Faemeister's page

You see, if you get fired instead of quitting they gotta give you your settlement pay for years of service, a fact that Mammon's church is no doubt aware of...

I posted about this before but Protection from X is now Protection, and it gives a non-conditional +1 status bonus to AC and all saves. You can upcast it to 3rd level to scotch-tape your own Circle of Protection, too, which is an incredible defensive boon to any party with a Cleric.
And unlike Bless, you get to select the target of the emanation as well. It doesn't obsolete Heroism or anything, but I'd be hard-pressed to use it over the killer combo that is Bless + Level 3 Protection, provided you have at least one round to get ready for combat (or have other party members with Bless).

A few scattered thoughts, but applying the clarified rules without making hard fights more lethal would definitely involve some getting used to from the players at the table, which could be tricky in ongoing campaigns where things like builds, party synergies, and access to competent healing might be set in stone and thus hard to change.

It feels like with how dangerous getting up after going down can be, the game effectively incentivizes characters that can operate at near-full effectiveness while at range, to the detriment of melee-oriented characters (including most Barbarians and all those who dumped DEX). Having powerful, consistent ways to mess with enemies' actions is more important now, conversely.

By the way, how do you guys feel about fast healing now? Some sources of it, like Witch's Life Boost, scale well enough to still be useful, especially since they help you avoid dropping to 0 in the first place. But some other things like mutagens could turn you into a liability if they heal you up from the floor, again, unless you have access to strong in-combat healing.
It goes back to what some people were arguing for at the start, that it might become tactically sounder to just let your dying ally stabilize on their own while you try to close the fight - if you spend your turn trying to heal them and then they have to spend theirs getting away from the danger (and the action!), then neither of you used your actions to help stabilize the fight or tip the scales in your favor. I can't help but think this has the potential to run counter to the way the game is set to be played, with a heavy emphasis on teamwork and party coordination.

Those are the impressions I've gotten so far after one session at level 7, at least...

Yeah, that's why I mention it might not be OP's cup of tea. Impossible to tell without specifics, so I just threw 'em there.

Apart from Champion and Fighter, there's also the Sentinel archetype; it's a pretty affordable way of getting both a better armor proficiency (the dedication itself) and its armor specialization effect via the Armor Specialist feat at 6th level, which is one level earlier than even Champ. It works out well for both martials and casters if you plan around it, and if you're getting Sentinel to nab heavy armor then there's also Mighty Bulwark, which kicks ass.

Lightning swap could have been a good candidate for a General Feat. It eould benefit a lot of classes and playstyles.

It feels the remaster was super rushed and some basic things or considerations were just missed.

This is just me, but I feel the same way about Blade Break as a skill feat. Then we could at least pretend to have a STR based analogue of Kip Up to help against being shoved.

But that's not what I dislike about the remaster: I think the Powerful Shove changes are completely arbitrary. Seeing part of the benefit restricted to either clubs or polearms got my hopes up that we'd get a bunch of new weapon-group specific feats, but no, they just decided to make that one feat less usable by certain characters to sprinkle some unneeded realism onto it.
It's a minor thing, but it sticks out like a sore thumb when no other feats besides the reworked Dragging Strike) work like that.

They fixed Additional Lore too, now you can take it for a Lore skill you already had, like those granted by backgrounds. Nice.

Did you guys see the Bless and Protection from X changes? The emanation on Bless starts out bigger now, and Protection now simply grants the target a non-conditional bonus to AC amd saves (!) - it can also be upcast to 3rd level, granting the same benefits in a 10 foot emanation around the target (!!!). You can replicate a better Heroism (+1 to attacks, AC and all saves) now for your whole party with just a third level and a first level spell!

All in all, Clerics are starting to look like the big winners here, at least from what has been shown.

More classes should be simple and not have the predefined paths. One of the biggest issues with other classes is exactly that: They are super complicated with very stricts paths, but then no real support compared to what the Fighter/Monk get.

I completely agree here, it's staggering how many good feats Fighter gets compared to some other classes. Anecdotical, but I'm playing one in a game right now and the other day I told one of my friends, a Magus, that there were around 5-7 level 10 feats I'd consider good to amazing picks for my character. He told me that for his, he had basically 2 choices that did anything. Not feats tha he was particularly eager to take like I was, mind you, just 2 that he could reasonably choose from because of his character, subclasses and other restrictions.

I'm thinking it just might be a particularly uneventful level for Magus whereas Fighter has a whole lot of things to sallivate over at 10, but a lot of thought was put into Fighter feats and it shows. I'd like to see the same extended to other classes, eventually.

This kind of build is rarely or never the comparison point against other classes, or part of the analysis of why the fighter is strong, which tends to focus on a damage potential that's marginally better than other classes.

I love the variety of character types that the feat spread offers. Many big brawly guys, some noble fencers, some scrappy shield soldiers. The blank slate is great.

Honestly I think the feats are stronger than the +2 (though they work off each other).

Anyway, good class. Those are my notes.

Au contrairie, I think that kind of character is incredibly powerful! My experience has been similar to that, although we're only level 6 so far and I favor double-hander swords instead. I've been meaning to play an Intimidation build centered on shredding enemy AC since the playtest, and I'm extremely happy with how the game delivers on that front. Thing is, it's just one way to do it, you can more or less mix and match whatever feats you want and you still end up with a good, cohesive whole.

Man, I wanna play some more now. Saturdays can never come soon enough.

Faemeister wrote:

That's where I believe a considerable part of their class identity lies besides simply being the best at hitting things: feat selection and customization.

If a fighter's identiy is "having none", I don't call this an improvement...

I think this may be an issue of perspective. You say it has none, when the class is purposefully designed as a blank slate so you can do whatever you want with it.

What's the fighter's equivalent of a barbarian's rage, a monk's ki powers, a magus's spell, a ranger's edge, a rogue's sneak attack and rackets, a gunslinger's way, a swashbuckler's style or a champion's cause?

I think that's a bit reductionist. Why would every class one specific action they need to use at least once every combat to define its mechanical niche? More to the point and if you're arguing mechanics, is access to Attack of Opportunity since level 1 not flavorful enough? You could level the same complaint to Monks despite Stances being a shared thing between them and Fighters. What about actions with the Press trait? Almost anyone can poach something like Combat Grab from dedications, but the Fighter is still gonna be best at it on account of the "must be under MAP" rule taking their higher accuracy into consideration.

pixierose wrote:

I think the fighters power is a bit exaggerated. Most other martials get riders to damage of some kind that make their attacks hit harder, fighters lack that in exchange for the accuracy, an accuracy that is still affected by the dice rolls.

White room testing has its value but so does actual play, and from personal experience I've had combats or whole sessions where the fighters accuracy boost did not save it from bad rolls. This is a major outlier, but I do recall the time my level 5 fighter wiffed their entire turn and their friendly neighborhood paladin crit 3 times in a row.
The developers also feel as if fighters are qoeking as intended.

Are you really going to sit here and use an anecdote to excuse the disgusting mess that is an Improve Knockdown Fighter? Show me any single action in the game as efficient as a Fighter knocking a boss flat on their back while dealing damage.

You're not asking for something particularly hard and I know Fighter feats well, so I'll level here.

There are cases where a monster might be better off biting the bullet and staying prone, taking that -2 to attacks in order to not lose an important action. This could be a legitimate consideration if they're already flat-footed from a different effect (like the sword specialization effect, which contrary to popular belief isn't always strictly inferior to that of flails and hammers), or if your party is loaded with reactions that trigger on movement. Both of these instances are perfectly fine with me, as they incentivize (and reward) teamwork.
Debilitating Shot has none of these things to consider, you can just fire and forget. If they end up prone by other means then it's incredibly easy to disengage away from the monster's attack range, effectively neutering two actions and making them unable to do anything meaningful with their last remaining one.

Of course, fixating on the numbers only tells you none of this; playing the game does as it was pointed out by others, in the sense that it helps put all these considerations into perspective.

If you think Fighters are OP but bring up Improved Knockdown instead of Debilitating Shot (which I do think is pretty stupid power-wise, but also a rare outlier), then... well, it doesn't necessarily dismantle your argument that Fighters are overpowered. But it does take serious credence away from these bold, heavy-handed claims you're making.

And this is just one feat, from the same class, at the same level range! I could go on and bring up Wolf Drag, which can be gotten 4 levels earlier, gives your attack Fatal d12, is not a Flourish and gives you a benefit on top of the prerequisite feat (a Stance), rather than replacing the prerequisite outright like Improved Knockdown does, meaning that in practice you get one feat less compared to the Wolf Drag user. So pretty much strictly superior in almost every way, as I'd be hard-pressed to think a simple +2 in Fighter's favor is worth all of that and more.
Admittedly, I don't know the feat lists of other classes very well so there may be other things that give Improved Knockdown a run for its money, but hopefully this illustrates that it's not the be-all end-all god feat some claim it to be.

You know, a lot is being said about the Monk's class identity boiling down to " being the best at Unarmed combat" and I'm just not seeing it. Maybe in a game like Final Fantasy I where character classes govern mostly static stuff like HP or access to weapons and armor, but that was like 35 years ago and PF2e has better ways to differentiate between classes.

Following this same logic, you'd need to give the Monk Legendary in all weapons you can wield with Monastic Weaponry too, since evidently Monk is meant to be better than everyone else at using monk weapons: it's faulty logic, and it completely sidesteps the fact that even if you're not hitting with that coveted +2 to attacks, you don't particularly need it either to establish yourself as a master of unarmed combat.

This is important, as there is a massive distinction between "making the most precise strikes with your chosen weapon", which is what the Fighter does, and the dozens upon dozens of exclusive class features and feats Monk gets that enable it to shine on its own. You know, the crazy acrobatics, the custom save progression, the harnessing and mastering of ki/chi/qi, stuff like Flurry of Maneuvers... you don't even need to go into all the mystical Wuxia s%!# you can do if you just wanna play a Pugilist, either! What I'm trying to say is that "unarmed attacks" aren't the Monk's defining feature: what actually defines them, relative to other martial classes, is the whole slew of things they can do as a result of their physical and spiritual training.

Faemeister wrote:

I haven't been able to keep up with the announced changes, it's a bit hard with so many threads to sift through... Does anyone know if there's a compilation of what's been confirmed somewhere, or at least a link to what was revealed at Paizocon?

I don't know if there is a more comprehensive collection, but you should be able to find most of the stuff we know over here.

Wonderful, this is exactly what I was hoping for. Thanks!

I haven't been able to keep up with the announced changes, it's a bit hard with so many threads to sift through... Does anyone know if there's a compilation of what's been confirmed somewhere, or at least a link to what was revealed at Paizocon?

2e is quickly becoming my favorite system, alongside the Log Horizon TRPG. They share tons of the same modular design, and really, the combat in both both is simply a joy to play.

All the problems people have listed above get solved just by exercising a bit of prudence and restraint. Sudden Charge and then stride halfway between them and your party; they now have to waste one action getting back to you, potentially more if you invested in movement speed. Charge forward then stride to the side and now they have to choose between engaging your teammates or chasing after you.
Even past round 1, it's amazing if you need to reposition unless you have a better Flourish for the situation, because the extra Stride guarantees you'll be able to outmaneuver anything in close proximity. Weave between enemy ranks without having to deal with enemy reactions or hazardous terrain, go in deep to destroy high priority targets, use it to set up flanks for free, that kind of stuff.

It's incredibly versatile turn to turn, which makes it fun to boot.

Claxon wrote:

YuriP wrote:

First of all, I do not imagine or regard order and chaos with the same antagonism that good and evil have. So much so that in the mythology of the game and in the deities of Gods and Magic you rarely see a dispute of this type.

You may not view it that way, but in the lore of the cosmos of Golarion law and chaos hate one another as much as good and evil. Our cultural views make law and chaos not seem as big of deal, but it's usually because we conflate orderliness with good. Unless you throw out the word Freedom specifically (which is something associated with Chaos). But Western societies generally prefer orderliness to chaos and so we often turn law vs chaos into good vs evil.

To +1 what you're saying Claxon, there are actually entire series of novels that focus on the order/chaos metaphysical conflict. And yes, there is definitely a reductive order=good, chaos=evil vibe going on in Western civilizations.

I'm with you both here. Say what you will about alignment being outdated, I'm all about some good ol' cosmic struggle in the way of Moorcock's Elric books; that's how I've always understood the Law/Chaos axis in DnD since it was taken from the books directly.

This is a perfect opportunity to fix advanced weapon proficiency scaling for non-humans and non-Fighters, seconded!

It's a level 1 class feat, it's not supposed to replace your normal attack routine.

Yes, it's worse than two Strikes and yes, Exacting Strike mathematically trumps it damage-wise, so Power Attack is situational by design; that's the point, you use it against things with high AC or damage resistance. To say it's without its uses just because it's not a strict DPR increase is residual thinking from past editions.

Spoilers: something like Exacting Strike might give you more damage in a vacuum but it's still not gonna come up most of your turns (unless you're used to attacking thrice every turn, which is downright suicidal in the encounters you wanna be optimizing for). I don't think Power Attack needs adjusting.

The cool thing with things like gauntlets is that you can wear a single one and get to choose whether you want lethal or nonlethal depending on which hand you use. Or, hell, just using other body parts like your legs or your head for unarmed (nonlethal) attacks works too.

Supporting the above, you can get most of the way there with already-existing options regardless of what flavor you're going for. Personally, I think the Fighter has a great chassis for it assuming you're looking to make a blademaster with access to specialized weeaboo techniques, but tons of classes have minute choices like that to really let you dig into a theme. On the skill side I love the Intimidation feat tree for that same reason.

The Bola is an amazing addition for a number of characters, being able to trip at 20ft. range is remarkable for anyone that's invested into Athletics outside of *very* specialized builds (like Giant Instinct Barbarian or Fighter with Lunge, both wielding something like a Guisarme or using a Hooked rune), and even then those don't quite reach the same distance in most cases.

On the other hand, it would make Assurance (Athletics) even stronger in combat as the feat specifically states you don't apply penalties or bonuses to the check. This is something I feel I'll definitely see a lot in our game, since both our Wolf Stance Monk and my double-hander Fighter value the Trip maneuver immensely.