Gorgo Primus's page

I never specified a turn around time because it doesn’t super matter so long as there is communication. If it takes them 5 months to get back to us with an answer after publicly acknowledging receipt (which does seem somewhat wild to me for a mere RAI question, but whatever), so be it. I never said it’d take 5min and I doubt anyone here thinks it’s that easy unless the question was something like “is it intended to use standard D6s when it says to roll 1d6”. Nowhere in my radio silence comment do I mention anything remotely indicative of thinking they can all drop everything and instantly answer anything. You should also note I started this thread in December and didn’t even send a PM until late January because I didn’t even think it was reasonable to expect a “we’ve seen this” response within a month.

The idea that its better to never say anything than to communicate at all, or have a to do list that may take an unspecified time, because trying anything can never please everyone is a self defeating attitude that’s responsible for numerous controversies and disasters from Kickstarter to AAA publishers. From what I know it really doesn’t take that much effort for someone working for Paizo (note this doesn’t have to be a designer or even someone directly connected to them) to come into a popular thread laser focused on a single issue after a month or three and say “we’ve seen this and we’ll work on getting an answer for you all when we can prior to next errata” - and not much more than that to then shove it to a master list of questions somewhere so people know they can stop asking.

As has been demonstrated a billion times over across the internet, people are always way more welcoming and thankful for a “nothing to report, but we’re working on it/have seen it” report than silence.

There is a very clear and easy middle ground to me between “random designer tweets out what they personally think is the answer to RAI without checking with others and then people run with” and “radio silence until an errata comes up and then if it doesn’t get answered then you have to roll the dice again”.
It’s “have someone come and tell us all in a public space that they’ve seen this and will talk about it, and then come and tell us the RAI and if things might change once they’ve had a group discussion and come to a real decision”. Preferably they can then go as far as to post a “questions we’re looking into” master list everyone can see so we know that even if it takes a few months they’ve seen and will get to it one way or another.

I’m disappointed that they’ve basically gone with radio silence unless you win the private email lottery, and then you can either get an answer or a “wait until errata maybe deals with it”. To be clear, I’m not blaming Maya because they didn’t give the impression this was their preferred route either and at the end of the day they’re not the one who can generate the answers.

I guess one of us might have to look into sending an email. I'm gonna wait a bit longer for some kind of response here before I do so cause I don't want to overstep and Maya could be busy or unable to answer still, but it'd be nice to get some sort of "we see this and will get back to you all soon" from someone given they asked for us to make the thread and all.

Please make it explicitly clear that when you use a Polymorph Battle Form to become an animal or something you lose your original speeds for the duration.

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).

magnuskn and TheFinish said it better than I could.

Gorgo Primus wrote:

Also if you can’t fathom examples of evil that aren’t SA, or can’t accept a literal demon god who births monsters to kill and desecrate all that’s ‘good’ in the world as evil because they don’t demand SA, that’s a you issue.

Also I see this kind of strawman thrown around a lot in these kinds of discussions and it's really not productive. It does not represent an attempt at honest discussion, but rather an attempt to cast the people you disagree with as objectionable individuals who can safely be ignored.

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.

Absolutely. Plus, from a purely 2e standpoint:

- She is Unholy.
- Her anathema does not prevent you from doing all the icky things she's called out as encouraging in 1e.
- She still wants to flood the world with monsters.

From a logical standpoint we can infer everything she did in 1e is still on the table for her worshippers, even if it's not mentioned.

Gorgo Primus wrote:

What 1e says is irrelevant - it’s a different game with wildly different ideas of what’s cool or acceptable in ttrpg lore (I mean it even printed Folca at one point) and afaik none of it is canon in 2e until it gets here.

Putting aside the idea of how relevant 1e lore is or not (I...

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.

Yeah the reorganization is awesome.

Ok, so now I'm back to "this is an awful intended design decision and they should errata it".

The premaster Champion feature for years was (bolding mine):

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):

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:

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.

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.

So very glad this happened before things became a full blown crisis.

Thank you Paizo! <3

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.

I’m not saying to just delete the level 1 feat and leave it at that. I’d suggest that it should just be part of the heritage. It’s not even a strong ability - it’s a very short jump because to even go up 5ft you’ve already used 10 of the 15.

Though I’m not opposed to your suggestion either.

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.

That'd be disappointing given that HOTW managed to get day 0 errata and some things are so broken in PC2 that GMs are having to rely on PFS rulings as holdovers to make them work.

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.

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.

I do think there is a problem when Wizard isn’t the best Arcanist. That and more slots than most is what it had going for it, and it has neither now. And that’s not due to nerfs to it, but buffs to others - so power creep seems like the appropriate term for it.

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.

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?

Gorgo Primus wrote:

Hopefully the Champion multiclass also has a smaller aura with a locked size to follow the pattern of changing to better protect class niches.

I don't see where either the remastered Champion dedication or the pre-remaster version grant an aura.

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.

Animal Instinct Frog Barbarian’s Tongue attack is only 1d4 when every other attack like it is 1d6.

1d4 made sense when it had reach, but it doesn’t anymore.

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.

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.

From what I’ve seen and heard from people who got their Player Core 2 PDFs early, the Tengu and Dragonblood ancestries can now gain a permanent fly speed upon taking a level 5 feat for a pseudo-flight and then a 9th level feat for a the real thing. Which is perfectly fair and reasonable to me given how powerful flight is in the system along with the fact that, for Tengu anyways, they’re straight up crow people with giant wings and so it’s already a bit weird that they can’t fly out of the gate. I’m also aware that for the Tengu these used to be at 9 and 13, and so this is a buff to them from how things worked premaster.

Awakened animals also have those feats, but their level 5 one requires a level 1 feat tax on top of that. This means that for Awakened Animals, for whom their feat choices are their primary way of mechanically demonstrating/matching what kind of animal they are, of the Flying Heritage need to use 3 of their 5 feats(!) on a simple fly speed that others can now do with 2 if they want to be an awakened eagle or bat or something that quintessentially flies as much as a crow (or dragon I guess) would.

Does anyone know why Awakened Animal works this way, and is there any hope of future errata to make it so that Strong of Wing (5) doesn’t require Take Flight (1) as a prerequisite so it’s but more flexible and closer to how the PC2 winged ancestries work? Usually I wouldn’t care much but given that reliant Awakened Animals are on their feats for their animal fantasy it’s now even sadder that you can’t really play as (for example) an awakened owl ‘properly’ until you’re level 9, and to do so you’ve given up getting the low-light vision they should have until even later because that’s a feat too. And then they have one last feat left for anything else on top of now being an owl.

But then again maybe this kind of concern/disappointment about how Flying Heritage pans out in retrospect after seeing Tengu is just me or maybe I’m missing something big in terms of balance considerations, so I’d be interested to see what the rest of you ah e to say on the topic.

If you parse the clause as “As such, it has no effect on [nonliving creatures or living creatures] that don’t need blood to live.“ then it makes perfect sense for Vampires to take bleed damage. They’re a non-living creature that needs (to drink) blood to live. Is that RAI?

Extremely mirror error, but it annoys me. On page 79 of PC1 there is an image of a character labeled as Nephilim, which is true but seems like the wrong label was placed in error given that the entire section is on Nephilim and every other character there is labelled as the specific kind they are like Angelkin or the like.

I just noticed the Edicts and Anathema for some gods in PC1 and GMC are different than each other in some cases. I’m assuming PC1’s are the correct ones and they just missed it for this errata pass.

The big example I’ve found being Lamashtu’s now demanding you indoctrinate others and not changing what makes you different (pc1) vs indoctrinating children and refusing to cure mental illnesses (gmc and crb).