibberish while nothing happens.

Because of this, it's borderline mandatory that the truenamer have access to specific magic items: a Amulet of the Silver Tongue provides a +5 (lesser version) or +10 (greater version) to the skill, which puts you somewhat back on the curve but still requires further investment to make your rolls reliable. Once you've managed to wrangle together enough items and esoteric bonuses (i.e. membership in the Paragnostic Assembly, the [[illumian]]'s racial abilities, an item familiar, and/or the aforementioned Amulet), you should be able to succeed your Truespeak checks reliably, or even 100% of the time, bypassing the class's wonky mechanics entirely and effectively letting you use them all day long ''a la'' the [[warlock]]. Unfortunately, things don't really improve from there, due to flaws with the utterances themselves. 

While most of your utterances are multipurpose to some degree, you can't take very many utterances, and there isn't an easy way to swap out older or less relevant ones. For how unreliable your utterances are, you'd expect them to be incredibly powerful, but they broadly aren't. The majority of utterances past 3rd level are severely undertuned for when you get them, stacking up poorly next to equivalent spells available far earlier (for instance, compare Reversed Essence of Lifespark, available at 14th level and giving the target one negative level, with Enervation, which is available at 7th level for wizards and gives 1d4 negative levels). The utterances often include spelling errors and other omissions that make them completely different from what they were intended to do: most notably, in the first print run of the book, the DCs for how Perfected Map utterances worked ''were not there'', meaning they had to be added in errata, and the DCs for Crafted Tool utterances suggest that it's ''[[What|harder]]'' to affect a mundane sword than a +1 sword. The existence of the Law of Sequence, which prohibits you from having two of the same utterance active at once, just makes things even worse. Wanted to use Knight's Puissance to buff the fighter, and then reverse it to debuff the guy he's fighting? You're outta luck. And for the cherry on top, several utterances require saving throws, which are based on the truenamer's Charisma, of all things, so that's even more potential for a Truespeak attempt to do nothing.

In short, their editing and playtesting were non-existent and it shows. Notably, the first incarnation of the game's [[Tier System|tier system]] refused to rate truenamers entirely, due to the class's mechanics being so broken that it's difficult to grade how powerful an average truenamer is. A well-optimized truenamer with the aforementioned Truespeak-maxing tricks is generally considered a low Tier 4 class, while a relatively unoptimized one drops all the way to Tier 6, hanging out with the [[aristocrat]] and the CW [[samurai]].