Unknown Sage's page

The game doesn’t have spell attack proficiency. It has one proficiency for all spell casting. Boosting spell DCs 2 levels earlier, twice, absolutely would have a cost elsewhere in the caster chassis or be an absolutely massive power boost to all spell casters.

They actually do specifically have a separate "spell attack modifier" proficiency and a "spell DC" proficiency

so spell dc proficiency can be left alone. and thus there would be no cost. because it is simply keeping their spell attack spells consistent between levels rather than suffering for 2 levels early game for no reason and 2 levels late game for no reason.

But I can see that we are not going to agree on this. we clearly have different ideas/preferences on how the games balance works/should work

Tridus wrote:

Unicore wrote:

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The answer is actually "Do not try to equal the martials at their own game."

What would people tell a player complaining that their martial PC does not have all the varied possibilities that casters casually get ?

forgive me if I don't find that a particularly convincing answer. why is it that we specifically should not try to equal the martials at their own game at levels 5,6,13, and 14. But we are allowed to do try at all other levels?

And even then why should it be balanced through accuracy rather than damage (like it already is for cantrips, or by costing limited resources in addition to damage, as it already is for regular ranked spells? oh wait. looks like they already have built in counters to not be on the level of martials.

making spellcasters not step on martials feet by making them terrible at accuracy is a terrible idea when it could be done through lower damage values. because there is nothing more frustrating than playing a roleplaying game in which your character misses 80% of their attacks and essentially achieves nothing for turns on end.

Spell attack roll spells don’t “catch up” at level 7 though. It is a very real problem if caster players are coming into casting trying to have a “signature” (as in stylistically) spell they cast at all and especially for that spell to be a spell attack roll spells. Not the least of which because there are not enough of them in the game for that to be a good idea and probably reflects a character over casting cantrips like telekinetic projectile into higher levels because the damage die feels higher.

I actually think having one or two spell attack roll spells are worth having on hand in a day, because your accuracy with them against higher level creatures can be better than targeting anything but a weakest save…but you have to use the tools of the game to make that work, like true strike or a reserved hero point, and it’s not a multiple times an encounter activity. I think casters would be much worse overall if power budget went into boosting their accuracy with spell attack roll spells at level 5 instead of getting a much bigger box of toys to get to start playing with at level 5.

The thing though is that it doesn't cost any power budget to move those proficiencies forward 2 levels for spell attack rolls. because it is only a bump in levels 5,6,13, and 14. For the rest of the game they are at the 'correct' proficiency. All the earlier spell attack proficiency would do is make the relative accuracy consistent across the whole game rather than having random drops at those levels. make spell attack rolls actually consistently useable. And eliminate all the feel bad moments about at least the first 2 levels at literally 0 cost. All spells are already balanced for the equal proficiency because that's what they are using for 80% of the game. if it isn't a problem to have the same accuracy for 16 out of the 20 levels then it also wouldn't be a problem to just have this be the case all 20 levels.

It has literally 0 downsides and doesn't take away from their already existing features on level 5 and 13. It doesn't require any of the class's power budget to be moved away from their other features. because rather than increasing their power it is fixing a kink in the mathematics so that they'll be on the same level as before and after the 4 levels in which this is a problem.

I disagree that players really experience staggered proficiency progression as a big problem/when they do it is kinda just the same problem as boring adventure design in the first place.

Like I have never had a wizard character hit level 5 and said to myself, “oh no! Now my character is worse than the martials!” It’s more like, “I just got slow and fireball and can hit 5 creatures with a fear spell.” And when we face 2 cave giants (level +1 monsters) and I cast slow on one and it crit saves, I feel bad, but that’s not the staggered proficiency, that is the targeting a big bulky giant’s fort save problem, and if I had instead cast hieghtened fear, on them, the odds of a critical success on either of them are very low and the fact they have gotten a +2 to saves at level 6 and my providence boost to spells hasn’t kicked in is not likely to register at all unless I am hyperaware of creature numbers and barely playing a game at all anymore.

That is certainly true for your wizard example. And I suppose my example was mostly in reference to the spell attack rolls on casters. Spell saves for wizards aren't delayed. as they are a different category of 'attacks' and have their own base progression. If you were to hit level 5 and wanted to cast say blazing bolt or hydraulic push or any spell attack roll spell/cantrip. You would suddenly find that your accuracy has effectively taken a permanent -2 until you reach lvl 7. Which if those were spells you liked using for either their function or because of thematics. yes that would be a "Oh no now my signature (not of the spontaneous type) spells don't work well anymore" moment. And that is definitely frustrating. Because there is now an permanent artificial -2 dragging you down.

for save spells this would more be akin to looking at a magus or summoner. who from level 1 to 6 would be exactly equivalent to a wizard in save spell effectiveness (assuming same attribute bonus. or at -1 with one less int) but then level 7 and 8 come and suddenly all their save spells suck (which for save spells is especially frustrating because they already often have very low chance to succeed. luckily though there is the failure effect still.

Now granted this could be perceived as a very minor problem depending on your playstyle. and you could certainly ignore it and do other stuff with your turns during those levels. But that does not mean it isn't a frustrating design choice that has an extremely easy fix without any negative consequences. Simply aligning the proficiencies will do. And for easier compatability with existing monster design you can leave the spell save progression increase on 7 15 and 19. just make sure all spellcasting classes have it on the same levels.

But yeah I see this is not a particularly popular opinion of mine. But still I'd like to see it be different. since there aren't downsides to fixing it

Unknown Sage wrote:

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I think the goal of staggered proficiency is something else actually.

A common complaint about 2E is that leveling feels like a treadmill. You go up a level, the monsters also go up a level, everything stays the same, you don't really get more powerful.

Staggered proficiency I think is meant to take that smooth line and make it less smooth. Suddenly, at level 5 the martials get a bump to hit. Meanwhile the casters get rank 3 spells like fireball, which is one of the first solid large area long distance AoEs. Then at level 7 the barbarian starts to do a lot more damage while the champion races ahead in AC.

Some levels, one martial will be ahead of other classes in to-hit, and other times someone will be ahead in AC. I think Paizo intentionally creates some minor imbalance to make things more interesting.

Assuming it is the case that this was indeed their intent with the staggered proficiency progression, though I do not believe this to be very likely, then, as Squiggit nicely summarizes (see quote below), it is not a very good way of achieving this.

I'm a little skeptical of this. The 'treadmill' never stops being a treadmill because of staggered proficiency, it's just that certain classes become uniquely bad at things at certain level brackets.

The last sentence is especially frustrating because I can't find anything especially interesting about just being bad at hitting things for two specific levels before I'm allowed to be normal again.

... The argument that it's just way to inject forced differences into the game doesn't even really make sense, imo, because it happens at such narrow and specific level ranges and tends to apply only to certain classes.

Like every primary martial is on the exact same weapon training track. That kind of blows up the idea that it's some special way to make classes more unique.

I mostly agree with everything he says. It is simply not interesting to have the game go: "Hey you, yes you in particular, you will now suck at this thing you were previously good at relative to everyone else".

In fact I would go a bit further and state this actually has the opposite effect of what you think the intended goal was. And fixes the "oh the monsters are always equally strong" problem in the worst way possible. Because now instead of you outgrowing the monsters you fight which would be a cool "look how strong we have become" moment. Or even instead of some levels you are stronger than the monsters, and some levels you are weaker to get a nice back and forth. It now is always the case that you become weaker than the monsters. It is always a proficiency delay. No one ever gets them early with the sole exception of the guardians AC gain, which was only introduced extremely recently.

And because the monsters grow based on the quickest increase for. It is always the case that the classes that get their proficiency 2 levels delayed actively become worse not just relative to your fellow adventurers who may have gotten a boost to their weapon hit chance or armor class, but also the monsters that grew with them.

This effectively makes the level up into the delayed levels into a de facto direct nerf to the classes that get delayed proficiency. It is akin to leveling down in that particular ability. And that is a problem.

You may call it more interesting because it changes things up. But I disagree. I consider this to be more a fundamental design flaw in the game, because it essentially punishes you for leveling up. And because it is only for 2 levels at a time, randomly spread across classes for defense and attack proficiencies (except for martials who are all perfectly in lockstep with their attack proficiencies), it seems to me to be a mistake that didn't need to have been made.

What I think would actually make a more interesting game, is not to mess with the mathematical backbone of the game, but rather to introduce cool class-unique abilities that are exciting to use.

ScooterScoots wrote:

Verzen wrote:

ottdmk wrote:

exequiel757 wrote:

The thing is at that point why bother having each ancestry have their own HP boost then? 4 HP is only a noticeable difference at 1st level, could probably save you at 2nd level, and pretty much not matter at all from 3rd level onwards.

Because I have an instinctive hatred of "one true builds", and I don't want the choice of Ancestry to be more impactful. I very much appreciate that you can start off as "the toughest", but that ultimately it doesn't really matter much.

Id rather have the feeling of variance. For example.. a halfling barbarian is just as good as a minotaur barbarian.

However the minotaur has more HP, less evasion and the halfling has more evasion, less HP.

How are you going to balance each ancestry so that no matter what class you pick they're all roughly the same overall power? That's not true even in the current game, but putting more of the power/variance in ancestries is going to make that an impossible solve.

Not really.

We used statistic and variance mathematics.

For example 1d6+4 = 5 to 10 damage or 7.5 on average.

on a roll of a d20, we need lets say a 18 to hit the halfling but only a 16 to hit the minotaur.

The halfling takes 7.5 damage 15% of the time which equates with 1.125 damage per first attack.

The minotaur takes 1.875 dmg per first attack.

Lets for the moment just assume they only do one attack per round for the sake of explanation.

HP(H)/1.125 = HP(M)/1.875

1.125/1.875 = 0.6 or 60%

So the halfling would have to have 60% of the minotaurs HP for it to be balanced.

Or the minotaur has 40% more HP.

So if the minotaurs HP was 80, the halflings HP would be 48.

Yes. The halfling is far squishier, but the minotaur gets hit a lot more often than the halfling would.

This would help maintain that fantasy of minotaurs being brutish while halflings are innately small and agile.

So this is a nice calculation, and this would work well for the particular scenario you are referring to.

But if we were to have hp be balanced like that.we run into the issue that it breaks down whenever we are in a situation where the to hit chance is not 15% for the halfling, but lets say more realistically (for pathfinder that is) at 40%. A difference of 2 between the minotaur and the halfling ac would then mean that (using the same math you did, but slightly simplified) the halfling would need 40/50 = 80% of the minotaurs hp for it to be balanced.

Or let's see what happens if we go in the other direction. 5% chance to hit for halfling, vs 15% for the minotaur. Now the halfling needs to have 5/15 = 33% of the minotaurs hp to be balanced.

So given this I hope it is clear that there isn't really a good way to balance the game for all enemy difficulties by making hp adjust to variance in to hit chances as long as you have a system with also a large variance in enemy hit chance. We'd need to throw out this larger enemy hit chance variance for this to work well. and that requires getting rid of adding levels to proficiency. in favour of bounded accuracy woth relatively limited outer bounds

The PF2e approach of everyone has basically the same ac (except the tank classes) and minor variation in hp is the more robust solution for enemies with large to hit chance variation if the goal is that everyone survives roughly equally long.

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Anyway while we are on the topic of things we want to see changed in pf2e. I would like them to get rid of what I call staggered proficiency progression as a balance method in favour of a static relative proficiency progression balance.

What I refer to as staggered proficiency is the bit where proficiency ranks increase for example 2 levels earlier or later than other classes with the reason given that this class gets other things so we have to make them a bit worse at this. or the other way around. think magus. they are good at swords and stuff, so they get their magic proficiency 2 levels later than regular casters. Or casters with their spellcasting proficiency at lvl 7 rather than 5, which is combined with the lack of attack runes one of the main reasons they feel especially bad at attack rolls. or say warpriest which gets weapon proficiency 2 levels late because they also get spells, and about those spells. let's give their upgrade to expert at lvl 11 because we did give them the weapon proficiency increase early. what warpriest is not very good? don't worry we're giving them master weapons at lvl 19, 7 levels later than regular martials. or how spellcasters get weapon proficiency at lvl 11 rather than 13.

The goal here is clear I think. there should be tradeoffs to being good at certain things. you aren't supposed to be abpe to do apl things super good. But this 2 level delay here 4 level delay there approach is in my humble opinion the single worst way to do this. Because it doesn't actually solve the underlying problem. the class is still just as good at the thing outside of the 2 levels where it is delayed. Those two levels now just become a feel bad moment where your class is suddenly worse relative to the rest until they get past those 2 levels. (this is why attack spell rolls are at their worst on levels 5,6 and 13,14). Or in the warpriests case. it is just bad at both being a martial, and being a caster due to not getting either in the name of tradeoffs. Armor proficiency have this as well.

My proposal: have eveyone get combat prociciencies at the same levels (let's say lvl 1, 5, and 13 (and 19 for spellcasters). and make the tradeoff consistent throughout the whole 20lvl range starting at the differentiation point of lvl 5. this way spell attacks lose their extremely bad 4 levels (you still need runes to make them on par unfortunately. give em a gate attenuator for spells maybe? or do a less hacky fix and give them full +1,+2,+3 runes at the same time as martials while also separating attack spell and save spell proficiency and have casters gain attack spell proficiency increases at lvl 5 and 13, while save spell proficiency continues to legendary just like normal getting increases at 5,13, and 19) and all other classes lose their random 2 levels of just being worse at the thing they used to be equally good at.

and in the case of warpriest like situations. just trade their martial weapon and spellcasting proficiencies so that they gain for weapons expert at 5 master at 13 and spell proficiency at 13 and 19 to mirror the cloistered cleric weapons expert at 13, and spells at 5, 13, and 19. this way the warpriest has full martial progression, and a consistent -2 relative to other casters (similar mostly to spellcasting archetype on a martial) and cloistered has full spellcasting, and a consistent -2 to weapons proficiency (just like all other casters).

this does require some rebalancing on monster saving throws to account for the 2 levels earlier expert and master spellcasting proficiency. But it would overall make the game's math much more beatiful. and more importantly, eliminates awkward feel bad levels that do not really make sense narratively.