1 Arguments about armor? Armor is very necessary early on where the difference between 15 and 20 AC is life and death. nobody wants to see an argument of Light Vs Heavy armor.
2 Bonus feats, i like them because they actually allow more variations than a strict "pick this to not suck" feat structure. Personally Id like those semi-exclusive feats like Point Blank Master be available to more people. Ranger Fighting Styles for other classes would fit that, too bad Ranger isnt so great.
3 I like options. There are plenty of middle-ground in the hybrid classes. Some very clearly shift in favor of one-side or the other through class abilities. The Hunter for example has a pretty cool animal companion as a second warrior on your team. Investigator on the other hand has plenty of skills and specialist abilities.
I personally favor combat becomes its more practical and immediately useful. I still try to plan accordingly, hence why why Im so reluctant to use a Fighter or Barbarian. I don't know if that animal companion will still be useful at level 20, and I doubt it because at the very least it means you split magic items between two characters. Someone pointed out the Skald's Inspired Rage only helps melee characters, and so on.
Im not done here, but thanks to everyone for the ideas. I like to read and hear what people think.
So, one thing that's kinda nice about the Medium, and one reason I keep pushing it, is that the class has no required feats to work. You can take some, but as a general rule, you can take whatever you want and go nuts. Spirit Dancer is probably the most versatile of the archetypes, but the base Medium isn't bad.
Short of fighter bonus feats, which you don't qualify for, you can do just about anything. Not that fighter bonus feats are really worth it in the first place. I'd much rather get quasi-pounce, and access to a third attack at level 8 over any of the options the fighter gets, if I'm playing the melee game. Especially if I've hasted myself, to make it 3 attacks with full BAB plus one iterative. There's your full attack action right there.
I think the question would be whether or not you can retrain class features, not class levels. At present, the worst that can be said for occult class retraining is that they do not have synergy with anything, and as a result, must retrain at the more expensive rate.
Class features pose a problem, because those are clearly spelled out in the retraining rules. At present, given the way the rules are written, a character can retrain into an Occult class using the 7 day per level rate, but may not retrain class features of an existing Occult class. This certainly needs to be erratad, because the problem will only continue to escalate from here, as new classes are introduced.
Martial Weapon Proficiency - when channeling a Champion Spirit, plus one Exotic Weapon each day
Medium Armor Proficiency - Check
Shield Proficiency - when channeling a Guardian Spirit, plus Heavy Armor Proficiency
6th level spells - when channeling a Heirophant or Archmage Spirit, with access to the two good spell lists (Wizard and Cleric, can pick new spells each day), otherwise 4th level spells
Bonus Combat Feats - not really, but equivalent and occasionally superior class abilities
At least 1 class feature with combat bonuses - all Champion Spirit bonuses are combat related, and make you better than a fighter so long as you have them
Minor class abilities to other areas - Trickster and Marshall Spirits grant access to a number of assorted buffs, to include to skills and initiative
The Medium, especially as a Spirit Dancer, is the closest you will get to a jack of all trades. The only thing you have to really try and manage is your Influence, but you won't be using as much of it as a normal Medium would be either.
Medium gets you basically everything, at a price. Bonus points if you choose Spirit Dancer as your archetype, since you now have everything on a day by day and encounter by encounter basis. Just be careful with your influence, and you'll be fine.
I could also say Summoner, if you're willing to be fairly broad on how exactly you fulfill your requirements. You can almost always summon SOMETHING to meet a challenge, after all, and a skill monkey Eidolon is hilarious for making up for your lack of personal skills.
Play an Alchemist. Or an Investigator. Or a Medium. Really, play absolutely anything that isn't a Rogue, because the Rogue is absolutely the most useless and most replacable class in the entire game, possibly even moreso than the fighter. Yes, it's not easy to disarm magical traps if you don't have a Rogue. Unless you just use some other method to flat out set them off, and ignore the problem entirely. Play a Cleric that raises Bloody Skeletons, and feed them into traps over and over again, since they keep getting back up.
Hurricanes are neither cruel nor benevolent. They simply are. Any moral virtue we assign to them is entirely outside the bounds of their own existence. Such is nature.
Nature does not care whether or not any given animal dies, any given tree falls, or any given lake is drained or river flooded.
First, a friend of mine made the Orb of Defenestration. Picking it up resulted in a character being teleported thirty feet into the air, and dropped though a plate glass window.
The second was one I actually experienced. It was simultaneously awesome and terrifying. Another friend gave us a ring in loot. I identified it as a custom magic item which granted one extra spell per level per day. Note that this is not spell per level you could cast, but in fact granted you a 9th level spell slot as soon as you put the ring on. I failed to catch that it had a curse attached to it, where it basically had reverse fast healing, and shut off when your character got to 1hp. Did I mention that you couldn't take it off? Because that was also a thing. That was a bad day.
Don't forget, you said there were two. It's 240,000lbs. That's approximately the same as having 2 MBTs sitting on the top floor of whatever you're standing in. Or 6 WWII era Shermans. Or two Tigers and a PzIII.
When you can compare your summoned monsters to multiple tanks in terms of sheer mass, it's probably not going to be good for whatever structure they're occupying.
Reverse bladed katana, because I'm a Rurouni Kenshin fanboy.
I'd also like to see Broadswords added... Cause why do we have Shortswords and Gladius but not Broadswords?
Also Legio, Longsword is an ambiguous term that refers to a very wide variety of one-handed, two-handed and hand and a half swords... But the Pathfinder Longsword is merely a long-bladed Shortsword. Though you are right about Falchions, and Exotic weapons are made Exotic due to their need for specialized training with the specific weapon as opposed to being covered by general martial training.
Longsword is not an ambiguous term in HEMA. It refers specifically to two handed swords of the late medieval and renaissance periods, and is distinct from greatswords or zweihanders. The longsword we have in game is an arming sword.
Exotic weapons are not exotic in a great number of cases. The falcata is not a particularly exotic weapon, nor is the bastard sword, the kama is literally a sickle, the katana is the cultural equivalent of the arming sword in areas where it was prevalent, a khopesh is an ancient weapon, but not an exotic one, a dwarven longaxe or longhammer is a pollaxe or lucerne hammer (which is especially stupid since we already have a lucerne hammer), a sling staff was historically a simple weapon. These are all allegedly exotic weapons in pathfinder, not because they require specialized training to use, but because they are either better than other options, like the katana, or because they are uncommon weapons.
Broadsword, on the other hand, is an ambiguous neologism developed in the Victorian period to refer to certain sorts of older swords, and had very little fixed definition at the time. In modern parlance a broadsword could be assumed to refer to a sort of basket hilted sword prevalent in the 16th through 18th centuries, and distinct from the backsword only in that it has two sharpened edges, but even that is largely a modern way of figuring things.
Just fix the damn list first. Then we can talk about adding new weapons to it.
No more one handed longsowrds, or two handed falchions, or any of the other nonsense we keep getting out of game designers. And no more "exotic" non-exotic weapons. Holy crap.
In our recent Reign of Winter game it has been decided that Giant, as a language, sounds suspiciously like Swedish. As a result, whenever we happen to be dealing with trolls, they all greet us with a hearty "Bork bork bork."
Also, we have the Nopehole. Anything we don't feel like being in melee with goes in the Nopehole. At which point I usually start flinging Lemures into the pit after it. So we end up with a nopehole full of hideous hellpit abominations and corpses.
Also, really anything that involves the Cauldron of Overwhelming Allies and the Rod of Giant Summons. 2d3+1 Giant Lemures? This is cruel and terrible and I should probably be ashamed.
I'm actually noticing that most of the truly funny and awful things that we've done are my fault. I may want to reassess my life choices.
The problem with number of Kineticist Talents at any particular level was inevitable guys. Complaining about it is like complaining about getting wet when you go out in the rain.
Kineticist has by far (about 10 pages, I believe) the longest Class Description of any Class ever written by Paizo (and is more like 20 pages longer than most of them). The lion's share of that is the Talents. There simply weren't ever going to be many more of them than there were given that page count is a real and existent thing.
Now, as time progresses, we'll get more and the whole class will thus be better (which was Azten's point, for reference). But complaining we don't have them already demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the way RPG Publishing functions. A few years from now, there will likely be a lot more Talents available, but expecting there to be that many already is just not a reasonable thing to be doing.
Really, it's suffering all the problems you'd expect of a Class whose powers can't be supplemented by previously published material. And is still a pretty fun and effective class with something over a dozen good builds (there's at least two for each element in the basic 5, IMO).
No, it was not inevitable. They chose to create an entirely new class, with an entirely new mechanic, give it five subclasses before archetypes, and then not dedicate the page space that was needed to supporting it. Yes, I know Mark got extra space in the book for more talents. There should have been more still. There should never be a level where you're obligated to take Skilled Kineticist, or really any other universal talent, because you don't have an option from your element.
I expect, not unreasonably, that each spell level for each element should contain three good choices to pick from. Not three choices, but three good ones. I should not have to look at an element and either have one option, like Void Kineticist 2 or Aetherkineticist 5, or a single obviously better choice like Air 6.
As to good builds, there are not over a dozen good builds. There are essentially two good builds, because each of these elements is basically a different archetype. So, each version of this class has essentially two good builds, which is generally considered to be rather bad. Unless you like your Kineticist looking generally like each other Kineticist of the same role and element, in which case good on you.
As more and more talents get published(please, Mark, make more) Extra Wild Talent will get stronger. I recently made a build progression for a Kineticist...
That's great for you, but third party solutions are no solution for those of us who play PFS. If it's going to be fixed, it needs to be Mark doing the fixing.
There are people doing just fine in PFS, thank you.
Everyone would like more options, but those take time and paper. Luckily, Mark isn't the only person who can work on them. Maybe you should lobby Owen for an Expanded Elements Player Companion.
Oh, my fifth level Aetherkineticist is doing just fine too. Of course it's in spite of what he has to work with, rather than because of it, but that's apparently not relevant. I'm being creative with the element which has the greatest potential to reward creativity, and I'm still behind where I'd like to be.
The reason I'm specific on Mark over this is cause he's the one who wrote the borked nonsense we got handed in the first place. Specifically, I blame him for handing over a half finished class, which is what it feels like we got. Most elements have MAYBE three talents or Infusions available at any given level, and of those available, maybe one is worth picking up. I can't think of another class that gets so many non-options at any given level, among classes that have access to that sort of thing.
If someone else wants to hand us a book of expanded elements from Paizo, that would be great. I'm quite incensed that it seems like there's not more than one or two ways to build any given element, and more options is always better. I'm still not going to let the fact that we were handed a Kineticist that wasn't truly finished go until it's made good.
You did exactly what you wanted to avoid. Especially with Aether. You created a class with a lot of "options" but not a lot of options, if you follow my meaning. And now, we have a class that makes me want to do the exact opposite of what you hoped for. Why would I take a second element when I lose out on a wild talent? When I'm already strapped for good talents? And there's no way to make up my loss until level 9 or level 11? What would possibly possess me to take some of these wild talents? I mean, Skilled Kineticist? Really? We're really going to waste one of our already limited talents on that?
If you took Extra Wild Talent, removed the utterly pointless level penalty, and instead just limited the number of times it could be taken, there might actually be a reason to take it. As it is, it's the most useless Extra Class Feature feat ever printed. So I guess you got what you wanted there, it's certainly not competing with anything else for your feat slots.
Honestly, the biggest problem I have here is that I actually like this class. I really like it, and I want it to be good. And it's really... Not. Anything that's good about it is in spite of everything you've done to it, not because of it. The choices you've made have limited options, shrunk the pool of choices, and left folks with a tiny pool of actual talents worth taking.
Hell, add some new talents. Add talents only accessible by multi-element Kineticists. Fix Extra Wild Talent. Just give us more options in general, so there's not one correct talent to take at any given level. Figure it out, because this could be a great class, but as it is it's actually pretty punishingly monobuild, and that's because of choices that you made. Choices that you made, that created the exact problem you were trying to avoid.
There are a number of things that I can do easier with a Warpriest or a Hunter than a variant of a Ranger, Druid, or Inquisitor. I would rather have more classes than more archetypes, since very few archetypes drastically alter the way a class functions, other than the ones we got for Vigilante.
I would complain less if they hadn't locked the powers away in an odd manner, and if they made it easier to access the midlevel powers that are your mainstay. Waiting to get Foe Throw until level seven, or level 9 if you go multiple elements is just punishing, and really discourages taking a second element. They really need to reward single element Kineticists more, and have more options for powers. When your kineticist has only three or four options at a given level, and only one of those is clearly the right pick, it just feels like underwhelming design.
"Going multiple elements is punishing"
"They need to reward single element kineticists more"
Um ... that's how the class rewards single element kineticists, dude. You get the higher-level abilities in place of lower-level secondary element abilities.
Getting third level spell equivalents a level later than everyone else does is not a reward. It's a less onerous penalty. If Mark had gotten it together and unf!#%ed the Extra Wild Talent feat, we wouldn't have this issue. But he didn't, and here we are. A class with no real feat support, and that rewards you for playing a predictable build by punishing you less than someone who does something interesting.
I like the kineticist, but it's obvious that it wasn't very well put together. It works in spite of the handicaps it was saddled with, but it would work much better without them, and be much more interesting.
Kineticist doesn't do similar things, and even if they did, they would still have gotten play, SWD changes or no. They were probably the most anticipated class in years. The playtest thread had thousands of posts, more than any two other playtest threads combined iirc. Kineticist was a big damn deal, and had nothing to do with the SWD errata.
Didn't stop Paizo from pulling their classic "nerf the stuff in the book you already bought to make the stuff in book they want you to buy look better".
Isn't it great when the company decides to nerf your old options just so you have an extra incentive to buy their new book? Completely fair to us, the customers who support the game and the company who publishes it, isn't it?
But that's not even remotely what happened. The Scarred Witch Doctor is now a better Witch than it was. The Kineticist does not look any better compared to the SWD because they share different design space. One is a buff/debuff controller with 9 levels of arcane spells, the other is a limited semi-casting psychic with primarily damage focused options supplemented by an array of utility powers.
They don't really get anywhere near each other in terms of what they do, unless you see SWD having con as a casting stat as the only thing it did. It's literally the only thing it had in common with the kineticist. Where do people get these ridiculous ideas from? I mean, seriously, the kineticist isn't awful, but it's certainly not competing with the Witch in terms of class tier.
You're aware that the errata actually made the Scarred Witch Doctor better, right? It's the only class that now has the potential to have an effective primary stat in excess of 20 at level 1.
Better is subjective. If you're one of those players who insists on having a 20 in your starting stat, then yes it might be better.
If you're like me and appreciated having a truly different option from all the other full casters and feel like the change was completely unnecessary, then it's not.
Better is not subjective. It is mechanically superior to the base Witch, even if you don't want to have a 20 in your primary stat. Only want an 18 after the SWD bonus is applied? Great, you now have an extra 12 points in your point buy that you can sink into other things. Having 12 more points to spend on other stats is better than not having those points to spend.
If you're interested in different, that's fine, but to say that the SWD is not explicitly better from a mechanical standpoint compared to its previous incarnation, which was already pretty damn good, is plainly false.
You're aware that the errata actually made the Scarred Witch Doctor better, right? It's the only class that now has the potential to have an effective primary stat in excess of 20 at level 1.
As to the rest, it sounds like a lot of complaining over nothing to me. Casters are the best classes in the game, not being able to dimensional slide at will is not the end of the world by any measure.
Even if you don't carbon copy your characters, making resurrection too painful does encourage people to make new characters. I'm one of those players who always seems to have at least one backup concept I wouldn't mind running if my current character gets killed off.
With the profusion of classes/builds, it's not too hard to make a nicely different character even if you need to fill the same overall party role. Bob the fighter gets replaced with Joe the Barbarian, who is then supplanted by Ted the Paladin, and so on.
That's how I usually handle things. I managed to create a new character to replace one that died recently, while still remaining consistent with the concept of the first character. It made me happy.
I make every character I build as grossly overpowered as possible, with the sole intent of being able to solo the entire scenario in the event that I get either a lame duck party, or that everyone has died horribly. Because it's no fun if the entire party dies horribly and has to burn prestige and gold to get their characters back.
Frankly, I think everyone should do this, and then just tone it down until they need to go balls to the wall on something. You'd never know my Summoner was a screaming murderbeast, until he suddenly pops out with a seemingly unending swarm of psychopomps and just craps all over everything. Especially when I get Catrinas at level 7, and start forcing gobs of really unpleasant saves on everything.
You could use the pregen, however, you would not apply the rewards until you acquired your XP to get to 7th level, at which point you would jump from 6/2 to 7/1.
Since you asked both "sides", from my reading of the RAW, a human with normal eyes and NO Arcane Sight spell (or anything like it) can see magic as it's being cast. Because RAW.
Having Arcane Sight or Drow racial feats (I assume you mean Drow Nobility?) has nothing to do with being able to see a spell being cast. Ranks in Spellcraft have everything to do with being able to identify the spell while it is being cast, but everybody can see it, assuming they're able (not blind, not in darkness, not in thick fog, not too far away, etc.).
You have yet to show that all spells make a visual display when cast. Your extrapolation from the counterspell rules is entirely inferred, and not supported by explicit rules text.
As a result of this, an ability like Arcane Sight or Detect Magic would be a reasonable way to say that a character can view an otherwise non-visible spell as it is cast. This would also allow for all spells to be used as counterspells, so long as the person intending to counterspell has Arcane Sight.
Because seriously, magical sparkles is just about the stupidest thing ever, and the PDT should be publicly shamed if they insist that all spells make magical sparkles.
Don't know if this counts, but I really want to run Carrion Crown, with all Occult classes. Have the whole party be made up of characters from Occult Adventures, and see how it all works out.
This does not shock me in the least. Clearly you can only oblige the martial character by making things easy for him and inviting attacks.
But, moving too far away would be metagaming, clearly. Because there's obviously no way the mage could guess that the fighter decided not to shoot him for a reason. No way at all. Nope. Unpossible. Fighter is smarter than wizard, wizard loses. Argument settled.
Also, why the hell isn't this guy using his mage armor and shield? He clearly knew a fight was coming based on the setup. Mage should have an AC of 19, not 16. Meaning those arrows miss clean on average rolls. But clearly, the wizard is too stupid to prepare for a fight he knows is coming.
The proposed fight was assumed equal footing. No buffs either side. If you ignore the "fighter has all combat feats and wizard has zero usable feats". Also, what the hell is Wizard Tattoo? I'm not seeing this on the SRD.
I am aware. More of a complaint about the general stupidity of the fight in the first place. Hell, add a haramaki to that armored kilt, and the wizard is now looking at 15 AC. He's 3rd level, so he can afford to make one of those items +1. He could have had a wand on him, and used that, which doesn't count as casting.
He basically built the most awful wizard he could, and then played it as stupidly as possible, before beating it in a fight, and declaring the results obviously valid. The entire fight was stupid, from the premise, to the execution.
So, we're going through the module, and I'm playing a nice fourth level Aetherkineticist. First fight, we all make it up on deck, and I'm unarmed. Nothing around to throw at folks. So, the barbarian kills a snake. Well, corpses are objects. You can probably see where this is going. I cut a snake in half with another snake corpse. At the end of the fight, I gather up the snake corpses, and we move on. So, we get to the island, do our thing, and eventually set up camp. Get ambushed by some freaky as hell blight wolves or something. So, I start throwing snakes through them. This works remarkably well. Second attack crits, and I essentially fling my snake corpse down a wolf's throat, before tearing it in half from the inside out. Everyone is laughing a bit by this point. So, I gather up my ever growing pile of corpses, and we move on.
Eventually, we come to the scene of a fight between the Razmirans and blight lizardfolk. Lizardfolk warband rolls up, and having had to abandon my pile of snake and wolf corpses, I determine that the only reasonable response is to fling dead lizardfolk at the lizardfolk. Hilarity ensues. We're outright giggling with every fight, as I come up with ever more peculiar things to throw at our enemies.
Finally, we reach the city proper. Rivers of molten gold. It's beautiful. We fight our way through the city, with me flinging assorted crap the whole while, just waiting for the time to be right. Because everything is immune to fire. Until we meet the babau that is. He's only resistant. This quickly becomes significant, as I use my basic telekinesis power to lift 400 pounds of molten gold out of the river under us, and drop it on the head of the babau. The GM decides that this is equivalent to full immersion in lava, and directs me to roll for damage. Borrowing a rather large container of dice, I dump the 20d6 onto the table, look up at the GM, and ask "Is it dead?" The table busts out laughing. It turns out that yes, it is in fact dead. Barely. We're all still chuckling about this as we count up the damage.
So, we continue on through the city, killing more and more things, including throwing a barrel full of caltrops and seriously poisonous water at a cultist for the lulz. Then we get to the undead gold dragon. My molten lava trick won't work, but we bludgeon it to death with various things. We move onwards, preparing to enter the inner sanctum. The doors are shut, and rather large. We ask how we're going to open them, and I point out that I have a dragon corpse. The doors burst open after a healthy battering by dragon corpse. Dragon of lockpicking works exactly as planned.
So, we go inside, and we get ambushed by the Naga. The fight is going, not really badly, but not well either. So, I go back outside, and get myself another 400 pounds of molten gold. 400 pounds of molten gold later, the naga is now nearly dead, and we're all giggling a little bit. Finally, it dies. Not wanting to fool around with whatever is waiting for us in the final area, I reload my molten gold, and we advance inside. The last fight is, honestly, an anticlimax. We crush it, and the molten gold is entirely overkill by the time it gets used. I use it anyway.
In a game where I fully expected to die, based on my experience with this character in the playtest, I killed everything, and got to drown a number of enemies in molten gold. Also, we flew on a tree for a while. Because reasons. Don't ask. It was weird.
Again, someone misses the point. A rogue, with a flanking buddy, and all the right gear can be a good Rogue. An Alchemist, who isn't currently naked, can be a good Rogue. A vivisectionist beastmorph with a dedicated flanking buddy and all the right gear is a horrifying murderfiend with the capacity to make a rogue in the same party utterly irrelevant.
The fact that low optimization covers up the issues doesn't mean that the issues aren't there, it just means that they're less obvious. Spackling over the holes in the rules doesn't fix them, it just covers them up for a little while.
The thing is , issues to whom? And really , i could ask my friends and they probably dont see the issues that you see.
Unlike what many people seem to believe in this forums , there is no universal game rule that says everything must be balanced... Plenty of games dont even try to go for this.
That said , many want a balanced game , sure go for it , i see nothing wrong with it myself , all im saying is that this game is working just fine for plenty of its players currently and if asked what the OP is asking in the title , they would probably say yes only because they want even more nice things , not because they see a balance issue.
Again, the issues exist regardless of whether or not a given player or group of players observes them. The fact that a low optimization group does not see the issues does not mean that they are not there, it only means that a casual observer is less likely to notice imperfections than a more knowledgeable one.
As an example, I've done construction. If I see a wall that's out of square, or not plumb, I can tell it. I might tell you that the wall is out of square, or not plumb, but without my prior expedience you may not see the issue, and insist that the wall is fine, despite the fact that it's empirically not.
Somewhat different problem though. The wall is a problem and will be a problem whether the amateur notices it or not.
The less optimized group is not just not going to notice the problems with the game, it's actually not going to have problems.
A better analogy might be a car that works fine at normal speeds, but starts shaking over 90mph. The race driver is going to be right about its problems and think it need drastic...
Trust me, even if you can't see it, the wall really is a problem. It may not be a structural integrity issue, but it is a real problem. The house might not collapse if every single wall is out of square, but a subcontractor is still going to have issues that Harry Homeowner will never see. I promise that it is a quite valid comparison.
Honestly, the fact that you don't realize just how apt the comparison is does more to strengthen it than weaken it. You literally have no frame of reference to know just how severe the issue I described could be. Anyone understands that a car shaking to pieces is bad, even if there's a caveat of "if you break 90." Seemingly minor issues in a home being built can turn into major ones very quickly, and the homeowner isn't necessarily going to know about them, even if the contractor and the subs are losing their shit as a result of them.
If you're that hung up on having the word Rogue written on your sheet, you're just going to have to accept that you're going to suck. Alchemist does the rogue's job better. Because it's not a drain on party resources. You will have to either accept it, or accept that by playing a rogue you will become unable to mechanically contribute to the party at some point, and will become a liability shortly thereafter.
I think 4th ed. is a perfect example of designers taking the easy way out in terms of game balance. Balancing limited-use magic with at-will martial abilities is hard, but that doesn't mean it can't or shouldn't be done.
Yes it's hard. From some approaches it's even impossible, as the entire idea from certain angles is that limited-use magic is more powerful than at-will martial abilities (SKR explains it very good here).
It's interesting that he specifically states that getting rid of Vancian magic is the way to get out of the nova-wizard-now-we-rest paradigm. I pretty much agree, and have long since instituted changes in my game which take that tack.
I like the idea that casting spells deals nonlethal damage which some RPG systems use. Shadowrun has it but with the ability to reduce the damage to 0 (and a high chance for that) its not enough of a drawback/a limit to spells cast per day. I like it best when combined with the fact that magic can not heal nonlethal damage.
Midgard, a german RPG, uses a variation of spellcasting = nonlethal damage.
Given those constraints, you may consider the Kineticist to be the ideal model for the casting class of the future. It's widely regarded as mid to low tier three, but in many ways, it's a cast with full casting ability, and broad utility through the adventuring day.
The fact that low optimization covers up the issues doesn't mean that the issues aren't there, it just means that they're less obvious. Spackling over the holes in the rules doesn't fix them, it just covers them up for a little while.
The insistence on 'operating entirely from its own resources' is, I suspect, the sticking point for many people ...
That insistence is part of what invalidates the argument for many.
That's what actually makes a class useful, rather than a drain on party resources. You need the wizard to use up his resources to keep you from sucking. The investigator uses his own resources to excel, providing a net benefit to the party. When the investigator handles his own shit, that leaves the wizard free to do more wizardly things, instead of having to give up some amount of the wizardly things he could be doing, just so you can be doing roguish things. Poorly.
Classes do not exist in a vacuum, which makes the things that they can do on their own more important, not less. An addition that can do many things makes a team stronger. An addition that needs other people to do things for them makes the team weaker. Including a rogue in your party directly leads to making other party members less effective at what they're supposed to be doing.
Trap SPOTTER, guys. Not Trap FINDING. The rogue talent.
It's not about just FINDING traps, it's about finding them WITHOUT TAKING AN ACTIVE PERCEPTION.
Because if you don't have Trapspotter, you will be in for a LONG crawl through the dungeon as you active perception EVERY FIVE FOOT SQUARE, and all your spell effects will wear off hellaquick then. Only check doors? Pit traps in the center of the hall. It's a thing.
Your mutagen (which has to be picked up by discovery) is a one-a-day, so hope that your day only takes an hour and a half. Your Int bonus to Diplomacy is only for gathering information, not persuasion (look at your class again) meaning that you are high and dry in the Faceman field.
Even with all of this, these bards and investigators and alchemists, you will lack evasion and uncanny dodge. If this is part of the package you want in your rogue character, then YOU PLAY A ROGUE!
Mutagen takes an hour to create. No per-day limit is given on creating them. Taking an hour break when it wears off is almost always worth it. So there's that.
If you want Int to diplomacy, you take a trait. Because for such a massively Int focused class, it's entirely worth it anyway.
Trap Spotter is essentially useless, as by RAW, it only actually works when the GM wants it to, since the check is top be made in secret by the GM. And I'd still rather have an investigator, since he can burn a talent to pick up Trap Spotter. How about that?
There's really nothing that the Rogue does that the Investigator isn't generally better at. I can live without Evasion and Uncanny Dodge in exchange for actually being awesome at everything I do.
And what DC would that be? D&D players are basically commoners, probably like a +2 perception modifier in general.
Except we do have extensive, specific experience practicing the estimation of distances and circles on a D&D board (by eye), so probably more like +3 competence bonus for specifically that.
And as a D&D player, you are having fun on a saturday afternoon. You are not in immediate danger or distracted, so you can take 10 on your perception.
Thus, the outperforming player's eyeballing the radii and distances of things on the game board WITHOUT rulers I'd put at about DC 15. (this isn't getting into birds eye view OR the significantly expanded time dilation for you versus your character, I'll give you those for free).
Thus, if you want to claim that your character is more perceptive than you, such that you need to use a ruler simply to compensate for your inferior perception, then fine, roll perception to beat DC 15. If you do, then your character is superhuman and I agree, you need a ruler to simulate his abilities! If not, then he doesn't actually have a better eyeballing ability than you, so eyeball it, just like him.
Who the hell needs a ruler to count squares? Unless you're using some bizarre 1"=5' nonsense, it's literally a matter of you, as a player, counting some squares on a map grid. You counting of squares is your character knowing what the hell he's doing with his abilities.
You're so hard up to fight metagaming, that you're actually metagaming such that characters don't know how their abilities work in character. A wizard is not stupid. He knows where he's throwing that fireball. He knows how far he can toss it, and how big a blast it makes. An archer doesn't have to guess at range increments, and apply the range increment penalties just because the player can't tell you positively that you're inside the first range increment without counting squares. And that's where your lunacy leads. To people suffering penalties because you are so afraid of metagaming that you actively metagame your players into forced stupidity.
ou seem to have a poor grasp on reality. As a guy who both builds things and shoots things on a regular basis, I can tell you that you get very good at estimating distances after a while. If I walk into a room and say "that wall's about ten feet long," you can take it as a given that I know what I'm talking about.
And? I'm not disagreeing with any of what you just wrote. Of COURSE you get better at it over time. And there's a game mechanic in pathfinder to represent exactly that: you adding ranks to your perception skill, and thus getting better at it over time.
In real life, if you, Legio, can already judge random walls perfectly, that simply means you already have obtained have a high perception modifier. Congratulations!
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Because it doesn't take complex equations to get an idea of just how far away something is if you do it regularly.
I agree, that is precisely my argument. The raw distance estimation (the ruler part) has nothing to do with equations, and thus nothing to do with that character's INT score. It has everything to do with his perception score.
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"don't count squares, that's metagaming."
I never said that at all. I said "By all means, roll perception and if you make the roll, your character can perceive all that FINE DETAIL (exactly the definition of the perception skill) of those EXACT spatial distances. And if so then you can use your ruler to count squares."
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that's represented by his attack roll
We're talking about area effect spells, you usually aren't even rolling attack at any point with those... so no, nothing would be represented by his non-existent attack roll.
Estimating distances doesn't require a perception check. It's not "fine details" and it's certainly not a move action, which is what specifically trying to perceive things requires. You look at the target, you know how far it is, and you go. There's no thought, no concentration, and no effort involved.
You have some seriously asinine ideas about how a game ought to be run. I really pity any player stuck in your games. Can't make decisions for themselves, need to pass skill checks to make ranged attacks. Is there any way you can come up with to suck player control of their actions out some more?
This is untrue. There are many equations designed to estimate distances using nothing but your eyeballs. They are used by hunters, surveyors, and the military all the time. Usually getting an accurate reading takes time and a calculator, but I have seen real life folks with 'high Int scores' calculate and apply the math in seconds. It takes the type of person who can do trigonometry in their head to do it, but it can be done.
Emphasis mine --- yeah your eyeballs. I.e. you need to use your eyeballs to get precise variable values first, in order to put them into the equation to get any precise result. So roll a perception check if you want to notice fine details like exact distances. Or don't use a ruler this round and don't roll perception.
You seem to have a poor grasp on reality. As a guy who both builds things and shoots things on a regular basis, I can tell you that you get very good at estimating distances after a while. If I walk into a room and say "that wall's about ten feet long," you can take it as a given that I know what I'm talking about. Because I do this shit for a living. By the same token, if I look at a target and say "that's about fifty yards," it's probably somewhere in the general vicinity of one hundred and fifty feet away. Because it doesn't take complex equations to get an idea of just how far away something is if you do it regularly.
What does this mean? It means that your wizard has a pretty good idea of just how far he's tossing that fireball. And your archer is going to drop those arrows generally where he wants to. And when he doesn't, that's represented by his attack roll, not by some nuisance GM with no idea what he's talking about saying "don't count squares, that's metagaming."
...making stupid random decisions for no apparent reason.
The reason is apparent, because I told you the reason: your character doesn't have any basis on which to make a less-stupid decision than random choice. He has not cast any divination, he has no direct experience, he hasn't rolled knowledge for whether his character knew this from downtime/the past. So he simply can't do better than stupid.
Yes this reduces player agency, in the same fashion that making you roll for acrobatics reduces your agency to jump over 20 foot wide pits at will, or failing to know how to cast fireball reduces your agency for casting fireball at will.
Rolling knowledge for knowing trolls are weak to fire and then just saying "well my character chooses to use fire" no chance of failure, is no different than saying "I failed my acrobatics check. Whatever, he jumps it anyway."
Clearly he can, because he just did. He picked the fire. Not the frost, or the acid, or the silver arrow, or punching it. Because that's what I picked. That is remarkably different from failing an acrobatics check, since acrobatics checks have penalties for failure. Like falling in a pit and taking falling damage.
Intentionally playing your character as an idiot with no knowledge of the world around him is utterly asinine, and in defiance of all logic. I may not know that it's a troll, but I can guess that my sword isn't doing the best job. When my sword stops working, default to fire next. Why? Because that's what my character would do, whether he knew it was a troll and took extra damage from fire or not. Fire doesn't work? Try acid. Then silver, cold iron, and adamantine. Maybe try magic. But don't just randomly choose crap because "my character doesn't know." Just cause I don't know doesn't mean I'm going to randomly pick things till something sticks. I have a method, and I'm going to use it, even if you try and enforce terminal stupidity by DM fiat.
Not least because odds are good that a character only has one or two types of damaging alchemical items anyway.
If you just pierced with a mundane arrow, and you only have one kind of non-piercing attack, and it is alchemical fire, then you're in luck! You get to use alchemical fire immediately.
If you have an acid flask and alchemical fire, flip a coin.
Acid, fire, and a silver arrow, roll 1d3.
Acid, fire, a silver arrow, and a ray of frost spell, roll 1d4.
Depending on the manner in which you observed it not to work, your character may also consider other means of brute force like bludgeoning and slashing.
I'm not seeing the shenanigans. Your character has no idea what will work, he has a random chance of guessing correctly amongst however many other options he has and his observations.
So, forcing player choice isn't shenanigans now? I have to try all of my items at absolute random to comply with your idea of how things should work? Piss on that. If my sword doesn't work, and I want to use fire next, I'm using fire next. Not making stupid random decisions for no apparent reason. I don't need a dice to decide which of my options I use next, and I'll call shenanigans on anyone who says I do.
Agreed, but even without that, there is nothing wrong with throwing an alchemist fire on a troll even if you failed the roll. Trial and error.
If you want to do this, as a GM I would probably make you list off ALL of the weird items you are carrying in your backpack that could possibly be a unique form of attack, and then if you have, say, 8 of them, you roll a 8-sided-die to determine which one your character tries.
And this is only after seeing a normal sword not work, as you seem to be agreeing.
I'd call shenanigans. Not least because odds are good that a character only has one or two types of damaging alchemical items anyway. Both of the most common ones just happen to bypass troll regeneration. So, you want me to throw my acid flask, or my alchemist's fire?
Aether - The ability to grab an enemy and just toss him away, or bounce him off walls or the ceiling. (Foe Throw is similar, but you must use the target NPC as a projectile to attack another NPC.)
Not actually required, unless that's been FAQed. I thought the same thing at first, but it was pointed out to me that if you read it that way, you're not actually allowed to target objects with your blast either, which is a fairly stupid way to read the ability.
