Crazy that we still have no official update on this.
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Hey, it was YOUR example ;-) I still wouldn't replace a cleric with a druid.
What happens beyond 10th level, or if your table uses free archetype, both things that happen at real tables and need to be accounted for. I also think it is basically wrong to evaluate all classes by whether or not they are absolutely top notch. In almost all campaigns there is room to be slightly sub optimal. The goal is to have fun, not muscle your way through every encounter as quickly as possible. When talking about balance, the only thing that matters is whether the class reach the expected level of power at all levels it plays at and if it fulfils its class fantasy. Currently, the druid can only manage that at some levels, if played in a very specific way, and if free archetype isn't used.
If we're looking to build an optimal party, I'm not even sure a Cleric makes the cut and certainly not as a Warpriest. I know the topic is open for debate, but something like a Fighter, Rogue, Oracle, Bard, Sorcerer party is likely among the strongest you can build. In such a party, who does the Druid replace to make it better? My take on balance is that we should attempt to raise all classes to parity with the best classes in their role. There is no reason why any melee martial need be less useful than the Fighter. Nor any blaster worse than the Sorcerer, etc. In this light, the Druid has room for buffs without much risk of becoming too powerful.
I mean... it does compare fairly well to their niches, actually? You probably replace the cleric with the druid if you are in a campaign with few undead/unholies and more things with elemental weaknesses so you aren't twiddling your thumb where there's nobody to heal (Outlaws of Alkenstar comes to mind). The ability to off-tank compared to a sorcerer would also matter if your primary DPS is ranged for whatever reason or enemies themselves are ranged or have a lot of movement options (again, see Outlaws of Alkenstar). I understand they taper off at higher levels but they get good focus spells very early on and can accumulate them cheaply. They may taper off at higher levels but I'd actually argue that at 1-4 when slotted spells for damage sucks a druid beats the sorcerer and oracle and still has time to give everyone rank 2 tailwind. I think that when you have to start calling out narrow level ranges and specific party builds to make the case for a class, that class likely needs some help. I think the druid is a step below the top-tier classes, but well above the worst classes in the game. I know people will likely quibble, but my list of top classes would be: Fighter, Champion, Rogue, Oracle, Sorcerer, Bard, maybe Cleric The bottom classes are: Inventor, Investigator, Wizard, Psychic, Gunslinger, maybe Ranger and Swashbuckler Everything else is in the middle with at least some room for improvement.
Is anybody still thinking Animist is OP? Everything I've seen post-release is basically people saying that it's strong, but not stronger than the best classes. It's not a crime to be better than the worst classes in the game.
Well, yes. That's why letting the druid do limited casting when they cast untamed form will be of the biggest help to untamed fullcaster druids, not adding more stats. That lets them leverage what their actual strength is and not leave them in a quantum state where the sum total can be too powerful but also most people will run it badly. If you're allowing limited casting, that just sounds like a martial character with a caster dedication. Why would we want that when we already have it? Note that the druid is a 'specialist' as a caster already - they're basically as good as a cleric at healing in any single combat, though they deplete heals faster, they get access to the best blasting spells, though not the status bonus sorcerers get, they still get access to the really good buff spells like, I have to reiterate, haste and slow. They can just cast 2nd rank tailwinds out of every slot too, and have the cheapest baked in access to mounts for free moves. The issue is that untamed pushes them into an area they aren't a specialist in, in the same way say, scroll thaumaturgy does for thaumaturges, which doesn't really stop them from being perfectly competent in their role any more than spending an entire turning casting a single scroll spell does for thaums but if a thaum refuses to do anything other than cast scroll spells they suck too; giving thaums full casting is not a solution to that.) The issue is, what does the Druid do when the party has a Cleric and a Sorcerer already? It doesn't compare well to either class in their niche and doesn't really have a niche of its own. It feels very much like a 3.x/PF1 bard, where it's a good fit once every other role has been filled, but never something a party would want instead of a more optimal setup.
For the druid to shift and then unshift in the same combat, they're wasting more than a full turn of actions. A druid who wants to transform spends one turn with their thumb up their butt, and then gets to be slightly more effective than an animal companion until the end of combat, unless they want to waste more actions changing back. The flexibility is almost theoretical because any combat where transforming isn't a waste of resources is either so trivial you could have just cast cantrips the entire time or a specialised puzzle that the GM handed to you, so your ability could feel useful. The fundamental issue with flexibility at a cost is that any time you could shine as a generalist, the specialist in the group should be stepping up instead. A class that only shines when the party is badly built or when something goes wrong, and your best option is down for the count, is pretty clearly a poor option. This doesn't mean you shouldn't play a druid if you like the class theme and understand that some of the class fantasy is mechanically iffy; it just means that the class doesn't actually support its entire class fantasy very well.
Not just fighter and rogue. You'd need to drag down just about every martial class that isn't investigator or inventor. Fighter and rogue might be the best, but swashbuckler remains among the worst. If the bar for balanced is anything besides performing on par with the best class in that category, then you're missing the point. People use Fighter as the baseline martial because it is both straightforward and strong. Rogue is the baseline skill class for the same reason. Casters are slightly more contested, but Cleric, Sorcerer, Bard, and Oracle (R) are clearly at the top with everything else somewhere below them. Kineticist seems more and more like a mistake as it tends to be weaker than most other classes, lacks a defined role, and doesn't play well with anything outside of its own class feats. You balance to that line, not at some arbitrary mid-point below it. You also balance at all levels, not just at levels 1 - 10, where balance is relatively easy. Not just for the optimum playstyle for that class. If you commit to making your game balanced, you should go all the way.
Nobody likes nerfs. The outrage that would happen if you hit Fighter, Rogue, Bard, and Oracle would be crazy. Meanwhile, buffs for Invesigator, Inventor, Wizard, and Psychic would be cheered. So it's obvious which path should be taken to rock the fewest boats.
This power is greatly diminished for those who play with a set party and know how to work together. If you know your group has a Fighter, Rogue, Cleric, and Bard already, then your versatility as a Druid doesn't add much of anything. When a class only feels good in a low synergy group or in easy encounters, which is the PFS experience, that suggests that said class is underbaked.
PF1 supported a wide variety of play styles if the game was being played at the correct tier. As you rise up the tiers, fewer and fewer playstyles are supported. In absolute terms, both PF1 and D&D3.x had more options than PF2; it just took a lot of work by each group and GM to balance those options and then figure out which encounters worked with your group's builds.
And yet, still a better gameBecause Paizo is too busy making a better game than themIf that's the case, it must be something they haven't released yet. The current one has a lot of rough edges, a poor errata cycle, and leaves many of the more unique classes waiting years, if they're lucky, between getting any new rule support. What game do you assume I'm comparing it to?
If this ask is so onerous, why can every other company in this space except for Paizo manage it?
If community engagement is so hard, why does every other company in the space do it better than Paizo? GW and WotC both give more and better feedback, though D&D under Hasbro has suffered greatly from restrictions placed on the developers from on high. Smaller companies like R Talsorian Games and CGL also do better on less than half of Paizo's budget.
Well then, your volunteer internship awaits. Looking forward to you getting hired, learning the ropes, and knocking out professional rules development blog posts every week. Since it's not that hard, should we expect the first one by...1 April? Your day job shouldn't be an issue since, as you say, what you're asking for is not that hard. If Paizo wants to give me access to their developers, design notes, and minutes from relevant meetings, I'd have no issue banging out a blog post for them. That said, why should any of us have to be the ones who take up that responsibility when I've already shown that the level of communication I'm asking for is industry standard from both larger and smaller companies? I'm saying that open communication isn't hard because everybody else in the space is able to do it.
<snip> If community engagement is so hard, why does every other company in the space do it better than Paizo? It's not that hard to write a blog post. Let us know what you're working on, how you feel about the state of PF2R, what's working, and what you wish had been published differently. The usual stuff that's expected within this space and that's delivered by almost everybody aside from Paizo.
...Why has this most recent errata still made rules errors, i.e. By RAW DaS still can't benefit from hero points because it isn't a skill check, so what was the point in removing the luck trait from it? That is such a narrow change as to feel like a troll, and I'd be willing to bet that RAI was to allow for DaS to be rereolled with a hero point. It's too bad that we're stuck guessing at what's RAI when RAW runs into a snag.
If I may summarize, interaction is a privilege, not a right It's also a wonderful tool for community building. There's a reason why most gaming companies have weekly developer blogs, YouTube channels, and a social media presence. If you look two posts above, I show that two companies smaller than Paizo both manage a better level of audience engagement.
If this is such an expense, why can smaller companies manage it? https://rtalsoriangames.com/#
https://www.youtube.com/@catalyst-game-labs/videos
Paizo is over twice as large as the largest of these entities and seems unwilling to even match their community outreach, much less exceed them, as we would expect the second-largest TTRPG brand on the planet to do. Doing that costs them a much smaller fraction of their labor and operating budget. You're basically complaining about how the corner store doesn't have WalMart's services. It doesn't seem to stop the mom and pops from stealing Paizo's lunch money. Also, there's a reason why Walmart, Amazon, 7/11, etc. plough other smaller companies under. Why go to Mom'n'Pops, where you pay extra, have a limited selection, and they don't take Amex or Discover, when you can go to a place that better serves your needs? High-level balance issues do matter, of course. There are many loyal players who play those levels. None of that negates the point, however, that the majority of play isn't going to involve flaming shock cold silver weapon vs. immune to A resist B C weak D E, so a rules change that mostly impacts such complicated situations isn't going to impact the majority of play. And the situation becomes even less dire when you step out of the white room and remember that GMs have the ability to tweak encounters if they don't like the way the revised resistance works. Your example suggests that you don't know why the old ruling was broken. It wasn't broken because you could hit with multiple different elements at once; it was broken because you could stack half a dozen of the same element on a weapon, force an enemy to be weak to that element, and absolutely destroy them with that extra damage.
For the record, I think this change is pretty minor, and I wouldn't mind it nearly as much if it didn't show us that, behind the scenes, the current dev team doesn't have any more of a clue how things work than we do. If we got more frequent and in-depth insights from the team, similar to how Mark Rosewater and Gavin Verhey talk to the community about MtG, design goals, what has worked and what hasn't, what's coming soon, etc. I'd be more willing to accept changes that match that shared vision. Instead, we're left in the dark, and then we get an awful ruling, backpedalling, and then a ruling that introduces a balance change, all in short order. To top it all off, this is after the team missed an errata period that they set for themselves. I don't think it's unfair to say that this doesn't feel like the work of a well-oiled machine. It feels like an understaffed team that has too much work and not enough time to make a quality product.
I don't think the retracted clarification did fundamentally break the game. I do not deny that there may have been some abilities/spells designed under the "community" rule that could break the game. Allowing one character to deal hundreds of damage per strike by triggering weaknesses that the party itself is able to create fundamentally breaks damage math, and telling players "just don't do that" goes against the entire ethos of PF2. If you can't see that, I'm not sure we have anything further to talk about.
I'd be less harsh if the devs gave us anything in terms of insight into these changes. It's not hard to write a quick blog post talking about the changes, letting us know why they made them, why other issues aren't being addressed, and teasing what's coming next. People hate them, but look at how WotC handles things with heads of departments engaging with the community all the time. That is the expectation, and Paizo is failing to meet that.
That "tantrum" was because the new ruling fundamentally broke the game and clashed with how nearly everybody had interpreted the limited rules/rulings we had to work with. The feedback given after that ruling dropped could be boiled down to, "WTF, why didn't they just have it work like it always did on Foundry, but properly spelt out?" Yup, my bad will edit that post.
Errata = balance patch, especially when the way people were already playing wasn't breaking anything.
Except this new version isn't good and breaks several old monster designs as well as harming existing player-facing options that haven't been adjusted in reaction to this change.No, it isn't ideal. That's nowhere close to the same as "bad". Home games I run will be using my houserule, but the new official stance is perfectly serviceable in Society play. Just because you don't like it, doesn't make it bad. There's no way that the design team didn't know that most of us were using the Foundry implementation; the best and easiest thing to do was to codify that. If they felt that might be unbalanced or otherwise less than ideal, they could print a sidebar that gives an optional rule for resist all as it currently works.
If you're going to have a living game, it doesn't make sense to pick and choose what bits you're willing to fix and which bits you aren't. You either fix things, or you don't. Half-fixing things while also breaking other things is a poor way of approaching a living set of rules. The lack of communication as to the whys of these changes is also a big problem.
If Paizo is going to lean into treating PF2's rules as a living document, and for the record, I very much support this, they should do it right. A living game requires developer feedback; we need to know what they're looking to change and why. The current faceless, silent development team is not a good fit for a team that also makes rules changes via errata.
The first stab at it was bad, yeah. But they listened to that and changed it, and the new version is good. That's the process working. Except this new version isn't good and breaks several old monster designs as well as harming existing player-facing options that haven't been adjusted in reaction to this change. This is very similar to how changes to Shield Strapping have broken things that are unlikely to ever be fixed via errata. If they're taking feedback, my feedback is that any errata should be accompanied by fixes to any rules broken by it. [qupte]I don't know what prompted this change, but the new folks in charge apparently feel its too powerful with how the rest of the rules changed. That has nothing to do with not understanding it. I'd have more faith if this new team could be bothered to communicate with us. The old team is beloved because they bothered to interact with us. You can see this with pre-master shields, where they aren't durable enough to work as written. The fact that the remaster specifically added runes to account for this says the opposite your assertion: they understood the problem and addressed it. Are you seriously surprised that as they've gotten more experience with the system, AP design has gotten more consistent? Because that's literally how everything works. Kingmaker says hello. It's a big, complex game, with an overly tight production schedule due to market reality. Mistakes will get made. The fact that stuff is being addressed is a good thing, not a bad thing, and the fact that everything you're using as examples is so old is really undermining whatever point you're trying to make. If you want new examples, what happened with the Mythic rules? Why did Rogue get buffed in the remaster while Wizard is still in a terrible place? Why doesn't the new Commander class properly interact with the Kineticist? Why has this most recent errata still made rules errors, i.e. By RAW DaS still can't benefit from hero points because it isn't a skill check, so what was the point in removing the luck trait from it? This doesn't point to a team with a great internal idea of how the system works. It points to a team that has less understanding of the game than the community.
If they knew, why did it take years and a remaster for them to clarify it, only to find out that the first clarification broke the game entirely when we called them out on it? The only sensible option is that they didn't know how damage worked. They may have had an idea of how they thought it worked, but they clearly hadn't ever tested whether their assumptions actually worked. You can see this with pre-master shields, where they aren't durable enough to work as written. You can see this with early AP design. The release version of the alchemist, before even the day one errata, the release witch, etc. This is a company that, at best, guesses at how its game works while having no idea what is going on at real tables.
We have hundreds of pages of rules for this game. I think it's fair to ask that these rules be written unambiguously, if not in the main rulebooks, then in a separate technical document that can be looked up to resolve specific cases. You can play MtG 95% correctly without ever looking at the full comprehensive rules, but if you ever have a question, those rules are there and, if correctly applied, work 100% without ambiguity. This is what I want for PF2R.
The way I see it, the first clarification was how they envisioned it in the first place, as it worked exactly how I read the rules since release. So the wildly different versions feels more because of how bad a reaction everyone had to being told it played differently than they thought, not because the developers don't know their game. If we were sitting here in the first year of PF2's initial release, I might buy that. Here, years and a full remastering of the system later... Yeah, I just don't buy that. If they always knew why not errata it at any point before now?
The issue is: Why doesn't Paizo know how their own game works, such that we have now had two wildly different versions of how damage works after two full releases of the game that never even attempted to explain how it works? Did the team ever have a clear vision for how instances of damage are supposed to interact with resistances/weaknesses?
I find that to be problematic. It might just be a me thing, but the people working on an RPG should probably know how it works. Instances of damage and how they interact with damage modifiers (weakness, resistance, etc.) should have been clearly defined from the start of PF2, yet here we are years into the remaster, and we're seeing it demonstrated that they have no idea how their own game works. This is just another look into how Paizo works, showing that everything is always working under a serious time and manpower crunch and that the technical debt of working this way is now piling up on the current team.
This change suggests that Paizo had no idea how damage worked in their own game and is now just winging it after their first attempt at errata was so poorly received.They had an idea how they wanted it to work. But after the last errata they are clearly trying to find a new way, and maybe this change is setting us up for that new way. [shrug] But...I don't think your example supports "no idea", because it's such a rare edge case it's not something any game designer would create a general rule to cover. What an instance of damage is, and exactly how hardness, weakness, and resistance work in a system featuring such, should have been hammered out during early combat testing. This isn't some edge case; it's fundamental to how dealing damage works.
This change suggests that Paizo had no idea how damage worked in their own game and is now just winging it after their first attempt at errata was so poorly received.
Rather than quibble about adding damage versus extra damage, each triggering event should act as follows: 1) Combine all damage types into polls by type. 2) Apply immunities, then resistances, then weaknesses to each pool of damage. 3) Combine this damage into a single pool of damage. 4) Apply any effects that apply to the entire attack (i.e. holy from sanctified strikes). 5) Apply any applicable resistances and weaknesses to the damage. 6) Subtract damage from the HP pool of the creature or object being attacked. This is the easiest way to deal with instances of damage without needing to rewrite how anything works.
I feel like PF3 really should have it so that each class is designed with at least 3 built-in subclasses for combat, then 3 picks for exploration, and 3 picks for social encounters. Ideally, there would also be a choice for class-based downtime activities as well. It's really hard to say, "These are the 3 pillars of adventuring", when some classes get nothing that natively interacts with one or even two of these pillars. This would solve the Ranger/Investigator problem and ensure that each class feels complete within itself.
Weakness should check for a trigger such as a successful strike/manoeuvre, damage taken from a spell, or any other instance where damage has been taken. Then all damage that has been dealt is added together by type. Then those damage pools are checked against weakness and resistance. If we want spells that trigger additional damage, we'd need to reword them so they can be triggered to do damage as a reaction or, if we want to be spicy, as a free action. Then, after the triggering action has resolved, they trigger and are resolved. This is the only simple way to handle this.
I'd rather just follow PFS or Foundry implementations of rules than official errata if this is the quality of errata we're going to get. You mistake my meaning. I'd rather Paizo not make errata at all, so we're stuck going with whatever PFS or Foundry does than release errata that actively makes the game worse. Sometimes, no answer is better than a bad answer.
Even if they revert this swiftly, it shakes my faith in the current team that this ruling ever saw print. It's like the writers don't even play-test their own game.
I'd rather just follow PFS or Foundry implementations of rules than official errata if this is the quality of errata we're going to get.
Given the recent errata and its issues. I'm starting to feel less charitable than I was after the Psychic demaster.
Paizo just needs to revert this errata. This level of burst damage trivialises encounters far more than Starlit Span IW builds ever did.
Very glad to see this errata, especially as it answers a lot of long-standing questions and rules issues. Even with regards to the Resentment nerf, I feel like it can hopefully help evaluate the Witch a bit more holistically as a class: right now, when the Witch and their power level gets discussed, it's usually just in the context of the Resentment, by far their strongest subclass. Although there are other strong patrons too, I'd argue that non-Resentment Witches could benefit from a few improvements still. Ideally, this can help lead the community to advocate more for the class, without having to contend with what up until now was a notable outlier. We've advocated for the Wizard and Psychic, and they both ate nerfs. Nothing we say or do will get them to fix casters.
The choice to give away the meat of their system is a choice they have made freely. It doesn't free them from the expectation - that they themselves have created - to provide errata for these rules.
The Oracle problem creating another problem does make developers hesitant to rush out errata though. That is how you get the villagers getting out the pitch forks and torches. Imagine if some random developer popped in to give a specific answer to the repertoire issue, not just admitting a problem (which in this case doesn’t need to be pointed out because it is either causing tables problems or it isn’t) only for 2 years later the book to get republished with a different number than what was posted on social media.what if the “obvious answer” actually meant having to change the language in not just the Oracle’s repertoire, but in every spontaneous caster’s repertoire text and it ended up obliterating the layout of books already in print or getting printed? Well now that initial answer can’t be practical official errata anymore, so maybe a less desirable answer becomes better for the company, but now customers are going to be even more upset because the first answer was the one they wanted to hear. The right answer wasn’t knowable to any developer until every aspect of its implementation is considered through the company because the game rules are not paizo’s product. Books and PDFs are that have many other considerations than rules clarity. I couldn't care less about errata causing layout issues for hypothetical reprints, I paid for functional rules, and the company I paid for said rules promised two errata updates per year and have now failed at that. Yes, this was expected as Paizo has never been good at sticking to promises to be better at errata, but that doesn't mean anybody needs to be happy about it.
Now that this thread has some answers, here's my take: I personally lean toward quality being close to the same as it's always been. Paizo has never really been good at communication, errata, editing, etc. The store being worse is new but not surprising, given how much trouble they had changing over to the new store period. I wish Paizo were better at all of these things and less pressed for both time and money. Hasbro needs somebody to keep them honest in the TTRPG space, and Paizo, for better or worse, is the runner-up. Sadly, the thin margins, staff churn, and general financial climate of both the PNW and the US at large seem to be conspiring to make life harder for them.
I know that no company is ever perfect, but Paizo seems to be making more unforced errors than usual after the remaster than they were before it. Even the much-promised rework of their online shop hasn't been without its issues. My question is: Has this change in quality worried you, and if so, how might it affect your purchases going forward?
The math and conversation about scaling only makes sense if we're talking about the amped version.
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