Quick Jump / Cloud Jump

I've marked this for erratum to make it clear that the second paragraph's "maximum distance you can jump" refers to the limit of jumping a distance equal to your Speed, as the reason that line exists is so you can spend a bunch of actions to jump farther than your Speed if necessary to clear the jump. But please everyone calm down and avoid from making personal attacks here. Thanks folks.

I've marked this for erratum to make it clear that the second paragraph's "maximum distance you can jump" refers to the limit of jumping a distance equal to your Speed, as the reason that line exists is so you can spend a bunch of actions to jump farther than your Speed if necessary to clear the jump. But please everyone calm down and avoid from making personal attacks here. Thanks folks.

So the intent of the first part is that you still can't make a normal long jump faster than your speed, even with Cloud Jump, unless you add additional actions? What is the value of tripling the distance you can long jump as just a method to reduce the DC for it? Still kind of weird.

Thanks for stepping in.

Mark Seifter wrote:

I've marked this for erratum to make it clear that the second paragraph's "maximum distance you can jump" refers to the limit of jumping a distance equal to your Speed, as the reason that line exists is so you can spend a bunch of actions to jump farther than your Speed if necessary to clear the jump. But please everyone calm down and avoid from making personal attacks here. Thanks folks.

So the intent of the first part is that you still can't make a normal long jump faster than your speed, even with Cloud Jump, unless you add additional actions? What is the value of tripling the distance you can long jump as just a method to reduce the DC for it? Still kind of weird.

Thanks for stepping in.

1) It makes it so you can jump up to your speed without a chance of failure. Not relevant if your speed is only 25, but most high level melee characters will be faster than that, some to a a very large degree.

2) It means you can actually utilize the second part of the feat. If you just had the second paragraph, trying to leap a 70 foot pit would be impossible no matter how many actions you spent. With the two paragraphs working together you can clear that 70 foot pit easily with a single Long Jump by spending 1-3 actions depending on your speed and Quick Jump.

If you just had the second paragraph, trying to leap a 70 foot pit would be impossible no matter how many actions you spent.

Not really?

A 25 speed character could, with quick jump, jump 25 feet and spend 2 actions to add 50 feet, which is 75, more than 70..

Without quick jump you'd need a speed of 35 feet, since 35 + 35 is 70, which is admittedly a bit harder.

Obviously doesn't matter if the feat's being changed, though.

Well that dropped from Legendary to Legendarily Terrible. Oh well, one less choice I have to make when choosing Skill Feats.

I've marked this for erratum to make it clear that the second paragraph's "maximum distance you can jump" refers to the limit of jumping a distance equal to your Speed, as the reason that line exists is so you can spend a bunch of actions to jump farther than your Speed if necessary to clear the jump. But please everyone calm down and avoid from making personal attacks here. Thanks folks.

Thank you for weighing in Mark!

A 25 speed character could, with quick jump, jump 25 feet and spend 2 actions to add 50 feet, which is 75, more than 70..

Without quick jump you'd need a speed of 35 feet, since 35 + 35 is 70, which is admittedly a bit harder.

Obviously doesn't matter if the feat's being changed, though.

That is assuming that you don't have to add the extra action distance to your DC, which without Cloud Jump would make that 75 foot jump impossible.

The feat makes much more sense with both sections working together, rather than only the first half having any bearing on your use of the feat, and the second half being largely useless barring an EXTREME jump needing to be made.

Well that dropped from Legendary to Legendarily Terrible. Oh well, one less choice I have to make when choosing Skill Feats.

I disagree here. The feat is still legendary. It does allow you to perform jumps that are simply impossible without it, or magic. But with this clarification, it is also not completely overshadowing most special forms of movement pretty much single handedly.

I really don't understand how you can think this is a useless feat. Maybe you would skip it if you had Sudden Leap already or something, but even then it is upgrades that feat in significant ways.

Yeah, you don't want to take it as a wizard as Old Man Robot suggested, but the additional mobility is great for melee characters. Flying enemies are super common, as is difficult terrain and other obstacles. And being able to leap reasonably tall buildings in a single bound feels pretty Legendary to me.

Captain Morgan wrote:

If you just had the second paragraph, trying to leap a 70 foot pit would be impossible no matter how many actions you spent.

Not really?

A 25 speed character could, with quick jump, jump 25 feet and spend 2 actions to add 50 feet, which is 75, more than 70..

Without quick jump you'd need a speed of 35 feet, since 35 + 35 is 70, which is admittedly a bit harder.

Obviously doesn't matter if the feat's being changed, though.

You misunderstand me. Without the first paragraph lowering the DC, a 70 foot jump would be DC 70. No PC can hit that DC. 28 Proficiency+ 3 item + 7 strength is only a +38 to the check, which means the highest you can roll is a 58. Even a natural 20 wouldn't let you make that jump without a status or circumstance bonus.

The 2nd paragraph needs the first paragraph to be usable for a 3 action jump on all but the slowest of characters.

Without the first paragraph lowering the DC, a 70 foot jump would be DC 70.

You wouldn't be making a 70 foot jump. You'd be making a 25 foot jump, then spending an extra action to increase the distance you jump by 25 feet, twice.

Captain Morgan wrote:

Without the first paragraph lowering the DC, a 70 foot jump would be DC 70.

You wouldn't be making a 70 foot jump. You'd be making a 25 foot jump, then spending an extra action to increase the distance you jump by 25 feet, twice.

Except again, that's not what that means. Maximum Distance merely refers to the "speed cap" on your leap. And even if it did not, now you are assuming that you would get a "free lunch" addition of distance to your jump by spending an action, without having to add that distance to your DC. Which is even more bonkers.

So this is clearly the singularly worst worded feat in the game so far, given that 2e had been better with using precise language that's a shame.

So the feat the is now a lot less exciting because by level 15 you should have several options for flight and the feat doesn't allow you to do anything not covered by that.

The main benefit of the feat is the high jump which gets a significant height increase. Getting the ability to jump 10 meteres in a single leap is impressive.

Most people who have decent speed are never actually going to need to spend extra actions on the high jump because you are still limited by the jump dc.

I've marked this for erratum to make it clear that the second paragraph's "maximum distance you can jump" refers to the limit of jumping a distance equal to your Speed, as the reason that line exists is so you can spend a bunch of actions to jump farther than your Speed if necessary to clear the jump. But please everyone calm down and avoid from making personal attacks here. Thanks folks.

Hey Mark, can you speak on the value of the first paragraph as well?

As it stands, as siegfriedliner says, the feat overall seems poorly worded.

Could you maybe also talk on the intentions of the feat as well, just so we get an idea of what we should expect from it.

Edit: Also if a mod could clean up this thread up a bit, it would be appreciated.

So this is clearly the singularly worst worded feat in the game so far, given that 2e had been better with using precise language that's a shame.

So the feat the is now a lot less exciting because by level 15 you should have several options for flight and the feat doesn't allow you to do anything not covered by that.

The main benefit of the feat is the high jump which gets a significant height increase. Getting the ability to jump 10 meteres in a single leap is impressive.

Most people who have decent speed are never actually going to need to spend extra actions on the high jump because you are still limited by the jump dc.

Cloud Jump has several important benefits I think you are overlooking.

1. It doesn't use resources, so you can save your spell slots for other spells, or flight granting effects for times when you really need to fly.

2. It allows you to calculate High Jumps with the Long Jump calculation, which is MUCH better. And with Wall Jump is more efficient at moving "upward" than flight, as you treat upward movement as Difficult Terrain. High Jumping does not.

By default when you High Jump, without taking into account any feats, you can only reach 8 feet, and that is a DC 30 Jump that you have to Critically Pass to reach 8 feet. With Cloud Jump alone, you can make that same 8 foot high jump with a DC 8 check. Or you can high jump up to your Speed. Combine with Wall Jump and suddenly you can essentially run up the wall at your full speed for a DC equal to your Speed for each High Jump, which is pretty great.

I did notice high jump improvement.

The main benefit of the feat is the high jump which gets a significant height increase. Getting the ability to jump 10 meteres in a single leap is impressive.

Most people who have decent speed are never actually going to need to spend extra actions on the high jump because you are still limited by the jump dc.

I am not saying that the feet is bad is just not legendary. Your comic book peak human rather than the wushu cloud jumper that feats flavor seemed to suggest.

Though I suppose it does leave room for a truly cool mythic variant if they go down that route in this edition.

I did notice high jump improvement.

siegfriedliner wrote:

The main benefit of the feat is the high jump which gets a significant height increase. Getting the ability to jump 10 meteres in a single leap is impressive.

Most people who have decent speed are never actually going to need to spend extra actions on the high jump because you are still limited by the jump dc.

I am not saying that the feet is bad is just not legendary. Your a titan leaper rather than wushu sky walker that feata flavour seemed to suggest.

Okay, so then:

3. It does allow you to Long Jump 3 times your speed: It just costs you 3 actions for the privilege. That is nothing to sneeze at, especially given that it ignores difficult terrain in doing so.

4. As pointed out by Captain Morgan, combined with any of the Class jump feats, you still get some serious mileage out of the feat.

The Barbarian and Fighter's Sudden Leap turns into a Monster, potentially allowing you to jump right by an enemy by a wide margin, making them have to move or double move at least to retaliate. With Sudden Leap's already doubled "maximum distance", you can put a whole lot of distance between you and your target, or reach targets over Difficult Terrain that you couldn't reach with a Sudden Charge.

The Rogue's Fantastic Leap is similar, but requires you to make your strike at the end of your Leap, meaning you have fewer options for extracting yourself from that situation, but you can essentially get a double move ignoring difficult terrain and culminating in a Strike, and can do so against flying enemies as well.

And Cloud Jump provides the Ranger and Champion with a Jump specialty that rivals, but is still inferior to Sudden and Fantastic Leap, meaning that such characters don't need to be left behind by their Grasshopper allies.

Well, it allows you to spend your whole movement for the turn mid-air at an affordable DC.
What it doesn't give you is the extra speed that wouldn't actually make much sense: why should you move faster (a lot faster!) when you jump than when you run? And what would a Legendary skill feat about running look like then? 5x Stride speed?
Maybe that would be fun, but at what price? Most melee monsters would become trivial, unless they can match your speed; at that point, not having the option to move so fast would make you an helpless prey against them. And you would need much larger maps for your encounters, which would be a pain.
Speed doesn't scale very well in a game like this.

Well, it allows you to spend your whole movement for the turn mid-air at an affordable DC.

What it doesn't give you is the extra speed that wouldn't actually make much sense: why should you move faster (a lot faster!) when you jump than when you run? And what would a Legendary skill feat about running look like then? 5x Stride speed?
Maybe that would be fun, but at what price? Most melee monsters would become trivial, unless they can match your speed; at that point, not having the option to move so fast would make you an helpless prey against them. And you would need much larger maps for your encounters, which would be a pain.
Speed doesn't scale very well in a game like this.

Having played Mutants & Masterminds where character speed quickly ranges into the MILES per action, I concur. I gave up using a map for that game quickly.

Needing to jump 3 times your speed for 3 actions is such a niche occurrence as to relegate the Feat to useless.

You're rarely going to need to do it in combat, and out of combat, if you were to jump over a chasm or something else this way, you would be leaving the rest of the party behind, which in most cases, is not acceptable. The same applies to super high jumps.

Because this is a team game, every scenario is going to provide another way to bypass such an obstacle in a manner that the entire group can get around it.

In the extremely rare circumstance where it is for some reason advantageous for you to bypass the obstacle and leave your party behind, you're better off just carrying around a Potion of Flying. Or a Broom of Flying. Or Balance on a Dancing Bo Staff (this even avoids AoO!). Or ride something with Barding of the Zephyr. You get the point. By 15th Level actual flight is pretty cheap and common.

There are dozens of other ways to avoid difficult terrain. Even just a regular Long Jump does this, and at 15th Level with even Master Athletics, you're going to auto succeed on that with Assurance.

There are also much lower Level Feats that give you a Climb Speed, which negates the need to High Jump in most situations.

There are too many other Skill Feats that are substantially better to bother wasting one of them on what is essentially a niche Feat under this ruling.

I am not saying that the feet is bad is just not legendary. Your comic book peak human rather than the wushu cloud jumper that feats flavor seemed to suggest.

Speaking as someone who has spent far too much time analyzing comic book feats... I disagree. Wall Jump is about where comic book humans start to peak. A 3 story vertical leap is a specific claim to fame of Spider-Man, and this feat can let you exceed that fairly easily. It isn't

There are also much lower Level Feats that give you a Climb Speed, which negates the need to High Jump in most situations.

No it doesn't. If an enemy is flying overhead, I can't climb up to it unless there's a wall or something nearby. And even then, it is going to take an action to get to the wall, an action to climb it, and probably another action if the enemy isn't hanging out right next to the wall.

Edit: Also, I find it bizarre to think you can't imagine characters taking this feat when it is the only Legendary feat for Athletics, which is in turn the only strength based skill and one of the best skills in the game. What is it competing with exactly? The most universally applicable skill feat is probably Scared to Death followed by Legendary Sneak... if you build for either of those skills. Beyond that, all the legendary skill feats are niche. They are really good within that niche, but almost none provide benefits you can't replicate by expending resources or magic.

You're rarely going to need to do it in combat, and out of combat, if you were to jump over a chasm or something else this way, you would be leaving the rest of the party behind, which in most cases, is not acceptable. The same applies to super high jumps.

Out of combat you could pick up your party and jump them across.

Aratorin wrote:

You're rarely going to need to do it in combat, and out of combat, if you were to jump over a chasm or something else this way, you would be leaving the rest of the party behind, which in most cases, is not acceptable. The same applies to super high jumps.

Out of combat you could pick up your party and jump them across.

Or other members of the team will be developing their own solutions. Fly. Dimension Door. And so on.

Paradozen wrote:

Aratorin wrote:

You're rarely going to need to do it in combat, and out of combat, if you were to jump over a chasm or something else this way, you would be leaving the rest of the party behind, which in most cases, is not acceptable. The same applies to super high jumps.

Out of combat you could pick up your party and jump them across.

Or other members of the team will be developing their own solutions. Fly. Dimension Door. And so on.

Most of which cost limited per day resources and may need to have been prepared ahead of time.

Sapient wrote:

Paradozen wrote:

Aratorin wrote:

You're rarely going to need to do it in combat, and out of combat, if you were to jump over a chasm or something else this way, you would be leaving the rest of the party behind, which in most cases, is not acceptable. The same applies to super high jumps.

Out of combat you could pick up your party and jump them across.

Or other members of the team will be developing their own solutions. Fly. Dimension Door. And so on.

Most of which cost limited per day resources and may need to have been prepared ahead of time.

Not so much at the levels in question.

Several classes have flight or teleports as focus powers, Brooms of Flying would be around, Alchemists are somewhere between 2-3 levels away from permanent flight (whenever they get Improbable Elixir) . Much of these can also be used to assist party members without them.

Exploration mode obstacles like chasms aren't that big a concern really.

With Cloud Jump + High Jump, does the horizontal distance change?

For example, a PC has speed of 50 ft. Jumping 40 ft. horizontally and 10 ft. up is within 50 ft. Can a PC make a High Jump to make it (1 action) or need a Long Jump 40 ft. and a High Jump 10 ft. (2 actions)?

With Cloud Jump + High Jump, it appears that you can still High Jump triple your Speed, but instead of doing it all at once, you'd need 3 distinct actions (and a place to land at the end of each of those actions). Is this correct?

Disclaimer, after a quick browse of this thread from 2 years ago, I favour the interpretation that the two parts of Cloud Jump work in tandem: The former part tripling the result of your check (or in other words, thirding your jump DC) up to your normal jump cap and the latter part increasing that cap based on actions spent. Something about the harmony of 3xDC jumps with 3x actions to increase the speed lends weight to that interpretation for me, in addition to it seeming to make the most sense.

With Cloud Jump + High Jump, does the horizontal distance change?

For example, a PC has speed of 50 ft. Jumping 40 ft. horizontally and 10 ft. up is within 50 ft. Can a PC make a High Jump to make it (1 action) or need a Long Jump 40 ft. and a High Jump 10 ft. (2 actions)?

With Cloud Jump + High Jump, it appears that you can still High Jump triple your Speed, but instead of doing it all at once, you'd need 3 distinct actions (and a place to land at the end of each of those actions). Is this correct?

I'm afraid I don't think there's any provision RAW for jumping both horizontally and vertically in the same Leap. It's possible I'm missing an important detail, but to my knowledge a cliff 40' away and 10' up could only be leapt to the base of, and then leapt up as a separate Long Jump and High Jump.

Long Jump makes no mention of any vertical distance covered, and High Jump only seems to modify the horizontal distance of the Leap action on a critical success:

If you Leap vertically, you can move up to 3 feet vertically and 5 feet horizontally onto an elevated surface.

Critical Success Increase the maximum vertical distance to 8 feet, or increase the maximum vertical distance to 5 feet and maximum horizontal distance to 10 feet.

Success Increase the maximum vertical distance to 5 feet.
Failure You Leap normally.
Critical Failure You don’t Leap at all, and instead you fall prone in your space.

Cloud Jump (and a few other feats) allows you to use the calculation for Long Jump for your distance on a High Jump (that is, DC 20 = 20') but makes no clarification what to do with High Jump's two options on a critical success (i.e. halving the maximum vertical Leap gains from +5' to +2' to double overall movement from 5' to 10')

So, RAW I don't see anyway to commit a High Jump that moves more than 10' away, so this is firmly in the category of "Pitch it to your GM, they might find it reasonable to extend that High Jump crit to net you some bonus unwritten horizontal options."

For a diagonal jump, I'd simply apply the single check against two DCs (the lateral DC and the height DC) to determine how high and how far you jump. Seems like the simplest and fairest way to handle it.

For a diagonal jump, I'd simply apply the single check against two DCs (the lateral DC and the height DC) to determine how high and how far you jump. Seems like the simplest and fairest way to handle it.

Bear in mind, applying the check against both DCs for a diagonal jump effectively allows both a long jump and a high jump to be combined into the same action(s). In particular, speaking of Cloud Jump, this would mean the maximum distance (aside from the speed cap) of the jump would always be 30' lateral and 10' vertical for every 10 points of the DC. It is a very simple solution but I don't think it's necessarily the best unless we are unconcerned with rolling the two separate activities into one (which to be fair, some GMs may be).

Of course, if we like the simplicity of this idea, it wouldn't be unreasonable to bring in an equally simple patch for the issue I raise: make the combined diagonal jump cost the extra action it would take to both long and high jump as separate actions. This way we are not getting too much work done with the one jump activity but also preserving the no-math simplicity of allowing diagonal leaps to combine both jump types into one roll.

Pre-errata Cloud Jump was probably one of the worst worded feats in PF2. I’m glad they’ve consistently mentioned speed caps in similar abilities since.

That said, around 16th level seems to have emerged as the level where permanent flight is common. So the feat could have stood to be a bit more generous.