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Mark Seifter's mentioned that they've determined that Feats to Buy 'Extra X' where X is better than a Feat are probably a bad idea.
So my guess is that they'll either be weakened (see: Extra Kineticist Talent) or nonexistent in the future.
So...no, I expect that's intentional. And makes the tradeoffs the spellcasting archetypes make actually meaningful.
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Mark Seifter's mentioned that they've determined that Feats to Buy 'Extra X' where X is better than a Feat are probably a bad idea.
So my guess is that they'll either be weakened (see: Extra Kineticist Talent) or nonexistent in the future.
So...no, I expect that's intentional. And makes the tradeoffs the spellcasting archetypes make actually meaningful.
Yes, that's what they said but it's seriously disingenuous. This year they printed a feat called extra ninja trick. This was months after they said that extra feats where horribly overpowered and where a huge mistake that never should have happened...
So which is it? They forgot what they said when they printed blood of shadows or do they really not think the extra feats where a mistake? Either way I see no reason to exclude only the vigilante when new extra feats are still being made.
To be fair, for some weird reason apparently the people who make Player Companion and the people who make the ... other type of books don't always seem to interact or be on the same page. It's one of the reasons why they don't do PPC errata (which is great because you have books from 2011 full of errors that no one wants to fix).
So Extra Ninja Trick appearing in a PPC book when a 'main line' dev says that Extra X feats are bad isn't entirely beyond the pale.
To add to that, a lack of Extra Vigilante Talent is probably there because most of the archetypes trade out talents for their class features and if they could turn around and pick up more talents with feats that
might actually make them decentallow players to overcome the archetype's tradeoffs in a way the devs didn't intend.
"Lead Designer • Jason Bulmahn". Jason gives final approval for all pathfinder material, so it's being a Player Companion is completely meaningless. Even if we assume he takes less time looking over them, after the big deal raised about extra feats just months before I find it hard to fathom that even brief skim wouldn't notice another feat that started with "extra".
On the second part, if they thought that an extra feat was too powerful for the Vigilante that would have been one thing. That, however, isn't how it was put. It was said that ALL extra feats where a mistake. IMO if they'd said they thought an extra feat was too much JUST for the Vigilante it might have gone over better in the playtest.
They said in the Playtest that Extra Talent was too powerful because their talents are strongest than feats.
They were laughed at because at the time of playtest the class sucked.
So even though they improved the class; they didn't add the feat I guess.
I absolutely would pick up Extra Vigilante Talent feat several times if I could.
A feat to pick up 2-3 feats as one levels up? Sign me up!
A feat to get +10 to base speed that becomes +20 at level 10? That's a gazillion times better than Fleet!
A feat to get renown is great for anyone that makes a sociable character. Get another feat for celebrity perks/discount? NPCs are literally giving you things with a class feature! Love it!
A feat to get low-light vision and darkvision? I'd be crazy not to pick that up.
A feat that grants Vital Strike and makes it useful on AoO's? Finally a decent use for Vital Strike!
Once I get Power Attack with an avenger, I'd probably commit most of my feats to Extra Vigilante Talent because the talents are way stronger than any feat with low amount of prereqs have any precedent/right to be. Would I have to give up a lot of other character ideas for it? Yea, but such a feat is stronger than all the other feats. It's like picking Iron Will or another feat that grants +5 to Will Saving Throws.
If such a feat ever exists, and I hope it doesn't, I'd hope it require at least 5 levels Vigilante or something because even the talents that don't have a minimum vigilante level or non-vigilante levels not counting for the advanced versions are still pretty strong and would make simply dipping 2-3 vigilante levels rather tempting.
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Just because something is balanced for one class doesn't make it balanced for another class.
Vigilante talents are strong. REALLY strong. The weakest ones let you pick rogue talents / bonus combat feats. THE WEAKEST ONES. Most have benefits that are worth two or even three feats. Shadow's speed is worth FOUR feats.
Ninja tricks are not that powerful. They are worth a feat. Maybe. And they tend to interlock more, such as needing two tricks for invisibile blade, and that is even limited by a shared resource. Vigilante talents have NO shared resource, and few have daily limits.
In short, vigilante talents don't have an Extra Talent feat because if they did, the benefit of each talent would have to be severely lessened.
Protoman: A trait can get you low light. For darkvision, there's a extra revelation/wild talent/rage power/Mesmerist trick/Ninja Tricks for that. +10 to base speed and extra's as you level. There's a extra revelations for that. "A feat to pick up 2-3 feats as one levels up": There's also a extra revelations for that. From what I've heard, there is nothing in the new material that would out power what you can already get with an extra feat.
Alexander Augunas: Again, if that was what they had said that would be one thing. The statement was that extra feats in general where a mistake they didn't plan on repeating. And THAT resolve lasted a few months it seemed.
As to OMG Vigilante are REALLY strong!!!: Stronger than oracle revelations that are currently available for extra feats? I don't have the book yet but the talents would have to have had a 1000% increase in power to out power abilities that you can currently pick up with extra feats.
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I really hope PF doesn't move away from Extra X feats, because actual feats are painfully bad and make my soul ache each time I have to take one, outside of a tiny handful of exceptions (hi Spell Perfection!). That being said, I don't like Extra X feats for every single type of class feature. Like I get why Extra Smite Evil or Extra Favored Enemy aren't a thing, nor should they be. I haven't read the Vigilante yet, so I am agnostic as to whether its talents fall within that range or not.
Protoman: A trait can get you low light. For darkvision, there's a extra revelation/wild talent/rage power/Mesmerist trick/Ninja Tricks for that. +10 to base speed and extra's as you level. There's a extra revelations for that. "A feat to pick up 2-3 feats as one levels up": There's also a extra revelations for that. From what I've heard, there is nothing in the new material that would out power what you can already get with an extra feat.
Alexander Augunas: Again, if that was what they had said that would be one thing. The statement was that extra feats in general where a mistake they didn't plan on repeating. And THAT resolve lasted a few months it seemed.
As to OMG Vigilante are REALLY strong!!!: Stronger than oracle revelations that are currently available for extra feats? I don't have the book yet but the talents would have to have had a 1000% increase in power to out power abilities that you can currently pick up with extra feats.
Extra revelations aren't exactly the best example as one's limited to one mystery's list of choices of revelation and going through each mystery list of ~10 revelations, one's only really gonna pick up Extra Revelation a couple of times each as the good ones would get picked up early with the feat and regular oracle advancement and the rest not-so-good-ones would be picked up later automatically. Otherwise, yea that's a perfect example of Extra [Class Feature] being too strong. The vigilante has several more talents, especially if counting the social talents, that the vigilante would pick up with a feat given the chance and be nothing but better off for it and still have plenty of talents to look forward to at higher levels.
Extra wild talent/rage power/Mesmerist trick/Ninja Tricks: All of them have conditions set (well Ninja Tricks is mostly conditional). Highest level talent Extra wild talent grants is -2 spell levels lower than highest spell level a kineticist can use which there is ENDLESS complaints about every month once some new kineticist player decides to build a kineticist; rage powers only work while raging; Extra Mesmerist Tricks just grants extra uses per day, not number of tricks known, and even the actual use of mesmerist tricks is the biggest example of "conditional"; most ninja tricks cost ki points to activate. The vigilante talents are pretty much always active except for the once per day ones; the only actual conditional ones are the ones that involve hidden strike damage, but that's like saying rogue talents that involve sneak attack or alchemist discoveries involving bombs are conditional.
Traits are limited to 2 or 4 with Additional Resources. A feat can be picked whenenver and however often it allows. Bloodline of Dragons to get low-light vision is a good pick, but a plenty of folks playing races with limited vision options would consider love to spend a feat to get low-light and darkvision when playing a stealthy character.
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Alexander Augunas: Again, if that was what they had said that would be one thing. The statement was that extra feats in general where a mistake they didn't plan on repeating. And THAT resolve lasted a few months it seemed.
That's not what was said. What was said was that they were a bad idea for things that were unambiguously better than Feats. Full stop. You can't blame Paizo for not sticking to things that were never said.
A decision was then apparently made (and Alexander Augunas would know, since I believe he wrote Extra Ninja Trick) that Ninja Tricks were worth equal to or less than a Feat, and thus an Extra feat was appropriate for them. That's a pretty defensible position, since none of them give you multiple Feats as one Trick (something several Vigilante Talents do).
As to OMG Vigilante are REALLY strong!!!: Stronger than oracle revelations that are currently available for extra feats? I don't have the book yet but the talents would have to have had a 1000% increase in power to out power abilities that you can currently pick up with extra feats.
This is true (though many Talents are actually as good as many Revelations). However, Extra Revelation is exactly the kind of Feat they think was a mistake. They can't get rid of it now, but they're trying not to repeat the mistake.
Are they right that it was a mistake? That's a matter of debate, but they have some justification for that point of view, and it's clearly informing their design philosophy going forward. And in a consistent fashion.
Mark Seifter's mentioned that they've determined that Feats to Buy 'Extra X' where X is better than a Feat are probably a bad idea.
Hmm, Extra X has limits:
* You gain some X the regular way. Assuming you pick the (subjectively) best X, the Extra X feat will only give you the second-best X.
* It doesn't bypass level requirements. While it allows you to collect X faster, you actually risk running out of interesting X because level isn't high enough yet. Ever scratched your head what rogue talent or hex to take at level 8? Extra X can make it worse.
When I look at builds here in the forum and at my own, often there are a few Extra X involved. And 'a few' seems perfect to me - the player uses the option to emphasize their class' powers but is still open to other options.
Even if Extra X would be slightly overpowered - since when do players want perfect balance? If you look closely what players choose, recommend and care about, it's often the slightly 'overpowered' options: Crossblooded sorcerer, divine grace, finesse training etc.. As a game designer you can easily be trapped in the thought 'balance is fun', but it's not completely true. And if your fear of imbalance becomes too strong, you end up with providing numerous uninteresting options and the according negative feedback - Inner Sea Races and many of its feats come to my mind...
To be specific, it wasn't just that they were overpowered. It's that Mark considers Extra X feats to be feat taxes. That's why Extra Wild Talent is so bad, to discourage players from taking it unless they absolutely have to.
And remember above all else, Vigilantes are a martial class. Which should basically explain every negative design decision with them.
They are not always feat taxes; rather, for a class whose features are far superior to feats, they necessarily are either feat taxes if you don't get enough of them and have to dip into Extra feats to get enough to make your character work (shorting you those feats), or you already had the right number of them (or more, I suppose) coming in from your class, in which case, they are putting you more and more above. In most cases, it's the latter situation. It would have been the former (a feat tax) for the playtest kineticist to keep the number of wild talents the same and elevate Extra Wild Talent as a patch, since it didn't have enough wild talents on its own. I'm always in favor of just giving you more class features for free if you didn't start out with enough.
That said, these two options are only necessarily the case for classes whose selectable class features are much better than feats, though this generally applies to many classes out there, notably not including chained rogue (much to the chained rogue's chagrin).
The non-existence of the extra feats also makes it more meaningful to design archetypes that remove them and opens up major design space in that regard.
To look at the idea of taxed and non-taxed versions in a slightly different context, suppose there was a class with 6+Int skill points that had a special feature that at every even level, you could give up 2 skill points at a single level to get a feat. Suppose that's it's main feature, so you kind of need to do that a bunch of times to make the class work out. Clearly it's worth 2 skill points to get a feat, but in that case, I'd rather just give you the right number of feats for free in the class and avoid the tax.
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You're right that there's a tricky balancing act between a character either needing to spend those feats to function or just having better feats than other classes, but I think there's a balance you can strike between them where a character has enough options to pick up the good abilities, but an Extra X talent might still be valuable for ancillary ones.
I also think that there's a lot of value to be had in how fun Extra X feats can be. There might be power issues, but I love taking Extra Rage Power on my barbarian, because it always opens up something new I can do or some interesting bonus I didn't have before. There's an excitement in what they do that can't be replicated by weapon focus or improved trip or spell focus and so on and that's definitely worth something.
The non-existence of the extra feats also makes it more meaningful to design archetypes that remove them and opens up major design space in that regard.This I assumed was a big part of the design too. Nearly every Vigilante archetype gives up a bunch of talents to power their abilities. So that makes sense.
But at the same time, when I was building a magical child, being limited to five talents over twenty levels felt very constraining.
So sort of going back to the first point, I think there's another issue there where I have to use my limited pool of talents to take exactly what I need to bump up my relevant abilities but don't have anything left over to explore any of the more situational options.
Excellent analysis! I think you're correct, and, in fact, sometimes it comes down to the pool of abilities itself, and whether it can grow. Let's take Extra Revelation as an example, especially since some of those revelations are among the most egregious things you can get with an Extra feat. A given oracle has access to only 10 revelations, ever, and about 2 of those usually require you to be a higher level to take them. Of the remaining 8, usually about 2-3 of them are really strong compared to a feat (either handing out multiple feats or giving an incredibly powerful class feature like casting stat to some major character ability or animal companion), and often at least 1-2 of them are not actually as useful as a feat. You will eventually get 6 of them from the class alone. No future books are going to add more options to that list, either. So Extra Revelation is actually less of a problem than some others other than for accelerating those 2-3 really strong options to get them all at level 1 with a human (or level 3 for anyone else) or for making the loss of revelations by level less meaningful for archetypes and thus meaning they get less than they would have.
This dynamic matches what you were saying pretty closely: There are enough revelations in the class's normal progression to get the main ones you need to make it work, and with a small tweak to prevent that sort of binge scenario, you actually really would just be picking up the more situational ones with Extra Revelation.
The problem is when you have an open talent list that's going to be expanded in later products, and that means even if you balance the class like you described for the first set of talents, the class is going to pick up more and more of those big splashy abilities (even assuming that every later book balanced the mix perfectly with the first book and never produced abilities that were a power increase, just made more at the same mix), until eventually, you can take Extra ever time you receive a feat slot and build something that is so far beyond what a character could have done in the first book, they just crush that character. And this is without introducing any power creep options that were on their own more powerful than the original options; it's merely a necessary result of having an Extra feat and then producing more options that match the initial spread's power level.
Extra X Feats don't have to nessicarily be the start a chain of a single feat though. I can see paying a feat tax (And maybe an ability score such as wis or skill ranks) to recieve an additional Vigilante talent. I know paying feat taxes suck, but as stated the abilities should be too powerful for easy access and as such I think expending more resources is a reasonable consideration.
Also, I find it funny we have not been discussing the possibility of Extra Social Talents! Granted, the Vigilante Talents are more exciting. But that's pretty much exactly why Extra Social Talent seems a much less daunting prospect. They are stronger than feats, for example, Social Grace is obviously above the curve for skill based feats and Mockingbird gives a number of at will SLA. However, skill based feats are rarely taken being regarded as subpar and Mockingbird isn't that extraordinary next to a lot of feats. Added with the level requirements on many Social Talents preventing just dipping for the feature and their general level of usefulness and I would expect that Extra Social Talent would only be moderately over a normal feat, if indeed all that much so.
For me, I think the sweet spot for Extra Social Talent would be something like Cha and a minor feat requirement after which you could take it multiple times.
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The "no extra X feats" policy wouldn't be so bad (and disingenuous) if the quality of feats were higher...
However, this is a game where 80% of feats are garbage that serve little or no purpose other than page filler... And for some reason, the designers always use the weakest ones as their baseline for "what a feat is worth".
A feat can also give you Craft Wondrous Items, Quicken Spell, Leadership or Dazing Assault... All of which are considerably stronger than most "collectable" class features... But designers still insist on comparing those class features to stuff like Dodge or Cleave.
Give us feats that are worth taking and don't lock them behind a wall of awful prerequisites... Then players will value their feats. For as long as feats are there just so Paizo can add "A 100 new feats!" to the backcover of their books, players will rightfully ignore most feats.
This is not just about power either... Feats tend to be underpowered and boring. Don't blame players for taking Extra Rage Power when the alternative is... Weapon Focus. Playing the "Game of Inches" is just not fun.
Just because something is balanced for one class doesn't make it balanced for another class.
Vigilante talents are strong. REALLY strong. The weakest ones let you pick rogue talents / bonus combat feats. THE WEAKEST ONES. Most have benefits that are worth two or even three feats. Shadow's speed is worth FOUR feats.
Ninja tricks are not that powerful. They are worth a feat. Maybe. And they tend to interlock more, such as needing two tricks for invisibile blade, and that is even limited by a shared resource. Vigilante talents have NO shared resource, and few have daily limits.
In short, vigilante talents don't have an Extra Talent feat because if they did, the benefit of each talent would have to be severely lessened.
No, the weakest ones are the brute talent that lets him wear size appropriate magic gear with penalties. Even if standard rules is things size up with you.
I could possibly see an "Extra Social Talent" feat being published. After all, a halfling vigilante gets additional social talents as an alternate favored class bonus (+1/6 per level). Keeping the standard "you cannot take a feat more than once" restriction (or possibly limiting the number of times it could be taken to vigilante levels; i.e., "You can take this feat once, plus a single additional time if you have 11+ vigilante levels.") could prevent most "power creep" issues.
The vigilante talents are much more problematical, as many of them flat out give multiple feats per talent. IMO, an "Extra Vigilante Talent" feat is pretty unbalanced; it might potentially be allowable with some hefty restrictions such as "can only be taken once" and "13+ vigilante levels," if some GMs want to allow it in home games. At that point, however, expect every vigilante to take it, because it is so much more powerful than any other feat they could choose.
They could go like the Extra Advanced Weapon Training, that can be taken only every 5 levels
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If you're using a fighting style that doesn't use many feats the extra x lines are great, fun ways to power up your character. Any class without spells loves the extra x feats (especially kinetisist) once they got all the feats for their combat style and have nothing cool to grab. If you're not going to make those anymore then please make sure that feats for mundane characters that give them cool stuff to do.
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What I'd like to see are feats that build on the the vigilante talents. Like a feat with signature weapon as a pre-req that provides a +1 bonus to attack like greater weapon focus for your signature weapon. Or a feat with vital punishment as a pre-req that allows you to use vital strike on an additional AoO a round. Or one with surprise strike where, when they gain a bonus to attack from surprise strike, you gain a bonus on damage equal to the attack bonus. Stuff like that.
What I'd like to see are feats that build on the the vigilante talents. Like a feat with signature weapon as a pre-req that provides a +1 bonus to attack like greater weapon focus for your signature weapon. Or a feat with vital punishment as a pre-req that allows you to use vital strike on an additional AoO a round. Or one with surprise strike where, when they gain a bonus to attack from surprise strike, you gain a bonus on damage equal to the attack bonus. Stuff like that.
Or just feats that combine well with vigilante talents, like the Piercing Grapple feat and the Living Shield talent. Stab them with a dagger as part of grabbing them, then use them to block attacks; if they pull away, do damage again plus 1d4 bleed.