Here's one more for the road; again, Automatic Bonus Progression and half-wealth.
Magpie the Monk:
Magpie is a multiclassed Runesinger Fighter 1 and Street Fighter Monk 4 with a tattooed theme. Not only do the magical tattoos covering her limbs grant her rune powers, they also let her make her unarmed strikes at range by giving them the Sharding quality.
She takes the Strength and Lightning runes, using the former primarily to get a free-action Grapple off of an attack once per minute, and the latter primarily to zip around the battlefield without provoking. That free Grapple synergizes nicely with her ability to Clinch off of a Counter Punch. In fact, she can attack twice even while Counter Punching thanks to the Street Fighter's Flurry Strike, and each attack can separately cause a Grapple check if they hit. Hair Trigger lets her Counter Punch even at range while Deflecting Arrows, but she prefers not to, since that robs her of the chance to Grapple.
When she does Grapple someone, she deals her hefty unarmed strike damage again via Clinch Strike (and usually releases them immediately as a free action, so she can do it again).
The cherry on top is Practiced Interruption. By spending her martial focus, she can ready an attack against a spellcaster's next spell as a move action, likely disrupting their concentration. Since she can do this in the same turn as Counter Punch, it's easy for her to act as a disruptive presence to multiple PCs at once. This is really what the Sharding quality is for- it allows her to pull off this trick at range. Five-foot steps won't save them!
Lastly, her only Ki Power is Empty Body, which allows her to become ethereal for one minute. She can use this to seemingly materialize in the middle of the party, getting a guaranteed surprise round in which to mangle someone with her two Greatsword-like fists.
You're very welcome! I love building Spheres characters and do so pretty regularly, so if you continue to need them for your campaign, I'll keep tossing them up as they come off the presses.
Luminary is a human Conscript who spends most of her time as a four-armed construct via the Improved Transformation feat. She dual-wields swords, carries a tower shield, and keeps one hand open for grappling.
For her usual routine, she makes an offhand and a main-hand attack as a standard action via the Dual Wielding sphere, makes an additional main-hand attack against touch AC with Perfect Set-Up, then makes an additional off-hand attack against flatfooted AC with Three-Sword Style. For each pair of main-hand and off-hand attacks that connects, she makes a Reposition maneuver via Repositioning Routine, possibly activating Hammer by slamming her opponent into a wall. This provokes, but she can spend one of her seven AoOs on Active Defense via the Shield sphere to raise her AC to 30 whenever she's attacked, then use Forced Rebound to Bull Rush her attacker, possibly dealing Hammer damage again.
Lastly, whenever she succeeds at any of the above maneuvers, she may immediately attempt a Grapple or Trip maneuver against her opponent as an AoO thanks to the Conscript's Brute specialization.
Luminary is a very tough cookie, and will tend to lock down and melt anyone with mediocre AC and CMD, especially in a battlefield with lots of walls.
Martila the Just:
Martila is an entirely different caliber of monster- more a thought experiment than anything else. She's a level 18 Dhampir fighter who is very very good at mulching armies with her spear, and all but immune to anything that most mid-level characters can do. Anyone trying to cast magic at her or on anything within her reach has to hope she fails an MSB check against their MSD, using her class level and her weapon enhancement as her bonus, thanks to the Impossible Warrior archetype. This amounts to "rolling 1d20+23 against their levels in casting classes + 10", making it impossible to affect her for anyone level 14 or lower.
Martials don't have it much easier, since she can pseudo-parry the first 10 ranged attacks with her AoOs- not that her AC is any easier to hit. She's got just a dollop of spellcasting to give herself energy resistance, and uses Steel Braggart routinely to maintain DR 13/- on top of her ablative temporary HP from Berserking and her delayed damage pool.
For offense, everyone who comes within 70 feet of her must make a DC 26 Will save or become Shaken. She uses Burn the Chaff in conjunction with Cone of Death to make a ranged attack against everyone in a 1120-foot cone which auto-crits against anyone under a Fear effect and level 9 or lower; those characters must then make a DC32+ Fortitude save or instantly die.
She loses a considerable portion of her bite when not "punching down" against large armies of sub-level-10 characters, but is still a plenty formidable opponent for high-level parties, especially once she breaks out the Coiled Blade tension techniques!
Hiram Vandyke, Aged Armiger:
Hiram is a character from a modern campaign I'm running; his choice of firearm may not be appropriate for your game, but can be easily tweaked. He's only level 3, and Venerable age takes a big chunk out of his physical stats, but he can still be scary in the right hands. I've fudged a small bit on giving his animal companion feats it shouldn't quite have yet for thematic reasons, but you can change that too.
Hiram rigs the battlefield using his Shovel, which contains Trap sphere talents. He uses Augur of Combat to use his Intelligence to hit as long as he goes last, which is fine by him- he camps out hundreds of feet away, his animal companion and his traps between him and opponents, and picks away at them with Sniper abilities. If someone does manage to slip past his dog, he's got an old combat tool with Boxing sphere talents that he can ready against their charge with Brace and 2d6 damage to make them regret it.
SoP classes are built to about the same T3/T4 power level as the Paladin or the Ranger, and are generally more tightly balanced around that standard than Vanilla Pathfinder is. In the Armiger specifically, you should expect a tactically-flexible martial who can change significant parts of his kit to meet the situation and who will likely have decent out-of-combat utility. They will outshine vanilla T5/T6 classes like the Fighter, Rogue, and Monk, but not in any way that multiple Core classes didn't outshine them already.
In short, it won't clash with your regular game. However, I would recommend giving other PCs the option of accessing the Spheres of Might system's feats and other material even if they don't want to play a Spheres class, simply so that they won't feel left out and can pick up a few tricks from it if they feel inspired.
Livana the Mask, Clockwork Zealot is a devotee of Shivaska who has transformed herself into a gleaming porcelain-and-brass construct through the power of her infernal obediences. Though technically mindless, she has left herself the instruction to "behave exactly as I would in life", and acts in all ways as an eerie facsimile of her former self.
Unfortunately for everyone else, her "former self" was still a cultist of a demon lord. Livana acts as the dispassionate executor of her local cult's will, as her soulless shell retains its impeccable skill with a blade.
Mechanically, she has targeted herself with the Clockwork Doll ability, turning herself into a mindless clockwork construct. This takes away all of her feats and skill ranks. She uses the Evangelist class's bonus to untrained skills to still be competent outside of combat, dumps Con/Int/Wis to have superb stats otherwise, and has a permanency'd Enlarge Person cast on herself to reap the bonus HP from being a Large construct.
She's an X 6/Evangelist 4, and wants to use VMC to trade away half her feats so that losing the rest by becoming mindless doesn't hurt as much. When she's "slain" by reaching 0 HP as constructs are, her clockwork dolls revert to their prior state- which may (DM allowing) mean that when she hits 0 HP, she reverts to human and might potentially now survive the blow at negative HP. The Diehard feat lets her stay standing in such an event, giving her a kind of "desperation mode" as her human self.
Before creation, before the gods, before Good had been invented, the Qlippoth alone ruled the Abyss. When the material world came into being, the souls of the first mortal sinners became the first demons. The demons, in their endless numbers, dethroned the ancient Qlippoth from their rightful place as masters of that dreadful plane, and the Qlippoth have despised them ever since.
Ichelsis is a Qlippoth-born tiefling who wants to retake the Abyss in the name of her abhorrent kin. The best way to do that is to starve the demons of Evil souls... and so, to do that, she poses as a hero with a keen interest in redeeming villains to the side of Good.
Of course, should they decline her most strenuous attempts to redeem them, she happily decapitates them before their sins can further grow.
Ichelsis is built as a Serial Killer Vigilante who spends most of her time in her Social identity to hide her Evil alignment from the rest of the party. Her character motivations ensure that she gets along quite well with non-Evil party members- the NG cleric has gradually caught on, but "the enemy of my enemy", you know, wink wink, nudge nudge.
One of her long-term ambitions is to acquire a weapon capable of sealing away the souls of evildoers so that, even in death, they never feed the demons. Perhaps she'll have a new axe forged from one of the Final Blades of Galt?
Not really. By introducing third-party material he hasn't approved, you are putting a burden onto him he hasn't asked for- that burden being "determining whether or not your character will be unbalanced"- and proposing further modifications to the 3pp material only makes that burden heavier by giving him more things to analyze, to scrutinize, and to weigh in a way that first-party material generally doesn't require.
That's the real issue here. If your DM hasn't asked for that kind of work, don't put it on him. If he's leery, don't wheedle or cajole- just take the L.
I don't like magic trivializing social encounters in my games, so I run pretty hard with the logic of Spellcraft and Spell Manifestations in a world where magic is common. Any level 1 Sorcerer can Charm Person you, so everybody knows that common magic can be equivalent to a mugging.
If you just try to cast Charm Person on an alert city guard in the middle of a conversation without warning in my games, they're going to notice the blatant Spell Manifestations, (probably) fail their skill check to identify it, assume the worst, roll Initiative against you, and (if they win) punch you in the face as an attack of opportunity.
If you want to use spells like Charm Person successfully without turning the social evening into a combat encounter, you have to make them think you're casting something beneficial on them and put them at ease first (with a Bluff/Diplomacy check), instead of doing the magical equivalent of pointing a pocket crossbow at their face.
I believe this has a positive impact on the game because it keeps social skills relevant and forces my players to be more creative. They seem to enjoy the scenarios it creates, too.
Why would you want to prevent them from "abusing" it? If they choose to do the evil and selfish thing, don't make their choice meaningless and arbitrarily take away the power you tempted them with in the first place.
Instead, make them deal with the consequences of their actions in an interesting way. What are they going to do with infinite gold? Like, really *do* with it? To take it to town, you'd need a caravan. Does the caravan get robbed? Does one of the hirelings sell out your secret? Does a local paladin find out about your atrocities and bring the church down on you? Does a cult form around the miraculous golden creature and try to free their captive god?
Don't head off the players' choices. Roll with them.
If the "bigger fish" doesn't make sense in the context of the world (e.g. sudden tarrasque ambush), it makes you seem arbitrary and vengeful. If it does make sense in the context of the world, it sends the players the message that they need to be stronger to compete, which makes the powergamer try harder. There are better strategies.
1: Identify the problem. Is the powergamer having fun? Are the other players having fun? If the answers to these questions are "yes", the problem isn't with the powergamer, it's with you. Many DMs have a kneejerk negative response to PCs being good at the things they've chosen to be good at. This is a bad attitude.
2: Talk about the problem. No excuses. Now that you've identified the problem, sit down and have an OOC chat with the powergamer. Explain to them how their behavior is disruptive to the game, and offer them a chance to rebuild and tone it down. Many powergamers worry that they won't be active participants in the story if they don't optimize; try suggesting ways to reallocate their feats and gold that you know will allow them to engage with RP opportunities.
3: Tone down combat. Let's say you've talked to the powergamer, and it didn't go well. They don't want to respec and you don't want to kick them out. Solution: dial back combat, either making it a smaller part of the game, or making it easier to win without making it trivial for the powergamer to hog the glory. This helps the other players not feel overshadowed, which the Ambush Tarrasque wouldn't fix in the least. (Some powergamers focus on other things, like crafting or diplomacy. You can still shift the focus of your game away from those things in response.)
4: Get the powergamer to help the other players. This is your last resort. If you're set on a tough combat-centric game, and your powergamer won't respec, see if the other players are willing to. When everyone is "overpowered", nobody is- just send higher-CR monsters at them, and you've got a suitable difficulty with nobody feeling like a sidekick.
For Witches: Cast Unnatural Lust on your target, go open-mouth on the kiss, then cast Vomit Swarm directly down their windpipe. Optionally, follow up with Lipstitch to make sure they can't cough the bugs out.
On those issues, I'm going to disagree. No comic publisher has any kind of precise statistics on their characters - but Marvel, at least, has some general guidelines, particularly with regard to strength. Having a general idea of how much Spider-Man can lift, or Iron Man, or Beast - and how they differ in comparison - can be useful when writing their stories and maintaining continuity.
But even with more precise stats, as the superheroes might be expressed in a role-playing game like Mutants and Masterminds, doesn't make them fundamentally different characters. The stats might constrain the fast-and-looseness of the genre a bit, but that doesn't necessarily mean the characters are fundamentally different - just that some of the more outlandish or outlier-ish stories are harder to tell with the game.
I realize this is departing from the topic a bit, but this is a topic I find really interesting, so I hope you'll bear with me!
My perspective is that stories told by dice are fundamentally different from stories told by humans. In stories told by humans, narrative comes first and the random events work out however they have to in order to make the narrative work; Han Solo's million-to-one chance was never going to kill him, because that'd be a terrible ending.
In stories told by dice (without fudging), the random events come first, and then we create a narrative around them. In some ways this is more realistic and certainly less predictable, but it also limits our storytelling. 999,999,999 times to 1, Han Solo doesn't make the million-to-one chance, because that's how odds work. Maybe he's got a high enough Piloting skill modifier that it's really only a tense 50/50, but that doesn't have the same ring to it, does it?
I think characters are defined not only by who they are, but also by what they do, and the outcomes of what they do. If your favorite cool character appears in a new series and they try to do all their old tricks, but are humiliated and shown as incompetent at every turn, you wouldn't feel that that's a faithful representation. If Han Solo can't roll the million-to-one-chance with devil-may-care ease, he's not a faithful Han Solo.
This is a secondary point because a tabletop game could solve it, but I don't often see ones that have: (most) comic books have innate niche protection, and tabletop games have none. As soon as you give the Hulk stats, you'll notice that someone just a little more optimizeed, or a little higher-leveled, could be stronger than he is in every way.
Comic books generally don't do that. The Hulk is strong because Being Strong is his identity. If a problem needs solving with brute strength, he's going to solve it even if "the numbers" say he shouldn't be the best-suited for it- not as a matter of patronization, like the Wizard letting the Rogue sneak instead of casting Invisibility on himself, but because that's implicitly how things work. If the Hulk loses an arm-wrestling match, it's not because someone else had better numbers, it's because the plot needed him to.
Pathfinder is a system for modeling sword-and-sorcery adventurers, and it starts to break down in subtle and obvious ways when your characters get too far from that. It's not a universal system because it isn't meant to be. Only people who never play tabletops outside of D&D/PF think it's an adequate system to model arbitrary superpowers.
"Is Batman a full-BAB or partial-BAB martial?" is not a coherent question, the same way "is sweetness yellow or green" is not a coherent question.
EDIT: The above comment talking about "honest Superman" and "honest Batman" has hit on the core of the issue. Comicbook superheroes don't have stats. If they had stats, the stories wouldn't work. Trying to give them stats or extrapolate an "honest" version of them that obeys harder rules is against the fast-and-loose conventions of the genre.
Once you give them numbers, it becomes a fundamentally different kind of story, and they become fundamentally different characters.
But both are still questionable, because they don't have autotargetting and there is no mechanic for you to conjure it exactly in the path of a projectile.
I agree with you that they don't (or shouldn't) work, but I disagree with your reasoning. You appeal to a lack of permissiveness by implying that one can't position a Prestidigitation'd object directly in the path of a flying arrow even though the rules don't forbid it, but then appeal to that same permissiveness you've denied a moment later by insisting that one must be able to react to events that humans can't react to because the rules don't forbid it.
I would personally say that, in mechanical game terms, the arrow is never "in flight". In one instant it is in the archer's possession, and in the next it is sticking out of your body. You may create an instant where the arrow is "in flight" by, say, stopping time, but this does not cause the arrow to not be an attended item in that artificial moment.
It's like insisting there must be a point in a horse's movement where it isn't in contact with the ground and therefore must make Acrobatics checks. Sure, there's scientifically a point in a horse's gallop where all of its feet leave the ground, but for game purposes there is no instant where it does not have solid footing.
Before I DM for anyone for the first time, I talk to them in private and ask them if they would want me to fudge a roll if doing so prevented their character from dying an anticlimactic and unlucky death. So far, everyone's said "yes", and I've honored that. If someone said "no", I'd honor that too.
That's the only circumstance where I'm willing to fudge rolls. In almost all other situations, it really does reduce players' agency and faith in the game.
For sneaky Evil Guys, I suggest wearing armor made of lead to block scrying spells. Lead isn't listed as an armor special material, but there's no reason why you couldn't have armor made of it- especially as the DM.
That said, the reason why the Big, Bad Evil Guy is the standard is because it lets martials contribute too. Straight combat is practically the only area where martials can be as useful as casters. If you play a minimal or perfunctory role in the defeat of the villain because of your class, that probably feels unsatisfactory.
If you want to have a sneaky villain, make sure that the solution to defeating them isn't predominantly magical. If your villain can be sussed out by the party sitting in an inn and spam-casting Divination and Contact Other Plane, then they're a poorly-designed villain.
If, on the other hand, the party has to delve into a blood-mage's laboratory to hunt down a vial of the villain's blood drawn before they became a faceless boogeyman in order to perform a ritual to unmask them, then that shows a bit more promise.
I wonder would the dragon see improvements at it's new body actually aged? Picking up all of the improvements granted by age to dragons.
This is incredibly fast and loose, but I would look to the Sun Orchid Elixir for a precedent on de-aging. It says: "All penalties to Strength, Dexterity, and Constitution the drinker may have suffered as a result of advanced age are removed, but all bonuses to Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma that result from advanced age remain (although as the character ages again into middle age and beyond, he does not gain any of these bonuses a second time)." So I would personally rule that the dragon doesn't gain further mental benefits from aging until its physical age has caught up to its mental age again. Its size, natural AC, etc. would improve, but its BAB and such would not.
There are a lot of gaps in the RAW/wiggle room for GM fiat, but I'll answer as best I see it.
1. Dragons belong to the "dragon" type. Make a table of creatures with the dragon type and roll on it. Reincarnate says: "The magic of the spell creates an entirely new young adult body for the soul to inhabit from the natural elements at hand." Therefore, the dragon is now of the Young Adult category, but: "It retains any class abilities, feats, or skill ranks it formerly possessed. Its class, base attack bonus, base save bonuses, and hit points are unchanged." In essence, only things like its fly speed, its size, and its natural armor bonus to AC change due to its altered age category.
2. Its alignment absolutely does not change. Bugbears are Chaotic Evil, but the spell never remotely suggests that a PC who is reincarnated as a Bugbear automatically becomes Chaotic Evil.
3. Correct.
4. Irrelevant. Your premise is false: Reincarnate never even implies that it changes someone's alignment. Their mind and soul is emphatically the same. If the dragon's alignment does change for some reason, it can't be a direct result of the spell, and therefore reversing the spell would do nothing.
It sounds like the possibility of losing their characters is preventing your players from enjoying the game. You could either try to change your players' perspectives, or change the rules on death and dying. Changing the rules is easier than changing people's minds, so I recommend you try that first.
There are two easy ways to bend the rules. One is to give them access to Hero Points, so they can choose to spend a resource to Cheat Death. The upside of this method is that it gives the PCs a crutch to learn how to be less afraid and more daring, by tempting them to spend Hero Points on doing cool things instead of saving them up to avoid death. The downside is that if they know they have less than 2 Hero Points, they'll probably go back to being scared again.
The other way is to just tell your PCs that they will no longer die. PCs who reach -Con HP can't be healed during the battle, but they aren't dead. The players may still be captured and have to escape, or may fail a quest because they were unconscious, but their story won't end because they rolled poorly- it will only take a different path. This isn't how Pathfinder is meant to be played, but it seems like your party isn't enjoying "Pathfinder as it's meant to be played", so you may as well try something different.
You should also talk to your players and ask them why they're so timid. I suspect it's because they've become so attached to their characters that they don't want to "lose" them. If so, this can be a good thing! It means you have very strong emotional buy-in for your story. If it's for another reason, then the problem may be something different.
Trying to encourage the rest of the party to be less scared as a fellow player is harder than doing it as a DM. Try being adventurous and brave and engaging with the DM's plot-hooks, and gain the rewards. Then other players may see the benefit of doing that and follow your example.
So Invisible Pink suggests, "softening the consequences of death for player characters, maybe by some in-universe conceit of them returning to life over and over again", but when I suggest making fights challenging, he says don't make player's lives difficult, they'll respond by gearing up and optimizing. Seems bizarre to recommend making dying and returning to life easier, but criticize me for saying make fights more challenging. If fights aren't challenging, why would there be a need to make coming back from death easier?
1. she
2. You need to take that tidbit advice in the context of the sentence that follows it: "If-then". In other words: I don't recommend making your campaign unusually lethal if you want it to be serious and atmospheric, but if you must, then don't do permadeath.
Megatron777 wrote:
I don't know what is too difficult for your group, and neither do these people saying my advice is terrible.
You're entirely correct, and this is why I've stayed away from hard mechanical recommendations like "give everything the Advanced template".
To explain my position in more detail, Megatron: what gives a campaign the subjective experience of the tension of difficulty is like what makes a horror movie scary. What's scary isn't the probability of death or the gruesomeness of execution- a film can have a 100% mortality rate for its characters and still be a snoozefest, just like an adventure can be full of TPKs and merely feel frustrating rather than tense or challenging.
What gives us- the audience or the players- that feeling of fear and tension is our connection to the characters. An emotional connection is the difference between feeling scared for the victims and rooting for Jason to rack up a new high score. And in the case of tabletop games, coaxing your players to develop that kind of connection means not killing off their characters all the time, even if the implicit threat is there.
Make all the monsters have the Advanced Template; +4 to all stats. Don't increase CR when you do this, just make it the norm for all encounters. Try to throw a variety of enemies at the players, don't get locked into a few types or they'll get too used to fighting them. Huge Elementals for one encounter, a horde of 8 bugbears for another, Shadows, Will o Wisps, etc. If the group doesn't have much range, give them an encounter against flying creatures that hit and run, like a few Wyverns.
While this sort of thing will make individual encounters objectively harder, it's terrible advice for making a serious, atmospheric, dark-souls-y campaign. If you set out to make the players' lives difficult like this, they'll respond by gearing up and optimizing (or getting discouraged and losing investment).
Most players consider "dying" to be a failure state. People naturally adapt to avoid failure states. Before you kill off someone's Rogue because he couldn't fly or one-shot a Wyvern, seriously contemplate the future where that player comes back with a bat-riding lance-wielding barbarian, and think about the lessons you're teaching and their ramifications for the feel of the game.
OP has stated their dislike for cheesing past encounters. Turning the game into an arms race towards high-op strategies can be fun for very specific types of players, but it absolutely destroys a brooding and dark atmosphere and makes cheese near-mandatory. Instead of making players fear failure by brutalizing them, make them fear failure by giving them emotional stakes and building tension.
It's a "projectile of similar shape" to a rock. If you took a round rock and glued spikes to it, Rock Catching would still help you catch that.
Force objects are solid while they exist, unless you believe that I can simply walk through a Wall of Force or Emergency Force Sphere. You can catch it since it's solid for long enough to hit you, and then it disappears in your hand.
If we follow InvisiblePink's suggestion then every monk and almost every martial that can will take deflect arrow so they can be virtually immune to targeted spells...
Deflect Arrows feat wrote:
... ranged attacks generated by natural attacks or spell effects can’t be deflected.
Deflect Arrows says you can't deflect magic projectiles, so you can't. Rock Catching says you can catch rock-shaped projectiles, so you can catch rock-shaped projectiles even if they happen to be magic. Nowhere does it say they need to deal bludgeoning damage.
I disagree with Meirril. Force effects are not inherently damaging to handle- you can rub your face on a Wall of Force without being hurt, unlike a Wall of Fire. They're temporary pseudo-matter, and when they deal damage, it's because they're sharpened or moving at high speed. So I'd say you can catch a battering blast just fine.
On a more meta level, taxing mundanes to be able to interact with magic is not the direction Pathfinder needs to move in. We already have too much of that. The man paid his feat to catch balls; let him catch the magic ball.
I can see how vigilante can be decent in melee.... but it feels gross.
Here's another way. Be a Stalker Vigilante with a high base-damage weapon (like an Impact Butchering Axe). Take the Vital Punishment, Leave An Opening, and Up Close And Personal talents.
Vital Punishment lets you apply Vital Strike feats to one attack of opportunity per round. Up Close And Personal lets you make a swift action attack that deals hidden strike damage when you attempt to tumble through someone's square with Acrobatics (even if you don't succeed). Leave An Opening forces your opponent to provoke an AoO from you at the start of their next turn after they take hidden strike damage.
Move up to someone, attempt to tumble through their square, attack as a swift action, Vital Strike as a standard action, then Vital Strike again as an attack of opportunity at the beginning of their turn. All in all, you're dealing two Vital Strikes, one normal attack, and your hidden strike dice.
You threaten all squares you can attack. Tiny creatures can attack things in their own square. Therefore, yes, it threatens and the Medium creature provokes for leaving the square.
Separately, you also provoke an AoO for moving into a square occupied by another creature (unless you make an Acrobatics check against their CMD). So if the Medium creature tried to move through the square of a Tiny creature, it would potentially provoke twice- once for entering the square and once for leaving.
I don't think there's any mandate for everyone who plays Pathfinder to enjoy charop or its repercussions for their characters. You're failing to draw a distinction between building a character and playing a character there.
You also seem to be presuming that a higher power level is better by calling optimization "constructive changes". Character optimization requires the utilization of resources that non-optimizers likely want to spend on things that match their vision of their character better. Maybe Shield Brace and Combat Reflexes would help our hypothetical fighter, but that means he can't take Wildling and Pass for Human, which would be so cool for his half-orc who was raised by wolves and...
Note that I'm not saying system mastery is bad or high-op games aren't fun. I'm saying that, as someone who usually has the most optimized PC at the table, I find it more palatable to tone my characters down than to expect everybody else to step it up. After a certain level of optimization, you're less representing living characters and more wrestling with math. Not everybody likes that, and I can't force them to.
Unpopular opinion: the players who can't catch up with the updated difficulty should step up their game rather than blaming those who can.
In other words, if the Inquisitor can get to those levels without particular efforts, why can't the other characters too?
I can't speak to this specific situation, but this is an attitude that I occasionally see in many contexts, and I want to take a moment to lay out why I think it's generally harmful.
Pathfinder is a game in which not all character concepts are equally viable. Not all concepts are suitable to high-op play. If you declare from chargen that this is a high-op game, that's fine; experienced players will know not to bring their devilish and lovable rogue to a hardball full-caster party.
But if you start an arms race after the campaign has begun, and you expect PCs to catch up, you might be implicitly demanding that they change or abandon their concepts. How is the sword-and-board fighter going to keep up with the RAGELANCEPOUNCE barbarian? He likes his shield. His grandpa gave it to him. It's in his backstory.
That's why I think it's much more tenable to rein in the strongest members of the party than to demand the weaker ones optimize more, in general. It demands less concept-distortion for a shaman to pull her punches than for a monk to bootstrap himself into Tier 2.
My players are adults with busy lives; I try to avoid forcing them to sit out of a session for an hour because they rolled poorly. That's a poor use of valuable free time, and even if it is part of the game, it would demonstrate in a way that I don't respect them. Even if they're knocked unconscious or die, there's an unspoken agreement not to make them sit out for long- they can control an NPC or a follower while the other PCs try to get them back on their feet as quickly as possible.
Crowd control that restricts their actions instead of rendering them totally unable to act, though? That can lead to creativity. How does the Wizard deal with being silenced? Is he the sort of guy who runs away and hides, pulls out a Silenced spell, or loads his crossbow? I enjoy that a lot more, and my players seem to too.
Pathfinder martials are not even highly-trained human beings, and holding them down to real-world expectations in a high-fantasy setting is an incredibly toxic design paradigm.
I found Spheres baffling for a while too, but then it "clicked" for me. It's got an extremely simple backbone with an intimidating amount of content built off that, but all you really need is to learn the backbone and then sift through the content for what best represents the concepts you have in mind.
Spheres of Might gives you talents you can combine in various ways; Path of War gives you discrete abilities that are activated as actions. (PoW does give you some passive things, but they're mutually exclusive with each other; you can't have two passive maneuvers active at once.)
I use both in most of my games, and in that context, PCs who dip into both systems tend to use SoM to represent what they are and PoW to represent what they do- their "signature moves", in a way.
Get a Wand of Prestidigitation. Every day, before your friend wakes up, turn his skin a little bit more purple. Don't change it back until he says something.
L1: +5 to Str and Con (+6 when drunk) in Bloodrage. You're immune to fear until you fail an ability check, skill check, or attack roll.
L11: +7 to Str and Con (+8 when drunk) in Bloodrage. Self-cast Heroism for +3 on attack rolls, saves, and skill checks (+4 when drunk). Alternately, cast Blood Scent on enemies for +3 to attack rolls and damage against them (+4 drunk) or +5 if they're below half health (+6 drunk).
L12: Overwhelming Confidence comes online. While immune to fear, all morale bonuses double, but if you lose fear immunity, they become penalties. Rage's bonuses are morale bonuses. Assuming the order of operations is favorable to us, we get: +14 Str and Con (+16 drunk), +6 on attack rolls, saves, and skill checks (+8 drunk), or +6 to attack rolls and damage (+8 drunk, +10 half health, +12 half health and drunk).
L20: Self-cast Heroism on entering bloodrage. +18 Str and Con (+20 drunk).
The only problem here is that entering a bloodrage tends to sober you up, as it increases your Constitution modifier, so you'll need to pre-drink quite a bit. We also get some very nice morale bonuses to Will that I didn't mention, which shore up the penalties inflicted by Mood Swings.
Also, never ever miss. But with stats like these, that won't be a problem, right?
