DoggieBert's page

Animal skin has changed in a similar way to mountain stance:

Your proficiency in unarmored defense increases to expert. While you are raging and unarmored, your skin transforms into a thick hide resembling your animal’s skin. You gain a +1 status bonus to AC instead of taking a –1 penalty to AC; if you have the greater juggernaut class feature, this status bonus increases to +2. The thickness of your hide gives you a Dexterity modifier cap to your AC of +3.

Your proficiency in unarmored defense increases to expert. When you are raging and unarmored, your skin transforms into a thick hide. You gain a +2 item bonus to AC (+3 if you have the greater juggernaut class feature). The thickness of your hide gives you a Dexterity modifier cap to your AC of +3. This item bonus to AC is cumulative with armor potency runes on your explorer’s clothing, mage armor, and bracers of armor.

Level 3 Monk: 22 AC/24 with a Shield raised. Completely broken in my opinion.

It's actually worse than that on a Mountain Stance Monk. At level 3 they have 7 (proficiency) + 4 status (stance) + 5 item (mutagen) = 26 AC without a shield. A champion only has 7 (proficiency) + 6 item (full plate) = 23 before shield. Even if we up it a few levels to the point the champion has his +1 armor the monk AC is still as high as his is with his shield up. Sure, there's opportunity cost to drinking the mutagen, but there's opportunity cost to raising your shield every round too...

DoggieBert wrote:

I did a basic comparison of a bomber alchemist to other options here. It's long, but the tl;dr is that for an alchemist's entire career throwing an alchemist's fire deals about as much damage as a wizard using the produce flame cantrip while using a limited resource, and you probably should have been a precision ranger with alchemist dedication instead if you wanted to bomb better.

Does your comparison take into account the potential extra damage from Calculated Splash and Expanded Splash?

It does not. I was mostly trying to do comparisons without adding feats since the number of comparison points rapidly grows.

I should probably go back and add those in, since from a quick eyeballing, it looks like those feats would make perpetual bombs roughly keep up with a cantrip and your limited bombs roughly keep up with the precision ranger bomber until ~17+ when the ranger pulls away again.

I did a basic comparison of a bomber alchemist to other options here. It's long, but the tl;dr is that for an alchemist's entire career throwing an alchemist's fire deals about as much damage as a wizard using the produce flame cantrip while using a limited resource, and you probably should have been a precision ranger with alchemist dedication instead if you wanted to bomb better.

I think part of the problem is that bombs are just bad compared to spells after low levels while not having any advantages in usability, or cost.

Alchemists were put in a weird place because they have so many more "top level" resources than a spellcaster that the power of those resources had to be kept in check. It resulted in a class that has limited per day resources, but those resources are incredibly weak since they are comparatively so plentiful.

I think the most damning part of the current alchemist design is that they don't really need to be there for much of their contribution to the party. If they create all their advanced alchemy items in the morning, hand them to their party members, and then stay safe and sound in the party HQ they're probably contributing 80% of what they would if they actually went adventuring.

I honestly feel like putting the alchemist class in the core book has hurt both alchemical items and the class since it seems like design decisions were made with the idea that only alchemists would be using many alchemical items. I would have preferred that all alchemical items were made in a state where they were all worth purchasing and then made the class work around those items. As it is nobody is ever, ever going to buy a high level bomb or mutagen, and the only reason you'll ever see them in play is if your alchemist buddy gets them for free every day.

Update to version 1.1.

Changes in this version:

• * Added a reset function
• * Added a 'Copy Recommended to Final' function to more quickly create creatures.
• * Added a Roadmap function that allows you to quickly set up the tool to any of the basic roadmaps
• * Added directions for a (maybe?) simpler way to export the HTML.
• * Fixed a bunch of bugs.

Huzzah! I was hoping someone would do this

Only viewed from my phone but it looks to be exactly what I would want from such a tool

I'm pretty sure it was your comment that inspired this originally. :-D

I was so inspired by this I created a tool that basically turns all of the monster creation tables into a bunch of drop down menus, and then creates a plain text and HTML output of your creation.

Thread for it is here.

With the recently released monster creation rules I thought it would be helpful to have a tool that integrates these rules and spits out a nice stat block.

Introducing Monster Builder 1.0! This tool turns all of the tables in the monster creation rules into a series of drop down menus that output a recommended value for each of the monster's statistics. You can tweak these to a final value of your liking. Once you are finished there is both a plain text output as well as an HTML output that mimics the formatting of monster stat blocks on Archives of Nethys.

If you find any bugs, or have comments or feature suggestions let me know!

Acid arrow is heightened+2, so that would be a 10th level acid arrow. 10th level acid arrow is for sure a better bet than 6th level disintegrate.

I'm not sure a single spell has taken out more high-profile single targets in my WftC game than disintegrate (starting at the level it was available of course) due to the diviner's true strike shenanigans leading to many critical failures (or failures that become critical failures).

Whoops, thanks for the correction :-)

You're right, it's a two-hoop effect like the PF1 phantasmal killer was.

12d10 looks like a lot of damage, but I suspect it will be survivable for 13th-level PCs or foes. Double 12d10... now that's a lot of disintegration power.

Perhaps the devs felt it was too much not to lock it behind both a targeting roll and a save.

I honestly feel it's too weak because of the fort save. If we compare it to a level 6 Acid Arrow, Disintegrate does a bit more damage (12d10 ~66 v. 11d8 ~49.5), but Acid Arrow also does 5d6 persistent damage and doesn't have the extra save. If the enemy saves on an 11+ Disintegrate is down to 51.15 average damage on a hit, just barely more than average Acid Arrow without taking into account the persistent damage.

As for Doggieberts comparison to PF1. I feel that the argument is flawed. Having played PF1 at high levels I never felt that all those items were required to be effective. Those were just power gamers must haves.

So, in PF1 most full BAB characters can actually get away without magical weapons at high levels and still hit decently, but AC has absolutely no mechanic of climbing on it's own without magic, so high level ACs are laughable without magic items. Maybe your group is just good enough that most enemies aren't meaningfully challenging to you without magic items, in which case I would say this is an argument about re-balancing monster difficulty rather than how much magic items matter.

In general though I don't think this question should be "Can I beat a creature of CR = X without magic items" in PF1 vs. PF2 since monsters have been re-balanced in PF2. The question should be "In a fight that the party has Y% of winning how much worse off are they without magic items?" These are likely much different CRs between editions due to the re-balancing of CR. I think in this case the PF2 party will be better off since pretty much everything except damage scales decently with level, while PF1 was much more reliant on buffs and magic items to get characters to the expected numbers.

Personally I prefer PF1 with Automatic Bonus Progression, and I expect I'll prefer PF2 with the equivalent, since, like you, I want all of my numbers stuff to be built into the character and allow magic items to be mostly cool abilities and flavor things.

Picking the class that is designed to work with the least reliance on magic items to draw conclusions about how reliant on magic items all martials are is problematic. No?

No. I'm not doing a DPR comparison, nor am I comparing 1 class to another, I'm just comparing how much magic items affect a class in each edition. These numbers would be identical if I was comparing a PF2 Barbarian to a PF1 Barbarian, and would be more lopsided towards "PF1 needs magic items more" for pretty much any other class that currently exists in both editions.

Let's look at Monk instead
PF2:
Weapon - +3 to hit, +3 dice of damage (varies, but lets say 3d10, average 16.5)
Armor - +3 to AC & Saves
Apex Item - +2 strength (+1 to hit and damage)
Total - +4 to hit, +17.5 damage, +3 to AC and Saves

PF1:
Weapon - +5 to hit and damage
Armor - +5 AC
Belt/Headband - +6 Str/Dex/Con/Wis (+3 hit, damage, saves, init, +6 AC and +60 HP)
Cloak of Resistance - +5 saves
Amulet of Natural Armor - +5 AC
Ring of Protection - +5 AC
Total - +8 to hit, damage, saves, +21 to AC, +60 HP, +3 init

These are very similar to my earlier post. The PF2 monk suffers a slightly lower damage penalty for not having magic items, while the PF1 monk loses even more AC.

I picked the greatsword fighter in the first scenario because I think that is the martial character that loses the most in PF2, while losing the least in PF1, and therefore has the smallest difference between the two, while still showing the PF1 version is much much worse off than the PF2 version is without magic items.

Fighter is the least reliant on magic items in PF2e so you actually chose a poor class to compare. A 14 strength fighter is technically comparable to a 18 strength rogue. Technically.

I don't understand why this is a poor comparison.

In PF2 the fighter is best at hitting without magic items, but I'm not doing a DPR comparison here, just looking at raw numerical differences from magic items which should be the same for anyone regardless of stats. The only differences for other martials would be the die size of the weapon they choose and whether they use str or dex for their attack/damage stat. I chose the greatsword fighter since he has the most damage tied up in his magic items, so he's a bit of an extreme scenario. Other martials could have a smaller weapon die size and potentially 1 fewer damage difference from the apex item if they're dex based, but should otherwise have all the same differences.

Casters should be less affected on the offensive side since their spell DCs don't care about equipment, but are equally affected on the defensive side.

I find martials are more tied to equipment more than ever, sine the number of damage die are tied to it.

I just wanted to respond to this since I've seen this sentiment a few times, but I'm not sure the math actually bears it out.

Let's assume we have a level 20 greatsword fighter in both editions, who either has his normal big 6/3 or just mundane equipment. We'll look at the difference the magic items make.

For PF2:
Weapon - +3 to hit, +3 dice of damage (3d12, average 19.5)
Armor - +3 to AC & Saves
Apex Item - +2 strength (+1 to hit and damage)
Total - +4 to hit, +20.5 damage, +3 to AC and Saves

For PF1:
Weapon - +5 to hit and damage
Armor - +5 AC
Belt/Headband - +6 Str/Dex/Con/Wis (+3 hit, damage, saves, AC, init, and +60 HP)
Cloak of Resistance - +5 saves
Amulet of Natural Armor - +5 AC
Ring of Protection - +5 AC
Total - +8 to hit, damage, saves, +18 to AC, +60 HP, +3 init
Also note, to keep up with the magic wielding fighter the no-magic one should probably stop power attacking which changes the magic wielder to +3 hit, +23 damage

Anyway, I can see how in a white room DPR only calculation magic items can seem more necessary in second edition, but I don't think that's actually true if you look at a whole character.

I do agree through, that I would prefer that the math of the system be completely determined by character capabilities rather than what they're carrying, but I think we'll basically get that when we get the Automatic Bonus Progression equivalent for PF2.

CRB pg. 220

Rogue alchemists can combine a rogue’s poison feats with free daily poisons, and bombs present an interesting way to sneak attack with various types of energy damage.

Emphasis mine. Since bombs are non-agile, non-finesse, non-simple there is no way to sneak attack with them currently.

EDIT: Ok, I'm not so sure about this now. Bombs are thrown weapons, but they aren't melee weapons. So, can a non-ruffian sneak attack with a Javelin even though they aren't agile or finesse since they aren't melee weapons? It looks like RAW, yes they can. Still seems weird to recommend a weapon that rogues aren't even proficient in though.

...It's not about that, it's about learning to become a better player. I hit some pitfalls when I started playing for the first time long ago. I learned from the experiences and it made me a better player and GM. New players today should get to have those same experiences.

If someone isn't willing to learn the game, I question whether they're really that invested in the first place. The one time I got stuck playing a game in (the other big system), which I know I'm never going to play again, I still took a couple dozen hours to learn the ins and outs and make the best character I could. I've only played one session of Starfinder (which I do like). Even knowing it was a one shot game, I still took around 15 to 20 hours studying the system because I was new to it. It's just what you do.

Why does learning to be better at the game have to come from sitting by yourself and studying a book? Isn't it more fun to become a better player by actually playing the game?

Newbie Bob and Veteran Joe are each fighting an Ogre. On Bob's turn he uses all his actions to attack the Ogre, thinking that dealing damage is the best option for his character. Joe, realizing his third attack isn't very valuable, attempts to intimidate the Ogre before attacking it. Bob has now learned that using all 3 actions to attack isn't usually that useful.

A few rounds later both Ogres are on their last legs. Bob uses the intimidate > attack > attack routine he learned from Joe earlier. Joe, realizing that one extra hit might completely take the Ogre out of the fight uses all 3 actions to attack. Bob has now learned that different situations call for different tactics.

At the end of the session Bob has gained some "system mastery," but not by pouring through books by himself, but by actually playing the game with his friends.

This post will have lots of spoilers for Book 2 (Seven Days to the Grave) (don't say I didn't warn you).

My players are reaching the end of Seven Days to the Grave and I'm having some trouble deciding how Davaulus & the physicians will react to what the players have done.

The Setup: The players spoke with Davaulus but weren't buying his claim that he thinks the plauge was started by some were-rats in Old Korvosa, so they decided to sneak in at night. Using invisibility potions and infusions of Monkey Fish they were able to sneak around the Blessed Maiden fairly freely, but on a short clock. One of them made their way upstairs and threw a thunderstone down the stairwell to draw the Gray Maiden guards away from the door and was able to sneak into the Experimentation Ward where the true nature of the Queen's Physicians became apparent. The character grabbed the research notes from the table but was detected in the process. He and the other characters, still being invisible, were able to run away without being seen, and in the commotion break their way out of the back room onto the street. The characters retreated back to a safe location and perused the notes, discovering the secret (the Cult of Urgathoa) of Davaulus and the physicians. They then rested and spoke to Croft in the morning who was able to issue them a few guards to block off the area.

My question: What would Davaulus and the physicians have done in the intervening ~12 hours? They know what was in the research notes and therefore know that somebody (but not exactly who) knows their secret. I'm sure they would either kill the Varisians from the Experimentation Ward or relocate them down into the Temple, but what of the rest of the infected down in the Sick Ward?

I'm tempted to say that they kill all of the infected (and bolster their ranks of undead), and go into lockdown mode now that the secret is out. This makes sense story-wise to me, but 1) it makes the encounter harder and 2) it's a bit of an emotional slap to the players who now know that 60+ people are dead because of a minor screw up on what was actually a pretty decent plan on their part.

As I see it, the second option is that the physician's try to maintain the appearance of being a Hospital as long as possible. This gives them more time to freely move about the city continuing their research, but leaves them a lot more vulnerable.

I feel like signature are trying to make the statement “This is what this class is good at,” but it’s going about it in a way that stifles character options. Here's my thoughts on a replacement:
1) Remove the current version of signature skills. Anyone can use skill increases to get to legendary if they want to.
2) Instead each class selects 1 signature skill from ~2-3 available to their class. This skill automatically upgrades to E/M/L at levels 1/5/13 giving each character a niche where they progress faster than anyone else is able to using skill increases.
For example, a Barbarian could choose Intimidate or Survival as their signature skill at level 1. The chosen skill would start at Expert, then progress to Master and Legendary at 5 and 13 without spending any skill increases. The Barbarian would always have the niche of being the best survivalist since she gets her increases faster than anyone else, but if she wants to be a legendary medic she won't be told she can't by the current signature skills system.

Assertion: As written the Weapon Proficiency feat is useless for martial characters.

Assumptions: We are either a fighter or a different martial class with the Weapon Proficiency feat to become trained in an exotic weapon. I’m ignoring the fact that all exotic weapons are uncommon and assuming you can gain access to them somehow.

Proof: For non-fighters, when we initially take the Weapon Proficiency feat to become trained in our exotic weapon of choice everything is A-ok. However, as soon as we gain expert proficiency in martial weapons from our class we don’t gain it with our exotic weapon so we are always -1 or more to hit with it. For fighters our exotic weapon proficiency always lags behind martial by 1 step, so in either case the exotic weapon has to give us a benefit that is worth at least a +1 to hit to be worth using over a martial weapon.

Exotic weapons:

• Dwarven Waraxe - This is a bastard sword with sweep. Sweep gives a conditional +1 to hit, so is always worse than a constant +1 to hit.
  
• Gnome Flickmace - As a 1-handed reach weapon this is fairly unique. I guess an argument can be made for this one
  
• Orc Necksplitter - This is a longsword with forceful. Forceful gives you +1-6 damage on your second attack and +2-12 damage on your third+ attacks. This is a decent damage increase, but unlikely to be better on average than a +1 to hit.
  
• Sawtooth Sabre - This is a shortsword with twin. Like forceful this gives extra damage on the second or later attack, but only when using a pair of them. Again, it’s unlikely to be better than a constant +1 to hit. As a side note, I don’t know how you can actually gain access to this weapon or other uncommon weapons that don’t have an ancestry trait or monk trait.

I played Amiri at 5th level at Gencon and I felt like being sluggish was an overly harsh penalty for the benefit from the large sword, so I did some calculations for her with a large vs. medium bastard sword.

Defender: AC 20, no weaknesses, resistances, shield, etc.

Amiri large sword:
- To hit = str (4) + prof (5) + weapon (1) - sluggish (1) = +9
- Avg. Dam = weapon (2d12, avg 13) + str (4) + rage (6) = 23
- DPR = 12.65/19.55/20.7 for 1/2/3 attacks

Amiri medium sword:
- To hit = str (4) + prof (5) + weapon (1) = +10
- Avg. Dam = weapon (2d12, avg 13) + str (4) + rage (3) = 20
- DPR = 12/19/21 for 1/2/3 attacks

The spreadsheet I used for the DPR calculations is here (please let me know if any of my calculations are wrong).

You can see that the large sword barely increases her damage due to being sluggish and it almost certainly isn't worth the other negatives that come with the condition.

I've tried a few other AC values for the defender and gotten similar results, but haven't tried calculating the damage difference at other levels. Feel free to make a copy of my spreadsheet if you want to use it yourself.