Ascalaphus's page

Okay, that'll teach me to just assume I know what's on the far end of a link, I thought you were pointing to your shifter class :P I'll have to go and check our your scion writeup too then.

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I kinda liked the premaster magus coupling of Strike and spell attack because it also made the class good at working with innate cantrips and spells from multiclassing, such as adding Divine Lance so you could get your arcane cascade set to Holy. But the remaster put some sand in those gears because there's fewer attack spells, you need to get sanctified, and damage types and damage traits are more of a separate concept now, which is something arcane cascade wasn't really written to handle.

But the magus being the "jock" caster that can be accurate without a high casting stat is something I'd like to keep around, it allows some unusual builds that other casters couldn't really pull off. I wish there was an elegant way to actually make save spells borrow some of the accuracy of your strikes

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What I like about my ideas for refurbishing arcane cascade in that proposal is that it fits well with remaster ideas about set-up activities. Barbarians are now encouraged to stick to medium armor and enter rage during initiative rolls. Swashbucklers have decent ways to start the combat with panache and regain it efficiently with tumbling even on a failed roll.

Paizo loves the idea of set-up powers (see also, unleash psyche, as well as feats like Dazing Blow that are really hard to execute in a single round. Or poisons and persistent damage, or spells like Impending Doom. But what they struggle with is making the set-up short enough to fit the typical combat duration.

With my proposal, you'd pretty much always get arcane cascade set up on round 1. Depending on whether you need to move up to enemies, it might be after a spellstrike, but it could also be with the conflux spells. It fixes a feels-bad of conflux spells that their low action cost makes them good for round-1 but then you wouldn't get the nice side effects. But if you had a combat round where you need to draw a weapon, move to an opponent, then using a conflux spell to still get a strike in and set up arcane cascade would feel like a pretty clean correct opening play. And if enemies had already come to you, you can open with a cantrip-spellstrike instead and get your cascade going that way, too. So you're not locked into the opening move being exactly the same every time.

Automatically recharging spellstrike also opens up a couple of other playbooks, such as reload weapons and shields.

And by making it so you generally can't get in a focus-spell based spellstrike in until turn 2, that balances out that power pretty well.

Hmm, so you're speculating a magus that would work something like:
* You can spellstrike with cantrips
* You can't spellstrike with focus/slotted spells
* Spellstrike doesn't need recharge

And, as currently:
* If your spell uses a spell attack, use your strike result to determine the spell attack result as well
* If you spellstrike with a saving throw spell, the target rolls the save normally unless you critically missed the attack roll

That's definitely a bigger shake-up but it could have some interesting implications;
- it would incentivize much more than now, to use your slots for buffing, not necessarily always spellstriking
- if you needed to do at least SOME damage, you could use a saving throw cantrip; but if you're in a good situation (flank, attack bonus from somewhere) you'd have a higher expected value from using an attack spell. So the optimal move would vary more from situation to situation instead of having one best trick you always pull.
- the upper end of damage goes down a bit because you're always only using cantrips, perhaps opening up budget to boost arcane cascade numbers instead
- not needing to recharge spellstrike frees up action economy a bit, also helping to find action budget to activate arcane cascade

However, I do foresee hurt feelings that you can't use spellstrike to deliver e.g. disintegrate.

I think it's been proposed before that when using spellstrike with cantrips, you wouldn't have to recharge. That might be an interesting trade-off: if you use higher damage focus/slot spells you pay action economy costs.

Or you could perhaps flip it around; you start combat with spellstrike un-charged, and it needs to be charged to use it with a slot/focus spell. But you can use it un-charged with a cantrip. This would create a new dynamic where you'd actually want to open up combat with a conflux spell instead of the conflux spells being awkward "don't want to use it before the first spellstrike because then you're not getting any recharge".

You could go even further and merge the charging mechanic with arcane cascade:
- you start combat without arcane cascade active
- you can activate arcane cascade for free after you cast any spell (notably, including after a spellstrike or conflux spell)
- until you've activated arcane cascade, you can't spellstrike with slot/focus spells
- once activated, arcane cascade keeps running just like any stance
- you no longer need to recharge spellstrike because you stay in the stance

It would move the "big hit" moment to round 2. Conflux spells compete with cantrips for your round 1 action. Conflux spells also fit well with an opening of "recall knowledge, move, conflux-based strike".

I'm really struggling to figure out what would be the happiest outcome. As I posted in the other thread, I think it's become clear that "the people want to spellstrike with focus spells". It's on the table and why wouldn't you? By level 6, the difference between Fire Ray and Ignition is 3d6. The difference between Gouging Claw and Imaginary Weapon is 4d6 vs 8d8.

You could do that kind of damage with your "wave" spells. Your top rank spell slots should be competitive with focus spells. But you only have five per day, and your adventuring day might be longer than 2-3 encounters. Or you might want to cast a utility or buff spell sometimes.

The focus spells exist, we know they're there, it doesn't make sense to pretend they're not available. Either they need to really not be available, or we need to take them into account in design.

If we want to hold on to the "conflux recharge spellstrike" paradigm, then whatever those conflux spells do needs to be impressive enough that it measures up to the difference between a cantrip and an external focus spell. And right now they really don't.

So the question is: do we drop the requirement that conflux spells are your thing that you do when you're NOT spellstriking?

I guess maybe we should. To win people back over from multiclassing, the in-class offerings should offer at least a couple of spellstrike-compatible focus spells with competitive damage.

You typically spend feats to get focus spells so any given character probably will only have one go-to focus blast, and keep pressing that button every round if they can swing the action economy. But it's possible to write a couple variants that do different things that are about equally good. Maybe one does a d12 while the other does a d10 but can also knock enemies prone on a failed save. I mean, people use other weapons than just the d12 weapons too because those other weapons do something useful. And that way, not every magus is going to be built identically.

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Aside from that: yeah, I agree attack spells are not a great paradigm. Right now I feel the extra complexity the game has to have them isn't giving really great return on investment. If they didn't exist at all, would we miss them? Maybe a bit, because they cause some interaction between casters and martials around flanking, courageous anthem and such. But most non-magus casters don't really flourish with melee spell attacks so flanking is pretty niche. It could be different if you could get item bonuses to spell attacks (not necessarily DCs, just spell attacks), but that only exists for kineticist.

Now that we have reinforcing runes for shields, and druids got over their metal phobia, what do we actually need duskwood for?

I think it's a sign of not quite successful design if the go-to build is multiclassing. If there's something the class itself isn't providing that you really want and can get elsewhere much better.

I love multiclassed builds, and they don't have to be weaker than singular builds, but if they're consistently the favorite solution then something is off.

For the magus that's a combination of:
* A conspicuous gap between how fast cantrips heighten (+1d6 per rank at best) and how fast slotted spells heighten (+2d6 per rank is common)
* Doing a lot of damage early in the encounter is worth a lot, but you're a wave caster and you're gonna run out of slots fast

Unless you know adventuring days are consistently very short, it's really attractive to supplement your fuel tank with focus spells.

My recent experience playing a dragon sorcerer in Prey for Death is that to have focus spells that do 90% of the damage of a highest-rank slot spell is glorious. You can blast with top-shelf damage every encounter, by just mixing in 1-2 focus casts. Once you've tasted that you don't want to go back to cantrips.

Well, it wouldn't really be my cup of tea - I'm definitely more someone who enjoys the epic fantasy genre. But hey, it's your game and if this is more your taste, not my problem.

It's very valuable though to make sure you're on the same page about this as your players. It'd be no good if you as a GM felt combat had to be grittier, while your players felt things were quite harsh already!

I would say Pathfinder 2 combat doesn't feel too safe or easy, but the game is certainly set up so that level differences matter a lot. So under standard rules, a level 5 party in a Severe encounter is definitely sweating it. But a level 5 party fighting level 0 monsters is not at all scared.

With regards to balance: yeah, if you use the "Proficiency without Level" variant rule, you should definitely count on it doing weird things with balance. The rest of the game is really built around the normal expectations, and this optional rule has a little less than 1 full page devoted to how to change things. It just can't fully cover all the things you're going to bump into.

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With regards to your second point: I understand the motivation, but it feels to me like you're building something that already exists, to a large degree. Your system of "solid hits" and special effects based on damage type is a lot like the Critical Specialization effects that all the different weapon groups have. Instead of it being specifically a Slashing thing that a really good thing does persistent damage, it's something that Knives do. And instead of bludgeoning damage in general doing knockdown, that's something hammers do. But the overlap between what you're proposing and what already exists is pretty big.

And of course those weapon groups and damage types are already pretty strongly linked. Knives mostly do piercing and slashing damage. Hammers do mostly bludgeoning damage.

I'm not against the idea of using a skill challenge for it from time to time. But I also think that it should be possible to as a player display game skill to be better prepared for it. For example, by thinking ahead about which talismans, potions, smoke bombs or whatever could be used to make it doable.

Friendfetch is definitely a really good suggestion for this. I expect there to be more things in the game that can serve well, but by now there's so many character options that I went looking for Advice seeing the forest for the trees :)

Right, but that's something that already happens. Already, players are making the decision that using an amped imaginary weapon with their Spellstrike is well worth forgoing the opportunity to recharge Spellstrike with a Focus Point. Conflux spells are already not all that popular because the ability to recharge Spellstrike is factored so heavily into their power budget that they just don't feel that amazing to use by themselves, so I think that design is worth challenging.

Yeah, I think any proposal should be compared against:

I like comparing to Fire Ray more because I'm secretly hoping IW gets thoroughly reimagined while Paizo draws some conclusions about what psychics should be doing at melee range anyway.

Compared to Fire Ray, an in-class alternative might be less hassle with paying archetype feat taxes and have good built-in interactions with spellstrike recharge. So I think there's a damage "price point" at which it makes sense. Since these focus spells aren't going to go away, I guess the magus class has to have something in-class that's good enough that you don't feel like shopping outside the class is a massive power increase.

I also do think we're tunnel-visioning on one aspect of the spell I posted here, since it also works as a single-action conflux spell that can therefore recharge your Spellstrike when used outside of it.

We are, but for a good reason. As soon as you start putting things in a spell that says "if you do this during spellstrike, it's twice as effective", people start driving into that tunnel at high speed. Using Resonant Bolt for one action at half the damage would feel bad to me. The way you wrote it sounds to me like "you can do it outside spellstrike if you're DESPERATE but the happy path is to use it for spellstrike".

Also, because it still interacts with MAP, I wouldn't want to use it before a spellstrike, or after a spellstrike. I'd feel I'm sabotaging my spellstrike, or that after the spellstrike I shouldn't burn that focus point because I'd get higher damage AND a better chance to land it if I postone to next turn.

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That said, I've come round to the idea that the class should either ban spellstriking with out of class spells (firmly lowering the power ceiling to your wave slots + cantrips) or have some in-class choices that do comparable damage to the out of class options (making the higher ceiling official).

You should not feel like you must shop outside the class if you don't want to weaken yourself. But doing a burst of high damage early in the combat, every combat (because focus > slots) is just much better than trying to grind things out with low-investment cantrips over many rounds.

Then the challenge switches to: what kind of in-class focus spells are we gonna offer so that not everyone is doing exactly the same optimal thing? There need to be multiple options that from a Pareto optimization standpoint don't strictly dominate each other.

So maybe there's options that do more damage, options that inflict interesting conditions, options that are less fragile to enemies with reactive strike, etc.

@Ascalaphus

At least at first glance I like the general idea of your spells, but note they don't seem to have any heightened ranks. Maybe what they do, its utility continues to increase in its value naturally without needing it to be able to do more at higher ranks.

I suppose Spatial Flux could gradually increase range and maybe add a "don't fall immediately" clause at some point, but I don't think it needs might heightening. Heightening is mainly needed for damage-dealing spells because they need to scale along with enemy HP, and for protective spells that need to scale along with enemy damage output.

Ascalaphus wrote:

because you used a conflux spell, also immediately recover your spellstrike.

Using a conflux spell with a Spellstrike wouldn't actually recharge it:

Spellstrike wrote:

After you use Spellstrike, you can’t do so again until you recharge your Spellstrike as a single action, which has the concentrate trait. You also recharge your Spellstrike when you cast a conflux spell that takes at least 1 action to cast; casting a focus spell of another type doesn’t recharge your Spellstrike.

Spellstrike only begins needing to be recharged after it is used, and so it would only be by using a conflux spell after using Spellstrike that the action would be recharged. Casting a conflux spell during Spellstrike would happen before the action can be recharged, and so it wouldn't recharge it.

Well, there aren't any official conflux spells you could actually use as part of a spellstrike so it's a bit up in the air how precisely it would work. But I understand now that that's the interpretation you were working with. I think it would need to be much more explicit that using a conflux spell during a spellstrike doesn't recharge it, because that's the sort of thing wishful-thinking players will immediately assume :)

I'm not really a fan of that, seems to me that the base class design was that you use conflux spells to recharge spellstrike while doing something more exciting than just paying an action tax. Making in-class focus spells that do their best damage when used during a spellstrike goes against that.

One of the issues with the magus is that there are hints in the class design that they didn't want you to spellstrike every turn. But they don't have really attention-grabbing abilities for "off" turns, not that seem like they'd be relevant in every combat.

Maybe there's an interesting design space for TWO-action focus spells that you clearly won't use on the same turn as a spellstrike, but that are pretty solid in their own right. For example:

Arcane Momentum
2 actions, concentrate
Make a Strike. If it hits, the target is off-guard until the end of your next turn. You may then (re)activate arcane cascade, choosing fire, cold, electricity, acid, or force as energy type. Then make another Strike.

I'm currently GMing Strength of Thousands and at least for the first couple books, assuming the party can escape a tough fight, they could go and get help. But how would they actually escape?

If a fight is going badly, someone might be lying on the ground, an enemy might be looming over and have reactive strike, enemies might have about the same or higher speed than the slowest member of the party and so forth.

It feels to me like you'd need to actually have an edge to be able to stage a getaway. Something you maybe prepared beforehand, like packing the right spells or items. But what would it be?

What are your tips for how a party can prepare for having to flee a fight, so that they have a better chance of getting away? I'm thinking it might be an interesting lesson for one of the teachers to set up for the players (compare the mock combats against the leshie mechas).

My first impressions are:

* Cascading Energy is a useful spell that if I had it, I'd use it. But I don't know if it's quite so useful that I'd spend a feat on it. I do think it outperforms most of the focus spells you get from hybrid studies.

* Resonant Bolt on the other hand looks to me like a a spell I would ALWAYS use. Spellstrike, for a lot of damage, and because you used a conflux spell, also immediately recover your spellstrike. The damage is about as good as most spells-from-slots and much better than cantrips. But it's the action economy advantage that's decisive. This allows you to move+spellstrike, and be able to move+spellstrike again on the next turn, and on the third turn (because you'd have at least 2 focus). Being able to spellstrike every turn for high damage is why we say the starlit span is out of control, but this spell spreads that around to the other hybrid studies too.

None of the current hybrid study spells can be used directly in a spellstrike, which prevents that action economy short-circuit. Neither can Force Fang because it has neither a save nor an attack roll. Even so, and even though the damage isn't high, Force Fang is worth a feat because it does recharge your spellstrike without interacting with MAP. So you can spellstrike + force fang, or you can start next turn with a force fang and then a spellstrike. You could do that with the hybrid study spells, but they do cause/suffer from MAP, so it feels like either you're doing a hail mary strike post-spellstrike, or you're spiking your next spellstrike with MAP, not good. Meanwhile out of class focus spells don't efficiently recharge spellstrike so you're still in trouble if you have to move + recover spellstrike + actually spellstrike (except for starlit span, who doesn't have to move).

So where does that leave us? I think unless the damage is pretty low, you shouldn't make a conflux spell that's meant to be used during a spellstrike. But you could make focus spells that don't interact with MAP, that are easier to combine with a spellstrike before or after it.

So that's why I think the Cascading Energy spell is basically sound (maybe needs a little more juice somehow) while Resonant Bolt would be too dominant.

Okay, I should also try to contribute something that I'd be willing to spend a class feat on:

Spatial Flux
Focus, 1 action, Concentrate
You slip through a crack in reality and teleport up to 20 feet.

It doesn't have Manipulate so you can use it to get into or out of situations where reactive strike is at play. And it gives some action economy in a way that mostly favors the non-starlit studies, but doesn't completely steal the lunch of laughing shadow.

Temporal Flux
Focus, 1 action, Concentrate, range 30 feet, target 1 creature
The target becomes slightly unmoored in time, and cannot use reactions until the start of their next turn.

This is your pocket knife if you have to fight a boss with reactive strike. Stealing a reaction isn't unheard of (compare the Success saving throw effect of Laughing Fit and Roaring Applause). It's not something you'll want to do every fight, but it'll save your bacon in some of them (and helps other party members as well).

I think the genie is well and truly out of the bottle with regards to class dedication power. It makes me wonder if some of the designers thought that using them should be one of the standard build choices, not an exceptional one. As in, maybe half of all characters should be willing to pay feats to "multiclass". Even without free archetype, like in PFS, multiclassing is worth it.

* Rogue gives light armor, two skills, a skill feat, and surprise attack. As well as some really good later feat options like Mobility. Really strong choice for casters looking to fix their defenses.

* Champion gives even better armor proficiency and you can become sanctified. Looking at the main champion class to see what being sanctified does for you, it means it can make all your strikes holy. Can be pretty strong in some campaigns.

* Alchemist dedication is really good now that formulas automatically heighten.

Compared to so many other strong dedications, I don't think psychic is out of line in general. The problem is that the magus is so dissatisfied with their own focus spells that they'll forego free spellstrike recharge to go shop for focus attacks in other classes.

It sounds like the distinction of attack roll types is for a purpose and that purpose is not related to determining flanking or whether to apply things like the prone take cover bonus. They are likely designations meant to help understand what kinds of formula to use for the role and may just be that.

Yeah that's what it looks like to me. They say on page 402 they're gonna start by explaining melee and ranged and explain spell attacks later because they're not so simple.

Which is true: melee is mostly strength, ranged is all dex. They then talk about how spell attacks from your spellcasting tradition (key attribute) are different from innate spells (charisma, usually but not always) or focus spells (often NOT your key attribute, for example for champions with domain spells). And it might vary by source if you're taking some spellcasting archetypes with different key stats too.

I think if something says "melee spell attack" then it's melee, spell and attack.

Note that that's also a requirement for spells like Gouging Claw and Ignition to actually be able to benefit from flanking.

Yeah I think the phrasing of the rule may have been polished a bit compared to the (premaster) OP. But basically attacks can be divided up along:

Type: weapon, unarmed or spell attacks
Distance: melee or ranged attacks

As far as I can tell those lines are mutually exclusive; there are/were a few leftover cases of spells that made weapons that were sort of in the gray area but I think most of those got tidied up. But any of the types can be combined with either of the distances. We have examples of ranged unarmed attacks (leshy seedpod), melee spell attacks etc.

That does mean that the Fury Cocktail would work on melee spells, which is definitely a surprising thing, because an item bonus to spell attack to hit is exceedingly rare. It looks a bit like an oversight to me that it's possible. But the drawback is pretty significant, so it's not something I think is really bad for game balance.

I have a player with a Large awakened bulette character, so I need to know whether Large characters are able to use smaller sized weapons, shields, and gear that they acquire during their adventures.

So you're the GM, and it's basically your decision, but you want to play fair by the rules?

I think this particular rule doesn't exist for game balance reasons, it's just that someone thought "gosh, it would be rather implausible if you could do that".

From a game balance & enjoyment perspective, I would not want this to be a big problem. Large characters don't get a lot of extra power from being large, you get the same damage die, ability modifiers etcetera that other characters get. But if 90% of all loot is not usable by you, that's a pretty large disadvantage, just because someone thought it would look a bit silly.

Pathfinder 1 sidestepped this to a large degree by saying magic items automatically resized to the wearer. Weapons were an exception, because in PF1 weapon size actually mattered for your damage dice. It doesn't matter in PF2 anymore.

In PF2 it would actually be even more fitting to say "magic items resize to fit you" because (1) we never bother small creatures about using medium gear or vice versa either and (2) you're investing these items, so why shouldn't that conveniently resize them too? And then why not the same for large characters?

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Strictly speaking, if you want that rule served very RAW, yeah you'd have to deal with the sizes.

But, if that makes the game a lot less fun because now there's almost no loot for some characters, you should look at The First Rule of Pathfinder:

The First Rule

The first rule of Pathfinder is that this game is yours. Use it to tell the stories you want to tell, be the character you want to be, and share exciting adventures with friends. If any other rule gets in the way of your fun, as long as your group agrees, you can alter or ignore it to fit your story. The true goal of Pathfinder is for everyone to enjoy themselves.

So if you care about playing "rules as written", altering a rule that makes players miserable IS playing according to the most important rule in the book.

I think this is a very good case to look at altering those size restrictions. IMO it's a case of people taking "realism" way too far in a game.

It sounds (I haven't played this adventure) like this is a case where an NPC makes you an "offer", but if you accept it you basically wouldn't survive it.

We've had situations like that with vampires asking the characters to bare their necks so that they can make you one of them. But of course they'd just drain you dry, toss aside your corpse, and have an easier time fighting the remainder of the party. There's no option there for you to have a happy outcome and get cool vampire powers.

Likewise, your VC may have been trying to tell you there's no happy destination if you go there.

Do some of the damage cantrips not have the attack trait? Might be interesting to be able to do damage as a swash after a finisher with a spell lacking the attack trait.

There are certainly some cantrips without an attack trait (electric arc, scatter scree and frostbite are all solid options). The big question is how often you'll be able to pivot from finisher to cantrip.

On your turn, you might have to:
- move to an enemy
- do something to gain panache
- do a finisher

You can compress the first two a bit by using Tumble Through; you have a lot of speed and only the space of the enemy is difficult terrain. Or, maybe you got Hasted and already had panache from something that happened last turn/as a reaction.

GMing for a Swashbuckler now, and them ending the turn with Panache does make the next turn awkward especially when stuck with an opponent who doesn't move. I think the idea has legs

If that happens often enough then it could work out yeah. I dunno if I'd want a whole dedication for it - picking up a cantrip with an ancestry feat might be better ROI. On the other hand, just a few spells more can be really helpful to a martial. Jump for example is really handy for getting to enemies on high platforms like a caster or archer.

Overall, when building a swashbuckler, I think it's important to have a good plan for what to do with a dangling last action. You could lean on stuff like Demoralize, or Extravagant Parry. One-action options are a bit easier than cantrips which tend to be two-action. But if it doesn't cost you too much, cantrips could be decent too.

Stupefied is a pretty powerful condition, because it can interfere with casting (and other concentrate actions). However, the "if already stupefied" clause does hint at an intent to try to get in multiple crits, maybe over multiple turns.

A whole minute feels kind of extreme, but 1 round maybe too short. Another commonly used duration is "until the end of your next turn", which might be the right in-between amount.

I think exemplars have some interesting flexibility with weapons. Humble strikes means some simple weapons become competitive with martial weapons. And there's enough different weapon ikons that you can find one that works for your preferred weapon.

Taken together, it allows you to make some weapons viable that otherwise wouldn't be. Other classes that give a damage boost (barbarian, rogue) tend to have more restrictions about what your preferred weapons are. Exemplar is pretty flexible. If you want to go agile+strength based, this is a good class for it.

Well the GM might rule that you doing a mere performance check to crack a joke doesn't count as "particularly daring".

Now, doing Performance to dance/move and dare an enemy to Reactive Strike you, when you know/strongly suspect they have RS, that would be more daring.

If you were doing it to get the monster to spend their reaction on you instead of the wizard, I'd be enthusiastic about it. That's the sort of risk-taking distraction that feels very on brand for a swashbuckler.

NorrKnekten wrote:

Gisher wrote:

However cantrips don't have a spell rank so technically you can't meet that requirement. :)

No they absolutely do if you read the "reading spells" section. Everyspell has a nameline or header, The spell's name line also lists the type of spell if it's a cantrip or focus spell, as well as the level.

Most cantrips one can normally learn are level 1 and gains additional benefits per heightened level. But there are still cantrips of higher ranks gained from class features. Shattered Mind for example is third rank because thats whats written in its header.

Thank you!

I hadn't noticed that with the remaster the word "level" had been changed to "rank" in the Reading Spells section.

It's one of the nicer improvements. Instead of spells and counteract "levels" being something different than character/monster/item/feat levels but still being called level, now all those 1-10 scale things are "ranks". Saves confusion.

I think slings are just a random victim of the simple/martial/advanced weapon paradigm. By definition simple weapons have to be worse than martial. For whatever reason, slings were classified as simple (because they're cheap?) so they're also going to be weak.

The problem is that by now, most classes that are limited to simple weapons are also not that interested in using weapons at all, because they're spellcasters with better things to do. So a bunch of interesting weapons are on the scrap heap because they're simple.

There's some attempts to bring them back (exemplar/war priest/champion humble weapons) but that doesn't really lift them to a niche where they're interesting. A dagger upgraded to d6 is like a short sword, just in a different weapon group and thrown 10ft.

Slings have reload 1 which is a big price to pay, and it's not clear what you're getting back for it. You basically need two hands to really get stuff done with a sling, it's not a viable switch-hitting weapon for a melee character that thinks bows are too much hassle.

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To make slings really work I think you'd need to re-do their stats entirely as a martial weapon instead. With some custom rules language so rangers and gunslingers can use them with all the reloading things they can do with crossbows.

Numerically, you'd benchmark it against the sukgung and arbalest. The arbalest is d10, 110ft and takes two hands. So maybe the sling should be 1d10 + propulsive, 50ft range and only 1 hand? Even then it's niche, I don't see a ton of arbalest usage right now either.

Alchemists could get a feat to become proficient and use it to add extra bomb range (but requiring a hand to hold it).

Thaumaturges could use slings (they're technically 1H weapons, so viable for implement's empowerment) but they'd need some action economy support because that's already a bottleneck for thaumaturges. Taking inspiration from the new shield implement, a sling implement could combine reloading and exploiting vulnerability into one action. Imagine just adding some extra magic salt while loading the bullet. (It's not like a reload 1 weapon with a 10ft ranged reaction was gonna thrill you, so might as well do a bespoke implement instead. Could even re-use those rules for guns and crossbows too.)

Also, on a different note: technically, NPCs can also use the dying rules, but are usually ignored to not have to deal with "is this enemy dead or not?" The players could have fought it normally, then when the Balor drops to 0 HP, run like hell as it goes through Dying 1 to 4 and explodes 3 rounds later. In that case, you could stay in initiative (especially if there's still other enemies present) and ask, "the enemy is down, what do you do?" and if they don't immediately scatter, have the Balor go boom anyways.

That's a good point. Balors are just one example of "boss" monsters that explode, which can be kind of a downer if it happens completely out of the blue at the end of an AP volume. If you see them starting to glow brighter and brighter and have a bit of time to try to run (even as their minions also start running...) that could actually be a much more satisfying ending.

So I think we all agree that if you don't attempt a check at all, you don't get panache.

Normally you wouldn't have to tumble to get through the space of an incorporeal creature. So could you voluntarily tumble through and make the check, to score panache?

I think I'd allow that, with the usual risk that if you fail the Tumble check your movement stops. I'd say there's enough enemy there to "put on a show" and gain panache. Maybe instead of trying to dodge past a solid creature, you're trying to deftly sidestep past an insubstantial creature that will drain your life if you touch it. That seems like it's exciting enough that you can try to squeeze some panache out of it.

Saying "I don't know, but there might be an undetected enemy in that square so I'm going to dramatically tumble through there" goes a bit too far for me.

I did enjoy the theme of the axiomites vs proteans, law vs chaos. But I can just add that back in if I want. The game system doesn't stop me from having a great conflict like that, but it's more opt-in now, the rules don't depend on it so much.

For describing creatures, alignment was always a very very short shorthand. The lawful evil of a kobold was not the same lawful evil of a devil; one of them is just describing a typical member of a culture, while the other was fundamentally made out of law and evil. It's comparing apples and perfect mathematical spheres.

The place where I find myself missing it a bit was in partitioning which gods were somewhat aligned with each other. It made for interesting tidbits when someone was out of place, too, like Gorum and Calistria having their realms in Elysium, or Arazni accepting chaotic good champions.

Interestingly, if you learn a spell from someone else, they don't have to be the same tradition as you. A wizard could befriend a druid and learn a lot of spells from the druid, who automatically knows the whole primal spell list. The wizard can just ask about all the spells that also happen to be on the arcane list.

I think as a customer the healthy mindset is to not get too excited about any kind of loyalty point program. If the program is sustainable from the company's point of view, it can't be an infinite money glitch for the customers. I think calling it "gold" causes a bit exaggerated expectations.

Points HAVE to expire at some point. One of the big attractions of gold is the opposite: the promise that gold is an inflation-proof way to store value. But you can't do that with loyalty points or vouchers. As a company, they're a liability on your balance sheet. If you don't put an expiry on them they could sit there forever, and your accountants will also keep screaming at you forever.

That said, maybe 1 year is short. In the webshops I've built, modules for loyalty points tended toward a 2 year default expiry date.

Tiers are also a feature you'll find in modules for adding a loyalty point program to your shop, but I don't think there's a generic best policy that works well for all audiences. I'm getting the feeling that in this crowd, it causes people to start trying to optimize their way to the next higher tier (we're gamers) and getting angsty about it.

The thing with loyalty tiers is that unless there's some bug in the setup, as a customer it's always gonna cost you money to go up a level. If you were gonna make those purchases anyway then it's a nice perk. If you were just on the edge it could tip your decision. But otherwise, if you're putting in too much effort, it's just gonna make you frustrated because there's no guarantee that there's a way to "win" this game.

I'm not sure having tiers is a good idea based on how they make people feel.

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The thing that bothers me most is the review situation. Awarding points for reviews is another classic feature of loyalty point modules for webshops. But it feels like "that's what the technology does" is in the driving seat too much and "but what does our business need" is on the backseat.

For literally decades we've been able to write reviews of PFS scenarios and adventures we played, or bought as physical product in a game shop with no clear attribution to a Paizo user account. These are important reviews. We write them because we want to help other customers, and be helped by them. But also because it's the blessed path for saying which adventures we liked and why, and which ones were disappointing and why. We're trying to help Paizo make more of the products we love.

Now because you don't want people cheesing the point system by spamming reviews, you're about to choke off a lot of reviews (as well as throwing away the valuable content of the past). Authentic content is worth more and more as the internet decays so this seems like a really bad decision to me.

It feels like too much of this program is sleepwalked into by going with "what does this software let us do?"

I think it's not so much about strict physics realism, but more about whether it goes with or against the grain of your imagination. This isn't the first time the subject comes up. Big weapons = big damage is a popular trope.

But, so are "fast small warrior running circles around a big oaf of a giant" and "big weapon awkward in tight dungeon". PF1 had rules for polearms not working well against close by enemies, as well as bonuses to AC and to-hit for smaller creatures. Overall, PF1 definitely put more mechanical importance on size than PF2.

I've enjoyed my PF1 goliath druid that terrorized enemies in a 25ft radius by shapeshifting into a troll wielding a big horsechopper. It's an entertaining fantasy.

But what I couldn't really do in PF1 is play a goblin that's just really angry and has a hammer and will really do a big number on you. Because small PF1 races unless you were exactly the right class were just always at a disadvantage if you want to play a martial.

I think you can come at this in two ways:
- Let people build many different fantasies, and some will appeal more to some people and others more to other people.
- Strongly favor some kinds of fantasy, but to do that you have to make some others harder to do.

If you go really hard on "bigger weapons and bigger characters do much more damage" you might make it really hard for someone else to have fun playing that kobold with the bizarre pick axe weapon because he's not getting all those bonuses. Either you're too strong compared to game balance baseline, or he's too weak.

I remember fighting a balor two rooms off from what was probably gonna be the campaign's final bossfight. We'd also figured out that knocking it unconscious was a good idea, but I wanted to just toss it into the next room and the detonate it. Make it another monster's problem.

I've been reviewing the recent encounters where they struggled (including this one) and there is definitely one key factor in all of them; AOE damage dealers really hurt them a lot more than they should, especially when this damage comes from a higher-level monster that has a DC hard enough that some of them fail their saves on average.

NPC spellcasters sometimes seem like they're split between absolute jokes and absolute horrors. Sometimes they're placed in such bad tactical situations that they have no will to live. And sometimes they hit so hard that it's hard to see that the party had any chance against them.

The thing with the really dangerous ones is that they often have a combination of these factors:
- they have high save DCs for their level
- they are higher level than the PCs, so the DCs were hard to begin with, and their spells also do a lot of damage

It's sort of a multiplication problem. High damage spells times high DCs means lots of failures and critical failures.

The warpriest has the Harm font and doesn't prepare many Heals, so the group relies on the Witch casting Soothe, Life Boost and Summon Unicorn to keep them going, and despite her best efforts if more than one of her allies is getting damaged each round she can't keep up.

I think from a GM perspective, if I avoid using creatures with high damage + high save DC area damage abilities against them in general, then the difficulty scaling of encounters should be more accurate. Their low mobility and quite strict action economy (for everyone except the rogue at least) leaves them sitting ducks for this kind of foe.

Another trend I'm seeing here is that it feels like the players don't really analyze and adapt to things that repeatedly cause a problem for them. The low mobility of the frontliners is something that the casters could help out with by preparing Fly and Haste for example.

I don't know if they realize this. Or maybe they're having difficulty seeing the patterns - if you use different monsters all the time, they might not connect the dots that all these monsters cause them the same problems. If you left clues that they might run into more of the same monster, that could cause them to do more of that preparation caster stuff.

---

Anyway, I think what the others have said is true; this party has a lot of weak choices in it. If those are the characters the players want to play, fine. But then maybe it's time for you to just make encounters easier. One or two weak characters could have been fine, but if all of them are weak and they're not adapting & teamworking, then this is just not a party that should be playing at "default" difficulty. Dial down the numerical difficulty a bit.

If you're using a published adventure, just put weak templates on some of the monsters in most fights. Or if you're building your own adventures, just use a lower XP budget to construct encounters, and use few L+2 monsters. Again, if you wanted to use a particular monster but it's L+2, just put a weak template on it to make it more like L+1 instead.

I'm intrigued by the idea of spellbook-based casters spending an action to interact with their (worn or held) book to switch a prepared spell. Yeah, that's spell substitution on steroids, but it would finally drive home the point of wizards really being the most adaptable. You'd still want to have prepared the right spells just for action economy, so we don't lose the "thinking ahead" theme completely.

Also it puts the book much more in the spotlight instead of being just something that happens over breakfast. You could build on that with feats and special spellbooks that do something interesting when you're "must consult my notes"-ing.

(Also, I like how simple it is to implement.)

I think over the by now decades the idea of what class does spells in what way and why has drifted. Perhaps drifted a whole lot faster in PF2 than before.

For me one of the key elements of the "wizard fantasy" is that a wizard goes out into the world to learn new magics and is really excited to get hold of a defeated rival's spellbook. If you just knew all the spells already it'd take a lot of the wind out of those sails.

But it's already a bit busted in PF2. The "Learn Spell" activity can also be done by talking to someone who already knows the spell, doesn't require it be the same tradition. So a wizard can just find a druid buddy who automatically knows all the common primal spells. And then just take notes on all the spells that happen to be on the overlap of the arcane and primal list.

The way that clerics and druids automatically know all their common spells also seems like a bit of an archaism to me. Back when, a fair bit of those spell lists were really really circumstantial things. Not spells that you'd normally use when adventuring, but things that you might use to run a temple as a social organization, or to position yourself as the mysterious person in the wood who's awakening animals. A lot of that stuff has been turned into rituals instead (which helps trim the spell lists down to stuff that makes sense during encounters).

My big dream is that by the time of PF3 we'll mostly migrate to everyone using spontaneous casting, but that classes like the wizard have a better ability to switch a few spells from their repertoire during the morning.

It's already pretty rare that you switch a majority of your prepared spells. Usually you just make a few tweaks. Often you can't really predict what you're gonna face, so you pack a fair amount of generic spells that work well against any kind of enemy. I don't think the supposed advantage of the wizard of being much more versatile and preparing the perfect silver bullets (compared to a sorcerer) is really happening. In fact it's more likely that the sorcerer sometimes happens to have the silver bullet in their repertoire and just keeps pumping it out of every possible slot.

I think AoN should maybe make it easier to switch modes between a "core-oriented" mode and an "everything" mode.

Like, if I'm GMing and I give out a piece of AP-specific loot, it's convenient if players can look up the description themselves, I don't have to fuss with index cards or such. So that's when I want to use the "everything" mode.

But when it's about the players shopping, I might want to encourage them to focus on a "core + a few other books" subset.

I think you can already filter by sources a bit, but I'd want something big and obvious. One toggle you can switch that's quite visible in the UI, not having to remember to select stuff separately on every page.

Of course agreeing which books are core-ish apart from the obvious ones is another story.

I'd look at Ooze Form. It's not always going to be a good idea, because PF2 just isn't PF1. But there are some moments when it really does work well.

A friend of mine is fond of using it in PFS whenever we get into one of those "and then they drop a bucket of rogues on you" encounters. Turn into a large ooze that can't be critted, doesn't take precision damage, resists piercing and slashing damage, and gets a bag of temporary HP. Sure, they'll hit almost every strike they try against you, but they might not get through all of your temporary HP before the encounter is over. And any strike they're doing for pitiful damage on you, is a strike they're not doing efficiently with sneak attack and possible crits on another party member.

Ooze form makes for a remarkable tank, in the kind of encounters where it matters. But this being PF2, that won't be all encounters. PF2 just goes out of its way to make sure the same trick doesn't always work.

Keep in mind that as a wizard you can juice up ooze form quite a bit. Tailwind is a status bonus so it'll work fine to increase your bad battleform speed. Haste works too. So would Heroism if someone puts that on you.

It would be a bit more of a "wizard with tricks" build; you'd want to pick up some other spells for other occasions too. It's more a playstyle of "what does THIS encounter need" instead of "how can I make sure my standard plan is reliable in every encounter".

With regards to players feeling "too attached" to their items.

The players enjoying the game in their way is the point. Saying they're not enjoying the correct thing is not the way to go.

I think the rune system is genius here. PF2 makes it way easier to cater to different things players enjoy:

- someone who wants to keep using the same weapon across all levels, and doesn't want it to become numerically irrelevant

- someone who wants to switch weapons mid-career as it turns out a different fighting style appeals more, without having to start buying everything from scratch

- someone who enjoys finding an unexpected weapon and pivoting their fighting style to a signature weapon that came from a big story reward

Rune-swapping being fairly cheap combined with easy retraining rules and feats not requiring the narrow dedication to specific weapons make all of this very doable.

Static item DCs however get in the way of these.

Ascalaphus wrote:

I still wanna do a level 1 zombie horror adventure where at some point you make it to the local temple and there's a bunch of rank 3 Heal and Fireball scrolls in a "break the glass" case, and the casters can just lay waste and see the zombies driven before them.

I do feel that those rank 3 spells would still be incredibly effective in the hands of a level 1 party even if the party members were to use their own DCs. In general I don't think item DCs are what necessarily make higher-level items more interesting, so much as the effects they have -- if you give the party a potion of retaliation or a penultimate heartbeat, the fun factor will come from the retaliatory damage or the post-death explosion, and giving those when they're high-level items for the party will feel awesome even if they don't use an item DC. In the case of effects that deal damage, the double whammy of high DC and high damage I'd say would even be overkill -- you don't need to hugely rely on the former when you've already got tons of the latter.

When I look at consumables like bombs and scrolls, I feel pretty okay about them. Because they have a good balance between static power and level-scaled power.

Even a level 1 fire bomb in the hands of a level 10 character is pretty accurate based on their weapon proficiency, and you just need that splash damage to stop a regeneration. So it's effective. It doesn't do quite as much damage as a level 9 bomb, you're not gonna be mainlining level 1 bombs as your primary battle plan. But you feel good about it as a backup plan for regen monsters.

A scroll of Laughing Fit is likewise pretty good at any level as a backup plan, because the DC scales with your level. It's not as powerful as a rank 6 scroll of Roaring Applause, it's fair for its price. But if you're dealing with a boss with a reactive strike that's just wrecking your casters, it's totally fine.

And the level 1 party that gets a scroll of fireball as an ace card for a final battle, well the DC isn't crazy high but the damage is.

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The common thread here is that the effect of the items is in line with the item level, but the DC is in line with where the players are right now. If the effect is relevant at a higher level, the scaling DC means the item also stays relevant. But at level 15 you're not gonna be using rank 3 fireball scrolls as a main tactic, there's no need to worry that this is gonna totally skew balance.

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So I guess what I'm coming to is that I think higher level items should aim for better effects. Maybe they do more damage. Maybe they have more targets. Efficient actions.

Just like higher rank spells tend to start out more powerful than a lower level spell heightened to the same rank. The new toys are more powerful so that they'll get your attention, but your low rank spells in heightened slots aren't worthless.

I think I just talked myself into maybe letting item DC scale with level for free (I was expecting to ask money for it). Maybe like this, to minimize the amount of bespoke work needed?

If you're higher level than the item, increase the DC of the item's ability by the difference in level.

Note that this will lag a little bit behind after some levels. So when you get the next tier of the item you'll jump a bit in DC probably. I'm fine with that, the next tier should mean something. But until you hit that tier, your lower version of the item doesn't become completely obsolete within just a few levels.

I think the general issue is players approaching magic items as character defining game elements and that is very much against the design philosophy of PF2. Those kind of items are a part of a class kit like the exemplar. There are mandatory magic items for keeping up with numbers, but those items enable your class abilities (like weapons, shields, armor, etc). They are not character defining by themselves.

I'm wondering though. We've been doing this for half a century now. Game designers insisting the players should enjoy these items, and players saying Nope, I don't want it that way.

I feel like there's this ongoing struggle between designers insisting that a particular design is rational and balanced and exists for good reasons, and sure, I can be convinced of the sound reasoning.

Like the demon mask. It's pretty much a design rule that you can't have items that only give a +1 to a skill without doing anything else. And there are some of these items that are well-received, like the mage's hat that gives +1 arcana and prestidigitation. On the face of it, Intimidate is probably a more useful skill and prestidigitation isn't supposed to be powerful. But this feels like a nicer item than the demon mask. You can wear a wizard hat and just wave your hands at the dirty dishes.

But wearing a demon mask is a bit of a weird gimmick. Are you gonna wear that just walking around on the street? RP-wise it's kind of a big commitment, but mechanically it doesn't give you a lot back for that. A fear spell that is kind of marginal because it has a fading DC and also you probably already had Intimidate anyway because you're the one who cared about getting a bonus to the skill.

Static DCs let higher level items be awesome at the point of the story where they should play an oversized role in the adventure narrative.

This is a good point. I think PF2 wants to play around by making the level/power curve very much NOT a smooth diagonal line. They intentionally put steep jumps in there. They made sure different classes are getting their steep upgrades at different levels too, so that for a while this class will be really ahead with this, then that class will be ahead with that.

Items play into that too. When your third-level martial finds a Striking greatsword it's a bit of a power trip for a little bit. It's worth switching even if you were, say, a sword and board warrior. Because going from an 1d8 longsword to a 2d12 greatsword for a while is just wonderfully off-balance.

I still wanna do a level 1 zombie horror adventure where at some point you make it to the local temple and there's a bunch of rank 3 Heal and Fireball scrolls in a "break the glass" case, and the casters can just lay waste and see the zombies driven before them.

So, making item DC scale totally smoothly would remove that from the toolbox. There might be more nuanced designs that make it work though.

You could for example have your table of "to increase by X level and raise DC by X, pay Y". However, actual DCs go up by a bit more than 1/1 level. So when you actually hit the next higher tier of the item, you'd have a catch-up moment where it suddenly goes up in DC by 2-3.

That said, there really is one single game mechanic that is the tarrasque in the room.

The fact that all consumables (and static dc perm items) can be mulched for gp and put toward something really beneficial is *terrible* for consumables/items in pf2. I really want to use these neat summon-elemental gems we found, but they were -1 level when we found them, and now they are -2 level.

I *should* mulch them, and could instantly get a useful utility wand for the party, one which doesn't suffer from a static DC.

This is an interesting point. But we actually have some interesting sources to test this;

* PFS has always had a rule of your final gold reward for the adventure being about FINDING the item, doesn't matter if you used it up. If you find a consumable, you might as well use it, you won't have any less money at the end of the adventure if you save the item.

* Starfinder 1 went with a resale value of only 10% of the purchase price for all items.

In both cases, that should have led to more enthusiasm for using found consumables. But that's not what I saw in practice. I think what bites with a lot of consumables is that they're just not that good, compared to other things you could be doing.

You could use that healing potion to heal for 1d8 HP (spoiler: you're gonna roll a 1). But you need an action to draw it and an action to drink it. Oh, and were you using a two-handed weapon? Also an action to juggle that. Oh and it has Manipulate so you might wanna disengage from the enemy too.

I think the things that really get in the way of people using consumables is that:

* Hand economy is a real thing.
* Action cost is important.
* For items with a variable effect, how much am I gonna get at minimum?

Or to put it another way: my priority every round is to cast a spell or make at least one attack. You have to be driving in the direction of victory. I'm okay to forego an attack that already has MAP to use a consumable. But consumables that are so demanding that they eat up all your actions (like an oil that needs two hands to apply to a weapon) need to have totally transformative levels of power to be useful.

This is why talismans like the allow orb are well-designed. They don't mess with the hand economy, don't take too many actions to activate, and you're pretty sure they'll do something when you use them.

Bombs are also well-designed. You'll typically reach for them when fighting an enemy with a weakness that you'll gleefully try doing persistent damage to, or at least you'll have some splash damage. So the minimum effect is still satisfying. Especially splash damage vs. regeneration.

These elemental gems though... overpriced ways to get a so-so summon? I just don't think there will be a combat round where I feel that's the best way to spend my actions.

So even if you can't make money by selling them, I still don't expect to be using them.

I'm the only frontline character. The rest of the party is a witch, gunslinger, and rogue.

Once upon a time I was in a Starfinder campaign and our party was a ranged operative, ranged envoy, ranged mystic and my ranged mechanic.

Things weren't going well for us. Just about every fight, monsters would harass us in melee and we'd be spending sooo much of our actions just trying to get out of trouble.

One day we were all a bit gloomy and feeling down about the campaign because fights were really frustrating, and the GM said he was totally fine with it if someone wanted to refurbish their character. So I did; my character walked out into the night a frustrated dude with a rifle, and came back the next morning looking very muscular and a solarian with a flaming sword.

But, his personality and backstory stayed the same. He was still the android who was deeply disgusted by any organic looking food. The sort of person who takes "doesn't want to think about how cute the lamb was that's now a stew" to "doesn't want vegetables where you can still guess what plant they're from". As it turns out, character story and personality are more important for group-feel than precisely what kind of mechanics that character is using.

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That said, you are the only melee character in this group. Even if you were a super tanky class, that would still be a hard life. But if you switch to something else, your party needs to go make some adjustments too.

I'm curious, which of these sounds appealing to you?

* Maybe someone else in your party is open to switching to a more melee role as well? With two melee characters things can be more fun because you can also teamwork more. One of you could be more the "anvil", tanky, and the other more the "hammer" focused on hitting hard and using the anvil for protection. A champion/thaumaturge team for example can work nicely.

* Maybe you just don't want to play melee anymore? Someone else may have to step up to the plate then though, otherwise your party is going to be in trouble.

* Maybe you do want to play melee, but with a different class. You're high enough level now that you could still mix in the mirror implement by taking a thaumaturge multiclass.

* Maybe you wanna play a different class completely?

* Maybe you want to just streamline your thaumaturge build so you're more free in action economy?

I hope by the time PF3 rolls around we get a better take on weapons vs unarmed. There's so many feats that casually mention weapons and thereby exclude unarmed strikes when it doesn't feel like that was a particular balance goal. Just habit of phrasing.

I'm also still miffed that rangers are not that good with claws. As a nature-oriented class they should have nice synergy with close-to-nature ancestries with nice unarmed strikes, but instead it's a big nothingburger.

I also think Strike Hard is really good. It has a couple of different ways that it can work out really well:

* Your ally is already next to the enemy you want to target, and you're not.
* You already have MAP from making one attack; your ally using Strike Hard strikes without MAP.
* Your ally's attacks are just more valuable than yours (giant barbarian, fighter, rogue already in flanking position, thaumaturge with all the bells and whistles, or maybe PFS where the other character is two levels higher than you).

As I'm just starting to read the guide, just a note on the text colors: your bright green and bright yellow are really hard to read against a white background. It would be easier to read if you used a darker, more contrasting version of those colors.

(And now I'm gonna read it, very curious!)

I feel like even if having a GM star system of some kind only moves the needle 10% on GMing, that could still be a really good return on investment.

Because making it happen for donuts 1-4 is mostly a one-time cost of having an engineer implement it in the website. You have the occasional five-donut review and some backend admin. But is that a net cost, or is it compensated by having some good news content to put in a blog post for marketing?

A summoner might not want to spend the gold and invested item slot on an athletics item, but almost certainly will get the handwraps for the eidolon. I'm not impressed by the Disarm option but if you were gonna include Trip and Grab, there was no good reason to exclude Disarm?

It's fairly common in RPGs that drugs have totally unreasonable rules for downsides because it's assumed you're taking them willingly. So they're not balanced with the same kind of caution as poisons.

But using that in combination with a mind control effect is a good reason for the GM to say that that has to be rebalanced to be more in line with other things.

Oh, just thought of a really obvious one. Have them hand over their weapons to you/your allies. Let them try to critically disarm you to get them back.

Sometimes that's a problem with authors putting low-level flavored problems in chases for high level characters.

A low level chase is about "how fast can you get everyone over this garden wall". A high level chase problem is "a magical sandstorm is specifically chasing after you and seems intelligent and doesn't want you to dodge it".

I think we should celebrate that at some level, some things just aren't a reasonable obstacle anymore. Like at level 5, it's ridiculous to worry about provisions during hexploration. You've just graduated from those beginner level problems. It's time to start doing things where you run into much bigger scarier problems.

In any situation where you can't think of anything better, you can always have them run away at full speed. 3 actions going away means it'll take them 3 actions to come back too.

Making attacks against your other enemies is always a solid choice too, especially if you know they have a high level spell or something you'd rather see them spend on your enemies than on you. Super fun if you can get them to point a breath weapon or other effect with a cooldown at enemies instead of you.

For weapon-using enemies, throwing away their weapons (not just dropping - throwing them into the ravine) can be good too.

Having them drop prone is an option. So is making them try to Grab your other enemies. And you can have them jump of a cliff.

Your spell isn't normally Subtle, so people probably know the target is controlled. If you can make it Subtle, you could also try to have your target order the other enemies around.

PFS specifically asks the GMs not to get away from what is written. I can totally see GMs sticking to the letter of this.

Over the years PFS has added more nuance to that. This snippet has been in the PFS rules since at least 2014:

Creative Solutions

Sometimes during a game, your players might surprise you with a creative solution that the adventure did not anticipate. Rewarding the creative use of skills and roleplaying makes games more fun for the players. If your players find another solution that resolves or bypasses an encounter, give the PCs the same reward they would have gained by resolving the encounter as the adventure anticipated.

The Pathfinder Society never wants to give the impression that the only way to solve a problem is to kill it.

They also added a lot of clarification about GM adjustments to unexpected player actions here ; that part is more of a change, loosening previous "run as written" instructions a fair bit.