Joyd's page

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.

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.)

The Ageless Patience feat (Ancestry, Elf, Level 5) reads "You can voluntarily spend twice as much time as normal on a Perception check or skill check to gain a +2 circumstance bonus to that check. You also don’t treat a natural 1 as worse than usual on these checks; you get a critical failure only if your result is 10 lower than the DC. For example, you could get these benefits if you spent 2 actions to Seek, which normally takes 1 action. You can get these benefits during exploration by taking twice as long exploring as normal, or in downtime by spending twice as much downtime.

The GM might determine a situation doesn’t grant you a benefit if a delay would be directly counterproductive to your success, such as a tense negotiation with an impatient creature."

It is not obvious to me how this interacts with skill checks made as parts of a reaction, such as Aid. I can think of a few reasonable interpretations, none of which I think are clearly the correct one:

1) Ageless Patience doesn't work with reactions, as they don't have a defined time to double.
2) Ageless Patience works great with reactions, as they don't take up time, so doubling that time is essentially free, similar to a free action.
3) Ageless Patience only works with reactions if you somehow have two reactions and can spend both of them on the reaction.
4) Ageless Patience doesn't work with reactions in general, but for Aid specifically you can apply Ageless Patience by doubling the preparation time. (This is not even sort of supported by the rules as written.)
5) Ageless Patience never applies to reactions because all reactions fall under the "delay would be directly counterproductive to your success" clause, even in scenarios where the reaction represents reacting to something that happens over a long period of time, such as Aiding a downtime Medicine check.
6) DM handles it on a case-by-case basis, depending on their interpretation of how much time the reaction would take.
7) Some other thing I'm overlooking.

I'd appreciate any pointers to rules I've overlooked, developer insights, or even just general thoughts about this. (For what it's worth, I think that Ageless Patience and Aid are both plenty good in PF2e even if they don't interact.)

I'm not the first one to suggest that the Vigilante's dual identity stuff feels like it should be a series of feats or something instead of a class feature, but I feel like the status quo makes the Vigilante's dual identity feature pretty worthless on an NPC, assuming that you have mechanics-savvy players. Basically, as soon as an NPC Vigilante does something mechanically that makes it clear that they're a member of the Vigilante class (or likely a member of the Vigilante class), the gig is up, assuming that your players recognize it. The players can avoid metagaming by having their characters act like they don't know, but the surprise is still spoiled for the players, and I feel like avoiding acting on knowledge when it comes to major plot things is kind of unsatisfying (and pretty much impossible to do perfectly).

Alternately, the DM can carefully have the NPC dance around doing anything that suggests they might be a Vigilante, but for most specializations that means ignoring a lot of what's cool about the class.

In this regard, I feel like the Vigilante is fundamentally misconceived as a class, at least in terms of being an antagonistic NPC. As soon as the players can tell that the bad guy is a vigilante, it tells them that someone else - probably someone else they know or will meet (otherwise why have the character be a vigilante?) - is the same character, and given what the social identity is capable of, that usually narrows down the options considerably. That's a potentially huge campaign spoiler given away by the nature of the class design.

If the Dual Identity features were instead a feat chain, that would solve this almost entirely. The NPC antagonist wouldn't have to avoid using class features in order to avoid giving away that they have a dual identity, because they have the same class features as their base class. They'd be down a feat or two, but "this NPC has a few feats unaccounted for" is virtually impossible for the players to detect.

Ironically, this makes the Vigilante perhaps the single worst class in the game for an NPC that's supposed to have two identities, assuming you have reasonably mechanically savvy players, because it's the only class that tells the players "I have two identities." If you want to have a two-identities NPC antagonist, you're much better off making them literally any other class and then using PF's pretty extensive array of identity-shielding items and mechanics to paper over the differences.

I haven't been following the playtest super closely, so maybe this a known issue with a good solution already proposed, but as it is it seems like it's a pretty serious flaw.

I very much like the Vigilante talents, and I think the four-subclasses structure is fine, but having the other class features be huge tells regarding Dual Identity mostly spoils the class as a class for NPC baddies.

I may be able to expand this out further later, but my impressions where this:

- Even when it would have been relevant to do so, it felt hard to justify spending one of just three uses of Animal Focus on a temporary skill bonus. Even if it's not technically true, it felt more correct to use them in combat. (I was at exactly the level where you get to pick two at once.)
- There was some hesitation regarding how the Animal Focus buffs would interact when applied to skills that take more than one minute to fully execute. We ruled it the generous way, but there might be a more technically correct ruling, since it's not like buffs running out in the middle of something is unique to this class.
- I had forgotten how imposing it is to prep spells for a class that knows its whole list. Presumably this would be less of a big deal if I had started from level one and gotten familiar with what's available slowly over time. I'm not suggesting that this necessarily change, but it makes the character feel exceptionally spellcastery.
- Speaking of feeling exceptionally spellcastery, the spells kind of overwhelm everything else the class is doing. I'm not sure if that's intentional. Being able to use Animal Focus three times a day kind of gets lost in the shuffle when you can do equally high-impact spell stuff twelve times a day.
- Trying to figure out when you're flanking when you're holding a reach weapon and your flank buddy is five feet off of the ground is pretty weird, but that's an artifact of my weird combination of choices, and not the class's fault.
- I definitely felt a lot like a cut-rate druid. Having +2 to attack when I was flanking (with my bird buddy, who also gets the bonus) and the ability to give myself little combat bonuses three times a day does not feel like it compensates for what you're giving up. I know that the druid class is probably "too good", but I think hunters need something to ever recommend them over druids.

EDIT 1:
- I threw the character together without thinking everything through, and didn't think about the fact that using a Str-based combat style with a Dex-based animal companion is kind of a nonbo, given how Animal Focus works. I liked the idea of a bird because I thought it would be very easy to flank with it (for the Teamwork feats), and it was, but then I went and gave it weapon finesse. A Roc would have been way better, plus it could have carried me (not in combat).

If something like this already exists, that's great.

As a DM, I find that one of the most time-consuming things is generating NPCs with class levels. I think it would be cool to have sort of an "encyclopedia of stock NPCs". The Precon NPCs List is a great start, but consists primarily of characters of a small number of classes, and even then it can be difficult to find what you're looking for, and there's some holes. (For example, there's no low-level blaster casters I can find.)

What I think would be an interesting resource for DMs is an extensive, organized list of NPCs covering a huge range of possible concepts across every CR (though focused on lower CRs, where most adventures take place), allowing a DM to quickly grab, say, a pyromancer within a CR or two of what they're looking for and drop them into a campaign.

Here's what I would look for in a resource like this -

- Breadth: Should cover as many fantasy concepts as possible, without getting too hair-splitting.
- Simplicity: NPCs should be designed to be simple and coherent if possible, so the DM doesn't have to spend a lot of time figuring out how they work. It's more important than the character be simple than it be optimized. For example, a Pyromancer NPC can just be a sorcerer with the Primal Fire bloodline and some fire spells known. It doesn't have to be a duel-blooded orc-adopted Oracle 1/Sorcerer 4 gnome or something. Characters tend to focus skill points as narrowly as possible.
- Standardized: Things are presented as consistently as possible.
- Core-focused: Where possible, prefer material from the player's guide to other material, and material from PG/APG/UC/UM to accessory material.

This would -not- be a list of the most optimal way to build various PCs; it would be something that would allow DMs to grab things on the fly when preparing adventures and when you suddenly need stats for something you didn't expect to need stats for. A handful of barbarians of different styles is more useful to the database than a half-dozen level 20 AM barbarian variations. (And in fact ludicrously optimized characters should probably stay out, so that things aren't violating their CR.)

What do people think? Would this be a cool resource to have as a community project? Does anyone have any ideas for how to best organize and host such a resource?