Agonarchy's page

While shifters have history I'm much more interested in a class that has a static form that allows them to function more like a monster, with as many callbacks to actual monster design as possible. This lets you play directly with existing ideas like grafts, fleshweaving, and mystical bloodlines, without having to shove it sideways into a class with its own features. As the class gimmick you give them a cooldown system to play that plays into ye olde 1d4 round recharge powers. You can then tack on being able to change forms as a subclass or feat tree.

There are certainly builds and team combos where the feats are more useful or less useful.

Slam Down blocks the MAP for the trip. It does the most for a two-handed weapon without trip, but also helps with a one-handed weapon - even one with trip alreadt - if you have a free hand. Even for an agile flail with trip you're still saving MAP, though probably breaking even unless you're pretty sure about the strike.

Crashing Slam allows for some weird builds to work better, like a finesse fighter who barely dipped a toe into athletics. The damage bump is basically nothing but being able to trip reliably even at level 20 with Strength as a dump stat is pretty nice.

Claxon wrote:

I like slam down because you can play a two-handed weapon user without requiring that you use a weapon with the trip trait.

Yep.

But you expect Crashing Slam to be a significant upgrade compared to that given it's competing against other level 10+ feats.

Agonarchy wrote:

Not everyone has Kip Up. Guidance etc. are always useful unless you have something better, which may still be a one-action use.

I would wager a significant majority of martials do have Kip Up at that higher level, it's too useful for when you get tripped or get knocked unconscious/dying.

Literally any status bonus is better than Guidance (Bless, Bard Song, Wand of Heroism, etc). At that point in the game (level 10+), even just moving, raising a shield, Demoralizing, etc is generally better than Guidance.

Agonarchy wrote:

It's quite possible that your and your party's choices don't make the best use of the feats, but it's easy enough to make use of.

But the other level 10 feats do not require you to twist yourself into knots to be powerful.

Do you see that?

Tactical Reflexes is just good.

Disruptive Stance is just good.

Fearsome Brute is just good.

Certain Strike is just good.

Etc.

That's what Crashing Slam is being compared against. That's the opportunity cost.

A lot of assumptions about party composition, builds, and purchases here. Certainly may apply about a main class fighter for the higher to-hit option. Crashing Slam is also part of 3 different archetypes. Mauler even makes two-handed martial weapons count as simple. You are not guaranteed any particular status bonuses, and certainly not constant ones. Fortune effects are almost always one-roll wonders. Some builds just will not have a spot for Kip Up. It's possible that, for a traditional fighter on a traditional team it's a bad choice on the balance, but it's not so niche that it needs to leave you with a functional +5 on your third attack to be viable.

Agonarchy wrote:

Reducing the number of rolls needed lets you use single-use buffs for both effects, like guidance or fortune effects. Plus no chance of tripping yourself.

I assume this is referring to the original post about Crashing Slam vs the above discussion of Slam Down? Because Slam Down is still two rolls.

You're not wrong about being able to hero point or guidance one roll vs two (how often are you getting guidance at level 10+ though?) and eliminating the nat 1 case of tripping yourself...but if you DO trip yourself, you can literally just Kip Up as a free action since it's your turn. No harm done at all.

And those seem like very minor bonuses that should be part of a level 4 feat, not a level 10 feat that's competing with Tactical Reflexes, Disruptive Stance, etc.

Not everyone has Kip Up. Guidance etc. are always useful unless you have something better, which may still be a one-action use.

It's quite possible that your and your party's choices don't make the best use of the feats, but it's easy enough to make use of.

Reducing the number of rolls needed lets you use single-use buffs for both effects, like guidance or fortune effects. Plus no chance of tripping yourself.

Agonarchy wrote:

You're comparing a stance to a flourish. Slam Down/Crashing Slam may also trigger additional riders on the auto-crit, if any such exist.

I've never heard of any riders? Remember the auto-crit is on the trip, so it lacks all weapon traits (including magic so does nothing to incorporeals) and doesn't trigger weapon criticals or runes or anything.

I believe it works with "The Harder They Fall", but it at least opens up the possibility. At a minimum, it's a second instance of damage, which is worse if they have bludgeon resist, but better if they have vulnerability.

The main difference is, of course, still the stance.

You're comparing a stance to a flourish. Slam Down/Crashing Slam may also trigger additional riders on the auto-crit, if any such exist.

Agonarchy wrote:

For errata, having a brief window of planned support after each release covering major issues only would go a long way. Even just a window of one week for readers to find issues and one week to fix the top ten worst issues found in the previous week. This could all be overridden with a more careful sweep later, but would let things like the confusion over oracle spells get resolved.

I guess I sort of think it is ok to let this be a fan provided service that happens here on the forums. Players ask their rules questions, discuss them, see if there are consensus reached that cause those discussions to go away, and then developers can look and see if those are implementable in the products and line up with underlying game principles or if they need further tweaking. The rules are free to everyone so, in the vast majority of cases, this is not labor Paizo had to do themselves, nor will official rulings inherently make everyone’s games inherently better.

PFS makes that a less attractive solution. A good chunk of players purchase a book specifically for allowing PFS play. But this is why I emphasize the really nasty problems only.

For errata, having a brief window of planned support after each release covering major issues only would go a long way. Even just a window of one week for readers to find issues and one week to fix the top ten worst issues found in the previous week. This could all be overridden with a more careful sweep later, but would let things like the confusion over oracle spells get resolved.

Even ignoring the non-statically linked continuities and alternate timelines, deities and even just demons have such a weird relationship with identity that you can't really rely on "facts". There could be a new Nocticula, and number of equally valid ones, some sort of time loop, a split soul, a Piccolo good/evil split, an imposter, an entity formed from outdated lore, Nocticula being infested or forgetting herself, etc. etc.

The goddess of self-redemption on your own terms vs. going around redeeming people to your own standards. Nocticula's about self-perception more than external approval.

I am a reliable advocate for removing attack accuracy from stats. It does require cooking up extra uses for stats to give wizards a reason to max Int, but that's needed anyway.

The more free hands you have, the more interesting options there are. Nets aren't even magic, but they can do a lot as an opening move. Eternal eruption, even under-leveled, is great for when you're a martial fighting a swarm or ooze. Windlass Bolas is a great tool for abusing Athletics builds at a distance.

Utility items can be great with the right planning. Versatile Tinder box is handy for a patient pyro and for various bluffs. Flask of Fellowship, Bottomless Stein, etc. are simple but nice, flavorful tools, Decanter of Endless Water can be a menace, and so on.

Combat also doesn't have to mean getting the other team all down to 0 hp. From recent PFS examples:
I get lucky with a crit and one-shot the boss of a group of thugs in the first round of combat after saying stylish*, thugs all give up.

Encounter with a un underground room full of cultists with a narrow entrance, and I have Igneogenesis and immediately wall them in, cultists all give up.

Room with a few sleeping guards, and I'm a sneaky character with manacles; I cuff them to their beds and skip the combat part entirely.

Easy combats are perfect opportunities for a little improv.

* I pointed with a finger gun, said "Bang", and cast Needle Darts, and down they went. :3

Something the GM should consider, since they shy away from large numbers of enemies, is to use troops more often than usual. This allows you to have a wider scale of in-story combats without the GM needing to control eight fully separate pieces on the board, allows AOEs to shine, and is less awkward than there always being a swarm enemy.

Magic is generally not about high single target damage, so it's always going to be a bit difficult even with blaster builds. Control is usually going to be a lot more satisfying, especially if you build for spell combos, like any sort of damaging terrain spell you can sustain + any spell that keeps them in the terrain.

I would absolutely love a Book of Serpents, going over the various ophidian ancestries, giving access to sekmin/serpentfolk or a varition thereof, more details about their past and present, and a gaggle of serpent monsters,familiars, companions, and thematic magic, items, and features, particularly some more ways to deal with poison immunity.

Serpents have an astonishing amount of mythological and real life lore to work with, and the sekmins were kind of a big deal in the past.

Holding onto something would, at best, give you a circumstance bonus if the GM felt like it, but ladders are not super easy to hold tight to. Shove should work basically exactly as normal.

Though why shove down when you can shove down and *out*.

The Big Book of Scaling Items

Imagine a book where everything is still usable at level 20 you never have to get a graft ripped out because its DC is stuck at 20 or 26.

Brace is a tool you use when you're acting as a wall. You should not try to be a wall in an open field or against an archer. It's kind of weird it's not used for any spear weapons given this is basically what a pike/long spear is for.

Has Paizo tried a Precision Resistance to have a lesser form to use when it feels thematic, without completely turning off a precision class's core feature?

It probably needs some tweaking, since I think the level appropriate minimum resistance would still be close to effectively immune. So it might feel as bad.

Proteans have precision resistance.

A method of allowing siloed damage types to still be useful is to allow them to be converted into less-efficient alternatives. A swashbuckler or rogue could convert precision damage into a smaller amount of additional damage, and really you could do the same with elemental energy - have the fire kin bust out the sideaarm as they boost their speed or strength with elemental power.

I've been poking around with my swash build - finally should get to play it on Monday - and noticed that shuriken don't seem to be listed in the guide. With reload 0 they seriously ramp up the efficiency of Flying Blade, as you can now just carry a silly number of shuriken, powered by the bandolier, and use a more impactful rune than Returning. It also lets you play with metals and poison more while keeping your hand free for other things.

Swashbuckler makes for quite good "ninja" builds.

PF3, before any wizard tweaks, needs to have a major balance pass to ensure that spells of each level are roughly on par with each other. The imbalance between schools shouldn't be there to be a factor, and wizards become more attractive the harder the decision between spells is.

I'm glad the maftet got pushed up. They would make a great ancestry option. Sad sthenos weren't included for the same reason.

An Advanced or Persistent Weapon Infusion feat that would allow this would certainly have its fans, but the fiction is closer to a cantrip than actually wielding a weapon.

Basically, if you want reach flanking for a kin, carry a whip.

There are a handful of glaring issues which made 4E less fun than it was built to be, as much as I love the system, that PF2 mostly avoids:
* Monster HP was too high, forcing slogs
* Too many bonuses to juggle, PF2 is a medium to 4E's high
* Semi-forced builds. Choices were frequently negated due to previous choices, usually due to MAD.
* Almost nothing scaled, forcing you to abandon your powers to upgrade their output. PF2 does this with magic item DCs, though, which is stricter.
* Skill challanges were poorly explained and worse supported. Good idea, rough execution if the DM wasn't flexible.

Based on the D&D 5E 2024 feedback, a lot of players are hooked on the idea of summoning "real" monsters, so I think it would be best to add any formulaic summons as a new set of spells or an alternate option for the existing ones.

Narrow concepts like "pyromancer" are often narrow because of a lack of supportive options that allow a concept to be well-rounded in theme. The fire kineticist is a better example of what can be done, but misses things like fire-powered punches, melting terrain and objects, stoking the internal fires for an exhausting burst of energy, etc. which could allow a more varied set of options. This of course eats up page space and makes it harder to differentiate between builds, but the option go full Hunter X Hunter* with a theme is there, in theory.

* An anime that made the guy with bubblegum powers one of the main villains because he used it in all kinds of deadly ways.

Since a summon can stick around for a full minute, its round-to-round abilities have to be diluted compared to an unsustained spell. You might be able to have higher-powered summons with less issue if you had to constantly feed them spell slots.

The masks topic is actually near and dear to me. I have two characters about to start their PFS journey both with masks: An ifrit nagaji swashbuckler and a kholo magus.

Swashbuckler can't afford the ifrit smoke vision feat, but can use the goz mask for the same effect. The mask has no DC to worry about AND it scales! I can always use the mask to be a smoke ninja with hypno eyes.

Kholo magus has Cha as a dump stat. They're basically a stuttering noble out of combat. In combat, they put on a kitsune mask drop the kimono hiding their bone armor, and start laughing madly. Demon mask would be perfect here to let them be scary despite the dump stat, but only for a few levels

You can always just use a minimum DC.

Getting an amazing level 10 item at level 2 only to sell it as vendor trash at level 14...

It's too much like WoW or Borderlands for my tastes, though at least without level limits to use.

As for masks... characters wearing masks is an extremely popular trope.

It's especially bad for niche things. If I get the Toxic Blood graft because I kept getting bit at level 1-8, but I don't encounter anything that it would affect again until level 16, it's going to feel really bad.

As a player, I'm more than happy to pay the treadmill cost as long as I get to keep doing the thing so I can make doing the thing part of my kit and my story. This also goes for things that don't scale in other ways, like the lifting belt being stuck at +1 athletics - it shouldn't be something that you automatically discard once Sash of Prowess etc. come along because of math and limited slots.

Some people may enjoy the episode/comic-style scenario where you bust out a fun gadget during one adventure and it's never seen ever again, but I think it's more typical for people to want to build their characters up into a routine or theme. We have consumables and prescient planner for one-offs already.

Compatability between the systems is a bonus, but SF2 is intended to stand on its own. A pure SF2 experience should feel different than a pure PF2 experience and from a hybrid experience. It will take a bit for the options to be fleshed out; PF2E has quite a few more books to work with.

Kineticists are pretty well designed to break survival scenarios in general. That's part of their fun, but it needs to be considered for any survival game. If you want hardcore mode, you'll need to nerf them or limit their build options (probably to air and fiee).

Session zero, X-Cards, etc. exist for any actual discomfort issues. GM fiat exists for the annoyance issues.

Removing the divine element you could easily have things like warriors codes, personal ethos, etc. Certainly I would be distracted an ineffective if I violated one of my personal anethema, like ignoring the suffering of a friend or treating someone as a stereotype instead of an individual. If I were a terrible person, I would similarly kicking myself for failing to take advantage of someone being in a bad situation, like one if them bleeding heart goody goody suckers.

It's all fiction in a world no more real than The Land of Oz or Wonderland, so what ultimately matters is the table experience, but I'm happy to use the rules as written.

You could have some kind of ammo miniturizer or something but it does at least require more explanation than "battery gots more juice".

On the plus side, solid ammo is less likely to be drained by a monster to power its electro-gamma breath.

All drink, no pay
When you sneak the kegs away

Clumsy longshanks topple hard
Guitar strings strangle noisy bard

Snatch the treasure, reap the spoils
Of stupid dwarf and halfling toils

Burn the doggies, horsies too
Boil what's left into a stew

Eat a pickle, stab an elf
Goblins' lifestyle is top shelf!

We really do need more tools for low-impact equipment mods. I want concealable polearms that look like staves until the pointy bits spring up, or whips that look like belts.

The point of a free hand weapon is being able to do multiple things instead of one thing. If you only want to do one thing they aren't going to be for you. For those who like to do multiple things, they save a lot of actions on drawing and stowing weapons.

They make for great side weapons for agile and maneuvers, secondary damage and crit options, etc. Tekko-kage pairs well with rapier, for example, since sword crits grant off-guard which is often easy to get.

There's room for developing essentially a punk metal version offshoot of Hellknights through a civil war that rejects devils but still carries some of the feel, but in a defaced way, in the way that tieflings might acknowledge their heritage while rejecting its ethos. They might even do things like Hack Hell to sabotage it, screw with their records, etc. Hellpunks could be a good time while further exploring the topic area. They could even be reforming devils here and there. Plus the art would be amazing.

If one is to fiddle with prep, you can just say that wizards can prepare additional spells per day per slot, but their actual casting per day is the same.

Say I prepare the following list:

Fireball
Fireball
Iceball
Earthball
Snotball
Puppyball

I can cast:
Fireball
Fireball
SnotbalL
Puppyball

but I cannot cast

Fireball
Fireball
Fireball
Fireball

or

Fireball
Fireball
Puppyball
Puppyball

Versatility up, power the same, not stepping on Spontaneous, mostly just makes analysis paralysis worse.

More finesse weapons, body augment style weapons, and more themed weapons like the singing spear and singing coil. I want it to be possible to have a cross between the Silverhawks and Josie and the Pussycats.

Personally I'm more of an Ethereal Plane fan, but I'm always interested in transitive planes.

It could be interesting to delve deeper into wizard magic use specifically and how it differs from sorcery or granted magic. Perhaps some sort of effect lingers from having cast spells, instead if simply depleting them.

The classic D&D-inspired wizard is built around the core of collecting spells so they can have the perfect spell for the given scenario as long as they predict the scenario correctly, unless you want to go so far back that they are literally just fantasy artillery with limited ammo. Any version of a wizard that doesn't have to pick and choose spells every day has no particular reason to be called a wizard over any other name.

The fact that divine magic used to top out at 7th level instead of 9th was a partial mitigation between sources to balance out the full list access of divibe casters, but this obviously is no longer the case.

Given the variety of casters who can use arcane lists and other lists in the same way, the lists should be balanced with each other, and parity should be with the class. Wizarda should lean into the strengths of arcane a bit, but shouldn't automaticallu be the "correct" class for arcane casting over the witch.

Preaumably they somewhat deconstruct the armor and position it as needed, like a gelatin mold full of metal bits trying to move in the path of an incoming attack.