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Errenor's point is what I was getting at, the slashing/cold iron/personal antithesis combo doesn't seem to actually work out based on the most common "instance of damage" reading and how antithesis is defined in the class features.

What is more in doubt is stuff like a weakness to fire where you have flaming runes on your weapon and add on a personal antithesis. Is the flaming rune part of the same instance of damage? I think considerable electrons have been spilled on the matter.

Is there a link to this reddit post?

I can't find the Reddit post right now, but there's this Paizo forum post where he thinks Milos can do 20 points of weakness to a Glabrezu in that encounter with his cold iron weapon. A Glabrezu only has 10 points of weakness to cold iron, so the other 10 would have to come from 10 points of Pesonal Antithesis, which would be somewhat reasonable for a level 16 Thaumaturge facing a level 13 Glabrezu and level 7 Succubus and expecting to stomp them in that story.

When they make an option that allows me to be a ghost, I can't buy 'they didn't think about how incorporeal moves' seriously.

You should always take "Paizo didn't think about how X works" seriously, no matter what it is or how much they've written on or adjacent to X in the past.

Note that you can choose Mortal Weakness if they have a weakness, but you can choose to instead go with Personal Antithesis.

Why might you do this? Well, according to Mark Seifter, author of the class, on a Reddit post this is to add more damage on top if you already have access to a relevant weakness, like using a cold iron weapon against demons or fey - it hardly seems fair that you and the barbarian both get the weakness damage, and the barb also gets rage, just because you came prepared. So you can add Personal Antithesis on top if you don't need Mortal Weakness.

Whether this actually works depends on your GM and how "instances of damage" actually works on a strike and how various sorts of weaknesses interact with materials, damage types, elemental weaknesses, and the Personal Antithesis "weakness to your strike" all put together on one weapon strike. Good luck!

Fighter with Unexpected Sharpshooter.

There IS no exploit without a listed weakness to holy. Unholy on the skeleton lets it hurt, say, angels more by triggering their weakness, but only suffers against specific abilities that add on against unholy.

They have not said that they meant to write something other than what they wrote and that works fine as written.

One nice thing about the remaster is it gave us spell versatility that we otherwise never would have seen. E.g., lots of same damage type and spell rank, but now save with potential crit fail rider instead of attack.

Stifling Stillness steals an action and does no save fatigue to those in the area who aren’t ALREADY holding their breath - it doesn’t make them choose to hold their breathe to avoid that and the poison damage.

They probably didn’t intend that, but it’s what the spell does. It’s 4 stars without errata.

You can’t cast in any battleform. Pest Form is a battle form, albeit one with no attacks.

It’s the Dragon Form spell, not Dragon Soul.

Dragon Form also doesn’t grant the breath weapon rider effects a couple of dragons have. You adopt some generic characteristics, you don’t become the creature.

But now let's look at the Elementalist spell list. It is static. It does need a listing of what spells are and are not on the list. It was first created in Secrets of Magic and then updated in Rage of Elements. But when Howl of the Wild and War of Immortals come out, if either of those books include any new spells, none of those spells will be added to the Elementalist spell list automatically.

This isn't true. Check out Rage of Elements page 59 under Elemental Philosophy. Every elementalist gets the (small, generic, fixed) universal list of spells, and every spell that shares elemental traits of their philosophy (either air/water/earth/fire or earth/fire/metal/wood/water without also sharing a trait they don't have in their elemental philosophy).

So future single elemental trait spells will go on Elementalist lists, and dual (or more) elemental trait spells may, depending on the mix and whether the Elementalist took the feats to add missing traits to their philosophy. (The "no elemental traits missing from your philosophy" rule, incidentally, is why things like Cataclysm and Summon Elemental Hearald had to be put on the universal list - each is overinclusive in elemental traits.)

Player Core 1 and 2 spells also interact with this rule. Howling Blizard has the air trait, so it's on the spell list of Inner Sea Elementalism followers, but not Elemental Cycle philosophy casters. The opposite is true of Impaling Spike and a lot of wood trait spells in PC1.

There will be ORC books that contain monsters. There are not announced plans to do a Monster Core 2.

The four Remastered core books are the bare minimum to support a viable product line if the OGL blows up again. Once they're all out there (PC2 is all that's left) they can move on to their regular releases.

Plate in Treasure only coats an outer layer. It’ll trigger weaknesses (sickness if hit/bitten) but clearly wouldn’t change the structural strength of a shield.

The benefit to casting from a spellheart is that Daze would trigger the weapon or armor bonus - they want the benefit of that and the amp.

I agree that you can’t amp if cast from a spellheart. Spellheart rules allow you to sub your spell attack and DC numbers, but it’s still the item casting it (with a divine trait!), not you.

As a side note, the Barbarian could also ask to not use all his Strength modifier on damage. After all, what prevents you from doing 1 point of damage only?

And if I can choose not to apply sneak attack, why not weapon specialization bonus damage? There would need to be some rule for pulling punches and the limits of it, and there's not.

The trigger counts ("you hit a creature with a melee attack roll") but the text refers to a Strike, which would bar elemental blast.

The clear intent of making elemental blast not a strike seems to be to avoid it interacting or benefiting from martial feats at all for what I consider good reasons, so as a GM I personally would stick with the Strike reference and not allow it. In PFS they'd have to not allow it.

Xenocrat wrote:

Why would people be automatically skilled in piloting vehicles and starships, but not computing, engineering, diplomacy, and bluffing people?

Similarly, why would people from a backwater planet be automatically skilled in shooting guns, swinging weapons, and wearing armor?

Or searching locations for hidden objects or creatures? Why is that not a skill that has to be bought? Why are you not allowed to suck at searching for things?

The differences between these are self evident. No one capable of understanding needs to have it explained, and anyone who needs it explained has bigger problems than I can help them with.

The Subtle trait is clear, even if the feats that allow you to apply it to your spells are not in their own descriptions:

A spell with the subtle trait can be cast without incantations and doesn’t have obvious manifestations.

No incantations, no obvious manifestations. There presumably still are some nonobvious as spellcasting gestures, and nothing here removes either the concentrate or manipulate traits, so you must be doing a casual handwave or Clintonesque thumb point or miming an awkwardly timed panic dodge that makes you eat an AoA as part of the casting.

Blazo lends the PCs the only thing of value he has left, his cold-iron scimitar, with the promise they can keep the weapon if they return with his eye or proof that Cyclona is dead.

Wow, won't I be embarassed if I just take it with me and leave town and the blind man tracks me down.

It did during alignment days because each alignment other than N had two, and N had four. Now that alignment is gone it really have that scaffold underlying the number of core deities.

There's no more rule books, Starfinder Enhanced was the last.

Mechageddon! AP and SFS modules are still forthcoming on the adventure side for SF1.

A free action (for Drain Bonded Item) and the action cost of the spell.

So an example combat could be:

1) Stride, Drain Bonded Item cast 5th rank Impaling Spike (8d6 damage ~ 28, plus possible immobilized)

2) Stride, Drain Bonded Item (bond conservation) cast 3rd rank Agonizing Despair (4d6 damage ~ 14, plus likely frightened 1 or possible frightened 2)

3) Drain Bonded Item (bond conservation) cast 1st rank 3-action Force Barrage (Magic Missile) (3x 1d4 +1 ~ 10.5)

So I still think that the biggest limitation is finding useful low level spells to cast with the Bond Conservation castings. Example round 3 would probably be doing better to cast a cantrip instead of rank 1 Force Barrage.

No. Bond Conversation is a separate one action spellshape you have to take after casting the drain bonded item spell to get a new use of drain bonded item (that you use next round). So it would be this:

1. (free action drain bonded item), cast two action spell, one action Bond Conservation
2. Repeat.

No strides (unless hasted), no three action spells.

Elementalist archetype wizards deserve a look as well, the air and earth focus spells are very strong single target blasts.

From what I am hearing, the SF1 Society bans a lot of ancestries. Which means something about the frontloading in it's current state is not working if the ancestries are deemed too disruptive.

Power/disruption rarely has anything to do with it. (Trox and SRO excepted, probably.)

They are largely banned because it doesn't make sense for every rando species that has been published in AP backmatter (with a note that they exclusively live on a planet recently contacted by some random ship) to suddenly join the Pact Worlds' based Starfinder Society in large numbers because the players find them cool, novel, or powerful.

So newly introduced species are only allowed in SFS after they've been around for a while to narratively make sense (e.g. when published this species was barely known, two years later the SFS has done missions there and the Pact Worlds has established diplomatic and economic ties, so now they're allowed in SFS with a boon or eventually even without one). Requiring points to buy into them after they've been around a while also avoids weird waves of half the playerbase creating new characters all of the same species because it's the latest meme favorite.

This brings up the question of what deities or causes are best served by someone evolving a strange mutated evolving arm?

Any demons/devils who want you to beat up on celestials, Iomadae and Saranrae for beating up on fiends.

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Thinking about Evolutionist Adaptations from Enhanced again (I discussed them in my Enhanced posts around the time it came out), and they're mostly still pretty bad.

They seems to lean into two combat styles: passive buffs that are pretty meh, and active buffs that cost you a move action to be decent. Evolutionist: The Standard Attack Full BAB Class.

If you do want to go full attacking with the combat speciality you need to lean in hard to the passive adaptation selections to reduce temptation to spend actions. Movement/sense passives, adapative/ranged/area strikes for emergencies when your full attack isn't optimal, and maybe now Duplicate System to have All Of The Augmentations, Muahaha!

Secondary Strike is here for those who wanted a ranged and melee strike, but not until 10th, you suffer a damage decrease, and you still have the "not my primary attack attribute" issue I warned people about who wanted this.

Sudden Skill is such a sad ability compared to the Nanocyte "gimme free skillz on demand" ability in the same book.

Enhanced Strike is "ok, pretend to be a Vanguard or Nanocyte and add a weapon trait to your weapon, too." Fine, but they simulataneously made this VERY interesting by including polarize and completely useless by not including a dice value.

Energy Immunity adaptation on top of resistant form and enhanced resistant form is pretty amazing, I'll give them that. Just shut down so many threats.

I for one welcome the passing of our Trox overlords.

The only way you could do poison damage with an impulse would be by using an earth or wood elemental blast with the Versatile Blasts feat to do poison damage.

There's no way to make this work with a poison item.

The whole toxic gas conversation also has this issue with it:

Isn't it also fun to have species which breath different gases than air and thus find air toxic and other gasses not toxic?

Like... Going for the "we can't have blanket immunity to gas!" basically says "everything in the galaxy is weak to same chemistry"

Now do poisons and diseases.

No, it's not fun to publish a chart for every ancestry listing which they're immune to, resistant to, and vulnerable to due to their individual biochemistries.

AnimatedPaper wrote:

Both Powered and Analog should be traits. And "Analog" as a trait is useful for any ability or mechanic that interacts with analog weapons, as that one word is easier and clearer to write out than "Weapons without the powered trait".

Why? Why not use the default assumption of, weapons without the "powered" trait are not powered?

In SF1 the primary division is between technological items (most things) and analog weapons (not subject to effects that create, negate, or otherwise interact with technological items, like many Technomancer spells or magic hacks). While most technological items are powered and use batteries, this isn't the case for all of them. A nanite gun is technological, but uses nanite canisters and isn't powered. Almost every heavy projectile weapon, whether using rounds, shells, arrows, or darts, is neither analog nor powered. On the non-weapon side, a medkit, lock, or spool of cable line is technological but not powered, and would interact with rules that affect technological items (like the magic hack that creates tech items).

The baseline is that everything is technological, so no trait needed. If it's not they give it the analog trait. Some specific things do interact with items that use batteries ("powered" items) as a subset of technological items (example - the discharge spell and many class abilities drain charges from batteries or items holding batteries), but those don't need a trait, batteries show up in ammo or capacity/use entries in gear tables.

Potions of Speed, Invisibility, and Flight (I forget if the latter two have different names, bu those are their spell effects) are good utility for everyone, for Resentment witches check out Cayden's Brew from Treasure Vault - applies Clumsy 1 and Stupefied 1 even on a successful save in a small cone.

Enigma-Sight potion gives True Seeing that auto heightens its counteract level to your full level, but does have a downside if you crit fail the counteract check (based off Perception, not spellcasting modifier), so maybe hand this off the rogue/ranger/investigator in the party.

All this All for One love, and the Psychic is sitting over there with two different paths to an aid build with native Synesthesia access.

It's a marginal improvement over a d6 focus spells that is cheaper to get - at best, with a crit, you're averaging a +2 damage per spell rank advantage. Nice, but not crazy.

It's melee guys with Spellswipe landing double hits with Imaginary Weapon who are getting the most out of this.

BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GM

There's new errata not marked as such scattered throughout several books. (Newer stuff is towards the top for books that have been errated/FAQ'd more than once on a particuar list.) Noted on the discord yesterday as either new or not previously known to various participants (some of the below is almost certainly old but just not popularized or very noteable then and maybe not now):

You can shoot friendlies who want to be shot without rolling. Helps with those shield weapons that give HP, as well as injection (only biohackers can hit without doing damage, though) and those Locus healing weapons.

Called fusions work with combo gun plus bayonet to call both of them back to you.

Defrex Hardiness spell only provides half as much DR.

Titan Shield has a usage (and weird/unasked for/obvious clarification that it doesn't get bigger when used on Large+ armors).

Spell Amulets are harder to attach to weapons/armor freely for those considerable buffs.

Fiendish Torment got nerfed, I think the change is that it requires a full standard action to maintain the grapple now, it used to be move or something gross like that.

Conjure Grenade cantrip (techno list only) requires grenade proficiency to throw (techno doesn't have proficiency)

Moonlight Fibers are a free action activation so they actually do something, and are magitech instead of necrograft for some reason.

Adamantine Shot spell can attack one target more than once, but double/triple attacks on a single target take a -4/-6 penalty.

Verdant Code still greatly OP, now allows a standard action to try to shake off the entanglement on later rounds.

Blast Door spell can be opened as a move action. (Who knew, or cared?)

Various class, archetype, or other abilities that reduce fusion transfer/isntallation times have been modified to take into account the new faster fusion rules from the last errata.

Turquoise Cube Aeon Stone, which is very strong and cheap, limited to one use per day.

Hurl Ally got a lot of questions answered.

A bunch of SFS notes for AP items/options got codified (e.g. Zeitgeist connection spells).

All the obvious Ports of Call errata (missing paint sprayer stats, Germination Serum is not FULL PLANT IMMUNITY, MUAHAHAHA!, etc.)

Booster Shot biohacker theorem upgraded from hilariously bad to weak.

Nanocyte Body Array loses hardness option, making it 40% less overpowered and still very overpowered at high levels for punchy builds.

Other minor Enhanced changes/fixes.

In my not so humble opinion. My wife had to tell that's what that meant. Im terrible at acronyms.

Wow, somenone finally took "if you like Google so much, why don't you marry it!" to heart.

I remember Reddit being strongly in the "of course you can't do that, the RAW is clear, feel free to give us some errata, though" camp across numerous threads. There was also a single drive-by Jason Buhlman post on one smaller thread that said you could do it, but Paizo employees regardless of job title saying you can ignore the published rules on online forums have never had much impact on these questions.

Pernicious Poltergeist doesn’t let you move the area, that’s what kills it for me. Phantom Orchestra’s repositioning is key.

It really makes a huge difference whether only basic, defined glossary conditions count or any negative value change, and I honestly don't know what they intended. There has been an order of magnitude less fighting about this so far than I expected.

Anyway, Keen Senses is extremely GM dependent. Tremorsense has 2 points that can be played very differently depending on the GM:

- "the subject is moving along the surface" can be interpreted very differently from a GM who considers that it just means being on the surface to an adversarial GM asking for the enemy to use a move action to be detected.

Only one of these is a possible interpretation and it's not the one you think.

The enemy dies, he doesn't pull the lever. The PCs sigh in relief. His body slowly slumps over, the lever snags on his gear and is pulled as the body falls to the ground.

Xenocrat wrote:

How did you know they were insects you avoided?

My Familiar detected something 50 feet away, then we asked if we were seeing something at that spot and the GM allowed us a Perception check.

Uh, you didn't all mutually see each other and have to roll iniative against a moving giant insect 50' away with no wall or other total cover in the way? That's wild.

Sounds like Treasure Vault needed spectacles as an option for some parties. And the gods alone know how these species of insects evolved to survive when they can't spot things 50' away making spellcasting noise and walking around in the open.

I say you do have to do it every time.

Army vehicle identification classes teach you to drill the silhouettes and stats (armament and range, crew/passenger capacity, speed/terrain capabilities, etc.) of common enemy equipment, but no matter how good you get at it in the class room, you're never going to instantly look at an armored vehicle that has a custom camo (including mud and brush and add on cages breaking up the standard look, not just paint job) appearance and remember whether it's a BMP, BTR, tank (which version), and the dangers and weak points without taking a couple of seconds to identify it by distinguishing features and then pulling up the associated facts. Even if you are attacked by a platoon of BMP-3s, you may be sad to realize after toasting the first three of them with relatively light weapons that the fourth one, that you didn't look at closely, was actually a T-72.

Plenty of Golarian monsters look somewhat like other monsters. I think you need the time just to look at them and distinguish them from close cousins even if you recall was super fast.

Garretmander wrote:

That said, one of the PF2 update spoilers was doing away with ability scores in general, since ability score damage is gone anyway. So I imagine it might be tweaked from this anyway.

Wait...does this mean Str mod doesn't add to melee weapon damage? I feel like I missed this rule change...

"Ability score damage" means damage to PC ability scores via special monster abilities, poisons, curses, etc. That stuff has gone away in PF2/SF2. It was already incredible rare in SF1.

Strength still adds to melee damage.

Immunity to everyone is precisely to stop effective auto fails when you’re facing multiple enemies who are applying it to a single target or the whole party. I

Expecting randos to recognize holy symbol’s because they’re in the top 20 on the continent (of relevance to adventures, not necessarily the general populace) and could theoretically join the religion is like expecting people to recognize or describe the flags of the 20 most populated countries because they could theoretically emigrate or go on a long vacation there.

Urgathoa’s symbol is probably as well known as DR Congo’s flag, sure.

Night has to be adjacent, not 15’, to impose Frightened 1. No move to reach it.

I think he's saying the universalist feels better than the others, but even it still needs archetypes to get focus spells that are both useful and hit the 3 point cap. Even elementalist needs an archetype to get a third focus point.

I'll play devil's advocate for Inscribed One.

It's the melee witch patron! Make your familiar tough and independent to manuever, get Witch's Armaments and Sympathetic Strike, Needle of Vengeance/Curse of Death them with a penalty to their save, their downfall is ensured!

Or use it as a flanker for an ally, skip the dumb Witch's Armaments, you can still use the obvious familiar abilities and Life Boost to keep it/your ally alive, maybe toss in a Needle of Vengeance for extra support if you want. You're soaking up actions (if it does attack your familiar) and helping your ally with encounter resources, and sitting on big arcane slots when needed.

I do think that arcane list has some extra synergy with the witch class universal basic features, given you can pick up your big lack of healing via lesson and combo things like Elemental Betrayal that are less useful to Occult and Divine. It's not unreasonable that the more limited (if more thematic) spell lists get more patron/list specific goodies in return.

As for Discern Secrets, I can see why they might want to keep some limits on your ability to gift one (later two for one) action to your party. Recall Knowledge gifted to a Mastermind Rogue or Knowledge is Power Wizard (well, ok, they need a crit) can feed their own power quite a bit.

I'm pretty sure this comes down to personal taste. But for me, given how OBSCENELY strong Ongoing Misery is (try it with Command or the sorcerer focus spell You're Mine and watch your GM's head explode)

Neither of these is a problem. It's obvious from the heighten effect of You're Mine (and how Dominate works) that simply extending the duration doesn't take away the save every round to end the spell. Getting an extra round out of the crit fail effect on You're Mine is strong, though, sure. (The failure effect doesn't give a condition that can be extended.)

Command forces certain actions, but it doesn't directly impose any conditions (it can tell you to drop prone, but your action, not the spell, is what made you prone) so there's no condition for it to extend.

Themetricsystem wrote:

It is as reasonable for an enemy to know that Familiars are crucial to a Character as it is for them to know that a Spellbook or a special Holy Symbol is.

If anything, Familiars should be more obvious as a source of power and have a bias toward being targeted than basically any other thing that a PC uses to leverage power since, well, they have their own HP and can easily be targeted to great effect.

Kill the cat.

... This seems like a weird example because "GM destroys the wizard's spellbook" is one of the prime examples of an 'obvious' good tatic that's generally considered bad form because it just makes one player kind of miserable and useless.

GM destroy's the wizard's spellbook is one of the infamously bad tactics that's generally regarded as psychopathic and unrealistic because it doesn't help anyone survive a fight. It would be like sundering someone's wallet during a gun fight in the hope that even if they do shoot you they might slowly starve afterwards if they're unemployed and you took out all their credit cards and forms of ID.

Xenocrat wrote:

"Art theft" driving the anger against this in this context is two things.

On the other hand, being laissez faire about it is only one thing. That somehow stealing the work of people who create physical objects is theft, but stealing the work of people who create digital objects is not.

There's no magic "theft" button for you to push to make these things the same or be treated the same. Taking a physical object from someone obviously has much different impacts on someone (not least in terms of personal safety in the means to accomplish it!) than costlessly copying a nonexcludable good. Economics, the law, and normal human behavior all recognize these differences.

There really are differences between taking from me the child I produced with my wife, the craft project I produced with my tools, the widget I produced for my employer on company time and direction, using without attribution the joke I made at the company water cooler, and all forms of intellectual property copying. Calling it all "theft" and expecting it to all be treated the same and have anyone take you seriously is not a winning strategy.

But arguing the merits and details also isn't, so he here we are.