Resists, immunities and weaknesses Sonic is definitely far less resisted than electric
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.
If you go champion archetype, can you use champion reaction with your eidolon?I was wondering, what is your favorite or most efficient eidolon in your opinion ? 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.
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).
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.
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.
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
Beginner box does have a few different rules There’s a couple of feats that don’t appear in the core rules at all Focus spells work completely different (they’re slotted spells you reprepare with 10 mins, rather than their own resource) At least a couple of spells work differently (dispel magic has no counteract check iirc, flaming sphere does half damage on successful save).
On Familiars: Yes, Independent+Valet doesn’t work, but independent+manual dexterity still does. You can have your familiar start with 2 scrolls in hand and hand one off to you with its independent action. Not as good as independent+valet as you have to predefine what scrolls it has out, and after it has handed you two, it needs two rounds to draw + hand over another for free, but still useful for the prospective scroll user. The wizard’s strength is the number of top level spells it can have with specialisation and blending. They get 6/5/2 whereas a sorcerer is looking at 4/4/4 unless they are divine or primal, in which case they can get 5/4/4 but the 5th slot is limited to a specific spell. The wizard’s focus spells are mostly bad, some of the level 8 ones are ok and a couple of the level 1 ones are usable, but they’re supplementary (something you do in addition to casting a spell), not a spell replacement like sorc/druid/cleric ones often are. So, the wizard has weak feats and supplementary focus powers - they live and die by the strength of their levelled spells. When the levelled spells are good (character level 7+), the wizard is good. When they are weak (character level 1-6) the wizard feels weak, and when they are OP (15+) the wizard can feel OP. That’s basically all there is to my stance on wizards - overall, they can feel strong for a majority of the levels if you play to their strengths, but they’re about as vanilla as you can go on a caster. Very few of their feats are useful, and of the ones that are they aren’t really exciting. Rogue Archetype is usually my go to, filling out the 2 and 4 slots with light armor prof (very good early) and mobility or nimble dodge.
AFAIK ever since the "Great HP Inflation of 3E" blaster spellcasters were never the same as before (in a bad way, of course). Well, every archetype which relies on reasonably high damage (so no 3E and beyond abominations like those "dungeoncrasher" thingies), TBH... Blasting before 3e was pretty good, your average enemy in AD&D 2e had extremely low HP (to be fair, everything did), so a blast spell was likely to kill or severely injure whatever you threw it at, even if they passed the save, whereas Save or Suck/Die spells would definitely kill them but if they passed the save it often did nothing. For instance, at the end of Temple of Elemental Evil, we would be routinely fighting giants - the scariest threat we had run into at this point in time. The wizard, at this point, could have been about level 8 (they were multiclassed Wizard 7//Cleric 7) and I, as a Fighter/Thief/Bard had 10th level druid casting. A frost giant has 14HD+1d4 health, or on average about 65 hitpoints. These were threats you were meant to run away from at this point, because they did 2d8+9 damage when our average HP was something like 25. A 3rd level fireball or lightning bolt would have done 8d6 (28) on the wizard, or 10d6 (35) on myself, taking out half of a frost giant on a failed save. With a good rebound on the lightning bolt, you could kill a whole set of frost giants with a single lightning bolt. Most enemies we fought were far less tough than that though - often rooms full of cultists which would have one or two hit dice (4-9 HP) and would die even if they passed the save. Even the boss level cultists rarely went above 20-30 HP. I think the toughest thing we fought (in terms of health) that wasn't a boss before making it to nearly the end of the temple was an ogre, which only has 4+1 hitpoints, or an average of 19 - definitely within instant death range of a blast spell. 3e inflated all HP by a factor of 4-6x, but kept the damage the same, so blasts have been pretty terrible relative to save or suck/dies ever since.
Eroding bullets cast a faint green glow, and smell like the sickly sweet organic gases that rise from corpses. Handling an eroding bullet without gloves deals 1 point of acid damage and leaves the putrid scent coated on your fingers. Upon Striking an enemy, the glass casing inside the bullet bursts, releasing a splattering of bubbling green acid that coats the target. The target takes 2d6 persistent acid damage in addition to the damage normally dealt by the attack. I assume this is supposed to say upon Hitting an enemy, or upon successfully striking an enemy, or is it intended to function on a miss?
Please quote the exact line where that is shown, without it being an extrapolation made for the sake of "realism".Yet it repeatedly shows up in APs - AoA, ExC, Edgewatch, Ruby Phoenix B1 (B2 is 1 enc/day, B3 haven't read through yet). Of course, you can just allow your players to rest and break the narrative flow if you want, but my experience has been that the players aren’t sure that they can rest either. And if they can rest once without penalty, even under “pressure” are they ever sure what to believe. I can list out what is happening is ExC - resting in that AP is made really hard because there is always “pressure” going on, so letting the players rest is more a case of the GM breaking the given narrative to allow the players to get their resources back. Is it more fun? Probably, but also I can’t imagine that they would have written it in such a way unless they intended you to do it all in one shot (otherwise they would have put designated safe zones like in ExC B1C4).
that was largely the problem my group had with blasting. For reference, here’s what I rate as the good spells on the primal list > lvl 1 - mud pit, summon animal, summon plant/fungus depending on ruling, heal, lose the path > lv 2 - summon fey, summon animal, summon plant/fungus, worm's repast, dispel magic, glitterdust > lv 3 - fear, summon animal, pillar of water, fireball (decent at lv 5-7), slow > lv 4 - vital bacon, coral eruption (large monster cheese) summon fey, control water (highly dependent on rulings) > level 5 - there's wall of stone, and wall of ice if wall of stone is banned > level 6 - summon animal, tangling creepers (to combo with coral) > level 7 - summon animal, mask of terror, control sand > level 8 - mask of terror, deluge > level 9 - meteor swarm (for good single target damage), upheaval Primal buffs - Haste 3 is terrible and I’ll flat out say that. Takes too long to recoup value. Haste 7 is good. - Longstrider I put on a wand - I’m yet to be convinced by Protector Tree. It doesn’t have object immunities and allies have to stay adjacent to it. It says 10hp/level, but that’s more like 5HP/level seeing as the tree can easily be crit, or just hit on a high MAP attack. Precastable Healing is good and all but the restrictions on this one are a bit too tough. - Stoneskin is pretty bad for the level of slot it requires. If I knew an encounter was coming ahead of time and that I wouldn’t have many encounters that day, I might cast it for action efficiency. The level 6 version might be ok when you have level 8 or 9 spells. - Companion spells require your companion to actually hit. I’ll keep my free 50ft stride thanks. - Organsight has too many points of failure for me. You’re obviously going to max medicine so that’s a non issue, but it takes two turns to pay off, requires you pass recall knowledge checks (so at max you get three uses before you can’t pass the check anymore - and woe be you if you fail one due to rarity or whatever), and then requires you deal piercing or slashing with a strike or spell after. Also it’s self only and single target. No thanks. - Elemental Gift is fly but better. It’s reasonable. I usually use items rather than spells for flight, though. And battleforms are also pretty terrible out of a slot. Wild Shape can be ok (well… highly dependent on rulings) because it’s a focus spell, but I’m not spending a max slot for those benefits. Also most of the spells you listed are arcane as well (except the healing ones), which also has much better buffs (invisibility/disappearance) and debuffs.
... Even with crit failed saves, enemies at higher levels have such a ridiculous amount of HP that you’d need a crit failed save followed by 2 hits or a crit to kill a mook. It’s utterly silly how much HP enemies have at that point. For instance, at level 13, your blasting spell does 13d6 usually (gonna discount Chain Lightning because of restrictions and because I hate the RNG on it) - or about 45.5 damage. A crit fail would do 91 damage - if they even crit fail, it’s honestly not that common even on -2s - a fighter hits for, at best, 3d12+2d6+9 (35.5) damage. The level 9 monster has 155 hp on average. This only gets worse as you level from there, from needing a crit to a crit and a hit and eventually 2 crits (or more) from the fighter to finish the thing. Those are pretty low probability odds. Or alternately, if they crit failed against Fear - a level 3 spell that I don’t even need to upcast - they’d be out of the fight for 2 rounds (one fleeing, one returning) and would have no threat in the encounter during that time. If they crit failed against Slow 6, they’d be basically out of the encounter (slowed 2 makes it trivially easy to avoid their attacks).
People don’t run with item restrictions on purchasing because there’s so many essential items. If your players are level 12, they need their +2 greater striking weapon, +2 resilient armour, perception and skill items by the math. That is a ton of high level common items… but also you can’t really deny them access to those items without screwing up the math. Any settlement which stocks those items (in sufficient quantities to supply the whole party) is likely going to stock a bunch of much lower level consumables…
I mean, monks were often called one of the worst classes (if not the worst, depending on who you ask) in PF1 and the PF2 monk is... I mean not bad but mostly just kind of there. Summoner - Action economy, in two words. The summoner has four actions relative to the three of everyone else (with some restrictions). If you take actions that other people already want to take (such as Trip) with your eidolon or yourself, you are ahead. With 10 hp a level, even if the main summoner gets hit you won't really go down easily. I do think there is some jank to Summoner - notably the sharing MAP means that you must take Spout, Electric Arc or Scatter Scree to keep up your damage. Fortunately, Scree is just a level 3 item away, but it's probably better to grab electric arc from your ancestry. Standardly I might do Act Together (Trip + Electric Arc) - becomes better once you get Eidolon's Opportunity (and the rest of your martials get AoO). Druid is... it's okay. Mostly what holds it back, in my view, is the Primal list. In the games I've run and played (mostly modules and APs) blasting has always been a highly inefficient use of slots, in lower encounter/day games it might be fine but even then I'm really not a fan of blasting. It takes too long to generate value - you can count up the damage and say it's a lot, but not much of the damage is actually meaningful. That's most of the problem I have with blasting past level 5-7 or so - on the turn you cast it, it usually doesn't have an impact, it takes 2-3 turns to start "killing" enemies any faster. I much prefer control spells where I can start reducing the threat of the enemy side on the same round I cast it, and I've found these types of spells lead to encounters being far easier most of the time. On the contrast, I've found that blasting usually doesn't lead to an easier encounter once you've cast a blast spell.
...How are casters doing this when their saves are worse than martials? You have a higher chance of a martial acting before an enemy than a caster doing the same. Without evasion, if you get spammed by AoEs, pass or fail as a caster you will die. But that's only if you get spammed. Failing (or crit failing) a single fort save at that level can lead to far more disastrous results. An enemy you fight at level 14 in Ruby Phoenix can make you do a DC7 flat check for all of your spells for a whole minute if you fail a fort save. The Grim Reaper can straight up kill you if you fail the save (which has disadvantage) after it crits. There are quite a number of stunning, blinding and paralyzing effects that hit fort, in addition to damage. Reflex is just damage usually, the worst common thing that targets Reflex is Swallow/Engulf, which you hopefully had freedom of movement for.
I mean, monks were often called one of the worst classes (if not the worst, depending on who you ask) in PF1 and the PF2 monk is... I mean not bad but mostly just kind of there. PF2e monk is actually quite good if you play into its advantage - action economy. The fact that it only ever needs to spend 1 action dealing damage means you have always have 2 actions spare for other stuff - mobility, defense, utility. Some of the Ki Powers are actually quite good this time around as well. I rate monk as an A tier class, it's very good when played well. Playing it well can be difficult though - Summoner is a little more obvious on what "good play" looks like and operates in the same axis. My class rating looks like S - Bard, Champion, Cleric A - Fighter, Monk, Summoner, Wizard, Sorcerer (Arcane/Occult) B - Ranger, Barbarian, Oracle (Life/Battle/Cosmos), Sorcerer (Primal/Divine), Witch (Arcane/Occult), Druid, Rogue, Swashbuckler C - Oracle (All Other), Witch (Primal/Divine), Gunslinger, Inventor, Magus, Investigator (with archetypes) D - Investigator (No archetypes), Alchemist
Champions get faster armour, though admittedly it’s a bit janky. They get expert at 7, master at 13 (when most others get expert) and legendary at 17 (before most others get master). Ranger, Fighter and now Magus/Summoner getting expert armor at 11 instead of 13 is kind of a weird case. Monks definitely get faster armour - expert at 1, master at 13, legendary at 17. Why don’t fighters have to spend actions turning on their damage booster like everyone else is a valid complaint - other classes should be rewarded more when their damage booster is active. For some reason they only equal fighter under optimal conditions for their booster and are worse elsewise. But, IMO, martials needing 2 actions to do damage is a bit sucky - things feel much more freeing when you only need to commit 1a to damage and can use the 2a however you feel. 2a to deal damage, especially as a melee, feels very locked action wise.
Fighter isn’t even one of the top 3 classes - I rate it number 4. People overrate the ability to deal damage as a deciding outcome in fights. Fighter can somewhat spec for utility with AoO flickmace for some control and champion reaction for some defense, but for most parties I’d say a Bard, Champion or Cleric (my top 3 classes in that order) are more likely to result in them feeling encounters are “easier” than a fighter.
How are casters doing this when their saves are worse than martials? You have a higher chance of a martial acting before an enemy than a caster doing the same. Yes but if the martial acts first, they smack up the monster for about 25% of its HP (on a good day) and then get hit with the CC that prevents them from acting. When the caster acts first they get to use their CC before the enemy does. The CC isn’t always an AoE that hits the whole party (although it can be in the case of something like a Kamenhul), but usually a single target F You with something like Consume Knowledge. In this case, if you have multiple casters yes - one will be disabled and be unable to act - but the rest can pick up the slack. At level 20, caster saves really aren’t meaningfully lower than martial saves. Casters will be looking at M/E/M with Canny Acumen. Martials will be looking at probably M/M/M or that but with a legendary. Reflex is the least important save at 20 anyway (although you can get nuked by enemies spamming AoEs and evasion is useful there). Initiative should be the same - legendary stealth with legendary sneak (something I recommend having - combos well with disappearance) lets you roll +38 to init with incredible init - equal to what a legendary perception martial would be doing with incredible init (although dex based ones with legendary sneak will be at +40).
By making the enemy unable to act before they make you unable to act. Something like a Banishment 9 or Prismatic Sphere or Confusion 8 or Paralyze 7 that just straight up stops them playing the game. And the reason caster development is delayed is because enemy saves scale slower than enemy AC - and caster accuracy is primarily balanced around saves. You could split it to give their spell attack accuracy earlier.
Ye, only problem with doing independent + flier is that it consumes both abilities to keep it out of harm’s way of anything but specifically targetted ranged/melee attacks (which if they’re wasting on your familiar is good for you). That means the familiar isn’t doing much else. Instead, leave it at home. Spell Battery and Familiar Focus don’t require the familiar actually be on your person, so leaving it at home is the safest location to protect against AoE. In fact, it doesn’t even need to be on your person to select abilities for the day - see ya Catticus Finch, Bilbo is going on a multi-year adventure. That’s still decent value for a 1st feat - effectively Desperate Prayer + an extra slot. Otherwise, use Independent+Manual Dexterity for the 2 (+1/2 per round thereafter) free item draws per combat, and accept the AoE risk of losing the first level feat for a week if repeated AoE cones your way.
You're looking at the way that fighters feel stronger than other martials Level 20 play all casters (except maybe primal ones - but even primal has enough encounter solvers, just not a huge variety) are at the top and all the martials are underneath them. Fighter is probably the best of the martials due to boundless reprisals, but nothing comes close to the encounter solving capability of spellcasting at that level. Mooks at level 20 take forever to die, and everything is loaded with so much bullshit in terms of abilities that you need counter-bullshit and support to fight back. Martials don’t get that. They get more damage. More damage doesn’t help when you literally cannot act.
Changing their prof to be expert @5, master @13, legendary @17 would just be a horrible idea. There would literally be no reason to pick a fighter unless you were starting at 17+. That extra accuracy is their damage booster, as a martial master weapon proficiency alone doesn’t cut it for a striker - you need an extra damage booster like rage, hunter’s edge, etc. on top of that, or you have better defense like champion/monk. The problem with Fighter is that it equals or beats the other classes in their niche while also beating them outside their niche. As the generalist of the group, the fighter shouldn’t be beating the other classes in their niche. Ranger should be doing more in low enemy combats where they can keep a single prey for multiple turns. Barbarian should be doing more against mooks. Etc. The other problem, I feel, is not enough role diversity in the martial category - we have monk and champion being different, then every other martial competes for the Striker role. Can we just have less strikers and more other sorts of martials?
What's the reason for them to be in Heavy Armor? The obvious slot of an offensive divine wave caster is an Inquisitor, who was always Medium outside of specialty archetypes. Or maybe I'd just like some stat diversity. Currently if I'm building, say, a Barbarian without Sentinel (not even for Mighty Bulwark - just regular Bulwark), I need Str, Dex, Con and Wis. That's it. If I want Int or Cha, I'm sacrificing either my damage or defensive utility for ultimately mostly non combat effects - that's a tradeoff you shouldn't me making and why skill feats exist in the first place. Combat abilities and non combat abilities shouldn't be in the same "bucket" of cost. With Sentinel, however, I can do Str/Con/Wis/Int or Str/Con/Wis/Cha without sacrificing my ref saves. And for a class like the Magus, who already needs 4 stats, getting 12 dex is painful - you're compromising somewhere to get it and further compromising later if you want to keep up your ref saves. That's what actually isn't good - characters being notably behind on defensive expectations, or having very little stat diversity because of how hard the mechanics punish these things. Stat substitution is bad when you can throw everything on a stat, however, some things need the help for the sake of build diversity - you can afford to give a stat sub for one or two things to promote that.
What's the reason for them to be in Heavy Armor? The obvious slot of an offensive divine wave caster is an Inquisitor, who was always Medium outside of specialty archetypes. Meh, tradition shouldn’t really impact class mechanics. Medium armour should have been deleted from the game, it’s a weird half-spot between light and heavy which is honestly terrible. Light armour only needs dex, heavy only needs strength, medium needs… both for some reason, making sentinel (or armor proficiency) a must have on any medium class that needs all 4 stats.
A single press is a strict upgrade over a vanilla second strike, and Combat Grab *can* be quite useful when dealing with pesky monsters that have a bunch more speed than you and kite, or after you main action trip/improved knockdown. The accuracy isn’t always great - especially against bosses, but it can be pretty reasonable at 40-50%. Of course you’re not gonna take both the shield line and dueling line, but the extra reactions are good and 1 action for +2 AC for the entire encounter is a pretty good “capstone” for that line. The initial feats aren’t amazing, granted. One a day kind of sucks on determination, but when you need it you really need it. So many nasty effects at those levels that determination straight uo lets you remove. It’s insurance more than anything - you got your save as good as you could, you have a defensive buff, you got a bad result, rerolled and still got a bad result - determination.
Warpriest isn’t bad - it’s strictly better than cloistered 1-6 and 11-14 (they literally have the same features, warpriest just has armour and shield block as well while cloistered gets a single 1st level feat). The problem is that it utterly fails to deliver on the concept of being a cast+strike cleric at a certain point. Giving it master weapons at 15 wouldn’t really make it outshine martials - who are all effectively legendary anyway (either straight legendary, or legendary with a significant damage boost). Striking is probably one of the worst uses of an action a caster could do at that level, even with master proficiency. That being said I’d rather the two doctrines were more differentiated. Sharing that many features basically leads to the current paradigm where warpriest is better 1-6 and 11-14, cloistered is better 15+ and the only “real” choice is 7-10.
It's another place where casters and martials are designed differently, where martials get more of their power budget in unique class feats and features while casters its more in spells and spell selection, similar to 1e. Fighter class feats mostly suck? What? Fighter has some of the best feats in the game, I can name a lot of good fighter feats 1 - Double Slice, Sudden Charge, Reactive Shield 2 - Combat Grab, Dueling Parry 4 - Dualhanded Assault, Everstand Strike 6 - Dazing Blow, Shatter Defenses 8 - Blind-Fight, Quick Shield Block 10 - Improved Knockdown, Combat Reflexes 12 - Dueling Dance, Paragon Guard, Improved Dueling Riposte 14 - Determination 20 - Boundless Reprisals Wizard feats, yeah no argument there, they suck. Monk, Bard and Fighter probably have the best feats. Swashbuckler has good feats but a lot feel necessary to its functionality.
I see where I'm getting slipped up. See, I was under the impression that some of the game exists outside of combat. But, it appears that I was mistaken. I think I'm playing the game wrong. As per usual, most of the rules pertain to combat. Most of the interaction you’ll have in any published adventure is combat related. Failing a non-combat X usually doesn’t lead to death, but (critically) failing in combat does. And saying that charisma/intelligence have more out of combat uses than the other 4 stats hence they “deserve” to be worse in combat isn’t true either. Charisma and Intelligence have specific out of combat uses - every stat including Con does. Do they have more? Maybe, depends on your game. But I can expect every game of PF2e will probably have a decent amount of combat - so I can expect some sort of guaranteed value from investing in 3 saves + main stat. The value of investing in charisma on a wizard, increasing the likelihood I will die… is questionable. Entirely on the GM to make that investment useful - which is something I don’t like relying on for multiple reasons.
I’ve definitely seen characters who didn’t take wis/dex (or str with bulwark)/con with their ASIs, such as an 8 wis wizard because they wanted to go into Charisma (made more sense for their character). What happened to them? They got hit with a DC29 phantasmal killer at level 8 because age of ashes, Cf’d their will save (+11 due to no resilient rune), hero pointed, CF’d again and died. Wouldn’t have happened if they had boosted wis instead of cha.
Count me in on the alchemist support group, but honestly the problem with alchemist and archetypes is that it has so few free feats. You need calc splash, sticky and expand splash to make your bombs actually useful. You probably need Far Lobber and Uncanny Bombs to not go pop later in the game. Given how much the class is balanced around using all of its things, needing to dedicate 5 feats to get one of those things to scale correctly (maybe even 6 if you aren’t a bomber and also need Quick Bomber) is a bit sucky. Can we at least bake the straight up math feats into the chassis with the next errata? That’s already 5/11 feats gone and most of the early feats. Trying to fit even Dual-Weapon Warrior on a bomber was extremely tight
Thief and Ruffian are generally considered the best styles for that reason. The other 3 don’t really give anything that competes with the huge benefit of having a stat mod to damage in the early levels. A single level 2 feat, an upgrade to an action that sucks to make it still suck, or mastermind which you only take if you’re going ranged and even then it can have some difficulties (but at least it had a benefit).
12 dex doesn’t do anything against clumsy. It isn’t -dex, it’s just a penalty to AC. It affects 12 and 10 dex equally. As for ref saves, Swallow Whole and Engulf are both damage so bulwark applies. Heck even Trip might apply because it technically does damage (on a crit) though no one is insane enough to rule that. Very few ref saves in the game are non damage.
You've got options to mitigate lower wisdom. Charmed life and swaggering initiative. And again, you only need 12 strength to match the bonus damage from strength martials. As for champions, yeah dex kinda stinks for them, but they're mostly a defender class anyways and will add plenty of value to a party as long as they're using their reaction. Those options have a very tangible cost in class feats and action economy, and help both high wis (due to resolve, also mitigated CF chance because monster DCs) and low wis (mitigated CF chance) equally. You don't want to be CFing except on a 1. It's not really possible, but you want to get that number as close to 1 as possible, because the last thing you want is CF-> Hero Point CF and you're immediately dead or worse at high levels. And yes, 12 strength does match the damage bonus from str martials - but being a str martial with no booster is generally not very good. If you're making panache attacks with 12 str, that's what you are - a damage martial with no booster active. Champions and Monks aren't damage classes, they have a lot of durability (and eco for monks) instead. Swashbuckler's primary purpose is to do damage, so making attacks for 2d6+4 or 2d8+4 even if it's equivalent to what the champion or monk is putting out (still approximately 20% worse than fighter, barbarian, ranger, rogue) is just not very good. And when you're talking finishers, 12 strength is wasted points - the difference between doing 5d6 and 5d6+1 is basically nothing.
The thing is that strength is already an irrelevant stat for them… depending on what level you’re at. A 10 str, 18 dex monk, fighter, swash or champion will feel the pain (even completely useless as my dex champ player in plaguestone learned the hard way - hitting for 3.5 damage is just not good) at levels 1-7ish… but past there you don’t really need it anymore because scaling kicks in and suddenly your base damage is 3d6+2 instead of 1d6+0, so the addition of +4 is comparatively a lot less. Plus, the charisma based styles can’t really afford to invest in str because they need con/wis/dex/cha. Even if they did choose to invest in strength, it’s ultimately something that descales to become irrelevant as noted above, whereas con/wis (which is what they would be dumping for str) only becomes more relevant. Such a concept as “late game scaling” shouldn’t really exist in tabletops. Make the effect of strength at least consistent if you’re going to make it “the stat that gives damage”, but personally I think the distinction between dex and str has already eroded to nearly nothing by this point and we’d be better off switching to a four stat system. All it does by now is add some difficulty to certain characters at low levels.
It wouldn't be half or less, it would be half or more, except for barbarians. It's always at least 2. And even if you start at 10 strength, you're matching strength characters by 5th level in bonus damage. Barbarian and other (non champ/monk) martials have equivalent damage boosters. When precise strike is your damage booster that’s pretty bad when it leaves you that far behind. But lets see Longsword fighter/champ is doing 1d8+4 (8.5), greatsword 1d12+4 (10.5) Rapier swash is doing 1d6+2 (5.5) and ECB 1d8+2 (7.5) You’re losing a lot of damage relative to a damn champion which isn’t a primary damage class, on a primary damage class. The fighter also has +2 to hit over you if you want to compare to a primary damage class, so yes you will be doing half or less their damage. Precise Strike flat damage is not a good damage boosting feature. It’s certainly not enough to make up for the lack of stat to damage.
Most invested items already increase skills though. And I don't think investiture limits are that much of a problem. The baseline assumption is one slot for magic armor. Many characters will want a second for hand wraps, doubling rings, or a staff. And a third goes to Apex items, but apex items already boost skills. That's a lot of investiture left to play. Not enough to cover all your skills if you're a bard with high intelligence maybe, but odds are you can cover the 5 baseline... Apex item, magic armour, doubling rings/staff/etc., perception item are the four most common ones. Then consume three slots for your three "main" skills, that leaves you with three slots to chuck cheap skill bonus items in that are also competing with a lot of much better items, such as (greater) boots of bounding to increase your speed, cloak of the bat to give flight even if stealth isn't your main skill (you can use winged rune but it's much more expensive), etc. As for spells, inspire competence, whatever, yes you can technically use them. They aren't really baked into the math of the game and as such either assume you a) have trick magic item or b) have a friendly spellcaster/alchemist boosting your checks for you. Then, on top of all of that, the purported benefits of intelligence can basically be replaced by untrained improv or the human one that also lets you use trained skill actions (might require additional investment into adopted ancestry), so if you do have all those bonuses you can save the stat points (much more expensive than a general and an ancestry) by just burning a couple feats.
There's some accuracy to it. Over the course of 19 levels, the level based DC scales by 25 (15 @ 1 to 40 @ 20). A trained skill scales by just 19. To have the same chance of success as you had at level 1, you need to get a +6 boost from somewhere. Kitting yourself out in cheap items for +x skill bonuses has you run into investment limits rather quickly. Boosting your stats... if you started with a 14 you'd have a bonus of 3 by the time you hit 20 (boosting it from 14 to 20), and you'd still be missing 3. If you started with 10, you'd get +4, but you hardly had a stellar success rate in the first place with +3 against DC15. And that leaves... raising your proficiency.
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