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Magus definitely suffers a bit from being ranged in that Starlit span is weaker than the other Hybrid studies in terms of available feats (not just hybrid specific ones, but also some just don't work as well or at all with a ranged weapon) and not getting an extra benefit from arcane cascade, the focus spell is also a tad underwhelming (it's ok, but you'll have plenty of fights where it doesn't really do anything).

I'd just like to point out that doing 55% of fireball damage is even more underwhelming when you realise the sorcerer could cast 2 fireballs out of every single spell level it's got and still have as many spells left as psychic starts the day with.

The int one is nasty when it triggers, flat footed makes the attack more likely to crit and therefore more likely to actually interrupt and stupefied ruins your spellcasting next turn too.
It's just also much more avoidable.

Whereas the charisma one is damn near impossible to avoid, emotion effects are everywhere.

Druids can get flight for a focus point at level 8, literally half this level, out of combat 5ft air walk is nice, but it's not really on par with real flight.

Flight is strong because you can be out of a melee enemy's reach, bypass the need for climbing and swimming.

All this does is let you float over water and maybe not trigger a trap, but we're 16th level, traps probably aren't overly reliant on pressure plates at this level.

I'm just hoping Psychic casting isn't switched off by every emotion effect in the game in 2e, being able to cast in silence sounds great until you realise literally any enemy can turn you into a commoner with a simple intimidate check.

Agile only works on finesse weapons, which are generally just worse than other options.

You're not getting an agile Falchion, falcatta, fauchard, glaive, butchering axe etc.

Oh and remember you need 13 strength for power attack, and piranha strike only works with light weapons so is not an adequate substitute.

Agile weapons only deal 1x dex to damage even when two handed, as compared to 1.5x strength on a two hander.

So a dex based character is doing significantly less damage with a worse weapon.

Familiars really don't do anything, it'd be one thing if they were just some free RP thing, but witches and one kind of wizard are treating them as a major class feature.

You have some support for summoning, but summoning spells really aren't great in 2e, so it's hardly worth spending feats on.

Oh, it's a mistake, I was really hoping we'd just finally got a blasting spell with actually good damage.

Sadly most deities don't exactly have a stellar offering, not too bad for an oracle who can choose from quite a broad selection, but it sure does suck that as a cleric you might be massively screwing yourself over by picking a thematic deity rather than one who has good spells.

Arcane is good, it doesn't really have a unique amazing spell like synesthesia, but it has a much easier time targeting different saves than other lists.

Occult list is extremely will save heavy with fewer but still adequate fort save options mixed in and practically nothing for reflex.

Primal has plenty of fortitude and reflex, but basically nothing for will saves.

Arcane has good options for all three saves.

Divine is just lacking in general.

Arcane is clearly meant to be the generalist who does everything other than healing, which is perfectly adequate since medicine can handle all your healing needs, battle medicine is perfectly adequate for the emergency mid-fight heal.

It's true you don't really need a caster anymore, there's just not much that actually requires magic to do and utility spells are generally underwhelming rather than gamechanging.

Despite the complaints, I'm pretty sure this is the best setup we'll ever get for a gish and I definitely prefer it to warpriest.

Attack is probably allowed because it's really not going to be strong, a staff full of damaging spells is not a great staff, in fact it's barely better than a wand of the strongest spell.

Temperans wrote:

Guntermench wrote:

siegfriedliner wrote:

Decimus Drake wrote:

How much casting should they have gotten in terms of proficiency, max level and frequency? What of their other class features should be given up to achieve this?

I was rooting for 2/3 casting like pathfinder

2/3 can roughly be achieved with a dedication as is.

Needing multiple dedication feats to get what they should had gotten by default is not good thou.

Full spellcasting dedication (up to master + the breadth feat) nets 14 spell slots. That plus your 4 slots from wave casting gives you a total of 18 slots by 20th. "Standard" full casters get 27 slots (ignoring the 10th level slots). 18/27 = 2/3. There's your 2/3 casting I guess.

Not saying you're wrong in your opinion but if the hybrid/martial-caster classes started off with 2/3 the slots of a typical full caster and then still had the option of taking a spellcasting dedication might push them to be too strong.

I dunno....Just an analysis I figured I'd throw out there.

Those normal casters are just as able to gain more spell slots as a wave caster is.

Honestly you'd be better off giving warpriest wave casting and magus' weapon/armour proficiency progression, spellstrike doesn't work well with the divine list and is significantly less useful when used with save based spells, as rather than using your superior weapon proficiency for a spell attack you're now adding an extra failure condition (missing) to a spell with a save that already won't have the best DC (because int, or here wis, isn't your key ability score and you eventually get worse spellcasting proficiency than normal casters).

I think the new spellhearts might fix the cantrip issue though, just grab a flaming star for produce flame on your divine magus.

I'm happy to see it explicitly stated, I've been arguing that all these game mechanics are empirically observable in universe and that scholars would treat them much like we do various laws of physics.

10 is a number that shows up a suspicious amount sure, but there's plenty of physical constants that just show up everywhere in real science.

They published damage spells that don't work for neutral deities again, true neutral deities should just let you pick a damage type to use for aligned damage at level 1 (matching your own if you're not also true neutral, naturally) rather than simply locking you out of most of the damaging divine spells. Same for anyone who doesn't actually have a deity.

Elves are a classic fantasy race and as such a fairly major part of golarion lore and expected PC option.
Most races should have a fairly different outlook to humans, that's part of the fun of playing a nonhuman race.

Unless they're meant to be discovered as part of the AP I'd just let people have whatever rare and uncommon stuff they want, it's not like they're overpowered, it's usually just a flavour thing.

It's decent, at low levels it's stronger with a shortbow, but once you get a striking rune a longbow does the same average damage (2d8 and 2d6+2 are both 9 average damage) while doing more damage at a distance and having better crit damage. (And naturally with greater striking the longbow outdamages the shortbow).

It's an incapacitation effect with probably not the best DC that requires you to burn two actions and a reaction to pull off.

That honestly seems fine to me, it won't work all that often, virtually never against important foes.

Remember this is happening instead of say, move in, flurry, move away which costs an enemy who fails two actions from stun and having to move anyway.

Readying your flurry gets you a potential extra denied action, but also means that in the rather likely even you fail you're standing in melee range and eating a full 3 actions worth of enemy abilities instead.

I really don't see how this could be worth it to anyone but the wizard, 2 spells/level is just not nearly enough when spells are the only combat relevant ability you're going to have (the cha based casters are spontaneous so you're not even going to be good at intimidate/bon mot without sacrificing a save stat).

Champions are definitely more restricted than any other 2e class or even the 1e paladins.

Paladin isn't too different, though the change from legitimate to lawful authority does hurt as it doesn't let you just decide that the local tyrant is unfit to rule and therefore illegitimate.

Redeemer is majorly restrictive, expecting you to try and redeem all the evil people instead of just fighting them like every other adventurer.

Liberator isn't too bad until you realise you're not allowed to convince people not to be evil. Not too bad because while you can't threaten or coerce people into not being evil, nothing says you can't punish them for it with as much lethal force as you want.
Not hard to play, but really, really stupid. Who'd have though chaotic good would be the smite them all alignment, just make sure not to tell them why, that might count as coercion which we can't do.

Tyrant is awesome and basically just tells you do what you probably already wanted to.
(Pity touch of corruption is garbage to anyone but a Dhampir, because evil champions look much more fun)

Desecrator is a tad vague if you ask me.

Antipaladin is also pretty easy to play for anyone evil, just crush anyone who gets in your way, pay no heed to the law, and steal and decieve whenever it benefits you.
So basically just be entirely self serving and as violent as the average PC.

At levels 1-4 casters with weapons are nice, with the right ability scores you can be only a single point behind a martial in accuracy, you can even cast magic weapon to be really good for a fight.

Then the martials get to expert proficiency, monster ACs go up accordingly, magic weapon is no longer actually good and there's never another spell that gives nearly the same boost, your AC isn't good enough for anything dangerous to ever miss.
And now you're probably better off just moving further away from the enemy, using metamagic or even casting shield rather than flailing inaccurately at an enemy for unimpressive amounts of damage.

I feel like you must be using a very different exploration mode to me, because it feels barely interactive at all to me. You pick from the list of activities and get the listed effect.
You can decide you're sneaking, which just means initiative is now a stealth check rather than a perception check.
Investigating is just "The GM rolls some recall knowledge checks in secret and lets you know if you happen to know anything"
Scouting ahead doesn't let you spot foes in advance so you can actually plan encounters, just gives the party a +1 circumstance bonus to initiative (which is entirely redundant with both a fighter class feature and a general feat).
Search means you get to make checks to notice hidden stuff.
It's basically everything non-combat boiled down to a single sentence and maybe a (secret) skill check.

Thunder999 wrote:

Sure the GM is told it shouldn't pursue, but the PCs don't know that.

...why would the PCs need to know that?

Players should know that retreat is actually an option, even if it uses the Chase mechanics, not feel like the existence of creatures with higher Speed traits than their characters makes it impossible to ever say "Nope, this was a bad choice, I'd like to leave now."

Oh, and it also doesn't actually require knowing whether it will or won't chase you to try to run, so it's extra irrelevant that the PCs don't know this creature won't chase.

Because the default assumption of myself, and most people I've played with is that enemies aren't going to just let us escape if they have the ability to chase us down.

So it looks like the best shot at surviving is to fight it and hope we get lucky.

I'd just like to point out that the voidglutton is a fair bit faster than any PC is likely to be with its 40ft fly speed.
Sure the GM is told it shouldn't pursue, but the PCs don't know that.

Higher level encounters in APs are already nasty without overtuned monsters like this one.

So, do any monsters get silence, because that'd just switch off any casters in the party pretty easily, and unlike monsters PC casters don't get to also be good at other things.

I think one of the big things is that enemy casters don't tend to have any of the drawbacks of PC casters, they have defences appropriate to their level like everything else, they're reasonably effective with whatever melee abilties they have, they have DCs on their spells high enough that PCs are expected to fail relatively often (as opposed to PC casters who are expected to tolerate success as the default option) and they can just dump a whole day's spells into this one fight where a PC would cripple themselves doing that.

According to my GM it's super easy to run. Most of the players, myself included, feel like it's a definite downgrade compared to 1e, but the GM loves it.

What exactly does the wizard do at higher levels that's so impressive as to justify their many downsides?

Bombs don't count as alchemical weapons because all those little things that improve alchemical weapons are designed/balanced around the otherwise rather low power of alchemical weapons.
Making a thunderstone, acid flask or alchemist's fire better isn't going to cause any issues, those items need a lot of help to stay relevant past the lowest levels.

But alchemists' bombs are already a pretty strong class feature, capable of doing a lot of reliable nova damage (fast bombs rapid shot TWF for 16d6+4*int mod against touch AC with 16+4*int mod splash) and/or spreading a number of useful debuffs (those fast bombs could be entangling, blinding, staggering and knocking prone).

This is, by the way, a common talking point. I personally have gone with the idea that "sucessfully saved" is the default effect, and both "failed save" and "critically failed" are increasing bonus states.

I see spells like that and for me it just makes them all look pretty underwhelming slowing someone for a single round really doesn't feel like it should be limited to 2 or 3 times a day.

Apart from AC, bosses are meant to have 3 different saves :

-Good
-Moderate
-Low

This even without considering debuffs.

In either AoA and EC, for example, bosses have an average chance to fail a saving throw.

To give you an example, the last one my party fought by lvl 8 ( spell DC = 10+8+4+4 = 26 and spell hit +16 ) had these stats:

AC 30; Fort +17, Ref +23, Will +20

So, 40% chances to fail a fortitude one, 10% chances to fail a reflex one, 25% chances to fail a will save and a 30% chance to be hit with a spell attack ).

Unless you know what the boss's saves are in advance (which is pretty unlikely since the first you see of them is usually the boss fight and they may well not have the same save spread as their minions) you probably don't have many spells for each save, so a 10% chance your spell is completely wasted and a 50% chance it has only a minor effect for one round is really not great.

Now sure, if you know the boss has fort as his weakest save you could just prepare slow in all your 3rd level slots and then you'll probably manage to land one, but if you need to spend spells on minions and/or don't know in advance you'll have one, maybe two, shot at it and that shot will probably fail.

In 2e the enemy will generally hit harder than you, more often than you, outdamage your healing and succeed at their saves, you can't actually just stand and fight, you should be making one or two attacks then moving away, perhaps even make one attack, then use your last two action to ready an action to move away (so that you can provide flanking if there's not some other source of flat footed active).

Healing is a fine use of the cleric's actions, there's not many spells that'll do more than a heal after all.

I think it's a real problem that people keep trying to use "This one time multiple enemies managed to crit fail and it was awesome" as a balance point for spells when it's absurdly rare, it's not uncommon for enemies to succeed a save on an 11, meaning they only crit fail on a 1.
And it gets worse in the big climactic boss battles you'd really want to break out big spells for, but 2e is setup so that most boss fights are about hoping the boss only succeeds rather than critically succeeds his save so you can at least have some contribution to the fight.

Wish clearly does all the things listed with no risk at all, it's only when you go beyond that that issues may arise, in such a case I generally prefer partial fulfillment unless it's being granted by a malevolent entity who may prefer to twist it.

It is after all an extremely expensive 9th level spell, it should be worth it.

In a bad luck game it's save or lose caster time, since your spells are much more likely to work whereas attacks are all much less effective.

In a good luck game it's the opposite, avoid anything that uses saves like the plague.
But your enemies are also more accurate, so you don't really want to end up in melee, so archer or summoner would probably be best.

Doing almost as much damage as a not that focused ranged martial a few times per day isn't some great feat we've all not noticed, it's terrible.

Limited resources are meant to produce better effects, not worse.

Casters are never going to feel powerful, they'll never deal much damage (unless you get to face a huge number of weak foes, which is sadly quite rare), they won't be crippling enemies with a big save or suck.

They'll apply an unstackable (as in everything is just status penalties so there's no combining multiple spells to get a bigger penalty) numerical penalty and perhaps cost the enemy an action or two if they're using a really good spell.

This is a useful role as by default monsters hit harder and more often than players of the same and bosses will have even better stats, so those small penalties are needed to make the fight fair and one less action means the monster can't use whatever terrifying 3 action abilities it has or move and use a 2 action ability.

It's still pretty underwhelming if you're used to 1e where spells can make fights easy rather than just manageable.

There's buffs too of course, but much like the above penalties, it's all status bonuses, so once you've got one there's no need to ever use another.
Oh and remember that they're only useful cast on the martials, they're not nearly enough to make a caster competent with weapons and nothing will ever raise your save DCs.

At least you have a bit more variety in options than a martial (though only at higher levels, you'll spend a good chunk of the game stuck spamming your offensive cantrip of choice thanks to very limited spells per day)

Getting to target multiple foes doesn't mean they're using the action economy.

Also I really don't see the issue with the mentioned fervour for divine font, it'd do two things wonderfully, make self buffs actually useful (because you''re literally always better off just buffing the martial otherwise) and give people a good use for divine font if they don't want to play a healbot (because basically every good aligned deity forces you to go heal font, even many decidedly martial ones like Torag and Iomedae)

Nothing says poison is some evil or cowardly act, this is deliberate, there's a reason the 1e paladin code doesn't mention it while the 3.5 one does, Paizo don't buy into that nonsense, it's not worse than burning people alive or hacking them to bits.

Well the int mod isn't added to lingering damage on bombs, so I'd say that's a good precedent that it does not.

If detect magic is an issue you must really hate permanent arcane sight.

Bigger-picture response to the OP:

I don't think assumptions about magic reliability are breaking the game.

I do think there is a problem with PF's over-reliance on rules though. I think there is a dominant assumption (reinforced constantly in these forms, and several times in this thread) that PF is meant to have a fairly consistent play style, and that Paizo is the authority on how the game should be run.

DM-player adjustments to the rules are often referred to as "house rules" (granted, that's what the rule-book calls them), and I sometimes get the sense that people think these "house rules" should be an exception rather than the rule. "Rule Zero" is given less priority in PF than in any other RPG I've DM'ed in my 32 year DM career.

The game itself propogates the over-reliance, because it does have a rule for almost everything. How can a DM hand-wave a cool dramatic action when the rules say you need Feats X,Y,XX and ZZ to do that?

Following from that, how am I, as DM, supported when I don't think a player should have a certain spell (for good reason)? The rules say everything else that happens in the game... surely it would also tell us if the entire spell list wasn't accessible?

This all takes agency away from the DM as someone who builds a world with the players. It takes trust away from the DM. And I think it risks a RP environment where the DM is a 'rules-judge' in opposition to the players.

I suspect Starfinder is going to be a lot more restrained with rules, so the game doesn't slip into the same fundamental problems.

**I don't think any of these things kill PF for me. I am DM-ing it without these problems, but it takes a lot of investment and discussions with players beforehand so we agree on the style of game we want. It helps that all of us played a lot of more free-flowing systems, as well. And I think it helps not to have players with excessive mastery of the rules, or over-investment in this particular system over the RP experience itself. {edit - slightly ninja'ed...

It's because players expect the game to follow the rules they know when playing pathfinder, house rules brought in at the start are fine, but when the GM starts changing things half way through and suddenly that plan you had for your character doesn't work it's really annoying, rules for everything is one of the things I like about pathfinder, if I want to be able to do something I know in advance what it takes.

Why did he become a lich, what are his current goals? The signs that a sorcerer terrified of what awaited in the afterlife turned himself undead to ensure he never had to face it are different to the signs left by the power hungry sorcerer who turned undead as part of his plan to conquer the region with an army of undead. One might be a cave noone returns from alive, the lich killing all who find him so they don't discover his secret and tails of a powerful sorcerer who had a near death experience and became paranoid or lost his mind as a result before vanishing without a trace, preferably in a similar location to the cave. The other would be disappearances, sightings of large bands of undead, perhaps the head of the local militia disappears and the room smells of rotting flesh, maybe there's a chunk of zombie he managed to cut off before dieing that lets the players realise necromancy is involved.

You get +8 to perception. All but the finest coffee now tastes like badly prepared Folgers.

You get magic, just prestidigitation things so everything tastes great, the best bit is you can buy the cheapest stuff around too.

11 levels of casting and immortality, I cannot see any reason not to want this.

I trust Ssalarn's numbers, but he failed to emphasize that the vigilante is pretty much bound to his milieu. Dual Identity is not an extraneous bit of fluff, it is core to the concept. The consequences of exposure is a whole lot more than losing your scry defense. You are exposed to your enemies, powerful enemies who WILL go to stupid lengths to destroy you, they will attack you on every front, your resources, your allies, and any other way they can hurt you. Also, kind of cutting into the class's evident adaptability is the Mission. Yes, the Vigilante would be the perfect adventurer, except that he is bound to his milieu. Why he is involved in the adventure isn't fluff for this class, it is core. If there is no reason to be there, then this class just should not be there.

Ignoring the milieu unbalances the class. It is the same as ignoring the alignment (etc) restrictions of a paladin, the metal restrictions for a Druid, and anything like that.

Every other adventurer manages just fine with everyone knowing who they are, it's not like vigilantes are somehow drastically weaker and need to hide.

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.