Exocist's page

Extra go through because we had time, this time with a Ranged runesmith trying to use Remote Detonation, and a necromancer without muscle barrier just to see how it was. Neither of them have Beastmaster. Same encounters, level 10. This time the party is barbarian+ranged fighter+runesmith+necromancer instead of champion+ranged fighter+runesmith+necromancer.

Ranged runesmith is so significantly worse than the melee one, the 30-foot range on the 2 action Trace is just not a safe distance, at all, and is practically only good for making you not take Reactive Strike at a rather hefty cost, or tracing against low flying creatures that you otherwise can't reach. In most other situations, Stride+Trace+Trace (or Tracing Trance + Stride + Trace + Trace + Trace) is probably just going to be a better use of your time than trying to use Tracing Trance + 2 action Trace + 2 action Trace. As a result, its damage is backloaded into every second round where it gets to actually Invoke, making it very normal in terms of damage, while still keeping many of the Runesmith's issues due to the low range on trace. Remote Detonation probably had about a 50% hitrate, and as such the runesmith was frequently needing to spend another action on Invoke after using it.

This time, the Necromancer bought 2 wands of containment with their money. They barely used their focus spells. When things got tough, which was fairly often, they cast containment, 5th-rank command or synesthesia. Their focus spells just couldn't compete on the action denial or debuff angle with those three spells, and the blast spells aren't going to turn the tide of battle when you need to reduce the damage the enemy is doing to you. Any other occult caster could have done what they did, but better.

Needless to say, the party lost quite a few of these combats (Mantis+Giant, Chimeras, the 16 10XP enemies, Mukradi) and came quite close to losing another (Shadow Giant+Gogiteth). The Lich encounter was only won because the player specifically took Silence 4th and No Escape on the barbarian to hard counter the Lich (assuming that Drain Soul Cage is a misprint and doesn't let the Lich cast any spell as a free action). In the combats they did win, it was the Fighter and Barbarian doing most of the work while the Necromancer and Runesmith existed.

Based on your play experience, do you think the following changes, implemented together, might make a significant improvement to Necro's gameplay?

First: when casting Create Thrall, one may skip the Strike in order to create +1 thrall.

Have never really had thrall quantity troubles, mostly range troubles. I doubt the extra thrall would have helped in this regard, especially at level 7+ where you already make 2+ thralls, I would almost never skip the Strike unless I was going to use Bone Spear.

Second: anytime a Necro destroys or consumes a thrall as part of any other ability or spell, that thrall may first make a Strike as per Create Thrall.

I don't think this would increase the class' power all that much. You mostly destroy the relevantly positioned thralls on the turn you create them (except for the ones you're using as muscle barrier fodder, which probably won't be adjacent to an enemy), so you're usually getting a spell attack -5 strike out of this, at best, if the thrall is actually adjacent to something. With your other main focus spells being AoE (Necrotic Bomb, Bone Spear, Bony Barrage) the thrall might actually not be adjacent to anything to maximise the AoE, or to prevent friendly fire.

If this is a replacement to the Strike you get as part of Create Thrall, then I'd say it's a downgrade.

Overall, the intent behind these changes is to try to make sure the Necro is able to cash the on-paper benefit of their "Necromancer" features during as many turns as possible, trying to minimize the number of turns where they just feel like an inferior caster.

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IMO, Witch had the right idea by making evergreen ability-like effects triggered passively via familiar hex abilities. For the tiny space they had for such additions in the Remaster, that change added a ton of both mechanical teeth and Witchy flavor to the class. But, the "hex only" limitation to proc/invoke those abilities does significantly cap that benefit during actual play (and it imbalances the class to swing a lot depending on how good your hex cantrip is).

These proposed tweaks would similarly maximize Necro's unique "individually small hits, but never-ending onslaught of the undead" foundation. It would also add room for new feats/ synergies. Most notably, Reach of the Dead burning a thrall with potentially any spell significantly improves the Necro's ability to keep swinging those thrall Strikes (and maaaaybe RotD cold be a base feature for such a range-limited class, pretty Paizo please?).

I feel the issue starts at the quantity and impact of focus spells you get. Your focus spells are made up of debuffs that aren't competing with slotted spells past 3rd-rank, and blasts. If you don't want to blast this turn, your debuff focus spells aren't particularly good or reliable - just cast containment.

two action create thrall sounds really annoying to play around with.

I don't really understand "we can't balance the ability unless we make it worse first" ... like if the focus spells aren't good enough the focus spells aren't good enough you don't need to compromise when the class is too weak to begin with.

The problem with keeping it 1a is that you can 1a Create Thrall + 2a focus spell, and that will be, if the focus spells are powerful enough relative to anything else you do, practically all you do in combat. The class becomes a turret unless disrupted, and even things like needing to move will tend towards Beastmaster so you can continually do your rotation. Very little turn to turn flexibility unless you’re absolutely forced to do something else.

2a Create Thrall means that you have a spare action on the turn you Create and a spare action on the turn you cast the focus spell to do something, and also lets you significantly buff both halves of it. Create because its now 2a instead of 1a, the focus spells because they always take 2 turns to go off instead of being possible to do in 1, and that means enemies can always move around it before it goes off.

Mind you, I don’t think that style of necromancer will actually work out that well into later levels. Enemies are simply far too fast for that sort of predicting positioning gameplay to actually work out at all, though I suppose you could increase the AoE sizes and range to try to keep up with enemy speed.

If what people are wanting is a necromancer whose main gameplay loop is predicting where enemies will be next round for an extra-powerful spell, that’s the only way I can see it working. For as long as it remains possible to do the focus spell in the same turn as making the thrall, it will never be about predictive positioning, regardless of how much you buff the focus spells, it will always be correct to do it immediately if you can.

The need for thralls to be in the right location made what I initially liked about the class much harder to do. I like the idea of announcing your intentions in advance. Placing a thrall in the middle or beside a group of enemies tells them whether you are going to use necrotic bomb or boner barrage. Then they should get to act accordingly, either spending actions to avoid the area or destroy the thrall. My problem was that both options are so easy that you end up just being better off creating new ones every turn. Even if it does work out the payoff is not any better than just casting a slotted spell or focus spells from psychic or oracle.

There was a question in the survey about the number of thralls, the number of focus points, and are the thralls in the right spot. I had to pick the custom option because this problem shifts as you level up. Low level you don't have enough thralls, but at higher levels the enemies have so much more built into their kit that it is hard to keep thralls near them. in both cases you end up having to create thrall on the turn you plan to use a grave spell.

I feel like there are not enough options that can use up the thralls left behind. There are a few, but only one really lets you use the ones no longer near the fight and it has a frequency of once per 10 minutes.

As long as the thrall remains 1 action, the focus spells are going to be balanced as if they only take 1 turn to use as opposed to the (without haste/beastmaster) 2 turns. It's the general problem with 3 action and classes that have a 1 action setup + 2 action payoff, they get balanced around constantly using both in one turn whereas in reality the game, especially for shorter range or melee classes, tends to be more 2 action + move.

If create thrall were 2 action and more punchy on its own, you could probably juice the focus spells to be appropriately more powerful for the now 2 turn cost and the fact that the enemy can always choose to move away instead of just standing there, but without a couple of Reactive Strikes on your team, I just don't see this being very effective. It's usually not that expensive for enemies to move away (short of a few enemies who do use 3 actions very well).

Exocist wrote:

Most of the time, this class' best contribution was simply casting muscle barrier over and over again.

Given YuriP’s assessment of the ubiquity of Muscle Barrier, I have to ask: how “necromantic” does it feel to…buff your allies with viscera…goo? Like I get that there will be more options in the final release, but this isn’t what I would be looking for to be “necromantic”…

I guess I’d like to know more about how the class…feels narratively. I’ve made my distaste for the thralls clear both in terms mechanically AND aesthetically, but I’d like to hear others thoughts on the aesthetics…

Official flavour has never mattered to me. Even if the text says it’s viscera goo, I’d probably just reflavour it to bone armor, the undead literally throwing themself into the way of attacks or whatever.

My issue is more from a mechanical perspective - when I think Necromancer I don’t think “guy who applies a shield”.

Didn't have a huge amount of time this go around, and after playing both of these classes, I don't think I really needed more time. Eight combats at level 10, eight at level 20. We severely reduced the difficulty of the combats from the usual severe/extreme blender because it was clear neither of these classes could perform at that level.

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Necromancer

Fundamentally this class feels like it was designed for a small corridor, indoor dungeon environment. It just doesn't work correctly outside of that.

The thralls, outside of recurring nightmare, cannot fly. It's questionable whether they can swim. They obviously can't burrow. Given the outright terrible range on your focus spells (as many of them are 10-15 feet from the thrall), that means if an enemy is 20 feet in the air, none of your focus spells function. Same with any party member being 20 feet in the air, you can't muscle barrier them.

In any sort of more open environment, the undead cannot meaningfully block space. They are far too small for that, and you start needing more open environments by higher levels because monsters are too big for dungeons. Never mind the fact that you can just tumble through the thralls anyway. This class never felt like a battlefield controller to me, its control tools were simply inadequate.

2-slot prepared casting feels pretty bad. If you prepare a spell wrong, that's half your spells of that level that are now useless. I'd much rather be spontaneous at 2 slots, at least then half your spells are signatures.

Its action economy is pretty bad as well. The necromancer had beastmaster to deal with the thrall problems, i.e. the fact that they can't move if they want to create thrall and cast a focus spell. Putting thralls in the "right place" is just not really possible with how much the battlefield moves around at higher levels, and how bad your focus spell ranges are. I often found myself with spare thralls on the battlefield that just did nothing except sit there, and having to summon new ones because the range on my spells was too short.

The focus spells do not feel like they make up for the lack of slots, at all, they aren't really substantially better than other class' focus spells, given the additional action cost of having a thrall in the right place to use them. The AoE and ranges do not scale on the low level focus spells, and the higher level ones just... aren't particularly good in the first place.

Most of the time, this class' best contribution was simply casting muscle barrier over and over again. At least I had control over my allies' positioning so they could be within 15 feet of a thrall, and the 50/100 temporary hitpoints was far more impact than any other focus spell was going to get me. By level 20, casting a real spell, even a 6th or 7th rank one, was far better than my focus spells - I would have much, much rather have been any fullcaster by then.

This is easily the worst feeling playtest class I've ever played, at least playtest magus had its highs for all its substantial lows. I never felt like the Necromancer ever had a high point, just many situations where it felt utterly useless and some situations where it was just okay.

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Runesmith

This class is analogous to melee magus. It has the exact same list of issues - stringent action economy to get the best damage, reactive strike, any sort of disruption completely hoses it, very squishy with 8 hit points and medium armor.

The difference between this and melee magus is that when it works, it does actually do great damage. Engraving Strike + Trace/Fortifying Knock + Invoke 2-3 runes (depending on how many etched esvadirs you had) is a huge burst of damage, better than even a fighter with a reactive strike.

Again, beastmaster was used to patch up some of its problems, but it still fell flat on its face when the enemy could disrupt it in literally any way (prone, slow, stun, swallow, etc.) or the enemy had high fortitude, or the enemy had reactive strike.

Originally I thought it was 1 rune per invoke when I first read it, upon reading that it was any number, I questioned the point of all those 2-action invoke 2 rune + minor bonus effect feats.

I do appreciate that, unlike many previous iterations of this 8 hp melee class (magus, inventor, investigator, thauma), there is actually a reason to be melee instead of just going for the strictly better ranged which would solve all your problems immediately. The ranged runesmith deals less than half the damage by comparison, and is probably a bit anemic.

Some people will probably appreciate this type of glass cannon class that can have extremely explosive turns, but is susceptible to shattering if it gets hit in the wrong spot - this is certainly not for me though, I don't like my ability to contribute at all being entirely placed in the hands of what monsters the GM decided to field that day.

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Level 10 combats
Day 1
- 1x Cloud Giant and 1x Deadly Mantis
- 3x Tyrannosaurus
- 6x Chimera (Ankrev head replaces goat head, primal, sonic)
- 7x Aapoph Granitescale and 7x Choral
- (Replaced with) 6x Zecui, 4x Jungle Drake and 6x Choral
Day 2
- 2x Roc and 2x Young Mirage Dragon
- 1x Lich
- 1x Gogiteth and 1x Weak Shadow Giant
- 1x Weak Mukradi

Level 20 combats
Day 1
- 1x Warden of Oceans and Rivers
- 4x Aolaz
- 12x Vilderavn
- 1x Treerazer
Day 2
- 2x Tarn Linnorm
- 3x Weak Nessari
- 2x Elite Guthallath
- 1x Grim Reaper

Forgot to mention: For the purpose of this playtest, any enemy with Manifestation (The Yamarajs and Nessaris) were banned from casting Singularity Seed with it. The reason is if they spawned it right next to the spellcaster PC, the only one that can dispel it, then on any save result other than a critical success that PC was likely dead. It’s simply infeasible for them to escape unless, for some reason, they had legendary athletics due to their +0 strength, making them take well over 100d10s of damage without the ability to take any other action.

Same thing but level 16

Same thing but level 13

Same thing but level 8

Same thing but level 3, pre a bunch of errata

Party A

Party B

It's 20th level. Those of you who have played this level range for any length of time know it's not exactly well balanced gameplay, it's broken content fighting against broken content, and if you're not doing something broken you lose to the thing that is.

Which is part of why I test this (the other reason is that no one else does) - the question is: Does your class get anything substantially broken to compete with broken monsters at this level, or are they just a numerical improvement and feel like they've relatively fallen behind since 16th? Do they have any class-specific broken content, or are they just abusing the general broken content (Invisiblity+Hidden Mind, Legendary Sneak, 3rd-rank Heroism wand stack, etc.)

Important to note that, due to the size and speed of many creatures at this level, alongside the fact that nearly all of them have flight, maps fundamentally do not matter. As such, we just used mechageddon maps, which tend to be large open fields.

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System mechanics and general stuff

Not going to talk about anything broken in PF2e at this level range, I don't expect SF2e to fix this, so there's only a couple of points

1) Borai. This didn't really show up before because we only had 1 Borai, but for 20A, just to have a chance against one specific encounter, party A is all Borais. Borai... don't really work correctly right now, as an undead without void healing, they cause game mechanics to become dysfunctional in a couple of ways.

A) Anything that refers to a living creatures. Spells like desiccate can only target living creatures. Treerazer's Aura of Corruption. The Grim Reaper's Aura of Misfortune. Wails of the Damned. All of these, and more, completely blank on Borai. Granted, undead from Book of the Dead have the same problem, so its not as much of a concern as...

B) Things that specifically have different effects for Undead and Living Creatures. Spells like Execute do Vitality damage to undead and Void damage to living creatures. The authors seemed to assume that all undead would have void healing, so a Borai, being undead, takes the vitality damage - which they are immune to, because they don't have void healing. Same with monster mechanics like the Yamaraj's Shepherd's Touch.

2) The New Game spell. Specifically the PvP mode, it's really unclear how exactly it works. I simply assumed it worked like the Fated Confrontation spell in PF2e, but there's far less text actually explaining it than in Fated Confrontation. What's the terrain? Where do both participants spawn? Can anyone else affect creatures inside the game?

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Envoy

At this level we have finally gotten Get Them! and True Leader, improving action economy significantly and making Get 'Em! finally feel like it works against swarms. Unfortunately, the Envoy still really doesn't have anything else to actually use this action economy on - Demoralize, Strike, Scare to Death. That's pretty much it.

While it has improved since 16th, it hasn't improved relative to the most threatening monsters that are faced at 20th, so I feel like it's relatively gotten weaker.

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Mystic

Due to some specific playtest stuff, and wanting to test things out, I had a skill challenge that awarded off list spells from the SF2e playtest book just to see if they would be cast, which the Mystic used to pick up New Game. They did cast it twice, and it did help a bit. Other than that, they have picked up Enlightenment which makes their healing even more effective.

However, monsters that interact solely on doing single-target damage are the least threatening enemies by far at this level. While the mystic can heal any one person to full HP over and over again, this really isn't as useful as it may seem against the most threatening of enemies.

They don't really have anything broken outside of that, so while I'd say they're slightly stronger relatively than they were at 16th, it's a miniscule increase.

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Operative

We have divergence in feat choice yet again.

Striker Operative goes for Tactical Assault and Infinite Aim. Tactical Barrage didn't really feel that much better than Line 'Em Up, and Infinite Aim, outside of synergy with Tactical Assault, felt extremely redundant with how much aim compression operative has.

Ghost Operative goes for Combat Reflexes. Combined with Dual Aim, this means 3 hair triggers per round, substantially increasing their damage output.

Both of them get Tactical Barrage from class features, which is a significant increase in damage as expected, and really not necessary.

With Combat Reflexes, it's definitely relatively stronger than it was at 16th, with Infinite Aim, it's the same or slightly weaker.

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Solarian

This is the class that needs Quickened for Strike most, and unlike everyone else who gets it from Quicklock at 16th-17th, Solarian needs to take Cosmic Alignment to get it.

They really struggled with the increased speed and map size, the bonuses they've gotten since 16th (Legendary Solar Weapon, Cosmic Alignment) while they feel like they should be significant, they really... aren't? The class overall felt much weaker relatively at 20th.

Really struggled to use either Big Bang or Supernova at this level. Kinda just felt like a worse fighter.

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Soldier

Seeing on level enemies critically fail their reflex saves on an 8 doesn't get old.

With Spread the Love and Hybrid Technique, alongside Legendary DC, their damage has actually scaled quite well.

It certainly helped that both soldiers were on the party with the Witchwarper, who used Complete Transposition to put all the enemies into a blob for Area Fire, but even without that I think they're about the same power relatively as they were at 16th.

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Witchwarper

Warped Infinities making your quantum field a 100ft burst suddenly is a massive bonus, however if we were just stuck using Twisted Dark Zone as our only relevant Zone option, it wouldn't mean too much.

This class instantly became broken due to Complete Transposition. With Warped Infinities, this feat is utterly bananas. Teleport everyone in your 100ft burst Quantum Field to anywhere in a 100ft burst within 100ft of you. One action, not once per round. Sure, enemies get a will save to resist, but who cares? Against single or double enemies, moving your entire party up to 200+ feet for 1 action is stellar action economy. Against a horde of lower level enemies, you can bunch them all up then nuke them with AoE attacks.

While this is incredibly overpowered, it also feels like something the Witchwarper should be able to do. 100ft burst and anywhere within 100ft of you is obviously way too much, but back when the quantum field was a 15ft burst, if you could teleport anyone who stayed in your quantum field a little bit - say, 30 feet or so, remember this is a ranged game so the forced movement distances have to be a bit bigger to compensate for the fact that no one naturally groups - it would be pretty fun.

I took Quantum Negation for my 20th feat. As a focus spell, its cute, but its not that great. Vastly overshadowed by Complete Transposition.

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Encounters

1) 8x Vilderavn and 8x Shemhazian (160XP)
- Was originally going to be 8 Giyleas instead of 8 Vilderavns, but the Giyleas have detonate magic. While this spell is less of a problem in Starfinder than it is in Pathfinder (where you can get your +3 major striking weapon or +3 greater/major resilient armor detonated then be useless for a week) as weapons/armor are nonmagical, things like Apex augmentations (if you chose magitech), any magitech augmentations, etc. can still be detonated for a week long debuff. In the interest of playtesting things instead of having them be disabled on the first encounter, we replaced those.
- Neither party really struggles with fighting these.
- Party A heals off any damage taken with Transfer Vitality and Infusion, divine decree banishes a few of them
- Party B groups up most of the enemies with Complete Transposition, denies turns with Twisted Dark Zone, Ghost Operative Line 'Em Up or Terrified Retreat, and then shreds through their health bars with Line 'Em Up and two soldiers Area Firing (this will become a common theme). Enemies barely even get to take actual turns. These 16 enemies got a total of 2 turns where they weren't stunned, fleeing, confused or out of range to do anything.

2) 4x Guthallath and 1x Elite Guthallath (160XP)
- This monster has been nerfed since the original printing, I have run the original where, as a 60XP encounter for a level 18 party, it caused 3/4 characters to die instantly on its first turn. Admittedly, 2 natural 1 saves against the 10th-level disintegrate beams were rolled, but it's still pretty silly.
- Party A needs 4 tries. 13d10 AoE death effect, combined with their extreme attack/high damage (effectively extreme damage when you factor in their 3d12 deadly) leads to the Solarian dying, a lot. Operative, envoy and mystic all have legendary stealth so they can just be undetected, Solarian does not. Even then, they only win on the 4th try due to bad Guthallath attack roll RNG, and the mystic using New Game, a spell that isn't on their list.
- Party B does it in 1 try. Guthallaths get grouped up, confused and/or stunned and shredded by AoE. The Guthallaths take a grand total of 0 turns where they weren't confused, fleeing and/or stunned.

3) 2x Elite Nessari and 1x Nessari (160XP)
- Party A needs 2 tries, mystic gets repeatedly hit + poisoned due to their bad initiative roll before they can take a turn. When they can take a turn, they have 18 HP and are stuck between 3 Nessaris who have Reactive Strikes that trigger on concentrates. As the only party member who can do the Holy damage (or death effect) necessary to kill these things, it's a loss. Second time, better initiative and bad nessari attack rolls means win.
- Party B does it in 1 try. A bit close, the Nessaris can't be kited with Complete Transposition as they can always Masterful Quickened Casting Fireball->Fireball to be effective at 500 feet away. Operative doesn't get their crits to stun early enough. Repair Module on the Witchwarper keeps them alive. Despite the bad initiative, the party still turns this into a win after 7 rounds.

4) 2x Elite Grim Reaper (160XP)
- If you read this encounter and went "oh god why?" know that this is the only 22nd-level monster using remastered content that's even remotely threatening. The rest can easily be rendered mostly ineffective by a fly speed.
- Party A takes 4 tries and loses all 4 of them. Even with a full stack of Borai meaning that Aura of Misfortune doesn't work. Even with two save rerolls from Persistent Confidence and Stubborn As.... It's a grossly overpowered enemy. Their first try was the one with the most promise, they got absurdly lucky getting twenty 11+ rolls to only five rolls of 10 or less, whereas the reapers got four 11+s, eight 10 or less and missed two important Lurking Death attacks (which hit on a 3). Still, in that run, the Envoy died to Death Strike after the party managed to put down 1 reaper. In following runs, the party did not get as lucky, and someone died to Death Strike before even a single reaper died.
- Party B does it in 1 try. The luck was... average, I'd say. The reapers still only got four 11+s and seven 10 or lesses, and the Witchwarper passed 2 saves against Death Strikes with rerolls (only ~57% chance to pass the save with a reroll), but the operative also didn't get any crits past round 1, when their crit chance with Clustered Shots, 9th-rank Heroism and master proficiency aid was 64%. Takes 4 rounds, and involves some kiting (or the threat of kiting) with Complete Transposition denying turns and Lurking Deaths, but they get there.

5) 8x Ancient Mirage Dragon (160XP)
- Do you notice how literally every SF class has resolve? Yep, combined with hidden mind's +4 status bonus to mental saves, this makes the breath weapons a non factor. All they can do is try to kite with their 180 foot fly speed, and do a flanking dance to get sneak attack.
- Party A just heals off any damage they can do to the mystic, then kills them one by one.
- Party B... you guessed it, groups them up with Complete Transposition, denies turns with Twisted Dark Zone, Ghost Operative Line 'Em Up and Terrified Retreat, then shreds down HP with Line 'Em Up and Area Fires. The dragons get 3 total turns where they're able to do something.

6) 11x Makosa (165XP)
- Everyone still has resolve and hidden mind. That renders their Phantasmal Calamities useless, and... they don't have much after that.
- Party A just grinds through them one by one while the Makosas can't do much damage.
- Party B groups up, denies turns and shreds with AoE (made better by the Makosas' fire weakness 20). The Makosas get 0 real turns.

7) 2x Yamaraj and 2x Ancient Diabolic Dragon (160XP)
- An encounter I thought would be more threatening than it really was.
- Party A gets through it in one try. Maybe they got kind of lucky. Envoy, Solarian and Operative are able to burst down one Yamaraj before it gets a turn, then mystic locks the second one in combat with the Solarian using New Game preventing it from reviving the first.
- Everyone except the mystic has evasion, and the dragons don't have an answer to advanced cloaking skin so it's easy cleanup from there.
- Party B also gets through it in one try. Again, enemies are grouped up by Complete Transposition, witchwarper uses true target to give operative a staggering 84% crit chance on Line 'Em Up with Master Aid, Off-Guard and Frightened 2 from critical demoralize (opening roar). They stun the entire encounter and it's just easy cleanup of Area Fires and Line 'Em Ups from there (featuring a second stun on the entire encounter with a second Line 'Em Up). The only one that gets a turn is the Yamaraj who beat the party in initiative.

8) 1x Treerazer (200XP)
- Anyone who has fought this guy before knows that he's a complete pushover at 20th. He can't really do all that much except Strike for some damage, and his damage isn't good enough to meaningfully threaten characters at this level even if he lands 2 crits in a row. The Stunned 2 on crit is cute, but it's not nearly enough cheese factor.
- Party A just grinds through him the normal way, healing off any damage he can do. Being a full stack of Borais, they're immune to his Aura of Corruption, and his desiccate, leaving Strike as his only real option. Not that the extra 2d12 damage would have helped him much.
- Party B kites him around the map with Complete Transposition. Complete Transposition moves the party about 200 feet, and Treerazer's fly speed is only 60 feet (40 feet if suppressed by Anchoring Impacts). He can't punish Concentrate actions with his Reactive Strike so... once he's used up his single copy of desiccate and freeze time, he can't actually damage the party at all. They kill him with Manifestation -> Holy Light.

1 health works without having to make new rules.

For cover and or concealment a forested area could work from ground level and flying at the same time without needing 3d measurements. Shooting from a window could protect from ground and flying attacks too.

Another idea, a forest could also have cover and or concealment at range. For example, every 30 feet of forest would increase the amount of cover. 30 feet of forest could give concealment, 60 feet hidden, and 90 feet or more invisible. Using the same map and changing the range where cover or concealment increases or not would make the map play differently from one encounter to the next.

1 health doesn't really work when you have automatic damage and basic save stuff, it's just too little. What XP value do you assign to something that falls over that easily to any AoE? Then what happens if they win initiative? You'd need to invent new rules anyway to balance that out.

1/3 health is about the right level where a crit failed save or critical hit will kill them even at the highest levels, but a regular fail or hit will leave them severely injured.

Maps for ranged combat when flying is common, could still have cover, a forested area could count as cover from above. Objets like tables could be used that way too, or being under an elevated walkway.

I had to look up PF2e minions, that minion only has 2 actions might help too.

I meant the PF2e version of a 4e minion (which has 1 health)

Cover from above sounds nice in theory but its incredibly painful to measure cover in 3d in practice. If you make the entire top forested that's basically like adding a ceiling with extra steps.

Combat at long range becoming a slog, I'm assuming because it's harder to hit at long range, also if there is cover on top of that. One idea is to have really weak opponents with good weapons, this way they are easy to kill, I'm thinking like only being able to take 1 or 2 hits, but they have good weapons so they have some chance to hit the PCs to make up for being low level NPCs.

It's

1) Harder to hit (range penalties, cover, no off guard from flanking).

and

2) Does less damage than melee equivalents (Soldier and Operative's damage expressions are currently very far above even a melee PF2e equivalent but your average ranged character will be lacking in some damage from no str, and a lot more damage from no consistent reaction attack).

You could make the PF2e equivalent of minions where they have a very small amount of health, say something like 1/3 of the health for -2 levels, no other adjustments. It would make AoEs like missiles and grenades more valuable if they were commonplace, as it would deal with these low health minions much better.

Makes maps can be hard because the number of PC can change as well as the use of ranged weapons in each party. Using movable objects like the tech terrain pawns to add cover to maps would be one way to adapt maps to the party.

I'm curious if you can find any maps you think do work well that you could link to to show us.

And speed. These parties are somewhat indexed into speed, with all of them having Speed Suspension and Tailwind Wands at 8th, then Superior Ultralight Wings at 13th. A slower party would need a smaller map (not that these options are particularly expensive, it's just that you can't assume people have them), but a party of this speed needs a larger map to make distance mean anything.

Maps that have been good... I find flip-mats tend to end up in one of two categories

1) Massive featureless plain

2) Excessively line of sight blocked

If you restrict some flip-mats to just a small section of them, they can be decent enough. For instance, if you cut the 2nd Space Station map (the brown one) to just the middle bit, removing most of the rooms and walls, it's okay.

The front side of Solar Temple is also okay, there's line of sight blocks, but only a few, and its hard to dart "between" the line of sight blocks constantly.

Then, of course, you end up at levels where high-speed flight is commonplace (i.e. as soon as enough people have advanced ultralight wings), and any map without a ceiling can be turned into a featureless plain. You can argue Lancer has the same problem, but flight in that game is

1) More expensive build-cost wise.

2) Not necessary because the majority of enemies cannot fly, unlike Starfinder where a flying enemy is fairly common and you might need flight to answer that.

and

3) You still need to play the objectives, so you can't just spend the entire encounter 10 hexes in the air shooting at melee enemies who can't hit you or you will lose.

So flight is more of an opportunity cost to ignore terrain there, than an option everyone is going to have that just so happens to also make every map featureless.

Certainly cover and line of sight should play a factor in ranged combat, but depending on PC and enemy speed the distance between spots of cover/line of sight need to vary significantly.

After the latest errata your vitality pool fills to full on a refocus. This does seem excessive to me - with no feats expended, you can fill everybody up to full HP in under an hour, a task which previously required investing in feats to accomplish.

This is about the same as just having a focus spell that heals, like Lay on Hands, or something like the wood kineticist’s Fresh Produce. There are a bunch of abilities that give repeatable healing 1/10 minutes. Medicine is one way to do this but it’s far from the only way - out of combat healing isn’t intended to be limited.

The time you have available out of combat might be, but we don’t really know if this is supposed to be a balancing factor either, and if so how much time you’re “supposed” to have between combats to heal, etc. The encounter guidelines assume everyone goes into each combat at full HP, and even says to combine encounter XPs if you do one after the other with no chance to rest.

Same thing but level 13

Same thing but level 8

Same thing but at level 3, pre a bunch of errata

Party A

Party B

A few things changed this time, mostly in relation to party B. Party A feels very similar.

We also decided to try out massive maps (enemies and players deploy ~200ft away from each other) and... they really didn't go well.

In case we don't manage to finish level 20 by the 31st December deadline, I'll just leave my general major system issues here as well.

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Major system issues

1) Cover, AoEs, ranged combat and map design. Grouped together for being very related.

This is not in reference to any specific rules, because specifics can be fixed, but rather a ground up design problem. One that Lancer actually dealt with a lot during its development, and eventually (mostly) solved.

The core issue: Ranged combat as a default makes it very easy to just stand wherever, and kite forever if your speed is higher. Which makes it very hard or near impossible to land any sort of AoEs on more than 1 target.

If you respond to this by making the map littered with tight chokepoints, low ceilings and narrow corridors, it becomes a melee centric game where no one can shoot each other because no one can really see each other.

The core combat mechanics are really not designed with ranged-as-a-default in mind and its impacts on positioning. It still fundamentally feels like many options were designed around melee blob positioning being a default when it just isn't.

Cover is really easy for a ranged character to maneuver around unless you start combat really far away, in which case it's two sides barely hitting each other and is kind of a slog.

How did Lancer solve this? Objectives. It's an extremely simple solution that does so much to make ranged combat more dynamic. Essentially, forcing PCs and enemies to be on certain points if they want to actually win the combat. Also comes with the benefit of defeat != TPK. Needs either a round limit or constant reinforcements to work correctly, and even then some balancing needs to be done on the rate of reinforcement/round limit, but it solves practically all the issues that ranged combat as a default creates.

I don't think Starfinder wants to go this direction though - that every combat or nearly every combat should have an objective that is the "main" threat.

In which case you need to create general incentives for people to group up. You need to make it so that indefinitely kiting enemies with superior range and speed isn't the way to win every combat against slower opponents. You need to make maps that have sensible sight and cover lines, not too open, but also not line of sight blocked in every direction.

The current flip-mats really don't work well on the third front.

2) Economy. This is both the action economy and the wealth economy.

It genuinely feels really, really difficult to have or use multiple weapons, and as far as I understand this is a core thing that Starfinder wants you to do. The action economy to swap weapons feels rather stifling with many of the existing classes, drawing and throwing grenades, etc. Then comes the cost of actually having multiple weapons against WBL guidelines. You do really feel like you just have 1 main weapon, and that's all.

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Core system mechanics and class-agnostic things not mentioned before

1) As an experiment, I decided to give out 4 ultimate missile launchers, 4 superior undermounted grenade launchers, 4 ultimate grenade launchers and 100 of each type of paragon grenade and missile, with the stipulation that none of these items could be sold, just to see if these above-levelled items would be useful at all. The answer was no.

Because of how heavily incentivised everyone is to use a two handed ranged weapon, grenades are effectively 3 actions (draw, throw, interact to regrip), and for that price they're really not worth it. The superior undermounted grenade launcher isn't worth the loss of an elemental damage module. Even at 1 action (such as for the Solarian, which still comes at a cost of not having their agile, twin weapon offhanded) they still don't feel particularly impactful. There's no "free draw" things like Sleeves of Storage, Retrieval Prism or an Independent+Manual Dexterity Familiar (to hold 2 items and hand one to you as its action) to do this more than once per combat, though. When you add on the cost of actually using them (in credits) it becomes so much worse.

There was some point of confusion about how both of these work with the Soldier's primary target feature - do you get 2 grenade shots or missile attacks? They are Area Fire. Ultimately, though, neither Soldier would have used them because of the capacity limit. The Grenade launcher has 6 grenades, the missile launcher has 4 missiles. The Soldiers currently burn through ammo extremely quickly - Area Fire, Primary Target, Fanning the Hammer, Overwatch and Soldier's Training for another Overwatch - that's five shots per round. They'd much rather be using battery weapons for a 50 or 100 round clip.

2) Singularity Seed. Is it busted? Yes.

More expounding on that. Athletics only to Escape, while being unable to do anything else is a start, but its more on how it works alongside that. Moving away from it is difficult terrain, and after every move action and at the end of your turn, you have to save or get dragged closer to the center. Any enemy with a speed of 40 or less is going to find it incredibly difficult to ever get away from this thing, and even if they do manage to escape... where can they realistically go before they end of turn save prompts to force them back in again?

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Envoy

By this point Directives are not being used at all aside from the 1/combat Show Em What You Got! (and even then that might not be used) and Ready to Roll.

The reason for this is Ready for Anything. The Envoy now has 2/round easy to trigger reaction strikes with That'll Show Em and Ready for Anything, which increases their damage substantially despite their lack of any actual damage booster without Get 'Em, and attacking on a secondary stat.

Get 'Em is really just... not that good at this level, advanced cloaking skin making everything off guard already, swarms of lower level enemies are much more dangerous than a singular higher level enemy, and Get 'Em falls off if the target dies. You have to wait until level 18 to have Get 'Em function the same way that Courageous Anthem does at level 1.

So essentially this is playing as a featureless class with 2/round reaction attacks, and it's effective at that but quite boring. Even if this wasn't the case, it's not like the Envoy has many real options for its actions - Get 'Em, Demoralize, Show Em What You Got!, Strike. That's practically it.

The other directives have never been used.

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Mystic

Plays essentially the same. Infusion, anthem. Some of these encounters even required dipping into slots for Heal. Gasp, the horror. None of its feats have really changed anything in regards to play.

Still effective just being a healer.

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Operative

The two operatives diverged a bit in feats here.

Striker Operative went for Instant Reload, giving them insane mobility... that mattered a couple of times, but 100ft range and Aim really limited the need for them to even use it. Clustered Shots for single targets, Line 'Em Up for swarms. Hair Trigger for a free reaction attack every turn.

Ghost Operative took Dual Aim because they had a problem where after a crit Line 'Em Up, all those stunned enemies couldn't trigger Hair Trigger because they couldn't act (suffering from success I know). Again, Clustered Shots for single targets, Line 'Em Up for swarms. In one instance a level+3 boss spent half the combat stunned by the Ghost Operative.

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Solarian

This class just feels like it's falling further and further behind. Big Bang was essentially just a worse Supernova, 3 actions and disharmony, for less damage and no blind? Why is this level 15 feature worse than the level 1 feature? As such it wasn't used aside from just using it for the heck of it because it's really hard to use.

Its damage falls behind due to lack of elemental module stacking. Graviton has never been intentionally swapped to because it's just not relevant. None of the feats its picked up since level 6 have been useful.

We were debating whether Stellar Shield Collapse with cheese (have an ally punch you and keep blocking it, Dermal Plating prevents you taking damage but the shield loses HP) to put the shield down to 1-6 hit points, so it would be destroyed in 1 block, would be worthwhile. Ultimately the issue is that you still have to raise the shield, be attacked (the Solarian is the lowest priority target) and the attack has to be shield block-able. So it wasn't taken.

Note from Edna (verbatim)

The higher-level solarian is, earnestly, genuinely, one of the most miserable experiences I have had playing a tabletop RPG character. It feels so outdated, falling behind due to itemization (or lack thereof) and a dearth of good feats.

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Soldier

Fanning the Hammer is a crazy feat. We emergency ruled it to be [Flourish] so triple Fanning the Hammer turns didn't happen, but it's still an incredibly overpowered option.

It skyrockets soldier's damage against single targets to be on average above the operative, and yes this is an AoE class that does AoE damage with it.

Due to map constraints (still) because many enemies simply cannot deal with a 60 foot fly speed, the AoEs are much more effective. Doesn't really matter though because the Soldier's single target damage is still above the operative's. AoE is a bonus.

The Bombard has swapped their Stellar Cannon to a Zero Cannon. Much easier to hit 2 enemies on area fire with it, and due to the rate of ammo consumption reloading the Stellar became a real problem. The Zero Cannon never needs to reload.

For the same ammo reason, the action hero is now using a Rotolaser as their main weapon.

I can't stress enough just how much better many of these area and auto weapons feel with Spatial Drift adding just 10 feet to their range.

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Witchwarper

Feels exactly the same as they did 3 levels ago. Twisted Dark Zone is a gamechanger, everything else... not so much, they're just a basic caster.

I'm looking forward to picking up Complete Transposition at level 18 - that's the kind of thing I feel my Quantum Field should be able to do. I don't understand why it takes that long to get it.

The actual effect of the quantum field is still not relevant. The speed penalty doesn't stack with suppress, and the speed bonus doesn't stack with tailwind/on the move.

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Encounters

Encounter 1 - 8x Elite Shimmerspawn (160XP)
- 25 foot speed, low range (it has a ranged attack but its a full 3 points of attack bonus behind its melee attack) monster with only a 15ft cone as its anti-invisibility tool.
- Party A only takes some damage because the Solarian is forced to melee these guys, everyone else can just fly 60 feet away where they can't hope to damage them (even if they could use the cone, 3/4 party members have evasion).
- Party B - well, a stack of low speed, low reflex, enemies with weakness is just food for Anchoring Impacts double soldiers. They take no damage. Twisted Dark Zone helps a bit too.

Encounter 2 - 2x Elite Makosa, they start ~200 feet away from the party's deployment zone. (160XP)
- Of course this is stacked in the Makosas' favour, due to their 500ft range spells, whereas the party with their max 100ft range increment weapons needs to close distance.
- Party A needs to do this twice, some bad luck against Telekinetic Tantrum the first go around and some Phantasmal Calamities later, they're pretty badly beat and the mystic cannot get in range to heal people due to the short 30ft range. They're essentially turn skipped in their first round due to needing to close distance. A better initiative result just lets them brute force it.
- Party B only needs 1 try. No Solarian, the soldiers are capable of closing distance rather quickly and still dealing damage with shot on the run + cardiac accelerator. Fire weakness 20 is a great time for the soldiers.
- Witchwarper feels rather useless this encounter, with many spells being limited to 30ft range, and the Quantum Field being limited to 100ft range, they just can't get in range to do anything. Being constantly stunned and proned by Tantrum doesn't help.

Encounter 3 - 16x Kurshudi (160XP)
- At least it has an invisibility answer due to Area Fire being its main attack.
- Singularity seed utterly destroys these 30 speed low reflex monsters though.
- Party A takes a really long time to kill these guys even with the Seed taking out 10 of them. High HP + Regen deactivated by acid (only the operative has an acid weapon in the acid dart rifle) + resist to all the damage modules = a long time to die. Mystic takes about 50 rockets to the face and still doesn't go down due to energy aegis cutting the damage a bit, and self-healing.
- Party B takes less time, and that's despite the operative crit failing twice against divine wrath. Seed takes out 10 of them, Line 'Em Up acid shots and Scare to Death take out the rest.

Encounter 4 - 8x Atrocite, again they start ~150ft away, preventing use of Opening Roar + Terrified Retreat (160XP)
- 2x Void Scours, high attack and high damage ranged strikes, x8, with inherent true seeing to get by invisibility.
- Party A is more suited to dealing with this, with 3/4 characters having evasion, and even then they need 2 tries. These things just output so much damage that the Mystic ends up hitting 0, and once they're at 0 void scours are still hitting them along with the rest of the party.
- Party B needs 3 tries and even then they barely get over the finish line with the third try. Eight rounds of suffering, won mostly because the Atrocites ran out of void scours and relied on their strikes (which still hit very hard).
- Again, this high range start feels really, really bad for the party while the enemies who have a 500ft range spell are barely effective. If both characters were limited to the same range, it would just be one side gap closing on their first turns.

Encounter 5 - 8x Elite Shimmerstone Robot (160XP)
- Low speed, mostly melee enemy with only a short range area fire and weakness to 2 damage types that are on elemental modules. Can't see this going well for team enemy.
- Party A elects to use absolutely zero resources, and due to an incredibly fortunate series of rolls on the Robots' part, Mystic nearly hits 0. Very easy cleanup afterwards.
- Party B... well, Anchoring Impacts + Soldier AoEs with enemies that have effectively weakness 20 to the damage. Gets out of this having barely taken any damage and no resources used.

Encounter 6 - 16x Elite Sihedron Guard Specialists (160XP)
- I used the Undercity map here because I felt these dudes might be able to do something with Wall of Plasma. They mostly just ended up walling themselves though. Again, no invisibility answer (Aside from dropping Wall of Plasma directly on top of someone) makes these guys virtually a non threat.
- Party A finally uses Wormhole at least to jump by some Walls of Plasma (otherwise Solarian would have to cross 5 of them to deal damage which would be pretty bad for them). Eight round kiting slog that really can't inflict much damage through hidden.
- Party B gets the more aggressive variation of the specialists who try to inflict damage using Battle Casting, Promession and Caustic Conversion, alongside opportunistic walls of plasma dropped on top of people to deal damage. They also kind of fail miserably at that, though out of 8 scare to death criticals, 7 of the guard specialists rolled 18+ (where a 17 or less on the fortitude save against the heroism 6'd action hero soldier would have killed them). Still not threatening.

Encounter 7 - 1x Ancient Fortune Dragon and 4x Elite Sediya Vrath (160XP)
- Simple concept, the healers heal the boss.
- Party A gets kind of lucky with the Mystic escaping from Quandary (they need a natural 20 to do so, any other result is a fail or critical fail), but even then the dragon has no invisibility answer outside of its AoEs, and party A can just kite it around walls so it can't use those if it wants to Sustain Quandary. If it doesn't Sustain Quandary, its damage can't outpace the Mystic's healing. Not a difficult encounter.
- Party B chain stuns the dragon with Ghost Operative, making this a fairly easy win even despite some bad saves against its AoEs on the rounds it can act.

Encounter 8 - 1x Tarn Linnorm (160XP)
- It has True Seeing and Party A does not have hidden mind.
- Party A needs 2 tries and even then they barely win on the second try, with multiple opportunities where a crit -> crit failed poison save, or hit->crit failed poison save, or crit->failed poison save could have killed someone outright. Mystic deactivates regen with Impaling Spike, operative finishes it.
- Party B has hidden mind from the witchwarper, which negates true seeing on everyone but the bombard (crit failed the counteract check), making this fight pretty trivial. Operative even rolls badly, scoring 0 crits despite offguard, heroism 6, aid and clustered shots (no Synesthesia to lower defences because that's PC2). Witchwarper kills it with Vision of Death.

Not that I think this is super strong unless your GM is very generous with how often you get free action DaS, but one interesting interaction it does have is with the feat Line ‘Em Up. Because that uses the same attack roll for every target, if you have a line that includes A and B, and another line that includes A and C, if you DaS on B, get a natural 1, you can Line ‘Em Up on C instead and get a better result for A.

Combined with extra movement such as from Haste or the free movement given by Instant Reload, it’s very possible that a line that includes A and B allows you to DaS B, roll a natural 1, move and then Line ‘Em Up A instead, hitting B with your other result.

I read it as only applying to the Recall Knowledge check used as part of Akashic download (i.e. the one/two/three/four you get before the spell expires) but it is rather ambiguous.

Thanks for the insight. So is one of the takeaways here that Starfinder characters are overall stronger than their Pf2e counterparts? Or is it really just outlying options being too good?

Operative is definitely way better than any PF2e base class.

Soldier is pretty up there as well, it has issues but even single target the raw mathematical power it has is undeniable. Probably equivalent to the best PF2e martials.

Mystic is about equivalent to heal font cleric, might be be better, which puts it pretty firmly in S tier.

Witchwarper… aside from Twisted Dark Zone I’m pretty sure it’s just a tankier occult sorcerer that struggles to cast its slotted spells due to range issues. It’s better than an occult sorc due to stats, but the surrounding context of the game it’s in makes it worse.

Solarian and Envoy are definitely worse than any PF2e equivalent class.

Once you get past the level 1-3 hell of single dice no mod damage for soldier and operative their damage is incredibly good. 1-3 is suffering though.

A number of surrounding options are also overpowered, however. Even in the context of SF.

I haven't been able to pull a group together to test at anything other than 1st level, but these write ups suggest that even a somewhat less optimized group will comfortably be punching well above their weight...

Looking through the things you tested, it also seems like higher level enemies need more flexible tools at their disposal so you don't have quite so many binary encounters. This was a problem in Sf1E as well, as higher level characters had broad spectrum capabilities and defenses (thanks to augmentations and armor upgrades mostly) that tended to outclass the things they were fighting from one angle or another.

Yeah doesn’t look like things have changed much then. The enemies still fundamentally feel like they were designed for the close quarter melee centric metagame of Pathfinder and maybe a 20-25ft fly speed was slapped on.

Generally some combination of being too slow (when characters in SF especially at this level can easily be rocking a 45-50ft land speed and a 40 or 60ft fly speed), range being too short, being reliant on area fire/AoE when SF characters have almost no reason to group up, and just generally lacking damage because they’re using PF2e ranged damage.

Some of the SF unique enemies are threatening but not in ways I think is necessarily intended. Like I don’t think the devs intended for the Immolsivix to just continually spam Bomb Barrage on one person.

Map design certainly doesn’t help make these enemies out much either.

It’s difficult to really say with this and suppressed in general. It’s very binary, because enemy speeds are very binary. At 20-30 speed it’s absolutely crippling, making enemies basically immobile (and normal suppressed is a notable penalty if they need to move). At 40 speed it’s just a notable penalty if they need to move at normal suppressed can barely be felt. Once you get to 60+ speed neither of them can really be felt.

I suggest just making it halve speed (min 10ft reduction) instead.

Really interesting write up that highlights some feats and options that might be above the intended power curve. Can I ask why you had so many fights with 6+ enemies? I find from both games I run (in PF2E) and prewritten modules that this is exceedingly rare. Usually you get at most a half dozen foes, and most typically it's 1-4.

Stress testing mostly. We started with moderate and severe encounters in the level 3 test (and even some less than 160XPs in the level 8 area) but they were just too easy, practically zero threat or resource expenditure required unless the monster in of itself was broken (e.g. the Crest Eaters or Glass Serpent).

There's almost no point, therefore, in us testing encounters at the XP range you'd typically see in a prewritten adventure, which tend to be moderates or even lower than moderates at this point. What would we really find out? No class is pressured into using any of their resources, or using their actions the most effectively, because there's such a massive margin for error before anyone is at risk of dying. Essentially, the question we're asking is: When push comes to shove, you're in the hardest possible encounter in an adventure, does this option perform well?

There are adventures where a whole stack of low level enemies is fielded. Extinction Curse, from memory, does this a lot - one encounter features 18 Xul'Gath Thoughtmaws (a level-5 creature!) at level 20. It's also acceptable under the budget to have a swarm of low level enemies as your main threat - it, at the very least, makes area fire and AoE spells feel a bit more impactful than they ordinarily are.

These encounters can actually be threatening if the enemy is loaded up with save-for-half effects that your character does not have the relevant juggernaut/evasion/resolve for. There are some other creatures that are still threatening at this range - for instance, 6 Zecuis, combined with 6 Chorals and 4 Jungle Drakes made a very difficult extreme encounter for the level 10 Battlecry playtest, and showed an area where the Guardian might have been preferrable over the Paladin.

HolyFlamingo! wrote:

Okay, so prime takeaway seems to be that enemies aren't keeping up with players in regards to detection and mobility. Also Edna's riding the struggle bus with the solarian, but he's been posting about that elsewhere already.

I feel like I might wind up banning unlimited flight/invisibility in my own games, because they seem primed to create a really unhealthy relationship between the players and the GM. Like with any other cheese strat, either the GM puts up with it and watches game balance simply collapse, or counters it and makes all that player investment useless. Might be better to just pretend those options don't exist.

I really hope that the playtest feedback allows for more consideration about range and flight. The Starfriends were very vocal about wanting unlimited flight at level 1 to be a huge draw of the system. Unfortunately, it kind of feels like an afterthought? Only one ancestry has access to it before level 5, no feat has alternative movement clauses, and then with some level 3/5 items basically everyone becomes vertical.

Id rather they work harder to make it an important core to the game rather than just give it up entirely.

Flight has issues with Pathfinder 2e whose rules generally assume the battlefield is 2D. Drawing cover and AoE templates in 3D is awkward, and all terrain becomes meaningless in 3D because you just fly around it. Every battlefield is a flat, featureless plain.

It would need some work if they wanted it to be an important core to the game.

Okay, so prime takeaway seems to be that enemies aren't keeping up with players in regards to detection and mobility. Also Edna's riding the struggle bus with the solarian, but he's been posting about that elsewhere already.

I feel like I might wind up banning unlimited flight/invisibility in my own games, because they seem primed to create a really unhealthy relationship between the players and the GM. Like with any other cheese strat, either the GM puts up with it and watches game balance simply collapse, or counters it and makes all that player investment useless. Might be better to just pretend those options don't exist.

The commercial and tactical ultralights at 20/30 speed are fine, as is the Jetpack. Advanced at 40 is pushing it and Superior at 60 is far too much.

And yeah, Invisibility 4 is mathematically pretty insane relative to anything else of a comparable level.
It’s:
- +2 to hit
- ~+100% HP (all attacks against you have a 50% miss chance)
- An effectively massive save bonus against anything targeted (A spell that misses due to concealment is effectively you crit succeeded)
- An enabler for any Sneak based shenanigans

Compared to Heroism 3 a level prior, or even Heroism 6 2 levels later, it’s obviously very out of line. Yes enemies can counter it with precise senses or truesight, but it’s rare, and if you’re constantly having to field enemies with one of those two just to negate Invisibility, it’s a problem.

Would definitely suggest banning the advanced cloaking skin (not sure that putting it to 2a would put it in line).

Same thing but level 8

Same thing but level 3, before a bunch of errata

Party A

Party B (yes there's a reason they have so many credits spare, it's because I felt like testing Fabricator).

A lot of things changed relative to level 3 and 8 this time. Plenty of things came online, and I'm not sure many of them were for the better.

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Core System Mechanics and general stuff

1) At this point, every single light armor character (which is everyone except Soldier) can have 40 or 60 feet of fly speed through Ultralight Wings, alongside a massive range from laser rifles. Enemies do not seem to have been built to account for this with many of them still boasting a rather short 30 foot range, with a speed of 20-30 and a similar fly speed.

This, of course, meant that I had to make a lot of maps boxed indoors, otherwise the party would easily win by kiting the enemies infinitely with their superior range and far superior speed, while the enemies can barely land a scratch on them. This made Area Fire feel a lot better, combined with the fact that a 16 stack of level-4 enemies with save-for-halfs is a threatening encounter at this level, the soldiers' Area Fires were feasting.

2) It was already tenuous before, but Cover really no longer matters at this point. Many enemies are too large to effectively make use of it, and PCs just have better things to do.

3) Area weapons and hordes of enemies. Something needs to be done to cut down on the dice rolling here, because each crit fail prompts crit effects, which tend to involve saves. When fighting a stack of lower level enemies, having 4 of them crit fail, prompting 2 more saves each (projectile crit spec, frost module) as well as a check for shock module was really tedious in play.

4) Ammo counting. Seriously the most annoying thing ever. When you have people with 50 shot before reload weapons (i.e. never going to reload), comparing to your 20 shot that needs 2 bullets per person in the cone weapon, or your 8 shot but you need 2 shots to area fire and also 1 shot for your reaction attack weapon... it's really easy to lose track of how many bullets you have left after 3 or 4 rounds. Do you need to reload? Don't really know. This mechanic really needs a cleanup, if Ammo is supposed to matter make it matter don't give guns 50 shots before reloading. If it's not supposed to matter, don't have reloading. Don't make me count how many individual bullets out of my 20 clip I've used where each person in a cone costs 2 bullets.

5) Cloaking Skin, Advanced is a broken item. 3/day 4th rank invisibility for 1 action. Very, very few enemies have an answer to invisibility, and invisibility 4 is a silly powerful offensive (everything is off-guard) and defensive buff. Combined with the ruling that you don't need to do a flat check to target yourself (we asked in numerous places and this was the almost universally agreed upon consensus) made it virtually impossible to actually get anyone to 0. The entire party having easy access to Off-Guard by this made Get 'Em a lot worse than it already was.

6) Opening Roar might be one of the most broken feats ever printed. Combined with Terrified Retreat, especially on multiple characters, you can have a fair amount of the enemy team fleeing on initiative roll. This happened on multiple occasions. It's also unclear if it's supposed to demoralize 2, 3 or 4 enemies. We ruled 2, so we were playing it at its weakest.

7) You probably already knew, but Fabricator is broken. You probably shouldn't be making 180,000 credits per month (it's crafting so you need an equivalent amount of credits to earn that money but still) at level 13 when regular Earn Income makes 4500.

8) Dermal Plating, even in the context of Starfinder, might be too efficient for the price. A good chunk of enemies still do physical damage.

9) Despite the above tight, sealed off maps... grenades and missiles were still useless. That's despite me giving above-levelled (ultimate) grenades and missiles at level 13. They just didn't do enough for the action cost.

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Envoy

Due to the aforementioned "Cloaking Skin, Advanced" on everyone, alongside a lot of encounters which featured many lower level enemies, Get 'Em! was hardly used over just doing another Strike. Fortunately, the Envoy picked up "That'll Show Em!" at this level, which gave them an easily triggerable reaction attack. They are strongly considering taking Ready For Anything for the 16th level playtests and just not using any of their directives at all, because an extra trigger of That'll Show 'Em is better than their directives.

Show Em What You Got! Was okay. Needing to choose your role at the start of the day rather than when its used makes it incredibly inflexible, so everyone just picked Striker except for the Mystic who picked spellcaster. Also Defender being specifically on the "Next time you're attacked", rather than you getting to choose, means it's easily wasted. It really does just feel like a 2 action, worse, True Target though.

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Mystic

Pretty much the same, except now with everyone being invisible their healing is effectively twice as good. We ruled that, for functionality purposes, Extended Vitality meant transfer vitality did not need to check concealment/invisibility.

Didn't use any of their higher level focus spells, just Anthem and Infusion.

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Operative

Striker operative is practically the same as before. Added Overwhelming Strike so they can suppress things (off guard didn't matter due to the Cloaking Skins).

Ghost Operative, however, got one broken tool: Line 'Em Up. As far as I can tell, if you're undetected to each enemy in the line (because you sneaked) and crit, it will stun all of them. This is so incredibly overpowered that 3 of the encounters just ended to nearly the entire opfor being chain stunned by a line attack. Of course, it's still pretty binary, you can fail the sneak, or you can only hit the attack after the sneak, but against encounters with multiple lower level enemies - combined with the offguard from undetected, and Aid from an ally, with the fact that you only roll once, you can very reliably crit the entire line.

Also combined with Anchoring Impacts and Twisted Dark Zone very well, as most enemies simply couldn't move very far if at all, keeping them in a line.

I expect this to get even more degenerate at level 16 when Clustered Shots is picked up, makes critting single enemies more consistent. Fish in a Barrel would do the same, but getting an enemy immobilized or prone is a bit more difficult.

If you are playing with PF2e material, do not let the Ghost Operative take Supreme Sneak.

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Solarian

The smaller rooms helped them a lot with Supernovas, but their damage just wasn't there. Everyone else has 3 damage modules, the Solarian has 1, making their damage just on par with the Envoy. None of their feats have given them any meaningful power growth since level 8, and the player does not think that level 16 will change this either.

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Soldier

A class that's gotten a huge glow-up since its humble beginnings at level 3.

Anchoring Impacts doubles down on Suppressed's already existing issues to make it even more binary. 20 or 25 speed enemies can basically not move at all when suppressed, whereas those 180 speed dragons? Still basically unaffected. The stunned 1 on CF is nice when it shows up.

It's also a feedback loop of sorts. You Anchoring Impacts the entire enemy team. They can't move, so they're stuck in place for the next Area Fire, which makes them unable to move...

I am unsure why this class gets master weapons at level 15 instead of 13 like a normal martial, while they get expert weapons at level 5 (on time). The reduction of to-hit was noticeable.

Spatial Drift made a lot of the area weapons a lot better, simply extending their range by 10 feet made the Flamethrower have a decent sized AoE. The Action Hero had pretty enormous AoEs with it. Sadly I didn't end up using a Magnetar, as I needed my general feats for other things, and we ruled it couldn't be gotten with unconventional weaponry.

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Witchwarper

Another class that's gotten a huge glow up but not in ways I think is intentional.

For starters, Twisted Dark Zone. Hooray, my Quantum Field finally matters because I can put a decent effect on it. You become acutely aware of just how many SF enemies are weirdly lacking in Darkvision when you use this, and your team is immune because of the 24 hour immunity making you able to just throw it on them at the start of the day, making them immune to it for the rest of the day.

The Confusion effect is very solid as well. For some reason nothing about this ability is [Mental], so all of those mindless low will enemies can still get confused by this. With many starfinder enemies having ranged attacks, this means they'll stand in place making ranged attacks... which means they were also standing in place to get hit by more Area/Auto-Fire and Line 'Em Up. The blinded (from darkness with no darkvision) stacked with Anchoring Impacts to make all of those 25 speed enemies unable to move, because 5 foot speed + everything is difficult terrain.

Focus spells, they were okay. Time Loop is reasonable for the same reason Twisted Dark Zone is - it's not mental. The range is also good because its anywhere in your Quantum Field. Warp Time was by far the most used focus spell just because it's 1 action for 25 temporary HP.

Still found it difficult to use their "real" spells due to difficulty using them and sustaining the quantum field. Outside of Soothe to heal themself, and Contingency for Invisibility 4 on themself, not many spells were used.

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Encounters

For all encounters to prevent indefinite stalling due to game mechanics, the emergency rule "If the party is not turtling, they automatically win at the end of round 10" is in play.

- 1) 2 Comet Wasp Swarms and 8 Heliacal Maw Ferocitums (160XP)
- Party A gets 3 crit Opening Roars and a Wall of Stone, making this encounter a joke as the enemies simply cannot output damage through that.
- Party B drops down a Twisted Dark Zone (Ferocitums don't have Darkvision), and combined with Anchoring Impacts the Ferocitums can't move at all. Once the swarms are dealt with, the encounter is over.

- 2) 6 Swarm Dissolvers and 7 Fangs of the Devourer (160 XP)
- Party A crits some opening roars and mostly enters cleanup from there. Mystic throws out Chain Lightning for the heck of it but didn't really need to.
- Party B drops down a Twisted Dark Zone and shreds this encounter with Area/Auto Fires and Line 'Em Up. Some unlucky natural 1s on Devourer's Teeth stopped some momentum as the Soldiers couldn't do anything while slowed 2, but overall not threatening.

- 3) 16 Kehtarian Mulch Munchers (160 XP)
- Party A actually has some issues with this. Wall of Stone stems the bleeding a bit, but repeated instances of 8d8 sonic save-for-half does wear them down, with the Mulch Munchers recharging each others' Sonic Breaths. Eventually the Incendiary Grenades are brought out to end the fight a bit faster. It was an ideal situation for the Incendiary Grenade - tiny room with packed, fire weak enemies and even then it was just... okay.
- Party B drops down a Twisted Dark Zone, making the Munchers unable to sonic breath round #1, while cleaning everything up with area fire flamethrowers, auto fire rotolasers and line em up.

- 4) Weak Ancient Mirage Dragon (160 XP).
- Everyone has 5th rank See the Unseen spell chips because everyone is invisible from Cloaking Skin and they want to be able to heal each other with only a DC5 flat check in the event the worst happens. That makes this fight doable.
- Realistically this is a massive problem enemy without See the Unseen. It goes invisible with invisibility 4 and then Sneaks. It succeeds on a natural 2, and moves 90ft flying, you are never finding it.
- However it also lacks damage. Something very common with high level level+4 enemies. See the Unseen disables its sneak attack, so past the initial breath it can't do nearly enough damage (especially because it cannot get by Invisibility 4 itself) to threaten anyone.
- Party A wins with some lucky natural 1 saves on the Mirage's part, but would have won without it.
- Party B just wins through Readied Strikes, invisibility from cloaking skin and healing off any damage the Mirage can actually do. Despite bad initial saves vs the breath attack, the Mirage just can't output enough damage.

- 5) 4x Elite Armed Defrex and 1x Elite Ancient Horned Dragon (160XP)
- Party A kinda gets lucky (or rather, the enemies get unlucky). Yes, nothing here can bypass invisibility, but the enemies also win initiative this time due to a bad series of initiative rolls. Despite that, and despite the Defrexes critting on a 16+ on their MAP free attack, they get only 1 crit across the entire fight. Party A does take a beating, though, from the initial bad tempo.
- Party B has to do this twice, the first time the enemies get very lucky. The defrexes do not have darkvision, so Twisted Dark Zone makes them blind, but they roll a lot of crits through blindness and the Witchwarper eventually dies to this. Not helped by the Operative rolling quite poorly on their attacks, managing no stuns.
- On the second attempt, they roll good initiative, Opening Roar terrified Retreat the 4 defrexes and it's easy cleanup from there with Twisted Dark Zone blinding the defrexes.

- 6) 16x Stone Mauler (160XP)
- Probably not an encounter you should ever do.
- 16 Maulers doing Burrow, Strike, Burrow every round. Incredible gameplay. Of course, 13th-level SF2e characters have no ability to answer Burrow so they're stuck doing readied Strikes. The targets of which the Maulers have total control over.
- Party A doesn't manage to kill even a single mauler by the end of round 10, and wins by timer. Dermal Plating and Invisibility means the Mystic (The target of all 16 attacks, every round) never hits 0, but they did have to burn a few slots on Heal. Solarian just uses a Laser Rifle this combat.
- Party B has the advantage of the Ghost Operative's crit stun, meaning their readied Strike stuns a Mauler as it pops out of the ground, letting the rest of the party clean them up. They still win by timer as they can only kill 1 mauler a round, but there's only 6 maulers left. Witchwarper does not go down and does not need to spend many slots on Soothe (they do use all 4 of their FP on Warp Time though).
- Twisted Dark Zone does not prompt the confusion on entry, only on start of turn, so its useless here.

- 7) 3x Elite Immolsivix and 4x Elite Azlanti Dissident (160XP)
- If the Immolsivixes were not elite, this encounter would be over to Terrified Retreat on initiative.
- Still, it's a reasonably threatening enemy. Who knew all you had to do to make Area Fire worthwhile was... have it do literally more than double the damage that every other Area Fire does? Bomb barrage is basically that. Gets around invisibility too.
- The Dissidents are basically just here to Haste the Immolsivixes (it's an enemy with a good 3 action attack routine of Strike + Bomb Barrage, but it needs to move to do this consistently). Nerfs to the Seeker Rifle make them basically inadequate at dealing damage.
- Party A is lucky that they picked up spell gems of Energy Aegis as part of a reward from an earlier VP challenge, which severely cuts down on Bomb Barrage's damage. Despite that the Solarian still almost dies. This enemy is no joke.
- Party B... well, Immolsivixes have 25 speed, so Anchoring Impacts essentially locks them in place. Past there, the operative rolls a critical Line 'Em Up 3 rounds straight after Sneaking, keeping the Immolsivixes chain-stunned and unabl to do anything until they die. Party B did not take any damage past the first round.

- 8) 5x Elemental Hurricane and 2x Heliacal Maw Stellar Hulk (160XP)
- Party A gets 5 Terrified Retreats off on all 5 hurricanes on initiative. The Solarian is dead useless after the Stellar Hulks are down, they cannot catch the Hurricanes to deal damage to them, so they opt to simply switch to a Laser Rifle. Still, the Hurricanes can't really deal with invisibility so its mostly a painless win.
- Party B forces the Hurricanes to land under threat of the operative stunning them in midair (where they'd fall and take a bunch of fall damage at the end of their turn as they can't Arrest while stunned). From there, time loop stuns them to prevent Disperse, Line 'Em Up stuns some more. I'm fairly certain the opfor spent most of the encounter stunned. Pretty easy victory for them too.

Text for reference. Notably, not a free action, so it doesn't run into trigger issues.

At the start of a combat encounter, if you are aware of your foes and aren't attempting to Sneak or Hide, you can roll Intimidation for your initiative and can use the result to demoralize one foe within range.

Additionally, if you have the Battle Cry feat, you can Demoralize up to two creatures within 60 feet of you who you're aware of.

So my question is... how does this feat actually function if you have Battle Cry? Does it:

A) Let you demoralize up to two creatures within 60 feet, using your initiative result as the check result?

B) Let you demoralize one creature within range (30 or weapon range with Intimidating Shot) using your initiative result as the check result, then roll two more Intimidate checks with Battle Cry?

C) Let you demoralize one creature within range using your initiative result as the check result, then roll two more Intimidate checks, then use Battle Cry because you rolled initiative to demoralize one more creature (totalling 4).

D) Something else?

Still broken.

There's still almost no way to avoid it. At 100ft or even 30ft, a creature has no options but to move, make a ranged attack or use a manipulate action (i.e. cast a spell). If it doesn't do any of these things, it effectively passes its turn, which means you traded your reaction for the target you aimed at's entire turn, which is a trade I would take 100% of the time every time.

It's a little more awkward to use now, particularly at lower levels, where your aimed at target may or may not die to your attack (higher levels are much more certain due to more dice being rolled), so you might have to Aim a different creature than the one you're attacking to get it off, or might accidentally kill your target without a spare action left, meaning you lose it.

You can take Switch Target and Always Ready, then it just functions practically the same as it did before.

It being only on the target you aimed at does almost nothing to balance it because that's the target you most likely wanted to shoot with an extra MAP free attack anyway.

Soldier's Overwatch is higher level, has fewer triggers and is harder to activate (unless you're bombard) and even that activates far too consistently as a MAP free strike.

I've been running a Healer Mystic, and had a chance to compare Infusion to Heal recently.

Infusion: restores 1d6(+6) HP, heightens 1d6(+6), two-action range 30', two-action only affects members of my network

Heal: restores 1d8(+8) HP, heightens 1d8(+8), two-action range 30'. In PF2, a cleric feat will let you ignore enemies when you cast it.

To me, Infusion seems to be the equivalent of Font, and feels ... unnecessarily weakened. If it were 8s instead of 6s, I'd be happy. If the two-action range was 'in network range', I'd be happy. If it were both, I'd be ecstatic.

I'm not certain how Focus vs. Font limit plays out. Focus I'm limited to three/battle if I use no other focus spells. Font is limited to 4/5/6 per day (based on character level). Outside of mega-dungeon or other situations where you're time-limited, I think Font wins? I.e., if you're only having one combat/day, Font is better than Focus. If you're having multiple combats/day, then Focus is probably better?

If you’re having one or two combats per day then any daily-resource based class is going to win that. Focus points and Font might as well be irrelevant, both classes can just spam Heal out of their highest level slot if they want and they likely won’t run out before the encounter is meaningfully over.

At the 4 combat per day range, especially if you pick up a 2nd focus point by feat at level 2, Infusion is more efficient than font for a long time. 2 Infusions per combat (you probably don’t need 3 so New Epiphany for Anthem instead) is effectively 8 top rank-1 spells per day for Heal. When Transfer Vitality is added on top, the Mystic is a much better burst healer than the Cleric.

Same thing but level 3, pre a bunch of errata though

Been a while, fellow player wanted to wait for a bit of errata before continuing and we were doing some other stuff in the meantime, but we're back on track to do this, then level 13, level 16 and level 20 soon.

I'll start with the class feedback first and then the specific encounter stuff later.

Party A - Mystic, Envoy, Skirmisher Operative, Solarian

Party B - Action Hero soldier, Bombard soldier, Ghost operative, Witchwarper

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Envoy

There is almost no significant difference in play pattern since level 3. Get 'em!, Strike, X (demoralize/second strike usually). Watch Out! and Look Alive! were really annoying to track, luckily we wrote down all the dice rolls for the dozens of times we forgot about it, so we could retroactively alter things. It's just so unlikely to actually do anything, and you need to use it pre-roll.

I don't really have much to say that I didn't say in the level 3 playtest.

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Mystic

Basically played the same as it did in level 3, except this time it's a Rhythm mystic with New Epiphany for infusion. So it's transfer to sustain or activate Anthem, and infusion. They didn't do anything else, really, because they didn't need to do anything else, and that's despite all of these encounters being in the extreme range.

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Operative

With Always Ready and Switch Target, you're basically playing with an unnerfed hair trigger. And yes, it's still busted even post nerf. Not really much else to say, with 1 or 2 weapon upgrades available at this level, it does crazy damage at range.

Ghost Operative was also played in addition to the more vanilla skirmisher operative (that was just skirmisher for the free hair trigger feat). Ghost Operative is... significantly jankier. It relied on the Witchwarper providing it invisibility, and even then it might be the most feast-or-famine class I've ever played. You successfully sneak (usually a coinflip), and then you crit, the encounter is trivial because stunned 1 round is massive. If you fail the sneak, you usually don't get a second attempt to do so, because if you fail again you can't free action aim and strike. If you miss the attack after your sneak, your sneak was pointless.

Also runs into stun-mid-turn issues as seen before, except this case because it's a stun 1 round that applies mid turn, its even worse. Stunned 1 you can just take an action off next turn, 1 round means either
1) They lose the rest of their turn, and it wears off at the start of the operative's turn by duration rules.
2) It does literally nothing and wears off at the start of the operative's turn by duration rules.

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Solarian

Basically just playing an inferior fighter/barbarian. It gets in people's faces with reach reactive strike, and that's good enough for starfinder where most ranged enemies simply can't do anything except take the reactive strike. Supernova didn't see much use at this level, Solarian had to move a lot.

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Soldier

Add overwatch, the class is now top tier. Two variants of soldier were played, action hero and bombard. They basically played the exact same though. Both were Shirrens for Eager Assistant so they had a consistent use of their third action (aiding the ghost operative in this case). Action hero used Fog of War to some effect, whereas Bombard used covering fire, but they mostly both used Shot on the Run.

Suppressed is still very feast-or-famine as a mechanic as well. If you have a slow (20-30 speed), melee enemy it cripples them (worse, I imagine, with Anchoring Impacts). If you have a high speed enemy (pretty much a coinflip by this level or later) or a ranged enemy, they don't care.

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Witchwarper

Aside from Quantum Field being a bad effect, I now present a second problem with Quantum Field: Action economy. This witchwarper was a Gap witchwarper, so they could use Forget on the ghost operative to give them invisibility. This meant they had to keep Quantum Field sustained every turn, which made them... extremely immobile, to say the least. They found it difficult to even use their spells with most spells being 30ft range, and not sustaining the quantum field, they couldn't Stride+Cast if they wanted to keep the field up.

Yes this was easily worse than just casting Invisibility 4 and as such I will just be using that, or advanced cloaking skin, at level 13.

I don't really see why they need to sustain the QF, its effects still aren't good enough to justify the action cost sustaining it. Why not just have it stick around no sustain, with Anchoring being to move it, and Quantum Transposition to move it further?

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Encounters
- 2x Protection-Class Security Robot and 2x Commander Eiran. The protection-class robots start with covering posture already used, Commander Eirans start already having taken cover and in a favourable position.(140XP)

Not very hard, overwatch/hair trigger/reactive strike wrecks them.

Witchwarper / Action Hero Soldier / Bombard Soldier / Ghost Operative party struggled a bit more than Mystic / Skirmisher Operative / Solarian / Envoy due to poor dice luck.

- 1x Elite Vampire Mastermind and 1x Elite Captain Vasoya (160XP).

Would only be hard due to the cheese factor of dominate. Mystic party just passed the save, soldier party suppressed the vampire making it unable to dominate anyone due to range/speed issues. Vasoya gets wrecked by suppress.

Amusingly the Solarian is still the worst at dealing with the vampire due to being hardstuck to a physical damage weapon, whereas everyone else gets elemental weapons.

- 4x Void Shark (160XP) in zero-G.

Probably the second hardest encounter here, due to the cheese factor of Swallow Whole + flying really far away. Soldier party was better here, mystic party suffered the most by having mystic constantly stuck swallowed, but ultimately the party won both times handily.

- 1x Asteray (160XP) inside a starship, starts with Matter Consumption already used (expires round 10).

Both parties come in prepared with cold iron weapons, reactions on movement (hair trigger + reactive strike or hair trigger + 2x overwatch) and darkness (asteray doesn't have darkvision). This is still not an easy fight, at all. The asteray is blazing fast, able to run around the starship to block line of sight while still getting off 2 ranged attacks. If it weren't for all those preparations, both parties would easily lose this.

This is another example of kiting, cover-based combat and... it's really just not fun, at all. You're just chasing some super fast enemy around a map, barely able to hit it.

- 3x Living Lodestone and 5x Elite Hatchling Swarm (135XP)

Not difficult. Enemies can't really do enough damage. Both parties get out of this with barely a scratch.

- 1x Corpse Fleet Screamer and 2x Elite Sample 62 (160XP)

Sample 62s get wrecked because of fire weakness (every single party member has either a laser rifle or a backup fire weapon such as a rotolaser or flamethrower for non-physical damage needs). Screamer takes a long time to take out, especially for the soldiers who do almost no damage to it. Fortunately, it does not do much in return, so this is mostly a grind fest.

- 1x Elite Famesworn (160XP)

Kinda scary but only because of Absorb. One person hits the floor and a single Stride instantly kills them (the famesworn is encouraged to do this). Unsurprisingly the Solarian party is at bigger risk here because the Solarian needs to close gap on it, whereas the other party can kite away from it (unusually poor dice luck meant that they couldn't suppress or slow it that well).

Still, no one died, and people only came close to dying due to threat of Absorb, not because of dying values.

- 2x Troll Bombard in a tiny room (160XP)

15ft burst grenades and autofire in a tiny room should be good for these dudes, right? Unfortunately, electricity weakness 10 and fire weakness 10 is a total death sentence, given how heavily incentivized PF2e and by extension, SF2e PCs are to stack elemental damage runes, everyone having shock modules with a fire damage weapon (laser rifle/rotolaser/flamethrower) meant that these dudes died like chumps.

Ghost operative crit twice in this fight rendering it even more trivial.

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If they’re dead set on keeping something CON related (instead of just making it a flat number like 5, or making it work off investment), just set it to a flat number and add a general feat with a +2 con requirement that increases that number, similar to how we resolved investment from playtest to print.

Advanced weapons are nothing more than a legacy design at this point. I don't see a world in which an hyphothetical PF3e doesn't remove advanced weapons because they bern consistently bad for like, 4 editions now? (I don't remember if 4e had an equivalent of advanced weapons, but exotic weapons in 3.5 and PF1e were certainly bad). One of the best design decisions made in 5e was to not have advanced / exotic weapons because for the most part they take space page for no real reason.

Unfortunately, SF2e is still PF2e so it sadly will carry the (arguably few) problems it has, advanced weapons being one of them. While I would love ElementalofCuteness's suggestion of removint them entirely and making them martial weapons instead, sadly there's very few advanced weapons that would be really overpowered if they were made martial. I guess those could be tweaked, but if the remaster didn't attempt to do that much less I would expect SF2e to do it.

4e had advanced weapons (they were called superior weapons) and they suffered many of the same problems. Outside of one specific fighter subclass, no one got proficiency with them for free, you needed a feat and due to the way 4e damage scaling works your weapon stats beyond having a +3 proficiency bonus don’t really matter past the lowest levels.

The only superior weapons anyone spent the feat to get profiency in were those that had no +3 military equivalent (greatspear, superior crossbow) or those that had 2 weapon types (gouge and maybe sometimes double weapons) due to being able to benefit from weird weapon enchant/feat support combos.

I mean, in Pathfinder you're never going to see a character pick up a simple weapon when their martial proficiency is as good or better. The niche of the seeker rifle now is "a character without martial proficiency who expects to spend most of their actions on non-strikes(like a spellcaster)."

A sniper operative should just use an Assassin Rifle or a Shirren-Eye Rifle, which is straight up better at the cost of being martial. Martial weapons are supposed to be better than simple weapons. My sniper operative spent fully 2/3 of their starting credits on the gun. I hope to get paid before I need to make more than 20 shots.

It's now worse than a PF2e heavy crossbow, for reference. The weapon was overnerfed, one of the two changes would have sufficed, both just make it basically unplayable.

A character with simple weapon proficiency will likely now gravitate towards an Acid Dart Rifle or Laser Rifle because of no Volley (60ft).

Compared to Bard, you get a bigger damage bonus yourself from the Get 'Em / Lead By Example. You're more like a martial, not so much like a caster.

The damage bonus is pretty good at level 1, the difference between a 1d6 gun and 1d6+3 is a lot. Maybe it should scale a bit more aggressively though?

Courageous Anthem has a ton of benefits that Get 'Em doesn't, it

a) Has lingering composition so you don't need to repeatedly use it
b) Is a 60ft emanation for your allies which is somewhat easier targeting than one enemy in 60ft
c) Applies to your allies, rather than an enemy, so is not at risk of going away if the enemy dies unlike Get Em.
d) Comes attached to a class with full spellcasting, as opposed to a class with only master martial weapons and a non-attack key stat.

It probably should scale more aggressively if the envoy is intended to be more of a Striker, or they should have many more tactics that do other things (like the Commander) if they're supposed to be more of a martial support unit.

Guntermench wrote:

Yeah it's basically just so Operative doesn't end up the best with them at this point.

Which is, mind you, a good thing. The Operative is already the best class with a knife, with a sniper rifle, with pistols, with regular rifles, etc. It does not need to also be the best with artillery and machine guns.

There’s more to being good at something than simply having the right numbers for it (though conversely without good numbers it’s impossible to be good at something). Soldier will still be far better at Area Firing due to Primary Target + feat support, and Operative still probably won’t use area weapons because basically none of their stuff actually works with it.

The same reason Witchwarpers don’t use Area stuff despite having the same DC as soldiers for every level except the last 2 - they just aren’t very effective compared to the other stuff they could be doing.

Granted that might be because in the current state of Area weapons, only soldiers use them with any level of efficacy required for a class to contribute in combat. Everyone else is basically casting a worse cantrip.

Am I missing something or is the Mystic the only class that never gets to have their Perception proficiency raised any higher than "Trained"? From what I can tell, every other class either starts as an "Expert" in Perception or receives Perception Expertise, Perception Mastery, Incredible Senses, or some other class ability that improves their Perception at some point in their progress but not the Mystic. Is this an oversight or an intentional nerfing of the class because it is Wisdom-based?

There's a lot of weird errors like this, for instance:

Mystic is also missing weapon specialization.

Witchwarper never gets Expert weapons, despite having weapon specialization.

Soldier is almost completely lacking in actual class features beyond proficiency, and doesn't get greater weapon specialization.

That is still not completely bidirectional, though, as having greater cover still gives you a relative +2 to AC over your opponent. If everyone's Taking Cover this way, everyone gets greater cover, but for +2 AC it's still an arms race to get to cover.

Sure, but so does raising a shield, and that can't be gotten around by moving and also doesn't give you an effective penalty to hit things. Requires use of a non 2 handed weapon, but it (or the shield cantrip) is far more effective IME.

If I need to move to shoot (maybe because my opponent is in cover), I don't want to move into cover first because then my shot is at an effective penalty. If I don't need to move to shoot, I'm looking to then back out of line of sight instead of taking cover as "can't be targeted" is a better AC buff than +4. In many cases, due to the speed of the enemy team, striding to cover and taking cover is wasting 2 actions because the enemies can trivially get around it while not affecting their turns all that much, which happened a lot IME.

Cover was just not often worth the action cost of getting into it considering how easy it was to get around it. Compared to ducking out of line of sight and closing a door, which always demanded a lot more actions (particularly because many of the best weapons are two handed, so it requires an extra action to regrip the weapon afterwards).

I'm not sure cover is bidirectional when you use the Take Cover action. It only states you gain the benefits of standard cover, or greater cover, which to me sounds like it's a one-way street. In practice, cover works both ways because both sides Take Cover, but a character Taking Cover isn't going to limit their own attacks against characters who aren't Taking Cover themselves.

Taking cover is not bidirectional but moving into cover in the first place is. If you move behind standard cover so you can get greater cover, now pretty much everything you shoot will be in standard cover from you due to Center to Center making it hard to draw the line such that it doesn't pass through the cover directly in front of you (and if it does, the thing you're shooting can shoot you without cover, making taking cover against them useless).

The best single target damage dealer in the game is not correct. With no stat to damage, and the rather short range on the roto
laser, they’re not competing with a melee character’s 2 strikes at 1-3 or even 4-7. What breaks them is picking up Run Hot or Fanning the Hammer much later, which is best done with a Stellar Cannon, not a rotolaser.

I don’t even think they compete with Mobile Aim, Strike, Strike from the operative

E.g. if we assume moderate AC (Operative and Fighter hit 75%, Soldier hits 60%) and moderate reflex (well even be generous and say level 2, so +8 vs DC19) then:

Operative’s damage (Seeker Rifle, Aim) = 1d10+1d4 = 8. EV = 0.75(8)+0.25(8)+0.5(8)+0.05(8) = 1.55(8) = 12.4

Fighter’s damage = 1d12+4 = 10.5. Same accuracy as the Operative so you can just do 1.55(10.5) = 16.275

Soldier’s damage = 1d8 = 4.5. Attack damage = 0.6(4.5)+0.1(4.5)+0.35(4.5)+0.05(4.5) = 1.1(4.5) = 4.95. AF damage = 0.05(9)+0.45(4.5)+0.5(2.25) = 1.6(2.25)=3.6

Totalling 8.55, much lower than either of the other classes. Even if you assume the Seeker is not correct and swap the operative to a laser or acid dart, their damage is still 1.55(7)=10.85, substantially higher than the Soldier.

The soldier’s issue, to me, is that Area Fire is a one size fits all solution to every problem. Single target or 5 targets, you Area Fire. Due to it being done at range, and the area part of it ignoring cover with a Stellar Cannon (measuring cover from burst’s origin), plus the mobility afforded by Shot on the Run, you usually don’t care what the map looks like either. You can’t meaningfully make the enemies group up, there’s no reason for you personally to take defensive measures because Suppress doesn’t make them attack you as the penalty applies to everything. You usually can’t do any maneuvers or skill actions outside of demoralize and one specific subclass, so it’s essentially solved at character creation as to what you’ll be doing in combat.

It doesn’t really help that it’s quite unclear as to what it applies to (does it apply to Tech armor considering you don’t take actions with armor?) and a staggering amount of stuff is just not Tech. In my playtests this condition has never done anything because all the commonly used weapons are Analog. This should be rectified if the stickiness issue also goes away.

I’ve been using Starfinder flip-mats for my playtests, and it tends to go one of three ways

1) You get the wide open flip mat, in which case no one takes cover because there isn’t really much cover to take in the first place.

2) You get the incredibly densely walled flip mat, in which case no one takes cover because it’s better to just move out of line of sight instead.

3) You get the rare flipmat which has an okay amount of cover and open spaces. In which case Taking Cover has still been a rarity for me because it’s so easy to get around it, and cover is bidirectional (by the center to center rule) meaning that if you go into cover you make your own attacks worse.

From the classes we’ve seen

Operatives typically don’t care about cover. With Mobile Aim they have such good mobility (the level 8 operative is currently sporting a 45ft land speed without really giving up much) that they can easily move to a position where Center to Center cover doesn’t apply. Not to mention Aim itself reducing cover bonuses (though it doesn’t ignore standard cover until 11th).

Soldiers have the same bonus. With Shot on the Run they can easily move to get around the enemy’s cover.

Solarians are primarily melee and therefore don’t really care about cover, they’ll often need to move close enough to attack, which means moving close enough to get around cover.

Witchwarpers and Mystics, being spellcasters, also don’t really care as they can just launch a will or fort spell.

That only leaves the Envoy truly caring about enemy cover because of their action economy being worse.

As a result, in the playtesting I’ve done, Take Cover has generally not been used on either side due to the action economy (1 action to move into cover, 1 action to take cover, 1 action to strike is quite rigid), the bidirectional nature of cover and the ease at which characters can get around it. Breaking line of sight, particularly by closing doors, by contrast requires much more actions on the opposing side to counter.

I think the most important thing with regard to cover is to have map building guidelines that Paizo actually sticks to. Making good maps for ranged combat is not easy by any means, but it’s doable. There’s considerations required for cover, sightlines, what positions have too much or too little visibility, and how game mechanics can interact with all of that by chokepoints or cover busting.

Then I would also like to see a reversion from Center to Center cover back to Corner to Corner (not counting running along a blocker as having your line blocked), so it’s possible to outflank an enemy in cover, having no penalties yourself while still having bonuses.

I agree that's a reason melee is good, but it's easy to say that it's the main reason coming from PF where the system's options are built to support it. Again, it's great that a Doshko does more damage than a Rotolazer, but it shouldn't be understated that one of those has a class built around it and the other needs a major feat (or other option) tax to be relevant to an actual character. White-room calculations only get you so far. If you have no gap closers, have no ways to meaningfully threaten the creatures in your reach, have no melee action compression, have no rider effects to apply, and potentially have no way to even apply your core class features to your melee strikes, is the 2-4 extra damage at level 1 really going to offset that?

4 damage at level 1 is massive, it's basically double damage (d8 vs d8+4 or d10 vs d10+4).

4 damage at level 8 is not much. 2d8+2d6+2 (18) vs 2d8+2d6+6 (22). Only about 25% growth.

This is the main cause of ranged damage being pretty awful 1-3, because of no stat mod to damage, but becoming competitive the moment you get enough runes and weapon spec that the flat mod difference is not that much. Monster HP is balanced around you having that mod at 1-3.

Then at 15+, at least currently, if you're not going for a reaction stacking build (prep backstab, combat reflexes and dueling riposte, divine reflexes, etc.), then ranged tends to become better because the difference of mod becomes miniscule, while monsters tend to get a bunch of anti-melee auras, reactions, abilities, etc. that makes it difficult to actually get in range to hit them.

Ascalaphus wrote:

TL;DR - my meta prediction: ideal party composition is two switch hitters in the front row, and two pure ranged in the back row. Everyone can do ranged okay, and two are built to do melee okay too.

But how do you build a switch-hitter in SF2?

From my currently limited knowledge of the game, I don't see how to make it happen well.

You don’t.

Switch hitting has much the same problems it always has.

1) Price. You need to up to date weapons.

2) Stats. If you’re a strength primary character, you now need dex to have a decent chance to hit with your secondary. If you’re a dex primary, you need strength to have any reason to use your melee and even then it’s probably not worth it. Swapping from a Seeker Rifle or Laser Rifle to an ECB might deal +1-3 damage at best, or might not even deal any more damage on average. Is that really worth putting all those points into strength and making it your secondary when they could be instead in wis or con for better survivability? Admittedly, Operative, Solarian and Soldier are free to do Str, Dex, Con, Wis as their four stats, but starting strength higher than +1 means you’re losing out on one of the other three.

Then we get into class specific problems

Envoy obviously can’t switch hit, it needs Con, Wis, Dex, Cha. No reason or benefit for it to ever switch to a melee weapon.

Operative simply has no reason to. They lose a bunch of damage, and even with Skirmisher there’s still very little point. You have On the Move to get out of reactive strikes, and unless you have a second melee character you can’t flank.

Soldier has major stat issues because of no ECB equivalent. Even if there was an ECB, you need to take Whirling Swipe to do anything decent in melee and it doesn’t work with a majority of your feats. Without an ECB you’re either neglecting dex which makes your ranged primary target a lot worse, or neglecting strength which makes your melee damage worse and your melee primary target (if you take the Whirling Swipe is intended to allow primary target interpretation).

That leaves the Solarian. And their problem is that Solar Shot sucks, due to having bad range, no potency runes and no damage weapon upgrades. Now I have seen a Solarian “switch” “hit” (currently going through my level 8 playtests, in that because they lack decent mobility options, special mats or the ability to deal any damage types other than physical/fire, then they swap weapons to deal with those problems. And stay on it, often never bothering to swap back to their Solar Weapon. In the latter two cases it’s because physical/fire resist will be a problem the entire fight. In the former because it’s also a problem the entire fight, spread out enemies with long range weapons are hell for Solarian’s action economy. Also helps that a ranged weapon does equal or better damage to their photon solar weapon due to having more damage upgrades.

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As for the reactive strike thing, it’s not that rare once you get to level 11. 20ish% of 11-15 monsters have Attack of Opportunity, and 30ish% of 16+ ones do. Many of these also have long reach, and I didn’t even count the many reactions that have most of the same triggers as reactive strike, while being named differently.

So... I had an idea about how to fix 'Hair Trigger': change the requirement from:

You're wielding a gun
to
You're wielding a 1-handed gun

That way, it still works well for the Skirmisher specialization, which is built around betting in close-ish with 1-handed guns, while not feeling overpowered and a "must have" for non-Skirmishers.

To note, among the Playtest 1-handed guns, most of them had a range of 30-40 ft, with only one having a 60 ft range. Furthermore, the damage for them is, on average, d4-d6.
What do you guys think?

60ft is still a ridiculous amount of range to be doing a reactive strike at, basically still guaranteed it will trigger every round because again - what can your opponent really do to not trigger it at that range? Melee enemies need to move, which triggers it. Ranged enemies attacking triggers it. Casters casting triggers it.

One of the triggers on it, or multiple of them, probably need to go, or it needs some other restriction (e.g. you Aimed at the target on your last turn). I’m most in favour of axing the move trigger and preventing its use on creatures that have cover from you.

Flying enemies can technically not fly, fall at the end of their turn (which doesn’t provoke) and then arrest a fall so they don’t take damage/prone from the fall. Of course this does require them have some sort of decent non-ranged damage option to be an effective turn (something which many starfinder enemies currently lack), but it is a way out of reactive strike while flying.

I don’t think anyone wants melee to be completely unviable, but they also don’t want the presence of reactive strike + reach weapons to completely dominate the game. Considering the low engagement distance and otherwise lowered amounts of damage that Starfinder enemies tend to deal, there’s a real possibility of that happening due to melees getting the boost from strength (for early levels) and then easy reaction attacks (later levels) if operative/soldier/envoy’s easy ranged reaction attacks are nerfed without any other ranged compensation.

Engagements constantly starting at 100+ feet away is not viable under the PF2e system. Having playtested fights that start at this range, they’re even more turrety than fights that start at the 30-60 range. It takes so long and so many actions to cross the map to get around your opponent’s cover (during which time you might have no cover) that it simply isn’t worth doing. Unless you’re melee and lose a round or a round and a half having to cross that distance before being allowed to strike.

Characters being assumed to have a ranged attack, and most enemies having a ranged attack as good as or better than their melee attack, already changes a number of things. AoEs become far less valuable, because enemies don’t naturally group. Melee characters need to spend far more actions moving around because enemies aren’t clumping up to flank (ironically a problem I’ve had with both melee soldier and solarian - both of them don’t have action compression which is sorely needed, but operative and ranged soldier do).

You can make a game that starts with both sides at 100+ft (20+ squares). Lancer does it, and weapons in Lancer have less range (typically 8-10, so 40-50ft equivalent without ranged increments) than Starfinder. Objectives do a number in forcing characters to actually move around the map instead of turreting in one place, but part of it is also how you design maps around sightlines and cover. I’ve certainly played on bad lancer maps before where it was impossible to interact with the enemy team.

Starfinder doesn’t seem like it’s going to ever introduce the idea of objective combat as a default, and it doesn’t currently have the tools to really force the opposition to group up or move from their current spot, do engagements at that distance just aren’t that fun.

Will it lead back to the melee problem where reactive strike reach characters simply dominate the game because the distance between you and the enemy isn’t that big? Probably, Operative and Soldier are currently holding their own (so to speak) once they get weapon damage ups off the strength of Hair Trigger / Overwatch. Without those easy reaction attacks operative would probably be fine (devastating aim and the endless aim action compression still makes them do very good damage) stacked up against a guirsame fighter, but soldier probably wouldn’t be.

Operatives start with expert proficiency at 1st level, and increase their rank to legendary at 19th, but I can't find any class feature that gives them mastery somewhere in between.

Master Gunner level 5 - Increase prof to master for simple/martial guns and expert for advanced.

Legendary Gunner level 13 - Increase prof to legendary for simple/martial guns and master for advanced (expert for unarmed, simple and martial everything else)

It’s true, many baseline PF2e martials do want to spend 2 actions Striking if they can, similar to how Soldier wants to spend 2 actions Area Firing, and both (well the good PF2e martials at least) get some sort of compression to make it less stuck.

Why does the Soldier feel so rote compared to a regular martial then? I can’t exactly tell you, but the feeling is there. I suspect it’s to do with the fact that it does it from range, so it never feels like it has to change up its turn for being slowed/prone/grappled/whatever, its almost never out of range, etc. The only consideration is cover and even then there’s an extremely large amount of places to stand which get around center-to-center cover, so often times the soldier’s turn being Area Fire (or Shot on the Run) + something (demoralize if everything isn’t already immune) feels… uninteractive I guess? There’s nothing I can do to make them reconsider what they’re going to do, there’s not a selection of Metafires available from level 1 with distinct effects that they choose from. There’s no reason to hit them over another PC, except for Close Quarters and even then there’s very little reason to hit them.

It certainly comes away with the feeling that the class doesn’t actually care what’s in the encounter or on the battlemap, it’s turn is already solved into infinity. The only choice you’re really making is what damage types of guns did you buy.

Important to note that was during the field tests, I have since done playtests with the soldier at level 3. The plan is to do 8, 13, 16 and 20.

Soldier’s turn being Area Fire + X (or feat that allows area fire + X) has been pretty much the same through. Edna recorded a log of all actions taken by the party, which I imagine she’ll publish once these playtests are done.

Why does the Soldier area fire so much even against single enemies? The answer is quite simple: it does more damage than striking twice, if striking twice is even an option (unwieldy, you may not be able to afford 2 at level upgraded guns). For instance, at level 3, the soldier’s DC is 20 and their hit bonus is (3 level + 2 trained + 3 dex + 1 item) = +9.

Against a single enemy, such as the Corpse Fleet Officer (AC21, Ref+14) or Elite Tashtari Alpha (AC24, Ref+16), their average damage looks something like

0.25(6.5)+0.5(3.25) = 3.25 (Area Fire) + 0.4(6.5)+0.05(6.5) = 2.925 (Strike) for a total of 6.175 average damage with a Screamer against the officer (Stellar cannon has resist problems). It’s worth noting that even this is a counter I wouldn’t expect an ordinary soldier to have due to the requirement to invest in a general feat to make it trained. Edna took it expecting skeletons, but it would be unviable cost wise to make it advanced for level 4 or 5 (as they need armor upgrade as well), and past there it would have proficiency problems.

Alternately, if they had a non unwieldy weapon like the machine gun. Let’s even say a Seeker Rifle, and assume the Officer doesn’t have piercing resist, they can only really do Strike+Strike for the same action cost, dealing

0.4(5.5)+0.05(5.5)+0.15(5.5)+0.05(5.5) = 3.575 average damage. Nearly half the damage of the screamer, and still substantially less than the stellar cannon.

This pattern follows for the Tashtari, and every other single entity you can think of. Primary target is the soldier’s damage booster like Rage, they simply do more damage when using it relative to regular strikes (not to mention their lower strike accuracy), and so they use it as often as possible. I struggle to think of reasons, outside of range which Shot on the Run patches, that you wouldn’t area fire if you could. The competing options for your attack (in the case of Armor Storm) are much, much worse in Starfinder’s ranged meta.

I would compare it more to a space barbarian than a space fighter, you just Area Fire (where a barbarian just Strikes because they have no metastrikes), but even the barbarian has considerations about athletics stuff and positioning. The soldier mostly doesn’t.

It doesn’t really show up in easier encounters - Lows and Moderates - because even if you don’t play those to the best of the class’ ability, you will win. They aren’t challenging enough to really make you need to get the best out of every action. But at higher difficulty encounters, you sort of need to (unless your class is broken), and the problem that we run into with Soldier is that it actually can’t do anything else. It’s strategy is the exact same every encounter, the choice is merely who to suppress which also may not matter if the enemies don’t need to move (happens a lot more often than you may think).

This will be an issue with compatibility going forward. Corpse Fleet Officers (and skeletons as part of a corpse fleet) are something you could reasonably fight at low level. Umbral Echoes, a weakened version of the Shadow, are in A Cosmic Birthday. Both have resist 5 to many forms of damage.

For the Soldier, it’s really quite bad. Their only real option is the Screamer, an advanced weapon, against skeletons. They don’t get to combine PT/AF damage like Flurry of Blows.

The Solarian gets stung by resist because their bonus damage from Photon is fire, so they’re hitting for d8-1.

But I also think this is part of a much larger issue with low level ranged damage, and should be solved by adding a general flat bonus to ranger damage for starfinder.

Exocist wrote:

Also Recall Knowledge is generally compressed into tons of other actions, meaning infosphere actually has the best action econ of any subclass. You don't actually care what you get as the result on RK, and you can't afford to boost int anyway because you want Cha/Wis/Dex/Con, it's just a free action LBE trigger.

Is this intended? Probably not.

Thing is, it is very easy for a GM to care. In my experience assuranced RK fails much more often than it succeeds. No GM in their right mind is going to give a thumbs up to a player using automatic knowledge (knowing that they are going to fail) in order to freely trigger a LBE. This all seems to additionally ignore the fact that a singular skill is not going to work for all RK checks. Therefore, you'd have to get assurance and then automatic knowledge in multiple different RK based skills.

Hence why the intended? Probably not. As written, you don't have to succeed on the RK (nor could it be phrased as such because RK is secret), or RK on anything relevant to the current combat. You could get Automatic Knowledge (Basketweaving Lore) and recall random different facts about Basketweaving (did you know that 15 years ago, all druids were such basketweaving fanatics that they were excessively skill focused in it?). By RAW, it would trigger Lead By Example every time.

The issue with tying it to specific actions like that is that some of those actions can already be compressed into other actions, RK is compressed into a bunch of stuff.

Remember Seeker Rifle also was Errata'd to be 1 shot per magazine.

This has not been errata'd yet (it's not on the official errata page). It was merely commentary that it "might" be misprinted.

It does currently have two "actual" downsides relative to a laser rifle, that being reload 2 and the inability to ever get more than 6 shots per reload.

After now having run some combats for all the classes at level 3, I feel I can give some feedback regarding class balance and system mechanics

The parties

Party A - Mystic, Envoy, Operative, Radiant Solarian. This party was just choosing what the player thought were the best 4 classes at this level. Soldier damage is not very good due to lacking a second damage dice, and no flat mod.

Party B, using the classes not present in the first one. Here the aim was to create some sort of synergy between Black Hole, Area Fire and Quantum Field.

Party C, this time it's just 4 soldiers trying out all the different subclasses and seeing how bad Soldier's problems can get at low levels.

The encounters are:

Workday 1

- 1x Skeletal Giant and 4x Observer-Class Security Robot (Severe)
- VP Skill Challenge
- 1x Elite Elf Ranger, 3x Elf Ranger, 3x Ghost Courier (Severe, enemies need to be taken out nonlethally if possible)
- 12x Computer Glitch Gremlin (Severe)
- VP Skill Challenge
- 1x Elite Tashtari Alpha (Severe)

Workday 2

- 4x Umbral Echo (Severe)
- 3x Electrovore (90XP, Moderate)
- 5x Hardlight Scamp (100XP, Moderate)
- VP Skill Challenge
- Corpse Fleet Officer x1 and 5x Cybernetic Zombie (Severe)
- VP Skill Challenge

I'll put the detailed breakdown of classes at the end

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System Mechanics

I'll echo most of what Teridax said here regarding the ranged focus of the game, I do think a number of things will need to change relative to the base ranged combat rules of PF2e in order to make ranged combat really pop.

1) Cover rules. Currently PF2e's rules are essentially "The GM tells you if there's cover" and "If in doubt, draw center to center". For a game where cover is presumably a thing that shows up often in combat, this really needs better defined rules. The center-to-center cover rules are not great, as it means if you have cover from an enemy, the enemy also has cover from you, making it impossible to outflank an enemy in cover while maintaining cover yourself. I'm not sure why we aren't using corner-to-corner cover rules, which would make it possible to do this. SF1e, PF1e and 4e all use corner-to-corner cover which are much more functional for this purpose.

2) Damage. Ranged damage is incredibly swingy and rather weak at low levels due to the lack of striking rune - particularly level 1-3 is a pain point for the Soldier, Operative and Envoy who struggle to deal enough damage to kill enemies unless they're really low level ones (level -1 to 1). Anything higher level just takes far longer to die due to lack of flat mod. I think this needs a general rules change for half dex mod to ranged damage at least, just to patch up these early levels, and make it less swingy. Rolling a 1 or 2 on your weapon dice feels like you accomplished absolutely nothing if you hit, and happens far too often at these levels.

3) Positioning and cover. Currently anyone can shoot anyone from pretty much anywhere, cover is the only concern. The operative and soldier both have incredible mobility through feats (Mobile Aim, Shot on the Run) to let them get around cover easily, which makes Taking Cover against them kind of a waste. But this also creates a number of flow-on issues.
- Unless forced (such as Corpse Fleet Infantry), enemies have no reason to group up (they don't need to flank or whatever), which makes it so Area Weapons have a really difficult time hitting more than 1 person.
- Enemies often have a lack of reason to really move except to get by cover, and you can't incentivise them to move to any particular location because there's often a pretty wide variety of angles they can attack from to get by cover. Grenades are not threatening enough (for the action cost, never mind the credit cost) to get enemies to want to move, and neither is the Quantum Field.
- Compounding on that, many options that exist right now are anti-movement, such as Hair Trigger and Overwatch - massive range reactions triggered by moving - making the battlefield even more static.

4) Map design. Often what makes sense for these maps doesn't lead to good gameplay. Cover based shooters have needed to custom design their maps for ages to ensure gameplay there is good, and tabletops are no different. You need to think of sight lines, cover, and the like. Ensuring that the map is neither too open, nor too cramped, that no position ensures unfettered access to everywhere on the map, but at the same time that no position blocks off a majority of the map. Starfinder flip-mats currently don't do this, they tend to vary between wide open and having an excessive amount of rooms/walls that block line of sight.

5) Reloading. Tracking reload on enemies as a GM is a major headache when they have different usage rates, different clip sizes and might even have autofire adding even more confusion. The GM should not be asked to track the minutiae of 5-6 different enemies expend values, especially when it often isn't relevant because the enemies will die before ever running out of bullets. Likewise for SF guns, batteries and petrol end up at so many shots that you will never feasibly run out in combat. Many weapons already start at the point where you can fire continuously for 3 rounds straight, or more, before needing to reload. If this mechanic is going to be this ignorable, don't bother including expend at all except on weapons that have a very limited number of shots, simply assume that everyone has enough bullets for the entire combat.

Other sci-fi games, such as Lancer, have tried to force movement with objectives which generally works pretty well. I do have a feeling that Starfinder doesn't want to force an objective into every combat, though.

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Soldier

Soldier damage at low levels is extremely luck dependent on your dice, and it struggles very much with resists. It doesn't get to combine PT damage with AF damage like e.g. Flurry of Blows or Double Slice does for the purpose of resist.

One of the two players also found it rather awkward due to being a bit stop-starty. Maybe its just because the VTT automation isn't there yet, but having both the soldier and GM roll every time they area fire + primary target feels clunky. IMO both sets of rolls should be on one side.

From all the subclasses, Bombard and Action Hero are easily the best. Bombard, however, works much better with many of Soldier's feats that rely on suppressed enemies (such as Overwatch or Warning Spray) because it suppresses much more frequently without spending additional actions to do so, so I'd rank it as #1, with action hero far below it at #2. Then the rest.

Close Quarters works reasonably well at low levels when the strength mod to damage is significant, and punitive strike disrupting movement on a hit is great. It does suffer from a number of issues such as not really having great ranged capability (for flying, ranged enemies which are common even at low levels) or flight available until jetpacks at level 5. It also doesn't scale particularly well if PF monsters are anything to go by, many of them will start outreaching your reach weapon, which significantly limits the efficacy of punitive strike. The biggest issue, by far, however is that Whirling Swipe is incompatible with pretty much every other Soldier feat due to being a distinct action. IMO, this should be given for free to Close Quarters, and should just be a free action start of turn trigger to add Area Burst and Unwieldy to your weapon.

Armor Storm seemed incredibly weak through play. Disarm, Trip, Grapple, etc. are just far less relevant when nearly every enemy is ranged. They don't need to move as much, so denying them the ability to move just doesn't matter. The resistance is too small at low levels to really matter and should have a flat bonus like 2+half level instead of just half level.

Erudite Warrior wasn't used but a distinct action to suppress 1 person seems quite bad. I like the "enemy loses suppressed if they attack you" and feel like this subclass could increase the penalty of suppress you apply for the downside of making them lose suppress if they attack you. Make it more of a "draw aggro" subclass.

-----------------------

Solarian

I'll preface this by saying in all of these combats, Nimbus Surge and Solar Shot were never relevant a single time. The Solarian does have Ultralight Wings specifically to deal with ranged, flying enemies. The only things that meleed the Solarion were the skeletons, which neither the push nor fire damage were relevant against.

This class contributes at low levels off the strength of two things:
- 1) Strength modifier to damage. It does about as much damage as a champion.
- 2) Supernova is very strong against level- enemies at these low levels, where that much fire damage + blind kills or severely injures them. The damage does not scale particularly well past level 8-9 or so, and will only hit lower level enemies for ~20-25% of their HP on average post-save.

That's pretty much it. The Graviton strike effect never mattered because the Solarian has no Reactive Strike innately, needs to spend a level 4 feat to get it. The whole switch between graviton/photon thing barely mattered because the effects are really just not that much different between graviton and photon.

Black Hole was significantly worse than Supernova. Prone + pull on fail is much worse than blind, and it does less damage. It can't consistently group up enemies and gets awkward if you're trying to use it to pull an enemy in to attack them (basically making having Reach on your Solar Weapon mandatory, and even then you risk a CS causing your plans to be foiled).

I won't speak to higher levels of Solarian until I see it played, but at low levels this class is very mediocre outside of combats where Supernova could nuke the entire thing.

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Operative

This class has all the tools in the world and still somehow ends up doing Weakening Shot + Strike every round. I don't think there was a single round of combat in which Hair Trigger didn't trigger, the trigger is far too broad at far too great a range, and nearly everything an enemy can do triggers it.

Couldn't be locked down with reactive strike from the officer, tactical reposition gets them out of it scot free (it's meant to do that)

Can easily get around cover with Mobile Aim (or just aim's cover-reducing bonus)

The only thing keeping this vaguely in line at these levels was the fact that ranged damage is bad, I suspect when I do the level 8 playtest and this is doing 2d10+4d6+3 instead of 1d10+1d4, it will prove to be significantly overpowered. At level 3 it is merely very strong.

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Mystic

Easily an S tier class with healing connection (or just taking infusion on another connection with the feat). The party without the mystic had a much harder time than the one with the mystic solely due to the lack of massive heals that the mystic puts out practically resourcelessly. Comparisons of whether or not its better than heal font cleric, I think they're about equal or the Mystic is slightly ahead due to its much better burst healing capability with vitality network.

Can we get a consistent recharge rate on the network though? Why does it go from recharging in 2.5 rounds (level 1) to 10+ rounds (level 19). If the network scales up 4 per level, the recharge should scale up 1 per level.

Not really much else to say, its a spontaneous divine caster.

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Witchwarper

In all the combats with the Witchwarper, Quantum Field + Warp Terrain did not matter a single time. It could have mattered against the Skeletal Giant, forcing them into Stride + Stride + Glaive Strike instead of Stride + Terrifying Charge, but a push from the Hydraulic Push on the security robots made it possible to do the charge anyway. The passive effect never mattered.

Core memories ability was never used, the assurance in medicine technically did something in allowing the witchwarper to stabilize without a check.

Really this class just felt like a spontaneous occult caster with 4 slots, light armor and 8hp per level at this level. The field doesn't do enough of anything for the enemies to meaningfully change their turn based on its existence, and using Warp Terrain to provide cover for allies proved rather awkward in practice.

Ultimately the Witchwarper just dropped sustaining their QF a good chunk of the time, and in more difficult combats used either Soul Surge or Force Barrage.

This might change at later levels when it gets better stuff going on with its QF, but this core feature should be relevant without high level feats.

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Envoy

It really just suffers from having a very rote turn of Get 'Em, Strike, X. Get 'Em lasting only a single turn and being single-target until level 18 feels rather bad, it does feel like you're just using a worse version of inspire courage - a cantrip that comes stapled to a class that also has full casting.

Its damage isn't bad at low levels, d10+3 with a seeker rifle is the same as the Solarian's d8+4, and it also comes with a bonus for your party. Not stacking with off guard is a bit sad.

I think this class either
a) Needs more directives and directives should not be feats, rather given from a pool.
or
b) Needs to action compress its Acts of Leadership into directives, and do so from level 1.

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Combats

Party A

Encounter 1 - Skeletal Giant x1, Observer Class Security Robot x4
Init - Envoy (31), Operative (28), Mystic (25), Robots (top left, bottom right, 23, 21), Solarian (19), rest of enemies (18 robot, 12 giant, 11 robot)
- Did the Solarion use any special abilities? No
- Very easy though, everyone has the ability to bypass skeleton resists (Solarian bludgeoning, envoy and operative have acid darts), robots go down fast and hair trigger crit stops a hydraulic push dead.

Encounter 2 - 1x Elite Elf Ranger, 3x Elf Ranger, 3x Ghost Courier
Init - Envoy (29), Solarian (HP Reroll, 19->27), Courier (Middle Bottom, 24), Elf Ranger (Both Bottom, 24, 22), Operative (20), Courier (Bottom Left), Elite Ranger (18), Ranger (Top right, 17), Mystic (14), Courier (Top, 9)
- Supernova nukes enemy side, we forgot this was supposed to be nonlethal. Reset.

Encounter 2 (try 2)
Init - Operative, Elite Elf Ranger (31), Elf Ranger (Top, 30), Ghost Courier (Middle Bottom, 25), Mystic (23), Solarian (18), Elf Ranger (Middle Bottom, 18), Envoy (HP Reroll 18->17), Rest of enemies (14 ranger, 11 9 couriers)
HPs used - Envoy, Solarian, Operative
- A really sloggy, but not difficult, encounter due to the quantity of cover and line of sight blockers on this map. The enemies constantly move between rooms, closing doors, etc. forcing the party to spend a bunch of actions chasing them around. The enemies can do this due to double shot and the couriers attacks past the first are pointless anyway.
- Mystic kinda gets close to going down but ultimately healing from Infusion and Transfer Vitality outpaces enemy damage
- Permanent resources used: None

Encounter 3 - 12x Computer Glitch Gremlin
Init - Solarion (HP Reroll 15->32), Mystic (27), Gremlin (6th from the right, 25), Operative (24), Gremlin (Rightmost, 22), Envoy (22), rest of gremlins (21, 21, 19, 19, 16, lower)
- What armor is metal for the purpose of Thunderstrike? We ruled Hardlight to be metal because of the projector, but its somewhat unclear. Especially for e.g. Skyfire which says it "often" has metal.
- The most threatening level-1 enemy is still a level-1 enemy, past their initial Thunderstrike barrage (of those that survived to take a turn) which... did about 25 damage to the mystic all we are left with is a very slow, very low range, very low damage enemy who is Hair Trigger fodder.
- Glitching doesn't seem to affect armor at all, so glitch aura did really nothing on the Operative or Envoy due to the Seeker Rifle being analog.

Encounter 4 - 1x Elite Tashtari Alpha
Init - Solarian (29), Mystic (26), Operative (25), Envoy (HP Reroll 14->22), Tashtari (20)
- Envoy dies, Mystic dies but Tashtari also dies
- Unlucky CF vs Solar Cry one shots envoy and from there its a cycle of getting back up and getting hit down, they can't afford to stay down due to persistent
- Mystic rolls an unlucky nat 1 recovery check with persistent on them
- Fight takes until round 6 to finish, Solarian and Operative just lack damage output on the Tashtari without appropriate striking runes.

Encounter 4 (Redo)
Init - Party (Mystic 33, Operative 31, Envoy 31, Solarian 24), Tashtari (17)
- Party rolls very well this time and Tashtari dies on round 2

Encounter 5 - 4x Umbral Echo
Init - Solarian (31), Envoy (29), Echo (Bottom-right, 22), Mystic (21), Operative (19), Other echoes (15, 14, 12)
- Pretty much as expected, everyone but the Solarian who has a Light spell on their Solar Weapon struggles to do real damage.
- Mystic highrolls a Soul Surge to one shot an echo, Solarian takes out 2, Operative and Envoy combined with a few crits manage to take out 1
- Echoes don't really do anything because they get mulched too fast

Encounter 6 - 3x Electrovore
Init - Mystic (29), Electrovore (top, 28), Solarian (26), Electrovore (Bottom, 23), Envoy (21), Operative (19), Electrovore (Middle, 15)
- High rolled supernova + bad fort save enemies = very easy encounter even though 1 of them rolled a natural 20, it wasn't enough
- Not very hard
- Limited use resources used: Fear

Encounter 7 - 5x Hardlight Scamp
Init - Mystic (33), Scamp (Top right, 24), Solarian (22), Scamp (Top middle, 21), Operative (20), Scamp (Bottom Right, 18), Envoy (18), Scamps (15, 8)
- Another encounter of level-2 enemies at this low level, another supernova clearing everything instantly and leaving what remains as a blinded mess
- Not very hard
- Probably warped by low level HP/damage scaling, i expect these issues will steadily get resolved as levels climb

Encounter 8 - 1x Corpse Fleet Officer, 4x Cybernetic Zombie
Init - Operative (32), Solarian (30), Zombie (top left, 23), Officer (23), Zombie (bottom left, 22), Mystic (22), Envoy (22), Zombie (Bottom right, 15), Zombie (Top right, 9. Top, 7.)
- Hero points: Operative, Mystic, Solarian, Envoy (assumed for a medicine check)
- Corpse fleet officer rolls pretty badly with not a single crit, but gets crit twice (2 nat 20s)
- Probably way easier than it should be due to 3 party members having arc rifles so they're able to mulch the zombies
- 2 corpse officers and zombies, an elite corpse officer and 4 zombies or 2 elite corpse officers would all be significantly harder combats (probably a loss)
Past the initial supernova, Solarian feels pretty bad
- Mystic may or may not die depending on the party's medicine rolls (no one is trained in medicine). Assuming someone is, Mystic lives.

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Quad Soldier

Encounter 1 - 1x Skeletal Giant, 4x Observer-Class Security Robot
Init - Buster, Hotshot, Robot (Bottom-Left), Hammer, Robot (Top-Left), Skeletal Giant, Anvil, Other two robots
- Resources used Battle Medicine (on Hammer) x2: Anvil, Buster, Battle Medicine (On Anvil): Anvil, Buster
- Resist 5 fire, cold, electric and piercing is very hard for a low level soldier to do anything about, the only weapon that really gets by this is the Screamer which is advanced
- Fight ends round 8, first enemy dies round 5. Damage output is extremely low and the skeleton's resist 5 piercing means the soldiers do basically nothing to it without critting. One resorts to unarmed strikes to deal some measure of damage.
- Party wins

Encounter 2 - 1x Elite Elf Ranger, 3x Elf Ranger, 3x Ghost Courier
Init - All the enemies except the top courier, hotshot, top courier, rest of party
Battle Medicine (on Hotshot): Buster
- Hypernerves
- Soldiers definitely had an easier time with this than the other party and I think Shot on the Run was a big reason why
- Party wins round 3, pretty easily

Encounter 3 - 12x Computer Glitch Gremlin
Init - 2 Gremlins, Hotshot, Anvil, Gremlin, Buster, 7 Gremlins, Hammer, 2 Gremlins
- A salvo of thunderstrikes takes out Hotshot but these gremlins are still -1 creatures and thus have no real damage past that, and die easily to area fire
- Party wins round 4 or so, its a bit grindy but not difficult

Encounter 4 - 1x Elite Tashtari Alpha
Init - Tashtari, Party
- Soldier is unsuprisingly terrible against a single enemy with high reflex
- With very limited damage output on the party's side (and the Tashtari rolling 2 crits) opted to call it in the Tashtari's favour
- Probably not winnable without extreme luck

Encounter 5 - 4x Umbral Echo
Init - Echoes (all but top left), Buster, Echo (top left), rest of party
- Not really winnable, d10+0 vs resist 5 all and high reflex saves

Encounter 6 - 3x Electrovore
Init - Anvil, Hotshot, Electrovores (Middle + Top), Buster, Electrovore (Bottom), Hammer
- Not really loseable, only one character gets close to dropping, not a difficult encounter just takes a while due to low damage

Encounter 7 - 5x Hardlight Scamp
Init - Buster, Scamps (all but top left), Hammer, Hotshot, Scamp (top left), Anvil
- The damage on these enemies is awful so they're not actually threatening, that plus some bad attack rolls means that barely any damage is dealt
- Very easy

Encounter 8 - 1x Corpse Fleet Officer, 5x Cybernetic Zombie
Init - Hotshot, Hammer, Zombies (both right), Officer, Anvil, Buster, Other zombies
- Considering the struggles facing the Skeletal Giant before, it should come as no surprise that the Corpse Fleet Officer, a far more threatening enemy, is too difficult for the party to overcome
- With no electric or slashing damage, the zombies are way tougher than the observer robots

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Party B

Encounter 1 - 1x Skeletal Giant, 4x Observer-Class Security Robot
Init - Same as Party A, replace envoy with soldier and mystic with witchwarper (-1 init)
- Hero points used Operative, Witchwarper, Soldier, Solarian
- Operative drops to 0 this combat
- Obviously way harder without the Mystic, also some very good luck with saves on the enemy side
- Witchwarper's field does absolutely nothing this combat and after the initial round won't do anything, so its just dropped. No this is not a case of "The Quantum Field is forcing the enemies to move out of the field", I would call that out if it was that. The enemies, if they are moving at all, already wanted to move and the field is not doing anything to impede that movement.
- Resources used: 1x Force Barrage

Encounter 2
Init - Same as party A, except the Soldier does not burn a hero point for init (they are less inconvenienced due to Warning Spray)
- No Take Em Alive this time so the party tries to switch between lethal and nonlethal, an accidental crit (->HP crit) made at a full health ranger causes them to die
- Witchwarper field does nothing, WW moves around opening doors for people
- Player plays better around the map this time, enemies' low damage makes this fight a non threat, but still takes almost 5 rounds to finish

Encounter 3
Init - Same party A
- Quantum field continues doing nothing
- Sad low roll blackhole
- Still a very easy encounter, these enemies have very low speed and range past their initial thunderstrike volley which leads to them being unable to meaningfully follow up
- Resources used: Force Barrage x2

Encounter 4
Init - Same party A try 1
- After an 8 round slog in which 2 party members (solarian and soldier) die, and Witchwarper gets very lucky to survive (passed their persistent check and all the death saves), the Operative wins barely at 6 hp and is also very lucky to survive (rolled 2 on 2d6 persistent at 8 hp, then passed the check)
- Tashtari is also fairly unlucky, not rolling a single crit until round 6
- This is one of the weaker level 6 monsters, the party simply cannot do enough damage
- Quantum field does nothing
- Resources used: Soul Surge x2

Encounter 4 (Redo)
Init - Same as party A try 2
- New strategy, Witchwarper just ignores everything that's new and spams Force Barrage instead
- Some luck on hits, but the WW adding +35 or so damage from 3 force barrages instead of +0 from missing Soul Surge twice makes a tangible impact on the tashtari's health
- Resources used: Force Barrage x3

Encounter 5
Init - Same party A
- Resources used: Soul Surge, Force Barrage
- Not very hard when 2 characters have Light, however Soldier who doesn't have Light is unable to do anything
- Quantum Field still does nothing

Encounter 6
Init - Same as party A
- Very easy, enemies can't really do that much damage
- Quantum field does nothing
- Blackhole was kind of useful for knocking the enemies out of the air, even though they both just Arrested to prevent taking fall damage

Encounter 7
Init - Same as party A
- Still a very non threatening encounter
- Party does get kinda lucky with 2 CFs vs Black Hole and a CF vs Frostbite, but it really wouldn't matter if these were only regular fails
- Enemies do too little damage to be threatening and have too little hp. Standard level 1 enemies used at level 3 issues.
- Quantum field obviously does nothing because everything died

Encounter 8
Init - Same as party A
- Stellar Rush says you choose the pull order but Black Hole doesn't, implying you can't choose the pull order (in which case, what would be the pull order?)
- Solarian dies
- Barely a victory with the zombies being a non threat after the officer died due to 2 arc rifles (the arc trait works well on these weakness 10 electricity enemies that want to be grouped for rotting aura stacking)
- Nimbus surge triggers... and does nothing because the captain has fire res 5

Encounter 8 try 2 (different strat)
Init - Same as party A
- This time the party tries to focus the zombies first with their arc rifles instead of the officer.
- Officer has some really bad luck this combat (misses ~half or more of his attacks when they hit on a 6, zero crits)
- Pretty sure if the officer's attack rolls were the same as the first iteration, this would be a much different story, I'm fairly certain this strategy is just worse on average.
- Operative goes down but survives

I think this feature needs to pop out a bit more, currently the baseline effects of it (without feats or focus spells doing something that enable it) are pretty mediocre, or may even not show up in combat. This is an issue at lower levels where it's often correct to just not sustain this thing - a core class feature - because its passive just isn't useful.

Fixing this comes down to asking "What is it actually intended to do in combat?". Personally, I think this is supposed to be some sort of no-go zone where enemies are disincentivized to stand in, whether the player wants to use that as an anti-cover tool, an anti-melee tool or a chokepoint creator is up to them. Therefore, I would suggest the following:

1) Add "At the start of your turn, each enemy within your quantum field takes 2+your level force damage". Keying this to the start of your turn means that enemies will always have a turn after you place or move the field to move out of it safely without taking the damage, and it also means it synergizes with Soldier through suppress and Degradant Solarian through forced movement. This provides enemies an interesting choice - stay/move into the field (maybe a good position that they want to be) and take damage, or spend actions moving somewhere else.

2) Allow the field to be moved a bit (10/15ft ish) whenever you Sustain it.

3) Make Quantum Transposition a 1st level class feature so you don't have to Dismiss the field to move it a large amount.

Have you actually played a few playtest rounds ? Area weapons are great. They ignore concealment entirely (because they don't target), they don't care for MAP (but increase it), so you can use a normal attack and then follow up with an area attack and they still deal damage when you "fail") because they use a basic reflex save.

And Soldier is an absolute Monster. Using an Area Attack with a soldier allows you to hurt multiple enemies and then you attack your primary target again without any penalty. This is basically Power Attack++.

The only bad thing about Area attack is its limited range and lack of range increments. And while it makes sense to keep grenades simple and not have them use range increments it feels really bad to use a machine gun with a tiny range.

I can say I have, and they're really not great at all.

Enemies don't group up naturally in SF2e due to being ranged, so the AoE component is often just hitting 1 person. Without the Primary target bonus which makes it a little bit underneath a striker ranged martial (such as fighter/ranger), the damage is really not all that good. You're spending 2a for what is only about the same average damage as a Strike most of the time (the Strike has a higher chance of critting for double, even if it can miss for nothing).

The lack of flat mods on it really makes this issue a lot worse at level 1-3 where you don't feel like you do much damage at all, and are just a suppress bot. This issue goes away once you pick up your striking runes, but may come back depending on interpretation WRT weapon upgrades working on AF (I playtested that they did work so the Soldier's damage was fine - great even with Overwatch nearly always triggering for bombard).

Shot on the Run is a great feat to allow the Soldier to have good mobility (for getting around cover/LoS blocks) while dealing with the somewhat clunky activity cost of Area Fire every round.

All that and I haven't mentioned using Area Weapons on anything except for Soldier. That's because... they're not very good on anything except a Soldier. Operatives and Envoys don't want a 2 action essentially vanilla strike most of the time, and without Soldier's feats to make it more worthwhile or less clunky, they'd rather just Strike.

Mystics and Witchwarpers can generally do about the same damage with a cantrip for a lot of levels, for the same action cost, and on later levels a spell of level-X can probably more reliably get 2+ enemies for the same or more damage.

Solarians don't want Area Weapons.