Melkiador's page

I wouldn't say it's a misrepresentation. You just agreed that your conception was that of a spellcaster who does not bother casting the "perfect" spell but rather someone who casts "good-in-most-situations" spells after all, and yet we are discussing "very high system mastery" spellcasting. These are not playstyles that settle for good-in-most-situations spells unless they have no better options. Very high system mastery means making the most of spellcasting and other capabilities.

Your conclusion doesn't seem to follow from your arguments. From the beginning I stated "similar results" meaning not identical. Having a good enough spell 99% of the time isn't much different than having the exact spell 100% of the time. Even then, the arcanist isn't guaranteed to have the "right spell" as adding spells to your spellbook requires time, gold and access. The system mastery part is in knowing what those good-enough spells are and cherry picking them into your spells known. Also in knowing when and what to pick to expand your spells known further.

Scribing spells into a spellbook does cost time and money, but with a Ring of Sustenance it is possible to scribe while others are sleeping and with a Blessed Book you can remove the cost of scribing spells into the spellbook

Honestly, you are just front loading the costs in those cases, and only getting a discount if you manage to access a very high number of spells for scribing. The sorcerer could spend that same wealth and time buying and crafting a large number of magic items to boost his power further.

Very true, except I should like to add that the Arcanist with a dip of Crossblooded Sorcerer will in fact do more damage when using the Potent Magic exploit (but less damage when not using that or when forced to settle for less from a lack of spell slots).

Sure, that's an option, but in that case the arcanist is slowing his spell advancement. This might be acceptable if you are starting at a high level, but leveling, especially in low to mid levels, is going to feel like a slog. Waiting till level 5 just to get your 2nd level spells is terrible. Honestly, waiting till level 4 is already painful. A regular old wizard would be getting fireball the same level your dipped arcanist is finally getting flaming sphere.

I've played both sorcerer and arcanists, and I've played with others playing those classes. I'm very familiar with how each feels and what they can "normally" do. Now, your experiences could differ if you are playing with unusual amounts of wealth or downtime, but some of what you are saying just doesn't align with my "real world" experiences. It sounds more like theorizing or a Schrödinger's wizard.

You could really remove cross-blooded from the equation entirely. One damage bloodline combined with blood havoc is already +2 damage per die. Even more damage is always nice, but there are annoying tradeoffs that have been discussed here. So, compare the non-crossed sorcerer to the arcanist and you see the sorcerer is unequivocally ahead of the arcanist on damage.

Melkiador wrote:

Arcanist does have an advantage in a number of casting categories, but a sorcerer with very high system mastery can achieve similar results when cherry picking all of the best options.

That is a common myth but very untrue. At high system mastery the Arcanist is superior because people will actually use a lot more spells, including many you would commonly overlook, and use them a lot more creatively to take care of things. They do not just gravitate towards a small list of high power general-purpose magics.

That's a bit of a misrepresentation of what I said. Yes, the Arcanist is the king of versatility, but at the same time, niche things are niche for a reason. For the vast majority of your adventuring career it won't matter if you have the "perfect" spell for the situation. You can usually get by with your cherry picked good-in-most-situations spells. At a certain point you can just teleport out, buy a scroll of whatever is needed at the closest big city, and be ready to face that super specific challenge. And since the sorcerer is strongly charisma-focused with use magic device as a class skill, they can often use a scroll of whatever they want to use. And sure the scroll costs money, but it's not like the arcanist getting all of those niche spells is free. Scribing spells into your spellbook costs time and money.

Arcanist does have an advantage in a number of casting categories, but a sorcerer with very high system mastery can achieve similar results when cherry picking all of the best options.

What I really like about Arcanist is how forgiving it is. "Did you make a bad spell decision this level or adventuring day? Fix it the next day or the next round with quick study." It's great versatility, but also combats selection paralysis that effects a lot of caster players.

Benthic spell metamagic only raises the spell level by 1 and switches the damage to bludgeoning. You do lose the bloodline bonus to damage that way, but the bonus from blood havoc still applies

+1 per damage die is basically the baseline for all sorcerer blasters because of blood havoc. A bloodline can give an extra +1 on top of that. Go the extra step for cross-blooded and you can pretty easily have +3 per damage die. Personally, I don't like cross-blooded either, but the career damage increase is obvious.

I'm really not a fan of school savant, because it limits your options by giving you two opposition school. The sorcerer is free to cherry pick whatever side spells it wants, without that concern. Getting an extra spell known per level isn't meaningless, but the sorcerer has favored class bonuses to really pad out their spells known if that's your desire.

A bonus against SR is nice, but never guaranteed to help in a given situation. You could just as easily say that the sorcerer makes up for the spells that were resisted by spamming more spells per day. But the sorcerer also has its more spells per day when facing off against enemies who don't have SR.

And this isn’t to say that arcanist is a bad class. It simply isn’t the most optimal choice for a blaster focused caster. Where it excels is amazing versatility. The arcanist also has an advantage in save-or-suck spells, where they can easily raise their spell DCs by 2.

Benthic metamagic is how a sorcerer generally gets around elemental resistance. Spontaneous metamagic is way better than it often gets credit for. Since most spells are ranged, you often don’t miss the move action you lose by taking a full round action.

The problem with arcanist is spells per day. They have 1 to 2 fewer per spell level than the sorcerer, and they don’t get spells a level early as the wizard. They make up for this with amazing versatility of the spell slots, but a blaster spends most of its spells blasting anyway. A sorcerer burning 4th or 5th level spells on fireball isn’t strange.

The sorcerer also has the ability to up the damage per damage die with bloodlines and blood havoc. That amounts to a significant difference in damage per round.

I’m not saying you can’t make a wizard or arcanist blaster. But there are good reasons that sorcerer is the popular option.

It’s worth it if you have fun. Sorcerer with a bloodline to increase your damage is most popular for blasters. You can still fit in some ok utility spells like haste and fly to go along with your blasts.

Even in a prison, there could be other prisoners or guards who may pass by. A prison could even be considered a community. The hard part is getting the materials.

The main problem is that high level spell casters aren’t in need of buffs.

No, that does not work. But if your Aasimar Sorcerer has the Scion of Humanity race trait to count as a Human (which is usually popular just so you can use the Human race's favored class bonus) he could use the Racial Heritage feat to qualify as a half-elf for Paragon Surge.

It is kind of funny that something that convoluted actually works where a polymorph spell does not.

For completeness, I'll bring up an android trait that touches on this issue:

Cellular Match [Link]

Source People of the Stars pg. 7
Requirement(s) Android
Whenever you are affected by a polymorph spell or effect, your nanites adjust completely at a molecular level. For the duration of the polymorph effect, you are treated as only a humanoid for the purpose of effects that target creatures by type. For example, a ranger’s favored enemy bonus against constructs wouldn’t apply to you while you are polymorphed, but nor would spells such as make whole. This trait modifies part of the android’s constructed racial trait, but otherwise that trait is unchanged (a polymorphed android still can’t gain morale bonuses, is still immune to fear, and so on).

Notice that even if the android polymorphs into an animal, it is still of the humanoid type.

Most polymorph spells do not change your type or subtype. You take on the form of a creature that belongs to that type, but you don’t gain it yourself.

You’re pretty likely to have an arcane caster to cast heroism anyway. Magic weapon and magic vestment don’t stack with the native enhancement bonuses on items, so they aren’t typically very relevant, unless you are in a low wealth game.

By support I meant more like condition removal or even healing. But warpriest also has the prepared caster advantage of leaving a spell slot empty to prepare what is needed in the field.

I think the warpriest is better as a support caster than the inquisitor. But the inquisitor has a lot of other skill advantages. Both can make good archers in different ways. The inquisitor can spike higher but the warpriest has good sustain.

If you haven’t played cleric before, they go through an unexpected focus change as you level up. At low level, your martial abilities will matter more and be relatively ok compared to martial classes. But as you level and gain more spells per day, your martial abilities will sit unused as casting a spell becomes a better use of your turn than swinging a sword or shooting a bow.

Tea Ceremony is supposed to be pretty niche anyway. You traded some proficiencies that didn't fit the flavor, and this is the compensation along with scribe scroll. It's not a bad trade, but it plays more like a caster with almost no front line ability, which is something that some people already do with their bards.

10 minute party-wide inspire greatness is pretty nice for exploration. Makes a lot of traps and ambushes more survivable.

Is that limiting text for “weapon” too though or just addressing the default case of needing to be masterwork.

A shield could be built that also acted as a magic weapon, but the cost of the enhancement bonus on attack rolls would need to be added into the cost of the shield and its enhancement bonus to AC.

Almost seems like you'd get more out of playing a normal Magus with the Craft Magic Arms and Armor feat.

That will really depend on how convenient crafting is in your specific campaign. The Black Blade is a good archetype, but it's also true that a regular magus can achieve similar or even better results in given scenarios with bought, looted or crafted weapons.

It looks like that’s a perk of the unchained monk. Makes sense, since their flurry isn’t based on two weapon fighting at all.

The black blade always was a black blade. If it is destroyed, you don’t turn a weapon into a black blade, you reforge a new black blade.

The Terrifying Iaijutsu (Ex) text contains "devastates the morale" thus it is demoralize.

That is quite a stretch. If it were meant to be a demoralize, then it would have used the keyword demoralize.

And frankly, it's not worth going out of the way for a GM to prevent this. I've tried similar builds and they don't perform that well in reality. Maybe if you have a campaign of nothing but solo boss fights, who aren't immune to mind effecting

remember - official rules are on Articles of Nethys. You might want to go read there first.

"Using demoralize on the same creature only extends the duration; it does not create a stronger fear condition."

I take that to mean that demoralize doesn't stack with itself, but you can still use it and another source of shaken to get a stronger fear effect.

Enforcer: If you want demoralize, this is fast and easy.

Mock Gladiator: And this trait pairs very well with Enforcer

What do you feel is "missing" from Pathfinder 2nd Edition?

I most miss class and race identity. 2E made everything too modular. And there's a certain charm to having the "default fighter" or the "default elf" to compare other things to, when evaluating options.

The players decide how challenging their enemies become.

That may work for your group, but you also have to understand that real groups aren’t uniform in how they build. You may have 3 players who don’t optimize at all and one player who takes every single advantage they can. Do you punish the other 3 because they have a party member who doesn’t have the same playstyle as them.

It feels weird that the nature fang druid is the most powerful druid caster though. It may even be the strongest save or die caster in the game, since there’s no reason you couldn’t focus on wisdom and casting.

Yeah. Bloodrager was the start of a new paradigm. The lower caster level on Paladin and Ranger weren’t really interesting and just gave you extra math to track.

Bloodrager actually gets full caster level. It's weird like that.

It’s more of a concern with a full spell caster like the nature fang Druid.

The problem is that the language of the rules never explicitly states a spell is not an ability, but it does consistently refer to them as if they were two different things.

Magical Healing: Various abilities and spells can restore hit points.

…
Charm and Compulsion
Many abilities and spells can cloud the minds of characters and monsters,
…
Some abilities and spells (such as raise dead) bestow permanent level drain on a creature.
…
Etc.

Battle Dancer loses shield proficiency. That isn't a huge loss, but an odd choice for a shield based character. You could use feats or dips to get it back. I personally don't like dips because it slows down your progression for other class abilities

Melkiador wrote:

I'm really not sure why Summon Guardian Spirit isn't PFS compatible. The feat is almost underpowered. Even when you choose the most optimal generally accepted options to combine it with, it's just ok. If I had to guess, it's banned because of the extra bookkeeping it carries.

I think it is the multiplicity of choices and that extra critters add to the party CR. Just one special doesn't seem bad but consider it could be a summoned familiar duplicate with different abilities that's disposable.

That’s not meaningfully different than summoned monsters of the same tier though. And the regular summoned monsters are just as powerful, if not more powerful, than the guardian spirit. So you burn a feat for at best the same level of power you already had.

I’ve used this feat twice with optimal choices and it was usually just a flavor choice to use the spirit instead of a regular summoned monster.

I'm really not sure why Summon Guardian Spirit isn't PFS compatible. The feat is almost underpowered. Even when you choose the most optimal generally accepted options to combine it with, it's just ok. If I had to guess, it's banned because of the extra bookkeeping it carries.

Creatures that you summon shed light as a light spell. They are immune to blinding or dazzling effects, and their natural weapons are treated as magical for overcoming damage reduction.

The Lantern Bearer: The stargazer’s ability to conjure light increases. The radius of any light source he creates via magic increases by 10 feet, and its spell level is considered to be 2 higher.

If you’re capable of casting a higher-level summon monster or summon nature’s ally spell, you can perform a ritual to attune the guardian spirit to a higher-level version of the spell.

The obvious intent of Lantern Bearer is for interactions with countering and darkness. I doubt you will change the mind of a GM who thinks this shouldn't work. While you can interpret the text to do what you want, you could just as easily make multiple excuses for why it doesn't work.

My preferred reason this doesn't work is using the same logic that your summoned creature's attacks don't break your invisibility. The spell doesn't create a light source. It merely summons a creature which then serves as a light source. This is the same logic as the spell doesn't deal damage, but summons a creature that deals damage. But again, there are many ways to argue this combo not working.

Sailing ship

That’s what it is mechanically. As for what a sailing ship is in the real world, that word covers a wide variety of designs.

It’s odd that this specific thread has been targeted for spamming before. I wonder if there is something special about it to get that kind of attention.

A monk applies his full Strength bonus to his damage rolls for all successful attacks made with flurry of blows, whether the attacks are made with an off-hand or with a weapon wielded in both hands.

The limit on natural attacks is less about realism and more about power limiting. You don't want monks double-dipping on a bunch of flurry attacks and a bunch of natural weapons all benefitting from a single amulet of mighty fists.

Though, it would be possible to pull off something similar with a two weapon fighting character focused on unarmed attacks. For instance, the fighter has a natural weapons weapon group that also applies to unarmed strike. You could also then choose the weapon specialist option of advanced weapon training to double dip your unarmed strike feats for working on natural attacks.

I forget the details, but PFS is also easy on trick builds to a certain level, because you can do free respecs. Honestly, everyone in PFS should just be summoners at first, because those are so over-tuned at low level.

"Burst of cheese" isn't a bad combo, but 10d4 damage at level 4 isn't exactly amazing for that level of investment. That averages to 25 damage. The average CR3 has 30 hitpoints. The average CR4 has 40. That still wouldn't be bad for softening up the enemy, but then it also has the niche of the enemies needing to be evil to get the damage.

The worse problem may be that this doesn't scale too great past level 4. The spell itself is still pretty solid for crowd control, but I don't think I'd focus so hard on the damage of a low dice spell.

When I play a character like this, I have to struggle with the martial to caster shift as the character levels. At low level, your spells are very limited and your martial abilities carry most of the day. But as you level, your spells become a bigger and bigger part of your "best" actions. So, you have to decide if you are going to be ok with your low level investment in your martial abilities mattering less and less, or if you intend to sideline your mid-to-high level spell casting.

If the Oracle has chains of light then they are at least level 12 and the roper is a CR 12. So, that was never meant to be a deadly encounter.

I think a lot of people feel like every battle should be deadly, but really a lot of fights are just meant to burn resources. That 6th level spell slot used to defeat the roper won’t be available for the next fight.

You are imagining hard light chains actually grabbing the creature. But the chains are just made of light. They only paralyze the creature, because the magic lets them do that. They are still just light. Otherwise, we'd have rules for sundering or breaking the chains.

The text of chains of light is clearly paraphrased from hold person.

The subject becomes paralyzed and freezes in place. It is aware and breathes normally but cannot take any actions, even speech. Each round on its turn, the subject may attempt a new saving throw to end the effect.

The creature is paralyzed and held in place, but may attempt a new saving throw each round to end the effect.

I'm sure the behavior of the text was expected to be the same as hold person by the author. The parts from hold person were probably only removed to make the text shorter so they could fit more content into the book. For instance, I think we all assume that the creature affected by chains of light are still aware and can breathe normally.

Chains of light is good but if you dig a bit, you’ll notice that a shocking number of monsters are immune to the paralyzed condition: undead, oozes, elementals, constructs, plants, incorporeal, dragons and more.

Spiritual ally isn’t bad for narrow corridors. I guess monsters could still tumble past it like any other enemy. But really, narrow corridors just aren’t that common in the mid to later levels. So many of the CR appropriate monsters are large or larger.

To challenge the party, groups of monsters can be a lot more dangerous than a single strong enemy. Swarms are also very effective.

Maybe an aether elemental familiar? They could sneak around and poison the enemy’s stuff. They are immune to poison so can’t poison themself. And they are invisible so are very good at stealth. Also, they treat a lot of enemies as being flat footed because they are invisible so they could throw poisoned items at them with decent accuracy.

You could also summon these, but then you have the limitation of availability. They are one of the best choices for a Summon Guardian Spirit.

At most, the servant could be holding a poisoned object and then another creature could run into it, but even that pushes the boundary of what counts as an "attack" under the rules for magic.

The servant cannot attack in any way

Attacks: Some spell descriptions refer to attacking. All offensive combat actions, even those that don't damage opponents, are considered attacks. Attempts to channel energy count as attacks if it would harm any creatures in the area. All spells that opponents resist with saving throws, that deal damage, or that otherwise harm or hamper subjects are attacks. Spells that summon monsters or other allies are not attacks because the spells themselves don't harm anyone.

At most, a servant may be able to apply the vial of poison to some object, but they could never directly apply it to a creature

Being shapeless doesn't really matter much here, but not being an object does.

Applying Poison

One dose of poison smeared on a weapon or some other object affects just a single target. A poisoned weapon or object retains its poison until the weapon scores a hit or the object is touched (unless the poison is wiped off before a target comes in contact with it).

The servant touching the applied poison causes the poison to not be retained, and thus lost.

This is similar to the question of if you allow higher level characters to start with items they crafted themselves, getting that discount to their wealth by level.

I don’t think there is an official answer, so you just have to check with the GM.

...has failed EVERY SINGLE ATTEMPT to hit something with his bombs and rolled 1s on the roll and ends up lighting himself on fire.

This is a good time to point out that small house rules can have meaningful balance repercussions. By default, rolling a 1 just means you fail. But if you add crit fails as a house rule, then you are making every d20 roll dangerous, and martials roll way more d20s than casters do.

A mid-level monk flurrying will get multiple natural 1s per combat.
A mid-level witch will almost never touch a d20 to roll a 1 in the first place.