Fighters are the source of like every problem in Pathfinder

[swoosh]

Take a class. Give it nothing to do but hit things, but put it in a combat focused game so everyone has to be good at hitting things. Make it your baseline martial class for balancing.

Bam. There's your C/MD.

Take a class. Make it 'simple, but modular'. Its main class feature is having tons of feats. But how are you going to justify giving someone that many feats when you realistically don't need that many different combat styles?

Bam. There are your feat trees and narrow feat focuses.

the list goes on.

Lots of new toys have come out for the fighters to make them more interesting and powerful, which definitely improves their playability.

But in this case many of the problems are fundamentally systemic to the game and instead adding these fighter specific toys exacerbates rather than solves problems. Things that shouldn't be gated are, all of the sake of making the class that is not a class look better.

[Joey Cote]

Play a fighter with a higher intel instead of huge strength. Now you have the skill points to do other things. Take the plus to skill point instead of whateverelse for favorite class. Use your regular feats to buy feats not associated with combat.

It perfectly possible to build a fighter that can do things other then combat, it just means you cannot also optimize them for combat. And so many people optimize for combat, because it tends to happen more then other actions, generally.

It would be nice if fighters could take a list of feats that bonused some skills instead of pure fighting feats as the extra fighter feats, but its not that big a deal.

Clerics, on the other hand, get completely shafted when it comes to skills and doing anything other then casting or bashing.

[Azten]

Ha. Okay, this made me laugh a little on the inside, especially the part where all the martial classes are balanced around the fighter, yet the paladin and barbarian are in the same book and loads better.

It's a class. It's a good class. It is not a spellcaster or skilled class. Leave it be.

[The Mortonator]

But... but... we already had the final Fighter thread! D:

Azten wrote:

It's a class. It's a good class. It is not a spellcaster or skilled class. Leave it be.

It's interesting to see this opinion. Not common on the boards.

Personally, I would say that the game's problems are probably the other way around. There are terrible feat trees and narrow feat focuses, and thus Fighter is held back.

[Saldiven]

I still don't understand why people have a problem with Feat Trees. Sure, some suck when a pre-requisite Feat is just crappy, like Combat Expertise, and there are some Feat Trees where the Feats are weirdly unrelated to each other. However, the concept of a Feat Tree is perfectly ok with me.

[GeneticDrift]

Bad feats are prerequisites. Bad spells are just ignored.

[Antimony]

This thread can only end in tragedy.

[captain yesterday]

I'm pretty sure I've seen this thread before. As in title and everything.

I'm like, a little disappointed.

[Green Smashomancer]

Saldiven wrote:

I still don't understand why people have a problem with Feat Trees. Sure, some suck when a pre-requisite Feat is just crappy, like Combat Expertise, and there are some Feat Trees where the Feats are weirdly unrelated to each other. However, the concept of a Feat Tree is perfectly ok with me.

I don't believe anyone has a problem with feat trees existing, but the fact that many of them are three weak feats, and then an okay feat, is what bothers me personally. Oh yeah Whirlwind Attack? You think you're an acceptable cost-benefit ratio? 5 feats for one attack on a group of enemies?

[The Mortonator]

Saldiven wrote:

I still don't understand why people have a problem with Feat Trees. Sure, some suck when a pre-requisite Feat is just crappy, like Combat Expertise, and there are some Feat Trees where the Feats are weirdly unrelated to each other. However, the concept of a Feat Tree is perfectly ok with me.

As a concept, they are great. You spend resources to gain a more powerful effect. In earlier 3.Xe this was generally planned around intentionally. But, there was a big gap between casters and martial and Pathfinder increased the power curve by a lot on featish things. As a result, feats that were once acceptable are now legacy hangovers that are too expensive.

[Pizza Lord]

GeneticDrift wrote:

Bad feats are prerequisites. Bad spells are just ignored.

Oh yes. You've given me such a wonderful idea for when the next world-changing comet passes... Spell trees.

"You want summon monster III? You don't have summon monster II."
You want fireball and lightning bolt? You need to have burning hands and shocking grasp respectively."
"Oh, you suddenly can't cast beast shape IV anymore because you trained away beast shape (thus also losing access to beast shape II and III) and then a comet came by and it doesn't work. That's rough!"

Might take a little wording to make sure it's fair and balanced gamewise and clear how it works amongst wizards and sorcerers and between clerics and magus. Also how it works with directly granted spells, like some domains or innate, specific spells a class gets. Good idea, GeneticDrift. Shackle those pesky casters with the Yoke of Tyranny 'Fairness'!

[swoosh]

Saldiven wrote:

I still don't understand why people have a problem with Feat Trees. Sure, some suck when a pre-requisite Feat is just crappy, like Combat Expertise, and there are some Feat Trees where the Feats are weirdly unrelated to each other. However, the concept of a Feat Tree is perfectly ok with me.

The concept of a feat tree is not inherently bad, I'll give you that.

Feat trees turn bad when they have useless pre-requisites or simply take an incredibly long time to fully come online.

Stuff that doesn't need to be complicated or overpowered either. Let's say... I want dex to damage with a one handed slashing weapon. Einhander style. Nothing special mechanically. Well, that comes online at level 5. Now if you want to be able to do maneuvers with that build? Now you're 7. If you want to be competent with one of those maneuvers? Now you're level 11.

Level 11 to do what? Be kind of decent at hitting someone with a sword or tripping them with a dex build?

A human fighter, however, can reach that same goal by level 5! And that's why I say the fighter's core design is so problematic to the game. Because feat trees are a core class mechanic for the fighter. They're what allow it to look appealing when compared to other classes, but by that same token it suddenly becomes incredibly miserable to build a number of character concepts unless you're a fighter, because feats are designed around them and not anyone else.

[wraithstrike]

swoosh wrote:

Take a class. Give it nothing to do but hit things, but put it in a combat focused game so everyone has to be good at hitting things. Make it your baseline martial class for balancing.

Bam. There's your C/MD.

Take a class. Make it 'simple, but modular'. Its main class feature is having tons of feats. But how are you going to justify giving someone that many feats when you realistically don't need that many different combat styles?

Bam. There are your feat trees and narrow feat focuses.

the list goes on.

Lots of new toys have come out for the fighters to make them more interesting and powerful, which definitely improves their playability.

But in this case many of the problems are fundamentally systemic to the game and instead adding these fighter specific toys exacerbates rather than solves problems. Things that shouldn't be gated are, all of the sake of making the class that is not a class look better.

This is not a rules topic. The rules forum is for figuring out how the rules work. As an example how does feat X interact with class ability Y.

When we are discussing things such as class X sucks or class ability Y would be better if it ____ instead of ___ that would fall under General Discussion.

[Atarlost]

The Mortonator wrote:

But... but... we already had the final Fighter thread! D:

How many sequels and spinoffs has Final Fantasy had? Has Square Enix shown any signs that they might stop?

That's what I thought.

[Kolokotroni]

The fighter isn't the problem. The means by which the fighter gets his stuff is the problem. Feats. When you compare feats and spells, basically your head explodes from incompatibility.

Spells are insanely versatile, flexible, and expendable character resources. Each individual choice of a spell even for classes with a spells known list is not a huge investment, spells can over the course of 20 levels basically do ANYTHING and over the course of the day spell slots are used up.

Feats, and as a result most martial options are far less flexible (you pick them then you can't easily change it, and you don't get many of these choices at once), there is a narrow window of what they can do (excepting specific races, feats cant let you fly, walk through walls, change time, ask aid from a deity, powerful outsiders or turn you into a dragon among a bergillian other things, they do things like let you shoot faster, hit harder, or use a skill/ability slightly better). And, usually feats cant be expended over the course of the day.

Trying to balance these two fundamental things against eachother is the source of most of pathfinders problems. The fighter is just among its most prominent victims.

[Beating A Dead Horse]

Quote:

Spells are insanely versatile, flexible, and expendable character resources

You are correct, Casting Detect Troll on thread...

[Kolokotroni]

Beating A Dead Horse wrote:

Quote:

Spells are insanely versatile, flexible, and expendable character resources

You are correct, Casting Detect Troll on thread...

Who keeps resurrecting that poor horse? But seriously you know as well as I do this community (and any gaming community) doesn't need to be deliberately trolling to have the same damned argument for the 80 billionth time. I like the alias though.

[Blackwaltzomega]

Joey Cote wrote:

Play a fighter with a higher intel instead of huge strength. Now you have the skill points to do other things. Take the plus to skill point instead of whateverelse for favorite class. Use your regular feats to buy feats not associated with combat.

It perfectly possible to build a fighter that can do things other then combat, it just means you cannot also optimize them for combat. And so many people optimize for combat, because it tends to happen more then other actions, generally.

It would be nice if fighters could take a list of feats that bonused some skills instead of pure fighting feats as the extra fighter feats, but its not that big a deal.

Clerics, on the other hand, get completely shafted when it comes to skills and doing anything other then casting or bashing.

Fighter: Has a terrible skill list and 2+int skills. STR, CON, WIS and DEX are key abilities for the fighter, in roughly that order. Point buy is thin, and this class's purpose is to be strong, quick, and tough but not easy to mentally dominate. INT is a luxury, CHA doubly so.

People on the Forums: Why are you dumping INT and CHA? Just get worse at the thing you picked this class to be good at so you can get a few more skill ranks.

Wizard: 2+int skills, but its skill list is focused heavily around the class being staggeringly intelligent. Its class features key off intelligence. No level of intelligence is too intelligent for a wizard, and the more that stat gets pumped the more skillful and magical the wizard retroactively becomes. DEX and CON have some importance to keep the class moving about and upright, but STR, WIS, and CHA can be safely ignored or dumped at the wizard's leisure; wisdom has little part in their game plan, strength is easily compensated for with magic, and charisma can be neatly bypassed by the unscrupulous with mind control or by the crafty using one of the many, many options that allow the wizard to port charisma-based skills to their intelligence score.

"Well, you ought to increase your strength and charisma instead of focusing on being a braniac!"

Said no one, ever.

Well, maybe comparing Fighty McGee to a magic user is silly. Let's see how a fighter with 14 intelligence compares to this stupid old ranger with 7!

...Huh. They have exactly the same number of skill ranks per level.

And the Ranger's skills are better.

And he gets class features that enhance a number of them.

And almost as many bonus feats as the fighter.

And a dog. Or pony. Or hawk. Or whatever.

And MAGIC.

Yeah, Fighty McGee does not really keep up with his fellow hitting-stuff guys in that regard, let alone the magicians. Adaptable Training and Versatile Training from the Weapon & Armor Master Handbooks help, but I honestly feel like those two should have been freebies when you got the class feature as that brings the fighter up to a base 5+INT skills/level, or "I am no longer operating at the baseline of an INT-dumped barbarian."

[The Mortonator]

Atarlost wrote:

The Mortonator wrote:

But... but... we already had the final Fighter thread! D:

How many sequels and spinoffs has Final Fantasy had? Has Square Enix shown any signs that they might stop?

That's what I thought.

That was a joke on a sillily presumptuous thread.

[Klara Meison]

Joey Cote wrote:

Play a fighter with a higher intel instead of huge strength. Now you have the skill points to do other things. Take the plus to skill point instead of whateverelse for favorite class. Use your regular feats to buy feats not associated with combat.

It perfectly possible to build a fighter that can do things other then combat, it just means you cannot also optimize them for combat. And so many people optimize for combat, because it tends to happen more then other actions, generally.

It would be nice if fighters could take a list of feats that bonused some skills instead of pure fighting feats as the extra fighter feats, but its not that big a deal.

Clerics, on the other hand, get completely shafted when it comes to skills and doing anything other then casting or bashing.

>It perfectly possible to build a fighter that can do things other then combat, it just means you cannot also optimize them for combat.

Problem with that is that an equal Ranger or Paladin can do that too, an then they will also be better at combat because of their spells and healing, BUT because fighter "has a lot of feats" feat trees arise, denying anyone who isn't a fighter any chance to use them.

But instead of saying this myself, I will just leave this great post by Ashiel here.

And another post: how to make a fighter that has nice things

Notice how the resulting fighter's most important qualities are "is a gnome", "has normal feats", and "PC wealth". It'd be almost exactly as effective as a warrior of the same level.

[Atarlost]

The Mortonator wrote:

Atarlost wrote:

The Mortonator wrote:

But... but... we already had the final Fighter thread! D:

How many sequels and spinoffs has Final Fantasy had? Has Square Enix shown any signs that they might stop?

That's what I thought.

That was a joke on a sillily presumptuous thread.

<grammar nazi>You put a comma between adjectives. Eg. "silly, presumptuous thread." Most importantly you should have used the plural because you're talking about two jokes on a silly, presumptuous thread.</grammar nazi>

<spelling nazi>Also, there are only two 'l's and one 'i' in silly.</spelling nazi>

<grammar nazi>You shouldn't start a sentence with a conjunction.</grammar nazi>

<spelling nazi>People do it all the time in informal English.</spelling nazi>

The voices in my head proceed to have a pointless argument about prescriptivism versus descriptivism in linguistics and then get shot by the Russians.

[Anzyr]

The real source of most problems is actually "Mundane means realistic". Fighter would significantly more viable if martials were not chained to a strange basis in realism (though not oddly their ability to survive a fall or lava bath). Therefore, mundanes get denied nice things, because only classes with magic get to play outside the "realism box".

[Michael Sayre]

Pizza Lord wrote:

GeneticDrift wrote:

Bad feats are prerequisites. Bad spells are just ignored.

Oh yes. You've given me such a wonderful idea for when the next world-changing comet passes... Spell trees.

"You want summon monster III? You don't have summon monster II."
You want fireball and lightning bolt? You need to have burning hands and shocking grasp respectively."
"Oh, you suddenly can't cast beast shape IV anymore because you trained away beast shape (thus also losing access to beast shape II and III) and then a comet came by and it doesn't work. That's rough!"

Might take a little wording to make sure it's fair and balanced gamewise and clear how it works amongst wizards and sorcerers and between clerics and magus. Also how it works with directly granted spells, like some domains or innate, specific spells a class gets. Good idea, GeneticDrift. Shackle those pesky casters with the Yoke of Tyranny 'Fairness'!

Drop Dead Studio's Spheres of Power actually does this to a certain extent, and it's one of the reasons it's so popular. Want to cast a fireball? First you need to learn how to shoot a single ray of fire, then you learn to throw balls of it, then you scale up to a full-sized fireball. Want to create walls of soul-sucking darkness? First you need to learn to create a simple sphere of darkness. You can emulate just about any spell in the game, but you have to master all the building blocks for each spell you want to use, building them up in much the same way a Fighter assembles a feat tree.

Though I think there are a lot fewer "taxes" in SoP.

Kolokotroni wrote:

The fighter isn't the problem. The means by which the fighter gets his stuff is the problem. Feats. When you compare feats and spells, basically your head explodes from incompatibility.

Spells are insanely versatile, flexible, and expendable character resources. Each individual choice of a spell even for classes with a spells known list is not a huge investment, spells can over the course of 20 levels basically do ANYTHING and over the course of the day spell slots are used up.

Feats, and as a result most martial options are far less flexible (you pick them then you can't easily change it, and you don't get many of these choices at once), there is a narrow window of what they can do (excepting specific races, feats cant let you fly, walk through walls, change time, ask aid from a deity, powerful outsiders or turn you into a dragon among a bergillian other things, they do things like let you shoot faster, hit harder, or use a skill/ability slightly better). And, usually feats cant be expended over the course of the day.

Trying to balance these two fundamental things against each other is the source of most of pathfinders problems. The fighter is just among its most prominent victims.

This is a big deal as well. A single feat represents a significantly larger portion of your class resources than a spell, and generally it's much harder to swap out a feat than it is a spell. Even with Fighter bonus feat retraining, you still have to keep every feat in a tree if you want to lose them, so some taxes are paid forever. Meanwhile, a wizard doesn't need to have burning hands memorized in order to cast meteor swarm.

Sean K. Reynolds once described the game as the Fighter operating at 50% all the time, and the wizard walking around at 10% but spiking up to 100% when he casts a spell. I think the game's issues are very intrinsically tied to this belief in, essentially, a wave-form balance against the classes who operate at a fixed midpoint, and the classes that are supposed to spike up and drop down. My personal experience is that that balance doesn't actually happen very often.

Wizards in PF have a lot of spells. You've got unlimited cantrips, you probably start at 1st level with 3 or 4 spells, each of which can drastically change the course of an encounter, and you've got your schools which will generally give you a solid buffing effect combined with a combat ability you'll generally be able to use 3+ times a day. That's actually a lot of resource there. Combine that with the fact that most combat encounters only last about 3 rounds, and the likelihood of the wizard ever actually running out of meaningful contributions is pretty small, particularly if the player knows what they're doing.

It's also worth noting that no class in the game is without resource management; the Fighter still has hit points he has to manage, and while he's got a good AC, there's many other defenses in the game, and the Fighter tends to be weaker than other classes in that regard. How often does the Fighter successfully continue an adventure after the cleric and wizard can no longer provide him with healing and buffs? In my experience, not often, and trying usually ends disastrously.

[swoosh]

wraithstrike wrote:

This is not a rules topic. The rules forum is for figuring out how the rules work. As an example how does feat X interact with class ability Y.

You're right. I could have sworn I was in /general when I was typing this. My mistake. Sorry.

Kolokotroni wrote:

The fighter isn't the problem. The means by which the fighter gets his stuff is the problem. Feats. When you compare feats and spells, basically your head explodes from incompatibility.

While you're correct, the two are inexorably tied together. Fighters are feats. It's their most defining characteristic.

It's akin to those that argue "Wizards aren't overpowered! Spells are!". It's a difference without distinction.

The rest of your post is right, but I think a lot of the inherent weakness in feats ties back to the fighter. In a world where fighters don't exist and access to a large number of bonus feats is not considered a given, needing 5-11 levels to make combat styles even begin to function wouldn't be something that I think would be as common. Combat styles that have more important feats than most characters will ever get in their lifetime wouldn't exist. As it stands whenever those are brought up the response is always a low, whimpering cry of "b-b-but fighters!"

Anzyr wrote:

The real source of most problems is actually "Mundane means realistic". Fighter would significantly more viable if martials were not chained to a strange basis in realism (though not oddly their ability to survive a fall or lava bath). Therefore, mundanes get denied nice things, because only classes with magic get to play outside the "realism box".

This is also true, but I haven't quite figured out how to tie that back to the 'the fighter is the source of all evil' thing, so I'll get back to you shortly.

[phantom1592]

Saldiven wrote:

I still don't understand why people have a problem with Feat Trees.

Well, that's pretty easy to explain....

Saldiven wrote:

Sure, some suck when a pre-requisite Feat is just crappy, like Combat Expertise, and there are some Feat Trees where the Feats are weirdly unrelated to each other. However, the concept of a Feat Tree is perfectly ok with me.

OH!!! Actually it looks like you understand after all ;)

Paying for crappy things in the hopes that someday you'll get something cool... sucks. If every step is awesome, that's a whole different issue. It's the crappy requirements that have nothing to do with the character concept that people complain about.

Whip Mastery is always my go-to for a crappy Feat Tree.
Exotic Proficency Whip: D3 nonlethal damage
Weapon Focus (whip)
Whip mastery: Actually do damage...
Improved Whip Mastery: Use as grappling hook.
Greater Whip Mastery: Snag an opponent

Five feats dedicated to one weapon... Which capstones with 'allow a grapple attempt' and 'don't drop on failed disarm'... with what is a supremely subpar as a weapon. If I want to roleplay a Simon Belmont or Indiana jones character... This just sucks.

I'm all for taking a subpar choice or two in honor of Roleplay flavor... but the Whip tree... is just crippling and when you use all those feats to get it... You still suck.

[Jader7777]

Fighters are pretty dependable though, even being surprised and flanked they can out step and stab anything that tries to stronghand them. Spell flingers are useless in that situation and if you're in a dark mysterious location like some sort of dungeon that is what you should be dealing with chronically. If the GM is only facilitating situations that spellcasters or skill monkeys succeed in why play a fighter?

[TriOmegaZero]

Jader7777 wrote:

Fighters are pretty dependable though, even being surprised and flanked they can out step and stab anything that tries to stronghand them. Spell flingers are useless in that situation...

My spell flinger just walks out of the threatened area. Fighters are NOT the best in that situation. If you want consistent damage, fighters are pretty good. But that's about all they are the best at.

[The Mortonator]

Klara Meison wrote:

Notice how the resulting fighter's most important qualities are "is a gnome", "has normal feats", and "PC wealth". It'd be almost exactly as effective as a warrior of the same level.

Then why not play a Kitsune with Nine-Tailed Scion instead?

[412294]

Jader7777 wrote:

Fighters are pretty dependable though, even being surprised and flanked they can out step and stab anything that tries to stronghand them. Spell flingers are useless in that situation and if you're in a dark mysterious location like some sort of dungeon that is what you should be dealing with chronically. If the GM is only facilitating situations that spellcasters or skill monkeys succeed in why play a fighter?

But the fighter isn't the best there, he's not the only martial class, there's stuff like barbarians and slayers, then there's the full BAB but gets casting too classes like paladins and bloodragers, who are going to do just fine there. Oh and the spellcasters aren't particularly bothered unless the enemy appear right next to them, and that's before we get to things like the always act in the surprise round and probably do so before the ones doing the surprising diviners.

[Paradozen]

Jader7777 wrote:

Fighters are pretty dependable though, even being surprised and flanked they can out step and stab anything that tries to stronghand them. Spell flingers are useless in that situation and if you're in a dark mysterious location like some sort of dungeon that is what you should be dealing with chronically. If the GM is only facilitating situations that spellcasters or skill monkeys succeed in why play a fighter?

Spell Flinger options that make them succeed here:

Get Me Outta Here:

Grace

DDoor
Haste
Mount
Expeditious Retreat
Fly
Air Walk
Beast Shape (into a small bird)
Elemental Shape (Earth or Air)
Ethereal Jaunt
Jester's Jaunt
Vanish
Plane Shift
Invisibility
Greater Invisibility

Go Away:

Create Pit
Jester's Jaunt
Hydraulic Push
Hydraulic Torrent
Summon Monster (to murder)
Black Tentacles
Colorspray
Roaming Pit
Aqueous Orb
Mad Monekeys
Hold Person
Cause Fear
Murderous Command
Command
Waves of Ecstasy
Slow
Haste (your summons/party)
Grease
Entangle
Cure Spells
Charm Person
Dominate Person
Suggestion
Hideous Laughter

Yeah, spell flingers can do lots, this is one sample size. They just need to cast defensively and be careful about positioning things

[Chess Pwn]

How are fighters to blame for poisons being bad to use for PCs?

[swoosh]

Chess Pwn wrote:

How are fighters to blame for poisons being bad to use for PCs?

Well. You see it's a matter of. The numbers and... well if fighters weren't built the way they were you could... Uh.

Caster/Martial Disparity?

[Chess Pwn]

haha, dang fighters. They truly do ruin everything ;)

[GM 1990]

Ssalarn wrote:

This is a big deal as well. A single feat represents a significantly larger portion of your class resources than a spell, and generally it's much harder to swap out a feat than it is a spell. Even with Fighter bonus feat retraining, you still have to keep every feat in a tree if you want to lose them, so some taxes are paid forever. Meanwhile, a wizard doesn't need to have burning hands memorized in order to cast meteor swarm.

The permanency of it hurts. For our home game, I've changed it to retraining a feat every level, and the ability to start dropping entry feats like Expertise once you've progressed as far as you plan in a tree. Essentially you need the pre-req feat when you initially take a feat in the tree, but don't need to keep it to use the deeper feats once they've been taken. I also let fighters help others to retrain feats, gives them more flavor and adding their value to the party.

Ssalarn wrote:

Wizards in PF have a lot of spells. You've got unlimited cantrips, you probably start at 1st level with 3 or 4 spells, each of which can drastically change the course of an encounter, and you've got your schools which will generally give you a solid buffing effect combined with a combat ability you'll generally be able to use 3+ times a day. That's actually a lot of resource there. Combine that with the fact that most combat encounters only last about 3 rounds, and the likelihood of the wizard ever actually running out of meaningful contributions is pretty small, particularly if the player knows what they're doing.

I agree although I think some playing styles and tables suffer more from this than others. Some GM's may either not be able to (PFS?) or feel less inclined to tweak the encounters by making monsters a little tougher (APs?) or add encounters per day to reward spell-casters being conservative. If players start to realize that they're only going to need 6 rounds worth of fire-power per adventuring day, it would be foolish not to lead with your 6 hardest hitting things, whether it be SLA, per-day extra-ordinaries, or actual spells. Conversely, if its more typical for your group to have multiple encounters per day (not always but during difference sections of the story arc), then everyone would be smart to keep things in reserve early, especially those AoE or encounter changers from the casters.

In my son's game we've gone 3 sessions with 4 combat encounters in a game day, and not only was my druid down to cantrips (and I had been trying to hold back) but as you point out the fighters (Paladins in that game) were way down on HPs. We were all worried about running into anymore folks from our groups antagonist, because a couple crits and we would have been done. I'm seeing a similar situation in my game right now and will probably have to adjust the final encounter or risk a TPK. They've been in 2 big fights in the same game morning, and time is of essence for them to close in and finish their antagonist this same day. The two fights went harder and some player choices made them harder than I had factored in on paper (PCs deciding to split the party is never good), but the group is time-crunched, down to 1 potion of healing and trying to rescue their cleric. No time to stop, but they're going to make a quick stop at apothecary to try grabbing a couple more potions before making the final push through smuggling tunnels.

To make fighters more fun in these "multi-encounter days", we're also using a version of stamina with about 25 uses (similar to rogue talent/ki-pool items with both in and out of combat value) so there is another resource the player of fighters get to manage (some uses we've added also have per-day limits).

I dont' have the WMH or AMH, but it sounds like there are lots of neat options in those as well. For our part, I dialoged a lot on the boards here to get some ideas, looked at what other classes had for ideas and made some changes to fighter to make them more fun and interesting for my players. There is certainly no lack of ideas on the boards (or posted fighter house-versions). It sounds like some poster's feel like they're stuck with the CRB version because they play PFS or in someone else game who only allows CRB etc, so they're waiting for an official unchained fighter. For those people, the faster and more fulfilling solution might be to grab a GM screen and run a campaign rather than waiting. Sure, its not "as" fun for me to watch my players use the abilities we added to our fighters, but it is still enjoyable. And, I have used some monsters with level in fighter to help get a better play-test of our modifications, so I get to live a little vicariously through the NPCs/Monsters. Its certainly an advantage of RPGs like PF, things you don't like, you can always change in your own game if you're willing to take up the mantle of GMing.

[Veilgn]

While spelcaster eating popcorn on golarion sun. Laughing that punny fighters.

[Veilgn]

While eating popcorn. Some wall of text said mage doent need burning hands?

My tiny spider disagree with you.

*burn

[GM 1990]

Anzyr wrote:

The real source of most problems is actually "Mundane means realistic". Fighter would significantly more viable if martials were not chained to a strange basis in realism (though not oddly their ability to survive a fall or lava bath). Therefore, mundanes get denied nice things, because only classes with magic get to play outside the "realism box".

This is definitely an interesting point. Some of the C/MD threads I've read seem to almost doom failure on possible resolutions (well..basically all of them except the one myself and Insain Dragoon ended in a peaceful manner). Some opine that fighters are a bad class because casters get to do things like fly, teleport, and hit things with weapons; but then want to limit possible fighter improvements to anything except magic or even Ex/Su abilities that replicate magic. It doesn't have to be making fighters into Ironman with their armor either, there are lots of ideas people have floated around and posted that are somewhere in the middle. Nobody would like a solution where fighters outshine every other class either. But IMO any solution to make fighters more viable should attempt to include some kind of access to Ex or Su abilities since PF is a magical system game. It doesn't make sense to me to hold them to a different standard that basically -no- other class is forced to follow, especially so many of the new ones (some of which have even allowed different abilities to emulate Int when qualifying for feats).

[Das Bier]

Even worse, GM. The whole fighter thing isn't about flying or teleporting.

Fighter, historically, has been about being anti-magical. Overcoming will spells, cleaving through magic barriers, resisting magic.

Nope, can't have that. The sheer idea that you would need another fighter to deal with a fighter, and couldn't just take him out easily with a caster, is just not right.

[Michael Sayre]

GM 1990 wrote:

I agree although I think some playing styles and tables suffer more from this than others. Some GM's may either not be able to (PFS?) or feel less inclined to tweak the encounters by making monsters a little tougher (APs?) or add encounters per day to reward spell-casters being conservative. If players start to realize that they're only going to need 6 rounds worth of fire-power per adventuring day, it would be foolish not to lead with your 6 hardest hitting things, whether it be SLA, per-day extra-ordinaries, or actual spells. Conversely, if its more typical for your group to have multiple encounters per day (not always but during difference sections of the story arc), then everyone would be smart to keep things in reserve early, especially those AoE or encounter changers from the casters.

My experience has been, and I understand this isn't necessarily true of everyone, that when I try to tweak the difficulty up to compensate for casters trivializing encounters, it's actually the non-casters who suffer more. Beyond that, there's only so much tweaking you can do; you can't make the contributions of one class useless just because someone else is underperforming.

For my home game, we actually kind of cut out the upper and lower edges of the game by replacing or patching the most problematic classes and subsystems. We dropped the standard Vancian casting mechanics of core Pathfinder and swapped in the spherecasting system from Spheres of Power for our casters. This reined in a lot of the "win button" spell issues, and shifted casters onto similar advancement tracks as martials, so everyone kind of grows at the same pace.
I've got a series of patches for the Fighter available in my games, including some feats specifically designed to help ramp him up a notch on the versatility front. He generally gets passed over now in favor of some of the other options that have a naturally more well-rounded and capable chassis, whether that be slayers, vigilantes, or battlelords. I, personally, feel like the Fighter is really just deficient as a class; compare it to almost any of its peers, and it just has less stuff overall, and I mean that in just about every way- less skills, fewer defenses, weaker "class features", etc. The Fighter's main strength is his ability to complete feat trees faster, but when you look at classes like the Ranger and Slayer who can complete certain trees almost as quickly while still getting other options, that "strength" is really just the ability to pile more weaker options up to reach a decent option, when many other classes just get decent options up front.

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In my son's game we've gone 3 sessions with 4 combat encounters in a game day, and not only was my druid down to cantrips (and I had been trying to hold back) but as you point out the fighters (Paladins in that game) were way down on HPs. We were all worried about running into anymore folks from our groups antagonist, because a couple crits and we would have been done. I'm seeing a similar situation in my game right now and will probably have to adjust the final encounter or risk a TPK. They've been in 2 big fights in the same game morning, and time is of essence for them to close in and finish their antagonist this same day. The two fights went harder and some player choices made them harder than I had factored in on paper (PCs deciding to split the party is never good), but the group is time-crunched, down to 1 potion of healing and trying to rescue their cleric. No time to stop, but they're going to make a quick stop at apothecary to try grabbing a couple more potions before making the final push through smuggling tunnels.

This kind of underscores my point to a certain extent. In a high stakes, time crunch situation, the Fighter should be shining. He is the "go all day" class after all. But from the sounds of it (and don't let me hijack or misinterpret your post) he's in just as dire straits as the spellcasting druid. There's probably a couple ways to interpret that, but to me, this is a sign that "all day vs. limited resources" isn't really functioning as a balancing mechanic. I know that that has been my experience.

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To make fighters more fun in these "multi-encounter days", we're also using a version of stamina with about 25 uses (similar to rogue talent/ki-pool items with both in and out of combat value) so there is another resource the player of fighters get to manage (some uses we've added also have per-day limits).

I also like the Stamina system a fair bit, and we typically use the suggested option where the Fighter gains free access to it. I find it helps on the combat side, particularly in the area of longevity of effectiveness, but I find it does still leave the Fighter as a "lopsided" class.

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I dont' have the WMH or AMH, but it sounds like there are lots of neat options in those as well.

My problems with those options tend to be-

1)They don't kick in until a quarter or more of the way through the entire span of the game. In PFS, or really just most games in general, a party won't even make it past 10th or 12th level, so in those situations you're going half the campaign before getting the rest of your tools, and by the time the Fighter finally has access to relevant amounts of skill points, most classes are now leaving skill ranks behind as a metric of effectiveness. Unchained Rogues have a few skill unlocks, as well as probably some useful talents for achieving magic-level effects or expanding their skill uses, 2/3 casters generally have mastery over at least a half dozen skills with spells and class abilities to fortify and enhance them, don't even get me started on what clerics and wizards are now bringing to the table... and the Fighter is just catching up to a metric everyone else is leaving in the dust.

2) They're kind of immersion breaking. This isn't as big a deal, but it's weird for a Fighter to go from no Diplomacy to 7 effective ranks in Diplomacy instantaneously because suddenly he figured out how to hold his warhammer at the right angle when talking to someone. This is entirely personal preference though, I get that.

3) You have to go digging for them. Now, I understand that the game is in a certain place right now, and all we can expect are band-aid fixes, but I'm of the opinion that if someone is saying "All you have to do is grab the Stamina system from book V, this archetype from book W, these feats from books X and Y, and these Advanced Weapon Training options from book Z, and you've got a good character", you're not describing a fix, you're describing more homework and research than I had to do my first year of college, and purchasing about the same number of books.

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For our part, I dialoged a lot on the boards here to get some ideas, looked at what other classes had for ideas and made some changes to fighter to make them more fun and interesting for my players. There is certainly no lack of ideas on the boards (or posted fighter house-versions).

100% agreed. There's a lot of awesome 3pp materials out there, and a lot of them are even written by the same guys who work as Paizo freelancers. There's also some cool homebrews, and lots of great suggestions for different ways to patch up your game and give people the experience they feel they're lacking.

Quote:

It sounds like some poster's feel like they're stuck with the CRB version because they play PFS or in someone else game who only allows CRB etc, so they're waiting for an official unchained fighter. For those people, the faster and more fulfilling solution might be to grab a GM screen and run a campaign rather than waiting. Sure, its not "as" fun for me to watch my players use the abilities we added to our fighters, but it is still enjoyable. And, I have used some monsters with level in fighter to help get a better play-test of our modifications, so I get to live a little vicariously through the NPCs/Monsters. Its certainly an advantage of RPGs like PF, things you don't like, you can always change in your own game if you're willing to take up the mantle of GMing.

I think the biggest issue with that suggestion (and don't get me wrong, I think it is a fantastic suggestion and second it wholeheartedly)is that a lot of people feel like there are some pretty big barriers to GMing, and to an extent there are. You've got to prep adventures, know your group, quite possibly learn how to deal with people who know more about the rules than you do, etc. If you do happen to be someone who's thinking about making the leap into GMing, I strongly suggest you look into grabbing a prepared adventure module to give you some structure and direction while you figure things out.

Also, if you happen to know that you're going to have a player who likes to push the system, ask them to either refrain, or channel their energies elsewhere while you figure things out. For example, I realized at a point when I was playing more than GMing that I was building far stronger characters than the other players, and it was putting some strain on the GM. Rather than try to make intentionally bad characters (something I don't really like doing and seem to struggle with regardless since even my "bad" characters were often as good or better than some of the other characters), I focused on making great team-oriented characters. Sure, I was still making encounters way easier, but I was doing it in ways that weren't making the GM have to throw away 6 pages of adventure I'd just circumvented or obliterated, and no one felt like I was impinging on their fun because my way of being awesome was making everyone else awesome too.

[Das Bier]

Chess Pwn wrote:

haha, dang fighters. They truly do ruin everything ;)

They even ruined his how fighters ruin everything argument.

Truly, pheer the power of the fighter.

[voska66]

Blackwaltzomega wrote:

Joey Cote wrote:

Play a fighter with a higher intel instead of huge strength. Now you have the skill points to do other things. Take the plus to skill point instead of whateverelse for favorite class. Use your regular feats to buy feats not associated with combat.

It perfectly possible to build a fighter that can do things other then combat, it just means you cannot also optimize them for combat. And so many people optimize for combat, because it tends to happen more then other actions, generally.

It would be nice if fighters could take a list of feats that bonused some skills instead of pure fighting feats as the extra fighter feats, but its not that big a deal.

Clerics, on the other hand, get completely shafted when it comes to skills and doing anything other then casting or bashing.

Fighter: Has a terrible skill list and 2+int skills. STR, CON, WIS and DEX are key abilities for the fighter, in roughly that order. Point buy is thin, and this class's purpose is to be strong, quick, and tough but not easy to mentally dominate. INT is a luxury, CHA doubly so.

People on the Forums: Why are you dumping INT and CHA? Just get worse at the thing you picked this class to be good at so you can get a few more skill ranks.

Wizard: 2+int skills, but its skill list is focused heavily around the class being staggeringly intelligent. Its class features key off intelligence. No level of intelligence is too intelligent for a wizard, and the more that stat gets pumped the more skillful and magical the wizard retroactively becomes. DEX and CON have some importance to keep the class moving about and upright, but STR, WIS, and CHA can be safely ignored or dumped at the wizard's leisure; wisdom has little part in their game plan, strength is easily compensated for with magic, and charisma can be neatly bypassed by the unscrupulous with mind control or by the crafty using one of the many, many options that allow the wizard to port charisma-based skills to their intelligence score.

"Well, you...

The fighter is STR, DEX, WIS, CON in my opinion. The fighter is about tanking. High AC requires a high dex, armor training make you dex count in Full Plate. You need strength for damage output.

The Weapon and Armor Mastery guides solve the skill problem. You can use BAB as you skill rank on many skills. You can turn bravery into bonus on most all will saves with feat.

[Michael Sayre]

voska66 wrote:

The fighter is STR, DEX, WIS, CON in my opinion. The fighter is about tanking. High AC requires a high dex, armor training make you dex count in Full Plate. You need strength for damage output.

The Weapon and Armor Mastery guides solve the skill problem. You can use BAB as you skill rank on many skills. You can turn bravery into bonus on most all will saves with feat.

I strongly disagree about the Weapon and Armor Mastery guides solving skill problems. The earliest a Fighter can take Versatile Training is 5th level, a quarter of the way through the entire breadth of the game and halfway or more through most games, and that requires him to spend his feat to get his skills up to where most other classes already start, and he can't improve his effective skills in this manner again until 9th level (for the final time). You aren't improving the Fighter's base deficit, you're giving him a couple options to replace his resources at a slightly better exchange rate, but they're showing up late and he's still getting charged for them. More than that, at the times the Fighter is finally getting access to decent skill modifiers in a reasonable number of skills, every other class is gaining ways to stack big bonuses on top of their base ranks, so the Fighter never truly catches up.

The feat to allow Bravery to apply to most Will saves has the same issue- you're charging the Fighter feats to actually get a "real" class feature equivalent to what everyone else got for free. Just look at his CRB peers- Rangers get two good saves plus Evasion and Improved Evasion, Paladin gets two good saves and gets to add his Charisma bonus to all of his saving throws, Barbarian gains a scaling bonus to Reflex saves against traps (about as useful as base Bravery) plus a scaling bonus to all Will saves that starts at +2 and scales up to +8 plus the option to take Superstition for another scaling +1 - +7 on all saves against spells, supernatural abilities, and spell-like abilities.

These new books are definitely a step in the right direction, but they're trying to shovel benefits into a leaky and rusty sieve that was flawed from the moment it was conceived.

[swoosh]

Quote:

The feat to allow Bravery to apply to most Will saves has the same issue- you're charging the Fighter feats to actually get a "real" class feature equivalent to what everyone else got for free

Well, worse than that really. They're not just feats, they're limited access, heavily level gated feats.

You can almost get a good will save, but not until 5 and if you do get it at 5 you delay your extra skills or other bonuses until 9 or 10 or 13.

Which in a way is almost even worse, because instead of just fixing the problems with the fighter, the game makes you choose which problem you want to fix.

[Michael Sayre]

swoosh wrote:

Quote:

The feat to allow Bravery to apply to most Will saves has the same issue- you're charging the Fighter feats to actually get a "real" class feature equivalent to what everyone else got for free

Well, worse than that really. They're not just feats, they're limited access, heavily level gated feats.

You can almost get a good will save, but not until 5 and if you do get it at 5 you delay your extra skills or other bonuses until 9 or 10 or 13.

Which in a way is almost even worse, because instead of just fixing the problems with the fighter, the game makes you choose which problem you want to fix.

100% agreed.

The Fighter is the proverbial house built on sand; you can jenga stack patches on it with all your might, but it suffers from the lack of a firm foundation.

[Blackwaltzomega]

voska66 wrote:

Blackwaltzomega wrote:

Joey Cote wrote:

Play a fighter with a higher intel instead of huge strength. Now you have the skill points to do other things. Take the plus to skill point instead of whateverelse for favorite class. Use your regular feats to buy feats not associated with combat.

It perfectly possible to build a fighter that can do things other then combat, it just means you cannot also optimize them for combat. And so many people optimize for combat, because it tends to happen more then other actions, generally.

It would be nice if fighters could take a list of feats that bonused some skills instead of pure fighting feats as the extra fighter feats, but its not that big a deal.

Clerics, on the other hand, get completely shafted when it comes to skills and doing anything other then casting or bashing.

Fighter: Has a terrible skill list and 2+int skills. STR, CON, WIS and DEX are key abilities for the fighter, in roughly that order. Point buy is thin, and this class's purpose is to be strong, quick, and tough but not easy to mentally dominate. INT is a luxury, CHA doubly so.

People on the Forums: Why are you dumping INT and CHA? Just get worse at the thing you picked this class to be good at so you can get a few more skill ranks.

Wizard: 2+int skills, but its skill list is focused heavily around the class being staggeringly intelligent. Its class features key off intelligence. No level of intelligence is too intelligent for a wizard, and the more that stat gets pumped the more skillful and magical the wizard retroactively becomes. DEX and CON have some importance to keep the class moving about and upright, but STR, WIS, and CHA can be safely ignored or dumped at the wizard's leisure; wisdom has little part in their game plan, strength is easily compensated for with magic, and charisma can be neatly bypassed by the unscrupulous with mind control or by the crafty using one of the many, many options that allow the wizard to port charisma-based skills to their

...

This is something I wanted to bring up earlier but didn't; I feel like Adaptable Training and Versatile Training were good ideas but should have been freebies you got at level 3 and 5.

Doing this puts the fighter in a unique 5+INT niche that has him slightly ahead of the Barbarian, Brawler, Swashbuckler, Paladin and Bloodrager and slightly behind the Ranger and the Slayer (and way behind the Rogue still, but that's fine) without actually taking anything away from the class; it works as a patch to the Fighter's crippling lack of utility while still leaving options open for them to spend feats on the other options AWT/AAT offer. Given that the only reason the Fighter had 2+INT skills in the first place was because that's how it was in 3rd Edition and it was a bad design choice THEN, I don't feel like it's messing anything up to have the fighter catch up to the rest of the martial classes skill-wise as it levels as a freebie.

[Daniel Yeatman]

I don't know, I've only ever played in one campaign where there was a Fighter and he did just fine, all the way up to level 16. I do always find it funny that so much effort is focused on one class, though. Imagine if there was this much debate about the Medium, or the Cavalier, hah.

[Michael Sayre]

Daniel Yeatman wrote:

I don't know, I've only ever played in one campaign where there was a Fighter and he did just fine, all the way up to level 16. I do always find it funny that so much effort is focused on one class, though. Imagine if there was this much debate about the Medium, or the Cavalier, hah.

The Medium and the Cavalier aren't core classes, so they garner less attention. They're also both arguably in a much better place than the Fighter.

One of the other reasons the Fighter gets brought up so much, is that people want to like him. The Fighter was pretty much essential until the drastic nerfs he was hit with in 3rd edition (which have been preserved through 3.5 and into Pathfinder), but there's still books, movies, cartoons, etc. that feature characters people identify as "Fighters", but then they discover that the PF Fighter is arguably the worst class in the game for playing anything that resembles the character they want.

"I'm a former night watchman for the city guard who... What do you mean the Fighter doesn't have Perception as a class skill? And if I do take it, I'm going to have to choose between whether I can Climb or Swim, but not both? What the hell man!"

It's a core class that is inherently unbalanced with other core classes, because its mission statement as a class is a fool's errand. You can't, mathematically, have a class who's as much better at combat as the Fighter is worse at everything else. It's just not feasible within the framework of the game. So instead you have a customizable class who is marginally better at combat, while being severely deficient elsewhere, which is something you'd typically expect of an NPC class, not an iconic hero.

[The Shaman]

Daniel Yeatman wrote:

I don't know, I've only ever played in one campaign where there was a Fighter and he did just fine, all the way up to level 16. I do always find it funny that so much effort is focused on one class, though. Imagine if there was this much debate about the Medium, or the Cavalier, hah.

The medium and even to a point the cavalier are generalists with wider areas of expertise. The medium is basically choose you own class every day (DM permission needed), and the generic cavalier is a sort of spellless paladin with a mount, pseudo-smite and team buffs. The fighter can just fight, and s/he isn't that great at it. You can be "decent" compared to barbarians, rangers, paladins or slayers, most of whom bring a heckof a lot more else. You do not even outclass them significantly at the one thing you do.

I really, really wish Unchained had put the fighter there instead of the barbarian or even the summoner.