Class: Barbarian
Background: The Frog Animal Instinct Barbarian needs their secondary agile attack (Tongue) to be a d6 like all the others like it such as Cat, Bear, and Tyrannosaurus. It was only a d4 before because it got Reach in the premaster, by with that gone it’s just randomly worse than every other attack like it among the Animal options.
Well correct me if I’m wrong but it looks like the next step is for Maya to confirm for us how this works and if it’s intentional. I think it’s pretty clear cut that it takes a slot and is worthless, and that at least someone on the dev team (who worked on Battle Harbinger) doesn’t like it being worded/working this way, but it seems like until we get back word from the devs this is primarily going to be an echo chamber of people who want it reverted with a side a debate on if it somehow works the old way anyways but now has awful and incredibly misleading wording for seemingly no reason (and thus should be reverted).
MaxAstro wrote:
It seems to have been deleted, but I was responding to a post between my (now) two in a row posts where someone literally said none of the evil gods are allowed to be evil anymore and her not having SA in her 2e lore was an example of it, and then ranting about how anti-consumer Paizo was by not just using 1e’s old lore for all the gods as was. Outside of that context, yeah it’d look like a strawman and I’d totally deserve your response. TheFinish wrote:
I mean, you could say nearly any evil god who wants to spread misery or harm wouldn’t be opposed to their followers doing that kind of vile stuff. My argument wasn’t that followers of Lamasthu couldn’t, but that in 2e it was not something special or significant to her as a god such that she should be heavily associated with it and get called the goddess of SA all the time. Paizo seems to have very consciously made an effort not to bring that in from 1e (or at least not into the Remaster of 2e), and given the reality of how SA often gets treated in a lot of the real world (in a way very different than murder and mugging), the high potential to seriously trigger a surviver, etc I think it’s a good change that we should respect. If you want to run a campaign where her followers do that enough to be a noteworthy feature and your players all consent though, go for it. I just agree with Paizo[‘s implied belief] that it shouldn’t be a standard component, let alone a central part, of her lore. As for the monster spreading of it all, it should be noted her allowing someone to give birth to one of her children is literally her Major Boon and a thing many of her followers consider a high honour worth fighting to get from her; if it gets ‘given out’ randomly to nonbelievers it’d kinda cheapen all that. I don’t know of any other Major Boon people would argue should just randomly happen to people who don’t care about or even outright hate the deity in question on a frequent basis.
If some groups legitimately think this doesn’t count against the Rune slot limit despite not indicating that anywhere, then maybe it needs an errata for clarity alone one way or the other. If it had a sentence that said “this does not take up a rune slot or count towards your limit” then it’d be effectively the same as premaster and be fine - though it’d also be longer than just revering it to the premaster text to match the Battle Harbinger.
The premaster Champion feature for years was (bolding mine): Quote: Blade Ally: A spirit of battle dwells within your armaments. Select one weapon or handwraps of mighty blows when you make your daily preparations. In your hands, the item gains the effect of a property rune and you also gain the weapon's critical specialization effect. For a champion following the tenets of good, choose disrupting, ghost touch, returning, or shifting. For a champion following the tenets of evil, choose fearsome, returning, or shifting. In the remaster it was replaced with (bolding mine): Quote: Blessed Armament: Select one weapon or handwraps of mighty blows. You gain that armament's critical specialization effect, and you grant the armament a property rune of your choice from the following list: fearsome, ghost touch, returning, shifting, or vitalizing. During your daily preparations, you can change the spirit to inhabit a different armament, grant a different rune, or both. This relatively minor wording change is an absolutely massive change in how these things work and makes the new version infinitely worse to the point of being nigh useless. Whereas before it was an extra benefit any Champion could add onto their weapon regardless of what kind, now it is just saving them a bit of gold and taking up an actual Rune slot - with all the restrictions and caveats that that implies. Everyone seemed pretty sure this was 'a change for seemingly no reason/too bad to be true' on release that would be dealt with via a Day 0 errata, but none came. Then to make matters 'clearer' a few months later the Battle Harbinger Class Archetype for the Cleric came out, which has the Harbinger's Armament feat shown here (bolding still mine) at level 8: Quote: Your deity grants you extra power that you have learned to channel into your weapons. Select one weapon or handwraps of mighty blows when you make your daily preparations. While in your hands it gains the effect of one property rune. Choose either fearsome, ghost touch, returning, shifting, or vitalizing. This rune does not count toward your maximum rune count, and this choice lasts 24 hours or until you make your next daily preparations, whichever comes first. This is clearly a riff on the Champion feature and it uses the aforementioned original wording. But despite the Battle Harbinger seemingly proving the case that this was the intended wording for all along not we not only did we still not get the errata people expected with WOI, but just the other day we got a huge errata drop without a word on this subject let alone any errata to it.So to quote the Rogue Resiliency errata thread: "What is it? Bug or Feature?" And either way, do any players here think the way it works now is a good change?
That’s not how game balance works. If it’s confirmed this is WAI then it’ll change from me calling it an obvious error in need of errata to calling it a really awful design decision that should be looked at for errata. Its just a weird and massive buff on a class that was already outperforming several others.
I'm sure Maya is busy as it is, and if they don't run this back to the devs for us amidst all this I can't really hold it against them, but it'd be really nice to get some definitive word one way or the other on the Rogue Crit Fortitude and Champion Blade Ally Rune issues so we can know whether to stop bringing it up every errata cycle cause it just isn't happening or not.
I have to say Rogues still turning every single save type into a crit and Champions’ Blade Ally still being changed from Premaster to taking up a Rune Slot is super disappointing to me after the long wait. Love and appreciate the errata that we got, but those two being effectively confirmed as WAI is a huge misstep to me.
It’a not the biggest, but Frog Barbarian’s Tongue strike should be a 1d6 like the other agile secondaries of its kind now that it can’t get reach. I do think it’d be nice if they errated Animal Form and its peers to make it abundantly clear RAW that you lose all speeds not listed in your form while polymorphed. I’ve seen the Foundry team argue (and program in) that you don’t, so clearly spelling it out directly is needed.
Sarangay have a speed of 0ft because Paizo forgot to give them one. Also the new Poppet Heritage should probably replace the Flammable feature with a Conductive feature with the chosen weakness or something rather than just changing the weakness type on Flammable - because now you technically have ‘Flammable’ Ceramic Poppets that are weak to Cold.
It’s been about a month since this was announced and it feels like the only things keeping this from becoming a full blown OGL Crisis level loss of community faith and reputation off forum is people here hoping that somehow your explanatory FAQ comes with massive revisions to the core of what you’ve done and said you’re doing, and that most people have no idea this happened because nobody on YouTube with a large following has made a video detailing this yet. What are you guys doing Paizo? Cause I really doubt a FAQ explaining what you’ve done and that you’re not going to back down on any of this is going to help you at this point given everything we’ve read and had explained to us by you. You do indeed need to protect your IP and company, but this certainly isn’t the only way to do it and clearly isn’t the best way given how badly this has gone over.
Remember that unlike all those other ancestries you start with basically nothing that defines your ancestry outside of speed and size. A Crane would have low-light vision, but not yours because you don't get any ancestry feats for the first 2/3rds of the game outside of flight. Your bat? It also has no echolocation. Your moth? No Darkvision or Scent. These are just the senses alone, and what it'd take to match its animal counterpart in the bestiary. Aside from those there are lots of interesting animal feats that every other Awakened Animal would have a shot at and likely take besides a sense or two, but yours can't take any until you'd be at a high level in a 1-20/11-20 game. Saying 'you must really want flight if you pick a flying animal!' is missing the point of the OP. Yes, I do in fact miss not having more than [effectively] 3 ancestry feats by the time I'm level 20 - 1(!) for most players who end at level 10 - when they are what mechanically defines my animal on top of giving it the goodies ancestry feats typically get. All I'm asking for is Flying Animals to actually get a choice of feat at level 1 instead of being obligated to always get a feat tax on top of the feat tax others like them have to pay for Flight - two feats.
It’s not ‘functionally identical to automatic’ because you still need to actively do it - which is the opposite of automatic. If you somehow spent 10min in an encounter because you hate yourself, I don’t think any gm would go “oh, right, I guess you have all your focus points back now!” because you still need to use Refocus and that is its own (contextually exploration) activity you have to explicitly say you’re doing on top of whatever else. So claiming you literally don’t have to say or do anything to refocus, which is what it being ‘automatic’ would entail, is wrong.
I can’t find a single Creature that has “Land: 0” written for a speed. Which to me is confirmation that not listing a speed is absolutely to be taken as if it said 0, which means Sharks’ unwritten 0 speeds should overwrite your normal land speed - if the contention is that if it’s written it overwrites and otherwise lets you keep it. Someone else I spoke to also mentioned you have the same issues with senses. It never explicitly says you lose Darkvision and Lifesense or what have you, it just says you gain Low-Light and Sense. The whole spell really just starts to leak holes everywhere if you insist this is how RAW works in my opinion.
PF2E on Foundry runs it like this, else I wouldn't have even thought of this as a potential reading either. I was hoping someone would either be able to point me to something that disproves it, explain why this is fine actually, or else call for an errata or something. Sorry, I should have made that more clear in the OP.
So, my understanding of these types of spells is that you fully turn into said creature. Shark Form? You're still you in there but you're a full on shark. T-Rex Form? You're a T-Rex. The rules also make clear that when you transform you can't speak (cause your animal physically can't), and you lose any of your strikes that animal lacks - you as a crocodile physically have no way to make and throw your Leshy seedpods. So far makes absolutely perfect sense both thematically and mechanically. You also can't modify your statistics for various balance reasons. Also makes sense. Now when you decide what creature to polymorph into you have a fair bit to base your decision on according to what creature would be best suited for a given encounter or task. Things that can fly for aerial battles, things that do slashing if the enemy is weak to that, etc. But now we get to my rules issue. If you're in a shoreside encounter as a level 1 Nimble Elf Wildshape Druid you've got a great land speed of 35. Let's say your Elf wants to charge across a beach and strike someone at the shore, then go deeper into the water to fight something there. If you're just looking at speeds you might think your best Animal Form option would be Crocodile or Snake since those are animals that can traverse on land and also manage in the water since they've got land and swim speeds. You'd be wrong. No, if you turn into a Crocodile your land speed will drop to 25ft which is 10 lower than you could be getting... if you turn into a Shark. Yes since Sharks don't have a listed land speed - and they're a shark(!) - you might be confused, but since nothing says you lose your speeds that aren't in the stat blocks like they say you do for your strikes, by RAW if you turn into a Shark (something with no legs!) you can run across the beach at 35ft while holding your breath, stab someone, and then hop in the water with your new 35ft swim speed. And Foundry's PF2E System, because it's RAW, implements it this way. But the heck do these spells work this way? Surely this can't be RAI right? Cause it makes no sense thematically and also arguably hurts Form diversity mechanically.
Yeah the -1 to AC for the archetype is perfectly fine in my opinion. If anything I wish Oracle’s multiclass had followed suit and had more done to it to prevent Sorcerers who dabble in it from being able to poach all the best parts of Oracle with no downsides, and thus become better at Oracle things than actual Oracles.
The -1 is the only ‘nerf’ to the Barbarian multiclass and it already effectively worked that way for them premaster. The rest are incidental causalities of Barbarians getting buffed so they can fill their niche better, and since Paizo seems to think class niches were generally being encroached upon far too often by multiclasses premaster I’d say this is a pretty mild and fair change to those ends.
Worth noting, in case it hasn't already, that the game has rules for slower or faster leveling (requiring 800-1200xp per level), and if your players are all okay with it nothing would stop you from saying in session 0 "at level 10 we're going to slow advancement because it's better for the pacing of what I have planned". https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=574 So if you really want to have xp requirements be different at different stages of a campaign, you can do that RAW to some extent already. Generally though, 1000xp is just a nice easy to track and remember number and changing it drastically or often is just gonna confuse people for zero benefit.
Well, then this pack (and future ones) should also come with normal sized normal tokens as well and let us choose between them. Because I would not have bought this had I known it’d be effectively incompatible with all other tokens currently in use - and make it harder to see new small/tiny token art in general unless you zoom in a ton. Are they willing to do that?
JiCi wrote:
It doesn't say you can't retrain out of the level 1 feat because the retraining rules do. If you get rid of a prerequisite feat then every feat that required it turns off and becomes useless. As for more arms, it's just a general thing in PF2 that you can have as many arms and limbs as you want - but only two of them count as arms for doing anything mechanical. SF2 is gonna let you rotate out your pairs of arms if you have multiple, but even there it's only one in use for taking actions at a time.
Gisher wrote:
Correct, they don’t and are thus broken and need errata anyways. Hence my hoping for them to use a smaller aura when they fix it.
I'm also extremely confused as to how this affects FoundryVTT modules. Is a free module for the PF2E System on FoundryVTT that automates aspects of some Feats or Conditions (that are in System already, to be clear) now unable to do so if the Feats/Conditions themselves come from a mix of OGL and ORC sources? Cause if so that's going to be doing some significant damage to a number of ubiquitous modules in the community and potentially kill a bunch outright.
PossibleCabbage wrote:
Oh no, at no point was I saying you should have a fly speed from just the heritage. I'm saying the level 5 feat should be the start of the flying chain, not that it should start at character creation. As for flavouring, you could flavour your eagle having just enough flight to get things to eat but not to partake in combat or do much in exploration without any feats at all. The feats are primarily for combat and flight having a role in combat is for well well past level 1. Even if you take the level 1 feat as it is now and try to use it in combat I think you'll find it pretty pointless given movement upwards is difficult terrain and so 15ft of temp-fly speed isn't even enough to really do anything you couldn't do with Leap. In fact Leap when you're an Elf or Centaur or have Fleet will take you just as far iirc. Ravingdork wrote: The chief reasons there is a level 1 feat for Awakened Animals are (1) because if there wasn't some form of flight at level 1 for awakened birds, then Awakened Animal fans would have rioted, and (2) so that we can have non-flying animal concepts like chickens, flying squirrels, or leap frogs. I was super looking forwards to the ancestry and I wouldn't have rioted anymore than I did before when I saw Sprites didn't have a level 1 flying feat [until recently when they had a useful feat for interactions turn into a filler level 1 tax on pseudo-flying before the actual tax on flying at 5]. And while I can't really speak to the counterfactual 'what if they didn't' for anyone else, I do know I'm far from the first person to complain online about how shafted Flying Animals are in terms of freedom for feats compared to all their other heritages. And if you wanted to be a chicken you could just... wait for the level 5 feat that makes you sorta fly, just like you have to do already, and stop there. As it is most of the 'this is what kind of animal you are' feats are all level 1 anyways so you could get their Senses (for example) all in order for your chicken in the meantime and still be making progress on 'I'm a chicken'. I don't know, those don't seem like super compelling arguments to me.
Darrell Impey UK wrote: So that flying tengu & dragonbloods are more common than flying awakened animals? I have no idea what you mean by that. Awakened Animals are Rare and the Heritage in question that enables this long feat chain is literally called Flying Animal and has the same rarity as the other Heritages next to it. Tengu of all kinds are already more common since they’re just Uncommon, and why would you/they want there to be less flying Flying Awakened Animals at level 9? If your GM doesn’t want you to play an awakened owl or bat they can just veto the selection in the first place with full raw support on their side. Plus, in practice how things work now doesn’t make them any less common than if they errataed them as I’ve suggested - my change would just allow the people who want to play them have the ability to make their animal [have aspects of] their animal apart from “I don’t know, but it can fly!”. The only thing the status quo on the other hand makes less common is a Flying Awakened Animal who can do anything else (have a sense like low-light vision, act cute, have a second basic unarmed attack, scurry along if Tiny, etc) besides fly via Ancestry feats.
I’m really glad the multiclass Flurry of Blows has a cooldown penalty now so not everyone will/can poach a major Monk selling point and feature, but why doesn’t the multiclass Champion’s Reaction have one for the same reason? At least that’s what the previews have lead me to believe is how things stand in PC2.
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