Your witch’s familiar is the class’s second engine. It carries your spell knowledge, channels your patron’s power, and reconfigures itself every morning to match the day’s problems. It is also five hit points per level wrapped around all of that, so playing it well means knowing exactly what it can do, what it can’t, and which daily loadout fits the encounter ahead.
The core numbers
| Stat or rule | How it works |
|---|---|
| Hit points | 5 × your witch level (5 HP at level 1, 50 at level 10) |
| AC and saves | Same as yours, scaling automatically as you level |
| Acting in combat | It’s a minion: Command it (one of your actions) and it takes 2 actions |
| Reactions and Strikes | None, unless a specific ability grants them |
| Daily abilities at level 1 | Four selections: your patron’s unique ability plus three standard familiar abilities |
| Innate form abilities | Mandatory: a flying creature must spend a slot on Flier, and so on, out of your standard slots |
| Slot growth | Incredible Familiar (level 6 feat) raises the daily total to five; Partner in Pacts (level 12) to six |
Two of those rows drive everything else. The minion rule means your familiar costs you an action to activate every round, so its two actions have to buy more than your one action would have. And the daily selection means the familiar isn’t a fixed pet; it’s a slot machine you set each morning, which is the part new witches underuse most.
The familiar is your spellbook
Remaster witches learn spells into the familiar: it holds your tradition’s spells the way a wizard’s book holds theirs, and it can learn new ones from scrolls, permanently expanding what you can prepare. Two practical consequences. First, scrolls you’d never bother casting are still worth buying as inventory for your familiar to absorb. Second, two witches can share spell knowledge through their familiars with the right downtime activity, so if your campaign has another witch, coordinate purchases and split the cost of building a shared library. Guard the familiar accordingly: it isn’t just an action source, it’s your prepared list.
Patron abilities and the Sustain engine
Your patron grants the familiar a unique ability, and most of them key off the witch’s defining round-to-round activity: Sustaining a hex cantrip (a few patrons trigger off other things, like casting a spell with a particular trait, so read yours). That creates the class’s signature loop: you Sustain your hex, the patron’s familiar benefit fires as a side effect, your familiar spends its commanded actions on positioning or scouting, and every piece reinforces the others. When you pick daily abilities, pick them to feed this loop. A patron benefit that cares about the familiar’s position wants mobility abilities; one that grants temporary HP or defenses wants the familiar surviving adjacent to danger; if your patron’s trigger is rare, bias the slots toward scouting instead.
Three daily loadouts that cover most days
| Loadout | Pick abilities that give | Use when |
|---|---|---|
| Scout | Movement (flight/climb), enhanced senses (darkvision), Independent for action-free repositioning | Dungeon delves, overland exploration, any day where information beats firepower |
| Combat support | Whatever feeds your patron trigger, plus survivability and positioning tools | Known fights ahead: the boss door, the ambush you’re springing |
| Utility | Manual dexterity, speech, skill-flavored abilities | Town days, infiltration, talky sessions |
The Independent ability deserves a special note because its action math is sneaky-good: if you don’t spend an action Commanding the familiar, it can still use one action on your turn. On rounds where you need all three of your own actions, Independent keeps the familiar drifting toward where you’ll need it, for free. It does not make the familiar autonomous; it acts on your turn, within that one action.
How I run mine
I like the familiar to have a form that makes sense at the table first, then I worry about the mechanics after that. My default loadout would usually lean scout: movement, senses, and Independent, because information is almost always worth more than squeezing one more tiny effect out of combat. The big thing for me is remembering that the familiar can change with the day. If the party knows we are walking into a dungeon, it gets built like a scout; if we know a hard fight is coming, then I start looking at survivability and whatever helps the patron ability actually matter.
Keeping it alive
Five HP per level dies to one area spell or two attacks from anything level-appropriate, and your AC, while shared, doesn’t make up for the HP pool. The survival rules are positional: keep it out of melee reach and out of obvious blast shapes, spend its actions on movement before offense (it usually has no Strikes anyway), and when a fight turns dangerous, two actions of retreat are worth more than any buff it could deliver. If a day’s plan genuinely requires the familiar in harm’s way, that’s what the defensive slots in your morning selection are for. And remember the PF2e safety net: a dead familiar is a serious cost, but a downed witch is worse, and the dying rules give your familiar’s master the same spiral every other character faces; our PF2e character death guide covers what that means for how cautiously the whole pair should play.