Freakohollik's page

I agree with you mostly. I don't think the multiple stat thing is as bad you make it out to be, but I like the idea of paladin spells running off of CHA. Sounds like a good change to me.

D8 hit dice is a typo.

I sort of like the idea of 0 level spell casting. The thing with paladin spells is that paladins get them so late, and their spell list sucks so much. I'd like to see the paladins get some more use out of their spells. Perhaps through better spells, and/or making them available at lower levels. Either way, Paladin spells need some work.

As for detect evil, I like my paladins having it.

Right now, what I'd like the paladin to get is different high level abilities. I'm hoping the paladin can stay capable on his offense with smite, spells, and the new feats. I'd like to see paladins getting better at defensive things. Mostly saves. I like the idea of the paladin getting immunity to things and granting his allies bonuses on those saves. Works very well as a holy defender and it's a great ability to have. It's much more interesting to be than the auras the paldin gets now. To be clear I like the "paladin is immune to x. Allies get +4 on their saves vs x." type abilities. The aura of courage and aura of resolve type abilites. The other auras Paizo gave the paladin are forgetable.

I really liked alpha 1, but alpha 2 was a big dissapointment. These new classes are very unimpressive. Rather than changing the classes, Paizo tacked on a couple of extra abilities and called it good. Why did this take so long?
Here's how I see it

Barbarians were the best done. The rage powers were a good idea, but most of them were no good. However, I think there are enough good ones to justify the system. I liked the ones where you add your barbarian level to damage, attack, or AC. The rest were no good.

Druids were poorly done. The easier wild shape rules are nice, I suppose, but the rest is unchagned aside from allowing them to choose between a domain and an animal companion. Nothing new or different. It's just the same old stuff, which is odd considering how the 3.5 druid is supposedly the strongest class ever.

Paladins get more auras now and a few buffs. Also they don't have to get the mount. The buffs are nice, but if they paladin is supposed to be such a defender, he's going to need more than that.

Sorcerers. Wow, I could hardly believe how bad this was. Take the 3.5e sorcerer and give him some powers that make him better in melee. The wizard gets ridiculous domain powers, the sorcerer gets some irrelevant buffs. Metamagic casting time increase remains. Behind the wizard a spell levels half the time remains. Was Paizo too worried about destroying the bastion of raw power that was the sorcerer?

To sum up, barbarians are passable, druids and paladins are mostly the same, sorcerer remains without a use. It is no worse than 3.5, but it just makes me wonder what the point is. It looks like Paizo is bringing out a new ruleset just to keep the same stuff as before.

I'll jump on the hybrid bandwagon here. I like this approach a lot.

I was recently playing some 1e and I really liked how it was skill-less. I had the idea that my character could do anything resonably well. In 3.5e what happens is that you suck at everything except for the few skills you max out. I'd actually like to see skills go away and have this go back to DM adjunction, but since this won't happen I think the hybrid approach is the next best thing.

I would remove the level + 6 option though. Since we're trying to be backwards compatible here, it should cap at level + 3. If a player really wants that extra + 3, he'll need skill focus.

I could get behind lizardMEN, orcs, or a sahuagin-ish race.

I don't think goblins deserve to get the detail of a PHB race. I can't imagine any PC ever wanting to be a goblin. Yes, I played Burnt Offerings. I did not like the goblins at all.

A flying race would be troublesome. So much low level adventure design assumes the PCs can't fly.

I'm not a fan of the half ideas. Half ogres and half giants don't do it for me. They're just watered down ogres and giants.

As for more power races, like minotaur, this could be doable if Pathfinder finds some clever and usable way to handle powerful races. I am doubtful on this though. It would be easier just to use a race equal in power to the others.

I dont think a flat bonus is a good idea IMHO, why should every fighter be just as good with every weapon?

I don't see a reason why a fighter can't be just as good with every weapon. If you want to rock with some specific weapon, take one of the prestige classes focused around that. It is the fighter's task to be a generalist.

A number of people have been suggesting retraining rules. To my mind thats the same thing as giving the fighter the bonus with all weapons. The only difference is that you've now built some extra rules around it so you can pretend you're focused on one weapon. If your flavor demands that you use a specific type of weapon, then do so. Being just as good with the other weapons won't hamper you. However, being forced to specialize does hamper the rest of us who want to have our choice of weapons.

For example, I used to always have my fighter types take the weapon focus feat. I frequently ran into the situation where I have a weapon, say +1. Then I find a +2 weapon of the wrong type. So I've got two options, use the new weapon and have my Weapon Focus be useless, or sell the new weapon and use the gp to upgrade my Weapon Focus weapon. I'd always sell the better weapon so I could keep getting my Weapon Focus. The thing is that in this situation with either option, you feel that you've been cheated out of something. It's either "I don't get my weapon focus" or "I don't get the better weapon I found."

In my most recent game, I decided not to take and it's been great. It gives me freedom to use whatever I find rather than use the same weapon which I repeatedly upgrade.

Sure the fighter can get decent damage at high levels, it always involves power attacking to the max and finding some way to hit. The thing is that damage isn't what it used to be at higher levels. Damage is fine, but the wizard can throw out save or die spells. If its a situation where the enemies are going to make their saves, well the wizard has spells that put out some good damage too. If you want to let the fighter compete at higher levels give him some save or die abilites. Make vorpal force save or die on hit or something.

But no one wants to see things like that happen, so you've got to fix the other issues rather than the fighter.

Most people here have been suggesting bonuses to attack and damage or defense or something along those lines. Suppose you give the fighter enough of these bonuses so that he can compete. If he's competing with the wizard, he's as good as save or die spells. This guy is a total monster. And he can go forever!

I don't mind everyone wearing the same light, medium, or heavy armor types too much. What does bother me is that heavy armor is most often worse than light / medium armors. Even worse, the characters with the highest AC generally use no armor so they can get their entire dex bonus. Something is wrong here.

It might be better if the AC modifiers for medium added up to more than light and the AC modifiers for heavy added up to more than medium.

Well high levels are bad, but thats an issue for its own thread.

I'd like to see heavy armor and AC changed. In 3.5e heavy armor gets useless fast since you can't get any dex. The characters with the highest ACs in 3.5e are the guys who wear no armor and get all their AC from dex. That is messed up.

We're starting a game right now at 7th level. We've got a psion, a warblade, and a rogue. We all have AC 22. Thats wrong. The fighter type should have significantly more AC than the wizard type. Furthermore, the warblade is using a chain shirt since using heavy armor wouldn't raise his AC and would hamper his mobility. The heavy armor isn't more protective than the chain shirt. Now that needs fixing.

I don't see any purpose behind this rule change since the effect is nearly same as if it wasn't implemented. The only thing I see it doing is encouraging a one level dip into barbarian. Barbarian is already a popular 1 level class for the rage. I don't think this is the kind of thing we want to encourage.

Sure the fighter is lame at high levels, but is that because of the fighter or because of high levels? I would say it is because of everything else that happens at high levels. No one has been able to fix the fighter well since 3.5e is so wacked at higher levels. High levels are not a place for anything that doesn't do save or lose, which isn't in the fighter's bag of tricks. The fighter seems to get the most attention, but the paladin, ranger, and barbarian all have the same problem.

The first step to fixing the fighter would be to make a big list of everything that doesn't work at high levels and fix that first, then fix the fighter.

As to the original post in this thread. I hear your concerns about Paladins of non-LG alignments. For this to work, I feel that they would need to be specific classes. This is something we have tossed around the design pit a number of times (primarily in reference to the Hellknight). I am not sure that this solution is right for the core paladin. This may be a bigger sacred cow for me than it is for others.

Thoughts?

Jason Bulmahn
Lead Designer

I do agree that some non-LG paladins would be nice. I'd like to see something where you can choose your cause. Paladins could be able to dedicate themselves to a deity, an ideal (like what the deities stand for such as travel, magic, battle,...), or an alignment. It's all about options and that would make everyone happy with the flavor.

As for the crunch, Paladins should have a combination of martial and divine powers at higher levels. Right now the paladin's most popular features are the cha mod to saves and smiting. There could be more things like that at higher levels. I'd like to add my wis and cha to other things too. Maybe it could somehow enhance smites. These are all quite vague, but I'm not coming up with any good details off the top of my head right now.

Majuba wrote:

Fighters should be good at fighting with anything? They *are*. That's why they have a full fighter attack bonus. That's why they have tons and tons of feats to spend.

So, are Barbarians, Paladins, and Rangers not getting a full base attack bonus? Are they not allowed to take feats either? It usually doesn't take very long at all (especially for humans) to get the feats they need to match just about everything a Fighter can do in 3.5E. With an increased rate of gaining feats in the Paizo RPG, the one thing unique to 3.5E Fighters (a ton of feats) gets watered down further. You didn't need too many feats because you would just do the same attack every round. Fighters really need something to distance themselves from all other classes that get full base attack bonuses, because everyone else already gets feats.

Fighters shouldn't be good at fighting, they should be the best.

I like the way you think!

Freakohollik wrote:

So why is this important? Have you ever found a great weapon in an adventure that you didn't want to use because your weapon feats wouldn't apply if you used it? Its happened to me plenty times. Just avoid the whole problem by removing weapon and armor specializtion.

Or, as Carl proposed above, allow specialization, but make the bonus less than choosing a new group. That proposal, to my mind, is exactly what the doctor ordered.

You still keep some of the problem though in that you can't compare the weapons directly. You must compare the weapons along with what specialization bonuses you get for them. I'm a big fan of simplicity and I don't see why the bonuses can't apply to everything.

Well I don't think I'll be able to change your mind on this, but you're not following my argument. My argument is not connected to fantasy novels. I have always seen the fighter as the guy who is good at fighting in any situation. It's why he gets proficiency with nearly everything and its why he gets all those feats. Options. Exclusively using only a few types of equipment isn't options. It's forcing you to be good at only one thing. All those proficiencis aren't worth anything if you're only going to use one type of weapon and armor.

So why is this important? Have you ever found a great weapon in an adventure that you didn't want to use because your weapon feats wouldn't apply if you used it? Its happened to me plenty times. Just avoid the whole problem by removing weapon and armor specializtion.

Think about fantasy novels the heros have a weapon that they are great with like wih these rules

Think of Lord of the Rings Legolas and Gimley were great with there weapons they were not picking up new ones here and there they stayed with there type of weapon

So you would like your characters to be worse with some weapons for RP reasons? If you want to only fight with one weapon for flavor thats fine with me, but don't force that flavor into the rules.

The fantasy novel argument is not sound since D&D / Pathfinder is not emulating any one fantasy novel. Such a rule like what you suggest might be fine for a Lord of the Rings game, but what if I want to play a conan game? In the Conan stories, he'll fight with absolutely anything. Sword and shield, axe and shield, spear, two weapons, two handed weapons, fists, light armor, heavy armor, and so on.

Page 12 wrote:

Every 4 levels thereafter (9th, 13th, and 17th), a fighter

becomes further trained in one group of weapons. You
can select the same group of weapons multiple times. The
bonuses granted from this ability stack.
Weapon groups are defined as follows.

I feel this is too restrictive and encourage fighter to be one-weapon-ponies. I suggest the following instead:

Starfox wrote:

Every 4 levels thereafter (9th, 13th, and 17th), a fighter

becomes further trained in the weapons he knows, or learns to use a new group of weapons. Either increase the attack and damage bonus of your trained weapons by one, or add another group of weapons to those you can use with this ability.

In my example, a fighter adds +4 to one, +3 to two, +2 to three, or +1 to four weapons at level 20. In the original, a fighter has a +5 bonus to spread over all groups.

This is a step in the right direction, but I don't see why we can't just go all the way with this. Make all weapon and armor abilites work for all types. This way you're totally unrestricted to what type of armor and weapon you use. I think this a lot of people would like this.

I'm a fan of iterative attacks. The problems with the way they work right now is that they always miss, and you can't move if you want to use them. It would work if you got fewer iterative attacks, they could hit, and you could move while using them. They should also all be at the same attack bonus to keep things simple.