Kitusser's page

My point is that as you level up, the action economy should DEcrease, making tedious actions faster.

The fact that at level 16 and up, a Gunslinger can't Reload their weapons as a free action is ridiculous.

Same with Spellstrike...

I mean the capstone feats make you permanently quickened for both recharging spellstrike and reloading.

The Gunslinger has lots of action compression and action econ boosts throughout the entire class. Like off the bat you often can draw your weapon as a free action on initiative, and do something else. You also get a reload that is a rider on another action. The class has a lot of pretty good reactions as well. Hair Trigger lets you shoot as a free action on rolling initiative.

Why does it specifically need to be a reload as a free action?

Well, I don't hear people complaining about melee martials not being able to Strike 3 times in a row, so...

Reloading takes an action, or more.

Switch barrels on a Capacity weapon takes an action.

Recharging Spellstrike takes an action.

Activating Arcane Cascade takes an action.

And there is barely anything to speed things up.

BTW, very bad gaming habit to tell someone "Well you shouldn't do that every round"...

I'm genuinely not understanding your point. Can you just state it clearly?

The whole point of reload weapons is that you aren't firing them 3 times a turn, firing/attacking 3 times a turn is heavily discouraged outside specific builds that dampen the downsides, and even then you likely have something better to do.

It's more than you can't do it every round than you shouldn't. But like even on Gunslinger, you can with some really weird builds, but they kind of suck.

Sure, it's not viable due to MAP, but I'd rather at least have the choice to do so. Right now, some of the Slinger's Reload abilities are also quite specific in order to use. There's Running Reload, but there's nothing that rewards you when scoring a Critical Hit with a free Reload. Finally, Reloading your firearm "paints a target on your back".

Same with the Magus's Spellstrike. It's not about damage, it's about shaving off the number of Actions required.

What is this standard? You want martials to be able to do something that's not viable anyway? If that's the case, use a repeating weapon and you can. It's weird to complain specifically that reload weapons don't do this, that's kind of the whole point of them.

Also you technically can do this with Spellshot. If you miss you can use a reaction to suck the bullet back up. If you have two loaded weapons that's 3 shots as long as one of the first two misses.

So this is a criticism of PF1 right? And not PF2? Because high level PF1 encounters could have one round last an hour. Even with 15 enemies on the battlefield I’ve never had a PF2 round take 30 minutes without some kind of break happening in the middle. Average is definitely around the 10 to 15 minute mark, tops.

I'm not entirely sure what their point even is. It's not like fighters are attacking 3 times a turn outside of some exceptions.

One quick addition to the changes:

Unbound Step got a significant buff to Distortion Lens, making it a 5-foot burst instead of one 5-foot square, effectively quadrupling its AOE. This now allows the amped version to add 15 feet to allies' movement if they move through it at a diagonal.

It also lost the ability to sustain and move the effect. So a nerf and a buff. More of a buff though.

In addition, while not directly a Psychic buff, Phase Bolt did get it's range increased to 60ft. So that's nice.

Versus casting 3 different spells in 3 rounds?

Is there some kind of point hidden here?

Says who? Jealous players who watched Gunsligners steal their thunder?

I don't see people complaining about Gunslingers using Advanced Repeating Crossbows. Why should it be an issue with firearms?

Capacity weapons feel like they should work like early revolvers, where you had to manually cock the hammer back every shot, also known as "fanning". I should be able to shoot 3 times with a Pepperbox, if I'm have a hand free.

Saying that "a gunslinger shouldn't shoot 3 times per round" is as dumb as saying that "a magus shouldn't spellstrike every round".

What's next? "A spellcaster shouldn't cast spells every round" ?

Advanced repeating crossbows have worse traits and damage die than firearms.

Capacity could probably use a buff, sure.

I'm pretty sure it's common to say that martials in general shouldn't strike 3 times per round. It's not a very effective thing to do. Magus often does not spellstrike everyone round. A spellcaster not casting spells every round is more comparable to a martial not making any strikes than not making 3 strikes per turn.

The critical damage for Britney bolt increases by 2d6, just like the success result. So at rank 2 that is 4d6 regular damage and 6d6 critical damage. A few ranks up and the critical result is a paltry 2d6 higher than a success. It is useful for creatures immune to criticals because crit immunity only applies to the doubling of damage, not to the other results of a critical success, but against most enemies, the magus loses quite a lot of damage per round when their spells don’t double damage on a critical success.

For regular casters, briny bolt is not a bad rank -3 or 4 spell option because past rank 3 you just don’t get much heightening it any more. But Magi don’t have those spell slots.

Other effects are fun, and making an enemy waste an action is a good one, but Britney bolt will fall way behind even the new Imaginary Weapon for damage at medium to higher ranks. And most Magi players want some kind of maximum damage option that can go in a spell slot, which isn’t really in the game right now at allx

I missed that, but it still seems perfectly fine to spellstrike with considering how good the rider is. It still gets an enchanced critical which is pretty good. I'm not gonna exactly be unhappy to waste an enemy action.

Britney bolt is worse than hydraulic push though, with the same heightening issue for critical hits.

How? It has a great rider. Why do you only evaluate spells based on the damage numbers?

Also I think a fair reading of Briny Bolt would allow the damage on both the crit and success parts to scale by 2d6. It says "the damage increases by 2d6". It doesn't say that it only increases on a success. The damage is only written in the success and crit success effects. Whatever logic would make it only apply to success, would also be able to be used for it to only increase crit success, at least from interpreting the text written and not reading into background design.

But anyways, why does it matter if the remaster made a bunch of save version of attack spells? The attack spells are still in the game and perfectly valid to use, and the only way that’s changing is if Paizo outright breaks their word about legacy content.

It would be nice if they added some more. The amount of Attack spells in this game are very low. It seems like Paizo avoids making them outside of Focus spells.

But having a whole class of spells that are bad unless you're a Magus is a lousy design and also creates a bunch of trap options for newbies who won't know why they're bad.

Yep. I don't know if the Ivory Tower design is intentional in this game, but it's most certainly present. Especially with the Sure Strike nerf I don't really know what the place of these spells are outside some niches. It's really strange how they design a whole type of spells that seem to only really be useful against low AC enemies, or if you use some other thing to make them useful (Sure Strike, Magus, Shadow Signet).

The bar as set by magus is “doesn’t make you worse than literally not having a subclass if played in the straightforward way the subclass seems to expect”.

Yeah... Magus has this weird thing like the Gunslinger where playing the subclasses as intended can actually just make you weaker than if you just didn't. The subclasses tighten your options rather than expand them.

It's the company who's put out the best version of the game to date and continues to pump out great content. They have my support, and I'm happy to send them money when I make purchases.

Their rules are free on AoN, and they continue to invest in Foundry support. Wins all around for me. What's to gripe about?

Just because the rules are free on AoN doesn't mean that you cannot criticise the current lower quality of their products that they still charge for. Even if they didn't charge for it, you could still criticise it.

Criticism is healthy for the game.

I said it isn't outside of Paizo's intended balance after being nerfed because they don't balance the game the way you think they do because unlike you they acknowledge they know what is possible with their game materials, but not what is probable because there is not actually any universal factor that makes any given creature on the books any different in probability to get used than any other creature on the books.

Basically anything is possible, this is a ridiculous way to balance options. You need to balance this based on if they are plausible, not merely possible.

Edit:

Essentially by your logic, a spell that grants a +1 status bonus to Will saves is just as good as a spell that grants a +1 status bonus to all saving throws because technically there is a non-zero chance that you will only have to roll will saving throws in a campaign, and we of course, have no way to answer how likely that would be because that would be akin to rolling a dice for what you next campaign is going to be like.

Crouza wrote:

Accusing others of invoking abuser tactics over a class discussion? Mods don't get paid enough for this s!$&.

Especially when the accusation of gaslighting is accompanied by text that implies it's not the people framing someone's statements as made up nonsense that are gaslighting, but rather me for daring to introduce the fact that someone citing "most campaigns" as proof of their argument doesn't actually have the data set necessary to make that kind of statement.

So it's the good ol' poison the well by insisting different opinion must be inappropriate behavior and not legitimate.

Maybe it's because you are pretending like it's impossible to make any claim without a scientific study behind it.

You are conflating what you feel to be true with having actual measurements.

This is preposterous. Do I need to know the exact percentage change there is for a lion to kill me to know that there is less than a 0.1% chance I will win if I try to fight one with no weapons?

Some things are so extreme that you don't need mathematical precision to make an accurate claim.

Take a step back and think for a second. You are basically saying it's impossible to make any claim even to say a 51% certainty without having the exact data and mathematical analysis to back you up.

You don't need to be 100% certain to make accurate claims.

This example is so extreme that it's genuinely bad faith to pretend you can't easily provide an answer.

Nothing else about the spell is relevant

I think this sums up your position nicely.

Except that's actually not true. If you're playing a published AP, which is a pretty common method of play, then since it's published it's easy for anyone with the AP to determine by looking at the fights.

We have a lot of them to draw on now and based on that, it's clear that trading raw damage for force like this is a bad trade. There is no AP where there's enough creatures resistant to physical damage to make up for the damage loss vs all the other fights where that's not true. So the idea that we can't know isn't really a thing since for an awful lot of play including all first party APs and all of PFS, we actually can know.

There's no way to answer it in a home game without knowing what creatures the GM intends to use... but since 90% of the bestiary doesn't fit the bill, the odds are pretty bad for the IW change helping. A GM would have to stick to the creature them VERY tightly for it to work out. Which I'm sure happens sometimes, but that isn't the norm either, especially since other times the theme will be some other creature type without the resist and now it's a flat nerf.

Apparently it's literally impossible to even vaguely answer what is more likely in most campaigns, even when talking about extreme examples like enemies resistant to both bludgeoning and slashing (while having higher resistance than the damage loss in IW) being present in over 50% of enemies.

Kitusser wrote:

<snipped for space>

You're missing the core fundamental point of what I am saying, so I'm going to try and come at it from a completely different phrasing:

Which enemy is more common in the next campaign I'm going to play, an incorporeal creature or one where the best choice of damage would be slashing?

This is the wrong question. It should be "which enemy is more common in the next campaign, an enemy resistant to both slashing and bludgeoning damage and the resistance is higher than the damage lost from IW, or an that doesn't fit this category?"

The answer is obviously the latter in 99.99% of campaigns.

You would literally need over 50% of the enemies you face to be resistant to both these damage types for the former to be true.

It's ridiculous to pretend like you cannot answer this question to even a vague degree. Just cause you can't define the line precisely doesn't mean you can't say something is obviously over the line or below the line.

Ok since Teridax asked for some math I thought I would show the basic problem with 2d8 scaling for a psychic using their class features.

Lets look at rank 7 with basic class features that dont require extra actions.

Fire ray 49 ave damage, 98 crit damage (floor fire is a great make them move feature or 24.5 ave damage not affected by crits if they don't)
Chain lighting from a sorcerer 65.5 ave damage, 131 crit damage
Unleashed psychic OLD IW amped 77 ave ave damage, 154 crit damage
Unleashed psychic New IW amped 63 ave damage, 126 crit dmaage

Including basic class features Old IW was doing too much damage and way to much damage on crits compared to chain lighting a rank 6 slotted spell. As far as I am concerned IW should not out damage a sorcerer using chain lighting. I think Paizo made the right call to downgrade IW and by making it force gave it a different lane since that 63 ave and 126 crit is going to be just that against almost any creature.

It certainly seems like the current Psychic is not out doing anything that the Sorcerer is doing, let alone a melee spell against an ally friendly AOE with 500ft range than chains to any enemy within 30ft of the previous target.

Also this isn't real math, just looking at the values on a hit or crit ignores the fact that Chain Lightning does half damage on a successful save, and that Fire Ray still has an effect if the spell attack misses.

I don't know why you're concerned about a melee spell attack that targets 1-2 people outdamaging Chain Lightning on a hit and crit. Chain Lightning has always been a better spell than IW.

I mean, you've listed two already with cry of destruction and tempest surge, both of which do indeed fit the bill of dealing more damage than the remastered imaginary weapon while also featuring better range and even the ability to damage more enemies than IW at a time, but let's just keep digging

I'm actually so sick of needing to sift through all these comparisons and needing to only care about pure damage output after Unicore accuses people taking issue with the nerf by purely focusing on damage.

Unicore brings up a spell only for the comparison to fail. What happens next? They bring up another spell.

Now they start asking us to find the spells for them.

During all this: range, the function of the spell and how it targets a defence, any other benefits of the spell are completely ignored because apparently the only way to evaluate spells is by what number the spell says for it's damage.

It would be nice if Unicore could actually back up their own vague claims and implications instead of constantly demanding evidence from everyone else.

Kitusser wrote:

Bluemagetim wrote:

I think its the crit scaling of 2d8 on a focus spell. magus just made that happen with more frequency to the point it was becoming a cult build.

You literally said yourself it's the interaction that broke it. That means the interaction is the problem.

Yes, but it doesnt mean its the only one. It is just the thing that shows with more frequency the crit damage was too high for a focus spell.

What else? If it's an interaction through MC, then the MC dedication has already been nerfed.

I think its the crit scaling of 2d8 on a focus spell. magus just made that happen with more frequency to the point it was becoming a cult build.

You literally said yourself it's the interaction that broke it. That means the interaction is the problem.

Notice how it was the interaction of putting 2d8 scaling on martial to hit scaling that broke it?

It points to the crit damage having been the problem with the spell

"Notice how having superior accuracy, superior defences, and being able to combine the spell with a regular weapon attack makes the spell problematic?"

Yeah it's the spell that's the issue here, not the change of circumstances.

If you want to build and talk about a blasting psychic, and focus exclusively on damage output, we should be talking about the oscillating wave psychic, or even the distant grasp psychic. Instead there are several pages here in a thread talking about remastered psychics just talking about Imaginary Weapon spell, and insisting that this one nerf (I have been agreeing it is a nerf for multiple days now) represents a complete disrespect for the psychic and an overall nerf to the class

I don't even know where to begin... what?

People here again and again have stated that the Psychic as a whole is lacking! I have, I know Teridax has, so has Tridus. These comments were in direct response to you!

Imaginary Weapon being nerfed is just another example of how mistreated the class has been over the remaster period. The reason why everyone is complaining about the IW nerf is BECAUSE the Psychic class as a whole has fallen gravely behind the other spellcasters. It's because the class whose identity is their focus spells, had one of their better focus spells nerfed for no good reason. This and the fact that the class in pretty much every other category is worse than other casters.

Can anyone name 5 rank 1 focus spells that do better damage than remastered imaginary weapon? Tempest surge is seen as a very good rank 1 damage oriented focus spell. Its damage is 1d12 per rank. It is a reflex save spell so some people will try to argue that will more than offset the .5 less average damage it does than Imaginary weapon...but it is single target.

How many times are you going to find another spell or focus spell to compare to? This has got to be some kind of joke.

You are the one solely focused on pure damage output, it's literally the only thing you've considered at all with all your comparisons. Did you forget that Tempest Surge is ranged, offers a saving throw, and inflicts a really good debuff?

My point is that the psychic class does not need to have the best damaging cantrip/focus spell in the game, especially not as a melee only option. That is not a good spell to build a Psychic character around.

They don't 'need' it, but Fire Ray doesn't 'need' a 60ft range, so I guess it should be reduced?

Now, personally, I think a decent melee cantrip/focus spell option is nice to have for the psychic, as it works pretty great as a back up option for when you get forced into melee, but the remastered version is fine for that. It is still in the top 10% of damaging rank 1 focus spells, and probably in the top 5% of multi-targeting focus spells.

Maybe before the nerf it was in the top 10% of damaging rank 1 focus spells, now it almost certainly is not. It deals average damage in melee, with an unreliable method of multi-targeting.

It is almost certainly not in the top 5% of multi-targeting focus spells. Dealing average damage to two targets at most in melee.

The obsession around it has always been "its a focus spell that heightens at 2d8, that is what the ceiling of PF2 should be for focus spells." The developers appear to be saying, "No, that is too high of a ceiling for focus spells." That is why I believe people are reacting so intensely about it. It has nothing to do with the psychic.

Love to see the mind reading of intentions again.

If it being slighly behind fire ray means people will just stop talking about it/being so obsessed with it, than the nerf is probably a good thing.

So now the standard for how good a spell is, is how often people talk about it?

I don't even know what point you're trying to make in this comment.

Most games don't have any measurable degree of bias from the spread they are allegedly following "to a certain degree". Not because there is no bias, but because there is nothing but bias. The entire method of creature selection for a campaign is bias-driven, even when the bias involved happens to be the GM intentionally trying to make sure they are choosing in a way that lines up with the overall spread of abilities - a thing most GMs are not even aware of because it requires analyzing every creature rather than just picking what looks cool or fits their theme.

Most APs and most homebrew games tend to try and throw a variety of enemy types at you, while maybe gravitating towards one or two themes. Often these themes are a broad enemy type like Humanoids or Undead which tend to follow the trends of the overall monsters in the game with some commonalities or some bias toward certain things.

Like take Undead, which basically has all the incorporeal enemies in the game. It also has a higher proportion of enemies that are weak to slashing or bludgeoning. There are many APs that centre around undead, but they will not only use undead.

Like in Spore War you are fighting Fungal enemies that range from a T-Rex to a spellcaster on a chair.

Many categories are fairly broad or they don't really have many restrictions around them so they tend to follow the statistics of how most monsters are designed. That's why it's not entirely inaccurate to make arguments based on representation in the monster catalogue.

This is also, for better or worse, how Paizo balances options.

Which is absurd if true. Balancing IW around a campaign where you are primarily fighting (likely above 40% of foes) enemies with resistance to both bludgeoning and slashing that aren't incorporeal is not going to be representative of 99.99% of games. Especially when the change is not cleanly an advantage against these enemies.

You don't know the numbers that would be required for the declarations of "rare"and "<0.1%" to be accurate. Paizo also knows they don't, and can't feasibly, know that... which is why they balance the game the way they do.

You can make a pretty accurate guess that pretty much no game is going be favourable to the new IW without data. Some things are just highly unlikely. You would literally need the majority of enemies you face by a large margin to be resistant to bludgeoning and slashing, and those enemies would also need resistance high enough that the damage nerf isn't actually higher than the resistance you're up against.

You assume that I am making some precise mathematic truth that needs all the data and all the precise math. In reality, I am making a fairly simple claim that does not need this precise math because it is so obviously a nerf that you don't need to be precise to make the claim.

Even in the situation that favour the damage type, the increase is only marginal or can even be negative, the amount of enemies even in the categories where this kind of physical resistance is common is not high enough to be a net benefit.

You would need a GM to be intentionally picking enemies that have this physical resistance and putting it against the party over and over again. How likely do you think this is going to be? Or is it impossible to make any statement of likelihood about that either because you can't precisely know how accurate the numbers will be.

I don't need to do a mathematical calculation to know that it is highly unlikely for me to trip over when walking across my room. Dare I say it is less than 0.01% likely to happen?

I don’t think anyone is arguing that it is not a small nerf to a niche psychic cantrip anymore. The argument is that the cantrip was always an outlier that was too powerful, but so niche anywhere but on the magus that it wasn’t previously harmful to game balance…except where people were looking to it as a base line of what focus spell damage could be.

The extra damage from fire ray is a pretty bad effect. The damage only triggers if the creature ends their turn there and there is almost no encounter where a creature probably shouldn’t spend one action moving. It will occasionally happen, but it is extremely rare in my experience, and it is not enough damage for a party to plan around keeping a creature in place unless that was already going to be advantageous to them. Hitting a second target with the remastered Imaginary Weapon is probably twice as good of a rider ability than the extra damage at the end of a creature’s turn from fire ray.

You just keep throwing stuff at a wall trying to see what sticks. Like are we seriously going to pretend that forcing an enemy to spend one action to move is bad?

I hope that a melee spell has a better rider than a ranged one. Especially on a 6hp no armour prof class whose identity lies in their focus spells.

Most of what I have seen in this thread is people saying “it’s the melee limit” that justifies the extra damage, but at the same time, everyone already agrees that, even at 2d8 heightening, actively running a Imaginary Weapon psychic up into melee was not a viable enough strategy to see imaginary weapon as a primary play style for a Tangible Dream Psychic.

Is this supposed to be contradictory? This supports the argument of 2d8 not being overpowered more than anything.

Shocking grasp was a rank 1 spell attack roll spell that targeted one enemy in melee. It had slightly better base damage but didn’t heighten as well and was outpaced by imaginary weapon by rank 3.

Thunderstrike replaced shocking grasp in the remaster. The lowered base damage and increased heightening as well as making it a saving throw targeting spell and gave it range. It didn’t lose damage to gain those things. 2d8 heightening is too high for a focus spell, period. It was especially too much for a spell that can have two targets.

Making the base cantrip target 2 enemies, even at 1d6 and melee, would be plenty to make it stand out. It doesn’t need to do more than 2d6 heightening as a focus spell.

It's goalpost after goalpost. This is getting ridiculous. Why did you even use Thunderstrike as an example if you were just going to pivot to a worse spell? Shocking Grasp was not a very good spell past low levels where it's damage was high, there is a reason they made the spell much better after the remaster.

Fire Ray does 2d6 and creates a 1d6 damage zone. If the enemy stays, the damage is higher than Imaginary Weapon at 60ft range, if the enemy does not, they spend an action. This actually seems fairly comparable to IW.

Two targets is nice, but with the melee range you aren't going to guarantee that. The Psychic is also a 6hp caster with no armour proficiency and 2 spellslots. I'm not gonna buy that Psychic focus spells must be on the same level as other focus spells, especially when the archetype now limits how easy it is to access these focus spells. You're also vastly underestimating how bad melee range is.

The bottom line is that the developers clearly feel that 2d8 per rank heightening is not acceptable for a rank 1 focus spell, especially one that can hit multiple enemies. That exceeds spell slot spells, and is even with Thunderstrike, which is the single target damage spell. Of course Magi wanted it and wanted to cast it instead of spell slot spells.

If they did anything to fix it, probably the best would be to let the unamped version target 2 creatures, and maybe let the amped version target 3. Being melee only isn’t enough of a trade to do more damage than amped Ignition when Amped IW can hit two targets.

It genuinely feels like you're just trying to look for a reason why this change must be justified rather than you coming to the conclusion naturally.

Thunderstrike has a 120ft range and does half damage on a successful saving throw. Do I need to say more than that?

Kitusser wrote:

Bluemagetim wrote:

Well it doesn't matter how many enemies exist in the monster core with those resistances, it depends on how many exist in your game

So Paizo should balance options based on how useful they could be in one game where the GM essentially caters to that option being the most optimal thing rather than how useful it will be overall?

The issue at hand here is that there is no "overall".

The number of creatures in the roster the game presents that have X feature has no guaranteed and measurable relationship to the number of those creatures that will be encountered in any given campaign.

In order to measure "overall" accurately we'd have to assume every group will have their campaigns line up as having done all of the same things over the same period of time. That's not how things work.

The overall spread of monsters in the game is the closest thing we have to an assumption we can follow. Most games are going to be following this spread to a certain degree, with bias for or against some enemy types.

The alternative is treating each option in the game like it is constantly in a favourable scenario, which is more unrealistic and absurd.

Looking at things overall is certainly not perfect, but it's likely the closest you're going to get to an accurate picture.

Reducing the damage of IW and changing the damage type to force because in some rare campaigns (like <0.1%) of campaigns, that will actually be an equal or better change for the spell is just as absurd as increasing IW to a d10 and changing the damage type to fire because in some campaigns, this will be equivalent damage or a net loss due to enemies with fire resistance being highly prevalent.

You can literally justify any change as "balanced" this way.

Well it doesn't matter how many enemies exist in the monster core with those resistances, it depends on how many exist in your game

So Paizo should balance options based on how useful they could be in one game where the GM essentially caters to that option being the most optimal thing rather than how useful it will be overall?

What I suspect has happened (pure speculation) is that the devs working on the remastered Psychic saw the focus spell buffs as "Quality of Life" changes and not actual buffs, so in their minds the Psychic's focus spells are still above the curve significantly.

Same thing goes for the better refocusing, maybe they thought people were already running it this way, and people were happy with the psychic, so it was fine.

The fact they make it harder to poach the Psychic's focus spells backs this up, and perhaps they thought that since IW was above the curve for Psychic Amps, it must be nerfed to be in line with the "already strong" Amps.

All the small hits to the class eventually made it fall far behind, and perhaps the devs didn't notice the damage.

I am legit curious, though. My approach was a suggestion, and the solution I arrived at, but there are other ways I'm sure. What would you suggest as a buff to Imaginary Weapon as is. Granted, restoring it to its original state is a valid answer. But I'm curious, if it had to be weaker than it's original, if my approach is not a sufficient buff, what would you suggest

If it had to be weaker, I don't think your change is bad. I would personally want to lean into the dream aspect of the subclass, and make the damage type variable to simulate them pulling out various "attacks" from their dreams. You could even make it say only melee for the base version, and either for the Amp.

Imaginary Weapon is close to the least important possible change to the Psychic as far as I am concerned with, in whether it will still be a fun class to play or not.

While overall it doesn't impact the class that much, it highly impacts Tangible Dream Psychics. The issue here is that the class is receiving unnecessary nerfs when the class has fallen behind after the remaster.

I don't think the Psychic is supposed to have better focus spells than any other class.

I don't see how not. The Amps were clearly quite good for focus spells pre-remaster, and now they aren't as impressive because focus spells were buffed across the board. They nerf the dedication to restrict the ability to take these focus spells as well, which to me shows they think they are more powerful.

If the Psychic is not supposed to have better focus spells, then what exactly is the class supposed to be good for? It can cast focus spells more or less as frequently as everyone else, it has less spellslots, a bad chassis, and impotent/infrequent class/subclass features.

What is it supposed to be good for?

Kitusser wrote:

Bluemagetim wrote:

I do agree that you can't rely on it. Just the same you can't rely on the bleed.

It's dishonest to put these two in the same category of unreliability.

Would you care to spell out why?

Because every single time the bleed does damage it is useful, whereas every single time the push pushes, it is not going to be useful, sometimes even detrimental.

The bleed can never be detrimental, it can be not useful, but that's because the enemy dies before the bleed does anything, or the enemy is resistant/immune. These situations aren't that common though, you usually get at least one instance of bleed damage.

Also, the push is dependant on other circumstances while the bleed really isn't.

I do agree that you can't rely on it. Just the same you can't rely on the bleed.

It's dishonest to put these two in the same category of unreliability.

I guess I'd like to step in to explain myself a bit. Yes, I do think it was nerfed. But I think enough was given back to feel less like a nerf? If that makes sense. You'll see in some of my posts in the other thread that despite my defense, I think there is more that can be done. I feel it's a good direction, but even I'm adding to it homebrew side. If it was just d6 damage but stayed physical, I'd have poo poo'd the nerf too. I think it's an acceptable direction. It's SO CLOSE to being a proper side grade.

Force was enough for me to shrug and say, "Okay, I've been looking for some force options, this is a trade that at least softens it a lot for me." Heck, I've been designing a psychic concept for Starfinder about two months ago, so the class is fresh in my mind.

Here's the thing, there's an order of damages for spells. physical does higher damage than magical damage, Attack roll does higher damage than saving throw, and melee does higher damage than ranged. I saw the math, and my thought was, "They gave it damage in line with melee magical attack cantrips, so they switched it to a magical damage, but they picked force, which is pretty alright. At least it's consistent with the math." But it's lacking, to me, I agree more can be done.

Right now, Imaginary Weapon is a better melee Ignition, which I think is fine. But I for example would like to hedge on your point, Tridus. Psychics are squishy. They don't wanna be in melee. And I learned while drafting them as a Starfinder character, Imaginary Weapon becomes right questionable when facing ranged enemies. I feel it needs a ranged option, doesn't have to be a far-reaching option, if anything, I think 30 feet would be good. Make it do what Ignition does, but force, plus the amp. I feel at least at that point, it can make up for the diminished damage to non-resisting enemies, by being able to reach out while staying safe.

The original damage was in line with the melee only spell, Gouging Claw, but now that it does damage associated with a hybrid...

It's nowhere close to a sidegrade. It's beneficial in <5% of combats and only marginally so, because of the nerf to the damage. The -2 per rank applies every single time IW does damage. It's just a straight up nerf.

Saying it's a better melee Ignition is missing the point when Ignition can go ranged, and IW supposed to be superior to regular cantrips because it's a Psychic cantrip. I wouldn't even necessarily say it's better than melee Ignition, because fire weakness is fairly common.

I don't see why we should make it ranged when it could just be superior in it's niche and be more interesting rather than just an Ignition clone with a different damage type.

Teridax wrote:

I don’t think it was ever meant to be. The whole point of psi cantrips is that they’re upgrades to regular cantrips, and amps are better than most other focus spells. While I do think there are issues to poaching amps, spending class feats to have an above-average cantrip I don’t think is unbalanced when you have focus and slot spells.

Psi cantrips being better than other cantrips I'll grant you (Although that rapidly loses relevance once you have enough spells to cast multiple ranked spells per combat). But I've never bought the idea that Amped Psi Cantrips are better than Focus spells apart from maybe 4 outliers (Shatter Mind, Guidance, Message, and the old Imaginary weapon). I guess I can see where the reputation came from when bery few classes had access to good focus spells. But that seems to be more a case of them finally nailing down what they want focus spells to be able to do woth psychic, and most focus spells from then on being at roughly psychic's level.

The fact that they want to make it so difficult to be able to access these focus spells makes me think they are supposed to be more powerful. Psychic was always the "focus point caster", if their focus spells aren't intended to be more powerful, then the class being a two slot caster is highly questionable.

Also pre-remaster focus spells were overall a lot worse. They were made more powerful after the fact, but Psychic's weren't for some reason.

Psychic at the very least gets some very unique focus spells, and a few very powerful ones.

I disagree that a rank 3 focus spell and a rank 1 focus spell are supposed to be the same power level. PF2 is not a game where you are supposed to use the same spells or items all the time.

I don’t know what the ideal answer is or what the original intent was. I still think it is possible that it was originally written to double and then an editor removed the doubling line and didn’t have time to come up with something different. We know that there is probably a second round of errata that hasn’t been finished for player core 2 yet. So we could see changes yet. Gluttony’s Jaws is in a rough spot without doubling. It is worse than the preremastered version. I wouldn’t say the same about flurry of claws.

Which Rank 3 Focus spell are we talking about? Did I miss something?

Flurry of Claws not being able to crit would likely be placing it on the weaker end of spell attack focus spells.

Kitusser, in regards to the conversion we have in the other thread.

Basically the option was not in line with damage from other cantrips. that you can see.
When it was amped it wasn't in line with any other focus spell. Easy to see.

If they had made it a physic only class feature then it would have had a different set up design balance points it would have needed to clear. but as a modular feature any class can obtain it cannot obviate other options and it needed to have a place among other options.

Before this remaster version it was out of place.

Psi Cantrips are clearly upgrades over regular cantrips. This is pretty clearly shown by the fact that all of the Psi Cantrips based on already existing ones are given upgrades specifically for the Psychic. But even if this is the case, current cantrip IW is worse than Gouging Claw.

I also do not think that Psi Amps are supposed to be in line with other focus spells. For the most part they are more powerful or they do very unique things. Some are pretty bad, but that's just how it always is.

If the issue is other classes poaching the cantrips, then nerfing the archetype (like they did) should be enough to address that. I hate it when something gets nerfed because another class can poach it for themselves. It's like how Multiclassing in say 5e causes many features to be nerfed.

Devs, who are the people who best know their own game, reduce the die size when they change a physical damage to force.

It is not nerfing the spell.

Note to mention there are already at least 2 other threads that deal directly with this. No need to keep on polluting this one

It's funny when people say not to pollute a thread in the same comment that they do just that.

If you're going to say it's not a nerf, engage with the arguments made by people saying it is instead of just appealing to the authority of the developers. It's been pretty clearly demonstrated how the change is a net negative overall, so I don't know how else it can be interpreted other than a nerf.

The disconnect between how Paizo seems to view these things and how the community views them is really big and I'm not really sure why.

There's probably an inherent disconnect between designing and playing, and Paizo seem to have a very strict method for creating features, leaning towards making things underpowered.

Doesn't help that their rationale is rarely explained.

I also suspect that over the years the intentions of the original designers got lost a bit, and newer designers have their own interpretation of things. But that's just baseless speculation.

That could have been true if the spell was a class feature no one else could take. Instead it was modular, any class could have it so it had to be balanced against every other thing any class could have.

They nerfed the archetype for this exact reason. There's no point nerfing the actual spell as well as the archetype if this is the reasoning.

Also nerfing something for the main class because other classes can poach it is always something I'm going to frown upon.

I am happy with the duration spell change for unleash psyche. Gives an easy strat for the types of spells to cast on your last turn of unleash. Sustain on your stupified turns and do whatever miscellaneous strats need doing

It was definitely a good change. It was crazy how Infinite Eye had literally no way to make use of the feature with their Amps/Cantrips. It should work with Glimpse Weakness now.

I think I implied something there I didn't mean. Apologies for the confusion.

All good, sorry I jumped at the throat a bit.

It would be wild if they're making that mistake because the people writing the rules don't know about that rule, yeah. I find that pretty crazy.

I mean, it'd also be kind of par for the course these days, considering Oracle archetype not having a way to remove Cursebound, Champion archetype not having an aura, Oracle repertoire size (still)...

Personally it doesn't surprise me, recent QA seems to be much worse than before. For me, forgetting an area is worse than forgetting exactly how a basic rule applies because 99% of spells function the same way as that rule.

It's shocking to me that they barely buffed the Psychic for it's remaster and even nerfed some parts.

Because the conversation about imaginary weapon has come up and won’t leave the thread discussing the possible magic book, it really seems like the issue being expressed here is that magus players feel like the issue is that the class is somehow bad if it doesn’t have a 2d8 scaling damage focus spell. It is really not psychic players complaining about this.

I suspect that there was a deliberate intention not to have a 2d8 focus spell that basically breaks the starlit span magus into having one true build. With imaginary weapon at 2d6, minimally there are multiple build paths to have a 2d6 (or equivalent) focus spell, and if amps can’t be used with spell strike anymore then the entire discussion of imaginary weapon is very off topic to the new book.

I straight up do not care about Magus here. I have issue with this from the Psychic's perspective. It's annoying for people to assume intentions to try and discredit my arguments.

By necessity it had to be a bad deal. Went from an overtuned option to something more in line with design expectations for a cantrip and and amped version.

I think if we are going to make comparisons I would think of it this way. If IW stayed with its former damage types but at the d6s(which was going to happen) it would not have been a comparable option in non amped form to gouging claw which has a bleed rider on crit and can be any physical damage type.
Now that its force the spell has a place that occupies a different space than either ignition or gouging claw.

A psychic could have imaginary weapon, gouging claw, ignition, and shield for example. With that they have physical options, fire, or now force in melee.

I disagree it was overtuned. It's designed for the psychic, which is a 6hp no armour prof class, and it's a melee cantrip/focus spell, on the class that is supposed to have better cantrips/focus spells.

Tridus wrote:

There's ballpark ~100 non unique creatures weak to slashing or bludgeoning. I can't get an exact number because I can't get the filter to behave how I want it. Probably doing something wrong. Comparatively, there are exactly 2 weak to force, and they're from the same AP. So in terms of exploting weaknesses, this change is a massive loss.

There are ~288 non-unique resistant to both bludgeoning and slashing from what I can tell on AoN (usually in the form of physical resistance), but that's out of ~2840 non-unique creatures.

All this assumes an equal distribution of creatures in adventures. Which, nice as it would be to get a more balanced distribution of creatures, isn't exactly how it's done.

What you are doing is a assuming a disproportionate amount of enemies resistant to slashing and bludgeoning in every campaign. Which is worse than just assuming the average. You can't balance a spell based on the fact it's going to be really good in one campaign where the enemies are weak against it, you need to balance it holistically.

Yes some campaigns can overrepresent these enemies, but generally this means undead which means bludgeoning and slashing weaknesses and also, other campaigns can make other damage types shine so it's kind of a moot point. Even so, it's still not so common as to actually be a buff in those campaigns. You would need some number like 40% of enemies to break even based on a rough guess.

Tridus points out that casters aren't about having one damage type, they're about responding to different issues with different spells. So buffing the damage type doesn't really matter because you could've just used another spell, or targeted another enemy. Losing damage on the other hand, affects every single cast of the spell, even in the niche it's good for.

If you're going to call me out, at least make sure you actually know even basic statistics. Because you're forgetting about resistance appropriate to monster level. People like assuming max 20-level damage points in most of your arguments when in reality you'll be fighting monsters of your level plus or minus up to three levels. Which imposes more appropriate resistances. Another reality is most of you aren't even going to be fighting at level 20. As rarely do campaigns even get that far, as rarely are written campaigns even designed to go that far nowadays...

None of this analysis matters because you are ignoring the fact that resistance doesn't come up frequently enough to overcome the -2 per rank. I call you out because you refuse to engage with this idea again and again, even in this comment.

Making a jab about basic statistics, then not engaging with the fact that a -2 damage per rank against all enemies more impactful than a damage resistance that exists on small portion of the monsters in the game is certainly interesting.

This is likely to matter even less than that, because you can often just target another enemy without the resistance.

Don't forget the lack of playtesting. When people just change stuff and do it in a vacuum from other people doing that without testing those options, you wind up doing things that sound good on paper but... *waves hands*

I'm also not sure even people working within a class agree on balance. Oracle's mysteries/curses are all over the place ranging from "this curse does basically nothing" to "this curse will get you killed".

Agreed on all points.

I don’t know if I will have time to deep dive the math, but a quick look tell me that flurry of claws that does double damage on a crit is equal to fire ray damage wis, but would be trading 30ft of range for the ability to do twice as much damage when you can manage a second target. So the decision is, is that a fair trade off?

Another point of comparison would be to look at where flurry of claws with double damage on a crit compares directly to a spell slot spell like Breathe Fire, which is also pretty likely to hit 1 or 2 targets most of the time it is used. The damage is the same base but I would look at the accuracy map in a couple of different situations, including where there is are bonuses to attack in the party. Focus spells should come in better than a cantrip, but not as good as an equal ranked spell slot spell that is heightened to a top slot.

Fire ray is not nearly as good as Thunderstrike or Horizon Thunder Sphere.

The question after then becomes whether it's worth it to trade no crit effect and less range for a potential extra target. I would say it's not worth it.

But I'd also take issue with your base question, because Fire Ray does more damage than Flurry of Claws due to the burn effect on the floor, or it forces the enemy to spend an action to move. The spells need to be compared fully to eachother, and Fire Ray is a rare spell attack with an effect on a failure.