Exocist's page

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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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.

These don’t feel very useful right now, outside of the Infosphere Director + Automatic Knowledge trick. Your two main directives, Tactician and Get ‘Em, trigger off of Strike which as a character with martial proficiency is usually something you want to do once a turn at least.

Given Envoy’s rather stuck action economy at the moment (Get ‘Em, Strike, X) and given that Soldier/Operative have a lot of action compression for their main thing, I’d like to see these Acts of Leadership instead become action compression for their related actions.

Give all Envoys the following activity

Take Charge - 1a to 3a Flourish
You use a Directive that takes the same number of actions as Take Charge, and you use one of the actions listed in your Acts of Leadership. You may perform these two actions in either order.

And remove the automatic LBE from acts of Leadership.

This would add some much needed action flexibility to the envoy, allowing them to take their leadership style actions more frequently (and a good buff to the melee envoy who currently struggles to do their thing) while also doing their main Get ‘Em + Strike thing.

Some of the existing Acts of Leadership would probably need to change with this.

This should really just be a free action, start of turn trigger that adds unwieldy and area burst (5ft) to a two-handed melee weapon you are holding so it works with all of Soldier's feats.

Soldier has one of the best feats to support melee combat - Shot on the Run - allowing it to both move and area fire with 2 actions, then use a third action to back out to cover/whatever (or just a second stride to approach) but it doesn't currently work with Whirling Swipe.

Close Quarters should also just get this as a bonus feat.

Exocist wrote:

In theory this is what Solar Shot is for, but the range is pretty bad. Probably should be 30/60 instead of 15/30 and a range increment instead of a hard range limit.

You don’t need to contrive Barathu Snipers for this. There are flying, ranged enemies possible to fight at level 1 already such as the Observer-Class Security Robot and the Electrovore.

A solar shot range increase would be great. There's also a little bit of help in the solar shot's current mechanics. If you are graviton attuned, and crit, you can try to trip the enemy. That would cause them to fall and turn flight into a non-issue.

Granted, it would be nice if there weren't so many hoops to jump through there. You need to hit, also crit, then succeed at your Trip attempt.
While I suspect that the comparison to the kineticist is something the Starfinder devs are trying to avoid, making your solar shot have an easier time tripping if you, say, spend two actions to fire it, like beefing a kineticist's elemental blast, would be another way to solve that problem.

I would like for Solarian’s abilities to become more modal, as of currently the Photon/Graviton attunement doesn’t change all that much.

Graviton Solar Shot could just be a Ranged Trip (no damage) of some descript to help out Solarions who want to apply some CC from range or knock a flier out of the air, whereas Photon is the one that actually does damage. As opposed to the current version which is pretty much just crit benefits and nothing else.

In theory this is what Solar Shot is for, but the range is pretty bad. Probably should be 30/60 instead of 15/30 and a range increment instead of a hard range limit.

You don’t need to contrive Barathu Snipers for this. There are flying, ranged enemies possible to fight at level 1 already such as the Observer-Class Security Robot and the Electrovore.

In general, reactions in 2e are meant to be conditional. You are not supposed to use your reaction every turn, and so reactions are generally designed along a sliding scale of trigger specificity versus range: some reactions can trigger from a lot of different or common actions, like Reactive Strike, but are held back by a short range, so you usually have to spend actions setting yourself up to be able to use that reaction.

Forcing them to trigger is generally how melee characters scale damage into the later levels where tons of monsters start getting anti-melee mechanics, there are also some reactions that have very easy triggers (e.g. multiple people having retributive strike, opportune backstab, tag team, target of opportunity, etc.) which tend to be most commonly used for this purpose.

SF reaction attack feats are a bit more powerful in the sense that their triggers are extremely easy. Overwatch is basically just Hair Trigger on suppressed targets - if you have Bombard you're almost always going to have suppressed targets, and the things you just used Area Fire on are generally the ones you want to reaction attack anyway. That'll Show Em is level 12, but triggers if an ally gets attacked at all.

The only one lacking an easy reaction attack is, ironically enough, the melee character - Solarian - which needs to set up reactive strike with Graviton attunement.

Auto Fire being tied to range increment is going to cause so many design problems going forward, nearly every autofire weapon in the future is going to have terrible range increments because otherwise the autofire size would be "too big". Just separate them, there's no real reason to have 2 different mechanics doing the exact same thing as well. 1 mechanic, Area Fire, that lists a template size. If it is a burst, it can be done within the weapon's first range increment, otherwise you can just write

Area Fire (20ft cone)

Area Fire (40ft line)

Area Fire (10ft burst)

etc.

And buff the range increments of these weapons to not be terrible. Things that currently increase range increment can call out that they increase the size of area fire (like Scopes and Prismari's ancestry feat), and Action Hero can just double the size of area fire of certain shapes.

There are many things that reduce ranged damage - Cover, lack of stat, (general) lack of reaction attack access (Soldier, Envoy and Operative have easy ones), no easy to inflict FF due to flanking.

If you use PF2e assumptions about ranged damage, in a game where ranged combat is the expectation, without updating HP values to compensate, you’re going to end up with a slog where both sides are dealing far less damage than was expected when those math assumptions were made.

I have seen this class played from level 1 to 5 in the field test, and the release version is not too much different at this levels, take anything 6+ with a grain of salt.

CLASS FEATURES

4 slot, light armor, 8 HP a level caster. Already a good start.

TRANSFER VITALITY
- Still not sure why the recharge on this in combat is so utterly glacial past the early levels, why does it start at 4/round and barely scale past there? Could we not add some +level or +1/2 level scaling to this so it keeps a roughly consistent recharge rate, instead of starting out recharging in 2.5 rounds and going up to taking 10.75 rounds to recharge if you legendary your skill?
- Otherwise fine, essentially a ranged lay on hands 1/combat, its fairly good.

CONNECTIONS
- This is sort of where things start to break apart for me with regard to mystic. There really isn't a clear design idea on whether the mystic's focus spells are supposed to be supplementary (i.e. they replace an actual spell cast) or complimentary (cast in addition to a spell). PC2 rejigged a lot of level 1 focus spells so that they were combat useful for the class they were printed on, and I think this was a good change because focus spells are supposed to
- 1) Make up for the lack of slots at low levels so you don't feel like you're spamming cantrips.
- 2) As an encounter-refresh resource, they're supposed to be used on a per-encounter basis.
- Mystic's focus 1 spells are currently stuck between supplementary (Infusion, Shadow Snap), Complimentary (Anthem), basically combat useless (Akashic Fount) and questionable as to why it exists (Elemental Weapon).
- Infusion is probably the strongest of these because Heal is already a spell people cast, and an effective max rank-1 heal as a focus spell is extremely powerful.
- Elemental Weapon is questionable, its effectively a weapon that loses an upgrade slot for +1d4 damage, which is good early before you can get +1d6 upgrades and then you just never use this again. But it has another problem - why is it a 10 minute duration instead of an "until used again or next daily prep", you just have to keep stop-starting if you want this to start combat with, because spending 3 actions to manifest it in combat is awful.

By advanced focus spells, everyone can take a feat to have Infusion available to them.
- Akashic Assistant is unclear as to what it aids on (is it anything? Only skill checks? Only occultism checks?) and what rank the assistant has (I presume equal to your rank). If it can aid attacks, this is combat useful, otherwise its yet another non combat focus spell for Akashic.
- Cloying Shadows is an okay blast focus spell with a condition for less damage.
- Elemental Barrier is an okay defensive focus spell I guess.
- Shuffle Repeat being sustained means that Rhythm is going to start having problems casting spells if it has 2 of its focus spells up. It also kind of feels a bit weak compared to Anthem.
- Vitality Nova just seems like a worse version of Infusion, you have to lose points from your Transfer Pool to even cast this, and the rate is fairly mediocre. Feels like I'd rather just 2a Infusion -> 1a Transfer vitality.

- Data Drain is where Akashic finally gets a damage spell... a pretty bad single target blast, being 2 levels behind on damage and without that much upside to compensate.
- Elemental Nova is another okay blast focus spell.
- Shadow Prison is like Paralyze as a focus spell, it's okay but no multitarget means its pretty meh for a Focus 6.
- Remix weirdly starts out at 1 creature and goes to 6 2 levels later. It's effectively sustained Haste as a focus spell... except without the ability to Strike.
- Vital Rebirth is effectively Breath of Life as a focus spell with a transfer vitality cost, it's okay because its free but i'd probably never take it if it cost me anything.

HARMONY
- I get the point of these is supposed to be so you don't feel like dumping your entire Transfer Vitality load in one go, but none of them are strong enough to really justify spreading it out like that.

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FEATS

Just going to point out ones that are strong or weak

- Deity's Domain is more FP which means more infusions, and it can actually get a good focus spell too. The other focus spell granting feats are the same except they don't give great focus spells.
- Spot Healing's adjacent only requirement is rather awkward.
- Mental Inference requires using your Connection Skill, which for Healing and Elemental Mystics is great because their connection skill is Wis based. For everyone else its likely on a tertiary stat and will be far worse.
- Network shield is a solid defensive reaction.
- Convert Lifeforce doesn't feel like it should cost 1 action considering its an inefficient trade anyway.
- Overclock Spell is pretty fun.

This is a class that I have had some experience with in the field tests and not much has changed in the lower levels since then, take anything 5+ with a grain of salt.

CLASS FEATURES

GET 'EM
- Similar to the FT, the issues with this is that it lasts only 1 turn, is single target and is a circumstance penalty so it doesn't stack with off-guard.
- A lot of the envoy's turns are Get 'Em, Strike, X. The class certainly needs to be Striking as it is a martial chassis and should be making at least 1 strike to meaningfully contribute to combat. This means it can be hard to use the 30ft range charisma skill actions, e.g. unless you already started in a position to do so. IMO there should be some action compression for Get Em/directives, perhaps related to your Leadership style. Currently the leadership style benefit of using another action to Lead By Example aren't particularly worthwhile on the 3 class feature directives as two of them can trigger Lead By Example by Striking.
- The +1/2 cha to self damage makes up for the lack of damage ranged weapons do at level 1-3.
- The single target nature means that if the target dies, unlike a Bard whose benefits will just continue to other targets because it buffs the allies, the Envoy's benefit just ends until their next turn. It isn't a significantly better benefit than Courageous Anthem, and the bard is a full caster otherwise, I'm not sure why get em feels so bad relatively.
- As it stands you don't get any method to improve the action economy of this until level 16 with Extend Directive, and you don't get to deal with the single target nature of it until level 18.

LEADERSHIP STYLES
- I mentioned in Get 'Em that these mostly don't do much, there is actually a couple of exceptions though
- Guns Blazing gives you improved initiative as a bonus feat, that's okay.
- Infosphere Director is probably the best one at level 6+, because you can take Automatic Knowledge to recall knowledge as a free action once per round, which lets you Lead by Example on a directive, meaning you have much freer action economy to do whatever you want with directives than any other leadership style. It doesn't really matter what you roll on the knowledge check, just that you used the action.

OTHER STUFF
- Mostly a charisma based skill character

TACTICIAN
- Defender feels like the worst one by far because its the only one you don't have any control over, and given you need to choose this at the start of the day you can't opportunistically decide to give someone the defender role.

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FEATS

Just going to point out the ones that are too good or too weak

- Watch Out! being circumstance and therefore not stacking with cover is kind of awkward.
- Danger Sense is probably one of its best feats, giving 2 characters effectively advantage on initiative.
- Why does Hang In There have a 1 day lockout instead of a 10 minute lockout?
- That'll Show Em! Is one of the freest reaction attack triggers ever, even freer than Hair Trigger, at least its level 12. Also can get ridiculous with Hypernerve stacking.
- Know Your Target feels like a level 2 feat, why is it level 16?
- Extend Directive feels mandatory.
- So does Get Them.

You and EarthSeraphEdna are insane. How do you have time to do these?

We're both fairly experienced with PF2e and don't have to stop to look up rules, combined with these being straight combats (no RP or anything), it takes ~4 hours to get through 8 combats. Overall ~12 hours, just blocked out my weeknights for 3 days to do it.

Anyway, my only criticism of your setup is that just sending in one aeon guard is kind of lame. So much of their kit depends on being able to gang up on targets. It makes sense that they'd be pretty miserable flying solo. I definitely agree that guns need some kind of damage booster, though. Maybe a dex version of propulsive?

In both situations the Aeon Guards were paired up with other enemies - Corpse Fleets, the Serpent + 2nd Aeon Guard.

The issue is that the Aeon Guard doesn't do anything alone due to their incredibly low damage, so once the other enemies are dealt with, the Aeon Guard is essentially a non entity.

Yes I agree, even half-dex to ranged damage as a general rule would help immensely, if only to reduce the swinginess at low levels.

The difference between d8+4, high vs low, is about 2.4x the damage (5 vs 12)
The difference with guns, using d6 or d10 can be 6 or 10x the damage. Changing that range to 3-8 or 3-12 would help a lot, and make any rolls of a 1 feel less wasted.

I think feeling locked into the same routine every round is s valid concern for soldiers and envoys, but I'm also curious if part of the problem is having one person control 4 PCs. Edna has a very specific style of play, you know?

It's true, there's no reason to really change the playstyle if its winning encounters, but also looking back at what options the Envoy and Soldier have available to them, I don't think there's any actions they could be taking that would be the same or more effective than using their main damage booster every round. Certainly nothing that would have helped them be more effective in the encounters in which they were struggling.

Just finished doing 26 combats with a two parties of four. As we don't have a fourth SF class from Field Tests yet, player opted to take a PF2e class for the 4th.

They initially wanted to do a polearm fighter, I said they could do that, but they should also do it with a ranged class because Reactive Strike is not on the Soldier (they notably have a weaker version) and because of Starfinder's ranged focus.

So the parties were

Level 1 - Envoy (Guns Blazing), Soldier (Bombard), Mystic (Healing), Ranger (Precision, Ranged) or Fighter (Polearm, Melee)

Level 5 - Envoy (Guns Blazing), Soldier (Bombard), Mystic (Healing), Fighter (Gun, ranger AT) or Fighter (Polearm, melee)

Full builds can be found here Level 1,Level 5

The combats were split into workdays of 4 encounters each for both parties (1 at level 1, 2 at level 5), we had only 1 encounter that we needed to redo (which we did once for both) hence the 26 rather than 24 encounters.

I'll just open with the closing thoughts on the two classes as the rest of this post will be detailing the builds, combats and efficacy of each class in each combat.

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Enemies & Ranged Focus

This is a preface to the classes that I think is essential to understand. At low levels, ranged damage is pretty bad in Pathfinder 2e's paradigm. With no actual changes to this, this remains true for Starfinder 2e as well. Melees do more than double the damage due to having their +4 stat mod, while this is partially rectified at level 4 with striking weapons and more rectified at level 8 with weapon spec + elemental runes, it is still a massive issue at low levels.

Many of the enemies appear to be built like PCs and as such do a single dice of damage with no bonus (See: Aeon Guard, Corpse Fleet Infantry). Not only is their damage far below the expected for their level (both are beneath Low, even with the suppressed damage bonus on the Aeon Guard), which makes them extremely non-threatening, it also leads to a pillow fight where both sides actually struggle to do any damage to each other unless they roll well on both attack and damage.

It's possible that these enemies are intentionally low damage because SF PCs are intentionally low damage, but that simply means that anyone with an actual damage bonus they can apply (str melee, precision edge, etc.) is the only threatening PC.

In addition to that, many of these guns have extremely low range - usually just within a stride or two for the first ranged increment. They're worse, in many regards, than a bow - losing out in both range and damage, while needing to reload. This means that melee characters don't really struggle to "close the distance" to get their far more effective attacks off, and starting combats at 200+ft away is somewhat unviable because everyone will have massive ranged increment penalties.

As a final note, with so many enemies having fire damage laser attacks, the value of fire resistance is extremely high. In the level 5 playtest, the entire party had Nephilim Resistance (fire) which essentially nullified the damage output of the laser enemies. This might just be because we have such a limited preview of enemies, and the full set has more variance in damage types for ranged attacks, but if 50% of ranged enemies are going to be using lasers (and therefore fire) this will be an issue.

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Guns

I have a number of issues with guns as presented
- 1) Enemies use them, if I have a lot of enemies especially with automatic or area fire I have to track the bullets for each enemy separately. That's a lot of hassle.
- 2) Most feel like their range is too low for a ranged focused game.
- 3) I feel like the formatting for automatic and area fire could be more succinctly worded as just a single "Area fire" trait that includes a template, e.g. Area Fire (30ft cone). The current version of half range increment seems to strangle the range on the automatic weapons because otherwise they'd get a massive cone. This would allow having an automatic rifle with 100ft increment, but only a 20ft cone. If it's a burst you can put it in the first ranged increment.
- 4) Usage scaling. Don't really understand why capacity and usage both go up with level such that you always end up with the same number of shots. Initially I thought usage was only if you did Area Fire, but on rereading that's not it. Seems to just add extra complexity for no real gain.
- 5) Using the Pathfinder 2e paradigm of no stat to damage makes them really low damage compared to average enemy HP at low levels.
- 6) Enemies are missing a DC for automatic fire.

For this game we assumed there was ballistic versions of the laser rifles available, with slightly lower range in return for concussive.

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Soldier

This might be just due to the limited scope of the field test, but I feel the Soldier has a very stuck routine. Every single turn was Area Fire, they never really had a reason to do anything else. Third action was Demoralize, Reload or (when they got it) Dread Marshal. Couldn't Strike due to unwieldy.

Having a 2 action routine is not great in this game because it means ducking behind cover and Taking Cover just becomes something that you can't really do because your main damage output is locked behind spending 2 actions every turn.

It's really hard to hit more than 1 enemy with area fire in this game, because many enemies are ranged there's almost no reason for them to stand that close to each other unless forced to (Corpse Fleet Infantry). This is different from a melee focused game, where enemies may group up to hit one person in melee.

Bombard seems far and away the best subclass due to inflicting suppress on success, and Warning Shot only seems to work with Bombard. The DC reduction on allies was relevant only once in these 26 combats, because the soldier only splashed an ally once.

Suppressed only worked if the enemies were 25 speed, and needed to get in melee (Nihilis due to aforementioned fire resistance, Bastorox). If they had more speed, such as the 45 speed glass serpent or crest-eaters, the speed penalty didn't matter. Especially because of the soldier's limit to rather low range weapons, any speed of 40 or greater will close the distance even while suppressed.

In my opinion, Suppressed should scale because enemies get more speed as you get higher in CRs - maybe halving speed.

Basically I just want it to have more interesting things to do on its turn, and for suppressed to scale properly.

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Envoy

Similar issue to Soldier, unlike Thaumaturge or Ranger you have to use Get Em every turn, which leaves little room for anything else. Want to demoralize? Have to hope the enemy is already in 30ft of you, otherwise you can't really because Get Em + Strike takes up 2 actions. Similarly striding to cover and taking cover is also not an option.

Get Em should really be either compressed with another action, or last longer than a single turn.

The half-cha to self damage somewhat helps with their low level damage, but doesn't scale very well at all past there. It's occupying some halfway between support and striker, but feel way less effective at it than it should be.

Easily the least powerful member of the party.

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Mystic

This class is easily S tier right next to heal font cleric. Vitalize and Transfer Vitality allow resourceless, large bursts of healing that can just go on all day. With the remaster focus changes, having 2-3FP per combat to spend on vitalize is already incredibly strong. Its bard/cleric-like chassis with wis KAS makes it quite durable.

The Mystic in these playtests barely even touched their spell slots, Vitalize and Transfer Vitality were pretty much enough for them to have a significant contribution on every combat.

Primal mystic's focus spell is significantly worse, and I wish they got more ways to use their vitality pool that competed with just dumping it all for a 1a big heal.

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Encounters @ Level 1 (Melee Party)

Encounter 1 - 1x Cybernetic Zombie, 2x Corpse Fleet Infantry (Severe)
Init - Fighter, Mystic, Envoy, Cyber Zombie, Corpse Fleet (Left), Soldier, Corpse Fleet (Right)
- Fighter crits a corpse fleet which kills it, enemies really struggle to do enough damage in return. Level 1 melee vs ranged things. Slashing weakness on both enemies probably helps a lot. Fighter also crits cyber zombie which basically one shots it.
- Some above-average rolls on the rest of the party's ranged damage.
- Very easy battle

Encounter 2 - 2x Computer Glitch Gremlin, 1x Corpse Fleet Infantry (Moderate)
Init - Envoy, Soldier, Mystic, Gremlin (Bottom), Fighter, Gremlin (Top), Corpse Fleet
- Not a really hard encounter. Fighter fails both saves vs Thunderstrike but gremlins roll low.
- Rest of the party's combined damage output can take out the fleet infantry and the gremlins don't do much afterwards.

Encounter 3 - 1x Aeon Guard Soldier, 2x Cybernetic Zombie (Extreme)
Init - Mystic, Fighter, Envoy, Cyber Zombie (Right), Aeon Guard, Soldier, Cyber Zombie (Left)
- Mystic uses runic weapon on the fighter
- Fighter cleaves through a zombie in 1 turn
- Literally the only character that matters is the fighter. They contribute ~90% of the party's damage output. Pretty sure the fighter (and maybe the mystic for healing) could have solo'd these encounters.
- Spells used: Runic Weapon
- Aeon Guard hits like a wet noodle, a creature 3 should not be doing 1d8 damage. It crit the fighter and didn't even do 1/2 of their health as damage WITH the suppress bonus.

Encounter 4 - 2x Tashtari (Extreme)
Init - Mystic, Tashtari (Right), Fighter, Envoy, Tashtari (Left), Soldier
- Some really bad dice luck on concealment checks after getting muzzle flashed (several 1-4s) means a 2HP tashtari lives far longer than it should.
- Fighter goes down after Mystic used both Heal and Vitalize, one tashtari still at full HP, party loses because everyone else has very little damage.
- Spells used: Runic Weapon.
- Winnable with different dice luck, probably not in the party's favour though (maybe 40%)

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Encounters @ Level 1 (Ranged Party)

Encounter 1 (Redo)
Init - Same as before, replace fighter with ranger
- Can't hunted shot with SF guns because they're all reload 1 (the ranger swapped to a bow after realising this)
- Not really that painful these enemies are super low damage

Encounter 2 (Redo)
Init - Same as before, replace fighter with ranger
- Still really easy, mystic might have gone down to double thunderstrikes but the enemies' damage past that is basically nil

Encounter 3 (Redo)
Init - same as before, replace fighter with ranger
- Party wins but envoy hits dying 4 (hero point to survive staying at wounded 3).
- This is with soldier and envoy switching to their backup slashing weapons to make use of weakness 10 slashing.
- Aeon Guard struggles to do any damage. Crit and hit on the envoy did only 3/4 of their HP, required 2 follow up hits from zombie to get to 0...
- Spells used: Runic Weapon

Encounter 4 (redo)
Init - same as before, replace fighter with ranger
- Tashtaris get pretty lucky this time, both first muzzle beam attacks crit. One on the ranger who falls unconscious to persistent damage, one on the mystic and highrolls KOing them outright.
- Party very likely does not have anywhere near enough damage to win this, would need significant luck (maybe 5-15%)
- Spells used: Runic weapon

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Encounters @ level 5 (Melee party)

5th level test
Encounter 1
Init - Fighter (29), Envoy (17), Mystic, Serpent, Soldier, both guards
Enemies - Glass Serpent x1, Aeon Guard Soldier x2 (Moderate)
- Yes this is the nerfed glass serpent as per the reddit post, -2 to hit and -2 to damage on both attacks.
- All characters have nephilim resistance (fire) so aeon guards do so little damage it might as well be zero, even when critting.
- Fight over once the serpent died, which even with See the Unseen and the Mystic using Point Out constantly so the party could hit... took 3 full rounds of actions.
- Without see the unseen, the serpent can likely TPK or get a couple of deaths by using Sneak. It is very hard to find and even harder to stick damage to. I don't want to repeat this, but it follows for all future serpent encounters.
- Spells used: See the unseen

Encounter 2
Init - Soldier, Mystic, Fighter (28), Envoy (23), Enemies
Enemies - Corpse Fleet Officer x2, Corpse Fleet Infantry x6 (Severe)
- Very bad rolls on enemy side, officers miss pretty much every attack. The one that does hit is a pistol shot which does 1 damage post resist (1 void 5 fire)
- Rest of the enemies get mulched by fighter
- Officers can't flurry the fighter because of Reactive Strike

Encounter 3
Init - Envoy (29), Fighter (18->29 danger sense), Tashtari (Bottom left), Mystic, Soldier, rest of enemies
Enemies - 1x Tashtari Alpha, 4x Tashtari (Severe)
- Party constantly succeeds saves vs flash
- Fire resist makes the tashtaris do very little damage (their bite attack is quite weak)
- Fighter carves up the alpha
- Not that hard

Encounter 4
Init - Mystic, Envoy, Serpents (26, 25), Soldier (17), Fighter (16)
Enemies - 2x Glass Serpent (Moderate)
- Good rolls for party, bad rolls for snake, party wins
- If the snakes had rolled 1 higher on round 1, or if the second snake hit at all, probably would have been a loss. Yes, unnerfed serpents would have caused a loss.
- Strategy relies on mystic using see the unseen, then revealing light, to uninvis the serpents. Otherwise sneak makes this a TPK.
- Spells used: See the unseen, revealing light x2

Encounter 5
Init - Soldier, Fighter (29), Envoy (27->29 danger sense), Nihili (Middle), Nihili (Right), Mystic, Nihili (Left)
Enemies - 3x Nihili (Severe)
- Pretty lucky max roll -> CF save area fire
- Fire resist forces nihilis into melee, way too slow to get anywhere relevant and get cut to pieces by fighter.

Encounter 6
Init - Envoy (28), Fighter (23->28 danger sense), Bastorox (26), Emganat (Bottom), Soldier, Mystic, Emganat (other two)
Enemies - 1x Bastorox, 3x Emganat (Severe)
- Burrow kiting is a serious issue, a 3rd level monster should not have the ability to burrow and a ranged attack
- Bastorox died round 2, playing this out is fruitless - mystic has 1 vitalize and a slowly regenerating pool of healing that should outpace the emganat's single strike damage per round. 4 ready attacks from the party will likely win.

Encounter 7
Init - Elite Bastorox (30), Fighter (24), Envoy (18->24 danger sense), Mystic, Soldier, both Nihilis
Enemies - 1x Elite Bastorox, 2x Nihili (Extreme)
- Again not really too hard, 25 speed enemies struggle to close space.
- Mystic keeps fighter and self topped off after a bioelectric bolt
- Couple nat 20s on the party's side
- Easy win
- Resources used: Practiced Influencer

Encounter 8
Init - Crest-Eaters (3 right - 31, 30, 30), Envoy (22), Fighter (19->22 danger sense), Crest Eater (left), Soldier, Mystic
Enemies - 4x Crest-Eater (Severe)
- Crest eaters win initiative and beat the party to a pulp. Envoy, soldier and mystic basically forced to eat extreme+ attack high damage reactive strikes to do anything due to 10ft reach.
- Fighter drops on round 2, party concedes.
- Mystic did manage to get off a CF calm though.
- Spells used: Calm.

Encounter 8 (Redo)
Init - Soldier, Fighter (28), Envoy (24->28 danger sense), Crest-Eaters (3 rightmost, 26, 25, 24), Mystic, Crest-Eater (Leftmost)
Enemies - 4x Crest-Eater (Severe)
- Mystic gets a good 2 F 1 CF calm, and 3 hero points spent on r1 ensure a crest eater dies
- Party win from there, overall probably 60-70% this party wins a severe encounter, monster definitely overtuned.
- Soldier and Envoy don't do enough damage and get pummelled by reactive strike. Encounter winning is entirely down to Calm and fighter.
- Spells used: Calm.

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Encounters @ level 5 (Ranged party)

Encounter 1 (Redo)
Init - Same as before, replace melee fighter with ranged.
- See the Unseen makes this easy, the aeon guards still pose no actual threat despite scoring two critical hits on the mystic they managed to do a total of about 10 damage.
- Spells used: See the Unseen.

Encounter 2 (Redo)
Init - Same as before, replace melee fighter with ranged
- Level 1 enemies do basically no damage, even a CF vs area fire rolls a 1 on the 1d6 for a grand total of 2 damage.
- Both lead salvos miss, the 25 speed officers struggle to get into melee to do their flurry
Party wins pretty easily.

Encounter 3 (Redo)
Init - Same as before, replace melee fighter with ranged
- Fire resist nullifies tashtari's ranged attacks, leaving them only with an extremely weak melee option
- Easy win for party

Encounter 4 (Redo)
Init - Same as before, replaced melee fighter with ranged
- Envoy rolls straight 15+s in the first 2 rounds of combat, and 2 nat 20 crits, defeating one serpent before it gets a second turn
- Still dangerously close to KOing the mystic and getting a win by Sneak afterwards.
Needed 2 Revealing Lights and See Invis, a perfect counter
- If there were a 3rd serpent it's a definite loss, as of currently it might be ~50/50
- Spells used: See the Unseen, Revealing Light x2.

Encounter 5 (Redo)
Init - Same as before, replace melee fighter with ranged
- Same story, fire damage ranged weapon forces Nihili to engage in melee. Too slow to do so
- Low AC is a killer, they get crit a lot. They don't have significantly better HP.
- Did use gravity grab to drag the fighter into flanking. Still missed twice.

Encounter 6 (Redo)
Init - Same as before, replace melee fighter with ranged
- Burrow kiting makes encounter take forever but emganats can't really do enough damage to burn through 2 vitalizes and vitality pool
- Not very hard

Encounter 7 (Redo)
Init - same as before replace melee fighter with ranged
- Mystic having good fort and will makes them really hard to nab with suffocation
- Took a bit longer than the melee party due to lacking damage output
- Still very easy though, the fighter got down to maybe 1/3 and was the only one that took meaningful damage. Everything else was resourcelessly healed off by the mystic with 2 vitalizes and transfer.

Encounter 8 (Redo with init 1)
Init - Same as before replace melee fighter with ranged
- Positioning looks weird, but that's because the party is deployed to block for the mystic, as is the crest eaters have a hard time threatening the mystic with more than 3 attacks and 2 reactive strikes
- The party takes a couple reactive strikes and a few hits killing one threatening crest eater so the mystic can step out and Calm the other 3. They all fail, so party wins. This singular set of rolls is basically all that matters in this fight.
- Other party probably could have won with the same deployment
- Monster still overtuned though.

Encounter 8 (redo with init 2)
Init - Same as previous, replace melee fighter with ranged
- Party gets a lot of lucky crits (and crest-eaters don't), combined with 3 hero point expenditures, healer's gloves and blocking they manage to get a win here
- Probably <50% win rate

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Player's perspective

I wonder if Guardian could work by just having a 15ft aura (in place of taunt) that makes all enemies in the aura take a -2 circumstance penalty to attacks and DCs if they don't include you as a target of their activity. Threat techniques can just trigger off them choosing to target an ally while inside your aura.

Then just give it stuff to help lock enemies near it - grapple/trip bonuses, a reworked hampering sweeps, etc. - and it should gel together.

Unsure where intercept fits in this, it would probably need a different reaction.

@Exocist: I’d really like it, if you had time to expand on this:

Exocist wrote:

I was originally going to type up a much more detailed post on its various issues, but I ultimately think it comes down to one thing: This class is far too constrained by "Martial Realism", and as such it's not only lacking *flashy* abilities, but it also starts running into various natural counters to its abilities that it can't do anything about.

I'll start with one thing for context that isn't covered in that statement - the Guardian's lacking martial proficiencies. I already said it wasn't strictly necessary and that is true if they get other abilities, but it does matter in the context of playtest Guardian. Why? Fallback options.

Standard martial proficiency with no damage booster isn't stellar damage by any means, but it's an option that is always applicable. Every monster (if you can get in range to do so) can be hit for damage, and so if your actual class abilities don't work for whatever reason, you can resort to hitting for damage. Every other martial can do this.

Swashbuckler? If your panache action fails, or the enemy is precision immune, you can still do regular strikes at regular martial accuracy.

Rogue? If the enemy is precision immune, you still do regular strikes for regular (unboosted) damage.

Magus? If it's your recharge turn and you have no FP, or if you can't spellstrike for whatever reason (AoO threat, got slowed and needed to move, etc.) you can still do regular strikes for regular damage.

Fighter? Well that's a special case because there's no way to actually turn their damage booster off, short of disarming them which cripples everyone.

Then we get to Guardian. If it's main things aren't working, it doesn't have regular martial accuracy for regular martial damage for 1/2 its levels. Losing weapon spec doesn't matter as much as losing the accuracy, so you can say it's more 6/20 levels than 10/20, but it still does sting a little bit.

Furthermore, your damage is going to be further reduced by the fact that you either want a shield (in which case the best you're doing is a d8 weapon), or you're using Raise Haft, which doesn't work with Shielding Taunt, can't block, and if you want the +2 AC it's limited to d8 weapons anyway.

Keep all of this in mind when discussing Guardian's feats and features, it's another reason why the Guardian struggled so much in my playtests.

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Okay so what do I mean by "Martial Realism"? It's constrained by things that "make sense" or "should be possible" because it's flavoured as an entirely mundane character. The Champion can defend an ally from 15ft away because they're a divine character using divine magic to do so. The Guardian, they have to be adjacent, because you can only shove your ally out of the way to take the hit if you're right next to them.

They don't get anything remotely fantastical for a long time (except for Hampering Sweeps) - they can't shield block spell attacks until level 18 for instance, a feat that power wise should be 1st level and wouldn't even be very good at 1st level, but is put at level 18 because a shield blocking magic seems fantastical. Never! is another such example, the power level of it is basically 1st level because of how niche it is, but the idea of a mundane character overcoming mind control through sheer willpower is too fantastical.

You don't really get anything with SFX budget - your enhancement to Shove just adds a tiny bit of damage, or a tiny bit of distance at level 12. Stuff like Whirling Throw or Explosive Death Drop on the Monk would be the kind of things that would fit well on the Guardian given their athletics focus, and are extremely cool, yet they have nothing like that. A suplex maneuver? The ability to grab something and drag it to you? Maybe at higher levels fully swapping places with your ally from a distance using Intercept Strike? Not thinking of balance here, just things that would work with what the class does, while being very cool.

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Once we get to mid-levels, monsters start having various forms of attack that you have to deal with. These include

1) Swallow Whole, a skill-check based attack that can absolutely cripple a character for the rest of combat.

2) Any AoE attack, spell, breath or otherwise. These tend to get very large - 30ft cone/20ft burst, then 60ft cone, then 120ft cone/60ft burst.

3) Any spell that causes a disable - Dominate for instance, but also Feeblemind, Petrify, Baleful Polymorph, Confuse. Many of these are incapacitation spells, but when you run into a monster casting them at the correct level they're kinda nasty.

4) Forced movement effects such as the "drag" effect found on Mammoths, Rocs, Horned Dragons and Jungle Drakes. These split up the party and can prevent focus fire combined with the inherent grab of these.

5) Other anti-melee abilities - reactions such as Wing Rebuff or Twisting Tail. Auras that just suck to be in. Things like that.

Probably a few examples I'm forgetting but that's a broad view of stuff.

Then we look at the Guardian's two "defender" mechanics - Taunt and Intercept Strikes. I'll throw in Sweeps for free and compare that too.

1) These mechanics start becoming at odds with each other the moment any AoE is introduced. The Guardian wants to be right next to its entire team for intercept, but this also means your entire team is getting collected by any AoE ability. Which the Guardian usually can't do anything about because their reaction only works on physical damage. Not that it would help much if they could use their reaction in this scenario - if you're playing to Intercept Strike you can't split the party, and if you do someone is unprotected by you.

Woe is you if you decided to Taunt the thing with AoE, now it has +2 to DC against you and no penalty vs the rest of your party.

This isn't just spells and breath weapons, any sort of multiattack like Draconic Frenzy can also blank Taunt if the Guardian is too close to their ally by spending the third (unlikely to hit) attack on the Guardian.

2) These mechanics mostly only protect against melee, physical, strikes. Hampering Sweeps does absolutely nothing if your opponent's angle of attack is anything from 2-5. Depending on their reach and swallow size limit it might not do anything against 1 either. You sit next to them, activate Hampering Sweeps and... they just cast a spell on the rest of your party anyway. Or just breath attack the rest of your party anyway. Or if your opponent uses a ranged attack. Intercept also tends to fail on anything 1-5, and Taunt is a bit of a gamble on most of them as well. While you can taunt the enemy to Dominate (or whatever) you instead of a party member, do you really want to be saving against a +2 DC save or suck?

That's the long and short of the natural counters - its defensive mechanics have a rather narrow set of attacks they actually apply to, so anything outside of that purview is a natural counter.

But where a regular martial could just say "ok I suck for this encounter but at least I can do regular strikes" the Guardian... can't a third-half the time. Also that's a lot of encounters for your main features to be blanked in.

You gave me some new ideas for threat techniques. These ideas make taunt more worth wile and create some interaction between guardian abilities but don't address the accuracy issues with the class.

Strike accuracy issues don't need to be addressed if hitting things for damage isn't the point of the class.

I would still prefer that they are addressed and the Guardian has the same weapon progression as a Champion, but it's not strictly necessary.

Thank you for the detailed information on your playtest.

Taunt along with threat technique look like they are not defining the class in a positive way.

In theory these two abilities can work, it just really needs to pick a direction on what they are meant to do in the context of a defender's role.

A defender needs two things to function

1) A punishment for enemies attacking you (Harder to hit, damage resist, damage reflect, etc.). Anything that makes an enemy not want to hit you suffices.

2) A punishment for enemies attacking your allies (You attack them, you debuff them, it costs more actions for them to get around you to your allies, etc.). Anything that makes it so an enemy must consider whether to attack your ally instead of you works.

Ideally at the end of this, the enemy is left with two bad options.

The tenets of good champion answers both halves of the defender equation

1) It has higher AC, and, if you went for it, Shield support which makes it take less damage if it is the target of the attack.

2) Not only do you reduce the damage an enemy does to your ally, but you also apply another punishment - a Strike or a debuff.

The Guardian... doesn't quite get there.

1) Applies as it has higher AC (from level 5 onwards at least) than other characters. It also has some native shield support with Raising Taunt, and I'd imagine the shield feats aren't there because this is a playtest and they're a known quantity already. Threat Technique: Mitigate Harm also falls in this category as a way to lean into 1) more than 2). Except you lose the higher AC benefit against enemies you Taunt, so they're not really punished for hitting you then unless they need to move over to you.

2) Is where it really struggles. None of its punishments, are quite strong enough for enemies to reconsider attacking your allies.

Ferocious Vengeance is just too small of a damage bonus considering the class is also behind on martial progression. Even if it was at baseline martial progression, +2/4/6 is only about half the benefit that a normal martial with their damage bonus (+2 to hit, rage, edge, etc.) has (should be +2/4/8).

Intercept Strike is not a real punishment tool as it doesn't actually apply any punishment to your enemy, it just moves the damage around. While this can be arguably a bonus (dealing 50 to 2 characters is worse than dealing 100 to 1), it never really makes the enemy reconsider hitting your ally unless the Guardian themself is already low.

Hampering Sweeps isn't a punishment either, because it's a pretty binary tool, either they can get around Hampering Sweeps with an easy non-shove forced movement, ranged attack, spell, massive size and reach, whatever or they're forced to attack you. Shoving the Guardian usually isn't worth it due to their high fort, anything with high enough athletics to succeed this probably has a better MAPless attack. There's no consideration, it's a yes/no.

Their last method of punishing enemies for going after your allies is athletics maneuvers. Anyone can do this. Grapple an enemy and now they have to escape before moving and attacking your ally, or they just just attack you. Trip an enemy and they have to stand (theoretically) before moving and hitting your ally, or they can just stand and hit you. It wastes action econ on the enemy, which is a punishment, but these tend to fold to the same things Hampering Sweeps doesn't work against - with the exception of large space/reach enemies who might still be affected by grapple/trip and not Sweeps.

Remember that giving your enemy a choice between A and B is just worse than always having A or B, so any class relying on a punishment mechanic like this has to have both halves feel a little overtuned in order for it to be right.

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I do think focusing in on the athletics maneuvers, and general annoyingness, would be an interesting way to have the class function in the context of a defender. The ability to pull enemies next to you, taunt far away enemies (ofc remove the bonus they get to hit you), and make it difficult to attack your allies by the sheer action economy detriments you'd provide to enemies trying to do so.

The problem is all of that stuff works at low levels where enemies are mostly melee with 5ft space and reach, but it would need ways to scale into higher levels, defending allies against the multitude of angles of attack enemies can have at this level, or it will still suffer the same issues the Guardian does now.

Making it more directly punishment based like the Champion is probably a lot easier to have work.

Extra info

- Although Rage of Elements was allowed, no material from it was used.
- For the purpose of Get Behind Me! combined with Incercept Foe, I ruled it could not retroactively cancel a melee attack by moving the ally out of range.
- Pincer Attack was used only a single time, on the Guardian, and it wasn't particularly stellar then.
- On the long list of issues with Taunt as it currently is, it feels weird that if an AoE attack targets you and an ally, that attack has no penalty against the ally but still has a bonus against you.

Melee party full builds

Ranged party full builds

I just finished running a series of 16 combats (with some repeats due to losses) for the Commander and Guardian. In total, we did this twice, the first time we overall didn't feel the Guardian fit with the party so we tried to make a party that would help the Guardian shine, then reran all 16 combats. In total we did 36 fights including the repeats.

The building rules tried to keep as close as what we know is in the remaster. This meant sources were limited to *Player Core* and *Rage of the Elements*. We didn't get *Howl of the Wild* until midway through the playtests. The *Advanced Player's Guide* was also added in because some APG content is in Player Core.

The party is all martial, deliberately so we could run each combat "in isolation" so to speak. Each combat is part of a single encounter day, the only daily resource is Battle Medicine on the Commmander which wasn't actually used that frequently, and Nephilim Wings on the melee party so they don't get cheesed by ranged flying enemies. All characters have 1 hero point per combat.

I'll just open with the closing thoughts on the two classes as the rest of this post will be detailing the builds, combats and efficacy of each class in each combat.

Commander
- Power wise, Targeting Strike + Strike Hard! or Piranha Assault + Targeting Strike + Aid/Strike is fine
- The issue is that this is pretty much all the Commander ever did in these playtests.
- The mobility tactics that use Steps *do not scale well* into later levels, when monsters start getting large reach, big aoes, etc. These micro-repositioning tools just do not do anything anymore, a single Step barely changes the map.
- Many other tactics are very specific, requiring 2 or more characters be invested in a particular thing (Reload, Raise Shield, etc.) to even be action positive, or can only work if you have an Athletics character *and* they're in position (All the athletics ones).
- Nothing really *competes* with Strike Hard because its the only one that's general enough to work regardless of party makeup, and usually regardless of enemy positioning.

My three suggestions are as follows

1) *Generalize* a few tactics, or make them apply to the Commander + 1 ally. The reload and raise shield ones could be combined into a single tactic that allows the use of one of these 1 action abilities, such as "Each Squadmate uses one of the following actions: Reload, Raise a Shield, Prepare to Aid or Seek". Another 1a tactic could be "One ally Steps, Strides or Escapes as a reaction". Another 1a tactic could enable an ally to use any 1a skill action.

2) *Increase* the breadth of what the commander does as a support class. Currently it only moves stuff around and enables strikes. If you don't need to move stuff, your only option is to hit Strike. The following support tools are missing from the commander's kit and they could use them as tactics: Anything that allows an escape or a reroll against a failed save, anything to help out against conditions, defensive benefits such as ac/save bonuses or thp grants.

3) *Remove* the limit of an ally only being able to respond to one tactic per round. This is just a really awkward limitation that I don't see the need for, and it causes rules questions on what responding to a tactic even means? Does it mean using an action granted by a tactic, or benefiting from a tactic at all?

Guardian
- I was originally going to type up a much more detailed post on its various issues, but I ultimately think it comes down to one thing: This class is far too constrained by "Martial Realism", and as such it's not only lacking *flashy* abilities, but it also starts running into various natural counters to its abilities that it can't do anything about.
- Hampering Sweeps did help out in some combats, but was a total blank in others.
- Yes, Taunt was used on enemies that are far away to get them to either move to the guardian or eat the penalty. Most of the time they didn't care.
- Really awkward that taunt's penalty doesn't stack with prone's penalty when you often want to trip.

My suggestions are as follows

1) If the class is trying to be an *annoying* defender, one that *can't* be ignored without significant action econ issues, then it needs to be better at that. Make shove and reposition scale properly with reach on monsters (+5 ft at expert athletics, another +5 at master and legendary). Other buffs to grab and trip so it can keep monsters locked up, if they want to hit your allies they have to spend extra actions. Let it pull enemies with its taunt.

2) If the class is trying to be a *punishing* defender, in the vein of champion, then it needs an actual punish. *Intercept Strike* is not a punish, it doesn't really impact the foe at all, it just shuffles damage around a bit. Ferocious Vengeance's benefits are far too small for enemies to care about, given Guardian is also behind on martial progression 50% of the time.

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Party 1 - Fighter (Halberd), Rogue (Ruffian), Commander, Guardian (Mitigate Harm)

These characters are level 10, with the level 10 starting wealth using the "midway through xth level" rule, so they have a 10th level item.

Both melees have Nephilim Wings to prevent getting cheesed by ranged flying enemies.

For both parties, the weapon rune choices are Frost and Astral. Guardian has only a +1 striking shield boss, chose a 10th level sturdy shield for their 10th level item.

Fighter's build
1 - Sudden Charge
2 - Blessed One Dedication
4 - Blessed Sacrifice (for the extra FP)
6 - Lunge
8 - Felling Strike
(9) - Sudden Leap
10 - Tactical Reflexes

Rogue's build (Longspear)
1 - Tumble Behind
2 - Blessed One Dedication
4 - Blessed Sacrifice
6 - Gang Up (this was hugely buffed with Player Core)
8 - Opportune Backstab
10 - Vicious Debilitations

Commander's Build (Piranha Assault, End It, Strike Hard, Pincer Attack, Form Up, Shortbow)
1 - Combat Medic
2 - Beastmaster Dedication
4 - Mature Beastmaster Companion
6 - Efficient Preparation
8 - Guiding Shot
10 - Targeting Strike

Guardian's Build (Mitigate Harm)
1 - Long-Distance Taunt
(1 Natural Ambition) - Larger than Life
2 - Shielding Taunt
4 - Blessed One Dedication
6 - Blessed Sacrifice
8 - Group Taunt
10 - Quick Intercept

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Party 2 - Fighter (Eldritch Archer), Fighter (Bow), Commander, Guardian

Why no Ranger? Fighter works better with Commander because their damage bonus (higher accuracy) applies to Strike Hard. Precision likely won't as its 1/round and flurry definitely won't.

Guardian's build
- Only change is Quick Intercept -> Hampering Sweeps

Fighter (EA)'s build (Longbow)
1 - Point Blank Stance
2 - Cleric Dedication (Sarenrae)
4 - Basic Dedication (Domain Initiate - Fire)
6 - Advanced Dedication (Domain Initiate - Truth for the extra FP)
8 - Eldritch Archer Dedication
(9) - Blind-Fight
10 - Debilitating Shot

Fighter (No EA's) build (Longbow)
1 - Point Blank Stance
2 - Rogue Dedication
4 - Sneak Attacker
6 - Basic Trickery (Nimble Dodge)
8 - Felling Strike
(9) - Blind-Fight
10 - Debilitating Shot

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Encounters (Melee party)

Encounter 1 - 2x Jah-Tohl, 1x Nilith (Moderate)
Init - Fighter, Rogue, Jah-Tohl (bottom), Nilith, Jah-Tohl (Top), Commander, Guardian
Nilith starts invisible as it has at will level 4 invis
- Not very difficult, as expected from a moderate. Rogue dropped to ~1/3 and was healed up by Lay on Hands.
- Commander seemed pretty good with targetting strike + strike hard
- Mobility issues may be apparent with commander
- Guardian did nothing this fight.

Encounter 2 - 1x Paleohemoth
Init - Fighter, Rogue, Guardian, Paleohemoth, Commander
- Intercept Strike kind of useful here to shift fossilisation from more important targets to the guardian
- Being able to do it twice with Quick Intercept allowed them to take 2 hits, but fossil only triggers once a round, which was beneficial
- Commander's Piranha Strike added probably 30-40 damage, pretty good

Encounter 3 - 4x Cave Bear, 4x Smilodon (Moderate)
Init - Guardian, Rogue, Commander, Leftmost Bear, Fighter, middle-right bear, middle-right smilodon, rightmost smilodon, rightmost bear, middle-left bear, leftmost smilodon, middle-left smilodon
- Fighter armor gets broken, Intercept strike does nothing to prevent it
- Not really all that difficult as you'd expect from a bunch of -4s with no real special abilities. Grab changes hit hard.
- Predictably the guardian does very little in this fight, their taunt is terrible vs multiple enemies... but its also bad against a single large enemy.

Encounter 4 - 2x Mammoth
Init - Rogue, Guardian, Fighter, Commander, Bottom Mammoth, Top Mammoth
- Mammoth gets nuked before first turn
- Guardian... prevents a second dual tusk by doing an assurance trip and absorbs 24

Encounter 5 - 1x Lich, 4x Zombie Hulk (Severe)
Init - Fighter, Lich, Guardian, Rightmost Zombie, Rogue, Commander, other 3 zombies
- Rogue & Guardian both fail their frightful presence saves with HP reroll, Commander & Fighter CS
- Party gets 2 CF dominates and loses
- Guardian way better against the party bodyguarding the lich than for the party

Encounter 5 (try 2)
Init - Rogue, Fighter (HP reroll), Guardian, Commander, Lich, 4 zombies
- Party loses, Fighter got dominated, saved out, dominated again. Crit allies three times while dominated. Rogue and Guardian could not do enough damage to put lich into the ground.
- Commander very good showing with Piranha assault
- Guardian still not very useful

Encounter 6 - 4x Mummy Guardian, 1x Mummy Pharaoh, 1x Elite Mummy Pharaoh (Severe)
Init - Fighter, Rogue, Elite Mummy Pharaoh, Mummy Guardian (middle-left), Mummy Pharaoh, Mummy Guardian (middle-right), Mummy Guardian (Left), Guardian, Commander, Mummy Guardian (Right)
- Tiny map, plenty of chokepoints, guardian still finds it difficult to do anything
- Friendly fired with Sandstorm Wrath too much
- Not a very difficult encounter still, rogue and fighter are able to tumble past the frontline and kill the pharaohs.

Encounter 7 - 1x Iron Warden (Severe)
Init - Rogue, Iron Warden, Guardian, Commander, Fighter
- Piranha strike continues being very useful
- Taunt possibly did something by forcing the warden into Inexorable March instead of just hitting the fighter, which made it take an AoO. Probably a misplay and should have just hit fighter with the penalty.

Encounter 8 - 1x Gosreg, 1x Gongorinan (Severe)
Init - Commander, Fighter, Rogue, Gosreg, Guardian, Gongorinian
- Guardian Taunt kinda did something in making the Gongorinan's club attack vs the fighter a bit worse. Fighter still got disarmed and weapon stolen though, if gongo had better init this could have gone differently.
- Piranha still useful

Encounter 9 - 2x Roc, 2x Young Mirage Dragon (Severe)
Init - Rogue, Fighter, Guardian, Roc (Right), Commander, Roc (Left), 2 mirage dragons
Init (Try 2) - Mirage Dragon (Right), Commander, Fighter, Rogue, Roc (Left), Guardian, Mirage Dragon (Left), Roc (Right)
- Party lost the first time, won the second time. Bunch of flying enemies that outreach them, some Sudden Leap + Felling Strikes were used.
- We actually did discover an issue with the commander here - they’re entirely land bound. All their stuff is Step or Stride. Should definitely say Burrow, Climb, Fly or Swim if you have the appropriate speed. Unsure what to do about their Step tactics when flight becomes commonplace, maybe Step has descaled so much by then and you’re so high level that you’re spamming the level 15 tactic anyway.
- Taunt probably had its best showing here, and even then the net effect of it was still about neutral, preventing a couple hits on the party, but making the guardian take a couple hits. Also the wording on “hostile action that does not target the guardian” could stand to use some clarity on if its supposed to be whether the entire activity targets the guardian at all.

Encounter 10 - 3x Tyrannosaurus (Severe)
Init - Fighter, Guardian, Rogue, Tyrannosaurus (Middle), Tyrannosaurus (Left), Commander, Tyrannosaurus (Right)
- Speed ruling: Tyrannosauruses cannot interact to pick up items (Prevents fighter or rogue getting disarm cheesed)
- Some extremely poor rolls from the tyrannos on round 1, everything 5 or less
- Guardian's contribution is assurance trip, which is something they can do with Larger than Life. Not particularly stellar though
- Too easy, party wins

Encounter 11 - 4x Chimaera, 4x Desert Drake (Extreme)
Init - The party, everything else
- Didn't finish but likely a loss for the party. Flying enemies with an effectively ranged attack in their breath means the melees had to activate Divine Wings to get up there, losing a turn of tempo, or sit on the ground taking them out one at a time with felling strike sudden leap.
- Guardian more useful than Champion here.

Encounter 12 - 6x Zecui, 6x Choral, 4x Jungle Drake (Extreme)
Init - Rogue, Fighter, 1 Choral, 3 Drakes, 2 Zecui, Guardian, Drake, Commander, 5 Chorals and 4 Zecui
- Called approx midway through round one, probably a 50/50 win loss (maybe slightly enemy favoured). Verdict: Guardian useful here, uncertain whether better or equal to champion.
- Guardian slightly screwed by Counter Performance.
- Running theme: Guardian only useful on large maps with tons of enemies. Too few enemies and they just pass taunt saves, too small of a map and its easy to gang up on the guardian. Large maps allow you to taunt far away creatures for a consistent penalty.

Encounter 13 - 2x Deadly Mantis, 1x Tyrannosaurus (Extreme)
Init - Mantis (Right), Rogue, Mantis (Left), Tyranno, Rest of Party
- Party loses, not really all that close.
- Both Guardian and Champion would struggle with this encounter. Deadly Mantises are no joke. - Leaping Grab separates party members preventing focus fire. Also prevents intercept or champion reaction. Rending Mandibles cracks armor making the crits roll. Very hard to escape.
Ultimately Champion is likely slightly better if only because it forces a Leaping Grab on them to separate them from the party and turn off the reaction, rather than Taunt not really doing that.
- Tyranno swallows Commander, Commander completely unable to do anything while swallowed. Not a problem unique to the commander by any stretch. Rupture threshold too high for fighter to hit, rogue is grabbed by a mantis far away.

Encounter 14 - 4x Greater Hellhound, 1x Fire Giant (Extreme)
Init - Guardian, Hellhound (Left), Fighter, Commander, Fire Giant, Hellhounds (both right), Rogue, Hellhound (Middle-left)
- Guardian buys a round for the party by taunting the entire opfor, immediately gets thrown in the blender of hellfire breaths and flanking strikes. Survives only due to *supremely* poor damage rolls, and even then only barely.
- Still a win, triple frost runes against cold weak enemies.

Encounter 15 - 1x Weak Mukradi (Extreme)
Init - The party, weak mukradi
- Party critted (x2, nat 20s) and succeeded on mukradi breath. Very lucky.
- Guardian can't do anything in this combat. Single entity is their nightmare, Sweeps wouldn't help cos of 2 melee chars.
- Party wins.

Encounter 16 - 1x Snow Oni, 1x Adult Horned Dragon (Extreme+)
Init - Rogue, Fighter, Guardian, Snow Oni, Commander, Adult Horned Dragon
- Snow Oni died on round 1, spirit weakness 15 (+5 beans) against a party full of astral runes. Beans were thrown to frighten 2.
- Got cheesed by the Ancient Horned Dragon individually Impaling Horning on character, flying them hundreds of feet into the air and then death dropping them if they couldn't fly or just fighting them 1v1 (level 12 enemy vs level 10 PC).
- Guardian couldn't meaningfully assist, both enemies just passed their taunt saves.
- Champion would probably be better here, certainly better against the Snow Oni and will probably do more damage trying to 1v1 an Adult Horned Dragon.
- Party loses.

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

Ranged Party's combats
All inits are identical for consistency, this party has the same init bonuses anyway.

Encounter 1 - 2x Jah-Tohl, 1x Nilith (starts invisible as it has at will invisibility)(Moderate)
- Map is a little narrow so I had to move a bit awkwardly to play around reach weapon hampering sweeps.
- Flicker somewhat counters Hampering Sweeps, though it needs to be sustained to do so, so its not a real counter.
- Pretty easy encounter overall. Guardian couldn't help against Visions of Death, but they're also the only party member without Forlorn so they were the target.

Encounter 2 - 1x Paleohemoth (Moderate)
- Pretty good showing for Sweeps here, keeping the Paleo focused on the guardian and unable to escape. A reach weapon means it has to succeed at 2 shoves (or crit a shove) to get out of Sweeps. Also the entire party has frost runes, so Piranha assault made quick work of this.

Encounter 3 - 4x Cave Bear, 4x Smilodon (Moderate)
- Taunt and Sweeps managed to keep a number of enemies focused on the Guardian, though they were incentivised to attack the Guardian anyway due to armor break.

Encounter 4 - 2x Mammoth (Moderate)
- Hampering Sweeps, and the Guardian, do nothing here due to Grabbing Trunk. It's trivial for a Mammoth to pick up the Guardian, move them in such a way that they can't Intercept Strike while still being in Dual Tusk range with another PC, and beat them up. Taunt does nothing either because Dual Tusk targets the guardian and someone else.
- Party still wins but takes significantly more damage than the other party doing so.

Encounter 5 - 1x Lich, 4x Zombie Hulk (Severe)
- The all ranged party and debilitating shot prevents a Stride->Dominate (or straight Dominate) on the first turn, unfortunately 2x DC36 Chain Lightning destroys the party instead.
- The Guardian does nothing in this encounter. Hampering Sweeps cannot help against an enemy with casting or range.
- Piranha Assault is the only thing making this vaguely doable but even then it would need a lot of luck. The melee party probably just needed good init and to pass 1 dominate save, the ranged party needed a lot more.

Encounter 6 - 1x Elite Mummy Pharaoh, 1x Mummy Pharaoh, 4x Mummy Guardian (Severe)
- Bad map for ranged party, really small, tight chokepoints and cover issues.
- Hampering Sweeps does help keep the Mummy Pharaohs away from the ranged chars, preventing reach AoOs from messing up their days.
- High will enemies, bad for Taunt.
- Party still wins but needed a bit of in combat healing.

Encounter 7 - 1x Iron Warden (Severe)
- Sweeps stops it dead, though Inexorable March is something of a counter.
- Highly mobile ranged characters + debilitating shot = this enemy can't do much.
- Didn't really need the Guardian.

Encounter 8 - 1x Gosreg, 1x Gongorinan (Severe)
- Party just severely lacking in damage to actually kill these enemies before the save or sucks start coming. Commander CFs against Calamity, but saves out of it. Eldritch archer passes vs Petrify, fails vs Baleful Polymorph, spends the rest of the fight unable to pass the will save.
- Guardian cannot help against save or sucks, not can it help against broadcasted Mind Bolt.
Sweeps does help lock the Gongorinan in place so it can't fly over to the fighters, knock their bows out of their hands with Reject Tools, pick them up and fly away.

Encounter 9 - 2x Roc, 2x Young Mirage Dragon (Severe)
- Significantly easier for this party than for the melee party, can naturally hit the flying monsters they want with ranged attacks. No one except the Guardian really cares about the Rocs dragging them around.
- Guardian does some stuff with Taunt and moving away from the enemies to provide a penalty, Hampering Sweeps predictably not useful in this encounter. Champion would likely be better than Guardian here as the mirages need to go melee once their breaths are expended.

Encounter 10 - 3x Tyrannosaurus (Severe)
- First time Form Up has been used, getting the party away from the Tyrannos while the guardian stalls them with assurance trips. The combo of Debilitating Shot, Form Up and Assurance Trip prevents swallow on any of the three ranged characters. Larger Than Life prevents the Tyrannos swallowing the guardian because their swallow size limit is medium.
- Form Up replaced End It!, which was also attempted but was ultimately just not a good idea in this combat. Form Up was a guaranteed win, End It! gave a check.

Encounter 11 - 4x Desert Drake, 4x Chimaera (Extreme)
- The all ranged nature of this party meant they were able to split up a lot better than the melee one, making it so the breaths could only hit 1 character.
- Guardian taunted most of the enemies, so they all focus fired the guardian with their breaths. Guardian bought about a round and a half worth of enemy damage before going down, party lacked the damage to actually kill enough enemies in this time though, so the remaining enemies killed them.

Encounter 12 - 6x Zecui, 6x Choral, 4x Jungle Drake (Extreme)
- Party doesn't have the damage output to beat enough of these enemies before they get beaten into the floor
- Hampering Sweeps not useful here, taunt minorly useful but 2 of the enemies nat 20'd it.
- Choral's pure sonic damage on their ranged attack bad feels for Intercept Strike. They didn't use divine decree or noise blast because of the triple high fort juggernauts against dc23.

Encounter 13 - 2x Deadly Mantis, 1x Tyrannosaurus (Extreme)
- Party does better here than the melee party, similar to the rocs encounter getting grabbed and forced moved away from each other doesn't impact their damage capabilities all that much, they can still just hit whoever they want.
- (Arguably a bit skewed, the entire party is master acrobatics with cat fall, and I ruled that the bow crit spec can pin a tyrannosaur when i think most GMs will rule it can't under the remaster addition to that crit spec. Would have been a fair bit harder if either of these weren't true)
- Forced movement grabs countered intercept strike, though the Guardian did themselves become a target of the forced movement grab to prevent this. Armor break was bad for them though. Maybe mission successful?
- Still lost but could have been a win with better rolls.
- Commander has no escape tactic

Encounter 14 - 4x Greater Hellhound, 1x Fire Giant (Extreme)
- Guardian stops the entire OpFor dead with taunt + hampering sweeps, proceeds to get beaten to the floor on round 1.
- Does an unconscious creature still have reach? I thought yes, so the guardian's unconscious body kept Hampering the enemies. Enemies killed the guardian to stop that nonsense.
- Guardian did, however, buy enough time for the party to win here.
- End It! Sealed a victory when it was 1 hellhound + fire giant left.

Encounter 15 - 1x Weak Mukradi (Extreme)
- Form Up used for mobility and to split the party so they wouldn't all get breath weaponed.
- Guardian tries to buy time for the party by walking behind the Mukradi and Hampering it.
- Mukradi is a Mukradi and crits a lot of times, Guardian hits 0 on its first turn.
- Party lacks damage to kill Mukradi before it systematically annihilates them.
- Probably would have been closer if the Mukradi rolled some normal hits instead of crits.

Encounter 16 - 1x Snow Oni, 1x Adult Horned Dragon (Extreme+)
- Unlike the melee party, this ranged party managed to beat this one. Bow Felling Strike prevented a majority of the cheese, but also just being able to hit the dragon while its trying to cheese someone.
- Hampering Sweeps could have been useful if the dragon failed its shove check. Guardian otherwise did nothing.
- Snow Oni went down easily, even with Icy Deflection, against this ranged party. Beans + spirit weakness 15 (increased to 20 via beans) against 3x astral runes made quick work of its HP.

Report is not my own, just relinking it.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/15DjMMRAqxaur8TIXUvv6NwY9Ik7BMf6o_0bfKHO Rb5E/edit

Resists, immunities and weaknesses

Sonic is definitely far less resisted than electric

What are people’s go-to configurations for the eidolon’s primary and secondary attacks? Like the damage types and primary attack traits.

I bet it’s eidolon and build dependent but I’m curious about examples as someone who’s looking into playing a summoner for the first time.

D8+Trip primary for Weighty Knockdown later, Energy Heart it to sonic.

Secondary is set in stone iirc

The only reason to go Dex eidolon is to get the ranged evolution feat, though I don’t think its particularly useful even then - you lose out on a lot of eidolon utility going ranged.

Exocist wrote:

kryone wrote:

I was wondering, what is your favorite or most efficient eidolon in your opinion ?

Devotion - occult is the best list and it pairs well with champion archetype.

Dragon is a decent generalist.

If you go champion archetype, can you use champion reaction with your eidolon?

You can use it to protect your eidolon, so if the enemy attacks the eidolon or an ally, you champ reaction, and if they attack you the eidolon uses dutiful retaliation. The eidolon can't use champ reaction.

I had seen it before but I'm only now realizing how busted plum deluge is. It's a 20th Level feat alright. But if you're only using the research field for the extra uses, I'd say stick to bomber. Double poison is cool. I kinda wish you could use 2 of the same poison for a more effective double tap.

It's cool but it's ultimately pretty useless, the level-6 limitation combined with the fact that it needs to be poisons you spend reagents on means that it's not good. I'd say it's usually a sidegrade at best, considering it costs twice the amount of uses to get a poison that is only very slightly better.

That is, unless you take the text to be as written and not as intended, because

You can apply two different injury poisons to the same weapon, though not to a piece of ammunition. The two poisons can be up to six levels lower than your level, and you can't use the poisons made without spending a batch of infused reagents via perpetual infusions. Applying the two poisons requires a separate action to apply each poison. Once completed, you combine the two poisons on the weapon into a double poison with the lower of the two poisons' DCs. This double poison is only virulent if both poisons were virulent, and if the poisons have a different number of stages, the double poison has a number of stages equal to the poison with the lower number of stages. The target takes the effects of both poisons for its current stage

"Five" and "Zero" are numbers "up to six" right?

17th+ level toxicologists also have access to perpetual shadow essence that your archers will appreciate. As long as my understanding of using quick alchemy poisons is right.

Again, it's kind of unclear, but that's no feasible rules as written way to interpret Chirurgeon and Mutagen perpetuals to work as intended (i.e. they last the full duration once drunk) while still making Toxicologist ones expire at the end of the round when applied. They both use the same action (Activate) to apply them, and are both nonpermanent effects so will expire at the start of next daily prep due to Infused rules.

I rarely, if ever, use Boost Eidolon. It's just not worth it. I believe in almost all situations it adds less damage on average than a second attack from your eidolon, and striking twice with your eidolon is already not very good. Standard Routines may go

If you need to move

Tandem Move -> Act Together (Trip, Electric Arc)

Don't need to move and you somehow fit in Swashbuckler MC

One For All / Demoralise -> Act Together (Trip, Electric Arc)

Enemy is already prone; replace the Trip with a Strike or Grapple depending.

When you get Weighty Impact and Size feats, and therefore need to move less Strike -> Knockdown may become more useful than Trip. When you get Grasping Limbs you might also spend actions on Grab.

Exocist wrote:

Deriven Firelion wrote:

The summoner has none of this. The ability to use maneuvers that gets used on these forums way too often is insufficient. You can literally build a wizard with a 22 strength and Legendary in Athletics good at combat maneuvers if you felt like it. That means maneuvers are not a unique class ability, but an acquirable ability that any class can build for who wants to.

While you certainly can do this, the opportunity cost of 22 strength is high (putting your apex into strength instead of int), and you’d be extremely squishy, plus you’d be in melee meaning the multitude of reactions screw you. Also without quicken, the econ would be horrible - every round is athletics + cast, need to move and you can’t do one of these.

Summoner doesn’t have that issue. Trip+Electric Arc is only 2 actions for them. If they need to move, use tandem move.

An eidolon can also have 24 strength while the summoner doesn’t sacrifice the ability to have 24 cha.

Trip does no damage. You use electric arc doing d4 damage while engaging a trip. Then some other class comes up and does the real damage, often rolls high enough the flat-footed bonus is irrelevant, the creature is killed with minimal effect from your action. If the trip misses, you did even less.

Unless you're exclusively playing like level 1-4, a martial isn't oneshotting anything without some good rolls. At some point, even with 2 crits they aren't oneshotting anything. So what Trip does is let them make 2 MAPless attacks (which is better than 1 from you and 1 from them usually) on a flatfooted enemy.

Spending 1/3 legendary skills on athletics is whatever really, Acrobatics matters if you get tripped a lot which, while relevant for most melee characters isn't too relevant for the summoner because the thing that is actually is melee doesn't get the skill feat. Stealth is decent, but again, the Eidolon can't stealth very easily (they don't get the skill feats, and getting invis on both yourself and eidolon is far more costly).

Intimidation is still good, Diplomacy is still good.

In high level play, enemies have lots of things they can do in a fight at range or avoid AoOs on top of just outright taking a player out every round.

Outright taking a player out of the fight every round is moreso the problem than the ability to avoid AoO - actually breaking movement rules with the ability to avoid reactions and so on is extremely rare. Martials in general become devalued at higher levels, but at least you still have a caster side.

Unless you have someone constantly casting Roaring Applause, and the enemies constantly fail their saves, you can’t get free reaction triggers out of inflicting flat foot through flanking or most other effects. The real strength of Trip is that, if the opponent stands, they eat attack ops, and if they stay put they’re taking a constant -2 to hit, or you can move away such that they’re in your reach but you aren’t in theirs (enemy dependent) at which point they have no choice but to stand if they want to do anything that fight.

Sure there are other ways to knock prone but they’re usually a lot more committal (Improved Knockdown) or a lot more random (Flail/Hammer crit spec).

The summoner has none of this. The ability to use maneuvers that gets used on these forums way too often is insufficient. You can literally build a wizard with a 22 strength and Legendary in Athletics good at combat maneuvers if you felt like it. That means maneuvers are not a unique class ability, but an acquirable ability that any class can build for who wants to.

While you certainly can do this, the opportunity cost of 22 strength is high (putting your apex into strength instead of int), and you’d be extremely squishy, plus you’d be in melee meaning the multitude of reactions screw you. Also without quicken, the econ would be horrible - every round is athletics + cast, need to move and you can’t do one of these.

Summoner doesn’t have that issue. Trip+Electric Arc is only 2 actions for them. If they need to move, use tandem move.

An eidolon can also have 24 strength while the summoner doesn’t sacrifice the ability to have 24 cha.

Summoner is a utility martial not a damage dealer. You have 4 actions, but your actions are generally worse than other classes: so find things that other classes want to do anyway, that you’re just as good at (e.g. Trip) and suddenly you’re ahead.

Wellspring is good if you can get it and your GM runs longer days, Champion archetype is also quite good (pairs decently with Devotion eidolon).

If you’re trying to compete with other classes at their thing (e.g. striking against a real martial) you will fall behind. That’s fine, you have 4 actions they have 3. If you start trying to compete with other classes at things you’re just as good at as them, you’ll start seeing the real power of the summoner.

The first three APs were all at least partially written while the system was still in development, which explains a lot of the wonkiness in Age of Ashes. I've heard all those issues are mostly gone from Strength of Thousands and Abomination Vaults (not many people talk about Ruby Pheonix for some reason).

That said, if you feel this strongly about PF2 in general, I don't think Paizo unionizing will affect much. You might see a slight bump in quality due to happier workers, but overall I doubt things will change much one way or the other. Which if you enjoy PF2 like myself it's fine, but if you already don't, you're probably best off looking elsewhere. Converting the more recent APs to other systems might be up your alley though.

Ruby Phoenix starting at level 11 means that a lot of people don’t want to run it (there is still a pervasive idea of starting a low level and building up). I’m running it twice because, personally, as a GM I hate the low level grind - very little ways I can challenge my players because there’s very few ways they can fight back. High levels have some issues as well, many of them in fact, but I’d rather run 15-20 than 1-6.

As for the AP itself - it’s an anime fighting tournament. If you and the players go in with that mindset, constantly chew the scenery and ham everything up, you’ll have a fun time. Book 1 is mostly a meat blender though, there is a lot of encounters you have to go through in a short timespan.

Book 2 is mostly 1 enc/day, and book 3 is another meat blender.

dmerceless wrote:

But it's not about overtuned adventures in this case. A level 15 NPC spellcaster with High DC has a spell DC of 36. And this is not even that high for the game's standards, because the monster building rules suggest you start using Extreme DCs for main casters at that point. But let's be generous and go with High. If you leave a save stat at 10 by that point, you're likely to have 15 + 4 (Expert) + 2 (Item), for +21. That means you need a 15 to pass, and most importantly, you critically fail on a 5.

This is not a boss, this is a level+0 creature, and isn't even one with that high of a DC, according to the game (look at the Demilich for example, a level 15 creature with a spell DC of forty). It's not about adventures being overtuned or people setting DCs too high, it's that the DCs the game sets up as recommendations and uses as a baseline are balanced around a super maxed character, and you'll critically fail and be deleted from a fight very often if you don't invest. No wonder why people are paranoid about defenses.

But level 15 isn't level 1. If you were this hypothetical medium armor user and couldn't get bulwark and settled for a breastplate, you'd be starting at Dex 12 probably. By level 15 that could be Dex 18 from ability boosts, so you only need an 11 to pass. Which seems decent, against the best thing an enemy has to throw at you? It's better odds than you get with AC against a melee enemy's strikes. It's also better than you could have gotten with Bulwark, although that's only by level 15.

And if you're playing an inventor, or a magus, or any other medium armour class that needs another stat? You can't really afford to boost that dex along with wis, con, str, and your other stat.

So one of those saves is going to be abysmally bad for level 15.

Lack of dex to damage for finesse melee weapons makes dex melee completely pointless unless you're forced into it. Unless you want to spend two stats on dealing damage, at which point your defensive stats go down significantly, a bow actually does better damage than a rapier at 10 strength.

Reload is criminally undervalued as a negative, and reload weapons need a lot more damage to compensate for the action cost of reload. I suspect this is because of "preloading" - i.e., the fact that you can never pay the action cost of reload by just not reloading it, using quick draw, etc. Perhaps tie a damage boost to using the reload action.

Thrown should have the option of using str to hit - it's already pretty bad with many many negatives associated with it relative to an actual ranged weapon (poor range, rune tax, etc.) so I feel giving strength a (bad) ranged option is fine.

10 spell levels is too many. 9 is also too many. We should have 5 or 6 like starfinder. 10 is a balancing nightmare.

Too many martials are just damage and very little else. More monks and champions, less fighters please.

Key stat should just be a free boost. I really hate the new trend of giving classes a key stat they don't want (Alchemist, Inventor and now Thaumaturge would much rather have Str/Dex than their mental stat). If it's for balance, then it only matters half the time - make it consistently a -1 or don't have it there at all.

Proficiency gaps causing strangeness, and pidgeonholing you into certain things. MC casters are basically pidgeonholed into buff spells because casting anything else, outside of particular levels, is going to suck hard. Similar, weapon using casters are going to suck hard at it outside of particular levels. These things already have a penalty associated with them - Casters trying to martial have no damage booster and no survivability booster, on top of their frail chassis. Giving them master proficiency (the accuracy expectation) if they so desire it wouldn't break anything at all. Similarly, giving MC casters legendary proficiency (the accuracy expectation for spells) wouldn't break anything because they're also limited by slot level and number of slots.

General feats need a cleanup - what are they even for?

Skill feats need a cleanup - they were supposed to be a split for noncombat options to not compete with combat options, yet some skills have extremely good combat options and others have next to nothing.

Recall Knowledge needs a cleanup, or to be split into two actions (one for research out of combat, and one for in combat).

There should be a generalised pool of class feats anyone can take so the same feat doesn't need to be reprinted across multiple classes.

Archetypes being used as class feat expansion in place of printing more class feats sucks - archetypes were designed to be restrictive - you can't pick up a second archetype until level 8 and can't get your first feat from that archetype until level 10. Having to wait that long to build something a little off theme just feels too punishing.

Mooks at higher levels have too much HP.

Most familiars were originally animals, though the ritual of becoming a familiar makes them something more.

Who knows if this even means the familiar will have an obvious tell that it isn’t a “real” animal of its type.

Anyway, saying that ordinary cat/dogs/whatever don’t need stealth checks effectively makes Pest Form subsume the entire role of the Stealth skill out of combat.

What familiars can and can’t do with stealth isn’t super relevant for the games I tend to run - mostly dungeon environments, the monsters don’t really care if its an ordinary cat or a familiar, it looks like a snack all the same. I’m willing to bet that higher level guards might have some form of magic sense in the form of an ability to cast Detect Magic or elsewise - does a familiar ping magical?

Agree they probably shot themselves in the foot with regard to making the repeating hand crossbow advanced at only 1d6 dice size with 60 range, there’s no “room” in between the Air Repeater/LAR and the Repeating Hand Crossbow for a martial repeating weapon.

I think Capacity was probably intended to be the martial version of repeating but was changed last minute