Chess Pwn's page

At 9th? A Barbarian can get to Str 28 or so, but only very niche super optimized builds can actually get that high on Str, and not even then on Con (for the most part anyway).

I don't think so. Niche optimized builds can do far better. A lv1 human can reach a str of 26 while raging. doing nothing but buying a +2 belt and putting level ups into it gets it to 30 raging str.

Also, let's compare to PF1, shall we? The Glabrezu in PF1 has Str 30, Dex 16, Con 30, Int 16, Wis 16, Cha 20. Those are equally impossible for PC stats.

Well while the state spread is quite impressive and indeed hard to duplicate as a PC. Each individual stat is reachable by PCs in combat. 20 starting con greater rage for 6 and belt for 4.

Yes people usually won't have that high of a con, but it's reachable by a PC wanting to have a high con.

if I have HOLY CASTIGATION and CHANNEL SMITE does that let me channel smite with positive energy and hurt fiends?

I guess along with this is LIFE SAPPING and negative energy.

HOLY CASTIGATION: You combine holy energy with positive energy to damage demons, devils, and their evil ilk. Heal spells you cast can damage fiends as though they were undead.

LIFE SAPPING: You draw the life force out of your enemies to heal your own wounds.
When you cast a harm spell and damage a single living creature, you
regain Hit Points equal to the spell level of your harm spell. If you aren’t a living
creature, you gain no benefit from this feat.

CHANNEL SMITE: Instead of casting harm or heal, you siphon the destructive
energies you channel through a melee attack and into
your foe. Make a melee Strike. This Strike has one of the
following additional effects on a success.
• If you channel positive energy and the target is
undead, you deal extra positive damage equal to that
of a single-target heal spell.
• If you channel negative energy and the target is
a living creature, you deal extra negative damage
equal to that of a single-target harm spell.
If your Strike fails or hits a creature that isn’t affected by
that energy type, the spell is expended with no effect.
If you channel positive energy, this action has the good
and positive traits. If you channel negative energy, it has the
evil and negative traits.

For the most part, names aside, I like this very much. Seems to solve most of my problems with Ancestry entirely. I still think Ancient Blood is a bit overly punitive, though I suppose that depends partially on how they change Resonance...

Chess Pwn wrote:

so half-elf loses out on the speed aspect that old half-elf had?

Given that it's now cheaper and easier, something had to give. That being what went is fine with me. As others note, if you care you can grab the Elf Feat for that.

No I can't just grab the elf feat for that since I already had the elf feat. I'm wanting to go fast since movement is slow and now a big piece is missing that I can't make up. If there was a Half-elf racial to increase speed and stacking with the elf one THEN you can say I can just buy it back.

Chess Pwn wrote:

so half-elf loses out on the speed aspect that old half-elf had?

But can choose to take the nimble elf feat at lvl one. So... kind of back to square one but with more options overall.

but before you could get the movespeed from picking half elf and still pick up nimble elf feat at lv5 with fleet at lv3 meant base speed of 40 or 30 in armor. Now we're 5ft short of that. Just a little sad to miss out on that speed in heavy.

so half-elf loses out on the speed aspect that old half-elf had?

The Once and Future Kai wrote:

Ckorik wrote:

I suppose it'd work as a concept when you gain levels - but you need 18 in your prime stat to survive the first few levels.

Please elaborate? I've had a couple of players field non-offensive casters* with 16s in their primary stats and they've been fine in low level playtest sessions.

*Fey Sorcerer focused on Utility and Summoning. Bard focused on Utility and Buffs.

We have a goblin cleric of Pharasma in one of my home games who has a 10 WIS and hasn't bothered ever putting any additional points in. He's played the same character (with the occasional tweak or retraining as updates have come out or we've moved to different chapters) since the playtest dropped and he's consistently been one of the most effective characters in that group. He uses buffing and enhancement spells, a poisoned dogslicer, and typically opens combat by dropping forbidding ward on whichever ally he's going to be flanking with in the fight, or bless for a quick boost to attack rolls for the group before moving into position to attack. No 18s in any stat starting out and he's only even gotten close to being dropped once (and that wasn't until 7th level.) Teamwork and tactics undoubtedly contribute to his effectiveness to a significant degree but that's generally going to be true for any character.

Really a combat cleric is casting bless or forbidding ward? The action every round to maintain it seems quite the cost of these buffs going down.

So how many items can I have stored? Can I have 3 potions? 4? Like for an alchemist this limit I imagine would be important and probably reached for how much stuff they want in easy access. Is there something in the rules about how to decide if something can/is stored or in backpack?
For the upcoming playtest module one of my players is asking about this because he wanted to test a high level alchemist and how their combat economy is, but now we're stuck on if it'll be 2-3 or 1 action to draw his premade bombs

So I'm a little confused now. On page 307 it says the interact action is used to grab a stored object. But on page 175 it says 2 actions to retrieve an item from backpack and if your backpack you need another action to take off your backpack first.

What is the difference here? When do you use 1 action to get stuff vs 2 actions?

So if I'm wanting a wand or a potion or a backup weapon what actions does it take to get these?

John Lynch 106 wrote:

You have currently pegged everything at costing a feat

Hmm.. I have seen this, or something like it, in quite a few places. Its interesting because I think we are using the term feat for these options because they are selected and applied to your character in a shared way.

What they do not share is an equal value. A class feat is better than a skill feat. An ancestry feat is not meant to be the same value as the others. I see a lot of comparison between the categories and that alone might be the biggest problem with using the word "feat" for all of them. Useful to learn the system, but the baggage from existing users applying to word to mean "a rule with a specified amount of power and utility" is a barrier to overcome.

Hmm..

I am not sure we have made that clear.

(Normally I would just note this to myself and move on, but I felt like sharing this musing with everyone)

Personally I love it when you DEVs provide comments like this one. Getting a little insight onto the why and that some of the drawbacks were unexpected really helps us not feel like you guys are crazy.

Like for this, if we think that you thought all feats are the same and then we go crazy yelling about how these feats are clearly weaker is a lot of wasted energy for stuff that isn't true.

I don't believe 1 and 4 are being hit at all.
Currently there doesn't feel like any "reward" for system mastery but instead harsh punishment for not having it and the other part of this is that the builds that system mastery say are okay don't always feel like good characters. Also so far most characters feel very samey. All use weapons, even wizards, to have a good one action ability, the bulk of the builds are the same since since there are limited good abilities and combos and weapons and weapon styles don't make a good impact.

Also "allowing characters to thrive in their defined role." doesn't seem to be a thing either. Again similar to the first, it's more of being slightly okay at a defined role rather than thriving. When fighters miss on a 11 against a non-boss and need like a 15 to hit the "bosses" it's more like barely useful contribution instead of the master of combat.
Also I've not seen "Encourage characters to play to their strengths, while working with others to bolster their place in the group" supported by play or the book
Everyone rolls everything since no one is good at anything and everyone is kinda okay since they all get level so no one feels it's not worth fishing for a 20. So no one feels needed.

PF1 was where you had people that thrived in their defined role, damage dealers did damage consistently and well, supports could support well. A party with no wizard needed to play to their strengths to cope for lack of wizard. A strong fighter often needed a party to help with knowledges and talking and magic item identification. And the more mastery of the system you had the more solid and capable characters you'd have, people that could splash into other things like a diplomacy fighter or knowledge barb and have it feel fun and fitting while still being effective.

PF1 seems to be a much better fit of your stated design goals than the current playtest of PF2 seems to be and where it seems to be going.

So while playing the game we ran into a fight in the water and we were very unsure how it works.

Can I use a weapon and still swim? Does it matter the size of the weapon? Is there any guidance on floating or sinking, like does a person with no armor and only a dagger float or sink? If I'm 10 ft in the water how much do I need to swim up to get to the surface? Normally calm water requires no check to swim, should fighting in calm water make the water not calm? Is casting on the surface difficult or penalized at all? Can you concentrate when under water?

I believe the issue is how much the treadmill gets in your face and causes you to be unable to enjoy the gameplay.
Like yes, all leveling games have a treadmill in the back, but most you're not aware of and never think to ask if it's there.
Here in PF2 it feels like you're playing treadmill the game. You're started off with the treadmill going at a 9/10 and quickly get to 10/10 which isn't a fun or enjoyable pace, especially to start.

A 14 str reach cleric is very viable and able to hit and deal damage in PF1 for like 10 levels and minimal investment. In PF2 a 14 str cleric feels awful cause they are behind and always will be now and need to full invest to stay at bad and not fall to awful.

NielsenE wrote:

If the caster's spell has at attack role it still suffers the penalty.

To be more precise, the spell must have the Attack trait. Several cantrips and some actual spells have this, but a spell like Harm does not. (Bad touch clerics are probably the most destructive nova class in the game.)

We've been told that an offensive touch Harm/Heal gains the attack trait.

So I kinda really dig these newest dying rules of the wounds. My BIGGEST request though is making regaining consciousness when healed a player's choice.
Like I want to heal you so you don't die, but then you're forced to be conscious and so an enemy might hit you while you're vulnerable and now you're in a really bad spot.
Having the option would allow you to get up if it was necessary but you'd know it's a risk while the normal thing is to stay unconscious as to not draw agro while you're in a critical state.

It seems like they don't want wack a mole to be a thing. They want the idea of popping back up and fighting to be a rare risky thing.

so this chart is saying that a fighter does on average 16.5 damage at lv9 right? wow, let me tell you about this super OP damage build. It's magic missile. Like the full round action version does 10.5 average damage per heightening, and heightening happens at the same level that people are expected to have a magic weapon upgrade. So at lv9 MM is averaging 31.5 damage from your top tier spells and 21 damage from your second best slots.
These two tiers, lv5 and lv9 seem to be competitive and great for all levels. And the spell gets better from there. Super OP damage

Right, but Mark said in the other thread that enfeebled 5 would only apply a -4 as that's a cap.

But why is being enfeebled 5 not a specific rule as well overriding the general rule? If the barbs numbers going up indicate an exception then the enfeelbed number going up should do likewise right?

Nope, I saw this same issue last night as well. Either the conditions used to affect only their stat attacks and it was changed and not everywhere was updated, or it's a typo and it's supposed to only be their stat attacks.

Don't forget that if it does anything but HIDE or SNEAK that it becomes sensed to people as well. Rule found in the SNEAK action that this is the case for invisible people.

a nat 20 is a crit success for their sneak checks assuming a 30 beats their perception DCs and a normal success if it doesn't. So isn't that an auto success?

should it be ran that way for the playtest / is it okay to run it that way? Or should we stick to the current printed stats for it?

Is the poltergeist, an undead, really supposed to be resistant to positive energy? That seems REALLY dumb.
Look an undead, use this disruptive weapon to kill it, JK it won't help at all.

So I found out some of the rules are wrong when we did it.
If the ghost does anything but hide or sneak then it becomes sensed to the players and they know something is there and which square it is. So every time it attacks it would be seen. Still annoying because a stealth can auto succeed to rehide but it allows for readied actions and stuff.

The issue with your wording DM_Blake is that that changes what the spell does.

Level is the spell level
lv1 1/2 = 1d8+w, 3 = w
lv2 1/2 heal 3d8+w, 1/2 hurt 2d8+w, 3 = 1d8+w
lv3 1/2 heal 5d8+w, 1/2 hurt 3d8+w, 3 = 2d8+w
lv4 1/2 heal 7d8+w, 1/2 hurt 4d8+w, 3 = 3d8+w

The 1 and 2 action recovery version go up 2d8, but the 1 and 2 action attack versions only go up at 1d8 like the burst.

I think this wording is great. It goes up 1d8 for everything. Cool we have our base. Then it adds the exception, IF using it for recovery it's a 2d8 increase

yup, cause clerics can't do damage with their spells. All* their direct damage follows the 1 die per level.

*(okay it might only be most, haven't really dug into it to prove all, but it's all I've seen of theirs)

Sure, it's "definitely not" a company failure that we still don't have a clear answer on shields. Sure you flubbed not knowing on the live stream, sure that's not the company's fault. But to have us still not knowing is the company's fault. Like you've went and had a meeting about shields and if they have hardness or not but didn't address how shields are used.

I got REALLY excited by the active play of shields, it seemed so cool and I REALLY wanted to test it out. How does this shield play work and feel? Does the shield paladin feel cooler compared to just using a normal shield? BUT I've stayed away from shields due to not knowing the rules. And it seems I'll be finished with the playtest never getting to try them out at this rate.

Level is the spell level
lv1 1/2 = 1d8+w, 3 = w
lv2 1/2 heal 3d8+w, 1/2 hurt 2d8+w, 3 = 1d8+w
lv3 1/2 heal 5d8+w, 1/2 hurt 3d8+w, 3 = 2d8+w
lv4 1/2 heal 7d8+w, 1/2 hurt 4d8+w, 3 = 3d8+w

The trend is healing is dice = level of first getting that spell level. harm is dice per spell level. and AoE is 1 die less than harm.

Curious what people think of this idea.
What if proficiency gave a bonus to checks against people of a lower proficiency on opposed checks?

So an expert rogue trying to athletics to jump is the same along with trying to grapple someone who's an expert at fort, but an athletics to grapple someone that is only trained at fortitude gets like a bonus +2 or +3 to show that they know how to outperform due to their higher specialty.

damage for harm to a living target at lv7 is 4d8+wisdom. and AoE is 3d8+wisdom. The +2d8 is only for the healing version of harm to undead. Damage is only 1d8 increase a spell level.
Draco18s is correct that offensive use causes it to gain the attack trait.

oh if that's what it is that's a lot better. So only 1 dent that's good.

Well according to the post about the twitch stream "Jason is not sure whether the shield takes one dent and then all other damages are transferred to the user, or if it takes multiple dents."
So with the lead designer not understanding how it works I think it's fair that most players aren't sure how it works.

Chess Pwn wrote:

Like none of that seems reasonable. I'm glad that we finally got the clear question about shields, but SUPER sad that the answer was, "lol, who knows"

It feels within the realm of possibility that the devs could (in a group chat or something) say "okay so how exactly do shields work" and then tell us whatever they agree on.

Right, but that they haven't' when it's been one of the first and longest asked questions is very offsetting. We've had three errata documents, that is at least 3 times they've gotten together to talk about rules stuff that needs clarifications/fixing and decided to not address the shield rules which is either asking how it works or a minute long vote about which to use.

right, I just played that fight, we had 4 people in the room apparently all next to him doing 3 seek actions a round with him in the radius and we couldn't find him. I don't know if the GM was doing it wrong or what but seeking like 12 times and not finding the ghost standing still doesn't imply that seeking worked well.

Wow, so the devs don't even know how shields work? Like it's only been asked on here since the beginning and they are reading these forums to know what's going on. I feel that the devs, being aware of the confusion on shields, if they didn't know how it works would find out how it works. To say you don't know how shields work at this point you've either intentionally not brushed up on a pretty big new mechanic that you're wanting people to use that you know they want to know how it works, OR the devs don't know how it's supposed to work and they wrote words without knowing what they wanted.

Like none of that seems reasonable. I'm glad that we finally got the clear question about shields, but SUPER sad that the answer was, "lol, who knows"

Ah, I understand he is not a specialist in fighting but a specialist in hitting things much like kamikaze. I wonder how is that even a concept for a fighter, gets into one close combat fight after the other and does not know how to defend himself but somehow survives?

It's what a lot of barbs do. A lot of them play the DPR race. I'll kill you before you kill me. Hence the lower armor proficiency and the AC penalty of rage with options to reduce it further tied with the largest hit die and some DR, and some build to embrace it, having 4 raging AC while having blur/displacement and tons of HP draining a full wand or two in some fights.

I agree that it's not an OPTIMAL plan but the idea that doing so makes you really good at your thing is fun. Like with that kind of guy someone on the team is likely a controller that helps him fight 1v1 and not get swarmed by enemies, and also provides a big draw so that a squishy rogue doesn't get noticed and can get into positions.

They are just "Spells" found in the spell section.

Why would the opposing fighter not be a specialist? Is that a thing only PC's can be?

If he was a specialist at hitting by sacrificing his defenses he'll go down really fast as now our baseline hitters will be hitting often, especially if he doesn't have a capable team to cover for him, and it's not taking advantage of the low defenses of our fighter.

So he'll maybe be wanting to be a generalist, good armor and a normal weapon. This makes it so that the fighter is the biggest threat, the others have average chance to hit while I have average against them, but this fighter looks easy to hit and is good at hitting me. I'll go for him and see if the team can stop me from dropping this guy before going to them.

Or perhaps it's the turtle approach and adds a shield, Great AC but iffy on the attacks. Now the fighter has the coinflip and the rest of the party are iffy as well, and the iffy attack is still pretty good against the fighter's sacrificed AC

Or maybe the enemy is a ranged guy, He'd drop the fighter before he reaches him, but if the fighter's party can get him there safely that ranged guy has no hope.

Here are 4 "specializations" that the players and the enemies can do that show there's lots of times things aren't coinflips against an equal opponent. Or at least the actions in the encounter. Sure it's maybe a coinflip for the first of who out damages the other faster, but the actions of "I'm going to hit since I'm accurate" are not coinflips, in the first they are guaranteed, in the second they are likely and only in the third, when going up against your counter are they at coinflips.

Like compare this to sports teams Many people are familiar with American football
In football
Some teams have really good thrown plays and not so great running plays.
Some have good thrown defense while some are better at rushing defense.
These throwing teams in this highly competitive sport have a good success against a team with a normal throw defense and only reach the coin-toss against a team that specializes in their counter.

Or another comparison in sports is that an athlete is actually quite good at many sports, but they are super good at their main sport. So like a soccer pro wins 80%+ against a football or basketball pros at soccer. The football and basketball player probably win 50% against semi-pro soccer people.

So yeah, I want my stick swinger to be able to hit more enemies because that's his main job. The backup hitters can have a harder time but my training makes it easier. Against an enemy with high AC I'll be at the 50% while the others miss a lot because that's what I do, hit things that are hard to hit, but I'm probably getting hit a lot in return.

I mean this concept was really well done in PF1. Barbs at lv1 can get +2 accuracy and +3 damage over the lv1 fighter. But they had lower AC and were frontloaded, the fighter scaled better and would ultimately get bigger numbers.
Sword and shield prioritized defense over offense and not being able to two hand.
Bows did less damage by having their attributes split and needed much feat support to reach parity with the base of melee damage, but the advantages was not needing to move as much or be in as direct danger.

Or look at rock paper scissors as another example of this concept.
Rock specialized to beat scissors and does so, Rock v Rock is a tie, no clear advantage. Rock v paper is disadvantage rock. What pathfinder feels like is rock, rock pretending it's scissors, rock pretending it's paper. All the matchups are basically ties since everyone is pretty much a rock.

a fighter with flank and some self-buffs (or a bard in party).*

the numbers are taken directly from my high level fighter...

Care to share this fighter? I've been trying to build one and I can't duplicate your numbers and I'm curious what I'm missing.

They've already stated that since the weapon has to be at least expert that it's subsumed by the +1

Just like in PF1 +1 subsumed the masterwork, since masterwork was required having a +1 let you know it was masterwork

Now if they had a legendary sword and added +1 they've said that would be a +1 legendary sword since the legendary isn't the default for a +1

Yes, that's kinda the idea, if I sacrifice my armor gold for weapon gold I want to be able to hit reliably. If I use all my feats for combat and not skills then I want my combat to be more reliable than skills. combo this and I should get to like 90%+ on my attacks.
So the baseline is the 65% for a normal paladin build but special builds can get the 90%

Mark Seifter wrote:

There's a limited amount of blog space (and it's not just the author of the blog involved in getting these up there), so that would be tricky. I did post in a barbarian thread that covered most of these changes saying I had noted them and hoped to adjust them, but at the time, I didn't know when/if those would be included in an update.

I guess that answers my question then.

I totally missed your post about adjustments you hoped to make to the Barbarian class though. I do check the forums everyday but it's hard to keep track of everything, hence why I thought it would be a good idea to have a blog post or maybe a sticky thread with a list of features which you're working on.
I understand that this is not possible so I guess I'll just keep watching out for each new errata and enjoy the unexpected new features when they come out! :D
Thank you for taking the time to reply.

Yeah, the compromise that Mark has given us is that anything he sees that he wants to discuss with his team he'll leave a "Noted" comment. So seeing which threads he's noted via his recent posts is the "blog" of stuff they are going to look at via forum.

16 actually makes a lot of sense to me. You have to make a conscious investment in the relevant stat (either through your initial stat distribution or at 5th and 10th level) in order to multiclass, adding a character building tradeoff. I like it a lot, even for classes where its more challenging to make the stat investment.

My clerics can't qualify for the cleric multi-class off of initial creating. One started with 12 wisdom and the other, a dwarf, with 14. So saying that a non-cleric needs a lot more wisdom than actual clerics to become a cleric as a side job doesn't seem to make sense.

The dedications say so. Fighter is now str or dex 16, rogue is dex 16, wizard int 16 and cleric wis 16

Rob - The hyperbole he was referring to are comments like -

"do a single encounter, maybe two and retreat"

This is not the case.

This is what's happened in my playtest experience so far with playing and GMing part 1 and playing lv5 PFS and part 2. We do 1 or 2 fights and then need to rest cause we are out of spells and HP.

"Clerics nice to have instead of (as they are in this playtest)"

This is not true.

While they aren't "required" the parties without a positive energy cleric struggled in fights far more as one lucky hit brought them to critical and there's not many fast ways back into the fight.

probably a combination of classes accessing legendary training in weapons, potential access to +5 weapon, and just one of the strong levels.

But when you have a rule that can be read two ways and one way it's a workable mechanic that's actually quite cool and the other a worthless waste of ink isn't it reasonable to assume that the former reading is the right one?

until it's FAQ'd into oblivion anyway!

haha, I used to believe that, but some of the recent FAQs repeatedly seeming to go contrary to my understanding of the game I'm not so sure that the "reasonable" use is the intended rule.

What does Dread Striker do now? Is it there specifically to allow sneak attack? The penalties don't stack so it seems like a weird interaction.

Why don't the penalties stack?

frightened:
You take a conditional penalty equal to this value to...

is there something I'm missing about stacking penalties?