Absolutely masterful pass on the Dark Sphere. Giving players and GMs choices for level dips, clarifying and cleaning up powers that may have been falling behind since USoPs writing. A pleasure to read and worth the price. Be sure to invest DRS's line, they are keeping PF1e Spheres revitalized and alive.

Streamlined a sphere that desperately needed it. Talents flow together better, better synergy, still able to do everything you could with the base spheres (probably easier in some cases), all while adding more content to build exactly what you would want from controlling shadows. This is a strong start to Diamond Polished Spheres.

The talents are a bit longer to read than before, but no more so than a 1st party Paizo or 3rd edition spell. Make no mistake, this is an upgrade to the Dark sphere, but one it needed, and adds a bunch of new content and design space. As it often is, my favorite part was the archetypes and class features. I can easily see myself playing a Sablesavant or Darkthrone, and Occulted Visions lays the groundwork for future Thaumaturge tweaks that I look forward to seeing.

It's so nice that even after Ultimate Spheres of Power, the rougher elements of this system are still being...well, polished! Well done, I'm looking forward to using this in my games.

Loved the refresh on the dark sphere. The old sphere was rather bloated and made it hard to specialize as a dark caster but the re-work is fantastic.

I also like that this book gives an idea of what a reworked sphere is like and can hopefully cut down on talent bloat for the other spheres in the future .

Great rewrite of the Dark Sphere and a lot of good general formatting stuff for spheres in general.

For general sphere stuff there's a lot of clarity and new formatting that has been added. Being able to read sphere effects like they have stat blocks like a regular vancian spell helps determine what the effect even actually is to begin with, in addition to range, targets, durations etc. instead of having to parse through both flavor and mechanics at once is a great change. And adding more tags to make talents types more easily searchable and uniform is also great. Obviously this stuff only applies to the dark sphere right now but it does make for a good framework for the rest of the spheres to be reworked or polished up, as it were, so looking forward to that.

As for the actual dark sphere itself, it's really cool. Following in the vein of the Tinker sphere, there's a lot of mashing together talents of talents so that picking one option sometimes opens up the door for having a bunch of options open up at all at once. While some talents give more options than others I would say the overall balance between the talents is fine, especially because the more options a talent has generally the less powerful each individual option of that is. I also appreciate that there is like an almost "glamor" and "figment" style thing in the "cloak" and "gloom" tags so you already have a much better idea of what the effect is supposed to be before you cast it, and better separates the original "dark," "blot," "meld," and "Shadow" tags.

It feels like a great AOE debuff sphere overall, and it definitely feels like if I invest into this sphere now I don't just like, pick a talent and leave it forever (which I still could if I wanted to,) but there's actual benefits to going deeper and deeper into the sphere. Especially because a lot of Advanced talents require other talents to function, making the whole thing feel like it feeds into itself which is just fun for the vibe of being a master at that specific sphere.

Also has a lot of cool archetypes. Being able to add a shadow or darkness theme to anything that I do will never not be cool to me no matter how old I get and so I enjoy being able to merge together dark and destruction sphere stuff in the elementalist archetype or be shadow/dark monster with the Shifter one.

Overall, solid book, can't wait to see more of what Diamond Polished Spheres have to offer and darkness themed stuff is cool.

This supplement turned the Dark Sphere from being neat but painful to invest into or dip, into an excellent option for all levels of investment. Between that and Steven Alpert's usual excellent rules writing, I wait with bated breath for the next polished sphere.

In the past, I'd think "some Dark sphere might be neat for this character", then I'd go look at it, and realize it just didn't quite work. A bit too scattered, too many talents for too little return, too much boring stuff. Now it's fun and interesting - something worthy of your precious, precious talents.

This turns a dud into a lovely nutritious spud, and sets the framework for an impressive and wonderful overhaul to SoP as a whole. Very much hope more of this is able to be made. Tons of interesting and well written content.

Another excellent DRS release. Dark sphere has been effective as a trick but not as a deep investment while also including frustrating choices and traps.

This fixes all of the above and introduces new options to enjoy specializing in weaving darkness.

Old Dark Sphere was plain, and very unable to do its job as a debuffer sphere. This? This is clear, consise, and does the job of debuffing very well. I will happily await more books in the future.

A fantastic improvement on the original Spheres of Power Dark sphere. Clarified, solidified, buffed and with more interesting options all in. I'm really looking forward to further Polished spheres and hope one day, the whole system will be done in the same vein, but for now this will do wonders.