Editing Soulknife (section)

==Downsides==
First, the Soulknife is a full-on combat class, i.e. it has to get in and keep hitting people with its mind blades. The first problem with this is that the Soulknife has 3/4th BAB progression, the same as rogues, clerics, and druids. This is not good for a class meant to hit things in straight-up combat. Next up, while the Soulknife has a [[d10]] hit die, it has only light armor proficiency and no class features that help defending itself, meaning that you're stuck with light armor and a shield to not die. Its lack of feats (aside from a few crappy bonus feats and the ones you get normally) means that even if you try to become better this way you are still very vulnerable in combat.

Next up, the Soulknife is kind of slow to utilize. Until level 5, imbuing your Mind Blade with Psychic Strike is a move action. So if you want to deal some serious damage at lower levels you've got a bit of a problem. If you manage to live that long you'll become able to make your blades better by turning them into longswords or bastard swords... but this takes a full round action, leaving you doing nothing. At this point you'll also start to notice that the rest of your party starts to swing around +2 weapons while you just got your first +1 bonus last level. And at the point where it gets better, pound for pound you still deal less damage than your party's Fighter.

At higher levels Knife to the Soul becomes interesting, given that you can combine it with multiple throwing attacks. This means that you can throw four knives that each deal 3 damage to one mental characteristic of your choice, which might net interesting results when you start to damage [[Wizard]]s and drain their spells, or defeat a monster in one go with a well-placed throw. The obvious downside to throwing is that it's only got a 30 feet range, putting you into trouble when facing long-distance enemies.

Another problem with the Soulknife is that its skills kind of suck: they're all over the place. There are a couple of DEX based skills (Hide, Move Silently, Tumble) and the useful Autohypnosis, Concentration and Knowledge (Psionics) that you don't see on other classes... but those are spread out over four different [[stats|attributes]]. For the rest you have the standard package of skills, so you can't do something interesting with this.

There is a [[Prestige Class]] for the Soulknife called the Soulbow in Complete Psionics, and notoriously one of the few decent things in a book full of crap (which is why Wizards of the Coast [http://archive.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/ex/20060403a&page=2 chose to release it for free as a preview]). It allows you to create arrows just like you create your knives and shoot people with it from a safe(r) distance. This sounds meh... until you realize that while in combination with Zen Archery WIS is pretty much the only stat you need for this prestige class but it does zero good for your levels of Soulknife, your bow kind of sucks (a regular composite longbow that cannot be upgraded), the upgrades for your arrows just kind of stop at a certain level, and Phase Arrow (shoot through pretty much anything) is not really worth it. There's a few thing that make it far and away better than the base classes, though. Firstly because you only need one hand to shoot a mind arrow you can use two-weapon fighting and rapid shot to spam a lot of attacks a turn. Lastly, one of the abilities you can add to your arrows is ''Lucky'', for a mere +1 bonus. Lucky lets you reroll an attack with that weapon once per day, which doesn't sound too great till you realize ''each arrow is its own weapon'' so you can reroll '''all''' your attack rolls which more than makes up for your terrible base attack bonus (and many penalties from TWFing with Rapid Shot). Combined, these can get a bit unwieldy during actual play, though, as you can be rolling to-hit 10 times or even more ''every turn'' and as order is actually important you can't roll them all at once (A sane GM will let you roll different colored d20 for the initial attacks, but this doesn't solve the reroll issue). Plus all you'll ever do in combat is full attack.

In short, the only two ways that a Soulknife can kinds work is either as a Fighter but worse (far less attack feats and such), or as a knife-throwing machine that'll fold like wet paper when hit and wastes everyone's time with a ton of die rolls. Which is sad, because its concept is very fun.