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Lamp Flower wrote:

Has it ever been confirmed that the spells from different spellheart versions are cumulative? The guide claims that they are (in the rating guidelines), but I don't think it's stated anywhere. I remember looking into it at some point, and neither the general item rules nor the spellheart rules seem to say anything about it. There's the rule specifically for staves, but that just seems to imply that it needs to be explicitly stated.

The way I've read it is that a spellheart always has everything from the base version and everything that's listed in the specific version, meaning that every version has at least the cantrip. It would kind of make sense for the spells to be cumulative, though, so maybe I've missed something. Or maybe I'm just misinterpreting what the guide is trying to say, since the claim is in the rating guidelines and not in the rule section.

No, but I think community consensus is that it's cumulative because otherwise you either get something that is actively worse if you upgrade it (literally no one would ever use anything beyond a base Jolt Coil since Electric Arc is the point), or a case where "the third version inherits the first version but not the second version", which is just clunkier than how PF2 rules usually work.

I don't think it's stated anywhere, but the community consensus AFAIK is that they work like staves and the upgrades inherit what came before.

Alright. The third version inheriting only the first version has been my interpretation, since the cantrip is listed in the base item. It's at least clear that the base version of the item has to be inherited because otherwise the lowest level version of the jolt coil wouldn't do anything, for example (since the level 3 version doesn't list any effects). I do agree that it's a bit weird if it works that way, though. I wish they'd clarify it.

Has it ever been confirmed that the spells from different spellheart versions are cumulative? The guide claims that they are (in the rating guidelines), but I don't think it's stated anywhere. I remember looking into it at some point, and neither the general item rules nor the spellheart rules seem to say anything about it. There's the rule specifically for staves, but that just seems to imply that it needs to be explicitly stated.

The way I've read it is that a spellheart always has everything from the base version and everything that's listed in the specific version, meaning that every version has at least the cantrip. It would kind of make sense for the spells to be cumulative, though, so maybe I've missed something. Or maybe I'm just misinterpreting what the guide is trying to say, since the claim is in the rating guidelines and not in the rule section.

And thus, all threads arrive as they are supposed to: with Wizard talk.

Ezren's law: "As a forum discussion grows longer, the probability of the wizard situation getting brought up approaches 1."

Lamp Flower wrote:

"But there's magic!" has also never been a convincing argument, even though it gets repeated often. It just entirely misses the point. I'm not complaining about the existence of spells, Drift engines, or the cloud jump feat. None of those would make sense in real life, but they all have some explanation that makes at least some sense within the game's world, even if those explanations don't work IRL.

You are absolutely right. People shouldn't resort to pointing out the magical and completely fantastical aspects of the fantasy setting in order to counter argue against 'but reality' arguments.

There are plenty of completely mundane things that the game rules only crudely approximate to use instead.

How about the 3 action economy and Human Stride speed. Every Human, no matter their physique, can make three 25 foot Stride actions every 6 seconds. Which translates to approximately 8.5 MPH. No slower. No faster. Within 2 seconds, they can accelerate to that speed, move 25 feet, and decelerate to a stop. Then they can do other things such as swing weapons or fire guns immediately afterwards without any effects from their momentum on their aim or swing accuracy.

Everyone is also impeccably accurate at estimating distances. From 30 feet away people have no problems calculating where the center of a 15 foot radius circle needs to be in order to include an enemy character inside the effect, but exclude an ally adjacent to that enemy from the effect.

There is no character facing. You aren't looking in any one particular direction, you are instead looking and facing in all directions at the same time. The only nod to being surrounded or being attacked from behind is that Flanking exists and Strike only removes the Hidden condition after the Strike action resolves. Flanking only applies to melee attacks. If two people are stabbing at you from opposite sides, that is hard to deal with. If two people are shooting at you from opposite sides, you can dodge those bullets without...

Just to be clear, I didn't mean to suggest any mechanical changes. Those were only reasons for why my narrative explanations didn't make sense. I'd rather figure out how to explain the existing rules than come up with house rules, but I do want the explanation to somewhat fit together with the mechanics. I do agree that if mechanics need to be a certain way for balance, it's better to change the flavor than the rules.

Most weird balance-over-flavor quirks of the system I can explain in ways that are good enough. For example, you could just say that a fireball's radius is only approximately 20 ft. It varies a bit and the caster has a tiny amount of control over the exact size. Casters just ballpark it. Not a perfect explanation but close enough, and it also explains why every corridor's width is a multiple of 5 ft.

The rounding idea also makes sense if your gun uses batteries, for example. It even works with bullets if you say that one piece of ammunition in the rules isn't actually one piece of ammunition to the character and instead is merely a player-facing abstraction. Problem is, the amount of ammo you spend is still directly proportional to the amount of targets.

I'll discuss this more with my group when we're closer to starting our SF2 campaign. Out of the four of us, I'm expecting one person other than me to be bothered by this and the other two to go: "That's weird. Anyway...".

The idea I like most is just saying that the gun has an automatic targeting system. That seems like it wouldn't work with analog weapons, but the tracking trait does, so whatever. In a scifi setting, it's easy enough to believe that the machine works because science.

It KINDA makes sense if you squint, to me. I think of it as when you were a little kid with the hose running at full blast. It was naturally going to swing back and forth from the force, but you could kinda knuckle down and try to hold it still to aim it roughly at one spot.

It's the same with Auto-Fire. You're holding a machine gun, and you hold the trigger down. It goes spraying back and forth, which costs some ammo. And when you try to hold it still and roughly aim at certain points, thats going to cost more concentrated fire- and thus more ammo- to hit just that specific spot.

...ok, it doesn't sound TOO convincing when I say it out loud. You have to squint more than a little.

This is pretty much the explanation I'm leaning toward. It makes sense as long as the area only contains enemies and you're aware of all of those enemies. Otherwise... Yeah, a lot of squinting required.

Well, I wasn't asking for realistic guns or any kind of mechanical changes. I did mention that auto-fire probably should have been combined with area fire, but I also said that that wasn't the point of the post.

"But there's magic!" has also never been a convincing argument, even though it gets repeated often. It just entirely misses the point. I'm not complaining about the existence of spells, Drift engines, or the cloud jump feat. None of those would make sense in real life, but they all have some explanation that makes at least some sense within the game's world, even if those explanations don't work IRL.

My takeaway is that I probably haven't missed any explanation in the book for what auto-firing is like. What I'm looking for is something like the justification for the flourish trait.

Actions with the flourish trait are special techniques that require too much exertion for you to perform frequently. You can use only one action with the flourish trait per round.

Too tiring to do often. That's the amount of explanation I need to suspend my disbelief, but I haven't found anything about how the bullets bounce right back into the chamber when hitting the ground or anything else that makes just enough sense to be believable as long as you're willing to believe in borderline magical scifi technology. And I'm willing to believe something like that. I wouldn't be engaging with Starfinder in any way if I wasn't.

I like that it retains the ability to throttle back the amount of ammo spent depending on number of targets. Feels right.

I'd be fine letting a player expend ammo based on the number of targets they intend to hit, and letting the allies and unknown invisible enemies in the area get hit for "free".

Honestly, if there was a block of text explaining that "the quantum technology used in the weapon causes auto-fire to spend an amount of ammunition that depends on the wielders observations", that would somewhat fit in Starfinder. Otherwise, it seems weird that you could fire at an enemy for free except if you're aware of its existence.

In my head canon you're sorta aiming the gun while swinging it wildly through an arc and trying to compensate for recoil. If your targets are close you're holding the trigger, if they're far apart or there is only 1 you're firing short bursts,

Hmm, that does work pretty nicely most of the time. It's basically the full-auto option I was considering. Still wouldn't explain why you fire at allies and invisible enemies, since you'd be firing in bursts unless you have a group that you're aware of clumped together.

I've been wondering about this for a while, and the final release doesn't seem to have changed auto-fire, so here we are. Either I've misunderstood the mechanics or I just don't get the flavor.

Auto-fire is very similar to cone area fire (It probably doesn't even deserve to be a separate mechanic, but that's beside the point.), but area fire is a lot easier to understand flavor-wise. You fire a shotgun blast, a volley, or whatever in an area. Because you aren't aiming precisely, it's a save instead of an attack roll. You expend an amount of ammunition that does not depend on the amount of targets because you aren't firing at individual targets, you are firing at the entire area. Everything makes sense from an in-world perspective.

If you use the same flavor of shooting indiscriminately for auto-fire, everything makes sense. Except for the expend cost. Why does the expend cost scale with the amount of targets? Maybe you simply turn on full-auto and shoot so fast you can hit multiple targets. But then, if you're aiming at each target separately, shouldn't you be able to exclude targets from the area? What if there's an invisible target you're completely unaware of? Currently, a PC can look at the magazine (assuming it's trivial to check how much ammo you have left) and realize that there must have been one more creature in the cone than he was able to see because the auto-fire expended two more ammo than he expected. I guess the targets are picked by the gun then. There must be a device that scans an area, locks onto targets, and starts firing. If such a device is a common part of weapons, you'd think most automatic weapons would have a small monitor that can show invisible creatures to the user. There's already a part that scans for them, so it seems easy to implement.

Point is, every in-character explanation I can think of for auto-fire seems flawed in some way. What am I missing?

The point is, encounters should be scaled to a point where the party is, at least occasionally, challenged. If the players are playing tactically, encounters need to be more difficult. Clearly your group agrees with this, since you've already pumped up the difficulty.

Like you said, the difficulty of encounters varies. The way I look at the game, I don't find optimization to be meaningful in the easy fights. You go in, take damage, and heal to full afterwards. Doesn't matter whether it takes you 2 rounds to win or 6, the outcome is the same. Of course, in a more difficult fight the ability to end the fight faster might have been useful, but it didn't matter in that particular fight. Hypothetically, if 1 in 10 fights is difficult enough for optimization to make a difference, the outcome of 9/10 fights is the same regardless. That rare, dangerous fight is the one I'm concerned about. In that fight, someone is at risk of going down. That means that, at the very least, in-combat healing isn't "a waste of resources".

As for increasing encounter difficulty, the GM is basically omnipotent. I wouldn't expect a solo boss to be a meaningful threat against a high level party that has even a basic understanding of action economy. It would need some sort of ability that allows it to "cheat" against action denial. But that's also one reason why adding enemies can make encounters more difficult. The action economy isn't tipped so much in the party's favor anymore. A regular combat might feel easy, but what about when you're up against Treerazer and his semi-half-cousin with whom he shares three of the same mothers?

Somewhere between the encounter building rules and "rocks fall, everyone dies" there is a sweet spot where encounters feel meaningfully threatening but aren't the equivalent of the GM giving the party a middle finger. I mean, you mentioned using choke points. What if the enemies start in a position where they can utilize the choke point better than the party can? After all, you would expect intelligent enemies to construct their home in a way that makes it easy to defend. Things like this aren't properly taken into account in the encounter building rules. While they won't create insurmountable challenges, they can at least add some difficulty.

To reiterate, healing only matters when there's a risk of going down. Optimization, IMO, only matters when there's a risk of dying/failing the current quest, which usually involves going down. Therefore, in any encounter where optimization will affect the outcome, in-combat healing has a meaningful use. Of course, you need less healing if you have good damage, but you also need less damage if you have good healing.

The distinction between "striking" and "damage" is really just an argument about semantics. I'd call the overall ability to use the Strike action well a characters ability to strike well. Chance to hit (and crit) is "accuracy" and damage is "damage". Doesn't really matter what they're called, as long as we can agree on the meanings.

I'm a bit wary of giving druids master in weapons. I'm not convinced it'd be too strong, but I definitely could see it being too strong. Druids would still definitely be worse at using the Strike action than martials because the damage on a hit would be lower. Still, having better accuracy might be enough to make druids too good. Being able to use the Strike action almost as well as a martial while having full spellcasting is definitely pretty good.

One option worth considering is simply increasing the status bonus for using your own modifier to a +3 at level 19. It would be a smaller increase, and your chance to hit wouldn't be increased by heroism or fortissimo composition or the like at all.

The usefulness of untamed form lies in its versatility, and that's difficult to evaluate without seeing it in action. As I haven't seen a high level druid in play, I really don't have strong opinions on this.

Lamp Flower wrote:

Deriven Firelion wrote:

Divine Font? That ability is boring and loses its advantages past the low levels where very few PCs are getting dropped and in combat healing is a waste of resources.

I'm curious what you mean by this. If past the low levels very few PCs are going down and in-combat healing is not needed, are you dying from something other than damage or is every fight just a curb stomp? Is the action cost simply too high?

Combats are a lot more unpredictable in the early levels, but I still think healing in combat stays useful in nearly every fight that isn't an automatic victory even in later levels. If an enemy spends actions dealing damage and you heal that damage away, you're essentially taking actions away from the enemy, which tends to be useful. Even if you only want to heal when someone goes down, that still means you want to have healing as an option for when that happens. If your survival isn't threatened, healing doesn't matter, but neither does anything else. Unless it's an encounter where you aren't directly threatened and instead need to stop the enemy in time or something. In my experience, those encounters are the exception, not the rule.

Your hit point levels are so high as you level that the need for combat healing due to sudden crits is far lower.

My level 18 barbarian at the moment has 348 hit points. It's very hard to bring that down to a level in a single combat where I need healing during that combat.

So you wait out the fight and do Medicine between combat healing and your fine. Thus the reliance on Divine Font is far, far lower.

Whereas in those early levels as discussed in another thread a while back, a single crit my reduce your hit points to near death requiring combat healing fairly often. Those fonts are great to have to shore up the hit points in those early level combats.

You keep fighting at higher levels. If your hit points stay above or around 50, then you're ok to wait until between combat healing. Thus...

To me, it sounds like your combats aren't all that dangerous. To be fair, most combats in this game aren't meant to be. Some combats are still going to be threatening, unless maybe the combats aren't balanced correctly, or, perhaps more likely, the players at your table are very good at the game and the breadth of options available to PCs makes higher level combats easy for experienced players. In any case, I'd rather try to optimize for the situations where things go wrong, even if those are rare.

If your combats are tuned to a difficulty where you're never going to be afraid, what can you even optimize for? Adding more healing doesn't help if no one is going to go down anyway, but adding more damage won't make survival more likely either. What's the goal then? Lowering TTK? Big number = good? I think those are both very valid, but I would summarize my goal as "not dead = good". Because of that, I'm not really worried about combats that have no risk of character death. They have their place in the game, but optimization doesn't really matter in them.

I completely agree with your point about table (and even adventuring day) variance, though. I think the same thing applies to a lesser extent to spell slots in general. It's the reason I don't like slots/rank being part of a caster's power budget. I'm kind of hoping they abolish spell slots in 3e. The problem is a lot more noticeable with divine font, as spamming all your high rank slots in the only fight of the day isn't very useful if all those slots are heal spells. Versatile font can help with this, but harm has its own issues.

Divine Font? That ability is boring and loses its advantages past the low levels where very few PCs are getting dropped and in combat healing is a waste of resources.

I'm curious what you mean by this. If past the low levels very few PCs are going down and in-combat healing is not needed, are you dying from something other than damage or is every fight just a curb stomp? Is the action cost simply too high?

Combats are a lot more unpredictable in the early levels, but I still think healing in combat stays useful in nearly every fight that isn't an automatic victory even in later levels. If an enemy spends actions dealing damage and you heal that damage away, you're essentially taking actions away from the enemy, which tends to be useful. Even if you only want to heal when someone goes down, that still means you want to have healing as an option for when that happens. If your survival isn't threatened, healing doesn't matter, but neither does anything else. Unless it's an encounter where you aren't directly threatened and instead need to stop the enemy in time or something. In my experience, those encounters are the exception, not the rule.

I'm mostly just hoping that the new classes turn out well. I'm very excited about both of them, even though I have minor flavor related issues with the necromancer (occult tradition, reanimation vs. summoning).

Having the remastered SoM classes in the same book as the new classes would be a bit weird, but that does seem like the best solution at this point. Not really sure what Paizo will do, though.

I'd like to see some caster-specific archetypes and new content for existing casters. The addition of the runesmith also makes me hopeful for new property runes. The list of armor property runes, at least, could use some exciting new additions. More active weapon runes (i.e. ones that take actions to activate) would also be welcome, mostly for ranged martials.

I'm not sure if you realised it, but that's exactly the premaster Oracle! Revelation spells were the way to increase your curse (along with your poached domain spells), some of what are now cursebound actions were feat-granted revelation spells, the curses, being dual-sided, tended to have benefits proportional to how s#@@ty their curse were (not always possible, Time and Ancestor hurt bad previously, but it was a lot more balanced than the current 'just play cosmos duh' situation) and yeah that last slot was rush added.

I knew it was similar but I didn't know how similar. All I really knew about the premaster oracle was "spontaneous divine charisma caster w/ focus spells that worsen your curse". I guess my ideal oracle would have been the premaster oracle with some touch-ups.

Speaking of that, what were the actual problems with the premaster oracle to warrant such a heavy-handed remaster? Paizo at least thought the class was too complicated, which is fair, though I like complicated. I understand that the class wasn't very popular but that it also had some big fans. Sure, they ran out of time, but it feels like such a class could have been fixed with simple QoL improvements. Minor changes should take less time, so, if time was a constraint and they still decided to do such a major revision, they must have thought the issues with the original we're really glaring.

I love the flavor of drawing power from your curse. The biggest reason the oracle doesn't capture the idea of power with a cost properly is that the abilities seem very detached from the curse. It doesn't feel like the curse is the source of your powers, it just feels like you happen to be cursed.

I didn't have time to more than skim through the oracle before the remaster dropped, but I think the premaster version had good ideas. I'd like to see the benefits for having a higher cursebound value return, but removing that seemed to be a high priority for Paizo, so maybe not. In any case, having cursebound abilities that are mystery-exclusive would make the class a lot more flavorful.

If we want to stay close to the current version of the class, here's my suggestion:

1. Turn the revelation spells into cursebound abilities. The focus spells you get from your mystery actually fit the flavor. It would be nice if drawing power from your curse produced effects that actually have something to do with your curse.

2. Turn the 1st level cursebound abilities into focus spells. They feel like generic oracular abilities, and, since they don't feel related to your specific curse anyway, the initial cursebound abilities make more sense as something that doesn't interact with your curse at all. It's probably worth bumping those feats up to level 4 while we're at it. IMO, they're already strong enough to be level 4 feats, and this change would make them give extra focus points in addition to everything else. This would also make them a lot more expensive to poach via the archetype, since you'd be picking them up as 8th level feats.

3. Rebalance the mysteries. It might be possible to have some mysteries that have worse curses in exchange for more powerful abilities. However, this seems more difficult to balance in practice, and the archetype mostly cares about the curse anyway. Therefore, I think the curses should be equally punishing, and the revelation cursebound abilities equally powerful.

4. Just get rid of the 4th slot per rank. It's just not necessary. You can add in power elsewhere, but I think the class would be perfectly fine even if it just straight up lost a slot per rank.

After this, some fine tuning would be needed. Some of the cursebound abilities and focus spells might need some adjustments as a result of these changes. Also, you could potentially get 3 focus points as early as level 6. That seems like a problem at first, but it might be justifiable if the 4th slot per rank was cut as a way of redistributing power from daily resources to more easily renewable ones. Or... it might just be a problem.

Maybe a reaction that does something for an ally within some distance of the ranged character.

lets say its something like a harrying shot.

Trigger: You can see an enemy strike an ally within your first range increment. You have a reload of 0, your weapon is loaded, or have a throwing weapon in hand or have quickdraw and a throwing weapon stowed.

Reaction: You fire a blind shot in the direction of that enemy to hinder them. make an attack roll with the following results.

Crit success: Your blind shot actually connects doing normal damage for a strike. In addition the striking creature takes a -1 circumstance penalty to their strike.
Success: you don't connect but succeed at hindering your enemy, the striking creature takes a -1 circumstance penalty to their strike.
Crit Failure: your shot ended up distracting your ally instead giving a +1 circumstance bonus to the striking creatures strike.

That reminds me of a similar idea I had earlier.

Requirement: You're wielding a loaded ranged weapon or a reload 0 ranged weapon.
Trigger: A creature you can see makes a ranged attack roll against an ally within the required weapon's first range increment.

You attempt to redirect an enemy's shot with your own. You make a strike against... some DC? I don't know what. Maybe a standard DC for the foe's level. Anyway, if you succeed, the triggering attack is knocked off its course, missing the targeted ally.

Since hitting a fast-moving target the size of a bullet or arrow would be incredibly difficult, this would have to be a high level class feat. You could consider giving it the restriction of only working against projectile attacks or making it only give a bonus to AC unless you critically succeed.

Right before submitting the post, I found the Redirecting Shot feat, which has similar flavor but a completely different function. It's level 10, so maybe that would be an appropriate level for something like this as well.

What would happen if it was used against a PC? To what degree would you be deceived? Feinting, for example, has a clear mechanical effect and nothing more. Even if an NPC successfully uses the Lie activity against you, you can (presumably) at least suspect that the NPC is simply that good at lying. You're trying to bait your enemy into moving towards you. Does this mean the enemy doesn't know you have the reaction available? Or are you simply offering a risk–reward situation?

You could say NPCs just believe that you've left them an opening, though in that case, I think it should require a deception check. Does a PC act the same way? The player knows that if an enemy apparently leaves an opening, it's a bait, but in-universe the deception might be believable. At that point, the skill feat needs either roleplaying guidance or a forced stride (or any other movement type).

Also, another option for the crit effect would be making the enemy believe it has a bonus to its attack without actually giving it such a bonus. Basically, the enemy strides up to you, tries to exploit the opening, and then finds out that you were prepared the whole time when it doesn't get to add a bonus to its roll. Or maybe the lack of a bonus should become apparent as soon the reaction is done?

The idea of using crit specs more reliably made me think of another way more variety could be introduced to ranged combat without changing the core rules: property runes (and upgrades in SF2).

Most property runes you'll actually use have passive effects. It would be possible to add active ones that let you mimic athletic maneuvers, for example. There's an added opportunity cost because now you can't put another rune in that slot. This would help balance ranged maneuvers with melee maneuvers. Combine it with an added action cost, and it doesn't seem too strong anymore. Damaging every enemy in a line also seems more believable when it's a magical effect. In SF2, I could definitely see the Aim perception action being something you get for installing an enhanced scope to your weapon.

Also, how about something inspired by Star Wars (and especially FFG's SWRPG)? The neuro-overloader module: gives your gun the Modular (stun) trait. This allows you to turn a stun setting on or off by spending an action. While the stun setting is active, your strikes deal no damage but force a save against stunned 1 on a hit. It would be possible to make one damaging strike and one stunning strike on the same turn, but switching between modes would eat your third action.

I hope the final version of SF2's area fire will be good. I didn't get a chance to properly playtest, but, from what I understood, area fire was difficult to use for anyone except soldiers. Running around positioning lines seems cool. Cones and especially bursts probably won't encourage movement as much, but they'll be nice to have as well.

I'd like to see more line effects for martials in PF2 as well. Something like "impaling shot" might challenge our suspension of disbelief, but I'm sure it would be possible to justify something of the sort with the right flavor. Now that I think about it, that kind of just sounds like the enfilade mechanic suggested by Ascalaphus...

One thing I wish was clarified for the sake of ranged combat is how shooting from cover works.

Your GM might allow you to overcome your target’s cover in some situations. If you’re right next to an arrow slit, you can shoot without penalty, but you have greater cover against someone shooting back at you from far away. Your GM might let you reduce or negate cover by leaning around a corner to shoot or the like. This usually takes an action to set up, and the GM might measure cover from an edge or corner of your space instead of your center.

Interpreting this is mostly left up to the GM's common sense. If the PC could easily shoot from cover, you just let it happen. When you need to peek around a corner it "usually takes an action to set up". I read that as having to spend one action to set it up and then being able to shoot from cover until you lose that cover. I've also seen the interpretation that you have to spend one action every turn. (I thought I had seen a thread arguing about how to interpret this, but I couldn't find it.)

Does it work differently with the take cover action? If you're in a spot where you are able to take cover but wouldn't have cover without doing so, the enemy doesn't have cover from you, so you can shoot normally. But the take cover action says that you lose the benefits of the action when you use an attack action. So your normal turn would look something like strike, strike, take cover. In that case it would work the same way as spending an action each turn peeking around cover, so maybe that's a reasonable reading.

Anyway, the cover rules needing a bit more clarity for SF2 is something that was brought up earlier in this thread, and I definitely agree with that.

About the different activities proposed in this thread: I doubt Paizo wants to add new activities like these to the core rules. They probably won't do it even for Starfinder. I really hope they do, and I hope they're also brought over to Pathfinder. However, I think new skill feats are more realistic to wish for. Melee characters have athletic maneuvers. I think acrobatics is sort of the dex equivalent of athletics, and ranged martials use dex, so I think new acrobatics skill feats would be a nice addition. As to what they should be... I have no idea, honestly. Would be cool, though!

For example the Prone condition says that with the "Take Cover" action you get Great Cover against ranged attack rolls. So in your case, an enemy would get a +4 AC bonus against bows and crossbows, but not against your ignition cantrip?"

FWIW, the prone condition does say "ranged attacks" not "ranged attack rolls", so the AC bonus would apply against ranged spell attacks regardless. At least, that's what it says on AoN.

Then again, the intention could very well be different. Curse balance being what it is, it's hard to say.

Lamp Flower wrote:

That said, Runelord still seems a bit better than base wizard. My real issue with the archetype is the way it uses anathema as a balancing tool. Anathema is left purposefully vague because it's supposed to be a roleplaying thing. In the Runelord's case, your GM's interpretation of the anathema can affect your effectiveness. What does "cause harm" mean, for example? If it means "deal damage", Envy's anathema is manageable, though restrictive. If it also prevents you from using walls or other non-damaging spells, it's more of a problem.

The fact that anathema isn't usually used this way leads me to think that Paizo probably didn't mean for the anathema to be a real downside. I still think it is one, though.

Hasnt anathema usually been vague outside of the cases where they litterary make certain options unplayable, Looking at Superstition Barbarian especially and certain deities that makes me very glad that Clerics Anathema is loose.

It has, and I think that's usually a good thing. The player and the GM are encouraged to work together to find a nice middle ground where anathema has interesting roleplaying implications but doesn't became problematic while adventuring. That's why I don't like how it seems to be a balance consideration in this case. I think anathema as a system is too vague to be used like this. I like how a druid's anathema helps define your character while leaving a lot of wiggle room, but as soon as it has a direct effect on power level I'd prefer something clearer.

I'm surprised by how little some people here seem to value the horizontal power lost due to the anathema. It's definitely not the end of the world, and lots of spells have alternatives that don't violate your anathema, but it still affects your spell choices.

I feel like there's very little reason to specialize as a regular wizard. You get a few feats that only affect certain kinds of spells (Explosive Arrival, Convincing Illusion, and Secondary Detonation Array come to mind.), but it's hard to boost one category of spells that far above the others. Your curriculum might only give you certain kinds of spells, but that's just more incentive to prepare less of those kinds of spells in your non-restricted slots.

When you can't make one option stronger, the best thing to do is to increase your options. That way you'll have an ace up your sleeve no matter what your GM throws at you.

That said, Runelord still seems a bit better than base wizard. My real issue with the archetype is the way it uses anathema as a balancing tool. Anathema is left purposefully vague because it's supposed to be a roleplaying thing. In the Runelord's case, your GM's interpretation of the anathema can affect your effectiveness. What does "cause harm" mean, for example? If it means "deal damage", Envy's anathema is manageable, though restrictive. If it also prevents you from using walls or other non-damaging spells, it's more of a problem.

The fact that anathema isn't usually used this way leads me to think that Paizo probably didn't mean for the anathema to be a real downside. I still think it is one, though.

When I got to the "Support Gymnast" build, I thought it was going to be Derring-do + athletic maneuvers. I feel like that build is at least worth mentioning.

It only really comes online at level 10, but at that point your maneuvers are very reliable, with a decent chance of crit success. At that point you have two options. Either you use Agile Maneuvers to take two athletics actions and then One For All/Demoralize/move/risk a third maneuver as needed, or you use one maneuver + a two-action activity.

Because you'll never be spending panache, you don't need to spend reactions on gaining it. This allows you to use your reaction on Reactive Strike/Champion's Reaction/whatever. Admittedly, other builds get Get Used to Disappointment just 2 levels after you come online, but it's still something.

You won't deal much damage, but you'll be a pretty reliable control tank. Protect your allies, help them deal damage. Maybe you have another Gymnast in the party and he's using that Terminaswash build?