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.

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.

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

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".

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The spell attack roll that does the electricity half on a miss is clearly the spell's gimmick that differentiates itself. I'd bet the heightening is what needs errata.

I feel there is a heavy trend in Remaster to kill what were previously the obvious power archetyping options, like Monk MC for FoB, Sentinel to get Heavy Armor for Barbarian, Sorcerer MC to get Dangerous Sorcery.

Which makes the fact that you can still get Champion reaction at 6 all the more puzzling.

The giant barbarian still eats clumsy for its oversized damage bonus. I think it's fair for the barbarians that are breaking even with other martials to not have an extra penalty.

The schools had significant value for themed archetypes like the Captivator. It doesn't really matter because they had to drop the schools regardless but the wizard being put in a situation where it is largely the same except it has fewer choices for school slots is deeply unfortunate.

People who just want to play a blaster wizard that does nothing but damage really should be playing a Psychic instead of trying to crowbar the Everything Caster into something it's not.

Yeah, the basic problem is that the game does not (and will not) give you anything for "I prefer to use ice magic, and never other elements" when you have access to the entire arcane/primal spell list much like it will not give you anything for "I prefer to use a sword, I will never pick up a bow and fight at a distance" when you have martial weapon proficiency.

There really isn't anything stopping Paizo from making a cryomancer archetype with a bunch of feats with effects that trigger off of doing cold damage with spells other than time and interest. Shadowcaster gives you some good reasons to focus on shadow spells, the Fireball support in Spell Trickster makes it a lot more reasonable to rely on Fireball as your main trick. There's plenty of precedent for leaning into spell themes with class feats. The better question is why there aren't more caster class feats like that, given that supporting particular builds and themes is how martial class feats work.

It's called Monster Core.

Arachnofiend wrote:

My issue with Outwit is that it doesn't actually give you more utility, it just makes you more likely to succeed at utility that any class can do. There's nothing stopping you from rolling to Demoralize as a Precision ranger, and in that specific case Outwit isn't even giving an advantage since the bonus doesn't stack with Intimidating Prowess.

Well it doesn't need to stack with Intimidating Prowess for it to be good? It can also just mean you don't pick Intimidating Prowess, which is a pretty good thing because it means you can just choose not to tax yourself to get +3 Str for that bonus.

I also don't understand dismissing Outwit as "nothing is stopping you from rolling to Demoralize" as other Rangers? Nothing stops Outwit Rangers from dealing damage either, they just deal 1d8 less of it than Precision ones and have lower followup accuracy than Flurry. No one said Precision/Flurry Rangers don't have functional skill actions, only that Outwit is substantially better at them. Not to mention you ignored all the other bonuses they get that aren't to Demoralize checks (Feint, Hide, Recall Knowledge, and AC).

You kinda have to cut the benefits of Outwit in half because the charisma skill actions and Recall Knowledge are mutually exclusive. You're just not raising Charisma and Intelligence on a martial and coming out of it with an effective character. If you're starting at 10th level and can build with Master Monster Hunter in mind then I can see the vision a bit better - Outwit starting with that feat would go a long way to justifying it in my eyes though I would still be skeptical. You're still worse at being the knowledge monkey than a Thaumaturge or Investigator would be.

The difference between the benefits of Precision/Flurry vs Outwit is that having more damage progresses the fight. Your support has to be pretty good to justify not doing damage, which most support classes do perfectly well but I'm not convinced the Outwit Ranger does. A Bard does less damage than a Precision Ranger because the Bard is casting Courageous Anthem and Synesthesia. What does the Outwit Ranger DO that isn't done by anyone else with much less significant investment of character resources? Is the Outwit Ranger even the best support Ranger when flurry has such strong synergy with maneuvers?

My issue with Outwit is that it doesn't actually give you more utility, it just makes you more likely to succeed at utility that any class can do. There's nothing stopping you from rolling to Demoralize as a Precision ranger, and in that specific case Outwit isn't even giving an advantage since the bonus doesn't stack with Intimidating Prowess.

Huh. Okay. I could see that working as a take. It would be sort of similar to the way that psychopomps can be wrong sometimes when they assign you to an afterlife. It's not usually going to be what happens, but it's totally possible.

It's the Rahadoumi take. The ability to do extra damage against demons does not necessarily lead to objective moral truth.

Red Griffyn wrote:

This is a weird stance to take.

Yep and it has a name: Power creep. It's a real thing that invalidates old builds despite the fact that they haven't changed.

So, to rephrase it, the power creep brought by Treasure Vault lead me to abandon one of my Alchemist.

Power Creep only matters in the context of the game as a whole. Treasure Vault giving the Alchemist good enough support that struggling through your bad build no longer felt worth it isn't power creep.

I think the actual difference between the archer Fighter and the Ranger is that the Fighter doesn't get anything to punch through resistance. The Ranger is combining two shots into one and adding precision die for a meaty damage roll, the Fighter is just hoping to get big enough crits for them to count. Pretty relevant downside for a build that's locked into doing piercing damage.

Monk/Bard works, though you wouldn't have Inspire Courage until level 8; a long time to wait for a campaign presumably starting at level 1 for new players.

I would actually recommend Monk/Psychic for this. You can get Amped Guidance right at level 2 with the dedication which will give you your Bard-esque support ability. Amped Message is an alternative choice, though you wouldn't be able to give your allies extra Strikes until level 8.

At level 8 you can use Advanced Thoughtform to get Psi Strikes, which is a feat that Monks have particularly strong synergy with.

The grappling stuff can be handled through your Monk feats, taking things like Flurry of Maneuvers and Whirling Throw. There's also the Wrestler archetype depending on how your GM feels about using different archetypes for your main class feats and your free archetype feats.

Horizon Thunder Sphere, Magnetic Acceleration and Chromatic Ray are all in Secrets of Magic, so they would be spells available to a player who only bought PC1 and Secrets of magic, but that is still not nearly enough to make the magus spell strike feature playable for anyone who wants their magus to lean into their iconic ability.

The Magus is also in Secrets of Magic. If you're saying that you can't play something you don't have the book for this theoretical player without access to HTS couldn't play a Magus either.

Conscious Minds that don't get a blasting cantrip can (and should) use Parallel Breakthrough at 6 to get one.

Sorcerer is probably stronger overall but I really love the Psychic. My Infinite Eye + TK Rend Psychic is arguably the stronger character I've seen in play so far. Amped Guidance is the nuts.

You're ignoring a ton of context in these comparisons. Right away you're comparing precision to sneak attack while ignoring that precision rangers can use d12 weapons and rogues can't.

In a world where Paizo has infinite time and money, sure, but the normal release (and errata) schedule already got delayed big time for the remaster. I think if you could get people to actually understand that PC3 would come at the expense of new books the number of people asking for it would shrink.

PossibleCabbage wrote:

The Raven Black wrote:

And I kind of doubt we will ever see new elements from Paizo TBT.

It's likely that one of the reason we haven't seen the huge explosion of different class options in PF2 is that Paizo is deliberately leaving space for 3rd parties to fill in those gaps. Since, as I understand it the basic reason you print an archetype to do something instead of "more class feats" is that the former is applicable to more characters.

But PF1 had 50 sorcerer bloodlines before you get into wild-blood or mutations, and there's no reason that PF2 couldn't do something similar, it's just that Paizo would prefer to let some of the talented 3rd party developers handle the rest. Like there was a lot of 3rd party kineticist stuff for 1e.

I feel its more likely they just want to avoid the bloat that made PF1 so unwieldly, with so many options that were underwhelming, uninteresting, or in some cases just broken. 50 bloodlines is nice and all unless you're trying to build a Sorcerer for the first time, and then it's a huge number of things you have wade through to figure out what to take. Especially if half of them don't really get used because no one finds them that interesting.

I know some people think more is always better, but it's not really true. At some point more is just more.

Paizo loves to print bad archetypes that no one will use in PF2. They're just "generic" so that they could potentially be bad for an infinite number of characters, rather than be limited to one class's worth.

Powers128 wrote:

I actually don't mind it too much. Otherwise archetypes like Mauler become feat taxes.

I mean that's pretty much where it came from. Singular Expertise didn't exist in the playtest so people complained that drifters were almost compelled to pick up a proficiency advancing archetype and they asked Paizo to fix it with a class feature.

Then you had a second group complaining that firearms and the Gunslinger's core features felt weak (with one example being that mathematically a Gunslinger taking archer dedication for proficiency and just using a shortbow was just as good or better than someone trying to play the class corectly) and asking for Paizo to address the shortcomings.

Then the monkey's paw curled and we got Singular Expertise.

The old Drifter wasn't getting a free strike when it reloaded its gun so its not like they didn't give any compensation. Still can't help but feel that the Gunslinger was a waste of valuable page space that could have been used to give the gun feats to other classes. Imagine how much better Stab and Blast would be on a Ranger...

People keep complaining about reactive strike, in all honesty how many melee players have eaten a RS while spellstriking? In 3 years across 3 separate campaigns and I've only ever had it happen once.

It's more common if you are in a campaign with primarily humanoid enemies. The magus in my group got whacked twice by a Fighter-esque boss a couple weeks ago.

And besides, if it's so rare that it can't be considered a balance point for the Magus why should it be there at all? They removed magic immunity monsters in the remaster because it was a pointless frustration to just get turned off by specific enemies.

I think it's noteworthy that the way they rewrote Channel Smite for the remaster involves removing the manipulate trait from the Heal/Harm so it doesn't provoke. The feat didn't provoke in the original wording, but it didn't used to involve actually casting the spell and now it does.

To fix the ranged problem.

Two inserts.
- Enemies are immune to taunt for a short duration unless the guardian is within 5 ft of the enemy.
- subsequent uses of taunt have no AC penalty to the guardian against the same target.

So there will be one round of getting that attention but no more punishment after that. you can taunt at range and get that effect once but if your not within 5ft by either them coming to you or you going to them you cant keep taunting them.

So your solution is to just kick em in the balls if they don't have 100% melee uptime? Surely we can do better than that. Personally I actually like the ranged build as an idea and World's Most Annoying Archer is more of a character I'd want to play than the default Guardian. I think we can do something to make melee more appealing without just saying "well you're not allowed to do that" to ranged builds.

When they said the Commander would be the "prepared martial" I was expecting a martial with the play pattern of a caster, where you have a wide variety of situational options to choose from round by round. Only having two and therefore only having room for "tell an ally to strike" and "tell your allies to move" is way less interesting than just playing a martial yourself. Class desperately needs some sauce.