DocRoc's page

I guess I'm shocked this thread is still going. I don't think we'll see such a forum, unfortunately. I'd really like a place to go now that gleemax is proper-dead.

The monk has one niche that is very nearly his own.

He can move fast, get around enemy defenses, and strike their casters and bosses in the back ranks better than any class.

[..]

The monk, on the other hand, has the movement speed to get there quick (at after 12th level he can dimension door), has the AC and HP to withstand being pounded on a bit, has the saves and Evasion to shrug off most of the enemy spellcasters' tricks, and has enough damage output to kill mages quickly - sending a barbarian is overkill, for example (and he might not get there if that enemy mage knows what he's doing).

I'm not sure I see why I wouldn't just use a mounted barbarian or mounted charger paladin instead of the monk for this role.

"True. And in a one-on-one fight the fighter would mop the floor with the monk. They have their niches. Unfortunately, making damage is not what the monk does best."

What is the Monk's niche?

I personally adhere to the philosophy that dragons come from kobolds, given the predestined once-present-future existence of Pun-Pun....

I'm a big fan of Elementals as sources of sorcery, thanks to my early exposure to the excellently articulated Genasi from Planescape.

What's the precise shape of the nerf in Final?

A PF fighter can cross 300 damage in core, easy, without charger abuse. I'm not compelled by 4d10 damage. That said, I'm really curious about the build, and look forward to seeing it. :)

The issue is that all of this relies heavily on a strongly favorable set of conditions. And sure, you have a hopefully benevolent GM, but what if I was planning on using enemies too large to grapple, or flying opponents, or god-forbid, incorporeal undead?

I think the problem with the monk is that all the things it does well are highly situational, compared particularly to the buffed barbarian or the somewhat improved fighter. (Slightly, at least :( )

I'm going to weigh in, and say that they'd better get some very serious compensation for this loss, particularly with the increase in class features for the primary caster classes.

Me too. If you're within 90 miles of williamsburg, their candy shop is worth the drive. :)

Quite a bit, but I really don't think it works "perfectly."

Vancian casting is not the enemy.

One of my favorite GMs doesn't even bother with stat blocks. If the bad guy needs 10,000 hp so be it... one tough halfling, but still he puts up a good fight! If he needs a particular spell he has it. Doesn't work for some, but works ok for others.

Personally, I like it both ways. I like having a stat block to reference, but if the stat block proves too limiting I'll easily deviate from it to what I need.

Like I said, I do fudge things, but I have set rules for fudging things, and a solid valuation in gold or exp for anything I change. Other than the blob-o-hp which you really almost have to do in D&D. But that's fine, it's no more bizarre than the stats for a solar or the rules for burning.

Did you know that non-magical fire doesn't do enough damage to burn wood?

SCIENCE!

I use gametable, myself. It's nice and free. Also fast and easy.

Actually, a 25% viability for a reasonably optimized build is below bad, and down into terrible by my standards. I hope Final is better about this.......

I agree excepting the non-core builds like the Mailman, or orb-casters. In cases where you just need to get a small amount of damage through in an unpreventable fashion, DD can be very good. Otherwise I'm going to reach for a charger, myself.

I figured it'd look something like that :: hums thoughtfully ::

I am a huge fan of the monk 2/psychic warrior N build, using the Tashalatora feat. Hits like three trucks tied together by loose twine.

Technically, actually, standstill was core as it was in the OGL\SRD. It may no longer be core, but that would mean that psionics are also no longer core, which would be an absolutely terrible loss of one of the few well-balanced components of 3.5. :: worries ::

I rely heavily on the original 2e books. I trust myself, at this point, to update material as I need to. And my lord, the gate-towns? I've seen few if any WotC products that had as much color and verve as the gate-towns.

:: wistful ::

Spiffy Jim wrote:

My 17th level wizard had the potential to do 100d6 damage to an area, and an -additional- 12d6x 1.5 to one target within that area,in ONE ROUND. I could chose my element including sonic and my DC was in the neighborhood of 30, as I recall. I auto-popped SR32.

All with 3.5 rules out of the PHB and complete arcane.

Evokers are okay for damage.

I'd like to hear more about optimizing an evoker/direct damage arcanist.

Maybe it's not as bad as I think.

Maximize Streamers (shining south).

200 untyped damage if you can beat their touch AC. Oh, how often?
Oh, say, once per action they take. In the middle of their action. For CL*Rounds.

Wait.

What?

:: grin::

Non-core evocation is VERY powerful.

Could I get an explanation of how you are hitting so hard as a fighter?

My campaign, in fact, is up there. It's basically like mythweavers except less nice. :|

Here
doink

How is that better than a fighter with lunge, a spiked chain or the much under-loved Duom, and standstill? :: curious, not aggressive ::
I would find this in some respects a little more cheesy or strange than a spiked chain, but I certainly understand and empathize with your perspective.

I really don't want to accidentally let this devolve into an argument, so just take it all with some salt as I'm still missing information\bits of the changes to the system.

How about I hand you one of my player's githyanki characters? :)

I knock out the psi-like abilities and make it a +1 LA race, then allow buy off. The same makes Githzerai much better all around, and playable to boot. :)

So I've been re-reading the beta rules, and I really don't feel like monk's been improved much at all. Is this a common opinion? Are there plans for a change?

If not, I need to know why not, because it seems that all the other base classes have grown immensely in power, particularly classes like paladin or ranger which were already a full tier above monk. I like those changes, and in general, I feel very good about the life of a melee specialist in 3.5. But why is monk still so weak? Even the stances, though they help, just don't feel like they help enough.

The Good:
Scaling stunning fist!
Save-or-Sucks like scorpion style!
Increased number of attacks from flurry by spending ki.

The Bad:
Standstill is still more attractive than scorpion style.
Bab is still painful.
MAD seems worse, not better.
Must spend ki to overcome DR?
Relatively fragile
Mobility class that demands a full-attack to function.

Opinions and known changes in final would help me put this in better perspective, but right now, it remains the single most worrisome aspect of Pathfinder for me.

They actually aren't too obscure, and none of it is setting specific, interestingly enough. I don't have a list right at hand.
Frostburn, sandstorm, Unearthed Arcana, and PHB2 should be just about it.

Oh, and contemplative from complete divine, but you could comfortably drop that dip. It's for a bonus domain, and is a very common dip.

To be clear, tainted sorcerer has no class abilities after first. In other words, six levels isn't really a dip in the classical sense. :)

'S a lil extreme, in my mind, but there are some houserules, like that one, that might make me start to get uncomfortable. I think I'd only really have a problem with it after my third dead character, which might come up immediately, or never, depending on how he runs his games. :|

My issue with that is that, again, you'd need to reduce damage from melee across the board, taking away their one remaining joy unless you use ToB. :S

Not to be confused with the asshat, which is a dance, as in "Do the asshat".

I always assumed asshat was the vector quantity for stupidity.

I also have an explicit and readily posted ban-list. If someone takes something on it, they get fed to the hounds. Serious gamebreaks result in you becoming an NPC and getting a character from my mile high archive of builds.

No one has complained except one PbPer who wanted to play the twice-betrayer of shaar without understanding what made it work. That made me really mad. No just being a dick about it, but not understanding such a beautiful and cool build. :|

Man, as soon as I saw that 4E had killed the great wheel, I stopped reading as simple as that. Fortunately, I found this after learning to play, so if my friends desperately need a seat filled I can do it. But not well.

And by extension, here I am. As for your Spoilered character, you might take a look at my beloved factotum in the dungeonscape supplement. Blessed with win, that one is! :)

Bards. Don't. Suck.
Bard players often make them suck, blessing them with the sacrament of weakness through a determination that they will be awesome two-weapon fighting minstrels who have MAD out the ying-yang. Bards, specialized into a specific party role, are lovely if you allow non-core.

I just included the ones I had handy, but other than the earthen cleric, they scale down fairly well. The links I included are outbound to some other more viable builds with varying ECL. Unfortunately, I had precisely 1 hour to write most of that handbook, so.... :|

I'm Dr_Rocktopus from 339, actually. I steer clear of BG, myself. Dunno, seems a little bit more elitist than I like.

You may have seen some of my stuff in the Dirty Fixes Handbook, though, or possibly heard about my Buildomancers.

I count for a minyan too, if my (very accurate) avatar didn't give me away ;)

I'm very fond of evokers, though not for the usual reasons, and my builds might not be what most people like. I like doing interesting things, and evocation has a good number of fun spells. Not as many as I'd like, but many of the school-melding fixes suggested work lovely. Damage is just not fun for me, but evocation does have more to offer than just direct damage.

But I'm going to be blunt:
There are no good quick simple solutions to a problem like this that runs to the core of a game's entire design philosophy. Spells like web and glitterdust were made very powerful because the designers felt that people would use them rarely because hit point damage is cool.

Bad design is bad design. There's a reason I'm waiting, impatiently, for PF final to drop.

There are, however, feats that allow you to cast or otherwise act while performing, and these are a tremendous and important power boost for Bards.

[That should have been core.]

Were those comments directed at me? Because I haven't been "pseudo-polite."

I've been polite. And plan to be.

Not particularly controversial, though I feel it's probably not particularly apt, but I'm curious as to how long your fights take.

Seconded. I'm with Hogarth here. Bard is potentially very strong in a non-core situation. In 3.5 core, it is a weak class, but beyond that, I've gotten a great deal of joy from some of my more eccentric bard builds.

:)

If you think outbound links to google docs won't upset anyone, this is how I normally prepare and save my preliminary work anyway. It'd save me a lot of effort. Alternatively, I can set up a dedicated wiki-style site for optimization handbooks. Hard to say which is a better plan.

Oh by no means Doc, by no means.

I would not say that PRPG "assumes" the use of non-core, but one of the primary sub-goals of backwards compatibility was the continued use of the myriad of supplements available, or at least the majority of them. At least a couple were co-written by Paizo Staff after all :)

Investigating the interactions of those with Pathfinder prior to the Final version was difficult, and often unhelpful. Investigating them now/shortly will be an important step in judging the success of that goal.

Agreed on all points. I was just kidding about the books and the trash. :)

I'll be around, I think, more regularly after final drops to try and work through the vast amount of non-core material for the purposes of balance and analysis.

ToB is a lovely and very useful book that really helps a weak set of archetypes shine. It gives you something in the same range of rewards as higher level spells, though the parity tapers off around 7-9th. I understand it's not to a lot of people's tastes, but it really is an amazingly well-made book, probably my single favorite. I'll be running ToB alongside PF very extensively, so I'll let you know more about how they measure up as I have more information post-Final.

It's particularly good, though, for ominous villains, lending them a tremendous amount of power and flair that normal mooks can get away with not having. It makes the Sword\Lord BBEG almost viable, though you'll still want a full support system behind him or her or it. In that respect, I think it's important to consider it closely. Certainly, it's a powerful book, but nothing like old 3.5 with gate, alter self, dust of sneezing and choking, or contingency, to name a few serious offenders.

Heroes of horror, I think, was always intended as a book for GMs, and in that goal it succeeds almost without parallel, introducing interesting mechanics, cool gear, and full support for the darker range of villainy. I almost never allow players to use taint to their advantage, but the mechanical support for a fundamentally corrosive flavor of evil really helps make D&D much more scary.

While I am a proponent of understanding the theoretical underpinnings of the game, game balance can unfortunately never be a science with any degree of precision. Math and theory can help us discern the raw mechanistic power of classes or of certain kinds of enemies, but valuing things like secondary debuffs is very very difficult and can only be done with extensive playtesting.

Non-core is important to me for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that all of my games are run in Planescape, which means that it starts to become very odd to see your martial traditions mirrored on every world, mechanically speaking. :)

If nothing else comes out of this, I suggest we all inventory our own Jerk Points in our signatures, for maximum lulz. I think a statistical analysis of ChOp v. Paizo would be hilarious but impossible to found on any quantitative grounds as how would you aggregate the data into measurable categories? :) Still, it'd be funny enough to make it worth doing at least a joke-instance of.

A few of them are from the very-recently-published Dragon Magic book. It was basically the last supplement to drop, and I didn't even know about it until recently. It has a lot of buffs for weaker classes, including Favored Soul and Sorcerer. Fun stuff!

Might be hard to find a physical copy :S

Unfortunately, as is obvious, the index isn't complete. I use it in conjunction with four or five other indexes, as well as searching the WotCO boards. I are teh thorough ;)

Absolutely true, forgive my wandering mind. :)

One thing to note: compared to the WotC message boards, threads get archived fairly quickly here, and it's sometimes difficult to find a particular archived thread.

(No offense, Gary.)

Hey Hogarth! Good to see you over here.

That's going to be problematic. Is there a way around this? Maybe a readily accessible archival forum for handbooks? :: hums intently :: wish I knew precisely what BBS system they were using as the base for these forums. I'd know more about what is a reasonable suggestion.

While I have no maths to back this up (not my interest) I also note that the suggested superiority of save-or-suck seems to be based off the one-on-one gladiatorial matches used as a proxy for game balance (which, interestingly, are much easier to model that messy multi-party member "real" game situations, and in which a single successful save-or-suck spell will probably make the difference between the lone wizard winning or the wizard getting eaten the following round) and therefore misses that potential synergy, which might make blaster spells look less effective. I put this out there for discussion rather than as something I have tested.

Disagree whole-heartedly. Spells like Evard's Black Tentacles and Solid Fog have a tremendous effect on the shape of the battle-field, and lie at the heart of a strategy you've certainly heard of which is the BC (battlefield control) Wizard. Also known as the GodWizard, he's designed to help mitigate threat on a larger scale.

People like me tend strongly away from single target SoDs, because they're boring for all involved, particularly my fellow players, and often very weak. Give me glitterdust, grease (even nerfed), or my beloved web any day over phantasmal killer or hold person.

Kevin Mack wrote:

Well to be fair that build requires other sourcebooks to make. The question is not can you make an bard exceptional good with every book out there. Its whether the core bard itself is good enough.

Remember that non-core books also provide alot of abilities which can negate these as well. Quite alot of spells/powers/class features can't be negated or even hindered by core.

Besides, PFRPG is built under the assumption that non-core books will be allowed, so factoring non-core books into any PFRPG analysis shouldn't be unreasonable.

Seconded.

Here, this might help:
Searrrrrchhhhhhh meeeee

I think I'll cope with that by tanking the incoming fuss, or relying on my sophisticated point-defense system to allow me to continue to achieve my function, which is categorically referred to as being gnarly. ;) I don't mind ruffling a few feathers accidentally, if it's an unavoidable outcome of stating my opinion politely.

My first thought: If you don't wear armor, and/or don't cast while deafened, then you won't face any percentile rolls for spell failure.

My second thought: Why not? It's called the d20 system for a reason and since all percentile chances are given in lots of 5% the d20 can handle that roll just as easily. You could convert casting under harsh conditions, like wearing armor or being deaf, to concentration checks with a similar chance of failure for your highest level spell. I'd be onboard with that as a House Rule.

You missed my point. I can't affect those d% rolls at all, so I have no control over how often I will fail if we use your idea of ASF as a check on caster power. This is a game about odds, and a meta-game about mitigating those odds. There is no way for a player to escape a static ASF imposed by your suggestion. I'm afraid I'm still answering the original question posed in the OP.

:: Grins wanly :: Thanks for the welcome. I personally feel that as it stands, core-only is not terribly well-balanced.
3.75 is an improvement, by a wide margin, but not enough for me to start throwing away my books :: gentle hyperbole ::
Unfortunately, the posts are now edit-locked, so I can't go back and label the non-core material. For the most part, I kept it limited to the Magic Item Compendium and the Completes, though the half golem template is from... I think MM II. It was just too good and too sinister to leave out of that build, particularly with it being effectively an NPC-only template.

I actually avoided keeping it core only, because I haven't seen the final 3.75 rules, and it'd be very painful to hinge a build or example on something that's not there anymore. I opted to keep it somewhat lower on examples than I wanted, simply so that it wouldn't look dominated by crunch. I am, though, a crunch man and a GM for most of my career as a gamer.

Wave attacks is a superb trick that I meant to add, but ran out of time to do so. Time crunch + Edit lock was not a pleasant experience.