Neat. What did you name the book familiar?Was it me, I would have named it "Gutenburg". :)
It was a one-shot so I just called it “book”.
Search Posts
I actually did something like that, but using an inscribed one witch. Took tough, construct and flight. Played it like a wizard who found a sentient spell book. Worked well.
Bards get Hymn of Healing, one of the most underrated healing spells in the game. We had a fighter who took the bard archetype and hymn of healing at 4th level. At 5th level they could put out an effective 48 points of healing for a single focus point. It just doesn’t see as much play because it’s a composition spell and courageous anthem or dirge of doom is even better most of the time, but if it’s your only focus spell it really shines.
Important note: Talk to your GM about how they want to handle base and extended kinesis, especially proliferate. The rules are vague and up to interpretation. Make sure you are on the same page.
Which mastermind issue is this?
Did they change any of the verbiage on additional recall knowledge attempts on the same target? That was the biggest weakness of the mastermind.
Unicore, thank you very much. I have never really looked at Proficiency without level and summoning spells before. Normally I play standard so I have very little experience with it. And summoning spells are off the charts amazing when playing PWL. The sheer versatility of a conjuror wizard is staggering. The thing that holds back summoning spells in regular games is that you summon things that are woefully under-leveled vs. the things you’re fighting. But in PWL, a level one wolf or hunting spider is nearly equal to something 4 levels above it, especially when you use augment summons. There are so many creatures that are simply broken in the hands of a PC if the GM allows unlimited access to monsters. For example the level -1 ether sprite, which has a one action at will confusion ability, so a summoner can use one of his actions to confuse two enemies. If he has access to the summon fey spell natively, he can do this at level 1. It is hard to grasp how strong summoning seems under PWL. Maybe I am missing something. I hope so.
At lowest levels, before your martials get their striking runes, Magic Weapon is the strongest spell in the game. The two handed fighter’s extra damage? That’s damage that you did. No spell in the game does as much potential damage than Magic Weapon while it is relevant.
The Dwarf feat Sheltering Slab is really good on a class that can create 5 foot stone blocks at will.
The new kineticist dedication is going to profoundly change the caster meta. If you play free archetype, it’s going to be an auto pick for casters. Even if you don’t, for many casters (*cough* wizard) almost no class feat comes close to kineticist dedication feats, especially early on.
I really hope that they remove the sentence about only being able to use stances during encounter mode. There are many stances that would be useful outside of combat.
Strength +3 seems a bit high. +2 strength with the hefty hauler skill feat seems like a better fit. I also don’t see farmers as that dexterous, so a +0 is fine. +1 wisdom might be appropriate to represent the old farmer archetype, but maybe not the young farmer type. So +1 str/+1 con from ancestry, +1 str/+1 con and hefty hauler from background with maybe a bonus to wisdom.
Don't spend 3 actions striking Even that’s not universal. There are situations where making a third attack at -10 may be the best choice. Like say your bard critically succeeded an inspire heroics on you, the enemy is clumsy 3 from synesthesia for just this round, and the rogue just moved into flank with you. In that case, swing away.
Healing touch (Level 1) Through faith, study or mystic connection your bare hands can be as effective as the best surgical tools. Req: Trained in Medicine and either Nature, Occultism or Religion. As long as you have at least one hand free you are considered to be wielding the proper tools for all uses of the Medicine skill. If you have expert proficiency in both required skills, your hands gain a +1 item bonus to Medicine checks. If you have master proficiency in both skills, the item bonus increases to +2 and legendary in both skills increases the bonus to +3. Mechanically all this really saves you is some gold and maybe an action to pull out your tools in a combat situation but very flavorful.
i wish my experiance mirrored yours unicore, from everything i have seen in my playtests, i have found kineticitst to just be doing everything badly, (two level 6 kineticists, one dual air fire dex man, the other dedicated earth str man) they do an awful lot of stuff badly, save for the one impulse they get off at the start of a fight before enemies can all run and get tangled into your front line. I know that the utility impulses do get very good later on, and i do like that part of the class, and my dual air fire guy would have benifited from picking up fair winds, but my players felt like they got to do "cool kineticst thing" once per fight and after that they where just sub par at everything You are joking, but it’s really easy to build a subpar kineticist. I’ve done 2 tests so far, one with a 10th level water kineticist, and a 1st level air kineticist. The 10th level water kineticist was amazing. The first level air kineticist… was not.
I’m allowing elemental weapon (composite longbow) for the playtest, but earth blast does the same damage and water 2 points less, although with much lower range. Doesn’t change the fact that when built in a very specific way kineticist can do reasonable damage. It’s why I want CON to damage, so it allows more builds to do similar damage that they can already do without jumping through all the hoops.
I'm sorry, what options give you that? Elemental weapon (bastard sword or composite longbow), +4 strength, +2d6 from property runes, +2 weapon specialization, +1 from elemental wisp. Winter’s clutch adds +11 cold damage to anyone within 20 feet, which pulls it even closer to barbarian.
If all you care about is damage, at level 11 a kineticist can do 2d12+2d6+7 melee or 2d8+2d6+5 with a 100’ range, with any element, as a single action. Not barbarian numbers, but respectable. I’m more worried about there being a one true build.
Kinetic cover, kinetic healer and slick. Water has something like them but much higher level.
I hope they have something close to a kinetic chiurgeon. We had one in 1e that was amazing.
At 10th level, Hymn of Healing heals 10 hit points and provides 10 temporary hit points a round for 4 rounds. Being able to pick it up for a low charisma character, especially on a class that doesn’t have good third action options, is really good.
In combat, simple and complex characters are pretty close. Under certain circumstances, the complex character may eke out a few percentage points more here and there but usually not enough to matter significantly. Out of combat, the complex character rules. For example, the great axe power attacking fighter is simple as it comes. Move and power attack, power attack then move, or maybe use a skill and power attack. For the wizard or alchemist, they need to jump through a lot of hoops to even come close to the same power level in combat. Out of combat, the fighter only has a couple of good skills ( usually athletics and maybe one or two others) to contribute, while the wizard or alchemist has many more tools at their disposal. So yes, if all you care about is combat go simple. You will hit the power ceiling easier and more consistently.
Assuming the magus is covering thievery and you got medicine, the biggest hole is you have no charisma based characters. Too bad bard is off the table as that would fill the hole perfectly. If the magus is not covering thievery, then a rogue (dex/cha focused) would be the best choice. Swashbuckler would also work.
Mastermind only works once and getting crit success of recall knowledge is not easy, so planning for the 1-minute duration is ill-advised.So, the difference is that those other classes have no problem getting their additional damage at range, as opposed to the Rogue.Mastermind rogue is similar, as you can make a target flatfooted with a recall knowledge check. You usually just switch targets, but yes you do want an alternate way to gain flat-footed at range in case you fail your recall knowledge or there are no more targets. Still better than getting into melee range of an enemy. You could get hurt that way.
So, the difference is that those other classes have no problem getting their additional damage at range, as opposed to the Rogue. Mastermind rogue is similar, as you can make a target flatfooted with a recall knowledge check.
Expand the ritualist archetype into a full class. Add 10 minute rituals only the ritualist can cast.
Getting rid of NPC classes. In my last PF1 campaign they were an important part of the world building so I was extremely worried. Turns out the new NPC rules work great and I don’t miss them.
Since it looks like we will not finish due to work and stuff, I’m going to go ahead and talk about our testing of the psychic. We wanted to try something we’ve been meaning to do, the super fighter team, focusing on making a fighter the best they could be. We had a fighter (obviously), bard, eldritch trickster (divine) rogue and an infinite eye psychic. We were going to try multiple levels but only did level 1, and only 1 session at that. General comments: Super-fighter was super-effective, at least at this level. At one point the fighter could crit on a 7, for 6d12+17! Granted, it was against a zombie shambler, but still. Even the rogue was seeing good results and they weren’t the focus. Psychic comments: We went with spell attack for the mental scan roll. Cooperative Nature is very strong with mental scan, maybe too much so, especially with the cooperative soul follow-up. It makes humans the go to choice for psychics. The psychic chose mage armor as their one spell per day so it would have the biggest impact. They said that they would probably never cast true strike and hated that it was required. They requested maybe object reading as an alternative. Not sure about that one. Home game I’d allow it. They never amped detect magic, and only amped guidance once, which turned out not to matter besides taking a 10 minute refocus to get the point back. Hopefully there will be more options to use amps when the book comes out. On another note I never realized guidance and aid stacked before which is nice to discover. While we only did first, the psychic was underwhelmed by the feat options. They said in an actual game most class feats would be used for archetypes. Combat was very samey. Amp mental scan a target and TK projectile or daze, depending on what the results say. Partly because the fighter was wrecking everything. For something called infinite eye, their perception was pretty bad, tied for lowest in the party. Not a big deal, but was mentioned. Overall feeling is that with a little tweaking psychic will be in a good place but not quite there yet.
The question then is how important or strong are the class feats for the summoner and magus? Can they afford to give away 5 class feats, most of which are low level, to pick up a caster archetype?
Magic Weapon. By 3-4 you are going to be retraining it out, but for the first couple of levels it’s the best spell in the game. Magic Weapon, inspire courage and move to flank gives the fighter +4 to hit and an extra die of damage.
I’ve considered using ABP, but I’m not sure how it interacts with alchemy and alchemists. For example, devastating attacks says to increase dice size of weapons from one to two but bombs (which are martial weapons) already increase die sizes.
Crunch-wise it was the verminous hunter that started with the companion already dead. I was going to talk to the GM to see if I could swap out the teamwork feats and summon animal spells for something else but was ok if it wasn’t allowed. I was uninterested in summoning animals really. Fluff-wise I pictured him as a warrior who was linked to the world of vermin, internalizing the blessings of the insects to make him a better survivor. Never got a chance to play him.
When the Advanced Class Guide first came out, I worked on a verminous hunter/feral hunter cross who called upon the insect world to give himself the vermin boosts and picked spells that both fit the theme and were more long lasting buffs (ant haul, endure elements and so on.) I have no idea on how to do him in PF2. Maybe fighter with a shifter dedication when it is available?
You can take the versatile heritage instead of skilled for your general feat and then take natural skill as your human feat. This gives you an extra skill at trained.
Under weapon critical specialization effects I don’t see a rating for polearms. What rating do you give it?
Quick cantrip fix: Increase die size of all cantrips by one step except for electric arc.
So what about the elf ancestry feat “Ancestral Longevity “? If you choose the lore “nobles of Absalom” for the day should you get the reduction in DC?
I’m trying to understand why sturdy runes shouldn’t be a thing. If you don’t want to shield block you don’t have to pay for it and if you are willing to spend the gold for both the base shield and the rune you will get the effects of both. Can those who don’t agree with the sturdy rune house rule please explain the objections you have before I implement them in my game?
It seems that many people have an issue with the verisimilitude of battle medicine and not using a kit or empty hand. Let’s see if we can come up with a justification for it. Let’s say I am playing a monk with battle medicine. I want to define this as striking certain acupressure points causing the body to release its own resources to heal the injury. (It’s also why I can only do it once a day as it takes that long for the body to recharge.) I then point out that I can do it with, say, a stick instead of my fingers. I am still hitting the point only with the stick after all. I then teach my friend the fighter how to do it as well, using the hilt of his sword. He picks up the skill and feat so now he can do it too. Finally, I actually did this a thousand years ago. This knowledge has spread to many healers throughout the land. There. We now have an in-game reason why people can heal without needing a healer’s kit or an empty hand.
In pf1, dwarves got the trait “hatred”, which gave a bonus against goblinoids. In pf2, the ancestry feat “vengeful hatred” no longer includes them as an option. I assume that this was deliberate.
In the /wizards advancement sections, you include a first level wizard feat. That is no longer the case.
I find that building the character and knowing in what direction you are taking them usually informs me on how to play them. For example, what skill do you want to first take to legendary? Then ask why’d they want to do so. Let’s say you want to be a legendary diplomat. Ok, why as a gnome would you want to do that? Maybe you find humans fascinating and want to write biographies of every human you meet. They are so varied and have such interesting stories to tell. Sometimes the stories are incredibly happy and sometimes they are amazingly sad, but you want to know them all. You are constantly writing down in your notebooks their stories and life. You started as a barkeep but wanted to meet even more of these fascinating creatures. And becoming an adventurer was the easiest way to do so. And you will never run out of humans to write about, so you will never have to worry about the bleaching.
Elementalist water sorcerers get produce water instead of the produce flame cantrip. Is this water drinkable and how much is produced per casting? Since it does persistent damage on a critical I assume the water keeps bludgeoning the target so the water must stay around at least for a while.
I made an elven wizard just to see if this is an issue. I ended up with the following skills: academia lore, arcana, crafting, elven lore, medicine, nature, occultism, religion and society with 3 skills left to choose. I think wizards are fine.
My concern in that regard is while there may be nothing in the rules about non-sensible scaling, the people doing the adventure design will do such scaling under the idea that skill use should challenge the players. Like the mayor the characters try to convince at first level is equivalent to a third level character, but the same mayor when dealing with tenth level characters is now equivalent to a 12th level character. Or that the wall of the fortress is now built of smooth adamantine instead of rough-hewn rock to make climbing it more difficult, simply to be difficult.
Armed Fortitude states "Your proficiency rank for heavy armor and shields increases to expert, and your proficiency rank for Fortitude saves increases to master". So, does expert in shields do anything?
My only real issue is with someone who is just trained can treat 6 patients at once. Personally, I would prefer that trained can heal 1 person, expert 2 at once, master 4 at once and legendary 6 or 8 at once. I'd also like it to explicitly state that the patient cannot take any actions while being treated ("Sit still, darn you") and if they do you have to start again.
That said, I'm pretty sure shield bosses/spikes can, since they are a weapon attached to a shield. If this is incorrect, please let me know.
The player said that it was the only way he could get the ranger to work like he wanted. He was pretty effective for the parts that we played.Can you provide more details on both aspects of that? He wanted to play a ranged hunter type character. He didn't want to go two weapon nor did he want an animal companion. (The druid was going the companion route.) If I remember, he also didn't like the monster hunter, which left crossbow ace as his first level class feat. It was also the reason he went half-elf, as he didn't want another class feat, and the general feat he would have taken was fleet, so he took half elf and got low light vision at the same time. (He took fleet as his third level general feat.) He didn't really like any of the 2nd or 4th level feats, so he decided to multiclass cleric. At first it was so he could pick up deadly simplicity at 4th for crossbow, but he also wanted to be able to use divine scrolls and wands. Since as a multiclass you have to actually be able to cast the level of the spell for scrolls and wands, he took basic spell casting instead, choosing magic weapon as his spell and buying a few scrolls and a wand of heal. This gave us a backup healer. He was the MVP for the manticore fight, being one of two characters with decent ranged capability (the other being the bard's magic missiles). He cast magic weapon on the crossbow and with crossbow ace wad dealing decent damage. With a dex of 18 and magic hide +1 armor, he also had the highest AC in the party. He was the one who had expert in survival, too. After the fight, with the druid and bard mostly out of spells, he used his wand to heal those who were still injured.
In doomsday dawn part 2 we had a half-elf ranger crossbow specialist who multi-classed into a cleric of Abadar. He used hunt target to power his crossbow ace feat, but the reduced penalty never came up (because crossbow reload speed). The player said that it was the only way he could get the ranger to work like he wanted. He was pretty effective for the parts that we played.
|