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I also kind of like Zyphus and I wouldn't mind him getting to chill and have a beer with me. Comparing Zyphus to Naderi who is also very attractiveZyphus would be interestinghe could always get expanded bc he is already very swole and strongthx dudes preciate the support. don't forget to like and subscribe SIGH FINE I'LL WORSHIP YOU, if that makes you ha-- *dies, accidentally*
Zyphus would be interesting. My character is built on hunting down cultists of Zyphus - they'd be thrilled at the development, but "mission accomplished" ends the character's concept. Still, Zyphus is a niche tool that allows for places filled with traps that aren't otherwise justified in having them, so I don't see him leaving. That's the issue, it kinda feels one-note. Aren't deities more fun when they have a couple of twists to them? Comparing Zyphus to Naderi...
why would anyone kill Hanspur??? He's just a tiny rat dude???? If anything, they should off Charon (who is lame and not IP protected) and ascend Hanspur to ferrying souls. I also kind of like Zyphus but I wouldn't mind him getting merc'd in lieu of a deeper, more interesting, souls-ferrying deity. I also have a soft spot for Feronia because my favorite Cleric worshipped her, but even in Rage of the Elements, she didn't get much prime time.
The only person who said sword and board is the "correct" build is you. No one else has. It's there for those who want to use it. Almost every class has something like this (druid, wizard, Magus....). Now I could sort of see this being an issue if you cost you something, but it doesn't. And for a fighter it absolutely makes sense that they would learn to use a shield as a part of their basic training.Ah, but it did cost the player something. It cost them a choice (of which they have been deprived). The problem here is that Shield Block is unique as a General Feat in terms of power, and there's no comparable feat to it. If you give me Dueling Parry and Nimble Dodge as General Feats, then it's really IS basically a free General Feat. But no equivalent options are there for other types of characters to pick up. I'd love for the main options to be: - Wanna use a Shield? Here's Shield Block, you get +X AC and the ability to absorb damage with a reaction. - Wanna use a 1H weapon and an empty offhand? You get to turn on Parry for a blanket +2 AC and a reaction to riposte on critical failures. - Wanna use a 2H weapon, TWF, or be ranged? Here's Nimble Dodge... you don't get to activate for a blanket +AC, but you still get a defensive reaction if you need it.
I think people here are interpreting this the wrong way. A Reaction is a must for every character as it is a massive boost in action economy. The fact that you get an unusable one as a Fighter is a "feels-bad moment" that should be avoided. Fighters should have been allowed to pick up a thematic reaction, whether it is a Dueling Parry, a 2H Block, or a Shield Block. Same goes for Paladins, and hell, why not Monks, Rogues and Rangers?
Ahh you feel like. That's a big part of the issue that Paizo has to look at and think about. Because for quite a few people that feel it's doing what it says on the tin.Yeah, Barbarians are in a good place over all I wouldn't expect much.Yeah, I know I've been complaining about them but the class is functional and fun in a lot of ways. With the level of changes I expect in PC2 I'd rather focus be put on the bad classes. I already exposed my arguments here. Feel free to engage them or, alternatively, not respond to my comments.
Yeah, Barbarians are in a good place over all I wouldn't expect much.Yeah, I know I've been complaining about them but the class is functional and fun in a lot of ways. With the level of changes I expect in PC2 I'd rather focus be put on the bad classes. I don't get this approach... classes shouldn't be balanced in comparison to each other, they should be balanced as an experience on its own. I feel like the Barb not doing what it says on the tin is a problem, even if other classes are worse off.
This is just spitballing out loud, but what if the Barbarian could just pick up anathema as feats and gain benefits from those, instead of having fixed instincts? The general idea would be that becoming superstitious in certain ways is a choice you'd make that would give you special powers, and if you wanted you could become a really superstitious Barbarian bound by lots of different anathema, but who'd gain lots of varied benefits as a result. Alternatively, you could just have your Barb not lean into any kind of superstition at all and instead focus on other things. Similarly, Rage could start off as a fairly basic damage boost with no downsides or restrictions, but you could take on certain tradeoffs (which could include some of these superstitions) for additional benefits, which could then also make it much easier to bridge the gap into things like a bloodrager in the future as well. I love this, but I think it steps a little too far into the Monk territory of developing a discipline.
Really like some ideas, don't see eye to eye with many other comments/suggestions... ...but honestly would like some indication of where Paizo stands with the PC2 classes, TBH.
It's also common to have them be really sturdy, which isn't the case in practice. If DR started at level 1, sure. Because it doesn't, I think the AC penalty should go. I think the Action restriction is penalty enough.
1. Get rid of Anathemas. I wanna play a Barbarian without being told how they should act. If you want to keep them, keep something SUPER specific that won't interfere with the regular flow of character building. 2. Get rid of the AC penalty on Rage. -1 is MASSIVE, and causes Barbarians to be health piñatas at low level. I've DM'd multiple games where the Barb just blows up because of big increase in critical chances. The class shouldn't be strictly a damage dealer, it should be allowed to be the tank for the party too. The AC penalty needs to go... can be replaced by Clumsy, Stupefied, or whatever, but get rid of what makes the class so dangerous to frontline with. 3. Let Fury increase damage from 2 to 4 as an Instinct ability. No Lv1 Barb Feat can compete with the Instinct bonuses AND +2 to damage.
I think several arguments have been put here as to why things are broken and need fixing. I would think you should at least explain your criteria for things being "great" and why that is the case here. The Monk has a lot of things going for them, but I feel most of them are about the strength of 2E's system rather than the class itself.
2. Make Shields less useful for Monks. My favorite solution: add other alternatives to Shield Block as General Feats. The problem is not Shield Block being busted, it's that it has a monopoly in what it does. Adding a General Feat that promote 1H/Unarmed parries without a shield would be great. Right now, there's few incentives to NOT use a Shield.
I can't edit my last post so I wanted to put a link of the older thread here. We do have Michael Sayre there saying there's no chance they'll make Monks Legendary at Unarmed though.
I’ve made my points elsewhere, but in summary: 1. Clean up Monastic Weaponry. 2. Make Shields less useful for Monks. 3. And the most personal one: I think Styles should be baked into the class. Style dancing from level 1 onwards would allow the class to be more interesting, put versatility into the limelight, and move away from the Fighter But Different feel the class has right now.
Love this suggestion. Would it make all Swashbucklers too same-y? Yes, so there's something that should be looked at in terms of subclasses. Perhaps give them more stances like the Monk?
Love the play patterns associated with this.
Right now the problem is certainly opportunity costs. General feats are so forgettable that you cannot adequately price Advanced Weapon proficiency. If they make General Feats something you are excited for, then you could certainly have 1 General Feat for an Advanced Proficiency.
Totally disagree on DEX-to-damage and the whole MAD conceit. You get a ton of attributes in this game. After You should be a baseline skill though. It solves most of the problems about running into combat.
Hi team! I think the Remastered is a great chance to address one of the salient aspects of PF2E that seems to be irregular across the board: proficiency scaling that's not granted by a Class. Right now, we have:
Feels like, just like casting, this should be normalized somehow across the board because it creates needless complexity.
I don't like how outside proficiencies are gained, I'm sad it wasn't addressed. Getting Advanced Weapons or other armor is clunky.
I hate partial boosts because it creates the possibility of “dead” boosts for 20th level builds, and you start building your character with higher levels in mind. I’d rather have more rules about boosts than partial boosts.
Just a small thing I just thought up after a session: maybe get rid of vancian casting altogether
Just tell the king that these are not the refugees he is looking for and you'll be fine. Agreed, you are not forced to answer yes/no. You can answer a variety of things, with the ideal dialogue line being antagonism towards the evil doer that leads them astray. “What? Your men lost sight of the refugees, and now they are sending you my way? You’re wasting your time. If I were harboring the refugees, you know that interrogating me will get you nowhere - I’d never reveal their location. What worries me is your awful choice in lieutenants… as a matter of fact, I was looking for employment and I think I could do your kingdom a great service as your new Master of the Watch…”
I don't think that discussing any Level 20 feat, good or bad, is relevant to the topic in the discussion. And yes, Unicore brings up Golden Body way too often.
While the focus point change is obviously a buff to all the focus point classes... I usually don't care about ki stuff and I don't want to feel like I'm missing out on the most powerful part of my class budget if I don't go for it. As for the suggestion, "you are guaranteed to be subpar" is not very exciting, and seems like the kind of feature that is not friendly to people without system mastery. I'd honestly have hardcoded Dancing Leaf/Water Step as a class feature just to give the movement more ways to be put to use.
I think the consensus has been "no, thanks" to Legendary Unarmed Proficiency, but "yes, please" to some sort of boost. As I've said in other threads, a big part of the Monk's power budget goes to movement speed and metal strikes, and both are too situational (when compared to, say, Intensify Vulnerability, Raging Resistance, Debilitating Strike, etc.
I stand by my thought that if you made Stances into a subclass (free at Level 1, with a small boost at level 6 and 15), and gave them back their Level 1 and 6 feats to spend on (an expanded) array of feats, the class would be fine.
Monk in my opinion is very solid class, but them not being Legendary in unarmed on top of other martial being able to get their Flurry while running in armors is an lore/thematic and mechanical balance issue. This are two separate issues and I don't see how one has to do with another. "Monks need a stronger, unique mechanical identity" and "so they should poach Legendary proficiency" don't follow each other. Didn't we have this exact same thread just one week ago? My post last week was focused on the first part of that sentence. I posited that there's not enough things to do as a Monk with Class Feats - you end up feeling like you are missing tools just because you are "buying into" your power with Stances that are mostly passive.I don't like the solution of "just have stronger accuracy".
How do you get proficiency?
I actually think that the best "Monk reaction", in terms of style, is the Acrobat's Dodge Away: Dodge Away ⤦ (reaction)
I love it because:
2. It's only against a single attack, making Parry still valuable. 3. It gives you movement, which is the core mechanic of the class.
This is a personal quest of mine, ever since the playtest. It's been a long time and I got a better grasp of system mastery since then, but Shield Block as a general feat has been too tempting to pass up. I did ask about this during an AMA, and the team mentioned that they don't think it breaks the flavor of the class because you can re-skin the "shield" as "bracers". I cannot remember for the life of me where that AMA was though, so I haven't been able to find the post... In any case, I think giving Monks an early game defensive reaction would be fantastic. My preference would be to allow Monks to pick a defensive reaction from a series of options: a "block" (like in fighting games) that creates a small amount of resistance to damage, a "dodge" which gives you some AC, and a "roll" which gives you some movement. EDIT: But I'll take anything really! I do believe it won't break the class to give it an extra push in the early levels.
Good thing you got here for the first lesson: "be like water" (ง`_´)ง I'm trying to summarize what I believe is everyone's points in this thread: 1. The great things about the Monk come early, and the class feels really good before level 10:
2. The things the Monk receives from later levels are situationally good, not universally good, so the class starts losing luster after level 10:
3. Multiclass makes it easy for other classes to poach the great early level features of the Monk:
4. This makes classes with stronger late-game features very competitive against the Monk in whats supposed to be its niche. Fighter is mentioned quite a bit in this thread, as Legendary Proficiency seems much more appealing than Mystic Strikes and Movement Speed due to how universally applicable it is I feel you either:
As for power budget, each class certainly has its own and its own way to dole it out.
The Monk, baseline at Level 1, without any feats, is much weaker than a Fighter. Once you pick a feat with both, they are about as strong as each other, because Monk feats at Level 1 are pretty strong.
So, without getting prescriptive: There's general agreement that the biggest issues with the Monk right now are power budget comes in too frontloaded, so other classes can poach it easily. But even if it's frontloaded, the early level power from Stances/FoB only leaves it up to parity with other classes early on, and there's no late-game power spikes of note.
Obviously there's a midpoint here - Or you could make Ki Strike an innate class ability that requires 1 action to activate to per round. This is exactly the same thing that I'm saying: FoB is one half of the puzzle, the other part of the puzzle is a Third Action Sink. I think it should be a Style Dance, Deriven thinks it should be a "reward" action in case you don't use a third action. Doesn't need to be a magical thing, it just needs to be a thing Monks do after Move + FoB regularly... and that's where you put a subclass.
This is my original point – and why I think it'd be good for the Remaster to give the Monk the Magus/Swashbuckler/Barbarian treatment and find more spaces to build a stronger mechanical identity for the class. I imagine something like: - Pick 2 stances at Lv1
I'd probably take away the Lv1 Feat, reduce the power budget of the Stances, and move some of the class benefits to the stances (like resistance-bypass from Adamantine Strikes and the speed boost). You could reasonably fit a 5th stance some where too.
Sounds like a hella of a time! Can't recommend the Dwarf FCB enough for Iron Gods...
Ki strike scales +1d6 every 4 spell levels. You don't start casting level 5 spells until level 9 and level 9 spells until level 17. If you were imagining that the monk is primarily supposed to function as a striker, then blah blah blah. Ki Strike is about the +1 to attack, the damage is gravy. You already have access to a lot of great rider effects, what you need is accuracy. So between finding different ways to lower enemy AC and increase your attack with the environment, the no-questions-asked +1 is magnificent to me.
I tried! But I found out I didn't have anything interesting to say. I did the 1E UnMonk guide because I thought building them was hard but rewarding, and that sharing that knowledge could be a good thing for the community. 2E Monk... get your ability scores right, pick your favorite feats, find a use for your Third Action... you can't really go wrong. I really like the Monk of this edition, I do! I just feel like a lot of the classes don't have a deep mechanical identity, and because they don't, it's tough to say something interesting about one class in particular that doesn't apply to the rest. EDIT: WAAAAIT is this the same Jabbing Style Monk than the one you posted in TWENTY TWENTY ONE? DAMN MAN. What happened with the Strange Aeons campaign?
What do you mean bad at scaling? +1 is massive, it's the foundation for my Monks dealing crazy damage.
Love it, I think this could be a viable solution: 1. Bake in Monastic Weaponry 2. Add a ton of specialized Stances for specific weapons (that require you to be unarmored so that multiclass is less appealing) But even then... it still seems to me like baking in Stances as a whole as a Subclass and then really souping them up with power is a much more interesting class than what we have. Having the Monk be about flowing from Stance A to B during a fight makes much more sense to me as a class fantasy than what we have right now, which feels like you can easily compare to other classes because all you have for you is action economy... and other classes also solve for action economy too.
This is kind of my point in the first post. I feel the power budget is extremely focused on Stances, so why not make a Fun Stance Class with all the frills that would imply, including dancing stances? You already have one of the big tools a Stance Dancing Class would want, FoB. And making the chassis meatier is a GOOD thing, not a bad thing. Making classes too streamlined like the Monk and the Fighter reduce design space. I think Swashbuckler, and not Fighter, is the future of Pathfinder 2E.
I think the issue here is that multiclass archetypes are pretty haphazardly designed. Their power budget is all over the place.
I highly doubt big changes are on the way for the Monk, if not many are primed for the Fighter either. Both classes are relatively simple to play, with the Fighter being geared towards using many different attack actions, and the Monk geared towards using more non-attack actions. However, I think this simplicity plays against the Monk because it reduces design space. All the new Monk feats outside of Rulebooks are Ki Spells because it's really hard to find other ways to give it more depth. For this reason, I believe Monks should have a subclass feature: stances. This would mean making stances mandatory, which I won't imagine to be a 100% popular idea, but right now stances have such a high power level that it seems reasonable. Making stances part of the core class would encourage stance-dancing, something that many Monks opt out from because using once stance means not benefiting from your investment in another. By having a feature that, says, forces players to pick two stances at Level 1, then you bake the cost of the stances into the chassis. Doing so, you set up a play-pattern for Monks: switching from once stance to the other as it's benefitial to you. You could add extra stances at certain levels (to say something), adding additional depth along the way. This would create a more complex play pattern, but much more replayability, and the ability to add more variety of content since Monks will have a subsystem that is not Ki that they'll be juggling with.
100% agreed, these were my experiences too. I didn't go too deep into my Sorc/Investigator, but the little I did felt like this.
I think we are just skirting the issue with this kind of patch and it is pretty inelegant. Also, the whole "touching the floor" thing to Mountain Stance remains a thorn on the side.
Change proficiency feats to have some sort of scaling going on with them. No reason why we should have feat traps in 2023.
I just think this is a subclass in anything but name, so they should just make it a subclass and allocate the right power budget.
Paizo needs to make new proprietary creatures there to be big bads. Serpentfolk aren't it to me... they are a bit silly, especially because to anyone who has seen a snake they are... little cute fat guys. Sure, scary, but goofy scary. So I'm hoping they create something novel...
I would like any barbarian to be able to get the equivalent of medium armor while unarmored, not just animal barbarians. I just like the idea of a big burly low dex combatant who doesn't wear armor. You are getting dangerously close to the truth... and the truth is that armor proficiencies in 5E are not entirely well-designed. Seems to me like the most important thing is the outright proficiency bonus (from Trained to Legendary), and not the type of armor in the first place. By giving Barbarians Master Unarmored Proficiency... there's not much point in forcing them to max DEX while at it, if you ask me. DEX to AC feels a bit like CON to HP... I get why it's there, but should it be?
I don't care what they do, just as long as: (1) They realize that "selfish" reactions don't play well with Shield Block as a free feat, and should likely offer more alternatives to getting Shield Block, (2) Yes please rename Antipaladin to anything else by the love of jove
I'm counting Monastic Weaponry as a "Style" feat in this case. I know not all martial artists stick to a rigid style, but the way they are balanced, they are 100% upside. The only "real" alternative is Ki Strike, and even then you are probably looking to pick up a Style eventually because they are so PACKED with power. +X to damage, boosts to skills/defenses, extra traits for your unarmed strikes... Very hard to miss out on these.
My only expectation is that refocusing gets simplified down to be something that happens automatically after 10 minutes rather than being a nebulous activity you can do while doing other vaguely related activities. Absolutely. I don't like taking Focus Feats just to have more of the one I actually do like.
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