Arachnofiend's page

Squiggit wrote:

It does not take an action for a versatile weapon to change between damage types. You're thinking of the modular trait. With a versatile weapon you simply declare what kind of attack you're making when you attack with it.

In that case my bad. Though it still doesn't make sense that something like a morningstar doesn't do both types at once.

"Does whichever one is better" is functionally the same as "does both at once". It'd be silly to have a different keyword for the same mechanical result.

Something I just realized I'd like to see today is a switch-hitting magus hybrid study. The one magus I got to be in 1E used a bastard sword, and I'd like to be able to replicate them.

Inexorable Iron doesn't fit because it wants you to have a two-handed weapon all the time, and Laughing Shadow doesn't feel like a great fit because its benefits are meant for a free-hand fighter. I'd love to see something that's in the middle, though I admit I have no idea what such a hybrid study would look like.

This would have to be a specific synergy thing for Two-Hand weapons, right? Like Fighter's Dual-Handed Assault? Actually you could probably just make a Magus version of that feat rather than dedicating a whole hybrid study to it.

Speaking of which, I do think there need to be more payoff feats like Dual-Handed Assault for the more niche weapon traits that aren't quite worth a die size but kinda have to be priced as if they were. Forceful is begging for some way to capitalize on the effect because as it stands the scimitar is just not as good as any of the other weapons in the same class.

A general feat that gives you martial scaling on a single advanced weapon (or simple scaling on a single martial weapon) would be balanced with the existing ancestry feats. "Should cost, but not cost a class feat" is definitely the power budget of an advanced weapon, the Fighter feat is way too big of a price to pay.

I really dislike how hard it is to just pick up a weapon in PF2. While I like the idea of exploring tradition and ancestral history, I dislike the concept of culture-locked armaments, or of the idea that appropriating that culture is literally a special ability humans have (to the point where it's easier for them to learn to wield weapons from other cultures than pick up something local).

Yeah I really hate the design on Unconventional Weaponry. It would be better if it gave access to all advanced weapons that don't have an ancestry tag on them. Would be much clearer what it actually does in terms of katanas and such while also not having the bizarre cultural appropriation thing.

keftiu wrote:

Is there a description of that new Orc gun? I’m VERY tempted to have an Gunslinger from the Deadshot Lands with one.

The Barricade Buster?

"Developed by a half orc inventor from Alkenstar who brough the technology north to battle the Whipsering Tyrant alongside the ord hordes of Belkzen, the barricade buster deatures eight barrels fixed around a central pivot attached to a handle and firing mechanism. A barricade buster fires spheres of metal with extreme velocity and very little accuracy"

Its literally a hand cranked gatling gun.

This one's for the boyz who like the dakka dakka.

A pixie is the same size as a goblin, so about three feet tall. If you want to be pocket sized you'd need to pick one of the other heritages (Luminous is the one that's a standard-looking fairy) and the drawbacks of being tiny are listed in the sprite's ancestry page.

Oh, I missed that the fortress shield has a speed penalty on it. Yeesh.

I suspect there is an attempt here to make shields that are good enough to value without shield block; it would invalidate normal steel shields if you could upgrade the hardness on the fortress shield since the vast majority of shield block builds are strength-based anyways.

VictorTheII wrote:

Martial Crossbows let's GO!

The range on that Sukgung almost feels like a typo...if I may put a tinfoil hat on for a second it almost feels like they were going to release an arbalest that was a bow version of the arquebus at one stage, but they just decided to give the range to the suksong and called it a day.

So we're left with the best of both worlds, wield it in 2 hands and it trades the arquebus's extra features for 50ft of range. Wield it in one hand and it's an upgraded hand crossbow with over 3 times the range.

It does make some of the other martial crossbows harder to sell to a player though, since they seemed to have been balanced more harshly. Saving grace here is range doesn't come into play that often for most adventures so their utility might be enough if you build into them.

For example, Gauntlet bow being free hand means you can lean in hard into gunslinger reactions and never worry about having your main weapon reloaded before your turn is over. Heck this might even make instant return finally viable and actively encourage you to end the turn with your meain weapon unloaded and sudenly you can have access to every gunslinger reaction at the same time.

Basically the new martial crossbows are less likely to affect my current builds and more likely to open up new ones, which is good so long as your GM does not impose pre gunpowder tech. I almost wish there was a more generic martial crossbow that was just the harmona gun with less range for those sort of tables (for a ranger or inventor mostly), but It's not that hard to justify a homebrew when compared to the Sukgung's range so they should be fine.

I'd actually compare it to the jezail since it's its closest mechanical neighbor. They must value concussive a lot I think since that and range are what separates them. Apparently, it's worth over 100 feet of range in this case.

Well bludgeoning is the best physical damage type and piercing is probably the worst so it's not like they shouldn't value concussive.

I will say that if you are very interested in playing a rogue with a whip, you can tell your GM that rogues already get proficiency in the best martial finesse weapon (the shortsword) and that the rogue's lack of proficiency is a PF1 legacy problem rather than a real balance concern.

Secret Wizard wrote:

I waited basically the entirety of PF1E to have a historical Kensei-type warrior – unarmored master of katana, because I'm a chanbara film nerd.

The Warrior Poet archetype was perfection.
Sadly it was never allowed for PFS play...

I'd love to see a version for PF2E! Either based off the Swashbuckler or the Monk, at least a version at all...

Huh. Yeah... all you'd really need is some way for a swashbuckler to treat a katana as a finesse weapon, but as it stands....

The Aldori Dueling Sword is a pretty decent facsimile of a finesse katana. Sword Lords are definitely in the same thematic wheelhouse as the warrior poet.

At this point I'm going to assume they're not actually doing class archetypes like the synthesist or the Hyde Alchemist until proven otherwise.

Brutish Shove isn't bad if you're running a Reach weapon with Shove (I'm not sure there is any off the top of my head, but if so, it's solid), since then you can force AoOs from enemies.

The boarding pike is reach+shove; for a more esoteric option a leshy can take the Grasping Reach feat to turn the Maul into a 1d10 reach shove weapon with the hammer crit spec, which is crazy.

Arachnofiend wrote:

Are these books only available buying the complete set, or will I be able to buy specific ones I want when they release?

I know we at least don't currently have any plans to sell them separately. For one thing, the Foundry module is all one module that auto-updates as each ancestry is added, so there would be complications with splitting things up.

Unfortunate, but makes sense. Dropping a hundred bucks on this is a bit steep for my circumstances but the pdf pledge getting down to fifty looks pretty guaranteed so I'll grab that to sate my mimic-related curiosity.

Are these books only available buying the complete set, or will I be able to buy specific ones I want when they release?

The Energy Mutagen was reprinted and lost the uncommon tag, though I think that's because it serves as a stealth errata to fix the damage exploit. The crossbow is clearly considered fine by the devs given that they printed two new items that do the same thing, and therefore would not have the same need, though if rarity tags matter to you then I can see why you'd be disappointed.

Damn, I was really excited for Fury Cocktail but I missed the drawback on it... -1 to AC and -2 to reflex sucks hard. Not sure if that's worth it for a melee Investigator, even with the physical resistance mitigating it a bit.

Alchemical Gauntlet: Nice! If it has finesse, it's going in my permanent alchemist arsenal.

It's just a normal gauntlet so it's agile but not finesse. Think of it more like the Alchemical Shot feat for Gunslingers where it's a good payout for having a lot of "bad" underleveled bombs. Very good option for Martial/Alchemist Archetype builds.

A lot of hubbub is made about the mental stats but I think the biggest problem is actually constitution. The attribute does nothing other than prevent death, which is too important not to boost but is also not very interesting. It's a tax boost that probably should have been removed for the same reason perception was made fixed.

In a completely not-surprising turn, WotC just forbid any discussion of OGL 1.1 on the official D&D Discord.

They really want to burn the bridge they are standing on, I'm having the feeling that some boomer exec who doesn't understand the hobby came down on Wizards and told them to shift things up and get rid of that Paizo thing, this will be a fun catastrophe to watch.

As a wise man once said: "you couldn't even boycott Chik-fil-a". Hasbro can expect a month of whining from their community at most, and after that if the court case goes well for them it'll be business as usual with more taken off the top.

Well the flickmace had it coming I suppose, but if they were going to go after anything I'd have thought it'd be the overwhelming dominance of flail and hammer crit spec rather than a damage nerf that still leaves it the best one handed weapon in the game.

Nerfing the crit spec would screw over the war flail and maul, which would be clearly inferior choices for 2-handers without it. The die size is a big deal, you're basically paying the feat over the Asp Coil for that flail crit spec now.

Intelligence boosts should give Additional Lore instead of a trained skill. Far more useful in the long term, and means the smart character can cover creature identification entirely if they want rather than getting screwed by how many non-Int skills that needs and not being a Rogue.

I would like to see something like Traveller's "life path" or something similar, for both Pathfinder 2e AND Starfinder, which is used as an alternative way of generating stats that could possibly inject entropy into the character-creation process.

So -- say we throw all predisposed genetic traits in Pathfinder out the window. 10's across the board. And you make choices akin to Traveller -- you enlist in the army. Roll dice. Well crap, you took an arrow to the knee, and that's going to stay with you for awhile. You have an 8 to DEX or a -5 to your movement speed. But hey, you learned a useful trade during your time in the army. +2 INT and +1 Crafting, etc.

Those would appeal to me, anything to keep us from migrating blatantly towards "Unless you choose feats and other stuff that says otherwise, all player characters regardless of whether dwarf/gnome/elf/orc/human/etc. start out with 30 movement speed, are medium sized, and have 10's across the board with +2 to your choice of two attributes"

You know you can just play Traveler if that's what you want, right

Riding a horse is, at bare minimum, a free 40 ft Stride every turn which is quite good... that being said, if you get your horse through divine ally the benefits are extremely delayed compared to the Beastmaster archetype (you get the free stride at 10 through divine ally, or at 4 through Beastmaster). If you want a horse I might recommend getting it through the archetype and taking Blade Ally instead (I assume you want to use Szuriel's sacred weapon so no shield?). You can also take Beastmaster and Steed Ally, as Beastmaster's benefits would also be conferred on your steed ally and you'd be able to have two companions, one horse and something else for when riding a horse is impractical.

As for the Sacral Lord line... yeah, can't sugar coat it, these feats are weak. Definitely one of those class feats that should have been a skill feat instead. They also get directly in the way of the horse since they're the same level as the companion upgrade feats.

You'd rather have a game where everyone just uses guns because they're flatly better than every other available weapon? All right.

In the end Pathfinder is supposed to be a game where a badass with a dagger is on equal footing against a badass with a polearm who is on equal footing against a badass with a gun. The more you try to emulate the reality of how weapons work the less fun the people on the bottom of that tier list are going to have.

Tried it, decided I didn't like it. When I'm not playing Pathfinder I'm playing systems that aren't just another d20 fantasy system that I don't like as much as Pathfinder.

It is worth mentioning that Stab and Blast (and the new feat that is just the same thing at 6th) pushes the build significantly, definitely the kind of overtuned ability that you need to make something naturally suboptimal work. The build is pretty awful before you get that, though.

It's still incredible to me that the "multiple successes to pick a lock" thing survived to the official version of the game after it was such a laughingstock in the playtest. It is difficult to come up with a less interesting game mechanic than having one person need to make multiples of the same check to achieve a single result.

It doesn't work all of the time, but it works more often than you might think; plenty of very real encounters have multiple -1 or -2 enemies to bully with the tech, and when you have two different saves to target you've got decent odds that one of them will be terrible. Your level 10 character can trip an equal level Fire Giant every time, for example.

Having played a Sorcerer up to level 18, I can't stress enough how useless are low level spell slots. Before level 4 spells, you can ignore them, which means Expert Druid Spellcasting at a minimum. And even then you won't get much gain (and especially no gain that a simple low level wand can't cover).

In my opinion, just go Sorcerer, grab whatever you find to blast and you'll be fine. If you want more spells you can either find a proper Focus Spell or grab a few scrolls for tough cases. But I've found that the Sorcerer class gives you enough spell slots to last an adventuring day.

A primal sorcerer can just use all of their 1st level slots on Lose the Path and have enemies run around like headless chickens without ever using a main turn action so I don't think this is a problem.

Martial humanoids are built like fighters and usually have AoO. Martial humanoids tend to be far more common than their quantity in the bestiary would imply if you're playing anything other than a dungeon crawl.

A really popular houserule I've seen bouncing around the internet lately is making any ability with a range of melee/reach/5-feet and the manipulate action not provoke. It keeps ranged manipulate actions vulnerable while making it harder to punish melee people. Seems good.

It's not like manipulate can really be a balancing factor anyways, AoOs are too inconsistent and can either ruin your character or be meaningless depending on the campaign.

I've thought that offensive touch spells shouldn't provoke since before the game released. They basically didn't in PF1 because of the wacky "hold the charge" workarounds, and making it provoke in PF2 just buries a character concept that is already not as effective as the standard stuff to do.

Inexorable Iron Magus should work just fine. Magus doesn't get armor expertise until 11th level so what you can do is get heavy armor with the general feat and train out of it to take Sentinel at 10th, which is a dead level for the Wizard archetype in terms of getting spell slots.

Not even the flickmace is worth a whole class feat, nobody is getting advanced weapons without an ancestry feat that grants it. It is a good example of why Unconventional Weaponry should not be the way it is though (humans should get all weird weapons that aren't associated with an ancestry IMO).

If the players work together so they're not stepping on each other's toes, I don't know if there's a class that you couldn't make the entire party out of and have fun while finishing the campaign.

Like "Fighter Squad" is pretty fun in 2e, while it would have been a nightmare in 1e.

Fighter is probably the best class to do this with frankly. I don't think there's any other class that is so well-suited to speccing for damage, tanking, or CC depending on what weapon you choose to use.

I feel like a dragon who doesn't want to be caught and uses his mobility to the max... Will never be caught. You basically need a reason for the dragon to land and fight-- be it a high value target it wants, or just sheer arrogance in thinking these monkeys can't possibly hurt it.

Fortunate that arrogance is a central conceit of the monster. A dragon that doesn't let its pride get the better of it is like a lich that doesn't sacrifice morality in pursuit of knowledge.

I consider the alchemist a lost cause already so I'm more interested in elixirs that work with the Investigator methodology, to be honest. I was very annoyed when I saw that the War Blood Mutagen has a "no concentrate checks" clause that seems to exist only to prevent Investigators from using it.

Damn near all of the Wrestler feats require you to have a free hand or benefit making an unarmed strike so the archetype works very poorly with the gill hook. On the bright side 1d10 reach+grapple is an exceptionally good weapon on its own. Just Titan Wrestler and Assurance(Athletics) is all it'll take to make this setup feel good. You'll also want the 2H synergy Fighter feats like Knockdown.

The reason giving a wizard a sword doesn't make a magus is because the magus is associated with spellstrike. I don't think the Inquisitor has anything that spectacular that hasn't already been given to someone else.

I'm pretty sure everything the Inquisitor does has been divied up between the Warpriest and the Thaumaturge at this point; monster lore and bane are the domain of the Thaumaturge, and the warpriest is your holy warrior devoted to a specific god. The difference between an inquisitor and a crusader there is just skill selection, there is nothing stopping a warpriest from preferring stealth and intimidation over athletics.

Of course, this is hampered by the fact that people are generally dissatisfied with the warpriest's implementation...

The fire aura is hilarious. Now your whole party gets to know what it feels like to be a Flames Oracle! Very useful and fun.

Thaumaturge gets away with having Master in class DC because Cursed Effigy exists, if Legendary is off the table then something like that for the Kineticist would be fine.

I really hope they recognize they can't get away with this because if this is what it is in the playtest then people will be so g+@++%n angry about it that they will receive zero feedback on anything else.

Quoting myself from the pre-playtest thread because good lord I cannot believe they actually did it. Come on now, not even as an option you can feat into?

I have a feeling that the intent in this direction is that they want to get ALL of the Classes knocked out that they have plans for with the edition before they really dig into opening up a whole new serious batch of Feats, Class Archetypes, "Paths/Sub-Classes" and the like.... or at least that is my hope.

I think it's extremely unlikely that they will ever be done making new classes. Classes have always been the money maker player options, the thing that makes non-GM's buy the books. When they stop making classes it'll be time for PF3 and the cycle to start again.

Arachnofiend wrote:

I saw someone ask how to turn 5e into a sci-fi mech game and they got really mad when people responded that they should try Lancer. It is shockingly hard to get people to do new things even when the thing that they are already doing could never satisfy and is not even intended to satisfy what they want.

It's part of the broader problem that a solid chunk of PF player base are people who never played anything else than D&D and its offshoots, and in extreme cases, the only RPG they ever played is 3.5 D&D --> PF1.

This leads them to various weird ideas, such as desiring to have rules simulate everything (down to how fast the temperature in a cave goes up when you light a bonfire, in C/F, the cave is European, the moon is full) and thinking that a game with 43 skills on a character sheet is rules light.

What does this tirade about Pathfinder players have to do with my specific example of a guy that plays 5e

And on the other hand, pushing the classes to play in a specific way, limiting pp/munchkin from taking specific archetypes just for exploiting perks ( in this case, focus spells).

Fellas is it power gaming to take a spellcaster archetype because you want to cast a spell

Arachnofiend wrote:

I saw someone ask how to turn 5e into a sci-fi mech game and they got really mad when people responded that they should try Lancer. It is shockingly hard to get people to do new things even when the thing that they are already doing could never satisfy and is not even intended to satisfy what they want.

Sucks for them, LANCER's dope.

I don't think I've ever gotten so excited reading a player option as I did when reading the stuff that Horus mechs can do.

Martial and spellcaster are defined a bit differently in PF2 than they were in PF1 (see how the Paladin and Ranger went from having 4th level casting to only having focus spells). I could genuinely see the kineticist as a class with no slots and no weapon proficiency, just cantrips that would be overpowered on anyone else and focus points to push them even further.

I saw someone ask how to turn 5e into a sci-fi mech game and they got really mad when people responded that they should try Lancer. It is shockingly hard to get people to do new things even when the thing that they are already doing could never satisfy and is not even intended to satisfy what they want.

Paizo has kind of trimmed back on what they consider 'elemental' in PF2 with the options available to Elemental sorcerers and Elementalist spellcasters... I'm curious if that will reflect in the Kineticist. Will they get access to cold or electricity damage if they run water/air like in PF1?

Or are we going to see the four classical elements of PF2 in this playtest: fire, bludgeoning, bludgeoning, and bludgeoning?

I really hope they recognize they can't get away with this because if this is what it is in the playtest then people will be so g@+&&#n angry about it that they will receive zero feedback on anything else.

This is some kind of Paizo policy change to releases new classes or is an exception? Starting from now do you think that we will only receive just one new class per book?

In APG we have 4 classes released, since SoM this is reduced to 2 (with many people explaning that 4 classes in same book spread designers attention too much), now we have just only one class in the book.

Do you think this is Paizo trying to concentrate better in class development and to give more book space for other things (like new "subclasses", archetypes and maybe even class archetypes)?

I wouldn't get your hopes up honestly. The APG was full of player content because, well, it was the APG. The books that have come after have been very themed and split between content for players and content for GM's. I'd more readily assume that the space not being spent on classes is being used on setting information - they're introducing two entirely new elemental planes after all.

The Oracle archetype is kind of horrible unfortunately, since you get a really bad curse with no upside. I guess if you just used it as a way to pick up spontaneous spellcasting and ignored all the focus spells that might be fine but like you said earlier you aren't really playing an Oracle if you do that.

If you want to mix the two the best choice is definitely to play an Oracle mystery that wants to make strikes, so Battle Oracle/Thaum. Use an Asp Coil as your weapon implement and you'll be pretty well off.