thenobledrake's page

"Do you still waste the attack if you don't make the DC 5?" Yes.

"Can you not attack them at all with further attacks?" There's no more reason to think that would even possibly be how it works than there is to think that if you roll a miss on your first attack you can't get any other result on attacks against that enemy.

Xenocrat wrote:

They have not said that they meant to write something other than what they wrote

I'll never understand why people do things like this. Like seriously, why? You replied to an honest question with unwarranted glib mockery. Did that make you feel clever or something?

This is how communities wind up with a reputation for being insular and toxic. Knock it off.

While I agree that what was said could be viewed in a negative light by the person it was a response to, I have to ask what you think the poster should have responded with instead.

Typically, when someone asks a question that equates to "have the authors clarified their intent?" about something that is not actually unclear - or at least that the authors don't think is unclear and as such haven't issued any errata about and have no plans to do so - they are not going to be satisfied with any answer.

Whatever you answer with, because it's not going to be the completely unnecessary clarification they are asking for, is likely to be viewed in a negative light.

The only thing that seems variable in the situation is whether they get told something that makes them think the community is being rude to them or something that makes them blame the developers for not being the ones to say "yes, what is in the book is correct."

It wouldn't be "too powerful" if cantrips could be countered and thus be used to counter each other. But that's not the only thing to consider when entertaining the question of how a ruling could function. The more important thing to consider is this; your party goes up against an enemy caster and said enemy counters every cantrip one of your party members tries to use, is that a good experience to have deliberately created in the game?

It's not. And that's before we carry the conversation the next step further and acknowledge that if cantrips can be used to counterspell then clever counterspell would also work and logically since there's no extra line drawn that means you could count a cantrip with the same trait as being the "expend a prepared spell" and thus not actually have to expend any spell slots to counterspell so long as you have a cantrip with an appropriate trait. Which that part would be where we get to "too powerful."

It's a lot logically cleaner and more balanced AND a better player experience to just do what the book already actually says though and only let counterspell work on slot type of spells.

This is why I think Fighter is kind of a bad idea for a class. Because it has no identity beyond 'fighting'

Technically the fighter class identity is that of the weaponmaster... they just kept the name fighter instead of dropping it, likely for the reason that if there were no class called "fighter" people would wonder where the class went.

The issue doesn't come from fighter as a class lacking an identity so much as it does from people wanting that identity for other martial classes, which I'll admit is a natural thing since the origin of all those classes if you follow it far enough back is "it's a fighter, but also..."

Yeah, I would prefer to just give everybody a free first level general feat than to allow classes who get shield block to represent "proficiency with shields" to trade that away for something

PF2 is decidedly not like PF1- you shouldn't want to make your character have fewer options in order to focus on the best ones.

Yup.

We don't want to make it look like "I gave up the ability to read for a +1 to hit" is a real thing people are supposed to be trying to find a way to make happen for their character.

Is an extra 3gp really breaking the bank?

It's not an extra 3 gp even. The point of buying a bastard sword is so you don't have to have both a longsword and a greatsword because it can cover for both, so it's only an extra 1 gp.

a "feels-bad moment" that should be avoided.

"Feels bad" is a hollow argument.

Firstly because even if someone genuinely feels bad about something, someone else can just not. In this case, me; I do not feel bad at all that if I don't choose to use a shield I can't make use of Shield Block. And I also don't feel bat at all when I make the choice to Shield Block and as a result don't get to Reactive Strike.

And secondly because there is such a thing as unwarranted feelings which we shouldn't do anything as a result of other than work on not continuing to have them. Which things like "I feel bad because I got free stuff with absolutely no downside" unquestionably fall into.

Being mad that you get shield block for free is weird. It's free, and the alternative is that you get literally nothing so you're not losing anything by having it even if you choose not to use it.

On the topic of the bastard sword, though... game options exist to be game options. That's why we can't have a weapon have every possible trait that makes real-world sense for it; we'd end up with some weapons being hands down better than the rest. That makes for bad game-play even though it is mirroring the real world.

So we have to have the bastard sword have some disadvantages relative to both the longsword and greatsword to balance its advantage of being able to perform in a similar role to both while being just the one weapon. So it's more expensive but lacks the versatile trait and is only a single bulk where carrying a longsword and a greatsword would be 3.

Which, incidentally, is the smallest possible downside to give it since most of the time that slashing damage is undesirable so is piercing and slashing is more frequently able to trigger weaknesses so it's the better damage type of the two for the weapon to keep.

Thus it seems that both complaints are without actual point behind them and are just some kind of misguided "I should actually have even more cool stuff than I already do... but because realism, not because I'm asking for unfair amounts of cool stuff."

Again, happy to run it as intended, just find the insistence that it couldn't sensibly be read any other way is bizarre.

The text in PF2 being read to mean using the duration rules isn't sensible though.

Someone could have learned how to handle breath weapons back when the wording was "Once a dragon breathes, it can’t breathe again until 1d4 rounds later." or "A dragon can use its breath weapon once every 1d4 rounds" and it would be sensible for them to have not realized the change in wording so they were still working off the old actually reasonable to think means a 1 means next round (even though I always believed the intention was to skip at least 1 round because breath weapons do really high damage and having back to back breath is too much of a death sentence*).

But having that be the case and then also claiming the current wording isn't clearly a whole other thing? That's not sensible. That's putting the explanation for the situation on the wrong thing. With a side helping of being unreasonable if the conclusion is to continue on as you have been doing even after realizing that the text says otherwise and not in the "I've decided to house-rule that" fashion but the "this is what the book says to do" fashion.

*I should note that my opinion on breath weapons is colored heavily by having personally come in to using dragons via the old boxed set rules where they did damage equal to the hit points of the dragon so you could easily end up with a "save vs. breath; you passed!; you also died." situation so I've always been in a prepared to ignore "official" to instead insert "good" ruling.

The general case is that deities grant 3 spells of assorted ranks (almost always a 1st-rank, then one of 2nd- through 4th-rank and the third being 5th-rank or higher) unless "god of magic" or the like is an accurate description and then they grant a spell of each rank 1st through 9th.

Edicts and anathema are generally around 3 of each.

Just teach wildsong as the last part of the initial teachings so that there's no way the rest of your order could see it as anything other than having taught wildsong to a novice druid and you're golden.

To put that in mechanical terms; they either learn wildsong as a result of taking the dedication feat, or you did it wrong.

That was preremaster. Now there's no more concentrate trait to Heal.

Yes, there is. That's why it says "(concentrate)" after both the 2- and 3-action icons in the description.

How does "If you are at least 11th level, you also become an expert in these weapons." appear not to include the advanced weapon?

That is just false. Read the whole paragraph in the box.

It isn't, and I did.

I've read the whole of both paragraphs in the box and there is no contradiction with what they say either internally within the box or externally with other text in the book.

Specifically the text is talking about how "Other conditions" which say "can't act" are "unlike" slowed and stunned in that they "don't change the number of actions you regain; they just prevent you from using them."

There is no contradiction in that.

Finoan wrote:

If you have the stunned condition of any value, then you can't act. And you only have the option of reducing the value at the start of your next turn.

That's not how I would read it. The "total" in "how many total actions you lose" means total. The count starts immediately. The first sentence is just a qualitative short summary of what stunned does in a vernacular sense; it is a lead-in sentence to the rest of the paragraph. So to take your example, you take an action, get hit with a reaction during your turn, and gain stunned 2. The 2 means 2. It doesn't mean your remaining 2 this round and then 2 more next round.

The game is explicit that you only lose actions at the time you would regain them.

It uses the language "In brief, these conditions alter how many actions you regain at the start of your turn; thus, gaining the condition in the middle of your turn doesn’t adjust your number of actions on that turn." specifying that you do not lose actions mid-turn - and that stays true even if you were prefer that you did lose actions mid-turn because the alternative, thanks to you not being able to act, is to retain some actions that you can't use (or are heavily limited in how you can use them if you get paralyzed mid-turn rather than stunned).

The stunned action is further clear when it says not just the "fluff" bit about total actions, but also the explicit bit of "Each time you regain actions, reduce the number you regain by your stunned value, then reduce your stunned value by the number of actions you lost." where it also says not in the middle of your turn but when you regain actions is when you drop the number stated and reduce your stunned value.

Yes, it can be argued that it is obnoxious to have a distinction between actions you have but cannot use and actions you no longer have. But it cannot be said that the game is not clear and consistent (after the errata removing the relevant erroneous bit) about that in fact being a difference.

You've trimmed the text to make it seem far less clear than it is and invent a contradiction that does not exist.

The full sentence in the upper left is "Unlike slowed or stunned, these don't change the number of actions you regain; they just prevent you from using them."

It is referring to petrified and paralyzed which only have the "can't act" statement and don't reduce your regained number of actions.

Stunned happens to do both the "can't act" part and the "change the number of actions you regain" part, but nothing anywhere else says that it doesn't so there's no contradiction. In fact, the new wording provides clarity as to what happens if you get a "can't act" while you're already on your turn.

Even the errata you're mentioning is saying that text on page 462 of the core rule-book that read "When you can't act, you don't regain your actions and reaction on your turn." is what is being removed because it's wrong and the text on page 622 (which is incidentally the text now found on the upper left of page 446 of Player Core) is correct.

The issue the errata is fixing is that not only was there a contradiction, but the erroneous text made it so that while Paralyzed says you can use mental actions that's actually impossible because you didn't regain your actions on your turn because you can't act if you followed it.

The implication that "this would spoil the game" is not "constructive" feedback when someone asks how a house-rule would affect the game is nonsense.

"just don't play with it" isn't at all relevant because the thread isn't about the OP convincing others to adopt this house-rule. It's about analysis of the impact of the house-rule so the OP can decide whether they actually want to use it or not.

If "this rule should probably be avoided" were actually non-useful feedback to the OP that would indicate that the OP shouldn't have bothered posting in the first place because using the rule is a fore-gone conclusion, not a discussion, so they can "just play with it" like is being suggested should stop anyone else at "just don't play with it."

The whole act of trying to police "constructive things to say" is just a thinly veiled attempt at making it so that the house-rule forum is a back patting circle where every suggested rule gets treated as an inherently good idea.

So even though PF2e encounters are balanced around the party going in with full resources, rest casting still falls under "too good to be true?"

There are two kinds of "balanced around"; The "balance is achieved only by doing this" which PF2 doesn't utilize, and the "doing this will not impact the balance in an unpredictable way" which is how PF2 is set up.

Going into an encounter with all your resources isn't the only scenario the game works in, it just also isn't going to make GMs go "I guess I'm supposed to actually prevent that from happening if I want a balanced experience".

But getting the benefits of spells that cost slots without having paid that cost in a practical sense? That's no kind of balanced. That's free stuff, extra bonuses, having your cake and eating it too, and then pretending that "actually, I paid for it earlier, retroactively" makes any sense because no one is actually pre-spending a slot so they can't use it should anything else come up to get the benefit, they are keeping that slot on hand ready for any use that comes up and then when one doesn't are trying to get an effective do-over on having chosen "I'll save that in case I need it more later"

How does Hustle add tension?

It is technically a choice between travel speed and ability to notice hazards, besides the other ways already addressed by another poster.

If you have somewhere you are going and there aren't enough obstacles or other involved parties for it to make sense as a chase, it can still be a situation of choosing between going slow enough that someone can be Searching and be checking for hazards along the way, and going full speed.

Even without actually encountering a hazard, the reality that you could have makes the choice one not made lightly.

The same concept can be applied to other exploration activities, though their benefits are often of smaller impact than whether or not a hazard was notice before it affected someone.

So the tension is basically coming from the choice of risk; do you risk something along the way in order to arrive as soon as possible, or do you risk that conditions at the destination worsen in order to make your trip less dangerous?

It is a trap. It's supposedly be wildly dangerous. That's the fun of it.

No other trap is as complicated to deal with. Arguing for "wildly dangerous" when nothing else is even comparable comes off as a "who cares if the game is balanced or not"

If you players hate it, don't use it.

Also known as inflicting predictable and avoidable bad experiences upon your players just to check that yes, it did in fact produce a bad experience.

If you think your players will have fun with it, then make it fun.

There's the "get good" mentality. "Make it fun" as if that wasn't the responsibility of the writer of the hazard, too.

You'll remember the experience.

Memorable does not mean enjoyable.

With a few decades of memorable experiences already in the "remember how much it sucked when..." and "remember that stupid rule that..." category, I see absolutely no reason to leave this kind of tripping hazard laying out for people that haven't already had a bad experience with it just because of some nostalgia-blurred memory of some other time (likely with some other rules) when, best case, fun was had despite the bad mechanics.

This hazard is the kind of thing that if it weren't in the book and someone rolled up to the board with a post about their cool new home-brew they'd be told to tone it way down because it's out of line. Literally the only reason behind any defense of it I can see is "but it's from back in the day" as if having been thought up a long time ago means it is inherently good.

To me it reads as though the intention were a hard limit on doing the activity that would have to be reset by some period of rest, rather than a thing which you could elect to keep doing but would have a penalty for choosing to do so.

Of course said period of not hustling to reset your ability to hustle is unmentioned. I'd guess it'd be an until your next daily preparations kind of thing, though.

I think it's best to play PF2 with an approach of "if you think you found a loop hole, no you didn't." Which is my own summation of the guidance provided in the game convention sidebar about ambiguous rules that seem overly beneficial.

So basically as soon as a player starts to think in terms of "am I technically allowed to use a spell slot I didn't use before choosing to rest to benefit me after the rest is finished and I've replenished my spell slots?" I'm saying "stop doing that and play the game in good faith."

It's the same reason I insist that rest casting in 5e is not actually a thing people should allow because the argument for it is "well I had the spell slot left over, so why can't I benefit from using it? It's like I'm losing the slot otherwise" is assuming that we're not actually starting with the character having rest cast on the day the campaign started and every day since, effectively having gained a free benefit, or even just dove in to what is effectively "we had a day of downtime, so now I've got benefits of spells I cast and all my spell slots."

Why would it be all at once at level 16?

It wouldn't was the point I was making.

Like, oh hey, I want to do more damage so I buy a flaming rune.

So then you have a flaming rune and no handwraps to put it on, because earlier your choice for spending your money was an item with an immediate benefit you were going to make regular use of, not an item with the future benefit of letting you etch a flaming rune on it that you were going to use sporadically at best until then.

My point was that because it's not typically an all at once choice, the character has likely made other choices, especially give than they were more directly beneficial at the time the choices were made.

Saving your money and going without items or buying items explicitly based on a plan that comes online much later is just not, in my experience, as likely as picking stuff that is useful and affordable now.

thenobledrake seemed to be implying that you can't buy items whenever you want.

No, I'm not. Not even a little bit.

Of course, there is a bit of a caveat there because I mentioned that you might not find exactly what you're looking for just sitting on a shelf. The rules lay out when and where you could find something, though... it's just not anything in any major city with just the 1 day spent looking. Settlement level factors, as does the intuitive logic that even if all the parts you're looking at for a multi-part item are common and within the bounds of what the settlement can get that does not mean that your desired combination is pre-assembled and waiting so you may have to put extra time and potentially money into getting it put together.

Which is totally fair, but I'm not sure why it doesn't equally apply to fighters as druids.

Paul nailed it; it's about priorities.

There are choices being made, priorities differing, and more to the game than just damage, such that while a fighter likely has their main weapon kitted out as a high priority (though even then potentially not with energy damage runes), a druid - even a battle form focused on - likely has other priorities, especially since there are entire categories of item that a fighter can't use but a druid can (since, in my experience at least, players tend to lean into whatever is actually unique to their current build of character).

My entire point this whole time has been that I viewed property runes that add damage to an attack as a thing people are often going to not have because when presented with the choice of "do you want this, or do you want that?" the choices they make will lead to results other than doing a small amount more damage.

Sort of disagree on 'hardly changing the numbers', we're talking about maybe 20% more damage in certain cases. Three damage dealing property runes is comparable to the difference between a non-giant barbarian raging or not. That's definitely pretty meaningful.

I think of it as hardly changing the numbers because to get to the point where the difference is as impactful as a basic damage boosting feature you have to crank it all the way to maximum.

You're talking about a character that ostensibly doesn't use weapons having invested as much into a weapon as a character for whom a weapon is their most important tool, just so they can apply a few extra d6 of damage at the level of game when the spell portion of your damage is something like 2d12+20 and resistances are common enough that you'd need greater property runes to have those dice still matter and you're then talking about whether you spent that 28,435 gp on a potential damage boost from 33 average to 43.5 average or you spent it on a whole array of other things (since that's an apex item level of investment).

And skipping past the actual play experience where the player is going up just a level at a time, finding just an item at a time, budgeting their wealth into what is most useful at the moment... so will likely just not start putting money into handwraps and property runes that will eventually be ever so slightly more than just a drop in a bucket.

Potency runes figure into the "your own attack bonus" part, but property runes are something I don't think are intended to be applied to battle forms just like they aren't actually an assumed (meaning mandatory to not feel below benchmark) part of a martial character's kit.

It'd be great to have Paizo clarify if property runes were constant effects... but it's also one of those things where whether you allow them or not you're hardly changing the numbers enough for it to cause an issue so it's fine to let it be a point of table variance even though it's mildly annoying.

I love the state of healing in Pathfinder 2e.

A multitude of viable options to get the healing done, both in and out of combat, means less forcing a party to include a particular build. Depth of investment to be useful is also smaller so a party that are all "off-healers" is viable.

The potency of healing is high enough that it actually feels like a big hit can be off-set, where many older games even the biggest heal available would often feel like trying to hold back a flood with a wooden spoon.

The way that the dying rules work actually makes the best course of action to be proactive about healing to try and stop anyone from reaching zero hit points, so there's no benefit to letting someone get downed and miss a turn just so you're not "wasting healing".

And the most important for me; HP attrition as the presumed balance mechanism is gone so there is no longer a necessity to trying to stop the players who are going to do anything and everything within their power to heal up between fights from being able to do so, which results in a lot less of the game-play being the GM throwing obstacles in the way of the players just trying to feel confident that they can press on without losing a character. No extra force of time-based narrative to prevent heading back to town, no "random" encounter to interrupt a rest taken "too early", no keeping the shops void of the items they want to buy to refill their HP on the cheap, no forcing a time-scale that prevents crafting said items, and also a lot less needing to hand out exactly those kind of things at just the right moments to facilitate the party actually making it through the gauntlet they finally broke down and decided to push on through since the GM took away the rest of their options. So all those things that used to be mandatory just to have game balance can now take their rightful place as narrative elements that only show up when relevant to the narrative.

There were no changes to Player Core that made this detail more obscure than it was in the Core Rule-book.

Both have identical glossary entries except for page reference numbers.

Page 11 of Player Core and page 13 of Core Rule-book have the same text as far as proficiency is concerned, the only difference being Player Core actually further emphasizes the Key Terms section the text is found in by making a two-page highlighted spread out of what was just plain text in the Core Rule-book.

Page 400 of Player Core and page 444 of Core Rule-book likewise share identical text on the topic of proficiency, and identical charts that lay out the proficiency bonus math in a different style.

So the whole "not easy to notice" and "should have mentioned it more than one place" claims are without any base to them.

There are enough mistakes and choices to potentially disagree with in the books already; you don't need to make up new ones.

Yeah... I feel like as soon as someone says "No one takes [insert option Paizo stuck in the book] at all" we can just ignore whatever point they are trying to make.

Because that's not an argument that knock, or whatever other option, isn't doing what it is meant to do well enough for people that want an option within that aspect of game-play to feel like it is a valid option. It's an argument that, somehow, despite differing from what Paizo appears to be providing options for, the person making the statement knows with absolute certainty how everyone is playing the game and it's exactly like they personally play it.

Zero self-awareness to even entertain the idea that maybe it's one's own narrow view of the game that is flawed, not the options that Paizo thinks are fine and other groups out there are using and feel are actually great.

I too have seen knock at the table.

I also played, and thrived as, a wild shape focused druid and literally the only reason i backed off of battle form being my go-to combat method was because free archetype giving fighter and mauler feats and a massive hammer and that eventually eclipsed what I could do with wild shape (except for when I got blinded so I turned into a bat to get around the debuff)

Pyschic has a dedicated telekinetic option, yes... but within the kineticist class (which didn't get called "elementalist" since that's already used for an archetype, by the way - and also has no more direct relationship to "psychic power" than "school of mentalism" does) there is an option that can very easily be flavored as telekinetic;

aerokinesis.

You can be doing stuff like floating yourself around the battlefield while slashing enemies with near-invisible blades that (if you're high enough level) push them around on critical hits.

So in other words the benefits of int are things many of these tables don't value because they don't make situations in their campaigns that require int to succeed or at least get more desirable outcomes?

This sounds like you're saying I'm saying "int isn't bad if you go out of your way to fix it", but what I've actually said is "int isn't bad if you don't go out of your way to undercut its effectiveness."

Despite all the problems people post about Int, am i the only one getting the impression a lot of people in these forums do not want to see any kind of official change to it?

So many of the problems people post about intelligence as an attribute are things that they are exaggerating with their particular campaign choices.

To elaborate: Language. The game presents this as a thing which matters by giving each ancestry a particular list to select from, then having a number of actions rely on understanding the language you're using or else they are impossible or penalized. Yet at many tables anything that understands a language will happen to also understand common, even if that's the GM going "oh, well the party needs to be able to communicate so I'll give this common."

Meanwhile at my table not having a shared language is a time for Sense Motive to help get the general feeling and options that aid in understanding language to shine.

Then there's the topic of skill proficiency. Many tables will operate in a way that any 1 party member being good at a skill covers every possible need of that skill for the party even if they aren't an expert so Follow the Expert is off the table. The GM facilitates that style of play by not introducing any situations in which redundancy is useful (like something as simple as the party needing to convince two separate NPCs of something at roughly the same time in different locations so two characters being trained in Diplomacy is useful), and the players likely don't even think about situations like the whole party is talking but it's just one character rolling Diplomacy because they're the one that's great at it.

Meanwhile at my table there's been quite a few times that multiple party members needed to roll the same skill but none of them were an expert or better so it was either be trained in it or have terrible odds.

So Int doesn't need any changes. People that think it's a low-impact attribute just need to realize their "strength is useless... why yes, I do handwave encumbrance, what's that got to do with anything?"-esque behaviors about the things which intelligence is used for.

Reminded that in another tabletop I play (Lancer), the equivalent of RK on a creature just gives your their entire statblock for free with no check and it's still considered a mediocre use of actions and only used by people who tend to specialize in that kind of thing.

Obviously that's another extreme but I feel like in general this trend toward making it difficult for even RK specialists to get useful information is clearly not helpful or necessary.

I think a long history tied to the GM-as-antagonist style of play that Gary Gygax seemed prone to has got a fair number of people stuck on "you can't just let the player's know things, then they will know things" instead of thinking about what impact on game-play said knowledge actually has since you can't exploit knowledge without actually having some in-character means of exploiting it.

For example, I see a jungle drake coming to attack my party in a session the other day. I as a player recognize this creature and I know everything there is to know about it. I say "Ah, this is going to be a tough one" to my fellow players... and that's it. Nothing else about the encounter changed. We still provoked its reaction because not flanking it wouldn't actually make the encounter easier even though it would include not provoking that reaction. We didn't suddenly have poison resistance ready to go. We didn't suddenly have some means to make ourselves harder to keep hold of in case it got grabby. We just fought the creature, but we knew what we knew stuff.

Not sure where you're getting that rogues fail fort often seeing as they're opening with 16 con.

"Trained in Fortitude saves" is a 1st-level rogue class feature. "Has 16 con" isn't; and not just because the remaster has changed the phrasing of that to "Has +3 con".

Again, no... the words I meant were the ones I said.

Understand them without changing them or accept that you lack understanding.

So you're disagreeing with Squiggit, then, just to be clear?

Per his post:

"There's no such thing as 'separate type of Drained' you either have the condition or not, and neither the Bodak nor the Warsworn have any kind of 'container' effect that would independently maintain drained."

No.

Drained is drained, just as Squiggit said.

What I am saying is that the stacking feature of the ability the bodak uses is not keying off of "if you're already drained", it's keying off of "if you've already been affected by this ability."

When kineticist released I was playing a medium armor wearing frontline wizard using a bunch of gouging claw and shocking grasp casting, and the telekinesis themed psychic.

I immediately switched the wizard to a metal kineticist (same character, new mechanics, yet same overall play-style of getting into melee range, raising a shield, and doing slashing or electrical damage). The character has been great, and I've recently leveled up and expanded into fire to combo with the flames oracle in the party but we've been underwater since leveling up so that hasn't really panned out just yet.

I initially thought I'd stay with the psychic, but after a few weeks I got an itch to see what an air kineticist could do because it seemed like a similar play-style to how I was trying to telekinetically slash enemies to pieces was possible, because I wasn't really liking the inconsistent performance of the unleash psyche cycle while trying to be "the dps". Using weapon infusion to tweak my blasts for the best damage potential on any given turn (such as going backswing then agile in melee, or using thrown or propulsive to boost ranged damage when not in melee range) has been great, and the action condensing of the air impulse junction letting me get some movement with each 2-ation impulse is a nice cherry on top.

It has easily jumped up the rankings to be competitive with my prior two favorite classes (fighter and wizard) so there's no longer a massive gulf between my top two slots and the rest of the classes.

So you're saying that if the Warsworn applies Drained 2 first and then the Bodak increased Drained twice, the result is Drained 4 on the PC (because you either have the condition or you don't and thus the Bodak increases the existing Drained)?

The Bodak's drain says "multiple exposures to this ability..." so it doesn't increase drain on the first exposure if there's already drained from some other source.

So drained 2 from a warsworn plus 2 uses of the draining thing from a bodak would add up to drained 3.

It's not a loophole it's the natural reading of the text present, and yeah "impossible to heal at the levels that you are likely to be fighting a clay golem" that is the legacy.

The loophole is what someone else said about it elsewhere today; it only says you have to succeed at a counter act check, not that you need to successfully counteract the curse, so passing the DC lets a heal go through even though it didn't get rid of the curse entirely.

It's 5 feet, primarily because there is no "standard reach" for a size of creature in PF2. Even where the game lays out size categories and the idea of increased reach it mentions you're not guaranteed longer reach with larger size.

Reach, when not 5 feet, is meant to be specified. That's just how the game is actually set up.

Not necessarily... but these things being absent from Player Core 1 doesn't mean we won't see some kind of archetype covering the same territory in a superior fashion, nor that these things being legacy content (if that does indeed end up being what they are) prevents their use.

The double wall in Example B is explicitly allowed, per SuperBidi's rules quote above.

No, it's not.

The rules say the wall exists on the grid lines and no where else, thus it's own space would have to be where the second layer on the same side of a grid square would be trying to be, because "just slightly north of the border between spaces" (read: the grid lines) and "on the border" are not the same thing.

That's also a good reason for allowing the meeting at corners. Doubling back and being adjacent would be impossible otherwise.

No, it would just mean that doubling back and being adjacent is a phrasing referring to the configuration in example C.

And this is clear because any line of reasoning that suggests you can put 2 layers of the wall on the same side of a single square also suggests the entire length of the wall can be "doubled back and adjacent" such that all 24 5-fot long segments are on the same side of a single square.

The other issue is that these new schools are still beholden to the spells that existed before the ORC/OGL split so when they're smaller schools with the same spells we had access before, but in smaller numbers, it's really hard to see the change as anything but a downgrade.

For me, at least, the old schools were incredibly non-equal in how much it felt like I could benefit from having picked a particular school.

That led to, for example, my playing my blaster wizard with the conjuration school despite that I was actually going to focus on evocation because letting one focus spell be something I'd mostly ignore and having the other be extremely helpful for positioning (setting up for cones or getting away from the front lines) instead of magic missile jr. (a good spell too, but not as good as a thing I couldn't already do plenty of) and the one that only really works well if I planned on hanging out near enemies (which I didn't), while also being able to prep mud pit and obscuring mist instead of blasty spells I was no longer actually going to cast... but if I made that character today with the remaster, I'd be happy to be school of battle magic.

It's not a universal thing, but there are probably more than just that one character for whom people with the old schools were looking at numerically longer lists of spells to figure out what to have in their bonus slot but that just meaning taking longer to reach the conclusion they don't really want to use any of them - while the new schools have a much shorter list, but each has at least something that is actually worth spending the time to cast at every rank (though battle magic rank 1 is just hanging on to a force barrage in case an enemy is definitely almost dead so you can do a small but guaranteed to happen bit of damage, so it's debatably not hitting the mark)

And with focus spell improvements (like how battle magic gets "the good one" from both evocation and abjuration) it's actually easy for me to imagine a lot of characters that have been wizards pre-remaster would be better off post-remaster despite the "downgrade".

Note that it is entirely likely that Paizo introduced an option to swap items as a single action in Remaster so that important player character items don't have to be dropped as often and risk getting destroyed by area effects and the like.

AFter they used an errata pass to point out that the problem with an effect targeting both creatures and objects is that anything that does enough damage to threaten a higher-level character is almost assured to destroy most objects and then removed said targeting of objects with those kinds of abilities because, to make an example, throwing a fireball isn't supposed to make the GM stop and check if the room this has occurred in has been destroyed and whether the nearby treasure that was planned to be given to the party upon their victory is actually useless scrap and slag now... I think it's very unlikely that object destruction has anything to do with the reasoning for Swap.

I think it's more likely that the motivation behind Swap is that players were already willing to drop their objects because action economy makes it worth it, and GMs are generally already not having anything bad happen to objects on the ground because it's not perceived as adding to the game-play, so there's no strong reason to not have Swap instead of Drop + Draw.

But there is the strong upside of things being easier to track since now you don't have to mark where an item got dropped just in case someone does pick it up during the battle, and of not having any room for a GM to try and hardline the "but you didn't say you picked it up after the battle, so you didn't" line of reasoning even though part of why the player didn't specifically say that is likely to have been not interrupting all the other after-battle talk like looting, healing, refocusing, and plot development so saying the item is now lost is just bumming a player out for being involved enough in the game to get distracted and polite enough not to now derail the game play on purpose to go back to the site of the battle and get their item instead of doing whatever is meant to be going on now.

Not only do you not have to roll Recall Knowledge when you already remember the details, you don't have to roll if you don't because I'm going to tell your that your character remembers because I'm re-using creatures on purpose they are supposed to be familiar.

You also will not have to roll to remember other details of the campaign or have your own memory bleed into the game in a negative way because "roll to remember the point" is not fun game-play.

It's funny how this works... someone starts wondering why things aren't the same after one thing comes along that is different and they notice, but it's somehow not "can someone explain to me why it's fair for Inventor to automatically improve crafting?" to actually make the thing that is sticking out as unique make sense, it's "how come I don't get that?"

The basic answer is that fair and equal aren't always the same thing, and that not all classes - and not even just the few you bring up by name - need to have what inventor gets in order for them to be fair options because they get their own stuff.

Classes are different where possible because those differences create a feeling that each is a choice that it matters to make. If you're talking about automatic skill progression in whichever skill is automatically proficient and the reason you bring it up is because some other class gets it, you might as well be arguing that all classes should get 12 hit points per level (not as a slippery slope, but because that's something that is equally 'mysterious' as to why it's not a more wide-spread feature when it would clearly be helpful so its an analog that highlights the flaw in reason behind asking the question "how come I don't get that?").

It's RAW in both premaster and remaster

No it's not, it's bad advice.

If it were RAW it would be listed as part of the skill action just like how the not being able to retry immediately clauses of Learn a Spell and Identify Magic are part of the failure entries, instead of being off in some other section of the rules that a player probably didn't read when looking up how the action works.

And even if we were going to treat it as being rules, rather than poorly thought out advice, it triggers the ambiguous rules guidance because the rule appears to not function as intended if you're both supposed to have no clue you got a critical failure and believe that you succeeded and got real information yet you mysteriously can't try again - or more realistically the GM being saddled with not just having to make up believable false info on the spot but now also has to convincingly lie about future check results as you apparently are supposed to be spending actions to recall more information even though it's supposedly impossible.

Players effectively pick how they are rolling initiative by choosing how they are approaching a situation... but the end result is mostly rolling Perception for initiative because it's easier to just let that be the case than to try and manage to get a skill you have a higher modifier for to make sense.

Stealth is pretty easy because boosting Dex and avoiding notice are easy and very fruitful besides using for initiative, but managing something like reliably leveraging athletics requires some seriously good explanation or very repetitive circumstances.

While it's true that RoE is new, it's a little unfortunate RoE created a staff of metal but not a staff of wood.

Potentially because the verdant staff in the core rulebook is going to be the equivalent of a "staff of wood" in the remaster book.