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Glad people found this useful. Point of the playtest I guess.

As I mentioned, commander seems to be B tier. I think that my party would have done better with Octavia the wizard tbh.

4 more chain lightnings, 4 more walls of stone (Which is an uber S tier spell imo), 4 more invisibility 4, etc.

Or Linzi the bard would have been casting harmonise fortissimo defence and dirge of doom. That's another +1 to hit most enemies, plus effective +2 to +4 to party defences, which is insane. Only 3 rounds per fight (Unless had quickened attacks with warrior muse to possibly prolong fortissimo up to 6 rounds each fight).
But, with the 2 fighters and gunslinger, most fights are over in that time.

As Gortle mentioned, spells can be more powerful, and I think that by mid levels, casters have enough slots to have resources for several fights in a row (Assuming you don't splash them all as you think there'll only be one fight that day...)

I think that as party gets bigger, commander falls off slightly tbh. Fortissimo bard getting +3 song is about 50% extra dpr that round. And that scales up with members.

Strike Hard! is one attack per round, so gets proportionally worse as party size increases.

The shield raise tactic looks very good, especially if all party members grab a shield. That's great action economy. But dirge of doom is arguably better, assuming enemies not mindless.

I'm hoping that commander gets buffed before release. I'd like to see another powerful martial class, besides fighter, gunslinger (with bard support), rogue and kineticist.

Commander Playtest – Level 12 Kingmaker dungeon delve

TLDR: Solid B tier class, possibly A tier for parties that build around him. With a few tweaks it will be a solid class to release.

To the devs, just want to say that this is the best system that I’ve played in nearly 40 years of gaming. I particularly like the commitment to continual balance improvements, such as buffing barbarian in the new core 2, and the annual play tests that have helped keep new classes roughly in line with the power of prior classes.

So, here’s my little bit to help: commentary on a 3 session level 12 Kingmaker dungeon delve using the commander as a gmpc.
(I’ve also filled out the playtest surveys as well).

Was originally going to be Octavia, wizard 12, accompanying the party, but changed it to an old warrior they’d rescued from a dictator’s dungeon.

He beseeched the party to let him join them and help to rescue his daughter from a fierce barbarian tribe.
(And as I told them it was the commander playtest they said ‘yes’).

I assumed that he’d know all tactics, being a grizzled old veteran.

Feats were: Plant Banner, Adaptive Stratagem, Wave the Flag, Efficient Preparation, Defiant Banner, Rallying Banner, Fortunate Blow.

Armed with composite longbow as I felt he was too squishy and action starved to melee.

Party composition:
Meat head fighter paladin rogue, dorn dergar, aims to pump out massive damage and debuff via crit knock down and greater crushing rune.
Tactical fighter. Reach sword, open handed, knock down blow, medic and Overwatch dedications.
Gunslinger - sniper, dpr, thief stuff and fake out in combat buffing.
Phoenix Sorcerer kineticist – primal caster. Timber sentinel when not using slots.
Bard kineticist – fortissimo spam plus timber sentinel when not using slots.

Main party of 5 has very solid dpr, being able to pump out disgusting amounts of damage and finishing fights quickly.

During the campaign, 11 other companions have rotated in and out of party slot 6, and now it was the commander’s turn.

Fight 1: Rescue 5 hostages from barbarian tribe. 24 level 8 creatures. 160Xp fight.
Commander gave gunslinger extra stride to fly down a cliff he’d suggested the party attack from, tell the 5 hostages they were being rescued and have them enter a bag of holding. Gunslinger then flew back up with the hostages. Sorcerer placed wall of stone to slow barbarians down.
Barbarians then tried to climb the 50’ cliff to get to the party, and party tore them apart. Sorcerer used 4 chain lightnings that did a lot of damage. 17 died, 7 ran into a cave in the cliff side, hacking through the wall of stone blocking it off.
Commander also good giving gunslinger extra attacks each round with Strike Hard! Tactic.

The party had thought that was the only fight of the day, which was why the sorcerer blew all his rank 6 slots in that fight. However, the commander’s daughter told them of a grim plot to retrieve a magic sword that would allow the barbarian chief to attain immense power. The party had to stop him!

Fight 2: Party had scouted the cave with prying eye and found 3 ninja type women inside. 80Xp fight, plus 7 survivors from last fight making it 127xp difficulty fight.

They were actually 3 level 12 clerics, and party had a hard time with a repulsion spell limiting fighter engagement. The 7 barbarians from the previous fight added some extra pressure. Commander mainly gave gunslinger extra attacks in order to finish the repulsion caster at range quickly, leaving fighters free to wade in and murder the 2 other casters with disrupting stance plus double reaction strikes.

Fight 3: Party found a secret passage and triggered a trap that summoned 3 Derghodaemons. 80Xp fight.
Party was trapped by 2 blade barriers whist the daemons attacked at range. Sorcerer dispelled one barrier, letting the fighters go ham.
Near the end, gunslinger and a fighter were both confused. Wave the Flag granted them 2 new saves, that they passed, negating the confusion. Nice.
Commander also making heavy use of Strike Hard! And Fortunate Blow tactics combo with the gunslinger.

Fight 4: Party came across a gibbed up corpse in front of 2 massive iron statues. Even the meat head fighter figured out they’d likely animate. Commander had prepared Pirahnha Assault. This was handy as the 2 Iron Golems animated. 80Xp fight.
The party made short work of them, with the commander negating 12 of the 15 resistance of each golem in turn.

Fight 5: 16 skeletal barbarians, 107xp fight. Commander had nothing to do as the party entered the bag of holding and the gunslinger snuck everybody past the skeletons.

Fight 6: A cleric 13 of Gorum and his 8 skeletal servants. 73*Xp fight.
*The cleric spell dc was 7 higher than the party casters, and he was hitting the fighters on 2+ in melee. This guy was not a level 13 creature…

Due to a language issue, party missed out on two free gear upgrades and instead it kicked off. Cleric opened up with striding away and repulsion. His dc was so ludicrous, the casters couldn’t counteract it. He then pelted the party with spells whilst the 8 skeletons blasted the party with long bow fire.

Piranha Assault was very useful here due to cleric and skeletons resisting 10 most damage types. However, once party blasted with a divine wrath, with 3 party members crit failing to save, leaving them sickened 2 and slowed indefinitely, the commander used Form Up! To help the party beat a hasty retreat. Luckily the cleric declined to pursue.

(If he had, the repulsion would be negated and the fighters would have exploded him).

Fight 7: After 20 minutes of puking and healing, the party came back. The cleric no longer had repulsion, and the sorcerer used wall of stone to trap the cleric with the fighters and block the skeletons. Due to piranha Assault, the cleric damage resistance was negated. Cleric was nearly down after two rounds, despite 250+ hp and fast healing 10. Cleric was going to dimension door away when commander had his turn and used Strike Hard on the meat head fighter to crit the cleric and finish him off.
The skeletons fell easily after that.

Fight 8: The party came across a possessed barbarian chief, level 15, who’d butchered his own men in a fit of rage. He also had 8 skeletal barbarians helping him out. 133Xp fight.
The chief charged in and the party held him at the choke with the corridor. After two rounds the chief had taken over 300 damage, was dying 3. But he didn’t die, and didn’t fall unconscious. His cursed sword wouldn’t let him!

Noting that the chief was confused, blindly attacking himself when nobody else nearby, the commander used Form Up! To help the party retreat until the chief dropped dead of his wounds after ten rounds of super raging.
The skeletons were easy to dispatch after that.

So, overall a successful expedition, managed with one day’s worth of resources. General consensus was that the commander was a solid addition to the party. However, would the wizard have been better?

THE GOOD:

Has some very powerful abilities. Piranha Assault, Form up!, Guiding Shot, Wave the Flag coming to mind.
Fortunate Blow combo with Strike Hard for the gunslinger was very nice. I think Fortunate Blow might be an S tier feat. Strike combined with a limited true target spell for one action that can be used all day looks very good.
Also has Mountaineering and Naval Training to aid greatly with exploration. Very nice utility.

THE BAD:

Some tactics just didn’t see use. Stupefying Raid might have been good in some of the fights, but the commander didn’t prepare it as other more bread and butter tactics available. End It! Looks very powerful, but it helps a winning party win harder. It can’t turn around a losing fight, or at least unlikely to.

Ended up spamming the same few bread and butter tactics as can only change one per fight, and that costs a level 6 feat…

Apart from climbing and swimming tactics, very little utility. Wizard could have prepped a translate and possibly avoided the cleric fight altogether. But, that’s the nature of martials. Maybe he’ll get more utility feats in the final version? To be fair, he’s already more useful than a lot of martials utility wise.

THE UGLY: Utterly bizarre power scaling on feats.

The mount doesn’t get independent until level 10. Why? It’s almost useless for the first nine levels of the commander’s career. He’s either going to pay the feat tax of going beast master or cavalier, or just not bother with it at all.

Plant Banner goes from terrible to meh to bonkers at level 15. Why not a more uniform progression?

Defiant Banner is meh until level 14, then it’s bonkers good. At level 20 a commander can spend one action to give entire party physical resist 17 in his banner aura. Why bother with champion or guardian with limited 22 damage negation at that point?

Class Dedications: As these 2 feats scale with overall class, I can see a wizard grabbing both of these and getting amazing value from one or both of them whilst still having the advantage of being a full caster. I assume that commander dedication will greatly limit number of squad mates affected by commander dedication feats and tactics?

FINAL THOUGHTS: Solid class. Nearly there. Just needs some tweaking IMO. Looking forward to it, and guardian in the new book next year.

Great job devs.

Hi folks,

Party managed to get Flakfatter away from the Lesser Death, but there's pretty much no way they can kill it as a melee heavy party, vs a monster with good AC and a very nasty misfortune aura.

So it'll just murder everybody now?

How did your parties beat it?

We figured it out folks.

The "incapacitation" trait on their main abilities that moves them from busted to merely very annoying to chew through.

I'd still hate to meet two of those at level 15. I still think they're over tuned for level 15 critters.

Hi folks,

Player in Hyphz campaign. We're almost done, with about one session left as we're in the red tetrahedron.

Anyway, we had massive issues with the four Immortal Ichors. We just had to run for it and was about the closest we ever got to a tpk (Apart from we blatantly did all die at end of book 2 AOA, which Gm fudged, due to our Leeroy Jenkins fighter pulling everything. But he's played sensibly since then).

So, just couldn't believe how powerful these things are. Looked up their stats on Archives of Nethys and boy, are they busted...

Their AC and reflex save are terrible, but with 350hp, resists all physical 15, critical hit immunity and regen 15, they ain't going anywhere fast...

They are blind, and their motion (tremor?) sense can be negated by flyers, but damn if this wasn't the stupidest most brutal encounter we've come across in all the APs to date.

TLDR: How are you supposed to beat these things when you're trapped in a small room with them, and having just triggered a confusion trap, making escape even more difficult?

looks to me like you need to be able to lob several fireballs in quick succession, then pray you have a source of good damage in the party.

I'd posit it's up to the group how many encounters they have to an extent.

eg, we avoided a CR3 encounter by using stealth. We still got the xp as we bypassed the encounter and got the treasure, but didn't have to fight a lvl 3 creature with 4 lvl 1 party members.

Our reward was not having resources depleted in a pointless fight.

On the other hand, my goblin sorcerer tested if a meal was poisoned by eating some. Good news was that he confirmed it was poisoned. Bad news was that it was poisoned.
After 2 crit fail medical checks he was dying. But wotcha going to do? How else is a WIS 8 goblin going to check for poison? That's roleplay baby!

***********************************************************

In terms of party sustain, I've come up with the following. For rogue, slower for other classes:

lvl 1: medicine trained. Assurance - medicine. (useless lvl 1)
lvl 2: medicine expert. Quick recovery.

Character can now treat a character every 10 minutes with guaranteed result 16 for 2d8 healing.

(Unless assurance not valid for some reason).

lvl 3: Ward medic. Treat 2 characters every 10 minutes. By level 15 whole party gaining auto 3d8 heals every 10 minutes.

Cheers guys.

So goblin is still possibly a viable option due to extra sneaky movement. Helps vs. being locked down vs. enemies with AOOs and reach weapons.

There still should be acrobatics as a skill but yeah the way it works right now is funky at best. I feel like characters should be allowed to use acrobatics to jump and climb at the very least. On that matter why the hell is jump under a str based skill anyways? How many times have you seen a Schwarzenegger-esque long jumper, high jumper, or climber?

Pretty sure this is what you meant by

Quote:

stole all the utility that could have been in Acrobatics.

but I had that epiphany while typing and now we're here.

In Commando Arnie's character jumped about 200' out of a plane into 5' of water with no injury. There's a darn good acrobatics check right there...

Hi folks,

1) Am I reading this gnome racial feat right? Level 13 gnome, rest 10 minutes and recover Level x Con mod HP?

So a caster class can fully heal in 20 minutes.

Or is it just considered not good due to the new treat wounds ability? That needs a healing kit, and a medium skill check, but otherwise works the same. Presumably they stack as well, for a full heal every 10 minutes?

2) Goblin feats seem kinda weak. Goblin Scuttle should be level 1? Is listed as level 9, but is a prereq for another level 9 feat.
Also, does it really only work when another "goblin" ally, not "Ally to the goblin" moves in, as per the main text. Is this a typo in the header text?

Just about managed to finish the adventure, sans the final fight as we ran out of time.

I was playing Wizibit, A goblin sorcerer. I was accompanied by my faithful minions: Lord Two Picks (2 pick crit fishing fighter); Bow Ranger; Bow monk; Healer Cleric.

For goblin feat I took the burny damage feat, cos my guys likes to make people do the burny dance. Had a familiar, hawk named Beaky. Didn't take improved familiar as a lot of those benefits seem to be wizards only.

I took both general feats for light armour and shield, for AC 27 (29). A lot of the general feats seem weak sauce apart from fleet and tough, which seem almost no brainers.

Only dakka spells I took were fireball and magic missile. Both were subject to spontaneous casting feat. I also had a wand of 10 lvl 3 fireballs and 10 lvl 4 enervates. As I had plenty of dakka I filled my slots with utility spells: Dispel Magic, Slow, Glitterdust, Dimensional Anchor, Fly, Freedom of Movement; Shadow Walk; Elemental Form, etc

There was something about a mission to find some bad guys. Wizbit just heard it as "Blah blah blah blah blah, bad guys to burn, loot to grab, blah blah blah, 2 months, blah blah". With that settled we started to explore a mysterious valley.

We came across a mysterious lake and I sent Beaky to have a look see. Then he got scoffed by a giant lake monster, like Samuel L Jackson getting scoffed by a shark in Deep Blue Sea.

Suffice to say that we goaded it to the shore to attack us. I cast Freedom of Movement on the fighter, plus some other guys that got grabbed. Fight was super hard, especially as 2 of my 3 fireballs did zero damage. Crit saves is harsh... We barely won. Admittedly our tactics were poor, trying to melee it, but Lord Two Picks wanted some glory. Him only rolling 1 hit out of 10 attacks didn't help us a lot...
Also enervate was disappointing. In PF1 it was horrendously broken, but the quad nerf to it has really hurt it.

We then met a dryad that wanted us to stop some Cyclops from ruining her woods. This we did by basically murdering most of them with fireballs, with some follow up to get round their "die twice" reactions and the rest ran off. We gave her a bag of severed Cyclops heads as a present, which she didn't seem to like. No pleasing some people. But she said she'd help us.

We met some gnomes that wanted us to kill 2 Rocs. This was okay as I fireballed them a load and cast Fly on Lord Two Picks, so he wasn't left holding his cock in his hands being unable to otherwise reach them. The shield was good as one attack on me hit AC28. Fireballing and raising shield each round seems a legit tactic. We soon ended up with 2 roasted big birds. Lord Two Picks again failed to perform as spectacularly as before. Archer damage seemed a bit more consistent. Good thing the monk had a bow or he'd be utter pap.

We heard about a big fire dragon and a fire giant. I was hoping that my sorcerer feat to negate some elemental resistance would be useful here. Nope, complete fire immunity. Hmmm. Maybe should learn some cold spells... Anyway, we tricked the dragon into thinking that the Cult were planning to kill her. She flew off (Beaky mk2 was keeping an eye on her lair, to be innocuous like). We then ganked the giant (Crit fail on a Daze cast at it helped), fairly easily and grabbed loads of phat dragon loot. We ended up buying 2 +3 picks, +3 hand wraps and a +3 bow. My sorcerer was hard enough and my minions needed the help.

We ended there, but apparently we'd succeeded as well as we could to reduce the cult defences as low as possible (Reminded me a lot of Mass Effect 3...)

1) Goblin Sorcerer is a nice fun hero. Lots of options apart from burning people to death. Even though that's really fun.

2) Felt bad for the cleric having to select each spell. Really makes it hard to plan ahead. Makes me not want to play a wizard either. A lot of the time the cleric seemed to be stuck with the wrong spells. I'd much rather all classes could use slots freely, like D&D 5th ed did. Otherwise I can't see myself playing anything apart from Bard or Sorcerer.

3) Enervate seems kinda weak sauce now. TAC is now very similar to AC, so a lot harder to hit now. And effects a lot weaker and capped. I'm not sure that I'd bother taking it.

4) Fly spell. Wow, super nerfed into the ground. Higher spell slot, fewer targets, far shorter duration, slower fly speed. Also the sorcerer dragon wings are weak sauced and magic items to fly are really nerfed. Feels like PCs really aren't meant to fly much. Does make me question the utility of melee heroes at high level when a hard flying monster, possibly with spells, can fly rings around us raining down death from above. An intelligent flyer, perhaps knowing rubbish speed and duration of fly could just fly away until the spell expires.

5) Picks. Awesome when crits hit, but meh otherwise. I've no idea as to the typical AC of monsters, but certainly a lot of the time the fighter was only going to be critting on a 20. So he'd be a lot better off with a higher dpr for normal attacks. Not sure how viable to have two swords for high Ac fights and two picks as back up to quickly dispatch low AC critters?

6) Can creatures staunch bleed? I assume on a 20 each round?

7) Does 5' extra move from fleet feat apply to fly speed from a spell?

8) Dispel magic rules seem kinda complicated, and having a rule on page 319 refer to another rule on page 320 seemed a bit clumsy.

Anyway, we had fun, which is the main thing.

Level 12 play test next week. Not pleased with such a limited range of magic items. I won't be playing a tricksy skill monkey hero then...

Hi folks,

Couldn't find this on the forums. Apologies if this has been answered.

I'm creating a level 7 Paladin for the 3rd playtest module. He's got 4x 2D8+2 heals per day, which I hope counts as innate healing...

My paladin has master crafting, skill level 9 (INT bonus 0). He's going with a hardness 10 shield and going to shield allies. But I understand that the shield will break super quick, so have taken quick repair skill feat.

With regards to creating an item for a high level starting hero.

How do I know what the DC is to create an item? Example in the book shows DC17 for a 4th level item. Does this mean an item is generally 13+LVL difficulty to create?

How do you handle a level 7 character wanting to create a stack of potions for his team? In theory they'd all be half price as could just buy the half price ingredients, then spend as many days as required to reduce costs to zero for second half of the process.

How about the 10% lost ingredients on critical fails?

Any rules on this that we've missed?