Raising the Flag

Casters can not be allowed to do single-target damage consistent with the fighting classes, at least not without putting a lot of effort into it. Doing HP damage is the core competency of the martial classes. The casters CAN NOT BE ALLOWED to ursurp that one too, AGAIN.

Again? This has never happened ever, I think. In fact, blasters were considered pretty garbage in PF1 unless did super specific exploit builds. Feel free to nerf all the actually good magic, but this wasn't it.

a critical Snowball sneak attack

Awesome as that may be, it speaks more about sneak attack relevance than the low-level spells relevance. You would have done only ~5 damage less with a cantrip in that scenario.

So in the CRPG low-level blasting spells can absolutely remain viable for some time.

Doesn't the CRPG use PF1 rules for the base?

Blasters do enough damage even with just the 2 highest levels imo.

...

So, we're already approaching the equivalent of 70 rounds of damage without the 1st level spells.

Your math looks a little off.

The staff gives you, assuming the new more generous resonance rules and staff rules and a wizard with maximized spell power 2 more second level spells, in this case acid arrow. It would be 3, but we've spent one getting an additional 3rd level spell already.

My math could be off though, I don't know why your fireball has +3 damage to it for instance, I've included it in the corrected math but don't know where it comes from. As it stands, when the caster is out of top level spells, the martial has done 2/3rds the damage of the caster and could be doing that damage all to one target.

Overall, I'd say they're pretty comparable as long as the caster spends all their spells on dealing damage and you have combats with more than one creature, and the caster always goes balls to the wall and sleeps after two combats, the two options stay pretty close. That also requires the melee character not spend any feats. Making him a shatter defenses fighter for instance would tip the per turn average to 4/5ths the casters damage and twice their damage after those first four turns.

It does, although with some rules tweaks that make it work better as an ARPG.

In particular the thing that makes Octavia absolutely terrifying (she's an Arcane Trickster) is that any creature that is currently flanked is a valid target for ranged sneak attacks, basically meaning that as long as you have two melee fighters engaging the same target, she can make touch AC sneak attacks all day long.

Actually am considering stealing that rule for ranged sneak attacks so that ranged rogue isn't quite such a bad build, but I'm worried it might swing too far the other way. XD

Lycar wrote:

Casters can not be allowed to do single-target damage consistent with the fighting classes, at least not without putting a lot of effort into it. Doing HP damage is the core competency of the martial classes. The casters CAN NOT BE ALLOWED to ursurp that one too, AGAIN.

Again? This has never happened ever, I think. In fact, blasters were considered pretty garbage in PF1 unless did super specific exploit builds. Feel free to nerf all the actually good magic, but this wasn't it.

Oh sure, the real problem was that casters could get to a point where they simply did not need a party. Or at least not a party of muggles. How often did we hear/read that a summon is all the Fighter you ever need? And doesn't cost gold to resurrect all the damn time.

But a PF1 caster who WANTS to out-damage everything with blasting can absolutely do so. Do the names Cindy and The Mailman ring any bells?

So yeah, blasting spells are only half of the problem. But it does not help to boost damage spells and leave buffs/debuffs in the lurch. Ideally, a caster is the magical specialist who solves magical problems. Enemy flying? Make the beatsticks fly too. Invisible/incorporeal foes? There are spells for that.

Casters working TOGETHER with others are awesome. Casters making non-casters obsolete are not. However, the only way to ascertain that casters WILL cooperate is making sure they MUST HAVE martial support to survive. Let the martials do the HP damage. That is their ONE JOB. Let them have it. Casters softening up mobs of lesser foes with fireballs is cool (well, fiery hot actually, but you know what I mean...), blowing up the entire encounter, leaving nothing for the other PCs to beat up... not so much.

tldr: Casters dealing more damage then martials isn't 'the' problem, but it is 'part' of the problem. Boosting damage dice is the opposite of helping there.

Casters need help helping the muggles, not making them obsolete.

I'm not sure how relevant this is to the Playtest, but in the Kingmaker CRPG I did 60 points of damage with a critical Snowball sneak attack without using metamagic when my party was about 12th level or so. So in the CRPG low-level blasting spells can absolutely remain viable for some time.

That's because Kingmaker is stupidly broken when it comes to Sneak Attacks though, and it's terrible design. It makes Rogue 1 (with Accomplished Sneak Attacker)/Caster X/Arcane Trickster the UberBuild for any damage dealing caster.

Honestly whoever thought flanking should be a flat buff that applies to anyone attacking the target and not just the people actually flanking (let alone the fact that flanking requires 0 positioning at all) should be sent packing.

But it's not the most egregious mistake PF:KM has made from a design perspective so...we'll let is slide.

Honestly whoever thought flanking should be a flat buff that applies to anyone attacking the target and not just the people actually flanking (let alone the fact that flanking requires 0 positioning at all) should be sent packing.

But it's not the most egregious mistake PF:KM has made from a design perspective so...we'll let is slide.

That's because video games and TTRPGs do not play the same way and are not played by the same audience (although this one will have significant overlap). There are a lot of people playing CRPG Kingmaker that do not want to pause every combat to intricately reposition multiple players around the next target for every target in the combat.

With a party of six + animal companions + summons, that would get very tedious very quickly. It's also not always clear where the required position is, since the game doesn't use a grid, so you could theoretically pile up a lot of people in flanking position with Valerie acting as your tank.

They could address those issues by adding a display for where valid flanking is and add a behavior toggle to tell some of your party to seek it out automatically if it's available, but at that point you're investing significant technical resources into something that is also solved by what they did instead: "flanking works with multiple melee on the target."

That's not a game with a huge budget, and this is a complicated ruleset. I think they did a pretty good job of being as faithful to it as they could with the budget they had.

TheFinish wrote:

Honestly whoever thought flanking should be a flat buff that applies to anyone attacking the target and not just the people actually flanking (let alone the fact that flanking requires 0 positioning at all) should be sent packing.

But it's not the most egregious mistake PF:KM has made from a design perspective so...we'll let is slide.

That's because video games and TTRPGs do not play the same way and are not played by the same audience (although this one will have significant overlap). There are a lot of people playing CRPG Kingmaker that do not want to pause every combat to intricately reposition multiple players around the next target for every target in the combat.

With a party of six + animal companions + summons, that would get very tedious very quickly. It's also not always clear where the required position is, since the game doesn't use a grid, so you could theoretically pile up a lot of people in flanking position with Valerie acting as your tank.

They could address those issues by adding a display for where valid flanking is and add a behavior toggle to tell some of your party to seek it out automatically if it's available, but at that point you're investing significant technical resources into something that is also solved by what they did instead: "flanking works with multiple melee on the target."

That's not a game with a huge budget, and this is a complicated ruleset. I think they did a pretty good job of being as faithful to it as they could with the budget they had.

Pillars of Eternity 1 (and 2) already showed how to do flanking in a Real Time with Pause Game and have it require a modicum of positioning (unless you hace a Cipher with Phantom Foes). It still has the issue of Flanked just being a blanket thing that everyone benefits from, but at least you gotta work a bit for it.

As for the budget and stuff...they honestly shot themselves in the foot, in my opinion. They should've just adapted the ruleset as is, with true turn based combat, not turned it into a RTWP game. The game would be much better off as a result. But, we get what we get.

And besides, the game has way, way worse problems than a few finnicky rules changes. But I've derailed this thread enough, and I apologise for that. Carry on.

Tangent101 wrote:

Low level spells don't cease being useful. Maybe it can't kill an enemy in one shot but you still do damage with the spell - more than with a blade or a bow. Further, a lower-level spell that targets a foe's specific weakness has increased effect.

If you have 5th level spells, a 1st level blasting spell is useless. AT that point is it even doing more than a cantrip?

Which is okay, if you have something else at that level you can still use offensively (debuffs or something). That leaves the slot useful. Although it makes blasting pretty lousy given that actual effective blasting will be limited to only part of your spell slots.

Someone earlier suggested slots should obsolete entirely, and that is what I was replying to.

So tell me. You have an Ancient White Dragon and a GM that is competent and describes foes fairly accurately. After several rounds of combat and hitting it with powerful magic and your allies hitting it hard with physical attacks, the GM describes the Dragon as staggering and barely standing.

What will you use to kill it? A Level 1 Burning Hands spell, or your last Level 7 Augmented Fireball?

Or, let's say you are facing Lamia leading up to facing the ancient Wizard and if you retreat to memorize new spells you risk the ancient wizard being fully prepared to destroy you, compared to a weakened state. Do you nuke the Lamia with your Level 8 spells, or do you soften them up with some low-level magic to support your fighters and other melee types while conserving your hard-hitting magic for the Wizard's right-hand woman and the Wizard himself?

And hey, you even have Cantrips at this point that do 3d8+6 damage at this point. So your Cantrips may very well be able to save the day while allowing your Wizard to conserve resources for that last fight.

Just saying, sometimes you don't want or need to use your highest level magic. Sometimes... you want to hold it back until you're facing a foe truly deserving of it. And if you DO burn your resources, you might enter into the final fight with only a couple points of Mythic left and only prevail because said Wizard accidentally casts a Mythic Wish against a Sorceress with Spell Turning up and wish his Mythic powers away for the fight as a result....

If spell falloff needs to be a thing, then keeping the old spells around and having this collection of ever growing slots is itself pointless.

They could fix that by saying "you have 10 spells a day. Period. The only thing that changes is which spells you can put in them."

I'm pretty familiar with D&D 4th edition, and that's pretty much how that goes. 1/2 of the way through the game, you get your final new power slot, and after that, you just upgrade the old ones with new ones. It works.

It makes no sense at all to keep adding more and more slots while also saying that the ones you already have should become useless. That's just bloated, bad design. Either they must remain useful in some way, or they must go away.

From my experience GMing the playtest, casters have made the lower level spells more useful by using them for utility spells. The Wizard for "Mirrored Moon" used Feather Fall to great effect against the Rocs, and the Cleric used a lot of Auguries to help her search the hexmap. Vancian casting usually involves converting 1st-level spell slots from encounter enders at 1st level, to general utility at 10th level.

Really, they need to ask themselves if they want blasters to be a thing. If they do, they need to do enough damage to make it worth doing as compared to the other things a caster can do, or just playing a martial.

My own personal feeling, but casting spells as a Wizard should always be about solving problems. Sometimes, the problem is "That enemy isn't dead", but most of the time, the Martials can deal damage, but need you to overcome problems best solved with specific spells. Spells like Acid Arrow or Fireball are great "problem-solvers" for Wizards not because of their damage output, but because they can use them at a great distance, thus changing the rules of engagement.

I do feel that Wizard schools need to do a better job at boosting that PC's ability to fulfil the role of Diviner, Necromancer, or Evoker.

shroudb wrote:

Blasters do enough damage even with just the 2 highest levels imo.

...

So, we're already approaching the equivalent of 70 rounds of damage without the 1st level spells.

Your math looks a little off.

-Average per round for two handed sword given your numbers is 18.7 for two attacks.
-Average for fireball hitting two targets with 50% chance to save is 34.1, or 17.05 per target
-Average sphere damage is about 5.5, average cantrip damage using the same to hit numbers from our two hander gives an average of 7.65 for 13 total

The staff gives you, assuming the new more generous resonance rules and staff rules and a wizard with maximized spell power 2 more second level spells, in this case acid arrow. It would be 3, but we've spent one getting an additional 3rd level spell already.

My math could be off though, I don't know why your fireball has +3 damage to it for instance, I've included it in the corrected math but don't know where it comes from. As it stands, when the caster is out of top level spells, the martial has done 2/3rds the damage of the caster and could be doing that damage all to one target.

Overall, I'd say they're pretty comparable as long as the caster spends all their spells on dealing damage and you have combats with more than one creature, and the caster always goes balls to the wall and sleeps after two combats, the two options stay pretty close. That also requires the melee character not spend any feats. Making him a shatter defenses fighter for instance would tip the per turn average to 4/5ths the casters damage and twice their damage after those first four turns.

1st:

Why track "per target". Do you think that a blaster should for some weird reason deal equal dpr as a fighter to ALL targets? That would be absurd.

I specifically said you hit 2 targets since you can always do that.

Vs 1 target just use flaming sphere. Flaming sphere is around 8.5 dpr, another 2 from acid, and another 6 from a d8 cantrips per round, so around 16.5 dpr all n all (with basically a 1 round setup 8.5/14.5/16.5). With vicious concentration it could be even higher, with it adding up to +1.8dpr at level 6 and 3.8 at level 8+

2nd:

+3 damage is from dangerous sorcery which every blaster should have.

3rd:

Staff, with focus rules, for a sorc blaster is 6 casts of any spell in it /day

Caster is still 70 rounds/day of comparative damage without even using his 1st level spells.

I tracked per target in case we wanted to bump the amount of targets up. Why wouldn't I? "You can always do that" is of course wrong. I'm not weighing in on what should happen, just looking at the math. If anything I'm pointing out that their damage output is poor if there isn't more than one target.

Flaming sphere is 3d6. Average 10.5. 50% save chance is 5.7 if we account for crit fail. A 1d8 cantrip using your to hit values gives us 1d8+4*.65 = 5.5

That's 11 damage. We can get barely above 12 if we add the sorcerer feat in for flaming sphere.

I had discounted sorcerer entirely and didn't notice dangerous sorcery. That helps a little. My assumption was that you were using a wizard so you weren't stuck with blasting spells all the time, so I assumed a +3 charisma bonus and spent points on getting that 4th max spell slot. That explains the difference. Using our staff acid arrows only bumps damage up by 1.75 though, giving us a dpr of 14 spending all our actions. This compares poorly to the featless fighter with a 2 hander, and awfully to a shatter defenses fighter.

I tracked per target in case we wanted to bump the amount of targets up. Why wouldn't I? "You can always do that" is of course wrong. I'm not weighing in on what should happen, just looking at the math. If anything I'm pointing out that their damage output is poor if there isn't more than one target.

Flaming sphere is 3d6. Average 10.5. 50% save chance is 5.7 if we account for crit fail. A 1d8 cantrip using your to hit values gives us 1d8+4*.65 = 5.5

That's 11 damage. We can get barely above 12 if we add the sorcerer feat in for flaming sphere.

I had discounted sorcerer entirely and didn't notice dangerous sorcery. That helps a little. My assumption was that you were using a wizard so you weren't stuck with blasting spells all the time, so I assumed a +3 charisma bonus and spent points on getting that 4th max spell slot. That explains the difference. Using our staff acid arrows only bumps damage up by 1.75 though, giving us a dpr of 14 spending all our actions. This compares poorly to the featless fighter with a 2 hander, and awfully to a shatter defenses fighter.

Flaming sphere is 4d6, your math is wrong from the start. Ref save is also lower than 50% most of the time (accounting just 1 lower save brings us to 8.4 dpr).

Vicious conc adds up to +3 damage/round from the 3rd round and onwards (1.8dpr) and +6 damage/round from level 8+ (3.6dpr).

Any martial would kill for a feat that adds +6 damage from 3rd round+ (even if it was 1/round like vicious)

This brings total dpr of sphere of a 6th level sorc to 10.2dpr and at 8 to 12dpr. For a single action, single 2nd level spell, that last on average the whole encounter.

Plus "you're not stuck with blasting" is 100% the wrong attitude.

If you want to specialise for equal damage as a fighter, you should be able to do only that.

Being able to do equal damage to a fighter when you feel like it, and then swap to something else when you don't want to, us something that should NEVER happen.

And yes, that means that for blasting you're better off as either sorc or druid of the storm.

I see no issues with that.

No one expects a rogue to tank, similarly no one should expect a toolbox class like the wizard to easily pull off fighter levels of damage.

A feat based blaster sorc does much more Aoe damage, with much higher burst, and can keep just a bit behind in single target damage with a fully feated fighter specced for damage. Higher burst and higher AoE but has an encounter "cap" seems just about fair to me.

Plus "you're not stuck with blasting" is 100% the wrong attitude.

If you want to specialise for equal damage as a fighter, you should be able to do only that.

Being able to do equal damage to a fighter when you feel like it, and then swap to something else when you don't want to, us something that should NEVER happen.

And yes, that means that for blasting you're better off as either sorc or druid of the storm.

I see no issues with that.

No one expects a rogue to tank, similarly no one should expect a toolbox class like the wizard to easily pull off fighter levels of damage.

A feat based blaster sorc does much more Aoe damage, with much higher burst, and can keep just a bit behind in single target damage with a fully feated fighter specced for damage. Higher burst and higher AoE but has an encounter "cap" seems just about fair to me.

That's fair. And thank you for filling in my gaps on some of the damage stuff, I'm not a blasting fan so I've missed a fair bit. I'd quibble that the fighter isn't fully feated as I only spent 2 feats, but its not like the other two feats are going to suddenly make him blow up.

"Stuck with blasting" is my general opinion on taking a caster and going for damage. I much prefer the rest of the tool box.

Regarding tanking, so far I haven't seen tanking as a role really turn out. It's mostly characters swapping into safe and dangerous positioning while healing catches up to them. The only folks who aren't swapping in are the no-armor types. HP pools are high enough, and defenses are near enough together, that the role seems to be muddied.

You mentioned reflex saves being lower and that fit my impression but I had to check. So far it looks like will is much easier to target, which I suppose is necessary due to how much of that school is debuff related as well as the need to offset immunities. Knowing that reflex isn't always 50% isn't valuable without knowing how to hit changes in relationship to that change, otherwise we're just guessing about how important it is. I'm too tired to work out a solution for how to set percentage to land spells to 50% and determine what the percent to hit with an attack would be without a toggle or a graph.