| ComradeCanuck |
I'm going to be starting my first Pathfinder 2e campaign sometime next month, and I was looking for some input/advice from people more familiar with pf2e than I am. I'm heavily leaning toward the Kingmaker AP right now (though I haven't made a final decision) but I think my question would apply to a lot of APs.
Specifically, one of my players wants to run a Champion character. I'm concerned how well that will work with the current state of the champion in the Remaster rules- while I don't have the Kingmaker material to read though yet, my understanding from what I have read online is that it doesn't really have a lot of Unholy enemies. (I know we're getting the remastered champion in July, but that's well after the campaign is going to start, so we're stuck with it as-is for now)
My primary concern is that most of the Champion abilities that used to do good damage- which worked on any evil creature- now have been changed to do spirit damage if the target is unholy. The thing is, 'Unholy' is a much smaller category than 'evil' was- as best I can tell, it really only applies to fiends, undead, and unholy champions/clerics. That seems like a pretty unambiguous downgrade for all of these abilities- they're much less versatile than they used to be, and they don't seem to have had any changes to compensate for that loss. The only real exceptions I can find are that Divine Smite and the Litany focus spells now work on anything that's not Holy. And maybe I'm just missing the proper use, but I've tried running a few simulated encounters in my VTT to get familiar with pf2e rules, and as far as I can tell the primary benefit of the Litanies is to get extra focus points for Lay on Hands- they're just too short duration and situational to be all that useful, so Divine Smite is the only real positive change to compensate for the losses I can see.
So, my question is, am I just missing something, and either the Champion changes aren't the straight downgrades they look like, or there's at least some benefits that make the class work well against stuff other than Unholy enemies I'm not seeing?
If not, does anyone have any advice on how to deal with a Champion PC in an AP without a lot of unholy enemies? I'd really rather not have to just tell the player they should probably pick another class, but I know from experience how frustrating players find it to be playing the least effective member of a party.