LadyWurm's page

Interesting. I'd like to see this expanded on.

What in particular did they feel was hard about PF1E's character creation? Only thing I'd guess is point buy (some I'll fully admit I've used a calculator for every single time I wasn't just using 16/14/14/12/10/8.). Filling out/calculating the bonuses and feat/skill/spell selection seem like something that would be the same degree of difficulty.

For PF1, the stumbling blocks mostly came down to explaining the different ACs and what AC bonus applies to what, some confusion about how spells work for prepared casters, and just some general issues with making sure all the right bonuses were in all the right places (they played a cleric and a ranger).

For PF2, they decided to do the same, cleric and ranger. Character creation went a little faster. When we started playing, they couldn't figure out what makes someone good or bad at skills. The numbers didn't really tell them anything. Then they completely stumbled on the action system, and found it confusing and restrictive.

EDIT: I think that's part of why I find the whole playtest experience so irritating - the bits of PF2 that work are excellent, but the parts that suck are SO sucky that it's jarring.

THIS. So much this. It makes the game feel very patchwork.

I honestly feel like PF2 is off to a better start. So far in the past month and a half I have seen systems dropped and added much like in 5E.

If anything, I think feedback has been implemented much better as we have direct input from the...

Oh, don't get me wrong! Just because I thought the initial release was plain awful doesn't mean it isn't fixable. PF2 does have a number of really good ideas under the hood. It just needs to change and drop a number or things before any of my gaming groups would consider it worth picking up.

Most notably: Resonance sucks, the ancestries feel anemic and need their feats at lower levels, there's too much unnecessary repetition of rules (mostly in the classes), the proficiency system feels boring and unrewarding, and the action system needs a lot more attention.

Many of these are major revisions, but if they happen, I would happily invest in the game.

I own a whole stack of PF1 books, after all. ^__^

I can't really agree with this. Its simply because the system is new. I've devoured the book. I can create a lvl 1 martial character in P2E in 10 minutes. I can probably create a spellcaster in 15 min.

I can do the most important stuff for a lvl 12 character in like 20. It's gear that usually takes any more time. Against spellcaster are more time consuming but they always were.

It's just new. Get used to it and you'll do just fine.

Creating a character is actually fairly fast due to how anemic and simplified the game is, but actually playing it is slow, awkward, and unfun.

"It's just new" doesn't work as an excuse because we started playing 5E when it was brand new and only in playtest and we had both running and playing it just about down in literally an hour. 5E was fun from the get-go.

Weeks later, we're still struggling with PF2 and hating it constantly because the design is so clunky and even being a playtest its options and rules feel restrictive, overcomplicated or bland.

PF2 is similar to occult. It will take sometime to get used to. I dont think it will be hard to remember things after you got used to it.

I started this game with the kineticist. I do understand your pain. It will get better in time.

It will only get better if Paizo improve the game though. Right now, I don't think PF2 is in a good place, and that's a very popular consensus. Adapting is one thing, accepting is another. This is a "this need to change" not a "oh we'll just get used to this".

PF1 might look simple because we've forgotten, gotten used to, or ignored a lot of quirks. For example, the Actions in Combat table listing what is a standard action, a move action, etc, and what provokes / doesn't provoke an AoO is highly complicated; it is also incomplete and ambiguous. But we aren't worrying about it anymore, because the GMs among us have learned to work with or around it.

PF2 tries to be very precise, not to leave ambiguous situations, and consistent. This makes the rules appear heavier and nitpickier. It doesn't help that they're sometimes written with overly administrative-sounding language ("Operate Activation action" is an example).

But I'm fairly sure that after 6 months to 1 year of experience most groups won't find this more complicated than PF1.

On the contrary, I just offered PF1 and PF2 as options to a group with two new players in it, so I let the two newbies sample both. They found PF1 harder to make a character in, but PF2 much harder to play. Nothing about it "worked logically", as one of them said.

They won't go no level. It's too much of a differentiator between PF and 5e. Also not having BAB or an equivalent would cause the game to change too dramatically.

Going 1/2 level with at least a slightly larger gap between proficiency bonuses seems to be the version most people want (myself included).

Likes
1. Four spell lists and four caster types. Convenient and simple.
2. Scaling cantrips. I mean, 5e already did it, but better late than never.
3. The action system. It needs work, a lot of work, but the concept is solid.

My hate list is so long that I don't even know how to pick a top 3. It's like 70% of the game. But I'll try.
1. Incredibly spread-out and watered-down mechanics that not only feel more designed to be error-proof than actually rewarding smart players, but congest the game with constant referencing.
2. A lot of the class feats or features feel bland or impotent compared to their 1e counterparts, and this is even worse for ancestry.
3. Too many "locked" features. Restricted feats, Resonance limits, skill proficiency feeling generic and un-special, etc.

I don't know what Paizo's intent was... but I do know that I visited my two large bookstores in my town and found 20-30 copies of the playtest still up for sale. They're also still readily for sale online on amazon and bn.com.

Which suggests either one of two things. One: their production line was far larger than intended or two: apart from the initial pre-orders, very few of the books have been sold. Which is not a good sign for the product's viability, imho.

I canceled my preorder after I saw the pdf.

LadyWurm wrote:

Go beyond a certain level and it feels like you need notecards just to keep track of everything.

I was going to say that you did also have to do that in PF1e on occasion, but then I remembered that usually that took the form of remembering how all your bonuses were calculated, particularly when a miffed GM asked to see your math after having an attack roll 10 higher than it should be according to him.

I guess it's trading out one mess of memorization for another, though at least the old one was a mess you didn't have to remember while in the middle of a game.

Exactly. In PF1 you pause to look up a spell, or figure out a combat maneuver ruling, that sort of thing.

Now everything requires a lookup. You're flippign to the spells section for class features, flipping to the feats section to make a skill check, and so on. It's beyond obnoxious.

If this were the final version of the game, even after the current updates, I wouldn't even bother with it. This version is so bad I actually cancelled my preorder of the book once I saw the pdf.

My houserules would involve gutting half the game.

- Remove Resonance entirely
- Change how skill bonuses work to put the focus solely on your level of training, and remove all feats that provide "skill functions"
- Give ancestries more core features
- Entirely alter the class system to remove the "feats and powers" system and replace it with simpler talent system that offers stronger, more useful features
- Make feats largely independent of class again
- Rework the action economy for more efficiency and options

I don't mind touch AC, but the rest of this I agree with. Sometimes I feel like half of this game is just repetitive, useless nonsense that was thrown in to pad out the book, which also leads to some things feeling unnecessarily weak, unimpactful or convoluted. Also, the action system needs SO much work. I'd barely describe it as functional right now.

I don't just mean in the sense of the game's bloat or how you have to constantly cross-reference different sections.

I mean conceptually.

A surprisingly low number of things in this game are automatic, passive, or obvious. You can't just look at a number to know if you're good at a skill, you have to reference specific feats. A lot of your character doesn't do anything at all unless you either make a choice or take an action. Your ancestry is nothing without feats. Your class is largely nothing without feats. So many things that were just passive or simplistic features in 1E now require an action, or alter your rolls, or have special conditions, and so on. This is exactly what I hated about D&D 4E and it feels like Paizo is riding that train. Why?

How can this game be marketed as a "simpler, more new-player-friendly" version of the game when it's anything but simple? Go beyond a certain level and it feels like you need notecards just to keep track of everything. This, more than anything, is why I think many people are questioning the design goals of PF2E. If the goal is to make it more approachable, it's really failing so far.

Also, I forsee class design being a nightmare for 3pps.

I've already talked about all the problems I have with 2E (as have a great many people, at great length), so now I want to talk about how the game could be fixed, and what could make it more appealing.

1. Revised Proficiency System. There needs to be more disparity between highly proficient characters and non-proficient characters...not just in some wall of text feats, but in the actual game numbers. Something you can see and feel at a glance. I've seen a lot of suggestions for 1/2 level plus -2/0/+1/+3/+5 or -3/0/+3/+6/+9 (the second one is what I'm currently using). Whatever the case, this needs less bloat and more differentiation between ranks.

2. Easier Readability. This is another big one. This game reads badly. It's wordy and bloated with everything referencing something else and just performing a single task or making a single character choice can require a lot of book-flipping. More than clarification, the book needs restructuring.

3. Less Bloat. This is systemic to the whole game. We don't need the same feat regurgitated for multiple classes, and we don't need to be rolling huge numbers for everything in the game, instead of just the things our characters are really good at.

4. Action System is Too Restrictive. There needs to be more things you can do with it, and there needs to be an action that combines move and manipulate (move half speed and draw a weapon, etc). Also, the Ready action is basically useless for casters, which feels really bad.

These are the four points that would prevent me from buying this game. I've already had to do a lot of houseruling just to make the game feel playable. Unless these things at minimum are fixed, I have no reason to invest in a game mired with severe deficiencies.

LadyWurm wrote:

Gorbacz wrote:

Aaaand Starfinder is the second best selling RPG currently, giving D&D 5e a run for its money. So chances are that Paizo will follow the route that made them bounce back, rather the one that makes them slide into oblivion.

Slide into oblivion. What's an argument among geeks without some solid melodrama!

Given how much the tabletop RPG market has dwindled in recent years, that's hardly validation. That's like being the second-best restaurant in a town with only three restaurants, and the third one has a sewer leak.

Do you have any data on this? Because all other sources I have read point out that 5e has increased the total rpg market by a significant margin

A lot of the older games have been steadily petering out in both popularity and sales, including games like World of Darkness and Call of Cthulu. Most newer games that have cropped up (such as things like Capharnaum, Pugmire and Z-Land) are so incredibly niche as to have very little market appeal. The lion's share of the market is 5E, with a fair tick going to Warhammer (that game is just immortal), some for the newer Star Wars RPG (though that's starting to falter quite a bit).

I mean, the Starfinder bestiary is currently being outsold by the 20th anniversary edition of Vampire the Masquerade and the hyper-generic game D100 Dungeon, and that's pretty sad. Starfinder is not that popular. It's not in the top 5, and it's not high in sales. I don't know where people keep getting the idea of what a "great success" Starfinder is.

https://www.quora.com/What-are-based-on-sales-stats-the-most-popular-tablet op-RPGs

They had to lower the math in order to make the Crit Success and Crit Fail option more fluid within the system. Cause before anybody getting - 10 or lower past a certain point was fairly impossible. Now because of static gain and small increases those small increases matter more. They also changed a lot of Failures to not exactly be detrimental.

Let's examine simply climbing a cliff.

Climb (Athletics)
Let's say that a lvl 3 Fighter (+8 Ath) Rogue (+5 Ath) and Wizard (+3) are trying to Climb a cliff side. In the book it says a cliff side is generally a DC 15 to Climb. Let's say the cliff is 30ft tall. They all have to succeed 6 climb checks to move up the cliff going 5 feet a round. Although on a crit success they move up half their speed, which could depend on the armor their wearing and all that but we're just going to assume they're unarmored.

The Fighter
The Fighter with their +8 (+3 lvl, +4 str and +1 expert) succeeds on a roll of 7 and can only crit fail on a Nat 1. He also can Crit Succeed on a roll of 20-17. So they has a 20% chance of going much faster and needing less checks and only a 5% chance of falling. If he fails he just doesn't move at all.

The Rogue
With a +5 (+3 lvl, +2 str) they succeed on a roll of 15 can only crit succeed on a 20 and can crit fail on a 1.

The Wizard with his +3 (+3 lvl) can succeed on a roll of 12 can only crit succeed on a 20 and is the only one who can actually crit fail more than once with a roll of 1 and 2.

Now that's for the base DC if it was any higher the Rogue and Wizard would be in even more danger because of their lower bonus while the Fighter would only start to be in more danger once the DC hit 19 or higher. The bonus is not that huge with the fighter having only 5 more than the wizard and only 3 more than the rogue. Also if either the rogue or wizard weren't trained in Athletics then that would be a further minus 2 which would make them even more likely to crit fail and thus fall to their deaths the higher they get.

At higher...

The fact that you have to constantly consult a page of feats just to know if you're good at something or what you're rolls even mean is not a good thing. It's tedious, it's frustrating, and it slows down the game.

The playtest has one core rulebook.

This limits what can be included, no matter Paizo's plans for P2E. Instead of the entire first edition, the playtest rulebook can be compared to what P1E's core rulebook offered. Measured by this standard, some omissions and shortages can seem less critical.

Some examples from things I've seen:

• The playtest has weak archetype support. In P1E's core rulebook, there was no such thing as an archetype. They came in a later book, and became one of P1E's most popular features despite this late start.
  
• Backgrounds are bland and pretty limited. In P1E's core rulebook, the counterpart of traits did not exist yet. These were also introduced later on, and became fundamental to character expression.
  
• The options are generic and unimaginative. The P1E core rulebook alone was also pretty stock in its options. 7 races, no alternate traits, every member of *race* was the same. 11 classes, no archetyping, very standard, boilerplate concepts like cleric or barbarian. No traits to mechanicalise your identity, class skills only came from class, so on and so forth etc.
  

Remembering P1E's humble beginning, as well as the grand scope it reached, can help in assessing P2E's beginning.

Yet those classes were far more distinctive than these. Having a ton of options for a class doesn't add uniqueness if all those options feel the same and have been watered down heavily to make them "balanced". Instead, all these "options" just wind up feeling like tiresome bloat and very bland instead of making things better.

Aaaand Starfinder is the second best selling RPG currently, giving D&D 5e a run for its money. So chances are that Paizo will follow the route that made them bounce back, rather the one that makes them slide into oblivion.

Slide into oblivion. What's an argument among geeks without some solid melodrama!

Given how much the tabletop RPG market has dwindled in recent years, that's hardly validation. That's like being the second-best restaurant in a town with only three restaurants, and the third one has a sewer leak.

Hey there folks,

The playtest last time felt a lot more complete because you could backfill whatever you were missing from 3.5. All told, the beta book was only 400 pages long as was missing large sections of the rules and a lot of versatility.

There is some of that going on here too. We fully intent to expand out some parts of the game as we make our way toward the final. The playtest will tell us what parts need more options to be a viable part of the game.

We will be releasing some revisions and hopefully one or two content expansions as the playtest continues, but there will not be an entire additional pdf revision. There is simply not the time for that sort of undertaking. That does not mean there will not be changes, it just means that those changes will be part of the final design.

Aside from correcting oversights, I would make at least some reworking of the proficiency system a priority. I've seen tons of people saying that it needs a larger disparity between ranks, and I'm one of them. As it is, it feels too much like 4th edition D&D.

PF2E definitely needs to move away from making characters feel "samey". The underlying system is good, but the outcome is not thus far.

Agreed with pretty much everything. The classes feel bland. The races feel bland. The proficiency system makes characters even more bland.

While there are things I like about the game and can see potential, as it is now, I'm not even slightly motivated to buy.

All of this. I second ALL of this. There is too much thick terminology and too much scavenger hunting around from definition to definition before you find out what an ability actually does.

Omg yes. This book is dry, awkward, terribly organized, and nothing feels interesting or exciting. I swear it's like the writers of PF2E had no idea what makes an RPG fun or appealing.

But then again, they did make Starfinder, which my entire gaming circle rejected utterly.

Right now, this game has too many things you have to reference, a crazy amount of things to keep track of even compared to 1E, the layout is terrible, the proficiency system is bland and makes everything samey...the game just feels very poorly conceived overall.

+ Backgrounds (and stats generation). I like this. It adds flavor and feels very functional.

+ Action system. I like this in concept, but the execution needs a little work. The multiple attack penalty feels awkwardly carried over from 1E but it works kinda badly in this version.

- Proficiency system. This is just absolute garbo without major revision. Making every character feel "samey" with this whole "everyone's mostly equal" philosophy is terrible. Straight up terrible. This mechanic ALONE would make the game a pass for me. Characters need to be diverse. Specialists need to be more of a thing. Not because of feats, but because you can tell at a glance who's the best.

- Feats. I never thought I was say more feats would be bad, but it is. There's so many feats and so much that relies on feats that this game feels like a wall of text compared to 1E that you have to constantly reference to even know who's good at what.

In short, this game creates characters that on paper feel very generalized and not very unique. 4/10, needs massive amounts of revision to be viable.

I'm guessing troglodyte/xulgath. If not, probably a lizardfolk - Pathfinder's lizardfolk are even more varied in appearance than its catfolk. :)

I thought about both, but then I started looking up various arts of trogs and lizardfolk, and it looks pretty heavily different, especially with the horns.

It feels like a new race to me, but I could be mistaken. :>

Does anyone know what the race on page 196 is? I don't recognize it...

Strickly speaking, any class that does more than "press A to attack" is advanced. :)

Given that the devs have said they're trying out the hunter with traps, combat styles, spontaneous spellcasting, a buffed companion, and who knows how many other changes, which is awesome..that leaves only one problem.

Barring the release of a third playtest of the class, which I'm hearing isn't likely, that gives us four days with no frame of reference for discussion.

So...now what do we talk about? :D

In the hunter thread, I said that the hunter is definitely going to need another round of playtesting, and likely the shaman too. However, I also said the investigator may need another round due to some prominent changes in abilities and balance.

What do you guys think? Does it need a round three?

Given that we're talking a major overhaul here, I think the hunter definitely needs another round of playtesting. I would also say the shaman could use another round too, given it's getting pretty significant revisions.

The rest of the classes, with the possible exception of maybe the Brawler or Investigator, don't really seem to need a round three. They're mostly just balance tweaks.

Animal Growth seems extremely useful as a spell. Though it will effectively reduce the AC by 2, it will increase HPs by 2/HD and the to hit by 3, damage by 4 (plus the dice increase) and the CMB/CMD by 5/3 respectively. That can be huge for both damage output or combat maneuver effectiveness.

Strong jaw is useful as a damage buff that is not tied to an overly present bonus type.

In both examples they show a greater discrepancy between the hunter and the druid; the druid will get each spell at level 9 and 7 respectively while the hunter won't until 13 and 10.

This further increases the gap of effectiveness between the Druid and the Hunter in the Hunter's own niche!

Allowing the hunter to instead take them as ranger spells helps (changing the levels to 10 and 7) but it shows that the attempt to simplify the Hunter class to just using the Druid list without any modification is problematic.

Okay...after taking another look at animal growth...yeah, that would be a great reusable buff. I might have to reconsider putting it in my list. :)

Well, the ability to pick between druid and ranger for spell level would probably help prioritize certain spells, I'm sure.

Will we see a third revision before the playtest ends? There are at least four classes where it seems additional playtesting could be very poignant.

Well, I think we can safely say it's going to be A or C. :D

1. The more I think about it, the more this class needs a unique spell list. I am also thinking that your spirit choices should play a bigger part in augmenting this list.

2. The familiar took a step toward a spirit animal concept, but I dont think that goes quite far enough. I am beginning to think that it might need to go off in a different direction.

3. The witch definitely needs a bigger impact on this class. I am starting to think that hexes (which might be renamed) need to play a bigger role in general. I like the idea of a base list of hexes available to all, with the spirits augmenting that list.

4. Taken together, I think this means that the shaman has a lot of base components, many of which get more heavily augmented by the spirits chosen.

5. As a small aside, try not to get too hung up on real world "shamans" and similar terms. We are drawing some inspiration there, but I don't think emulating any of them directly is a good idea for the game. We are shooting for something a little closer to the fantasy understanding of the term.

Yes to all of that. :)

Moved to House Rules, as "this is how I would totally redesign this hybrid class" isn't really appropriate to the playtest discussion.

Good point. :)

Ladywrym, You left off the 4 most important spells for animal companions

3rd: Strong Jaw, Heal Companion
4th: Stone Skin, Animal Growth

I would also have Flame strike and Ice Storm on the list to give the Hunter some spell based offense.
I would also give the Hunter the basic healing spells at 1st,2nd,3rd and 4th level.

I also would like to see spells to buff tracking, stealth, swim and other out doorsy type things.

Sean I made an alternate Animal companion table could I PM it to you as I do not know how to attach a excel sheet to a post on the board.

All of those are good spells. :)

I probably wouldn't take animal growth myself, and maybe not strong jaw, but definitely heal companion and stoneskin if I had the slots. Also, taking flame strike or ice storm is almost a given. Gets a little crowd control in there. With two characters to watch out for, I'm definitely inclined to put more effort into defense over offense, so that I don't have to use as many heals on both hunter and AC. Even a good area damage spell can help with that, thinning the ranks and all.

Where did the idea that spontaneous casting has to be cha-based come from in the first place? Inquisitors are spontaneous casters, and they use Wis. Regardless of whether or not the class is spontaneous, I definitely think it should remain a Wis-based caster (by default). It's just more in-tune with the archetype. It's incidentally the case that there's a fairly tight correlation between being a Cha-based caster and being a spontaneous caster, but there's no particular reason for the class to use Cha as a casting stat just because it goes spontaneous.

Agreed, and given how much a hunter is based around cunning and perception, I think it will probably stay as Wis. :)

Charisma as a casting stat would make this class really MAD also it limits the utility of the list/lists.

You should read my breakdown of hunter casting and demands on the hunter. With two characters to take care of, essentially, there's literally no room for utility without spontaneous casting. Your spell economy is consumed just doing maintenance. I, one of my group, and others in this forum have all discovered that same problem when playtesting the hunter.

As for the MAD issue, the spontaneous casting doesn't have to be Cha-based, and even if it is, there can be an upside to MAD. It frees you up to raise the power level of a class slightly more because of stat division.

Now that the Dex to damage debacle is over, let's focus on the biggest hurdles: mobility and action economy. I like the suggestions so far. how about also being able to ignore difficult terrain during normal movement? The dramatic charge a few pages back was also perfect. Malachi had a good suggestion for the action economy. I'll post my build and detailed ideas later, when I'm not on my phone.

If I was a dev, I would totally come by right now and say "So...we've had this great idea about giving the swashbuckler Dex to damage. No idea where it came from, probably someone in R&D. What were you guys talking about?" :D

If the hunter can get on track as it seems to be headed now, that only leaves one or two other "problem" classes. Shaman is one of them I think. Lot of people harping on the brawler and swashbuckler though. Going back to the hunter, this class has so much potential, and I hope to see it really shine. :)

I will take this opportunity to say though that I think the bloodrager, investigator, warpriest, swashbuckler and slayer have really been batting a thousand in terms of great class design.

LadyWurm wrote:

Look, let's be practical about this. It's 12/3 now in favor of spontaneous.

Remember, this is not a democracy. We're not taking a vote about what to give the class. Just because 12 people on this thread think it's a good idea doesn't mean it should happen.

I know. I just meant it's a popular desire for the class. :)

Great news about you guys trying out the spontaneous casting, and about the hunter combat style! The improved empathic link and hunter's tricks would also be very nice. I imagine this news is going to make a lot of people happy.

More useful casting + less empty levels + more options + better survivability for the hunter herself = awesome. ^^

heh the hunter would just do the more reasonable thing when it comes to healing his animal companion, get a wand of cure light wounds and heal out of combat. Even on my cleric, I don't bother converting spells to cure spells, a wand does the job just fine. The only healing spell I bother ever preparing is heal because of how strong it is.

A class's ability to function should never be dependent on magic items.

I think "spontaneous +1" would be the best answer, and added ranger spells would also be nice, but I'd be happy with just spontaneous druid casting. ^__^

You're effectively shoe-horning the Hunter by saying they all take certain spells at certain levels.

The hunter has two characters to worry about healing and protecting. That affects her spell economy immensely. :)

I think I'm coming around to the Spontaneous + One. It does seem catchy and it does answer some big problems for the Hunter. But the direct damage spells should go. Other than that, I do believe you're on to something.

And I definitely think that people are right that the AC should have a higher starting intelligence. Something that makes the AC truly special.

Yay!

Call Lightning and Flame Strike? Seriously? Lightning Storm and Ice Storm? Is this a hunter or a mad bomber? Especially if you make the Hunter a spontanious caster. Maybe if they get bumped up a level for Hunters, but even then, I really don't see them as Hunter spells. Hunter spells should be combat support spells, not combat spells.

My more recent post gives a much better example of "what would I prepare" versus "what would I know" as a hunter. It gives an incredibly clear reason for spontaneous casting. :)

Okay, so I made this suggestion in the previous thread and would like to reiterate it.

If the hunter is going to be the premier AC class then why isn't its AC at least as intelligent as a paladin's mount? Personally I'm of the opinion that this class should compete with the Summoner in terms of companion effectiveness and strength.

As for the spontaneous vs prepared caster, I like LadyWurm's idea of spontaneous +1.

I was kinda throwing the smarter companion into my "revised hunter design", so yeah, I agree that would be good. :)

Also, yay for more people liking spontaneous +1! It's so catchy. You gotta say it out loud. "Spontaneous plus one". It sounds like a band name.

First off: LOVE the update

But I'm going to have throw my hat into the "sacred weapon damage should only apply to the deity's favored weapon" camp, as it is, there's too much potential for players to select weapons like the scimitar for the high crit range. It'll probably send more players into being Sarenrae warpriests, and that's fine, I'm more for flavor anyway (the fact that this helps control the potential abuse of ANY weapon focus is a plus)

Absolutely not, as that would kill a lot of the appeal. However, for the sake of balance, what if the Sacred Weapon provided a crit range and multiplier of its own?

Maybe Nimble can also give Cha to AC when unarmored?

It would support the classic image of the swashbuckler in nothing but a loose shirt. :)

And you can only use the small selection of spells you've chosen, meaning you will never be able to have the flexibility to handle multiple different situations. I still don't understand the benefit of being a spontaneous other than getting another single use of a spell per day that you could easily prepare anyway.

So, basically, you have a favorite selection of spells and would prepare them or choose them spontaneous regardless? If I'm understanding correctly. And by going spontaneous, you get, what, another daily use of said spell selection?

Okay, let me break this down in very clear terms. Let's start with the prepared version of the hunter. As a 10th-level hunter, these are the spells I would have prepared (assuming an 18 Wis):

0th: create water, detect magic, light, mending, stabilize
1st: cure light wounds x3, entangle, faerie fire, speak with animals
2nd: barkskin x2, resist energy x2, spider climb
3rd: cure moderate wounds x2, greater magic fang, quench
4th: cure serious wounds, flame strike

Now here's my spells known with spontaneous progression at the same level:

0th: create water, detect magic, detect poison, light, mending, stabilize
1st: cure light wounds, entangle, faerie fire, obscuring mist, speak with animals
2nd: barkskin, flame blade, heat metal, resist energy, spider climb
3rd: cure moderate wounds, neutralize poison, quench, stone shape
4th: cure serious wounds, flame strike

You see the difference? Because I'm not having to use up multiple slots taking care of "priorities", I'm diversifying into utility. I'm not worrying about having enough copies of a spell to survive, so I'm able to spend more time thinking about the magical tools my hunter could use to accomplish tasks.

I get you're trying to get a consensus, but just because you feel something is right doesn't make it so. I work in Clinical Trials and someone feeling a certain way does not cut it as a decision. We use numbers and analysis.

How exactly does spontaneous casting help this class? Less flexibility, reduced spell casting, and lowered utility. If you really want to talk theme and flavor, a Hunter is ready for anything with a bag of tricks to help them hunt. This means being adaptable to each situation. How can this be accomplished? Letting them have a large spell selection they can change each day (or leaving slots open to fill later in the day).

Please, other than feeling a certain way, enlighten us as to how spontaneous actually helps this class. Personal preferences and feelings are not valid data.

I already made two posts about why spontaneous casting is seriously useful to the hunter. It's the "protect/hinder/heal/group damage/transport" method. It's about doing the following things repeatedly:

- Buffing the hunter or the pet's resistances/AC (barkskin, resist energy).
- Healing either of them repeatedly.
- Hindering enemies to give the hunter and pet advantage (entangle, faerie fire).
- Damage enemy groups you can't flank or skirmish easily (flame strike, ice storm)
- Spells for getting out of situations (quench, tree stride).

These are the kind of spells I use over and over and over. In fact, when I did play druid, I wound preparing multiple copies of many of these spells, just because they were so useful. That's my primary reason for spontaneous casting.

My secondary reason is that a number of druid spells simply aren't that useful for the hunter, and she doesn't have enough spells per day as a six-level prepared caster to warrant using up precious slots on anything overly creative anyways. I would be more likely to take one or two creative utility spells as a spontaneous caster than I ever would with a tiny number of prepared spells. As I said, I've played it, one of my group had played it, lots of people here in the forum have played it, and prepared spellcasting is ten shades of useless for the hunter.