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Super minor thing, but the Forge-Blessed Dwarf heritage lets you cast the first-level spell once per week, rather than once per day. Still has some potential utility, but significantly more limited overall in many campaigns.

(My apologies if this isn't the most recent thread for this guide; I wasn't able to locate a more recent one.)

A major difference it would make mechanically is that it'd no longer be a status bonus, meaning that it would stack with other status bonuses. Status bonuses to hit are fairly plentiful in the system.

Right now, the design intent seems to be that you can approximately match a martial that isn't benefiting from a status bonus, but the martial can still end up ahead if it is getting its own status bonus from somewhere. If that wasn't the intent, then I don't think they would have made the bonus a status bonus in the first place.

This came up in the Twitch stream, where they mentioned that the non-selectivity of these options was a deliberate choice, as it allowed them to further push their power level. They also mentioned that they'd be evaluating whether that was the correct design.

I would love it if the way that the top-end was rounded out was to extend the lifespan of the Form spells in general. It's not a huge deal, but it's always struck me as a little odd that if your character's main combat thing is turning into a bear, at some point you either have to either abandon that premise or refluff decreasingly bear-like things as bears if you want to keep up with the system math.

I get that page space isn't unlimited, but I'd love it if the X form spells all scaled smoothly to level 10 (or at least level 9). Right now, the discontinuities and cutoffs in scaling make playing a shapeshifting character slightly awkward. You could still give the higher-level Form spells more exotic abilities so they have unique appeal, but a player who wants to continue to Bear doesn't necessarily have to leave that behind.

I currently very very much like that the current apparitions are largely defined by their areas of concern and not by being any particular sort of lore entity, so I'm focusing mostly on mechanical effects, but I think it's be cool to have -

- Summoning-focused apparition. This could use the summoning spell mechanics similar to how the current shapeshifting one uses the polymorph spell mechanics (although you'd probably need additional restrictions), or it could do its own thing. I know that the goal with the animist isn't to be primarily a pet class, but I think there's a little space for an apparition that puts something like an extra body on the field, even if it's not a full body.

- Athletics actions apparition. This could just give you a boost to athletics actions, but it might also be interesting if it let you make athletics actions with your spellcasting modifier (like some spells do) or do slightly unusual things with them (like tripping with extra range.)

- Fear/Demoralize apparition.

- Physically demanding apparition. This is kind of open-ended, but an apparition that provides exceptional benefits at the cost of applying conditions to the Animist or dealing damage to the character.

- Targeted buff apparition. Apparition applies benefits to a single ally of your choice, potentially fluffed as the apparition attaching itself to that ally.

First off, I love the Exemplar. Love the concept, love the over-the-top feat names, love the iconic. Love it. There's some stuff that I think would be cool that isn't currently supported, but I assume that's coming later.

The thing I wanted to ask about/call attention to is Reap the Field, the Transcend action associated with Peerless Under Heaven. While there's lots of things that muddy the waters (such as the free movement), it seems like it's the case that unless you are very likely to hit the second target, using this ability is typically a loss of expected damage compared to striking again with the strike action - often a pretty substantial loss. Making the second attack at the same MAP does not compensate for the drawback when you miss, unless you are hitting on a 6. You also must attack two different targets, which usually isn't desirable. You get to change where your spark is allocated, but every transcend action lets you do that.

I get that not every Transcend ability is or should be universally applicable, but most offensive transcend abilities seem to be designed around the idea that in situations where a not-so-numbers-inclined player would think that it's right to use the ability, it is right to use the ability. Reap the Field is only truly advantageous in a limited range of situations, mostly ones where you're willing to risk losing all of your damage for the turn in exchange for the movement.

The transcend ability doesn't seem to be offset by the other effects of Peerless Under Heaven, which doesn't seem especially remarkable compared to the alternatives.

I don't think that this ability is a critical flaw with the class or anything, but as long as it's the playtest window, I figured I'd might as well get it out there.

Again, think the class looks great overall, this one option just jumped out as mathematically questionable.

Alchemist: I think that getting the alchemist to a place I'd consider to be a fully great design would require reconcepting the entire thing, which probably goes beyond the scope of what they're doing. Assuming that we're sticking mostly with the loose shape of the current design, the major things I'd focus on are:

-- Making the alchemist come online and feel like a full alchemist at level 1. This likely involves giving them some cantrip-equivalent feature.

-- It's my experience that most people who read the alchemist class want to focus more heavily on their research fields than the current mechanics make a good idea. They want their bomber to be really mostly focused on bombs, their mutagenist to be a capable combatant, etc. I don't think that the "bit of everything" alchemist should go away, but I think there's some headroom to make the various research fields more better at their specific thing.

Barbarian: I think this class is in a reasonable spot. I'd give them more breadth through angles like thrown weapons and borderline-supernatural combat techniques, but that's as much a job for normal splats as it is for a line-wide refresh. A very low-hanging fruit option to improve the class would be to simply add additional rage damage to the weaker Core instincts. There's no particular reason that Fury and Spirit can't be ticked up a few notches. (Also while I think that they should always endeavor to balance options as neatly as possible, if some options are going to be a bit worse or more niche than others, Fury, which represents the stock general Barbarian concept, should not be one of those.)

Champion: Champion, at least Good Champions, are a perfect class design mechanically. Just pull out whatever alignment stuff you're going to pull out - it's not even consistently very good flavor to begin with, and I won't miss it at all.

Investigator: Investigator's combat routine is too clunky for not enough payoff. I don't think that the class is too terribly undercooked as a whole, but it can be juiced a bit to smooth things out and allow for greater flexibility. As a start, just allowing the player to discard an unwanted Devise a Stratagem roll smooths things out a bit. Melee investigators could probably also use a bit of action economy help. I don't want the class to be a combat monster, but right now the investigator combat fantasy is too unreliable and a lot of the tricks that make it somewhat worthwhile require venturing outside of the core concept of the class.

Monk: Current design is very solid. Can't think of anything meaningful I'd change.

Oracle: I think that the overall framework of the class is in a solid place, but many of the individual mysteries are kind of a mess. For what it's worth, I suspect that Oracle mysteries are probably the hardest open-ended subclass type to design by a wide margin. Most of the mysteries are flavorful and evocative in their descriptive text, but the actual mechanics are kind of fiddly and in some places feel like the connection to the concept is a bit arbitrary. Curses are all over the place in terms of benefits and drawbacks; while conceptually it sort of makes sense for there to be some with greater rewards but greater associated risks, in practice the game is more fun when advancing your curse has meaningful drawbacks but is still generally a pretty good course of action.

Sorcerer: If I was doing a full and complete refresh, there's some tweaks I'd make, but this class is in a pretty solid place. Depending on what spells end up in Cores 1 and 2, there are some places where granted spells that are awkward fits could be swapped out.

Swashbuckler: I'd maybe shuffle a few things around to get the class off the ground a bit faster, but I think Swash is basically fine. The overall class design isn't to my personal taste, but I don't think there's anything wrong with it.

I feel that it might be useful to highlight in the guide which spells merit serious consideration for in-combat use. There are many spells that only really have noncombat utility, spells that deal noncompetitive amounts of damage at the point you can cast them (in particular, ones that only work in melee or contribute to MAP), and spells that are rarely if ever going to be worth the actions to cast for a character that's primarily a melee beater. (There's nothing that makes a Barbarian particularly better or worse at using out-of-combat utility spells than any other martial character, but "Barbarian that can incidentally use Comprehend Language" doesn't seem to be the main concept the guide is pointing towards.)

These might technically be worth including in the guide, but currently they're crowding the small handful of spells that you'd seriously want to cast enough in combat as a Barbarian that you'd actually consider building around this concept. It might make sense to boldface or highlight in some way the spells that genuinely motivate such a build, or move them to their own sections.

It's still a strong skill feat, it's just no longer such a massive power-level outlier. The fact that it's a natural endpoint to what's already one of the strongest things you can be doing with your skill increases means that, from a pure power level perspective, it's still something that a lot of characters will end up taking and using in campaigns that go that long.

My guess is that the current version of StD is probably closer to the original design intent in terms of kill frequency, at least based on the language of the errata and the design of the rest of PF2e, which doesn't contain anything that kills enemies nearly as reliably with so few resource limitations.

Some of the ancestry feat ratings seem inconsistent. For example, Tengu's Storm's Lash is rated blue. Elf Otherworldly Magic, which lets you take any Arcane cantrip, including Electric Arc, is rated Orange. Unless you really value your Electric Arc counting as a primal spell for some reason, Otherworldly Magic is always at least as good as Storm's Lash. Gnome First World Magic is only rated green, despite being at least as good Storm's Lash. Realistically, almost no Wizard is ever going to choose to make their primary damage cantrip run off of Charisma, so Storm's Lash should be red, or orange at best; the other ones are at least take-able if you think that one cantrip is a decent deal for an ancestry feat.

Similarly, natural weapon heritages are all over the place. Some are correctly ranked red, but others are ranked as high as green, with no clear relationship between how good the effect is for Wizards and the rating.

It also seems unusual to rate Halflings only orange when they have great ancestry feats and +Dex/Int/Wis, -Str is very close to a perfect set of ability scores for a Wizard. Kitsune, in contrast, can't boost any of Dex, Con, or Wis unless you use voluntary flaws, don't have much in the way of good feat choices, and are rated green.

Minor nitpick, but Azerketi aren't Merfolk. Merfolk are an unrelated species, and Azerketi don't resemble what most people think of when they think of Merfolk. The "recognizable" name for Azerketi is Gillmen.

I think that most of the time, when somebody says that PF2e (or some other system) is "too balanced," what they mean is that they want some option that excites them to be mechanically stronger, and they're told that it shouldn't be for the sake of balance. That makes balance look like a design problem to that player. Some players want the things they're doing to be a little unfair (in their favor), and that's not necessarily a bad desire to have (one of the appeals of a TTRPG is that it can serve as a power fantasy). Few people are willing to say something like "wizards should be stronger than everybody else because they're wizards," at least nowadays, but they might chafe at the idea that win-the-game spells are carefully controlled for the sake of balance, because they like the idea of having and using win-the-game spells.

Most characters have something like their complete identity from level 1, especially if you're looking at build options that hew tightly to the core concept of the class. There's certainly exceptions; anything that relies on getting something from an archetype, for example, isn't generally going to work at level 1. (Two-weapon Barbarian, for example, doesn't have much actual use for their second weapon.)

I'd also say that spellcasters in general might be a little less appealing at level 1. A lot of level 1 spells aren't super exciting, and you don't have many. There are some spells that would have an outsized impact in such a campaign (Magic Weapon, for example), but on the whole I feel like spellcasters get a slightly slower start than most martials.

I'd like a more font focused doctrine. The "Zealot" perhaps. Same spell progression as cloistered, but gives healing/harming hands as a first level feat automatically and gives some kind of buff to your font at 7th level. Hard to gauge what it would be though, since cloistered is so vanilla to compare it too.

I think one of the challenges with any doctrine concept that starts with Cloistered spell progression is that Cloistered really doesn't have anything to trade out except for the Domain Initiate feat, unless you're willing to press outside of the normal boundaries of the system by making a class that stays at trained Fortitude or never gets Expert proficiency with any attacks. (And that last benefit is a small enough tradeoff that you can't really give much for it, because casting-oriented clerics don't really care about that weapon proficiency bump.)

I guess you could push the Fort bump later, like to level seven (and just give two benefits there), but that's such a small cost that it's again not something you could offer much for.

Realistically, if you're trying to build another full-casting Cleric doctrine, you're sort of stuck either just replacing domain initiate with something else, or trying to bundle in some other sort of drawback, but most drawbacks I can think of fall more in the realm of what I'd expect a class archetype to do than a Doctrine.

There may be some creative ways to shunt things around a little, but I sort of feel like there's not a ton of space for full-caster doctrines that aren't just a feat swap because Cloistered is spending its entire budget on the full caster progression.

Apologies if this doesn't merit its own thread.

The requirement for Unleash Self-Defense is "You’ve cast two beneficial spells on yourself or an ally this encounter, each on a different round."

Is Message, cast normally (no amps), a "beneficial spell?" It's certainly castable on an ally, and it's certainly not generally harmful, but I'm not clear on whether it qualifies as actively beneficial. It does give the target a temporary new ability (the ability to communicate back to you).

My feeling is that Message meets both the letter and spirit of "beneficial spell," but I was wondering how other people were interpreting that interaction.

(Unleash Dark Persona also uses the "beneficial spells on your allies" wording.)

If you haven't already, this is a totally reasonable thing to ask your DM for specific suggestions about. The Player's Guides to Paizo-published adventure paths usually include specific suggestions about what languages are likely to be useful during the adventure, and sometimes even have broad information about what languages might be useful for what purposes. Ultimately it's your DM's call about what sort of information they want to give the players about stuff like this, but it's worth at least asking if you haven't already done so.

HumbleGamer wrote:

Fast healing stuff might also help ( witch and bard focus spells for example).

Well, you have to watch which ones you use: for example, the bard focus spell, Hymn of Healing, has the Positive Trait so using it for fast healing is a quick way to kill a Dhampir. ;)

Dhampir and other creatures that have the Negative Healing ability aren't harmed by positive healing, they're just not affected by it. Hymn of Healing won't kill a Dhampir. The reason that Heal harms creatures with Negative Healing is that it includes separate clauses about dealing positive damage, but neither Hymn of Healing nor the Fast Healing ability it grants includes such a clause.

In Pathfinder 2e, positive healing and positive damage aren't automatically connected. There are effects like Heal and Lay on Hands that do one or the other depending on the target, but there are also effects that only do positive healing (which just don't affect undead things) and effects that only do positive damage (which just don't affect most other things.)

Yes, good catch. Interestingly, that brings all the martials but champion up to nearly the same score.

I skipped giving points to "1/2 damage on a failure," but that's a common mechanic, so I'll add that in as well. I gave Save Shifts 4 points. Should 1/2 dmg on fail be 4 points or less?

Not that it really matters, because the system used borders on meaningless anyway, but Champions do get Greater Weapon Specialization.

A -1 at half of the levels is a real and meaningful detriment, but it's not so severe a detriment that it can't be compensated for with other neat stuff, especially on a class with such open-ended thematics. On a class that relies heavily on attack rolls, actually hitting is very important both for making the class numerically sound and for making it feel satisfying to play, but I think you can be a skosh behind other martials on that front and still get there -if- the rest of the class is designed around it.

If it is the intent that familiars riding on you can reload a heavy crossbow for two of their actions when commanded, I sort of hope that they release some other character option that competes with or obsoletes it mechanically. "There's a gopher or whatever that clings to my weapon or forearm and uses its tiny hands to reload my crossbow every time I shoot it" is a pretty specific character concept. That's not to say that somebody can't have fun with a heavy crossbow wielding character that works this way, but it shouldn't be the case that the clear lowest-friction way to execute a concept like "Heavy Crossbow user" is to balance an unusually dexterous toad to your wrist.

I'm in no way adverse to offbeat character concepts, I'd just rather the game not be designed such that every character pursuing a particular fighting style is mechanically pushed toward the exact same offbeat character concept. (I had the same beef with the things that went into TWF with guns in 1e.)

While they weren't as loudly customizable as Eidolons, Phantoms were built as full normal characters just like pretty much every other creature in PF1, so there was still a moderate level of customization present. It's a little reductive to say that the only customization option present was the choice of emotional focus - that was just the only major phantom-specific axis of customization.

In practice, the overwhelming majority of the available feats weren't things you'd seriously consider giving a Phantom (or any character, really), but there was still a significant amount of mechanical customization that went into a Phantom above and beyond the emotional focus.

This is probably not what you're looking for in a response, but Pathfinder 2e (or Pathfinder 1e, for that matter) isn't the first system I would use for little-to-no combat games. That's not to say that you can't use it for that and have fun doing it, but it's sort of like using a concrete mixer truck as a taxi; technically functional for the purpose at some level, but very heavy in ways that you're not really making much use of, and kind of awkward for the purpose.

I think it would be reasonable for somebody to say that having +1 in their fifth-most-important stat for five levels is more important to them than having +1 in their most important stat for exactly level 20, even if you knew for certain that your campaign was definitely going to reach level 20. I probably would still always boost mainstat in most circumstances, but I also don't think that the strategy that produces the best possible stat array at 20 is necessarily automatically the best strategy if it produces a slightly worse stat array for several levels before that. It's a question of getting a very important boost for a short time vs. getting a less important boost for a longer time.

Depending on the frequency with which you fight flying enemies, it might be worth investing in Charisma to use cantrips to plink at things an Eidolon can't hit. That's not super exciting, though.

One way to kind of sort of vaguely make this an option for a relatively low cost would be to add spells that last a reasonably long time and give some kind evolution-like benefit explicitly to an Eidolon. That way, Summoners that don't want to worry too much about spellcasting throughout the day can just cast those spells on their Eidolon in the morning and be good to go - effectively trading spell slots for another "evolution." Not exactly the same mechanics by any stretch of the imagination, but sort of the same general vibe.

This definitely comes with the cost of sort of busying up the spell lists with spells that only summoners realistically want, but I don't think you'd need very many such spells - you could maybe get away with as few as one, if it was written super flexibly.

I think that the value of options that create good one-action options for spellcasters that don't have them built-in was initially undervalued by people when analyzing the system, and I think that the deeply negative initial reaction that some people had to Quickened Casting is part of that.

Many spellcasters have the trait that the best thing they can do with two actions is vastly better than the best thing they can do with one action. Because of this, Quickened Casting is often closer in its impact to getting an extra turn than just an extra action. (Though it's obviously not quite as good, for several reasons.) This isn't to say that the various "third actions" that we lean on don't have value, just that their value isn't anywhere close to the value of the two-action spell part of the turn, even if that two-action spell has to be lower than your maximum spell level. Being able to frontload your firepower in a tough battle also has a lot of impact.

In short, not all save-an-action things are created equal; the specific dynamic created by allowing spellcasters to save an action on casting a spell is especially critical.

That's not to say that Quickened Casting is a great feat. Especially on characters with exceptional one-action options, I don't even think it's even all that good of a feat. (Basically none of this applies nearly as much to Bards, for example.) It definitely isn't a core part of how spellcasters interact with the game system at high levels, the way that it was in Pf1e. In a post-APG world, where every class has tons of new class feat options available through archetypes, it's harder to justify than ever. If somebody were to say "I understand why the action saved by Quickened Casting is extremely powerful, but I still don't think it's a good feat," I'd think they were being totally reasonable, but I also think that the feat was initially misevaluated in general.

For what it's worth, it looks like most guides for classes that get it as an option have figured out Quickened Casting; only a few still give it as a below-average rating (which isn't necessarily unfair), and none still give it the lowest rating. One of the guides that gives it a low rating is a Bard guide, and Bards benefit less from Quickened Casting than Sorcerers and Wizards, in addition to arguably having stronger feat options for it to compete with. (It's still useful for Bards, but the value of a Bard's turn is more evenly spread between its three actions, for many Bards, so it doesn't have the same dynamic for them.)

I can't see taking an archetype in order to better use an item that is gone in a single round.

The major selling point of the archetype is that it transforms talismans from "expensive consumable" to "free several-times-daily ability." You're not taking the archetype in order to make better use of talismans that you're paying full price for. The fact that the mechanics for your free daily-uses ability piggybacks on the mechanics for consumables that aren't worth it until you're much higher level than the level listed for the consumables isn't really irrelevant. Loads of excellent daily-uses abilities are "gone in a single round."

Talisman Dabbler isn't a must-take, but it's head and shoulders better than the majority of the archetypes ranked higher than it. It significantly improves things scoundrels want to be doing anyway.

I feel like, as far as rogues are concerned, the killer app when it comes to Talismans is the Mesmerizing Opal. It turns successes on Feint into critical successes for no action cost. Granted, that means that about half of the time it won't have any effect (it doesn't do anything on a failure or on a critical success), but for Scoundrels it very strongly enables one of the major selling points of being a Scoundrel in the first place: the possibility to keep flat-footed running for an entire turn, not only letting everybody else get in on the flat-footed action, but saving you from having to set up flat-footed again on your next turn. (Plus it makes Distracting Feint way better.) Getting that a few times a day for the cost of a dedication feat seems like at least a reasonable path for a rogue to consider, even if we now live in a world where the opportunity cost of any dedication feat is really high. I definitely wouldn't say that it's something that every Scoundrel needs to knock down the door to prioritize, but it seems like enough of a benefit to warrant more than total dismissal. (Or, if there's some reason it warrants total dismissal in spite of the synergy between Scoundrel and Mesmerizing Opal, I feel like that's worth noting specifically.)

The class does go stale after a bit (once Opals become super cheap), but it still seems worth considering, even if you eventually retrain. (I guess you can start making Murderer's Knots instead.)

Not that this is hard rules text about how animal companions should work, but:

All large bears in the bestiary have 5-ft reach. They're considered long creatures.

Apes and Arboreal creatures have 10-ft reach when they're large.

As far as basically-bipedal dinos go:
Hadrosaurid's attacks (tail and foot) use the (longer) reaches of a tall creature.

Iguanodon's tail uses the longer reach of a tall creature, while its thumb spike uses the shorter reach of a long creature. Tails in general tend to have longer reach, even when the creature is unquestionably long, like a Stegosaurus, so it feels like Iguanodon is just reckoned as "long."

Pachycephalosaurus's skull attack uses the longer reach of a tall creature.

Spinosaurus's bite has the longer reach of a tall creature, and its claws use the shorter reach of a long creature.

Tyrannosaurus's bite has the longer reach of a tall creature, and its claws use the shorter reach of a long creature.

Other basically-bipedal dinosaurs are small enough that their reach would be the same regardless of whether they are considered long or tall.

All flying bird-like creatures use the shorter "long creature" reaches for things like jaws and talon attacks (or even shorter ranges!), but, probably unsurprisingly, the game does not currently have stats for secretary birds. (Wing attacks often have extreme ranges, but the Bird companion doesn't have a Wing attack.)

I was tying the classes based on their mechanics. Spiritualist Phantom's manifestations and elemental focus combines a lot better with Medium's Spirits. And then both have a similar thematic but different output.

In any case Spiritualist and Medium do not mesh well with how Summoners and Eidolons work.

I think you're getting distracted by the fact that Spiritualist and Medium both involve the idea of a ghost going inside your head; mechanically, the classes couldn't have less in common, while the Spiritualist is directly designed as a Summoner variant, with highly parallel mechanics. In a hybridized Summoner/Spiritualist class, you'd probably just make various iconic Phantom abilities into feats and/or evolution options. (I think it's useful to think of such as class as a hybrid between the two; there's no reason that an Eidolon can't have an emotion-themed aura, for example.) Yes, there are salient differences between Summoners and Spiritualists, and in some cases those differences stand out because of how highly alignable the classes are otherwise, but they're pretty straightforward to reconcile.

Meanwhile, Spiritualist and Medium have so little in common that I'm not sure where you'd even start with trying to hybridize them. You'd be essentially either creating an entirely new concept out of only the thinnest thematic ties, completely jettisoning the mechanical feel of one of the two classes, or creating a weird frankenclass that's two completely unrelated things stapled together. "Something involving ghosts going into you" is not a core mechanical conceit in the same way that the the chassis created for the Summoner and then cloned for the Spiritualist is.

Also, phantoms don't have an elemental focus; are you thinking of some other class? Do you mean "emotional" focus? If anything, Summoners have a slightly stronger tie to elemental stuff than Spiritualists.

I think there's a pretty good chance that if they do go with a system where you have eidolon categories inspired by existing creature categories, like the Unchained Summoner, they'll simply have one consistent type regardless, to entirely sidestep the issues with type-based immunities. (That type was Outsider in Pathfinder 1e.) Spiritualist phantoms were also Outsiders. In other words, the existence of type-based immunities or other inconvenient type-based traits may be a moot point; it's a problem that PF1e already solved, and even if they have to invent a new type to do it, the same solution could be pretty easily applied to PF2e. I'm not sure where the assumption that type-based immunities would ever be a problem even came from.

Also, there definitely shouldn't be a Spiritualist/Medium class. Those classes have only the most superficial things in common. The differences between Spiritualist and Summoner can be pretty easily be reconciled, especially as both classes would have to be pretty significantly redesigned. Mashing together Spiritualist and Medium is like mashing together Oracle and Cavalier because Alahazra and Alain are both humans.

I think that what makes sense for the Medium depends a lot on whether they are aiming for the Medium class fantasy or for how Mediums actually work in PF1e, which are very different things.

I think that the fantasy of the Medium was supposed to be that you have the flexibility to embody different archetypes to a reasonable degree based on which type of spirit you had, and that you could flex into different roles as it was advantageous to do so. Erasmus's story, for example, makes being a Medium sound like you get to be a flexible jack-of-all-trades, carefully choosing which strengths to emphasize as you need them.

PF1 did not deliver on this fantasy very well at all for a wide range of reasons. Because you needed (with most archetypes) to choose one for the day, you weren't really that good at being adaptive. Seriously exacerbating this, shifting spirits doesn't rearrange your stats or feats or the resources you've invested in magic items or anything, so you would end up pretty mediocre at everything if you actually tried to spread out your strengths.

In practice, it made sense to have a "main" spirit as much as you could manage, at least for days where you expected any combat. It usually made sense for that spirit to be the Champion, because the Champion does a better impression of the other classes that might normally fill that role than most of the other spirits do. The whole structure of the class creates a feedback loop; the more you invest in one spirit, the more you want to use that one spirit, which in turn makes you want to invest more in that spirit.

If I was trying to design a class for Erasmus vs. if I were trying to design a class for replicating the 1e Medium experience, those classes would not have a great deal in common.

Talisman Dabbler seems like a potentially reasonable fit for any Scoundrel. Scoundrel works well with Mesmerizing Opals, and even just the dedication feat allows for a few a day starting at level 4.

On some level, you're basically just trading class feats for money, and not even all that much money if you're only making Mesmerizing Opals. I haven't run the numbers on how much Mesmerizing Opal money you expect to save over the course of your career, but it seems potentially significant early on.

I'd probably use Meteor Hammer stats, maybe with the damage type changed to slashing. The weapon should be in the flail group and should have reach, and long and flexible weapons often have some combination of Disarm and Trip, which the Meteor Hammer has. The Spiked Chain also exists as a point of comparison, but it's not as long. You could also take basically any polearm and just move it into the flail group, depending on what aspects of the weapon you want to focus on.

A strength minimum to use a weapon isn't really part of Pathfinder 2e's idiom. The idea that you're better with a heavy weapon if you're stronger is already built into the basic rules for attack and damage rolls. Most characters that would want to use such a weapon will meet any reasonable strength minimum you could put on it anyway.

WatersLethe wrote:

Oooooh, Witch-only Master Abilities that grant Hex Cantrips!

Yeah, the potential issue with hex cantrips available via post-chargen choices is when multiclass characters poach them. But the bard has the same issue, and there doesn't seem to be any issue for an MC bard to grab them.

If it did turn out to be a dealbreaker concern that other classes could get access to them, you could resort to kind of heavy-handing a solution by giving the ability a prerequisite of something that only primary-class Witches have, like the Hexes feature itself.

I believe that the Spiritualist probably belongs as part of the Summoner, and I say that as somebody who absolutely loves the Spiritualist. I think the classes have more to gain by pooling their coolness than they'd get by being split out.

My basic pitch for the class would be that you'd made a doctrine-like choice at character creation between

A) having a companion that is a significant force in combat (and possibly having slightly diminished casting, like a warpriest; I do think it's important that the companion feels powerful from one to twenty, even if it means that the character has to be limited in other ways to compensate.)

and

B) having a companion that's more analogous in its role to a familiar, but having a font-like pool of summon spells

The actual balance between these options isn't something that I have intuitions about; the size of the font, the gap between how good in combat the companions are, and whatever other fringe benefits you'd want to put in there are all knobs you could turn. Summoners probably get bard-like proficiencies, with light armor and simple weapons, plus maybe a few thematic-but-not-amazing other weapons.

In a manner similar to bloodline, your companion's family (regardless of your "doctrine") determines which list you cast spells from. Families would be similar the ones used by the Unchained Summoner, providing some default abilities, with "Phantom" as an option that has the Occult spell list attached.

Various other things that are attached to the classes could be relegated to feats, appropriately rebalanced, of course. For example, the emotion aura and the random SLAs could go there. I feel like the idea of an emotion aura on an angel or demon or arbitrary outsider is reasonably flavorful. (You could probably also just drop the random SLAs.)

That does make for a potentially overstuffed class, and in particular you'd really need to be careful not to step too hard on the sorcerer's toes, but I think the overall package makes sense.

Phoenixes in the bestiary have Primal magic, so I'd imagine that that's what they'd default to. Primal also has the nice upside of having both healing effects and plentiful fire effects.

I'm not sure what sort of actual resurrection effect you could get away with making a focus spell, but you could sprinkle a few into the bloodline spells, and maybe have some healing (or flexible healing/damage) spells as focus spells.

I would hope that a Phoenix bloodline would have some kind of focus on restoration. Otherwise, the Elemental bloodline already exists, and while it's not a perfect representation of a purely offensively-focused phoenix, it's pretty close.

Champion seems like it has a lot of natural synergy with Marshal. It has a number of things I'd consider beneficial -

- First and most importantly, a compatible set of party tactics. "Stand near the champion" is something you want to be doing anyway. While the Marshal aura is (usually) a bit smaller than the Champion's reaction zone, the same general ideas apply. In a sense, the Champion and the party don't need to worry about spending extra move actions to try to keep people in the Marshal's aura, because they're already kind of doing that.
- Some charisma synergy
- A generally flexible set of actions. Champions don't regularly need to do things that require two actions, giving them the ability to flex into various Marshal options. (They do have to deal with having too many things that they want to do, but I think that's true for any Marshal.)
- The ability to personally benefit from the major effects of the auras. The easiest person for the Marshal to keep inside of an aura is the Marshal themselves, so it's nice if the Marshal cares about their own aura.

Isthisnametaken? wrote:

Someone wrote a rogue handbook that I wanted to pass along the link to. It’s a bit rough, but it’s the first attempt I have seen that tackles rogue.

https://rpgbot.net/p2/characters/classes/rogue/

Linkified for your convenience.

This guide is in really rough shape; while it's inevitable that any new guide will contain a few mistakes, this one is pretty dense with significant errors about how various system options work. The Ruffian section alone errs in how it describes armor check penalties, and suggests tripping (an Attack action that contributes to MAP) as a means of making enemies flat-footed.

That one-action Harm and one-action Magic Missile aren't considered good uses of a spell slot in most circumstances seems to be part of an overall design decision that using your third action offensively after using your first two actions offensively gets you pretty substantial diminishing returns, outside of specific class abilities. In this way, Martials and Casters use the three-action system pretty similarly - you're reasonably happy to use two actions offensively, but you can often find something better to do with the third. If anything, the biggest difference between Martials and Casters is what they can do when you have exactly one action on your turn to use offensively.

While they certainly have some validity, the sort of complaints described in the first post feel like concerns born of first impressions of the game. It's not immediately clear just from reading the rules (or at least it wasn't immediately clear to me) that (Attack Tag Action) x 3 isn't often practical for a martial character, and even when it is, it isn't really that great because the last attack is so poor. That's not to say that having that option isn't a useful tool for Martials to have, but at least in my experience the gap between how different class models use their actions is a lot smaller than I would have guessed just based on knowing that it's a three-action system where attack-like actions often use one action and casting a combat spell often uses two.

Casting a spell is done using the "Cast a Spell" activity. The Cast a Spell activity is unambiguous about how many actions it takes: "Casting a Spell is a special activity that takes a variable number of actions depending on the spell, as listed in each spell’s stat block." Nothing in the rules for the Cast a Spell activity links the number of actions to the number of components in any way. It happens that many spells that cost one to three actions - either as a flavor thing or as an artifact of how the system used to work - have the same number of components as required actions, but in the final version of PF2 those two things are entirely decoupled.

Conjuration carries on, at least it's focus spell combines nicely with it's core concept of summoning. [...] I find the Conjuration and Abjuration to have thematic and relevant Focus powers.

The conjuration focus spell is exceptionally poor. Even if you're playing a summoner for some reason, it is very rarely worth using Augment Summoning. Because the list of conjuration spells is broad and powerful, conjurers were given an extremely borderline Focus spell.

Divination is pretty bad. I mean, if you roll a good number it's great. But there's no guarantee you will roll well; what if you roll a 1? Congrats, you just wasted an action and a Focus point.

The Divination focus power is bonkers good. As in PF1, Diviners have been given a wildly potent special ability to compensate for choosing a spell school that doesn't have a huge number of general-purpose spells that are easy to make sure of every day. (PF2 compounds this by making many Divination spells Uncommon.) Its in-combat utility is okay, but its out-of-combat utility is incredible. (It doesn't work with downtime activities, but it works with a pretty broad swath of other things.) It is better than rolling twice, and PF2 makes rolling twice extra good because grades of success are now part of so many more checks.

You can very loosely replicate this for trips by using a weapon whose critical specialization effect knocks prone, although that's obviously far less reliable.

A lot depends on how often you expect to be able to retrain. If you can retrain a lot, then regularly retraining so that your incapacitation spells are just regular-known at high spell levels is good. If you can't, then it might make sense to make one a signature spell.

I've been thinking a lot about this, especially in the context of the premium that 2e places on higher-level spell slots. Here are some low-level spells that do benefit from heightening, but which are reasonable at any spell level:

(Note that I don't think this is necessarily a list of *good* spells, although most are okay.)

Charm (Assuming that there are low-level NPCs you want to charm.)
Disrupting Weapons
Enhance Victuals
Enlarge
False Life
Heal
Illusory Creature
Mending
Resist Energy
Sleep (Assuming that there are low-level NPCs you want to put to sleep.)
Soothe

There are also many spells that you generally want to cast at a high a level as you can, but which are still a reasonable use of a slot/action if you don't. The vast majority of spells whose primary purpose is damage fall into this category, although very low-level damage spells get outpaced by auto-scaling cantrips quickly if they're not heightened heavily.

Spells that heighten for a distinct effect but that are still useful with their base effect are another pretty good option.

Out of curiosity, has anybody actually modeled how much damage paladins built with an offensive inclination actually do, or is it just being taken as a given that they're bad at dealing damage? Especially against evil enemies, the number of bits and pieces of additional damage scattered throughout the class, along with multiple potential ways of making attacks as a reaction, mean that they might stack up reasonably, while still retaining a healthy level of survivability just through their basic class features. I'd hope, for the sake of game balance, that they're not superstar top-notch clearly-the-best (especially against non-evil creatures), and I certainly wouldn't expect that to be the case, but they have a lot of ways to gain incidental damage through feats that aren't paralleled in other martial classes (which tend to have one or two very powerful core features that enhance damage). It's possible that they're already not too shabby. (Frankly, I feel like modeling paladin damage requires a lot more assumptions than most classes, because so much more of their damage is conditional, even if the conditions happen pretty frequently.)

Why are champions shoehorned into using a shield? I was planning on playing a Paladin with a polearm, what am I really missing out aside from "2 AC" (since my AC is already going to be fine.)

The core chassis doesn't have anything more to do with using a shield than the fighter does, but Champions have a bunch of shield-related feats and features and don't really have any feats that directly promote other combinations of held weapons (TWF, two-hander, free-hand). You're not punished for not using a shield or anything, you just don't have much of anything that provides a mechanical incentive for doing otherwise. (Unless you really don't want to use a flickmace, in which case the reach that a two-hander can provide is nice, even though you have no specific support for it.)

I'm not sure if OP is updating the guide any longer, but I agree that Assurance (Athletics) and Hefty Hauler are deeply underrated. Hefty Hauler is amazing unless you're flat-out not tracking encumbrance or are a monk or maybe a barbarian.

Entertainer seems like a very poor candidate for being called a "a good option overall." It gives you training in a skill that most characters care about only very marginally, if at all. The feat wants you to continue to invest in this skill that only bards and maybe some goblins actually care about, and if you do, your payoff is that you can, for six seconds, distract one or more creatures, maybe, provided that they're not doing anything important. It feels hard to consider that a "good option overall." I'd call it a maybe option for a character that was already going to invest in performance regardless.

I'd even say that there's arguably a third kind of "uncommon."

There's (1) things that are flagged as being potentially disruptive to campaigns - teleport, many divination spells, etc., which DMs might be more likely to want to ration out access to.

There's (2) things that are mechanically largely insignificant in terms of the texture of the campaign and what characters are capable of, but are simply less common in the inner sea region - most uncommon weapons, for example.

Finally, there's (3) things are meant to be universally accessible to characters that have a specific feat or class feature, and generally off-limits otherwise. Most focus spells fall into this category.

And that's just for player options.

These aren't exclusive categories, and there's a little bit of blur between some of them, but the rarity system does seem to be serving multiple roles that are partially orthogonal. I don't think this is a crisis or anything, but I would not be surprised to see "which kind of uncommon is X supposed to be?" becoming a question people have in the future.

It probably doesn't work for downtime activities:

"Some downtime activities require rolls, typically skill checks. Because these rolls represent the culmination of a series of tasks over a long period, players can’t use most abilities or spells that manipulate die rolls, such as activating a magic item to gain a bonus or casting a fortune spell to roll twice. Constant benefits still apply, though, so someone might invest a magic item that gives them a bonus without requiring activation. You might make specific exceptions to this rule. If something could apply constantly, or so often that it might as well be constant, it’s more likely to be used for downtime checks."

That would seem to suggest that the DM may allow it provided that you're able to spend your own downtime continually aiding, but you probably cannot pop up at the last minute (or the first minute) and only aid just at that one point.

There is no such language in the section on exploration activities. This could be interpreted to mean that it works just fine for exploration activities, or it could be that we're supposed to interpret backwards a section from the downtime section that the downtime rules also apply to long-running exploration checks. (It should work fine for any exploration mode check that doesn't represent "a series of tasks over a long period.")

Fighter flexibility (and the improved version) explicitly only lets you choose fighter feats. It doesn't interact with multiclassing at all, except in the very loose sense that having an extra combat feat means that you might be more likely to use one of your normal class feats on a multiclass feat. It doesn't make fighters meaningfully better at multiclassing.

For what it's worth, Pathfinder 1e NPC statblocks for paladins routinely feature them using weapons that aren't the favored weapon of their listed deity, even when the deity's favored weapon fills a comparable role. (E.g., Paladin of Torag with an axe, paladin of Iomedae with a mace.) It does not seem to be a baseline expectation at all that Paladins in Golarion strongly default to using their deity's favored weapon. (Although there's certainly some correlation.) It's obviously a GM's prerogative to do whatever they like, but in Golarion as presented in the printed material, paladins take full advantage of their proficiency with all martial weapons, and frequently use weapons that differ from their deity's choice even when there's no particular mechanical incentive to do so. (Clerics, who have more incentive to do so, are more likely to carry their deity's favored weapon, although this is also far from universal.)