HyperMissingno's page

It's starting to become silly when people compare unarmed strike damage to two-handed weapon damage.

You know, one of those is prescribed lower damage universally because it actually gets to use their hands. Please compare to other things like a finesse weapon before I start comparing multiclass cantrip damage to 10th level slots.

This is not an unarmed strike vs. a two handed weapon. This is a focus spell with strength bonus vs. a two handed weapon with some extra class features and strength bonus vs. a buncha cantrips with casting stat bonus.

Exactly, HyperMissingno. When you have to pay a focus point, a 1st level spell (True Strike tax), a whole lot of money, a bunch of feats, and you still deal less damage than a cantrip?

That's not a good look for any ability.

It's even more spells if you end up using stuff like false life to keep yourself up. At this point I feel it's better to use the claws and then throw out bluff to keep opponents off of you by making it seem like glowy dagger is more deadly than it really is. Or, you know, pop it for that AC and resistance.

I didn't realize that 2-10 was better than 5-14. Or 7-16 from a raging barbarian. Or 6-20 from a precision ranger. Or 6-24 from a Power Attacking Fighter. By the way you have to spend an action for this 2-10 while the martial gets the 5-14 at the start unless they didn't have their weapon drawn already, something that's pretty rare in my experience and I'm in the AP where you need to sheath your weapon the most.

"B-but, but the s-strength score"
I would give you this argument, but you mentioned Finesse. The only way Finesse is going to help the claws is if the Str is 14 or below, and let me tell you 14 str/16 dex is gonna put a strain on that ability budget. You still have a casting stat to take care of. What, you wanna run around in melee as a bad fort class with only 12 con? Have fun in Paizo's poison chambers then. And that's before the HP problem.

The highest I can see someone reasonably expect push the damage of the claws early on is 3-11. Any further would leave you extremely vulnerable while in melee range or would sacrifice your casting ability too much. A focus point to just be able to deal 3-11 damage ain't worth it when you have cantrips dealing 5-8 (or 5-11) damage for free that you can use from range and run off your main stat. You get way more damage types too, and one of them hits two targets at once and runs off of saves instead of attack rolls.

Gods I was calling the offense part of Dragon Claws a shiny dagger but now that I look at the practical math I'm afraid I have to downgrade it to a glowy dagger. This damage is embarrassing if it's struggling to compete with the cantrips.

I feel I should clarify something. I feel looking at a spell called Dragon Claws and expecting to be able to tear into people like a gatdang dragon with it is not an unreasonable expectation.

Now what qualifies as that is subjective but I feel d4 + d6 with sorcerer weapon profs isn't gonna cut it. Cyouni's 2d6 on sorcerer spellcasting profs sounds better, especially since it gets more d6s faster. I don't think people would mind only getting one attack from it either, though I'm not the most offense oriented person so I might be off the mark.

Dragon Claws are still good past level 5. The problem is that it's not good in the way people want it to be. It's a one-action defensive spell with a shiny dagger you're free to use if you want. Most people don't want a shiny dagger on top of a defense boost when they see Dragon Claws, they want to tear into their opponents like a gatdang dragon.

I wonder if people would have a problem with Dragon Claws if it was called Dragon Resilience instead.

I'll be honest I don't think the fort saves thing matters all that much. They can easily get to Master late game with Canny Accumen, and while that's not as good as getting automatic crit success and happens later...it can happen.

Canny Acumen only gives you master at level 17. That's 6 to 8 levels later than other classes get Master assuming your campaign even gets to that level. I wouldn't call these small gaps.

I'd like to throw something into the ring that I thought of recently. Casters have crappy fort saves. You know who loves fort saves? Paizo loves fort saves. A lot.

A melee caster is gonna be subject to tons and tons of fort saves and I wouldn't be expecting them to do all that well against them. Form spells don't have a bonus to fort saves after all, nor do the crappy claw n' jaw focus spells. Even the mooks with fort saves are gonna be a problem for casters unless they pump con, and they're already working on a tight ability budget with str, dex, and [CASTING STAT] all crying for attention.

They could always make object reading an uncommon class feat rather than making the entire class uncommon.

Eeeeeeh, I feel something that iconic to occultist shouldn't be under the lock and key of feats.

I feel Occultist is getting hit with the Uncommon tag. Object Reading can be tough for a GM to deal with if they're not prepared for it, I speak from experience.

HyperMissingno wrote:

Because you implied that big boss battles are rare...

No I didn't.

You're conflating hits so hard even barbarians "die" in "a couple" with "big boss battles". I've seen the latter despite not having seen the former, on account of them not being synonymous.

You're gonna need to get to rewording then because from your post a page back you seemed to be arguing that this is only a thing in big boss battles and that big boss battles are rare which is something I disagree with.

Temperans wrote:

The barbarians with 12 HP and good armor dies in a couple of hits. The casters dies in half as many at best.

I haven't found that to be particularly common... but yes, I can see how facing creatures sitting at the high end of what the game says is possible to deal with at high regularity could skew the perspective of what is likely to happen if your "frail" character steps into melee range.

I mean, have you seen Paizo APs? My table's been running through Agents of Edgewatch and big boss fights have been a pretty regular occurrence. Hell it's not unusual for us to have two big boss fights in a single day.

I'm not the only one that finds it wrong that monk multiclass is looking like a better archetype for dragon claw sorc than dragon disciple, am I?

Can I just say that I want more hair feats? Better reach, grapple, stuff the White Hair Witch had back in the day, maybe a status bonus to athletics or using Int over Str when using the hair, fun stuff like that.

Sorcerer bloodlines are deep? They feel super shallow to me, at least in this system. Maybe that's because they moved all the cool passives like stretchy arms to the focus spell camp. Those things feel different when you have to activate them every time.

As far as I'm concerned, the PCs are allowed to believe and react however they want to my NPCs, just like I'm free to control the info the players learn about my NPCs without rolls

I'm pretty much of the same mind. Failing a sense motive check that I rolled in secret just means the PCs don't get any free hints, not that they have to take the NPC's every word as fact. There's a huge difference from reading the AP in advance and putting the dots together based on everything presented to you in character.

Cyder wrote:

In this case why pick Oracle over Divine Sorc? Genuinely curious.

More skills, trained in light armor, improved refocus along with the almost complete lack of interesting feats I don't mind spending on something else. With a sorcerer, I'd be torn about using most of the feats on archetypes but since I have NO interest in interacting with the curse mechanic, I can ditch the majority of the class feats.

Not to mention that Oracle is a master at nabbing spells from other lists. You want both Fireball and Haste on a divine caster? It's pretty easy with Oracle.

Oh, and I'm not sure how people might feel about this, but a Gods and Magic 2.0, focused more on religion. Maybe with archetypes for followers of the most relevant deities?

Now, you might say: "But Sasha, you can just pick the Cleric Dedication for that" which, yes, it's fair. But, what if I want mechanical support for characters that are not granted powers, but still have a deep relation with the faith and its practices? I mean alright, you can just bump religion for that, yeah, but there's some really cool room for development in there!

I'd rather have more information on deities without much info on them than archetypes dedicated to the inner sea gods tbh. Like, gimmie the scoop on Alglenweis or Chamidu. We have a lot of deities without even a description and while the edits and anathama can paint a picture it's not the clearest one.

HyperMissingno wrote:

Exocist wrote:

That does mean they’re effectively taxed out of feats to get the spells they need though, and it’s contingent on having a deity with the right spell.

Oracle's feat list is kiiiiinda lackluster so getting taxed out of feats isn't that big of a deal for the class unless there's some shiny archetype you want a lot of feats from or if you actually want one of the focus spells from your mystery.

I've noticed this too. Building oracles kind of sucks due to their uninspiring feat choices.

Thankfully Divine Access and archetypes that give out focus spells are both things. Splash in Blessed One dedication and bada bing, bada boom, you have a ton of Lay on Hands points to heal up the party with. Flavorful too. Even if you actually want to use your curse it gives you something to do with the spare focus points you may or may not have that doesn't put you further into your curse state.

That does mean they’re effectively taxed out of feats to get the spells they need though, and it’s contingent on having a deity with the right spell.

Oracle's feat list is kiiiiinda lackluster so getting taxed out of feats isn't that big of a deal for the class unless there's some shiny archetype you want a lot of feats from or if you actually want one of the focus spells from your mystery.

Now the deity part is an issue but if you can't find the spell you really, really want there's always Mysterious Repertoire which can get you a single spell of your choice onto your list. It is 14th level though so you will be waiting a while.

If the PCs are expected to take the die rolls and not pay attention to the roleplay evidence for believing an NPC's lie then the PCs get to just throw charisma checks at NPCs without roleplaying. It's only fair.

To be clear I would not mind playing this way since I'm on the Autism Spectrum and have a fair amount of trouble with social stuff, I'm just warning y'all to the door you're opening up.

Honestly the big 6 in PF1 aren't even the big 6. They're the big 3 or the big 4 for MAD characters. All you need is a magic weapon, a cloak of resistance, and the belt/headband to upgrade the stats you want. AC is extremely easy to dump in that system without shooting yourself in the foot once you get into magic item territory. Just get something to cancel crits and you're good.

This goes double for GMs that heavily use natural attack monsters as bosses. You have to put yourself in debt to get the AC you need to have a 4 miss you unless you're a class that specializes in high AC like paladin. Can't even count on iteratives to give you a chance to evade the later attacks.

Onto PF2 I don't mind the PCs needing magic items to keep up with the big nasty monsters they're fighting that much anymore. What I do mind is that the NPCs get such high numbers without magic items. Especially when it's normal stuff like a jailer or a bandit.

-The Great Book of the Damned-

All things hell, devils and devil worship. Basically like the first volume in 1E, but a lot more of it. I especially want an expanded set of lore for the archdevils - my buddy Dispater deserves even more awesome lore - and secondary powers of hell. I hope we see some "day to day" stuff as well, just to make it feel more alive. Playable devil option obviously ;).

If that is too limited in scope, it could be combined with Cheliax-related content, which I am rather interested in as well. Evil has taken a few blows too many in recent times, so they could use some love.

I'd rather have a book on outsiders in general. Fiends tend to get too much of the fun when it comes to that. Like, Demons and Devils get special treatment with individual bloodlines while the Celestials all have to share a single bloodline. Celestials should get the love as should the Aeons, Inevitables, Protiens, and the Elementals.

More info on the gods with little written about them would be nice.

Is there any reason we can't have both 3 book AP and 6 book APs?

HyperMissingno wrote:

Look, I just want an official Polearm User archetype. I don't care what book it's from, I don't care how we get there, I just want one that dedicated to polearms with Lunge and Lunge Stance and Attack of Opportunity and other goodies.

So, why not play a fighter with the Staff Acrobat archetype?

I want Non-Fighter Polearm users to have the same ability to get polearm goodies that Two Weapon Fighting, Non-Polearm Two Handed Fighting, Single Hand Fighting, Archery, Unarmed Combat, and Sword n' Board users all get by going into archetypes.

All those fighting styles get a common archetype specific to them that all give fighter feats earlier and extra proficiencies that scale with you as you level up. Polearm users have none of that so they have to sub into Fighter to get those goodies, which means trying to grab Positioning Assault will have to wait until level 16 for instance.

Plus Staff Acrobat takes until level 10 to give benefits not related to shove/trip and has a hefty 16 dex prereq. It doesn't even give you any extra proficiency like the other archetypes do.

I mean...Cleric doesn't take that much work to yank out the deity part from its mechanics either. Just have them pick a weapon, pick a skill, pick 3 spells (one at 1st level) and pick 4 domains. If all you want is mechanics and not flavor then godless cleric is not only operational but it's also optimal. Full control over your spells and weapon after all. You just don't see anyone advocating for it because it spits all over the thematics of the class.

Champion is the same way, mechanically easy to tear out the deity. It's just finding an uncommon weapon you want, a skill, and some domains if you want to spend some feats for them. Thematically it's a different story. That power doesn't come from nowhere and it certainly ain't something a Sorcerer or Oracle can produce with how neutered their weirdness is in PF2.

You're gonna need a pretty big justification for the power source of a champion that's working without a deity. The reactions alone are beyond what a mortal is doing solo, especially a mortal that's working with a lot of martial might.

But the forceful trait doesn't mention requiring a strike or making an attack that does damage. All it mentions making an attack.

Fumarole wrote:

An interesting question, but are there any weapons with both the forceful and trip traits? I see several with both forceful and sweep, which seem to work well together.

Not currently. But there are 2 stances that give unarmed attacks with the Forceful trait.

There's also the Knockdown feat which lets you spend 2 actions to strike and then make a trip attack with a 2 handed weapon even if it doesn't have the trip trait.

HyperMissingno wrote:

Since PCs and NPCs gain power differently I need to explain how they gain power differently and not just why the PCs gain power so much more quickly than the NPCs.

Why do you need to explain this? Does the mechanical difference between an NPC statblock, a PC sheet, and a monster statblock need an in world explanation? The difference between the three is their utility in play either to the player or to the GM - and doesn't serve an explicitly narrative function that would need explaining.

I treat the mechanics as a science in my world, it's a massive help for me wrapping my brain around the fantasy world and figuring out how this stuff really works.

In PF1 this works out because everything follows those rules all the time. Even the monsters follow the rules to the letter. Feat every other hit die on odd numbers, BAB and Save system operates this way, all that stuff. There may be bonus feats and very high stats, but they're still operating under the same rules as the PCs and NPCs with PC classes aside from the first Hit Die not being full and not having any favored class bonuses. I can tell where the NPC with a class is getting extra HP/skill points from compared to a monster and thus rationalizing the difference is effortless.

In PF2 a creature can get a free bonus with 0 explanation. Take the Jailer for instance. He has +4 strength and yet his club deals d6+8, his crossbow does d8+4, and throwing his club does d6+6. There's no listed area where he gets his bonus from. It sure as hell ain't from Weapon Specialization because he's level 3 and that's not till level 7 for martails. His math doesn't even add up legendary prof anyway, he's expert. There's no way this level 3 jerk has Greater Weapon Specialization. Oh, and there's the part where his weird, +4 bonus is halved for throwing the club but not shooting the crossbow for no discernible reason. The thrown quality doesn't have any text about cutting any bonus in half, strength or otherwise, it's just going from +4 to +2 with no explanation. It would be one thing if he had abilities the PCs couldn't get, in fact that's a neat idea and prevents options meant for NPCs mingling with options meant for PCs, but bonuses should be given a source.

Also his HP is off. Accounting for the 8HP humans get he's gotten 37HP from 3 levels. And we know it's 3 levels because the math checks out with proficiency rules. This means he's getting 12 and 1/3 HP per level. Now I'm fine with levels giving weird HP values. Everything in PF1 gains an HP value with a hidden .5 attached to the end at each level. The problem is that the con bonus doesn't interact in any meaningful way. Either we're working with Barbarian hit points with the con score divided by 3 or we're working with fighter hitpoints with the con score multiplied by 2 and 1/3. If he had 1 less Hit Point and an extra point of con his HP would math out perfectly.

What makes this worse is that a lot of other things math out perfectly. AC? Perfect match for trained prof. Saves? Expert in fort and ref and trained in will. Skills? Trained in diplomacy and expert in athletics and intimidate. Odd that there's two expert skills at level 3 but the math still checks out. Some rules are being followed to more or less the letter while others are being tossed into the wood chipper.

This may be nothing for some DMs and even a boon for others, but for me it's a massive problem. Why are the monsters and NPCs following different rules than the party? Are we just operating with different internal power cores? Is everyone just making deals with devils/fae/celestials/dragons/gods/etc. on the side for hidden bonuses? Are they just hopped up on drugs? I don't care what the explanation is, I'll take they had a really good nap, just give me some reason.

Now granted I'll figure out the in-universe reason for rulebreaking with time but for now it's an especially annoying box on a long list of "things I have to get organized in order to run my setting in PF2."

I think the disconnect people are having with the world is that PCs gain power in specific and predictable ways. NPCs have ways of following rules and formulas to determine power level, but they can also be arbitrarily set as needed for the world.

Honestly one of the things that's been a bit of a hangup for me in setting my world to its PF2 era is how differently PCs and NPCs gain power. It's not like PF1 where I can make a PC and then just throw them into the game as an NPC. Since PCs and NPCs gain power differently I need to explain how they gain power differently and not just why the PCs gain power so much more quickly than the NPCs.

I personally find Champion codes a lot more clear cut, which I highly appreciate since breaking the code means I lose powers and abilities. I'm also glad that your alignment actually means something here.

What I love the most however is that the good Champions are actually good at protecting people beyond just taking out big threats and sometimes parking their heavily armored rump in a chokepoint. Now they reduce damage to other people, and usually only other people, with their special reactions.

I actually hew toward letting them define the physical laws of reality, not in the OOTS kind of way, but more in the sense that the things that are true due to the game system, are true in the fiction as well.

In other words, adding level to everything does mean that power scales more like it does in an anime than "real life" people really are durable to take multiple hits from fireballs and sword swings and such. They really can just dodge things that aren't skilled/strong enough to hit them, or just have the attacks bounce off.

Spell slots really are a reflection of how casting works, although the in-universe explanation has more to do with training the soul.

This means my worldbuilding actually uses each element as a prompt and then writes the laws of reality accordingly.

Probably my favorite part of building my worlds is looking at the mechanics of the system I'm using, going "this is canon" and then figuring out just what the hell that means for the world.

Guess I'm just wondering why classes are the holy grail that must remain setting-agnostic, when ancestries and weapons and spells and everything else have Golarion-infused lines.

It's probably because classes take the most work to craft and balance. Weapons are just a statblock, spells are more involved statblocks but still just statblocks, and ancestries only have 5 levels of feats to worry about and a few level 1 features. Classes meanwhile have 11 levels of feats and 10 levels of features.

Here is a list of every domain an Oracle can currently get and which spells they offer through Divine Access.

I'm sure it'll be outdated in June but for now it should help. It doesn't say which gods give which spell so it's not as helpful as it could be. I advise having the Archives open while you reference this.

Any spell with a * means it's restricted in some way and you can't get an unrestricted version of it while any spell with a ? has the spell in a weird level.

Does anyone have the Gods and Magic book/pdf? On the Archives of Nethys it lists Charon as having Crushing Despair as a 4th level cleric spell. Crushing Despair is a 5th level spell. I dunno if that's an error on the book/pdf's part or a typo on the archive's part. He's on page 130.

Edit, Naderi, who is also supposedly on the same page, also has Crushing Despair listed as a 4th level spell she gives to her clerics.

Come to think of it, Pathfinder 1st Edition should have had the same question asked about it, although the ability score adjustment did give full Elves an advantage for a reasonably large set of builds, and while the Breadth of Experience feat would technically be available to old Half-Elves, they would (as somebody noted above) be taking some serious Constitution penalties for being old enough to qualify, whereas most adult and even young Elves would qualify or be close to qualifying. On the other hand, Pathfinder 1st Edition Half-Elves had Paragon Surge . . . .

In PF1 it was a different case because there half-elves only had one stat they could boost, so in that game an elf could pretty easily take advantage over a half-elf with any build that wanted high int and high dex. And those builds weren't exactly that rare. Bomber Alchemist, Dex Magus, Investigator that dips Swashbuckler or uses a bow, bow based Eldritch Knight, finesse based Eldritch Knight, blah blah blah. Now granted teiflings and ratfolk had the same bonuses while dumping less important stats but this is PF1 where elves have a lot, and I mean a lot, of racial features that can keep them in the competition. Not to mention half-elves can't get a fair amount of those features themselves since they're features and not feats.

Huh, okay so the con penalty is less of a deal than I thought it was. When I saw OPTIONAL on the archives of Nethys I assumed it meant optional rule you had to get GM permission for.

To make things clear I was talking about the hail mary thing as if the oracle had an additional explosion when they went down, the focus spells are not and should not be the hail mary.

Squiggit wrote:

Delay Affliction should really get swapped with something else anyways.

It's too niche of a spell for how recyclable focus spells are, especially for Oracles who are designed to be cycling around pretty frequently.

In a playtest one shot our Oracle would just cast delay affliction twice on a random person for no benefit in order to get into his moderate curse so he could boost his healing.

I'm definitely hearing this - it's not the right spell for that role. We're working on it!

Restoration as a 2 action spell? Pretty please?

See when I hear witch what I hear depends on the time of day. Sometimes it's actually spooky, but it's more often fairytales that come to my mind. Sometimes it's magical girls that come to mind, and not just the edgy ones. Every now and then a certain blonde kleptomaniac with the laserest laser to ever laser will cross my mind. And if you catch me on a nostalgia trip and sometimes my mind will go to the wicked, disgusting, green, rhyming, fat f--- of a rival to a bear and a bird that really needs a new game to come out, come on Microsoft!

Ahem. My point is witch means a lot of different things to different people. Your spooky could be another person's comedy, or mystic, or lewd.

Don't know if I'm derailing the thread here but I do want to get across to Paizo that... while I appreciate their desire to highlight diverse ancestries in the iconics... the need to represent human diversity requires more human iconics

Human diversity is more than just skin color. You could easily represent neurodivergencies like ADHD or the Autism Spectrum Disorder with a nonhuman race. In fact as someone on the spectrum I personally would encourage the latter...assuming they write them well. Western writers tend to be troublesome with this.

And no D&D version or Pathfinder version has ever been a "system that results in taking a sword to the chest that doesn't require 2 months of downtime to recover from" because that is not now, nor has it ever been, how hit points work.

This is table dependent. I personally flavor HP as how tough your vitals are and how hard your skull is to crack. More HP means it takes harder hits for those things to fail.

Why do I do this? Because PCs at level 5 or higher are superhuman in their prowess and should be given superhuman durability to match.

The big thing curse needs to do is be worth the bang for the buck it's charging. In PF1 Kinetisist was in a similar boat where it took penalties in exchange for using its powers and it got bonused based on how harsh the penalties were. And by penalties I mean working with a smaller pool of hit points.

This worked because the rewards for burn where pretty big deals. Boosts to attack and bigger boosts to damage. All day size bonuses to physical stats of your choice. Crit/sneak protection that went up with the burn. This was on top of boons you could pay burn for that lasted all day like the defensive talents. This type of system has worked before and I'm sure Paizo can pull it off for Oracle, especially since the discourse over it has been loud.

Excaliburproxy wrote:

Fire is probably the worst off of the three mysteries but its curse at least has direct offensive and defensive benefits.

Listen, people just aren't thinking of how to properly utilize being on fire

You joke but my build for apocalypse oracle was "grab fire resistance and wade into melee while on fire." And it did it better than flame does here.

Listen: The alchemist sucked in PF1 as well.

I could write something but this image says it better than I ever could.

I think I have an idea, instead of making the revelation spells the Hail Mary, what if we give each curse an effect when it goes overboard? An omegaheal for life, some kind of flame crash for flame, and a big party buff for battle. You'd have full control over the Hail Mary effect, but after that you'd be feeling a lot of hurt.