Arachnofiend's page

Yeah I don't like this Runelord change at all. This is very close to not having an Arcane Thesis. Your staff isn't any better than anyone else's, it's just free with an unusual list. Staff spell lists already struggle to justify themselves with the heightening issues. I guess all that justifies the Runelord is getting a better focus spell on your wizard now? The thesis is obviously strictly worse than Staff Nexus now, and if it's not as good as Staff Nexus it definitely isn't as good as Spell Blending/Substitution.

The way I understood it is that you're loading the spell gem as ammunition, and the bonus damage lasts as long as that clip is in the magazine. Which I suppose just causes more problems and makes it functionally permanent with some tedious maintenance so maybe that's not how it's supposed to work.

I do feel like the languages should all have an extra, "get you started" bonus. DPS++ should get martial weapon proficiency, servoshell should give you a robot familiar, Fortrun should get heavier armor. Viper should probably get a free per day spell gem? That might be too strong comparatively, the equivalent existing ability would be the Scroll Trickster's Basic Scroll Cache which is not nearly as strong and is a 6th level archetype feat. Still, I suspect it's not gonna feel great to blow your entirely WBL on basic class functionality. Some access to free spell gems should be available somewhere.

anyone can fire at them doing the same kind of damage a cantrip would do. saving their slot spells for big bursty moments.

To be clear, I don't see why if those other two are 4/ranks, this wouldn't be since it is doubling down on it's casting, unlike those two who have power outside of their casting.

Yeah it's a bit of a puzzling situation. Witchwarper felt like it was being held back from its potential by being a 4-slot, Mystic just felt like it was already strong enough that it didn't need them. Technomancer's "cool thing" is making its slot spells extra good, if anything it should be the only 4-slotter out of the three.

Yeah I'm pretty sure the jailbreak is for chips. It wouldn't be the only hack with a different use case when you jailbreak it; Virtualized Data Transmission applies to different kinds of spells for its normal and jailbreak versions.

Right now, I still see no reason to simply Cast Frostbite instead of Spellstriking with it, because the target still can resist it normally.

The reason is that it takes two actions to spellstrike a save spell, compared to three to strike+cast. I agree that a save penalty on a successful strike would make sense.

Blaming the rarity for the archetype being overtuned seems a bit silly since by all accounts the Exemplar itself is fine.

The standard solution to Bag of Rats tactics is for the GM to just put the kibosh on stuff that goes against the "intended way to play the rule". Like PF2 is a "strong GM" system, so whether or not you can stab your friends with tiny needles or not is going to come down to whether your GM likes that idea.

"You can drink your friend's blood, sure. But you have to be weird about it."

Thaumaturge archetype has to spend another feat to get the ability associated with its implement so it compares pretty unfavorably. Exemplar archetype is probably fine if you don't give the damage bonus?

I played a level 5 test fight with a Witchwarper built around exploiting the Aeon Rifle as hard as I could. It went pretty well, the class feels like a solid base for spamming out buckets of Sure Strikes. Obviously has the issue of needing to spend two general feats to have proficiency, I'd like to see a caster weapon that is more accessible to the casters.

I did have a question on how the "insert a spellgem to change the damage type" mechanic worked, though. The wording is can, which implies that if you have a snowball spell gem inserted the weapon is functionally versatile Fire/Cold. I feel like intuitively it wouldn't be optional and if you wanted to do fire damage you would need to remove the spell gem, though obviously it's stronger if you don't.

Not having bombs as a tool in the kit is a major head scratcher to me. Even if you refrain from using them as a normal part of your rotation just having them in the book to quick alchemy into to react to a weakness is very powerful.

One issue with using spirit warrior to solve runes instead of the bandolier is that it makes it significantly more difficult to get Quick Draw.

"Bucklers can't shield block" is a premaster issue, where the Sturdy Shield was a specific item that could only be a regular shield. You can put a Reinforcing Rune on your buckler and shield block with it just fine, assuming you spend a general feat to get Shield Block.

Having finished Cosmic Birthday I can officially say that I was a bit too even-handed in my last post and the Envoy is genuinely just boring as hell. May be the least inspired class in the playtest. Size Up and all the minor benefits that come with it simply do not exist; it's more restrictive and requires a more psychic player than even premaster Investigator did. I never got to claim the bonus, and I don't think there was ever a point where I reasonably could have. And even if I did, what does a locked in CHA/DEX class need Recall Knowledge bonuses for?

The real problem is the genuine lack of choices in combat, though. What would I ever do other than Get Em->Strike->Strike? Combat is too spread out for demoralize to be of much use, most fights stay well outside of the 30 ft range for that. The class desperately needs more directives, the only one in the future I see as being worth using is just Show Em What You Got at 13 and even that is just "use it on your first turn", no real decision to be made. We're rolling up new characters for a level 5 playtest so I'll be switching to a Witchwarper with an Aeon Rifle.

Moth Mariner wrote:

Terrified to see sneak attack on big weapons

Now to wait patiently for all the cool archetypes…

I'm really hoping that they made Sneak Attack with weapons you wouldn't normally be able to use sneak attack with dependent on Hunt Prey, so that we can have Bastard Sword Avenger Rogues, as opposed to say, just blocking out those kinds of weapons.

Unclear. Zadim's scimitar is already a legal choice for Ruffian rogues. I can't imagine they'd let us sneak attack with d12's.

Interesting that the bloodrager is almost an entirely different thing from the pf1 bloodrager. Team+ already did a great job translating the idea of that class, and frankly the new BR sounds more like what someone without experience in first edition would assume if they heard the term "bloodrager".

I vaguely remember the double slice barbarian with two non-agile weapons charting very high against target dummies in the early days of the game.

A mount helps a lot with this sort of build, I think. You want to commit as many of your actions to melee as you can so not having to spend actions moving is good.

Get Em has been better than I thought it would be in play. The reflex penalty is a meaningful advantage for the action in a world where the Soldier exists. Class's biggest issue is a lack of interesting decisions really, since Get Em does leave you with a very inflexible routine.

Probably synergizes well with the champions that have reactions for being hit. I like the idea of pairing it with Aura of Despair to make it super inconvenient to remove the condition.

Yeah but those two skills are way more important in Starfinder. It feels so bad to not have computers trained. Because you miss out on your level bonus to the skill check, which means you become a grandpa who can't google basic stuff after a few levels. Alternetively the GM needs to artificially keep the DCs low. Like when you scale the Request DC super low, because your player hasn't invested in diplomacy.

All the knuckleheads in my Cosmic Birthday group refused to raise intelligence so it's been left to my Envoy to deal with the frequent Computers checks. Fortunately I'm an Android and can Nanite Surge them but the skill does seem to be a bad one to not have!

The rotolaser having a battery instead of a magazine means that it's ammunition becomes functionally infinite at higher levels, but that's a balance point that I have no expectation or desire to see persist into the final version of the game.

Thinking about some of the weapons with no home among the Starfinder classes, the Nano-Edge Rapier specifically just... being a reprinted Rapier, which is a bad weapon for every class in the Starfinder book.

Which kind of got me thinking of the archaic problem and how I'd want a character using these weapons to work. If I chose to play an archer in Starfinder (I wouldn't but for example) I'd want her to have nanocarbon arrows that fit into the tech level of the setting. The archaic trait is kind of pointless for player facing options because if it means anything then the weapons are useless, but if it doesn't mean anything then you've got a verisimilitude issue.

It seems pretty reasonable to me to just say that the rapier in the Pathfinder book is a nano-edge rapier if wielded by a Starfinder character, and save the page space spent on reprinting weapons like that on the weird stuff that is uniquely Starfinder.

If you're using a d4 weapon, it should be because it's got traits that you are frequently making use of - or if it is a backup weapon for a just-in-case scenario that happens to have come up.

Which is to say that I am not in the position of having never seen someone make the choice to use a d4 weapon. Many players pack a dagger "just in case" but something like a whip can easily be a focal-point of a build.

And I think it's pretty amusing that most of what's being said against treating d4 weapons as viable is basically "if it's not the best, it's useless" false tiering.

Understatted on damage does tend to mean overstatted on traits, yeah. The weird d4's are the ones that try to make up the damage difference with traits like fatal. The whip has obvious applications but I'm not sure what character would be excited to use a karambit.

They could do a thunder hammer for a melee boost weapon.

A cross-compatibility issue with the melee weapons is that if you're using archaic Pathfinder weapons they are... often times going to be better than scifi weapons because the Unwieldy trait only exists in Starfinder. A doshko is a greataxe that you can only hit with once per round. Not sure what to do with that other than to simply say not to use Pathfinder weapons.

That entirely depends on how you phrase Unwieldy in 2e. If it's phrased something like "Attacking with an Unwieldy weapon is a Flourish action." then the problem of multiple unwieldy weapons is solved, since you get only one Flourish action per turn.

Don't even have to look at what other flourish actions Soldiers have access to to assume that will have way too many knock on effects.

Get Em notably can't be made a status bonus either because then it wouldn't stack with Frightened, which like half of the class's good feats are devoted to applying. If it can't be typeless it probably just needs to apply off-guard directly.

That is correct, proficiency is currently irrelevant for area weapons. Area weapons are still pretty weird and awkward for a Witchwarper since your action economy is already so busy though.

TheWayofPie wrote:

Swashbuckler trades the versatility and damage of a rogue for better survivability and being exceptionally good at skills in combat. Any roll with the Bravado trait gets a +1 circumstance bonus. At 9th level it increases to +2.

This is correct but also-

It's kind of wild to me that "worse damage but better at certain skills" is the direction they took the swash relative to the rogue.

Honestly does make sense to me. The core reason to play the Swashbuckler is "I have a particular skill action that I want to do all the time, and I want to be rewarded for doing so". The character who went out of their way to dance in combat probably should be better at dancing than a character who is just good at skills in general.

The weird thing is that, as far as we know, the damage runes are not part of the "expected player damage" math. They are a bonus on top, so removing them would presumably just be the intended experience.

Big caveat: This was said by the devs pretty early into PF2 and time (or my dumb brain) might make me misremember parts of this or even everything. So take this comment with a load of salt.

The ABP rules have this to say, which implies the opposite:

If you choose to eliminate runes entirely, this can reduce the PCs' damage since they won't have runes like flaming or holy. If you've removed nearly all treasure, challenges might become more difficult, even with automatic bonuses.

This isn't relevant to the playtest because there are no archetypes, but I'm curious how the "undetected for 1 round" from Warp Presence interacts with the Ghost Operative's abilities. It's a cool potential synergy even with the strict reading, but if Ghost Tap can extend your Undetectedness past the limit of the spell it becomes very powerful.

People keep saying Walking Armory just makes up for not investing in Strength but-

So what? I don't understand why that's a problem.

Like yeah they could switch the class to Str and remove the class features that fuel Con but...

They could also just not do that because that's what the class features are for.

The problem is that the class still has a number of options that ask you to invest in strength. If you decide you want to use those options you aren't benefiting from Walking Armory.

I don't think you have to but you certainly can. I've been considering a melee witchwarper that grapples enemies to keep them trapped in the quantum field. Worry it's going to be difficult to manage before the aura feat at six though.

I feel like I'm going through the same feeling as the Psychic playtest where you have this incredibly cool and thematic class feature that just isn't as strong as it feels like it should be because the class has spell slots. I think the witchwarper is a class where it should be correct to not cast a spell some rounds and for that to be true the field effects need to be plentiful and powerful, and right now I don't think they are.

Yeah I had the same question. You could theoretically have one of the twin weapons be twin+agile and have the other weapon be whatever traits you want, which seems strong... But the strict reading would lock both weapons into being twin/agile so that they're actually identical, which would be keeping with the usual design of twin weapons but be a bit unfortunate.

Just making con-to-hit the default for heavy weapons seems pretty ambitious. Con is already a stat you have to invest in, giving it that much offensive potency is something we haven't seen since the Scarred Witch Doctor. Though I dunno, maybe they aren't concerned about that given the Soldier already exists as it is.

Well obviously you're going to want to use a four-armed character (runs and hides)

You can't say that to me.

(Thanks for the laugh)

I hope the designers have more imagination than you do. You're so scared of the ghost of first edition that you can't imagine a world in which "I want to play General Grievous!" isn't met with a swift kick in the balls.

A lot of the examples given for witchwarper characters in the book fall under the "traumatic event awakens mysterious powers" trope which has generally been associated with charisma in Pathfinder.

Arachnofiend wrote:

"You scum are the reason it has to be this way" isn't a terribly constructive way to approach criticism. The complaint that started this thread wasn't even mine, I have no interest in playing a Kasatha. I made it on behalf of a player at my table who was very excited about playing a character with four pistols before seeing how it (doesn't) work.

Maybe not, but when the criticism amounts to "but now you can't do X that is expressly the reason things are this way now" it seems pretty appropriate.

If you can't multi weapon fight with multiple arms then the mechanics have failed to satisfy the fiction. Like every four armed character in scifi is using four pistols or four swords. It probably needs to be an archetype (iirc MWF was a feat chain in 1e so thatd be functionally the same balance) but it needs to be supported somehow.

Is there any guidance about making higher than first level characters? I know there is for pathfinder but don’t know about StarFinder.

Credits are identical to silver pieces so you can just use the existing Pathfinder rules for starting at high level.

"You scum are the reason it has to be this way" isn't a terribly constructive way to approach criticism. The complaint that started this thread wasn't even mine, I have no interest in playing a Kasatha. I made it on behalf of a player at my table who was very excited about playing a character with four pistols before seeing how it (doesn't) work.

I think if the Witchwarper is supposed to have good grenade synergy there should be something there other than "wait a minute this class has good class DC". A focus spell to manifest a live grenade in your quantum field would be funny.

This thread exists because I want to talk about the Singing Coil but a single comment about one weapon isn't worth its own thread so throw your other weapon design comments here too

The Singing Coil's description makes note of people playing it with a nano-edge rapier instead of a bow. This is notably sick as f$!$ but there isn't actually any way to do this since the singing coil is (understandably) a 2-handed weapon. I'm not sure how exactly this should be enabled but it definitely should be!

Wanna say that I love the idea of Profession weapons, trait is perfect as is, please add this trait to Pathfinder too.

Yeah I don't really understand why battery sizes scale up so much. Swapping batteries will feel very uncomfortable at low levels and then at higher levels you will simply... stop doing it? Your battery will be too large for it to ever run out during combat. It's strange.

I feel like the only real answer here is for Infosphere Director to replace CHA KAS with INT. Not sure how illegal it would be to have a nerdy envoy.

On a semi-related note, I would like a skill feat that lets you use Computers for Make an Impression if you're using your anonymous Infosphere persona. Call it "So Much Cooler Online" or something. Characters who can exert themselves socially online but fail to look a cashier in the eye are very much a thing.

Make CON the deciding attribute when it comes to heavy weapons.

DC for Heavy Weapons = 10 + CON + Weapon Proficiency + Tracking = BimBamBoomShakalaka.

It would negate the need for Dex (Soldiers use heavy armor after all, why would they bother with dex unless they want to use non-heavy weapons?) and better allow the class fantasy of the big heavy guy with a big heavy gun.

I mean, just look at the Iconic. That girl thicc.

I might be misunderstanding what you mean here, but I believe this is already the case? CON is your KAS, so the DC for Area and Auto-Fire attacks is based on CON. If STR was the KAS then it'd be based on STR instead.

The issue is Primary Target being a normal strike roll. I think it makes sense for Auto-Fire characters to want Dex but Area weapons shouldn't care.

The Soldier's class fantasy is being the biggest, strongest guy wielding the biggest, heaviest weapons. Walking Armory is a class feature that exists solely to let the Soldier be strong without investing in strength. It doesn't make much sense, and is especially punishing to Soldiers who want to mix in melee combat (such as with stock striker) since strength is frankly just terrible in this system.

Similarly, even if Soldier's KAS is not moved to Strength I think something needs to be done with Primary Target to make Dex less mandatory. If you were to use a flamethrower as another class dexterity does nothing for you, but if you're a Soldier it's essential since you have to make strikes where you normally wouldn't. I think Soldiers with Area weapons should feel comfortable dumping dexterity.

Woops completely forgot about this thread after posting it

I wonder if "free action at the start of your turn" would be sufficient to balance out the baseline and still let it feel impactful. Being forced to commit to which set of hands you use prevents you from shooting a 2hander and raising a shield, which is the main exploit you'd reasonably be worried about.

That being said, I think the baseline of what should be allowed with this is also pretty far away from the cap. A lot of people are gonna see that you can play a character with four arms in this system, get really excited about being General Grievous, then get disappointed that there's no meaningful benefit to doing that. I suspect the right answer there would be a multi-weapon fighting archetype, similar to how natural weapons were made a more appealing fighting style through the clawdancer archetype in pathfinder.

Sustained area spells like this usually have language that lets you move it around when you sustain it. Using the enemy-facing zones would be very difficult if you can't move the area.

There would have been some small advantage to the way they work in the original Pathfinder paradigm, but since the introduction of the Swap action a kasatha isn't really doing anything that a character with two arms couldn't do.