Joyd's page

A major difference it would make mechanically is that it'd no longer be a status bonus, meaning that it would stack with other status bonuses. Status bonuses to hit are fairly plentiful in the system.

Right now, the design intent seems to be that you can approximately match a martial that isn't benefiting from a status bonus, but the martial can still end up ahead if it is getting its own status bonus from somewhere. If that wasn't the intent, then I don't think they would have made the bonus a status bonus in the first place.

I would love it if the way that the top-end was rounded out was to extend the lifespan of the Form spells in general. It's not a huge deal, but it's always struck me as a little odd that if your character's main combat thing is turning into a bear, at some point you either have to either abandon that premise or refluff decreasingly bear-like things as bears if you want to keep up with the system math.

I get that page space isn't unlimited, but I'd love it if the X form spells all scaled smoothly to level 10 (or at least level 9). Right now, the discontinuities and cutoffs in scaling make playing a shapeshifting character slightly awkward. You could still give the higher-level Form spells more exotic abilities so they have unique appeal, but a player who wants to continue to Bear doesn't necessarily have to leave that behind.

Alchemist: I think that getting the alchemist to a place I'd consider to be a fully great design would require reconcepting the entire thing, which probably goes beyond the scope of what they're doing. Assuming that we're sticking mostly with the loose shape of the current design, the major things I'd focus on are:

-- Making the alchemist come online and feel like a full alchemist at level 1. This likely involves giving them some cantrip-equivalent feature.

-- It's my experience that most people who read the alchemist class want to focus more heavily on their research fields than the current mechanics make a good idea. They want their bomber to be really mostly focused on bombs, their mutagenist to be a capable combatant, etc. I don't think that the "bit of everything" alchemist should go away, but I think there's some headroom to make the various research fields more better at their specific thing.

Barbarian: I think this class is in a reasonable spot. I'd give them more breadth through angles like thrown weapons and borderline-supernatural combat techniques, but that's as much a job for normal splats as it is for a line-wide refresh. A very low-hanging fruit option to improve the class would be to simply add additional rage damage to the weaker Core instincts. There's no particular reason that Fury and Spirit can't be ticked up a few notches. (Also while I think that they should always endeavor to balance options as neatly as possible, if some options are going to be a bit worse or more niche than others, Fury, which represents the stock general Barbarian concept, should not be one of those.)

Champion: Champion, at least Good Champions, are a perfect class design mechanically. Just pull out whatever alignment stuff you're going to pull out - it's not even consistently very good flavor to begin with, and I won't miss it at all.

Investigator: Investigator's combat routine is too clunky for not enough payoff. I don't think that the class is too terribly undercooked as a whole, but it can be juiced a bit to smooth things out and allow for greater flexibility. As a start, just allowing the player to discard an unwanted Devise a Stratagem roll smooths things out a bit. Melee investigators could probably also use a bit of action economy help. I don't want the class to be a combat monster, but right now the investigator combat fantasy is too unreliable and a lot of the tricks that make it somewhat worthwhile require venturing outside of the core concept of the class.

Monk: Current design is very solid. Can't think of anything meaningful I'd change.

Oracle: I think that the overall framework of the class is in a solid place, but many of the individual mysteries are kind of a mess. For what it's worth, I suspect that Oracle mysteries are probably the hardest open-ended subclass type to design by a wide margin. Most of the mysteries are flavorful and evocative in their descriptive text, but the actual mechanics are kind of fiddly and in some places feel like the connection to the concept is a bit arbitrary. Curses are all over the place in terms of benefits and drawbacks; while conceptually it sort of makes sense for there to be some with greater rewards but greater associated risks, in practice the game is more fun when advancing your curse has meaningful drawbacks but is still generally a pretty good course of action.

Sorcerer: If I was doing a full and complete refresh, there's some tweaks I'd make, but this class is in a pretty solid place. Depending on what spells end up in Cores 1 and 2, there are some places where granted spells that are awkward fits could be swapped out.

Swashbuckler: I'd maybe shuffle a few things around to get the class off the ground a bit faster, but I think Swash is basically fine. The overall class design isn't to my personal taste, but I don't think there's anything wrong with it.

It's still a strong skill feat, it's just no longer such a massive power-level outlier. The fact that it's a natural endpoint to what's already one of the strongest things you can be doing with your skill increases means that, from a pure power level perspective, it's still something that a lot of characters will end up taking and using in campaigns that go that long.

My guess is that the current version of StD is probably closer to the original design intent in terms of kill frequency, at least based on the language of the errata and the design of the rest of PF2e, which doesn't contain anything that kills enemies nearly as reliably with so few resource limitations.

Some of the ancestry feat ratings seem inconsistent. For example, Tengu's Storm's Lash is rated blue. Elf Otherworldly Magic, which lets you take any Arcane cantrip, including Electric Arc, is rated Orange. Unless you really value your Electric Arc counting as a primal spell for some reason, Otherworldly Magic is always at least as good as Storm's Lash. Gnome First World Magic is only rated green, despite being at least as good Storm's Lash. Realistically, almost no Wizard is ever going to choose to make their primary damage cantrip run off of Charisma, so Storm's Lash should be red, or orange at best; the other ones are at least take-able if you think that one cantrip is a decent deal for an ancestry feat.

Similarly, natural weapon heritages are all over the place. Some are correctly ranked red, but others are ranked as high as green, with no clear relationship between how good the effect is for Wizards and the rating.

It also seems unusual to rate Halflings only orange when they have great ancestry feats and +Dex/Int/Wis, -Str is very close to a perfect set of ability scores for a Wizard. Kitsune, in contrast, can't boost any of Dex, Con, or Wis unless you use voluntary flaws, don't have much in the way of good feat choices, and are rated green.

Minor nitpick, but Azerketi aren't Merfolk. Merfolk are an unrelated species, and Azerketi don't resemble what most people think of when they think of Merfolk. The "recognizable" name for Azerketi is Gillmen.

I think that most of the time, when somebody says that PF2e (or some other system) is "too balanced," what they mean is that they want some option that excites them to be mechanically stronger, and they're told that it shouldn't be for the sake of balance. That makes balance look like a design problem to that player. Some players want the things they're doing to be a little unfair (in their favor), and that's not necessarily a bad desire to have (one of the appeals of a TTRPG is that it can serve as a power fantasy). Few people are willing to say something like "wizards should be stronger than everybody else because they're wizards," at least nowadays, but they might chafe at the idea that win-the-game spells are carefully controlled for the sake of balance, because they like the idea of having and using win-the-game spells.

If you haven't already, this is a totally reasonable thing to ask your DM for specific suggestions about. The Player's Guides to Paizo-published adventure paths usually include specific suggestions about what languages are likely to be useful during the adventure, and sometimes even have broad information about what languages might be useful for what purposes. Ultimately it's your DM's call about what sort of information they want to give the players about stuff like this, but it's worth at least asking if you haven't already done so.

HumbleGamer wrote:

Fast healing stuff might also help ( witch and bard focus spells for example).

Well, you have to watch which ones you use: for example, the bard focus spell, Hymn of Healing, has the Positive Trait so using it for fast healing is a quick way to kill a Dhampir. ;)

Dhampir and other creatures that have the Negative Healing ability aren't harmed by positive healing, they're just not affected by it. Hymn of Healing won't kill a Dhampir. The reason that Heal harms creatures with Negative Healing is that it includes separate clauses about dealing positive damage, but neither Hymn of Healing nor the Fast Healing ability it grants includes such a clause.

In Pathfinder 2e, positive healing and positive damage aren't automatically connected. There are effects like Heal and Lay on Hands that do one or the other depending on the target, but there are also effects that only do positive healing (which just don't affect undead things) and effects that only do positive damage (which just don't affect most other things.)

A -1 at half of the levels is a real and meaningful detriment, but it's not so severe a detriment that it can't be compensated for with other neat stuff, especially on a class with such open-ended thematics. On a class that relies heavily on attack rolls, actually hitting is very important both for making the class numerically sound and for making it feel satisfying to play, but I think you can be a skosh behind other martials on that front and still get there -if- the rest of the class is designed around it.

I think it would be reasonable for somebody to say that having +1 in their fifth-most-important stat for five levels is more important to them than having +1 in their most important stat for exactly level 20, even if you knew for certain that your campaign was definitely going to reach level 20. I probably would still always boost mainstat in most circumstances, but I also don't think that the strategy that produces the best possible stat array at 20 is necessarily automatically the best strategy if it produces a slightly worse stat array for several levels before that. It's a question of getting a very important boost for a short time vs. getting a less important boost for a longer time.

I think that the value of options that create good one-action options for spellcasters that don't have them built-in was initially undervalued by people when analyzing the system, and I think that the deeply negative initial reaction that some people had to Quickened Casting is part of that.

Many spellcasters have the trait that the best thing they can do with two actions is vastly better than the best thing they can do with one action. Because of this, Quickened Casting is often closer in its impact to getting an extra turn than just an extra action. (Though it's obviously not quite as good, for several reasons.) This isn't to say that the various "third actions" that we lean on don't have value, just that their value isn't anywhere close to the value of the two-action spell part of the turn, even if that two-action spell has to be lower than your maximum spell level. Being able to frontload your firepower in a tough battle also has a lot of impact.

In short, not all save-an-action things are created equal; the specific dynamic created by allowing spellcasters to save an action on casting a spell is especially critical.

That's not to say that Quickened Casting is a great feat. Especially on characters with exceptional one-action options, I don't even think it's even all that good of a feat. (Basically none of this applies nearly as much to Bards, for example.) It definitely isn't a core part of how spellcasters interact with the game system at high levels, the way that it was in Pf1e. In a post-APG world, where every class has tons of new class feat options available through archetypes, it's harder to justify than ever. If somebody were to say "I understand why the action saved by Quickened Casting is extremely powerful, but I still don't think it's a good feat," I'd think they were being totally reasonable, but I also think that the feat was initially misevaluated in general.

For what it's worth, it looks like most guides for classes that get it as an option have figured out Quickened Casting; only a few still give it as a below-average rating (which isn't necessarily unfair), and none still give it the lowest rating. One of the guides that gives it a low rating is a Bard guide, and Bards benefit less from Quickened Casting than Sorcerers and Wizards, in addition to arguably having stronger feat options for it to compete with. (It's still useful for Bards, but the value of a Bard's turn is more evenly spread between its three actions, for many Bards, so it doesn't have the same dynamic for them.)

I can't see taking an archetype in order to better use an item that is gone in a single round.

The major selling point of the archetype is that it transforms talismans from "expensive consumable" to "free several-times-daily ability." You're not taking the archetype in order to make better use of talismans that you're paying full price for. The fact that the mechanics for your free daily-uses ability piggybacks on the mechanics for consumables that aren't worth it until you're much higher level than the level listed for the consumables isn't really irrelevant. Loads of excellent daily-uses abilities are "gone in a single round."

Talisman Dabbler isn't a must-take, but it's head and shoulders better than the majority of the archetypes ranked higher than it. It significantly improves things scoundrels want to be doing anyway.

I feel like, as far as rogues are concerned, the killer app when it comes to Talismans is the Mesmerizing Opal. It turns successes on Feint into critical successes for no action cost. Granted, that means that about half of the time it won't have any effect (it doesn't do anything on a failure or on a critical success), but for Scoundrels it very strongly enables one of the major selling points of being a Scoundrel in the first place: the possibility to keep flat-footed running for an entire turn, not only letting everybody else get in on the flat-footed action, but saving you from having to set up flat-footed again on your next turn. (Plus it makes Distracting Feint way better.) Getting that a few times a day for the cost of a dedication feat seems like at least a reasonable path for a rogue to consider, even if we now live in a world where the opportunity cost of any dedication feat is really high. I definitely wouldn't say that it's something that every Scoundrel needs to knock down the door to prioritize, but it seems like enough of a benefit to warrant more than total dismissal. (Or, if there's some reason it warrants total dismissal in spite of the synergy between Scoundrel and Mesmerizing Opal, I feel like that's worth noting specifically.)

The class does go stale after a bit (once Opals become super cheap), but it still seems worth considering, even if you eventually retrain. (I guess you can start making Murderer's Knots instead.)

I think that what makes sense for the Medium depends a lot on whether they are aiming for the Medium class fantasy or for how Mediums actually work in PF1e, which are very different things.

I think that the fantasy of the Medium was supposed to be that you have the flexibility to embody different archetypes to a reasonable degree based on which type of spirit you had, and that you could flex into different roles as it was advantageous to do so. Erasmus's story, for example, makes being a Medium sound like you get to be a flexible jack-of-all-trades, carefully choosing which strengths to emphasize as you need them.

PF1 did not deliver on this fantasy very well at all for a wide range of reasons. Because you needed (with most archetypes) to choose one for the day, you weren't really that good at being adaptive. Seriously exacerbating this, shifting spirits doesn't rearrange your stats or feats or the resources you've invested in magic items or anything, so you would end up pretty mediocre at everything if you actually tried to spread out your strengths.

In practice, it made sense to have a "main" spirit as much as you could manage, at least for days where you expected any combat. It usually made sense for that spirit to be the Champion, because the Champion does a better impression of the other classes that might normally fill that role than most of the other spirits do. The whole structure of the class creates a feedback loop; the more you invest in one spirit, the more you want to use that one spirit, which in turn makes you want to invest more in that spirit.

If I was trying to design a class for Erasmus vs. if I were trying to design a class for replicating the 1e Medium experience, those classes would not have a great deal in common.

I'd probably use Meteor Hammer stats, maybe with the damage type changed to slashing. The weapon should be in the flail group and should have reach, and long and flexible weapons often have some combination of Disarm and Trip, which the Meteor Hammer has. The Spiked Chain also exists as a point of comparison, but it's not as long. You could also take basically any polearm and just move it into the flail group, depending on what aspects of the weapon you want to focus on.

A strength minimum to use a weapon isn't really part of Pathfinder 2e's idiom. The idea that you're better with a heavy weapon if you're stronger is already built into the basic rules for attack and damage rolls. Most characters that would want to use such a weapon will meet any reasonable strength minimum you could put on it anyway.

WatersLethe wrote:

Oooooh, Witch-only Master Abilities that grant Hex Cantrips!

Yeah, the potential issue with hex cantrips available via post-chargen choices is when multiclass characters poach them. But the bard has the same issue, and there doesn't seem to be any issue for an MC bard to grab them.

If it did turn out to be a dealbreaker concern that other classes could get access to them, you could resort to kind of heavy-handing a solution by giving the ability a prerequisite of something that only primary-class Witches have, like the Hexes feature itself.

Champion seems like it has a lot of natural synergy with Marshal. It has a number of things I'd consider beneficial -

- First and most importantly, a compatible set of party tactics. "Stand near the champion" is something you want to be doing anyway. While the Marshal aura is (usually) a bit smaller than the Champion's reaction zone, the same general ideas apply. In a sense, the Champion and the party don't need to worry about spending extra move actions to try to keep people in the Marshal's aura, because they're already kind of doing that.
- Some charisma synergy
- A generally flexible set of actions. Champions don't regularly need to do things that require two actions, giving them the ability to flex into various Marshal options. (They do have to deal with having too many things that they want to do, but I think that's true for any Marshal.)
- The ability to personally benefit from the major effects of the auras. The easiest person for the Marshal to keep inside of an aura is the Marshal themselves, so it's nice if the Marshal cares about their own aura.

Casting a spell is done using the "Cast a Spell" activity. The Cast a Spell activity is unambiguous about how many actions it takes: "Casting a Spell is a special activity that takes a variable number of actions depending on the spell, as listed in each spell’s stat block." Nothing in the rules for the Cast a Spell activity links the number of actions to the number of components in any way. It happens that many spells that cost one to three actions - either as a flavor thing or as an artifact of how the system used to work - have the same number of components as required actions, but in the final version of PF2 those two things are entirely decoupled.

Out of curiosity, has anybody actually modeled how much damage paladins built with an offensive inclination actually do, or is it just being taken as a given that they're bad at dealing damage? Especially against evil enemies, the number of bits and pieces of additional damage scattered throughout the class, along with multiple potential ways of making attacks as a reaction, mean that they might stack up reasonably, while still retaining a healthy level of survivability just through their basic class features. I'd hope, for the sake of game balance, that they're not superstar top-notch clearly-the-best (especially against non-evil creatures), and I certainly wouldn't expect that to be the case, but they have a lot of ways to gain incidental damage through feats that aren't paralleled in other martial classes (which tend to have one or two very powerful core features that enhance damage). It's possible that they're already not too shabby. (Frankly, I feel like modeling paladin damage requires a lot more assumptions than most classes, because so much more of their damage is conditional, even if the conditions happen pretty frequently.)

I'd even say that there's arguably a third kind of "uncommon."

There's (1) things that are flagged as being potentially disruptive to campaigns - teleport, many divination spells, etc., which DMs might be more likely to want to ration out access to.

There's (2) things that are mechanically largely insignificant in terms of the texture of the campaign and what characters are capable of, but are simply less common in the inner sea region - most uncommon weapons, for example.

Finally, there's (3) things are meant to be universally accessible to characters that have a specific feat or class feature, and generally off-limits otherwise. Most focus spells fall into this category.

And that's just for player options.

These aren't exclusive categories, and there's a little bit of blur between some of them, but the rarity system does seem to be serving multiple roles that are partially orthogonal. I don't think this is a crisis or anything, but I would not be surprised to see "which kind of uncommon is X supposed to be?" becoming a question people have in the future.

For what it's worth, Pathfinder 1e NPC statblocks for paladins routinely feature them using weapons that aren't the favored weapon of their listed deity, even when the deity's favored weapon fills a comparable role. (E.g., Paladin of Torag with an axe, paladin of Iomedae with a mace.) It does not seem to be a baseline expectation at all that Paladins in Golarion strongly default to using their deity's favored weapon. (Although there's certainly some correlation.) It's obviously a GM's prerogative to do whatever they like, but in Golarion as presented in the printed material, paladins take full advantage of their proficiency with all martial weapons, and frequently use weapons that differ from their deity's choice even when there's no particular mechanical incentive to do so. (Clerics, who have more incentive to do so, are more likely to carry their deity's favored weapon, although this is also far from universal.)

Is giving Meditated Strike the Fortune trait intended to make it a roll-twice ability, or simply cancel out misfortune effects? Currently, the number of misfortune effects in the game is quite small, which makes it a very situational benefit (which is fine, if that's the intent). If it's supposed to allow you to roll twice, I think it needs to spell that out; fortune is a tag applied to things like Assurance and True Strike that affect how you roll the dice (or don't, in the case of Assurance), but does not on its own have any rules effect aside from the cancel-out effect with misfortune and to indicate that it doesn't stack with other fortune effects.

It's worth noting for anybody coming into this thread now that it's a little bit of a necro from very soon after the game released, and that many of the takes early in the thread are based on first impressions. They're not uniformly actually reflected in how the game actually plays. Multiclassing turns out to be really good for most characters, and basically every class is a reasonable multiclass option for at least some character. It's true that the initial dedication feat is a bit of a tax for many characters, but many of the suggested "fixes" in this thread are overkill that would make multiclassing go from being a great option for nearly every character to totally bonkers.

We sort of misevaluated the value of multiclassing before anybody had actually played the game much by focusing on things that it could have offered but doesn't, rather than looking at what it does offer.

The Deific Weapon feature exists for two reasons:

1) To make it so that if your deity has a simple favored weapon and you want to use that weapon, it's somewhat less bad of an idea.

2) To make it so that if your deity has an uncommon favored weapon and you want to use that weapon, you have access to it.

"You zealously bear your deity's favored weapon" is just flavor explaining the ability. Champions do not need to use their deity's favored weapon for any reason. It's often not the best idea, and in the case of several deities, it actively works really poorly with your class features. You're proficient in all martial weapons, and can use any of those. It's perfectly fine, both in mechanics and flavor, for a Champion of Erastil to choose a melee weapon.

"As you started on the path of the rogue, you began to develop your own style to pursue your illicit activities." The three choices are described as pick pocket, con artist, and bandit.

The rogue class could potentially be used to play a skilled character that is not a criminal, but currently you would have to ignore class features that are contrary to that concept.

The rogue has no mandatory choices that involve anything criminal. One of the three rackets makes you trained in Thievery, and goes out of its way to offer examples of why a law-abiding person operating on the up-and-up would have those skills. You're picking and choosing words out of the descriptions to support the incorrect idea that the rogue class means you must be a criminal. You could just as easily have said that the three choices are described as security detail, diplomat, and security consultant.

It's literally impossible to build a rogue archetype that removes the mandatory criminal elements because there's literally zero of those to remove. You can play a rogue that's not a criminal as easily as you can play a fighter that's not a knight.

The idea that a crossbow is a better champion weapon than a longbow is so hyperbolic that it borders on parody. Even if you do nothing to address the volley issue, with a longbow you fight more or less like a Warpriest. With a crossbow, you fight like a character that's permanently Slowed 2, and that's on the turns when things go as well as possible.

You could probably do a nine-level caster that went up to master-level weapons proficiency if you limited the number of spells/day they got at each level to a low enough number, but it'd eat up most of the class's power level budget. You'd probably have to either turn all of the other turnable knobs in the basic class framework (HP, proficiencies) most of the way down and/or somehow mess with the basic class chassis. I think that trying to work it into an existing class, especially one with as many bells and whistles as bard, is probably more difficult that doing that from scratch.

You could probably make a better martial bard by creating a bard option that doesn't go all of the way to scaling like a full martial class but that has significant martial advantages. Between their very easy access to status bonuses to fighting-oriented things and okayish weapon selection, Bards are already a big part of the way there.

If they were going to take time to explicitly clarify rules, I'd also hope that they'd spend that time on rules questions for issues that are not things that are clearly, consistently, and unambiguously addressed in the CRB.

Not Monk-related, but the biggest surprises to me from actual play:

* The Liberator Champion is a lot better than it looks on paper. (Or looked on paper to me, at least.) I had initially deeply undervalued the impact of giving an ally the ability to step after moving. This can not only help set up flanks, but a lot of really common scenarios with enemy movement and attack activities make it so that that step effectively results in the rest of the monster's turn being wasted. It's possible for many monsters, especially ones with reach, to work around some of these advantages, but if they don't, then the Liberator has almost unmatchable action-wasting potential.

Because of the order in which the abilities are listed, its easy to misread the primary effect of the Liberator's reaction as freeing people from grapples and stuff, and that's certainly a perk, but you're mostly there for the awesome free Step.

I haven't heard people talking much about the Liberator online; it's possibly the most slept-on option in the game right now.

* Dazzled has gone from one of the least relevant conditions to one of the best. It has a decent chance of wrecking almost anything the afflicted tries to do, and it's budgeted pretty cheaply on spells.

* A dynamic that's not immediately obvious, I think, is that spellcasters in general and offensive spellcasters in particular have tremendous competition for their highest-level slots, which are not only the only places you can cast your new, coolest spells from, but which are also the best homes for a wide variety of other effects that benefit a lot from heightening. (Including Incapacitation spells, most spells whose primary function is damage, spells that rely on counteracting, summoning spells, and others.)

* One consequence of the above is that spells that do their thing perfectly or almost perfectly even when prepared or cast from their lowest-possible slot are really great.

* Multiclassing is really good. Somebody made the observation that, for most characters, the most exciting class feats from any other class are probably more exciting than your less-exciting choices from your own class. This seems borne out in practice.

Animal Instinct is the defensive barbarian option, with arguably the most general-purpose resistances and the potential for the highest Armor Class. The primary cost it pays is in raw damage, with a lower damage bonus to rage than some of the alternatives. They can also use a shield without giving up much offensive ability as long as they're raging. It's difficult to precisely weigh the value of added defense vs. the lost damage, but you'll still be a high-damage character - just not at the same level as a Giant or Dragon instinct barbarian.

Ape Barbarians and others with Grapple weapons can reach nearly unmatchable levels of Grappling ability. This synergizes somewhat well with the more defensive nature of the class, as one of the risks of grappling some enemies is that, with no other good options available, they use all of their actions attacking you.

Human is a fine choice for an Animal Barbarian. To the best of my knowledge, there aren't any ancestries with exceptional synergy that make them a must-take.

I don't believe so, but the 4) is a an actual question on my part since I don't know.

The extra size would be a complete nonfactor. They could hyperlink every word in the document to something else and it'd have essentially no impact on the size of the file, relative to its current size. Hyperlinks are extraordinarily cheap compared to images.

But that’s not how the final version of Harm works. And if the error was in Heal and fixed for Harm why does Harm have the typo stating positive energy?

Presumably that's another small error that wasn't caught. I have a much easier time believing that that sort of error occurred than that somebody was trying to communicate "This spell's area is the union of a 30-foot burst and a 30-foot emanation. It targets all living and undead creatures in the area," but the words that their brain produced were "You disperse positive energy in a 30-foot emanation. This targets all living and undead creatures in the burst." Even coming up with the idea that a good way to produce that effect is by introducing an overlapping burst instead of using the technology used by the rest of the system is a pretty huge leap. That the author would then have whatever mental spasms are required to then communicate that idea so poorly and have it make it into print requires another leap on top of that. (And also seems wrong; as written, it says that it targets creatures in the burst, but doesn't say anything about the emanation other than that's where positive energy is, which would seem to make the idea of the emanation entirely superfluous.)

It does not have the attack trait, and you can cast it while wielding a greatsword. The one-action version's only component is somatic, which has the associated rules:

"A somatic component is a specific hand movement or gesture that generates a magical nexus. The spell gains the manipulate trait and requires you to make gestures. You can use this component while holding something in your hand, but not if you are restrained or otherwise unable to gesture freely.

Spells that require you to touch the target require a somatic component. You can do so while holding something as long as part of your hand is able to touch the target (even if it’s through a glove or gauntlet)."

Even with the interact action to remove the blindness, they're still dazzled typically until the end of combat. Dazzled is really good in PF2e; putting dazzled on the enemies is the equivalent of casting Blur on your whole party and also has other benefits. That they're also forced to use an action if they don't want to be blinded for the whole round is icing on the cake. The interact action to remove the blindness provokes AoOs, making it very difficult for an enemy hit by it to have a productive turn without eating an attack if your party contains a fighter or somebody who's taken a feat that grants AoOs. It's not the best effect in the world, but it's a big step up from the vast majority of offensive Domain powers in PF1e.

I obviously don't have extensive experience with every class from levels 1 to 20, but based on the experience I do have:

- On a class-by-class basis, Pathfinder 2e is in the conversation for best-balanced game of its general style and complexity level that I've played, and I've played a lot of them.
- While there's no *class* that's feels all-around underpowered, there's a few directions within individual classes that look appealing or like you're supposed to use them and in some cases have been supported in previous editions but which don't really hold up super well. Examples include focusing heavily on summoning, melee hulk mutagenist, and warpriests of deities with awkward or marginal weapons, such as Abadar. (Even Warpriest of Abadar can be okay-ish with the right ancestry feats and ignoring Abadar's preference for crossbows.) These options (and a few others) aren't utterly nonfunctional, but are probably a cut below in a game that's otherwise really well-balanced. I consider this generally acceptable; it's unrealistic to expect every niche within every class to perform up to par unless you seriously limit the number of those that there are.
- As long as a player doesn't get excessively "creative," (e.g., rejects major components of the mechanical premise of the class, like "my sorcerer isn't really into spellcasting"), the game has a reasonable floor on how much optimization is required to build a character that is successful at contributing to a standard adventure at a reasonable level by doing what you'd hope it'd be good at, with only a few exceptions (such as the things listed above.)
- If you run a bunch of spreadsheets, there are realistic differences in things like the damage outputs of various martial classes. However, these tend to be within what I consider a reasonable tolerance of each other.

I don't think that they're disasters, but if I had a free blessing to bestow on any class to give them just a little bit more juice, I'd probably choose the Ranger or Alchemist. I don't think that it's overpowered, but if I had to identify a class to be the "be careful about what we do with that one in the future, because it's already really good" class, I'd probably choose the Fighter.

It's worth noting that in the final version of the game, there's no such thing as a "somatic action" (or any other type of component action.) The number of components generally correlates with the number of actions that the spell takes to cast, but the rules no longer state that you spend one action on each component or anything like that, the way that they did in the playtest.

Cast a Spell is now simply an activity that takes a specified number of actions that depends on the spell being cast and which has a set of traits and requirements that come from its components. No matter what happens to the components of a spell, it always takes the specified number of actions unless something else specifies that it doesn't. Similarly, something like Quickened Casting doesn't change the spell's components even though it reduces the number of required actions. As another example, Magic Missile always has a somatic component and a verbal component regardless of whether one, two, or three actions are spent to cast it.

In other words, you don't really have "two somatic actions" for the spell. You're spending two actions on the Casting a Spell activity, and because the spell has a somatic component, it has the Manipulate trait and requires you to be able to gesture freely. This distinction matters because there are things like Silent Spell that outright remove a component, but which do not change the number of actions required to use the Cast a Spell activity.

I think it's deliberate that Breath Weapons don't contribute to and aren't affected by MAP. Monsters with special abilities that are attacks have those abilities labeled as such - see the Dire Wolf and the Sea Serpent for examples. The technology to identify specific special abilities as attacks is used by the bestiary with some regularity, but is not used with breath weapons. (And is also not used with a variety of other offensive special abilities.)

I didn't have a chance to watch the Twitch stream, but that matches my experience with the Alchemist in general and the Mutagenist in particular. Mutagenists really feel like Jacks-of-no-trades; they're just kind of mediocre at everything, with no real combat role. I don't think the class is fundamentally misconceived or anything like that, it's just a tiny bit undercooked - especially the stuff that's not centered around bombing. Strategic mutagen use has interesting out-of-combat benefits, but it's hard to feel like it compensates for a chassis that doesn't have any clear strengths. (Chirugeons may be in the same boat, but I have no direct experience with them.)

There might be some hidden configuration of options that really makes them sing, or I might be underrating the versatility, but it's hard not to see Mutagenists as strikingly underwhelming in play. I think that legitimately the most capable Mutagenist might be one that only sprinkles in Mutagen use and primarily relies on bombs, but then you're pretty much just a worse bomber, which is already not a particularly impressive class.

While they're near the top of the list of classes that care, #6 isn't really a Monk-specific issue. A number of classes or builds would optimally like to start with an 18 in one stat and 16 in another and would thus prefer a background that has one of those two stats as something in can boost, with the Free boost going to the other one. Even among classes that are a little more flexible in what stats they'd like to start with, backgrounds where the only options are unimportant stats are less appealing.

The skill feats are also not irrelevant; while characters get enough skill feats to generally get most things they want eventually, but it's still a lot better to start with a highly-coveted skill feat that you would definitely like to take early like Battle Medicine than a very poor skill feat that may have no mechanical impact at all, like Courtly Graces.

While the degree of severity varies from character to character, Background isn't really a pure roleplaying choice for anybody. (Unless you value all skill feats equally and plan to really spread out your starting stats.)

A small note - technically, as written, the Polymorphic Pouch doesn't work when you shift into an Ooze. It gives a list of creature types that it works with that doesn't include Ooze. It's a reasonable allowance, though. If dropping the pouch part of the idea lets you take an Arbiter, that's that problem sorted.

(I don't know where you're planning to get a familiar from, exactly, so if any of this doesn't make sense, let me know.)

If you want a Leshy buddy that isn't necessarily strictly your familiar, you can create a normal one using the rules for creating Leshys. The process is a bit obnoxious, but can be made more reliable with a Leshy Mulch Manual.

Another good option might be a Poppet Familiar. They don't use the Improved Familiar rules, so they're easy to overlook, but they seem to hit all of the requirements you have for your familiar. You can get one with the Poppet familiar feat. They explicitly weigh only six pounds, and don't seem to have the sort of will that would make them mind living in a sack, and are crafted from natural materials.

As a DM, I would gladly allow somebody to take a Leaf Leshy (or perhaps even a better Leshy) as an improved familiar. It's clearly not as potent as most of the other available options, and in your case the only thing stopping you from taking one of several available options that would accomplish the same thing (like a Mephit) is your alignment. This depends on your DM, however.

I don't get the hate for dump stats.

Most people aren't good enough at math to realize that the difference between and 8 and a 10 is essentially invisible in play, and even the difference between a 6 and a 10 barely matters if it's in a stat that the character won't end up rolling with that often.

It's extremely hard to break out of the mental lock that somehow the difference between 8 and 10 is vastly larger than the difference between 10 and 12. Because 10 is presented as "average," humans default to thinking of 10 as a "safe" value for their character to have, in event that they do need to roll against that stat, while anything lower than that represents some kind of weakness. In reality, of course, in any game where charisma checks are SO IMPORTANT for your character that you'd really rather have a 10 than an 8, it's equally important for you to go from 10 to 12. There is nothing magical about the number 10 except for the way it is presented as a baseline.

People get stuck in a mental rut of thinking that a character with Charisma score of 8 is going to auto-fail every charmisa-based check while one with a score of 10 will be more or less fine. But it's +1. +1 to a type of roll that you don't intend to make that often is almost meaningless.

Extremely low stats do represent an actual vulnerability, but for reasons that have nothing at all to do with rolls based on them. Once a character is running around with a stat of 3 or something, they become meaningfully more susceptible to being taken out by ability damage.

I like point buy. I strongly dislike the idea that my character is stronger or weaker for reasons that have nothing at all to do with any decisions I've made. I realize that to some degree that's how reality works, but it's not (in my opinion) a good setup for a game.

If I was DMing a game and I announced at the beginning of the first session that I had rolled some dice some characters would be awarded powerful invisible slotless untransferrable stat-boosting magic items that stacked with everything and that other characters would be forced to wear and never remove some equivalent cursed items that lowered their stats, and that furthermore these items were not a set up for anything - they're just there to arbitrarily make some characters worse - I think many people would rather reasonably call foul on that. But if I announce that we're rolling for stats, which is perfectly equivalent in every way, most players will go along with that.

I really like the Spiritualist class, but people are correct that it's not a great class from a mechanical perspective. I mean, everything works, but you have to be okay with being sort of C+ at everything except scouting. The text of Occult Adventures doesn't really attempt to explain what a Spiritualist is supposed to do in combat, and the answer (hit things with your weapon; you're bad at it, but better than you are with other things) isn't super obvious.

It feels like class suffers a bit from them not wanting to repeat the catastrophe that was the original Summoner. The Spiritualist gets a limited and kind of janky spell list, and while it gets the marquee version of a few effects (Fly, Haste, Invisibility, Animate Dead, etc.), it's often stuck with more limited or awkward versions of effects. It gets very little in the way of early or even late-on-time access to spells. It has a reputation as a debuffer, but does not get access to very many good control spells.

I'm somewhat biased in that it's one of my favorite classes, but the Spiritualist could get a little bit of extra love and it wouldn't be out of line.

EDIT: With regards to complexity: the spiritualist is a little complicated, because the rules for how lots of elements of the class work are unnecessarily fiddly and aren't always written as clearly as they could be. The spiritualist has a lot of abilities, such as its SLAs and its Bonded Manifestation ability that, while not exactly pointless, take up a lot of words for stuff that doesn't really matter very often. In play, the spiritualist is easier to understand, because a lot of that stuff is meted out pretty slowly.

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The Medium works fine if you ignore the implicit promise built into the class that you're a versatile channeler of whatever expertise you might need and play it as a person who just hits stuff every day and can help craft a bit or something during downtime. It's a weird and kind of necessarily complicated route to something that's a lot like a standard martial character, but it basically works. The class is a disappointment in that it doesn't live up to its premise in any way, but it works as a mechanical game element.

(The class was a nonfunctional mess prior to the clarification that Mediums should generally have access to whatever spirit they want each day, but that's no longer a concern.)

Ignoring things that are easy to houserule (which probably aren't worth the hassle of a new edition) and things that would just be clarifications (which don't require a new anything at all), while still having something Pathfindery, I'd want the following. Note that my perspective is heavily tainted by being someone who teaches people to play on the reg:

- A simple(ish), resonant spellcaster class in core, or probably two. I don't care if Vancian and pseudo-vancian spellcasters are also around, but they're both very complicated and they don't work remotely like how anybody thinks of magic as working. I get that they're part of the game and stuff, and that's why I'm okay with them remaining - but I think that there should be options that are easier to hand to somebody that's totally new to the game, and options that better model how people think of spellcasting as working if they haven't been playing D&D forever. This would also make it way easier to make NPC spellcasters (I basically never make NPC spellcasters 'properly' any more, since it's too much of a hassle for what it gets you.)
- Monster design that focuses on making monster combat encounters more unique and distinct from each other. This is something where GMs can pick up the slack, but it'd be nice if the system met us halfway.
- Monster design that focuses more on foregrounding cool, iconic abilities of creatures. PF already does this some of the time, but many of the most iconic baddies, like dragons and powerful demons, have a big muddle of different abilities that aren't that iconic. The ability to make a dragon that's a sorcerer is important, but the fact that a dragon is by default a sorcerer shouldn't be the most important thing about every single dragon.
- Multiclassing that's more consistently not a complete trap. I think that PF is much, much better than 3.5 in this regard, since 3.5 had the property that you were almost always either an idiot to multiclass or an idiot not to multiclass. PF does that less, but it'd be nice to do it even more less.
- Do something about martial mobility in general.
- Do something about the fact that archetypally mobile character archetypes, like the agile TWF guy, are the least mobile characters in the game.
- A 'best of' core, in terms of what feats and spells are core.
- Pull some of the fiddliness off of races. Races are one of the first things that players see, and it's annoying that iconic things like elves and dwarves have so much fiddly stuff on them. Move that stuff to (powerful) racial feats if you have to, or replace it with more straightforward things.
- Unify common trait types (+1 to a save, +1 to a skill and it's a class skill, etc.), then stop making near-clones of those. Traits are far and away the part of the system that's the biggest mess at the moment; sure there's a lot of feats, but there aren't ten feats that all do almost the same thing.
- Either redesign the druid class to make it qualitatively complete at level one or two, or make a shapeshifter class core or near-core. IME, the promise of being able to turn into an animal is what draws many people to the class, and shunting that ability so late (and limiting it heavily until later) is a bit annoying. In the real world, level four represents a lot of play time.
- Cast a critical eye on whether a lot of rules systems are really pulling their weight. If you've been playing forever, you know that the spell components line in a spell is basically 100% ignorable and that everyone ignores it, but that's not obvious to a new player.
- Generally avoid "anyone can do this, but you're a total nincompoop at it unless you take a feat" design. Archery and combat maneuvers suffer from this. "You suck at everything you didn't specifically specialize in, going all the way back to when you picked your stats" really discourages players from trying interesting things.
- Have some idea going in how good different classes are supposed to be at different things with different levels of investment, and design them so that that's actually the case.
- Smooth out the [level one]/[rest of the game] discontinuity a little bit.
- Better guidance in core, and better transparency. In an ideal world, crossbows shouldn't be made to suck intentionally, but if they are, be forthright about that. IME, people tend to assume that the game isn't trying to trick them into sucking.
- Greater willingness to spell out RAI.
- Less of things that seem like they should work really being things where you have to pick out every character option in the system that improves them in order to make them work.
- No 'half measures' archetypes that point you in a direction but don't give you nearly enough support to actually make the direction work on the level of the rest of the system. Firearms-oriented archetypes do this constantly.
- Higher standards for how cool and generally useful a feat has to be before it gets printed. That doesn't mean that feats have to be more powerful, but the best way to fight system bloat is to not print feats that nobody will ever, ever, ever take.
- Overall balance pass, but especially focus on making options that aren't combat-related better. Even in relatively combat-light campaigns, non-combat options are generally underpitched. (They're probably fine in EXTREMELY combat-light campaigns, but I don't consider Pathfinder to be a system I'd pick if I was trying to run a game with almost no combat in it. The 3.5 chassis simply isn't optimized for that.)

Based on my exploration of the many threads, and the hatred that others reigned down upon the threads that i have posted it is obvious that the reason (or so it seems) that many of the people on here play is because they see it as a "battle of math"? Or so it seems. I feel many people forget that it is a Role Playing Game. Reminder this is all opinion. But i don't see how you can have a lot of fun when constantly running the numbers of how effective your character will be in every situation. Also i feel people rely to much on their spells, all that has to happen is for a wizard to lose the ability to cast and they are as good as dead, you have to have other classes, i feel other people do not realize that. Again all just opinion. Remember everyone RPG!! not Math Wars

That's not correct. What's actually going on is that people prefer the idea of characters being able to work as advertised and to actually be good at the things that they're supposed to be good at to the idea that some characters are less capable of overcoming standard adventuring challenges for no reason. An important part of playing the game for a lot of people is that the actual repercussions of their actions synch up with the character concept, and that if a character invests in being good at something, that should pay off.

In other words, people want a world where the math works well AND the RP stuff works well. If people didn't care about RP stuff, there are hundreds of non-RPG games with better "math" that they could be playing. People like the idea of both working better than the idea of only one working. Why settle?

I feel like the same set of conflations and crosstalk happen in most of these threads.

The rogue IS NOT strictly dominated - There technically exist (narrow and convoluted) sets of priorities where the rogue is technically the best way to get those things.
The rogue IS mostly dominated - For most realistic sets of priorities you might have, even for a rogue-like character, the rogue class is not the most efficacious way to get those things, or else you can get those things and a whole lot more better stuff elsewhere.
A rogue IS NOT complete dead weight - You won't instantly fail and die and doom your whole party if you play a rogue. A rogue can be a functional contributing member of a party.
The rogue IS below the curve - A rogue is less able to contribute to resolving standard adventuring challenges than most classes are.
A rogue IS NOT impossible to have fun with. While extremely out-of-band characters can make the game less fun, the rogue is not so far out of band that you'd expect that for the class.
The rogue is NOT magically better at roguey things than its listed abilities indicate, outside of houseruling.
That somebody correctly recognizes that the rogue class is mechanically mostly dominated and under the curve does NOT mean that that person hates the concept of the rogue, its general implementation, or the idea that somebody would enjoy playing one.

Joyd wrote:

You can get Improved Steal without putting 13 points into what's a dump stat for both classes, I guess.

I find this statement extremely telling. I would never build a rogue with intelligence as their dump stat - in fact I consider it the rogue's main stat. Why would you pick a class who's main thing is skill points and then dump the stat that gives you skill points?

Int replaced Dex as the rogue's "prime requisite" as soon as 3.0 hit.

Only the rogue can, in theory, be getting 15 skill points a level right out of the gate, although even I think that's a little extreme. 12-13 is very doable though. (16 int, favored class bonus, maybe human bonus)

Because a skill point on a rogue isn't really worth any more than a skill point on anybody else. A skill point on a rogue is worth one skill point per level. A skill point on anybody else is worth one skill point per level. If you wouldn't always start with a 16 on EVERY class, you shouldn't start with it on a rogue. In fact, once you already have a bunch of skill points/level, additional ones are LESS valuable, because your 13th-pick skill is way less important than your third-pick skill. Rogues are able to dump Int harder than every other class because they need it for nothing, and are sacrificing their eighth-most-important skill by doing that, instead of their second-most-important or fourth-most-important, like most classes are. Int is a dump stat on rogues. Rogues are NOT good at skills. They have zero advantages to using skills aside from perception and disable device, which they can easily afford even with six or seven skill points per level. Bards are good at skills; they get actual advantages to having skill points in things. Rogues don't. A rouge's skill point is no more valuable than anybody else's, and may be less.

It is the case that some skills complement each other when they're on the same character, but not to a degree that you need twelve skill ranks per level. Rogues have zero advantages to having decent int scores that aren't available to EVERY class. Zero.

Calling the rogue "a class whose main thing is skill points" collapses two different ideas - "a class that gets a lot of skill points" and "a class that gets more advantages from having skill points than other classes" - into the same idea. The rogue is the first one. It's not meaningfully the second. And that's why Int is a dump stat for rogues. (You certainly CAN build and play a rogue character with 16 Int, just like you could build and play a wizard with 20 Cha, and you might have fun with that, but it's not an efficiently built character.)

Also, if you're starting with the assumption that it's worthwhile to trash a character just to get a large number of skill points... bards STILL end up being better at that. (And unlike rouges, a skill point on a bard is actually worth a bit more than a skill point on a fighter.)

When the DM comes up with a way to prevent you from exploiting a feat to end his encounters in half the time he designed for, he is metagaming.

When he adjusts the CR of enemies so they are appropriate for your level and gives you loot that you actually want based on your level he is just DMing.

Double Standards HO!!!!

Unfortunately this game has a very bad way of opening the can of worms philosophy, and when you open up one can that destroys encounters by making the casters not able to cast, the balance of power in the game has shifted very heavily in your favor. The DM has to metagame to counterbalance the trick that you discovered when in a more balanced setting there would be more obstacles.

Not all metagaming is bad for the game. In fact, good metagaming is incredibly important. However, "metagaming" has a negative connotation for a lot of people, so people usually don't refer to good metagaming as metagaming.

(As a note, PF Open Minded works differently, to avoid being as powerful in concert with how class skills work.)

Either way, the reason that that doesn't work out right is that even if Open Minded (3.5 version) is worth a feat, it's not worth as much as your best possible feat choice. Imagine that you gave a character a choice, A or B.

A) 3.5 Open Minded
B) Their choice of any feat they qualify for.

Obviously, pretty much every character would choose B, especially past level 1. And when you let somebody trade five skill points for a feat, that's exactly the choice that you're offering them. They can have five skill points, or they can have a feat. If Open Minded was such a good feat that every character was strongly considering taking it, then the trade would be fair. Otherwise, not so much.

It's 100% fine. Is it possible that there's a few things in there that you can smoosh together with some other stuff and make something that looks a little unfair? Probably. But it's completely fine. If the question is "Is it too powerful for Pathfinder games?", at least. If the question is "Will it further marginalize already marginal classes?", then the answer is also "yes", but there's a huuuuuuge amount of ground between "things that would further marginalize marginal classes" and "too powerful for Pathfinder games."