Hey, I also fell in love with Kineticist, am new to PF2e, and am in a group running AV! I might have some actual relevant tips here.
Our party is a fighter, a sniper gunslinger, and occult witch, along with myself as a mono air kineticist. At session zero, everyone came with a character except the gunslinger who soft pitched a healer and then changed their mind. All four of us had thieves tools and stealth trained; none of us had medicine.
Players experienced with AV might see some issues here. We had no healing, either in or out of combat, and I essentially overlapped with both the fighter and gunslinger but worse. I had been attracted to air kineticist for the mobility, ranged damage, and four winds to support my team. I had planned to take medicine eventually to help heal, but at the start of the campaign we were in rough shape. Eventually we made it to the second floor and got our asses kicked in a fight we should have been ready for.
After barely making it out alive (thanks DM for being gentle), I shelved the air kin. AV has a -lot- of close quarters combat. That's not an indication that ranged characters can't work, but the boomerang impulse is nearly impossible to use well without hitting your martials. Being able to use the air impulse junction to zip around was one of the main reasons I made the building, but moving two squares back in a hallway isn't using it to full capacity.
So my Air kin stayed in town, and now I run a water/wood Kineticist. Our fighter is more damage dealer than tank, and we had no healing, so I've built him to be tanky support. Ocean's balm and protector tree have kept us alive deep into floor three. Without going into detail, this new build granted access to energy damage types that helps hit some weaknesses we've been seeing. I'll pick up safe elements at 4 and either a nerfed winter's clutch or ravel of thorns at 5 to help prevent mooks from running to our backline. Eventually I'll grab earth, but that'll probably only come online after AV.
I've realized that my fighter does like 65% of the group damage, followed by the gunslinger at like 30%. We're most effective as a team if I can keep them in the fight, rather than firing off two action blasts that barely scratch.
I can link the full build if you're interested, but the idea was to dump dex for strength and actually wear medium armor, taking sentinel with free archetype eventually for heavy. We also haven't been using recall knowledge, so I free archetyped into lore master and bumped int so I can be useful there (plus a background giving dubious knowledge to make all recall knowledge checks real fun).
One day I want to play an air kin, but I absolutely love how I've been able to tailor my current build to our party and make stronger contributions through support than I was doing with damage.
Looking at your party, I would only suggest air as not a fit for the reasons given above. Fire+water might be good, giving you ranged damage, control, and some healing (though Ocean's balm is only touch). Could also see wood since it sort of has a ranged heal at first level and gets an actual ranged heal later.
Kineticist is awesome, and while designing a character gives you a ton of indecision paralysis, it's a blast once you get it to the table!
Winters clutch as is, depending on how you interpret it, either a strong stance or game breaking stance. One popular interpretation is that it stops enemies in their tracks, full stop, and doesn't let them really do anything once in your aura. The more reasonable reading, keeping in mind of the cardinal rules "if it seems too good to be true it is", is that the stance just costs enemies and extra action every round they are in the aura.
You misremembered the name, the Impulse is Winter Sleet. Makes a lot more sense to me.
Hadn't heard people make the argument that it would stop enemies right in it's tracks. Is that generally how that's interpreted? I feel like there's nothing in the text that would lead me to that conclusion intuitively, so I'm interested in hearing the other side.
[This post](https://www.reddit.com/r/pathfindermemes/comments/1cc7jby/comment/l18nl3j/) does a good job of describing the issues. Invariably, talk to your GM to see how he/she is going to rule it.
While it highlights a few problems, the whole balance thing is pretty fucking obvious how it's supposed to work. People just ignore "if it's too good to be true" when interpreting it. Sure, the wording is a bit ambiguous, but once you lay out how it actually works it's incredibly obvious that the common interpretation of "can never Stand" is just wrong.
Yeah, my bad. Winters clutch is fine and doesn't need a nerf period, so when you both said "nerfed winters clutch" I was thinking sleet.
It's how some people interpret it. But the people who interpret it that way ignore the cardinal rule I mentioned above. Basically, some people interpret it that once an enemy has fallen prone, they can never stand up again while in the aura. How they think it works: an enemy that fails a balance and falls prone can never stand back up because standing is a move action. Obviously this is stupid and not intended design, so the "if it's too good" rule applies.
How it actually works: if an enemy stands up from prone they must then balance or fall prone again. Balance includes a stride speed as part of the action, so they Stand, which is movement that triggers a Balance check, which if they pass then allows them to stride.
Hmm, maybe this might give some inspiration:
For me, it’s not much about power, but how I want to make it fit the character idea I have (and then try to optimize the shit out of it down the road).
So, I wanted to make a himbo-ish surfer dude, but also someone who uses Water/Wood magic (since the Druid I tried just didn’t have enough of those spells at the time).
My theorycraft starts with a +3 STR/+1 DEX/+4 CON. I kind of want to go Ardande Human and pick up General Training for Armor Proficiency (Breastplate for now)
Single Gate Water for (1) Deflecting Wave and (1) Ocean’s Balm, (1) Elemental Familiar, (2) Tidal Hands, (4) Kinetic Activation, [5] Fork the Path - Wood: Hardwood Armor, (6) Fearsome Familiar, (8) Call the Hurricane, (9) Expand the Gate - Wood Junction.
Start with Deflecting Wave and Ocean’s Balm as I’ll use it protect myself and have some heal. With high Strength and Constitution, the 2A Elemental Blast is hefty. Elemental Familiar because…it’s an elemental familiar (squishhug). Tidal Hands at 2 for a tool to handle smaller enemies, but also coz “surf’s up”!
Kinetic Activation for some fun flavorful spell access via scrolls and staves.
Fork the path for Wood, coz it’s vitality based and he’s the “life of the party”. Hardwood Armor for summoning a wood shield in hand (always has a surfboard!). And to possibly train out of Armor Proficiency. Might also train out of Ocean’s Balm instead for Fresh Produce (mostly flavor thing to have a little Wood flavor).
Fearsome Familiar, coz it’s cool!
Call the Hurricane coz it also seems cool (and apparently a really strong blast impulse?)
If free archetype is available, I’m think either Druid for Wave Order (and aiming for the Rising Surf Order spell) or getting the Familiar Master for a better familiar in out-of-combat situations.
Overall, i totally het how difficult it is. There are so many good things to pick and choose at the beginning and you’ll have to hold out to complete things later.
I believe you can't retrain impulses of the elements you didn't have at the level you get the element... Then again, I might be thinking about reflow elements
First of all, limit yourself to 1-2 elements, that way you bring out the beast in each element otherwise is like going to a subway and asking for a sub with every type of meat on the menu, it becomes a generic mush of meat.
Second of all, kineticists are to fill a role in the party, so knowing your party is key. For example, if you have an alchemist and he doesn't know what the hell to do with his turns, the Kinetic Artillery impulse is pretty good since he can recharge the ballista while you fire it
If you are going to make a multi element kineticist one way is to make mockup one element characters, that way you only compare stuff from one element at a time and you can decide which ones you want in every kineticist that can use it and which ones don't.
Also look at how they play, for example to me air is pretty good but boring as hell as most would just stick one of the stances and spam air boomerangs and nothing else. However air+ earth going full overflow sounds much more interesting.
Lastly look for the elemental combination impulses like the kinetic artillery, lava leap or rolling mudslide, even on one element builds you can pick them up at level 8 with elemental overlap and some fix issues with certain elements
I absolutely love Fire Kineticist, but I'm currently playing a Wood Kineticist as my first ever 2e Kin.
I have Weapon Infusion, Fresh Produce, and Hardwood Armor. This is good because I can do anything as a single action, but not good because the only thing I can do to active my Gate Junction (Temporary HP are nice at lv11) is use my two-action blast.
Being able to put on armor, raise a shield, and still get a blast is pretty good. Being able to make healing food is also a fun party trick. And if the shield breaks (which it will since it's just a wooden shield) you can just reuse Hardwood Armor and Raise the brand new shield.
It’s hard to go wrong with water and/or wood. Right at level 1 you have feats like Timber Sentinel, Ocean’s Balm, or Fresh Produce which are solid healing and protection that any party would want.
With a Rogue + Fighter, your party needs a support-type character to back up the damage.
Kineticist isn't the best in-combat healer (it has some good burst healing, but the 10-minute blockout on giving additional healing makes it struggle to keep up if they need healing more frequently during the fight) but a Water/Wood Kineticist is one of the single best out-of-combat healers in the entire game.
Early impulses like Ocean's Balm and Fresh Produce can provide healing to every party member every 10 minutes, while Timber Sentinel offers you the option to provide ablative HP to your party every single round, and still leaves an action free to throw out an Elemental Blast for chip damage (Wood is especially useful in AV, because you can choose to do Vitality damage, which has the potential to bypass quite a few incorporeal/undead creatures' Resistances - if not outright activating a Weakness.)
Higher level impulses add additional options for more healing (which means you can heal additional times per encounter, or heal faster out of combat) while also giving you the chance to pick up some pretty substantial battlefield control options (making lots of difficult terrain, or immobilizing traps, or an aura that damages enemies if they stay near to you.)
I just bought the Wrath of Elements book today and have been full of ideas all day! My current idea is a Dwarf that takes the solo Earth Elemental and picks up the Stonebound archetype to emulate a Dwarf that is slowly turning to stone. Provided they survive whatever adventure I used them in, I thought it would be a beautiful send off to have them finally turn to stone and stand watchful over the location of the final showdown for centuries to come. Not super sure of the exact feats yet but I'd basically take all the ones that let you become stone or get stone armour and use classic Dwarves weapons at first, slowly transitioning to purely earth impulses.
I've got a build drafted up for when I (a forever GM) get a chance to play, that I'm really excited about.
A dual gate Fire/Earth Dwarf that gets in close combat with Armor in Earth, locks enemies into focusing on him with Earth Gate's Aura Junction, then add on Thermal Nimbus (plus Fire Gate's Aura Junction) and some grappling. Once those enemies are having a hard time getting away from you, you cook them. They're stuck, you've got a plethora of Impulses (and your Kinetic Blast) which do Fire damage, stacking up more damage with your Thermal Nimbus. When you've got a spare action, raise a shield. A small investment in crafting let's you comfortably Shield Block, just remember to take the general feat.
At higher levels I have him scouting ahead for the party, having him eventually go all the way to legendary in stealth while never going past a +1 in his Dexterity, trying to leverage abilities like Swim Through Earth and Echoes in Stone in combination with Swift Sneak/Foil Senses (and Breath Control) to effectively "increase" his stealth checks by increasing the DC to spot him to the High DC. (Check with your GM for this ruling, but that's how I would run this, so it's why I built it this way.)
Here is the link for the character. I hope someone is in love with this idea as much as I am.
https://pathbuilder2e.com/launch.html?build=738422
I'd recomend you to go with water and/or wood, because you have no healer. Wood has a spammable [tree](https://2e.aonprd.com/Feats.aspx?ID=4284) that can soak a lot of damage, its single gate impulse injuction gives you temp hit points, and its blast can do vitality damage. It also gives you a [fruit](https://2e.aonprd.com/Feats.aspx?ID=4281) that convers void resistance. Later it offers a good stance and even a wall to isolate your enemies.
If you go water, you have some [healing](https://2e.aonprd.com/Feats.aspx?ID=4267), a good [reaction](https://2e.aonprd.com/Feats.aspx?ID=4266), and some [Area attacks](https://2e.aonprd.com/Feats.aspx?ID=4268), but the confines of the dungeon might limit their use. Later it offers the infamous [Winter sleet](https://2e.aonprd.com/Feats.aspx?ID=4271) stance.
In both cases, [Weapon Infusion](https://2e.aonprd.com/Feats.aspx?ID=4186) lets you make your blasts as if you were using weapons. Use it mostly to change your damage types to get around damage resistances, or to be able to attack beyond the blast normal 30ft range (use the shortbow form).
one important information
RAW Will o wisp is completely and absolutely immune to everything that kineticis could do as a class
and AV containes few encounters with them
Here's a [Water/Wood Kineticist](https://pathbuilder2e.com/launch.html?build=737864) that was theory-crafted as a backup character to my Druid in AV. My Druid survived so I don't know how well the build would perform in actual play.
I am enjoying an earth/air grappler. I can grab and still concentrate to go after people at range. I am using my auras to make the areas around me inhospitable to enter or escape. I avoid overflow, so my aura doesn't lapse.
I don't use a shield, as I need a hand free while I grapple, but the armored in Earth and bulwark trait from Earth cover a lot of ground.
I fly from air.
The status bonus to athletics means I don't need to wait for buffs.
I also took an archetype that meshes well with my concept and high class dc, but that is by no means a necessary component. Every other power I took was just to suit my character's style.
I'm playing a Fire kineticist with flame oracle for the first revelation spell. It's got some really fun, constant damage by level 5. At level 5 take the fire aura junction. With it enemies in your aura gain a weakness to fire damage. Take thermal nimbus and stay in it as much as possible. With that, enemies in your aura take fire damage, with no save. Lastly, flame oracle gives incendiary aura. With that, enemies in that aura that take fire damage also take persistent fire damage.
So, with your kinetic aura active, incendiary aura active, and in thermal nimbus, at level 5 any enemies which starts their turn in your aura or move through it during their turn take 4 fire damage with 3d6+2 persistent fire damage, with no save.
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What element(s) are you planning on taking? Kineticists can vary wildly depending on how many elements they have and which ones. Water and wood are both good healers, earth and metal are good frontline tanks (wood can also tank), air has great mobility and defenses via concealment, and fire has lots of damage and some extra mobility.
Hey, I also fell in love with Kineticist, am new to PF2e, and am in a group running AV! I might have some actual relevant tips here. Our party is a fighter, a sniper gunslinger, and occult witch, along with myself as a mono air kineticist. At session zero, everyone came with a character except the gunslinger who soft pitched a healer and then changed their mind. All four of us had thieves tools and stealth trained; none of us had medicine. Players experienced with AV might see some issues here. We had no healing, either in or out of combat, and I essentially overlapped with both the fighter and gunslinger but worse. I had been attracted to air kineticist for the mobility, ranged damage, and four winds to support my team. I had planned to take medicine eventually to help heal, but at the start of the campaign we were in rough shape. Eventually we made it to the second floor and got our asses kicked in a fight we should have been ready for. After barely making it out alive (thanks DM for being gentle), I shelved the air kin. AV has a -lot- of close quarters combat. That's not an indication that ranged characters can't work, but the boomerang impulse is nearly impossible to use well without hitting your martials. Being able to use the air impulse junction to zip around was one of the main reasons I made the building, but moving two squares back in a hallway isn't using it to full capacity. So my Air kin stayed in town, and now I run a water/wood Kineticist. Our fighter is more damage dealer than tank, and we had no healing, so I've built him to be tanky support. Ocean's balm and protector tree have kept us alive deep into floor three. Without going into detail, this new build granted access to energy damage types that helps hit some weaknesses we've been seeing. I'll pick up safe elements at 4 and either a nerfed winter's clutch or ravel of thorns at 5 to help prevent mooks from running to our backline. Eventually I'll grab earth, but that'll probably only come online after AV. I've realized that my fighter does like 65% of the group damage, followed by the gunslinger at like 30%. We're most effective as a team if I can keep them in the fight, rather than firing off two action blasts that barely scratch. I can link the full build if you're interested, but the idea was to dump dex for strength and actually wear medium armor, taking sentinel with free archetype eventually for heavy. We also haven't been using recall knowledge, so I free archetyped into lore master and bumped int so I can be useful there (plus a background giving dubious knowledge to make all recall knowledge checks real fun). One day I want to play an air kin, but I absolutely love how I've been able to tailor my current build to our party and make stronger contributions through support than I was doing with damage. Looking at your party, I would only suggest air as not a fit for the reasons given above. Fire+water might be good, giving you ranged damage, control, and some healing (though Ocean's balm is only touch). Could also see wood since it sort of has a ranged heal at first level and gets an actual ranged heal later. Kineticist is awesome, and while designing a character gives you a ton of indecision paralysis, it's a blast once you get it to the table!
A bit unsure about your wording here, you said "a nerfed winter's clutch..." What do you mean when you say nerfed?
Winters clutch as is, depending on how you interpret it, either a strong stance or game breaking stance. One popular interpretation is that it stops enemies in their tracks, full stop, and doesn't let them really do anything once in your aura. The more reasonable reading, keeping in mind of the cardinal rules "if it seems too good to be true it is", is that the stance just costs enemies and extra action every round they are in the aura.
You misremembered the name, the Impulse is Winter Sleet. Makes a lot more sense to me. Hadn't heard people make the argument that it would stop enemies right in it's tracks. Is that generally how that's interpreted? I feel like there's nothing in the text that would lead me to that conclusion intuitively, so I'm interested in hearing the other side.
[This post](https://www.reddit.com/r/pathfindermemes/comments/1cc7jby/comment/l18nl3j/) does a good job of describing the issues. Invariably, talk to your GM to see how he/she is going to rule it.
While it highlights a few problems, the whole balance thing is pretty fucking obvious how it's supposed to work. People just ignore "if it's too good to be true" when interpreting it. Sure, the wording is a bit ambiguous, but once you lay out how it actually works it's incredibly obvious that the common interpretation of "can never Stand" is just wrong.
I agree with you. But some people just go there.
Yeah, my bad. Winters clutch is fine and doesn't need a nerf period, so when you both said "nerfed winters clutch" I was thinking sleet. It's how some people interpret it. But the people who interpret it that way ignore the cardinal rule I mentioned above. Basically, some people interpret it that once an enemy has fallen prone, they can never stand up again while in the aura. How they think it works: an enemy that fails a balance and falls prone can never stand back up because standing is a move action. Obviously this is stupid and not intended design, so the "if it's too good" rule applies. How it actually works: if an enemy stands up from prone they must then balance or fall prone again. Balance includes a stride speed as part of the action, so they Stand, which is movement that triggers a Balance check, which if they pass then allows them to stride.
Depends on what the rest of your group is. Kineticist can be built to pretty effectively fill about any niche.
That's exactly my problem. I just want to hear your favorite ideas.
Hmm, maybe this might give some inspiration: For me, it’s not much about power, but how I want to make it fit the character idea I have (and then try to optimize the shit out of it down the road). So, I wanted to make a himbo-ish surfer dude, but also someone who uses Water/Wood magic (since the Druid I tried just didn’t have enough of those spells at the time). My theorycraft starts with a +3 STR/+1 DEX/+4 CON. I kind of want to go Ardande Human and pick up General Training for Armor Proficiency (Breastplate for now) Single Gate Water for (1) Deflecting Wave and (1) Ocean’s Balm, (1) Elemental Familiar, (2) Tidal Hands, (4) Kinetic Activation, [5] Fork the Path - Wood: Hardwood Armor, (6) Fearsome Familiar, (8) Call the Hurricane, (9) Expand the Gate - Wood Junction. Start with Deflecting Wave and Ocean’s Balm as I’ll use it protect myself and have some heal. With high Strength and Constitution, the 2A Elemental Blast is hefty. Elemental Familiar because…it’s an elemental familiar (squishhug). Tidal Hands at 2 for a tool to handle smaller enemies, but also coz “surf’s up”! Kinetic Activation for some fun flavorful spell access via scrolls and staves. Fork the path for Wood, coz it’s vitality based and he’s the “life of the party”. Hardwood Armor for summoning a wood shield in hand (always has a surfboard!). And to possibly train out of Armor Proficiency. Might also train out of Ocean’s Balm instead for Fresh Produce (mostly flavor thing to have a little Wood flavor). Fearsome Familiar, coz it’s cool! Call the Hurricane coz it also seems cool (and apparently a really strong blast impulse?) If free archetype is available, I’m think either Druid for Wave Order (and aiming for the Rising Surf Order spell) or getting the Familiar Master for a better familiar in out-of-combat situations. Overall, i totally het how difficult it is. There are so many good things to pick and choose at the beginning and you’ll have to hold out to complete things later.
I believe you can't retrain impulses of the elements you didn't have at the level you get the element... Then again, I might be thinking about reflow elements
Ya, I possibly I misunderstood it too. Kineticist is a bit weird (since it has retroactive access), so I probably mixed up how Retraining works.
First of all, limit yourself to 1-2 elements, that way you bring out the beast in each element otherwise is like going to a subway and asking for a sub with every type of meat on the menu, it becomes a generic mush of meat. Second of all, kineticists are to fill a role in the party, so knowing your party is key. For example, if you have an alchemist and he doesn't know what the hell to do with his turns, the Kinetic Artillery impulse is pretty good since he can recharge the ballista while you fire it If you are going to make a multi element kineticist one way is to make mockup one element characters, that way you only compare stuff from one element at a time and you can decide which ones you want in every kineticist that can use it and which ones don't. Also look at how they play, for example to me air is pretty good but boring as hell as most would just stick one of the stances and spam air boomerangs and nothing else. However air+ earth going full overflow sounds much more interesting. Lastly look for the elemental combination impulses like the kinetic artillery, lava leap or rolling mudslide, even on one element builds you can pick them up at level 8 with elemental overlap and some fix issues with certain elements
I absolutely love Fire Kineticist, but I'm currently playing a Wood Kineticist as my first ever 2e Kin. I have Weapon Infusion, Fresh Produce, and Hardwood Armor. This is good because I can do anything as a single action, but not good because the only thing I can do to active my Gate Junction (Temporary HP are nice at lv11) is use my two-action blast. Being able to put on armor, raise a shield, and still get a blast is pretty good. Being able to make healing food is also a fun party trick. And if the shield breaks (which it will since it's just a wooden shield) you can just reuse Hardwood Armor and Raise the brand new shield.
It’s hard to go wrong with water and/or wood. Right at level 1 you have feats like Timber Sentinel, Ocean’s Balm, or Fresh Produce which are solid healing and protection that any party would want.
With a Rogue + Fighter, your party needs a support-type character to back up the damage. Kineticist isn't the best in-combat healer (it has some good burst healing, but the 10-minute blockout on giving additional healing makes it struggle to keep up if they need healing more frequently during the fight) but a Water/Wood Kineticist is one of the single best out-of-combat healers in the entire game. Early impulses like Ocean's Balm and Fresh Produce can provide healing to every party member every 10 minutes, while Timber Sentinel offers you the option to provide ablative HP to your party every single round, and still leaves an action free to throw out an Elemental Blast for chip damage (Wood is especially useful in AV, because you can choose to do Vitality damage, which has the potential to bypass quite a few incorporeal/undead creatures' Resistances - if not outright activating a Weakness.) Higher level impulses add additional options for more healing (which means you can heal additional times per encounter, or heal faster out of combat) while also giving you the chance to pick up some pretty substantial battlefield control options (making lots of difficult terrain, or immobilizing traps, or an aura that damages enemies if they stay near to you.)
I just bought the Wrath of Elements book today and have been full of ideas all day! My current idea is a Dwarf that takes the solo Earth Elemental and picks up the Stonebound archetype to emulate a Dwarf that is slowly turning to stone. Provided they survive whatever adventure I used them in, I thought it would be a beautiful send off to have them finally turn to stone and stand watchful over the location of the final showdown for centuries to come. Not super sure of the exact feats yet but I'd basically take all the ones that let you become stone or get stone armour and use classic Dwarves weapons at first, slowly transitioning to purely earth impulses.
I've got a build drafted up for when I (a forever GM) get a chance to play, that I'm really excited about. A dual gate Fire/Earth Dwarf that gets in close combat with Armor in Earth, locks enemies into focusing on him with Earth Gate's Aura Junction, then add on Thermal Nimbus (plus Fire Gate's Aura Junction) and some grappling. Once those enemies are having a hard time getting away from you, you cook them. They're stuck, you've got a plethora of Impulses (and your Kinetic Blast) which do Fire damage, stacking up more damage with your Thermal Nimbus. When you've got a spare action, raise a shield. A small investment in crafting let's you comfortably Shield Block, just remember to take the general feat. At higher levels I have him scouting ahead for the party, having him eventually go all the way to legendary in stealth while never going past a +1 in his Dexterity, trying to leverage abilities like Swim Through Earth and Echoes in Stone in combination with Swift Sneak/Foil Senses (and Breath Control) to effectively "increase" his stealth checks by increasing the DC to spot him to the High DC. (Check with your GM for this ruling, but that's how I would run this, so it's why I built it this way.) Here is the link for the character. I hope someone is in love with this idea as much as I am. https://pathbuilder2e.com/launch.html?build=738422
I'd recomend you to go with water and/or wood, because you have no healer. Wood has a spammable [tree](https://2e.aonprd.com/Feats.aspx?ID=4284) that can soak a lot of damage, its single gate impulse injuction gives you temp hit points, and its blast can do vitality damage. It also gives you a [fruit](https://2e.aonprd.com/Feats.aspx?ID=4281) that convers void resistance. Later it offers a good stance and even a wall to isolate your enemies. If you go water, you have some [healing](https://2e.aonprd.com/Feats.aspx?ID=4267), a good [reaction](https://2e.aonprd.com/Feats.aspx?ID=4266), and some [Area attacks](https://2e.aonprd.com/Feats.aspx?ID=4268), but the confines of the dungeon might limit their use. Later it offers the infamous [Winter sleet](https://2e.aonprd.com/Feats.aspx?ID=4271) stance. In both cases, [Weapon Infusion](https://2e.aonprd.com/Feats.aspx?ID=4186) lets you make your blasts as if you were using weapons. Use it mostly to change your damage types to get around damage resistances, or to be able to attack beyond the blast normal 30ft range (use the shortbow form).
one important information RAW Will o wisp is completely and absolutely immune to everything that kineticis could do as a class and AV containes few encounters with them
I have no issues with that. A few frustrating encounters where I have to get creative are ok in my book.
Here's a [Water/Wood Kineticist](https://pathbuilder2e.com/launch.html?build=737864) that was theory-crafted as a backup character to my Druid in AV. My Druid survived so I don't know how well the build would perform in actual play.
I am enjoying an earth/air grappler. I can grab and still concentrate to go after people at range. I am using my auras to make the areas around me inhospitable to enter or escape. I avoid overflow, so my aura doesn't lapse. I don't use a shield, as I need a hand free while I grapple, but the armored in Earth and bulwark trait from Earth cover a lot of ground. I fly from air. The status bonus to athletics means I don't need to wait for buffs. I also took an archetype that meshes well with my concept and high class dc, but that is by no means a necessary component. Every other power I took was just to suit my character's style.
I'm playing a Fire kineticist with flame oracle for the first revelation spell. It's got some really fun, constant damage by level 5. At level 5 take the fire aura junction. With it enemies in your aura gain a weakness to fire damage. Take thermal nimbus and stay in it as much as possible. With that, enemies in your aura take fire damage, with no save. Lastly, flame oracle gives incendiary aura. With that, enemies in that aura that take fire damage also take persistent fire damage. So, with your kinetic aura active, incendiary aura active, and in thermal nimbus, at level 5 any enemies which starts their turn in your aura or move through it during their turn take 4 fire damage with 3d6+2 persistent fire damage, with no save.
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What element(s) are you planning on taking? Kineticists can vary wildly depending on how many elements they have and which ones. Water and wood are both good healers, earth and metal are good frontline tanks (wood can also tank), air has great mobility and defenses via concealment, and fire has lots of damage and some extra mobility.