Fabios's page

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Haha, well spotted, sorry about that, I got carried away ^^

I'm not so sure about that, seeing how many people have fantasies about the last airbender.

I think it's weird that you mention avatar the last airbender because It kinda shows what i mean.

This Is a kind of "well but a lot of people like vancian spellcasting". The issue Is with the %of people.

I find Mono-Elements to be perfectly fine.

You pick the typical area dealing effect or save effect and a few tools from your chosen element, By staying in a single element you gain access to mono-element feats and can easily pick up more utility from the non-elemental kineticist feats.

Extended kinesis
Versatile blasts
Weapon infusion
Kinetic Activation
Safe Elements
Counter Element
Elemental overlap.

Its a tradeoff.
more elements = bigger toolbox.
single element = more specialisation.

You dont even need to bother about the composites as you can gain those trough Elemental overlap.

The problem here Is that this trade off doesn't really exist in practice, since you can "freely" take another element with fork the path and since there are a ton of levels where there's nothing worth to take your choice Is not "versatility or specialisation" but "Better vs worse" in a extremely mono-dimentional way.

Mono-element is a deliberate self-imposed restriction and build, rather than being something like a subclass. Like a lot of things in PF2, there are some tools to mitigate a popular build that would normally be flat-out worse. Dual Slice, Deific Weapon, etc.

At early levels, it's getting an extra junction. At mid-levels, it's a few exclusive feats and access to the composite impulses.

But PF2 doesn't exactly go out of its way to reward giving up your versatility. If you want to go with one of the six mono-element instead of the fifteen duals or twenty trios, then that's your call.

Single Gate and Dual Gate are a subclass choice of sorts, but the former can branch out later if the player wants.

And that's a problem. A core fantasy of playing an elemental wizard (yes, kineticists are essentially elemental wizard, no One really cares about Gates and stuff) Is that, as we can see in most media, you're defined by A SINGLE element which often reflects your personality.

Fabios wrote:

ALSO, not every element has that kind of damage: wood doesn't, metal gets It super late, earth's costs three actions if i'm not wrong.

You're wrong.

Hail of Splinters (wood): L1 2d4 -> L19 20d4, ave 50.
Magnetic Pinions (metal): L1 2d4 -> L19 20d4, ave 50
Retch Rust (metal): L8 4d10 -> L20 10d10, ave 55
Tremor (stone): L1 1d8 -> L19 10d8, ave 45

How about the 3a impulses?
Hell of Needles (metal) gets to 59.5 average,
Shattered Mountain (stone) gets to 55

How about the other elements?
Air's 2a overflow is Lightning Dash. It gets to 7d12, ave 45.5 at L19
Fire's Blazing wave tops out at 12d6 or 12d8 with the junction, ave 42 or 55.
Water's Tidal hands tops out at 45; the harder to use call the hurricane gets to 54.

Except for Fire's All Shall End in Flames - which is a total beast - all the elements 2a overflow damage blasts - and in fact most of the 3a overflows, too - top out between 45-55 points of damage at their highest boost.

The biggest differences are in AoE shape, damage types, and other 'special' attributes. This makes them all unique and definitely makes some better than others for specific circumstances. So for example, Metal's Pinion damage is immediate and easy to target, versus Wood's Splinters being a cone with half being bleed. Is one objectively better? Well if you want immediate down, of 3 or less enemies, Metal's got that. If you've got a nice cone-shaped group of lots of enemies, or you think bleed over 2+ rounds is going to be really helpful, that's Wood's forte.

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the only kineticists that can rely on damage are: early metal, Fire and late metal It's a weird halfway there

I disagree. Air's the slowest to get it's 2a overflow and it's d12 L+3 progression is not as smooth so there will be some levels when it's behind (it's 'make up bonus' is that it also moves the kineticist out of melee range in a way immune to reactive strike), but they can all do roughly similar damage numbers.

Hail of splinters'es damage comes from persistent bleed, very strong but easily resisted.

Magnetic peons targets AC, this makes It very weak in the Grand scheme of things (also, i did specify that early game metal and late game metal had decent damage).
Air's Is basically a suicide bomb cause you end up in the middle and you're ignoring that a Fire kineticist Main damage source Is not It's impulse damage dices but the weakness coupled with thermal Nimbus.
By using the best Fire rotation (which doesn't include all shall end in flame cause it's kinda crap, blazing wave and lava leap are much Better) almost HALF your Total damage comes from flat sources (weakness, thermal Nimbus and the persistent damage you get from flame Oracle archetype).

Also, you should aknowledge that doing 50 points of damage ON A FAIL at level 20 Is worthless most of the time, you're barely poking at their hp bars without also giving them debuffs (which Is fundamental to High level play, if you're not a magus It's a game of debuffs where hitpoints are almost a formality)

While I'm fully in support of more Kineticist impulses, and even in fact brand-new elements, I question how much those impulses would need to round out existing elements. If mono-element builds are so constrained that they're a lot weaker than multi-element builds in spite of the extra junctions they get, then sure, but I don't know if that's really the case now.

I'd also say that if current elements are meant to be good at something, but aren't, then that is a separate issue from them needing more things to do. If water is meant to be really good at healing and lacks good healing, for instance, then the solution oughtn't to be to make its current healing options obsolete with better impulses or let water do a bit of everything, but to buff the weak impulses accordingly so that a dedicated water Kineticist can be an excellent healer (and terrain controller). I do think each element offers enough to let a character specialize into a niche that is worthwhile in and of itself, so if that specialization isn't being rewarded enough, I'd like that addressed first before more stuff is layered on top.

I fully agree with both of you! In fact i wouldn't want for elements to be samey, but i'd like for them to be able to stand on their own.

Water Is not able to stand on It's own NOT because It needs an armor, but because it's niches (healing and control) are not strong enough to carry It. I mean, honestly, It's barely a healer :/

-lay on hands but worse ONCE
-three action heal once but worse ONCE
-small heal when you critically fail a save

It Just doesn't cut It, if It could spam It or have more powerfull options THEN It could stand on it's own

What on Golarion makes you think te class needs to be good at everything? No other class works that way, so why should kineticist?

But yeah, new impulses would be great.

I also disagree that solo element kineticists can't stand on their own. I've played several such characters successfully and had a (elemental) blast.

More than being good at everything i think that elements should be capable of doing more on their own.

There are some elements that are barely unplayable as a mono element (water and air)

There are elements that are basically One trick ponies (wood)

There are others that can stand on their own but are much, MUCH weaker than they would be if a kineticist Simply took other elements (metal, Fire, earth)

The class STRONGLY encourages mixing elements, and it's cool, but i'd like the chance to be as effective as a mono element kineticist

So! I despise gunslingers and now i'm gonna, respectfully, write why :3

1- The class doesn't have an identity

I believe that the gunslinger fundamentally doesn't have a mechanical idendity.

-it Isn't a crit fishing class: weirdly enough the +2 doesn't really make Crits something the gunslinger excels at:
-they're not common, sure It has the +2 of a fighter but a fighter also sets up his own buffs and with reactive strike It DOUBLES the already augmented chance of critting. The other crit fisher of the system, aka longbow flurry ranger, still has a higher chance of critting by pure virtue of striking a LOT.

It doesn't even benefit that much from crits, base damage Is quite low (even with fatal) so its crits are not worldbreaking (in fact, a gunslinger's crit Is worse than a starlit span's hit!) and neither do they apply great debuffs like a fighter can do (cause, let's be honest, the best thing about fighters Is that at High levels you basically cast "shut his PC off" with each crit)

This also ties In with, i think, a wrong pov the community has about gunslinger: "oh! He needs support, he really benefits from It" but... Who doesn't? If you give a ranger with a gun the same support he's gonna rock the same if not Better, everyone likes support! Gunslinger benefits a lot because it's much much WEAKER without It! So the difference Is more felt

-The class doesn't have a proper identity

I think that the class, other than cheesing encounters if there's a Cliff but that's something everyone with a gun can do, doesn't have a clear identity and that hurts its design tremendously.
Let's take barbarian as an example, no matter what you do, no matter how you build him, he's gonna be a chonky boy that hits hard. What's gunslinger's deal? Not crit fishing, not damage, not really support either (fake out doesn't count, like, sure it's broken af but It shouldn't be an auto pick for everyone); many people would Say it's action compression. But. BUT. What are you gaining from It? Likes guns have AWFULL action economy and so you fix It with your various reloads. You Haven't gained anything! The gunslinger, as a class, uses weapons that are purpousely made bad so he can fix them, it's a net nothing overall! Capitalism the class! (Create a problem and buy the solution)

The point of Companions is that you cannot think as they have been a fully independent creature but as an improved 3rd action for your character. For example.

A character with Cavalier Archetype and Impressive Mount feat can use the horse to move at 40ft for “free” or 80ft using only one action to command the companion to move without risk to trigger a move reaction (who will trigger the reaction will be the horse) besides other uses.

A LVL 1 Precision Ranger using a two-handed d12 weapon with a bear companion could flank and make 2 strikes vs a hunted target, one of them MAPless, doing 1d12+STR+1d8(precision) and another with MAP-5 doing 1d12+STR while makes the bear to strike using jaws doing 1d8+3(STR)+1d8(precision) and a MAP-4 Strike with claw doing 1d6+3(STR) allowing this character having 2 more strikes with a bit weaker damage in place of its 3rd action.

IMO, these are very good improvements for a 3rd action. I'm not saying that wort nor that they are cheap due to the feats tax along the progression, but it has a point.

The problem with this Is that they scale so badly that they're not even an improved third action anymore, from level 10 and onwards they're strictly a WORSE third action

If they only cost a single class feat to get and keep up with, even if they're not great I think that might acceptable trade off.

I agree with this, since they're so... Bad i always either see them on casters (aka: carry me through level One and Two mahoraga) or on characters with free archetype (therefore they can Just disregard the feat taxi).

You either let them be Better or let them be cheaper, cause right now only casters can use them without feeling like a trap option (and that's only because some casters feats kinda suck and Simply adding hps up front Is usefull)

I think the best companion Is actually the construct, by mere virtue of being super cheap to heal and replace that you basically have a kamikaze that Just dies every fight and spams trips

This Is my personal argument on why companions are lame/bad.

So! First, definition: animal, construct, undead companions.

Second, argument: companions, in my opinion, are inherently flawed and contraddict aspecta of pf2e's interior design:

1- they require a massive feat taxi which offers almost purely vertical growth, to have your companion you MUST spend at least 4 feats which all give your companion REQUIRED numerical growth, aka:
-feat tax
-feat chain
-vertical growth
And those are all things that pathfinder 2e specifically tries to avoid mixed up!

2- they're lame as hell, companions have practically no customization, with construct literally having none at all, and every item Is utterly useless; if you wanna focus on your companion there's literally nothing you can do (Napoleon meme), they're Stuck with being the same from level 1 to level 20

3- they scale horribly, this Is caused by Two things.

1- the gaps between feats are too big, companions generally start to really suffer from level 11-13 and from level 17-20 because their scaling Is tied to feats! And there aren't any to cover those specific levels!

2- their numbers are Simply too low, look, i understand that their only utility Is being a meatshield and grappling but It comes to a point where the player's map actions are Better than the companion's non map actions!

Trip.H wrote:

RPG-Geek wrote:

... In PF2, there aren't any unavoidable attacks. Even your example gave you a 40% chance, with a reroll to avoid the effect of Belcorra's Feeblemind spell. ...

Dude... an RNG outcome is not player agency, how is this something that needs to be explained. Rolling the RNG generator has 0 choice involved, it's not agency. Holy crap I didn't expect to get this far in with that kind of misconception being present. Rolling a save is a cutscene that the player is forced to advance, there's 0 agency involved.

That's the trade-off for using dice rather than having to physically perform the actions of your character or using some other skill-based method of action resolution. It's inherent to the design of any game that uses dice, cards, or other pseudorandom means to generate a range of outcomes.

Quote:

If the PC has 0 hero points, the idea that it is *literally* possible for Belcora to go first, and then use Feeblemind to end a PC with 0 decisions/variable actions taken by the PC, is completely nuts.

(and the existence of such spells itself changes the meaning of hero points, which then need to be saved due to being the one single lifeline against such instant, unavoidable death)

"If a person is just sitting in their living room, the idea that it is *literally* possible for them to get hit by a stray bullet without any warning or time to react is completely nuts." (and the existence of such events itself changes the meaning of being comfortable in one's own home. In some cases, one might feel compelled to design their home to be bullet-resistant or wear a bullet-resistant vest to feel safe. This is clearly unacceptable and an example of poor design.)

Do you see how wrong it sounds when you apply your ideas of what make a good game to real life? If we want to simulate risk and chaos with dice, we have to accept that certain undesirable outcomes are and should be possible. The further we stray from the idea that, as unlikely as it may be, bad...

Are you unironically bringing up real Life in this? I Hope you're being ironical cause no One in the history of ever has ever wanted true realism in games, games are literally the opposite of realism conceptually and philosophically.

Claxon wrote:

You ever play Dynasty Warriors? Where you're one person killing hundreds and sometimes thousands of enemies? That's my jam.

Yeah, they're terminally boring to me. If I want to bash buttons, at least give me a Bayonetta or DMC where there's a challenge in getting good combo scores.

I mostly play BattleTech 2018 modded to the gills with an ultrahard difficulty mod, and I'll still go into battles 10 difficulty ratings (in a rating system out of 40) higher than me and walk out untouched.

Quote:

Can I play a super tactical game where I'm thinking through every decision and making the "best" decision with the knowledge I have? I mean probably, but that's not what I want to put into the game, and it's not fun for me to put in that amount of work.

I don't get this mindset at all. If you don't need to sweat at least a little, where's the fun in overcoming challenges coming from?

If i wanted to overcome a challenge i would either go play professional football or get down and prepare for my wittgenstein exam for my philosophy Major. Y'know, things that actually would be useful. I wanna play a roleplaying game where i'm not Stuck in my boring cog in the machine world, ever Heard of escapism?

Fabios wrote:

Fabula ultima, call of chtulu, not the end, the last Torch, Kids and bikes, dungeon and dragons 4th edition

I can list systems, too, but doing so doesn't make them objectively better.

Each One of those system Is modern, a great winner in its own niche and has a much Better game design (cause It follows ACTUAL game design, not copying a dumbass in his basement winging It).

Oh, add lancer, 20 times the complexity and build variety of pathfinder

Fabios wrote:

Ravingdork wrote:

This is not some lazy isikai anime in which the party is overpowered and invincible right out of the gate. This is a tabletop roleplaying game, possibly the finest there has ever been. To insinuate that the math is badwrongfun is an insult to the developers that spent countless hours getting the math exactly right for the type of game they wanted.

This isn't about game design, but about heehawing one's personal preferences as the only correct way. Anyone who reads this thread and says otherwise are the ones being disingenuous.

"The finest there has ever been"

LOOOOL! pathfinder 2e Is the best d20 ttrpg ever that's for sure, but It's soooo far from the best ttrpg ever, It's actually exilerating that a system so convoluted and messy can be defined as the "finest"

Name something *objectively* better. Not subjectively, not your opinion, objectively better.

Fabula ultima, call of chtulu, not the end, the last Torch, Kids and bikes, dungeon and dragons 4th edition

This is the "better game" to me, so I'm sorry for having the wrong fun, I guess?...

Again, with all due respect and without being mean, yeah you're kinda wrong.

There Is One such things as personal preferences (which are sacred and i cannot argue againts them) and game design (which can be treated as an academic subject), and here we are talking about game design, not personal preferences.

Like, i know this metaphor might sound stupid but It's the best i can come up with: i'd rather read furry smut all day long than reading the kharamazovs Brothers, and those are my personal preferences, but i would never, in a discussion that tries to be objective as much as a discussion can be, Say that an ao3 monster hunter world's smut fic Is Better than One of the greatest novels to ever be written

Personally I agree with Deriven on this, there's no real issue with these numbers. It makes the early levels "more deadly" because honestly, why wouldn't they be? You're new to adventuring, or at the very least out of practice and likely to take a beating in all out combat.

This kind of reasoning Is, and i don't mean to sound unkind, genuinely the reason the ttrpgs space hasn't evolved much in all these years: you're applying narrative "common sense" reason while we should all apply ludo-narrative academic reason in such situations.

The main purpouse of EVERY SINGLE GAME EVER Is to be fun, not to be realistic, not to be accurate, but fun, this Is the reason there's not a secret roll to see if you're gonna die from a stroke all of a sudden, It's the reason that shooters gun don't work like in real Life.

If we Want to create Better games we should completely ignore common sense and focus on academic game design

Ravingdork wrote:

I'm not convinced the underlying math at low levels is problematic. I suspect that perception stems far more from the imbalances found in some of the earlier adventure path modules, which are known to have been calibrated poorly as the rules were still being written at the time.

The lack of an HP buffer combined with the most rapid period of numerical scaling in the game objectively make combats against higher level enemies more lethal. You are correct that the early modules are balanced poorly, but part of that is just that the encounter-building guidelines are not functional at low level. A single APL+2 enemy feels more like a severe (or rarely extreme) threat at those levels. APL+3 is a nightmare.

I also, personally, think the encounter-building guidelines have a hard time hitting "engaging, but not lethal" at low levels. My experience is that there's barely any daylight between "snoozefest" and "people are getting crit to the ground frequently" if you follow the encounter builder, especially with the lack of APL-3 or APL-4 enemies to fluff out encounters.

Low level encounters fail to hit that sweetspot specifically for the math problems that game has at that level range.

It is an RPG. You learn to play from the experience. These games are not simple bored games. You want the players to develop their own play-style and think about building a character mechanically and creatively including personality, motivations, and getting into doing a bit of acting. When they first start, you want them to get into the spirit of the game, which is playing make believe with rules.

Problem is: the game changes drastically from low levels to mid levels. my point is that 1-5 pathfinder is a COMPLETELY different game than 7-20 pathfinder mathematically speaking

Since there's going to be, or there already is, a stream of new players coming to the game i think that this argument is not at all unproper to discuss.

in my opinion the game fails at teaching new players how they should play the game: low levels are COMPLETELY focused on damage and innate survivability:
-the first since a crit can and probably will oneshot most enemies, and heavily injure some bosses; plus there aren't really any worth debuff spells to use, focusing wholly on damage is therefore not only the most effective strategy but highly incentivized by the fact that enemies WILL also do that! "three fighters and a bard" didn't come out of thin air.
-by innate survivability i mean the survivability of the base chassis of the class, in later levels thanks to items and abilities almost everyone will have resistances and means to significantly reduce damage taken, at lower level the best you have it's shield block which, while incredibly effective, doesn't really permit any serious stalling. (a high level kin can tank a boss due to abilities, a low level barb can tank a boss due to his enormous hp pool).
these two factors, coupled by the fact that some classes genuinely get an enormous spike around level 7+, have new players focus on raw numbers and come to conclusions such as:
-rogue suck (sorry, had to :p)
-casters suck
-the best party is 3 martials and a buff oriented caster.

what do you think?

.

I think part of the issue here is that, as Agonarchy says, you're trying to specialize a class that is intentionally generalist. The nature of Kineticist is that it has a suite of feat options (like weapon infusion, which is practically mandatory imo) that ensure it always has a decent option to contribute. If you start specializing with something like this Oracle archetype build, you start losing your fallback options, get stuck forcing one alright trick, and you're screwed if it doesn't work—the exact opposite of how the class is designed to function.

I disagree. The kineticist, in my opinion, Is an inherently specialist class which Is forced to generalize since most of its feats are bad.

Practically speaking; a kineticist doesn't have many choices, they have, give or take, 14 spells they can choose as they level up; that's an insanely low Number! For a generalist! What i think goes on Is that, since you have a handful of good feats, you're incentivized to build around them and then, when you're done, look around to find other good feats to pick up without any cohesiveness (i Hope It's a real Word).
I'll give a dumb example: my kineticist Is mainly Fire/earth, with Oracle dedication, the only other thing i could get would be the aura junction+thermal Nimbus at level 5, but that'd leave me with useless feats (bar Spikeskin) until level 12! And therefore i took wood as a new element so i could take wood's Good feats.
I DID became a kind of generalist, but not organically. Sorry if i explained myself poorly

I'll preface with two statement, nay, three:

-English Is not my mother tongue, therefore i exscuse myself for any grammaticale mistakes.

-i'm currently playing a kineticist, as It's my favorite class.

-i've thoroughly "studied" the kineticist, i really think i know my stuff. i Hope to not sounds accondescending, in case i exscuse myself.

Now! The critique, written in a miscellanea of points:

-The kineticist suffers from a slight ivory tower design. The class works but It requires a serious building effort. A good amount of its feats are completely useless; they'd work very well as situational spells to swap out if needed, but as your ONLY thing (since you get a "new spell" every 2 levels) It's Absolute insufficient.
Let's take a Fire kineticist as an example: you'd think that you could Simply blast stuff with fireballs, but that's completely wrong! Not only your build requires you to be melee until level 10 (aka, basically your whole campaign most of the time) but It also requires to use a "death by a thousand cuts" strategy, where most of your damage comes from proccing weaknesses and from the Fire Oracle dedication everyone gets.
It suffers from the same design choice casters suffer from: 90% of your Power comes from building choices. But while a caster can easily change spells a kineticist can hardly do that.

-"The caster Blaster everyone wanted!" LoL no.
The kineticist has an incredible amount of TWO damage builds, and both require an indecent amount of cheesing (Fire with Oracle dedication and earth/air with triple boomerang juggling). While every other build focused mainly on being a weird tank/support.

Fabios wrote:

now spamming Two flourishes a turn Is actually a viable damage strategy

Er what did I miss that allows 2 flourishes a round let alone per turn?

Nothing, i'm a dumbass and worded It poorly because i rushed.

I meant to Say that now attacking twice a turn, if possible, Is a consistent and viable damage ztrategy on a swash. Not two finishers i'm dumb. My mistake

The problem with TTk in my opinion it's that it is completely impossible to calculate accordingly, even paizo failed to do so in my opinion (they can't me look dead in the eyes and say that gunslinger has a great ttk, it's simply untrue).

while DPR is simple but customizable enough that you CAN get something that's good enough, not precise, but good enough

This Isn't meant as an insult to anyone, this Is Simply something i noticed and that i want to talk about.

Obligatory prescriptum: i have Two Active campaigns, in One i play a purely defensively oriented character, in the other i play a Fire/earth/wood kineticist

1- The moral argument:
I see that there's this weird concept that doing damage Is inherently selfish, in my opinion It really Isn't, It's a part of the game to which selfish people tend to gather because it's prone to big Hero moments and therefore It LOOKS selfish to a lot of folks.
The game heavily emphasizes utility alongside damage for a lot of martials characters, the only genuinely purely damage focused character i can think about Is a starlit span magus. Even a barbarian that strikes three times per round (let's take an Extreme case) Is STILL contributing to the team by Simply exhisting in front of people, getting hit, and so on and so forth.
Therefore i think that being unable to discuss dpr and damage building without being labeled as a "selfish noob" Is annoying

2- the technical argument:
"Once you really think about It you realize that damage Isn't important at all" well, i might sound mean for what i'm going to Say, but then you (you as impersonal) Haven't thought about It enough.
Any Given fight Is fundamentally a race between Two cars, damage Is the ONLY thing that makes the cars go forward, everything else (heal, utility) Is setting back the other car.
-ps: technically buffs put a multiplier on how fast the car Is going, so there's that.
Both are equally important! If the car doesn't go forward you'll lose, if the other car goes faster and you don't hold It back you'll lose too!