Using the Stamina rules puts resource attrition back to the game, which would make the isolated simple traps more relevant than they are now. Not so. Taking a Breather to restore stamina points requires spending a Resolve Points. At low levels, a PC has only 4 RP at most, and restoring RP requires resting for the night. So if you lost any number of Stamina Points, you move that much closer to a point where the party must withdraw or risk being unable to recover from combat. The clock advances. With Stamina rules, a single simple hazard costs a daily resource and causes attrition. In normal rules, a PC just spends time using Treat Wounds.
What bothers me most about the class though, is that the wizard is (traditonally at least) the "learned" caster; The guy who spends his time reading books. In my opinion this is not something that is properly reflected in the class chassis: Give the wizard some additional skill increases (and/or skill feats) exclusively to be spent on Intelligence and Wisdom related skills. This would give the wizard the edge on mental skills that he needs without causing any balance issues. IMHO this a weakness of the Intellgence attritbute - there should be higher-level versions of Skill Training that require high INT. Although wizards are disadvantaged by prepared casting + spellbook, bad focus spells and weaker class features.
Also, Pf2 is way more popular than PF1.IS it? PF1 was the highest selling RPG for a considerable period. Has PF2 EVER outsold 5E? Well, D&D 5E was orders of magnitude more popular than 4E, which itself was only outsold by PF1 for a brief period of time, not over the course of the entire edition.
If your player's monk is so tough and beefy, and cloth caster so puny, then why didn't they critically succeed? Restrained is one of the worst conditions you can have if PF2. Casters should be very vulnerable to grab because 1) low Fortitude saves make a crit possible even outside a nat 20 2) a caster with even lower AC that can't easily flee or cast spells isn't likely to last another round.
Oh are the Horsemen full-blown deities now? I thought they were on the same level as Demon Lords where they could be beatable by a top-level mythic party a la Wrath of the Righteous. The apocalypse riders were demigods in 1E and had statblocks. For example, Szuriel was L28 creature. Unless she was promoted, she should likely be L24 or L25 with mythic abilities. Traditionally, there were 3 types of dieties (entities which grant spells to worshippers), as explained by James Jacobs last year:
Imperial Sorcerer is ridiculously strong. To the extent that it almost certainly invalidates the Wizard. They have a moderate recall knowledge game for any RK check just using Arcana. They have a good one action blood magic spell so they will use some of the new feats. It can hand out penalties to saving throws. Only diehard Wizard fans are going to remain - I don't think this is a good thing. It is beyond me why Recall Knowledge is consistently better in classes that aren't Wizard. I haven't read the sorcerer yet, but even Premaster the imperial sorcerer was already a stronger arcane caster than a wizard. Now it seems the imperial sorcerer got buffed after the wizard was nerfed? I'm glad Crossblooded evolution is gone, since it was too good to not take.
There's a difference between inspiring someone and tracing over their work. AI art crosses that line. Public views on technology is informed by how that technology is used. If stable diffusion, or other tools, is built off stolen artwork and is used to replace human artists, then that damages the reputation of AI art in general.
The training data that some image-generating AI use is stolen ("scraped") from human artists, which is why it's controversial even when it's not used for profit. Other services that use AI, such as Adobe Photoshop, does use proprietary training data, so it doesn't face as much blowback. What you personally are doing is fine IMHO, especially if you acknowledge the tools you use, but generative AI itself is still very controversial for the reasons I mentioned.
Is anyone still using cantrips at L10, much less L17 & L20?Depending from your tradition options that are pretty interesting to trigger some weakness and disable regen. Due you not having the "divination touch" and maybe not prepared the damage type spell you need to a specific situation. Cantrips may help in these cases. If all you need from cantrips is triggering weakness and disabling regen, then attribute bonuses don't make a difference.
Rand al'Thor was more effective when using the Power rather than a sword and Gandalf was really just fighter with INT18.
As evidenced by developer tweets, the game is balanced around a hypothetically perfect wizard who always has the right spell prepared for the right situation. It is unrealistic to expect brand new players to possess this kind of system mastery, and casting "wrong" really hurts when you have so few slots. I'm not sure what tweets you're talking about, but it's true that the encounter balance doesn't take attrition into account. So... from a game development standpoint, what are some possible solutions? How would you make a baby wizard feel better? I have a lot of homebrew I use. Here are three that help low-level casters in general. Spell Recovery
Recharge
Spell Attacks
Int based prepared casting is not what is holding back the wizard. The fact that you even think that's the issue shows you how much Paizo screwed the class and the Int stat. Well, I know INT is bad because the worst classes in 2E are the alchemist, witch, investigator (and possibly wizard now). Trained skills aren't quite as good as high Will saves or the combat-applicable social skills, plus it's easy to get the skills you actually use Trained. Prepared casting (and Vancian casting as well) is bad for reasons that are too long to get into here, which isn't going to be corrected in Player Core 1.
The best Wizard build is currently a high-INT Imperial Sorcerer, and Player Core 1 won't change that. I think paizo would rather have a class rhat was too weak rather than too strong, but I'm surprised to see a nerf to a low-tier class like the wizard after hearing great rhings about the kineticist. I will say what held back the wizard (INT-based, prepared casting), can't really be addressed short of an edition change.
The sorcerer is absolutely not the king of blasting casting. Storm druids and maybe psychics do it better.
I guess what I want to know is what affect would a spell attack bonus item, lets say +1 at 5th level and +2 at 13th, have on the math, and would the increase of success make anyone playing a Martial "feel bad". It would raise the optimization ceiling non-cantrip attack spells, although even that wouldn't make disintegrate better than chain lightening. It would also make cantrip attack spells more accurate, but that woukd be even less significant than the first effect.
I still think it is a big mistake to say that all spell attack roll spells hinge on Truestrike. Hero points exist and are the much better "advantage" resource for pairing with spell attack roll spells, especially since you could spend that last action on a force bolt/heightened magic missile and usually exceed what any martial can do in a single 3 action round of attacks. No, hero points are not what makes attack spells viable, true strike is. Most players will get one or two hero points per session, and most players will preserve them to avoid a critical failure or character death. Also, burning a spell slot on a one-action heightened magic missile is a waste of high-level spell slots. If spellcasters want to deal decent damage against single targets (which the game discourages IMO), then they need true strike, either by preparing it multiple times in their lower-ranked spell slots or by using a staff of divination.
Just spitballin' here 'cos I'm not as mathematically adept as you all: What would the effect be if "True Strike" had heightened effects, such as +4 True strike can be cast as a reaction. +8 True Strike lasts until the end of your turn. I think the magus would benefit most of all classes, since they get high-rank slots natively and they benefit from action-economy enhancers. If I were playing a caster, though, then I still wouldn't use the spell because I already need to burn highest-rank slots if I want to make attack spells worthwhile. A L5 true strike or a L9 version would worsen that dynamic. Especially since so many casters are not action-starved. OTOH, it fixes the issue is too accessible to martials and best used by casters as staff spam, the way L1 true strike is. Being higher-level means that it would be less likely to be too powerful (synesthesia it is not). I'd say it's weaker than it is strong. True target should be your point of comparison for higher-rank true strike homebrew spells.
The raw quantity of damage you're dealing with isn't the only factor involved Then why did you ignore everything but damage from your calculation? You didn't account for how easy it is for martials to get flanking or for weapon potency bonuses. Action economy is very important in 2E, but you were comparing a 3-action turn (true strike + horizon thunder sphere) against a 2-action true strike + Strike. Resource depletion is a part of 2E as well, but you also assumed that a spellcaster will have that used their highest-level spell slots for that one spell. You forgot critical specializations, etc. That's the problem with white-room theorycrafting such as yours - it makes unfounded assumptions (usually in service of DPR, a clunky and inaccurate measure of utility). Your point that casters can spend two actions to deal 10% more damage than a martial that spends just one (only 3 or 4 times per day, tho), doesn't mean anything. My observation that true strike on a martial is better than true strike on a caster wasn't a challenge for you to build a PC that just spends their turn doing just that.
Item bonuses to spell attack rolls will barely make a noticeable difference in the feel of throwing out spells against non-debuffed, higher level enemies -- it will still be a bad idea. But where the item bonuses will make a big impact, is when the creature is debuffed, and suddenly a creature making a save on a 5, is being hit by an attack roll spell on a 9, and that swings the damage wildly in the spell attack roll's favor. This why my preferred solution to attack spells being bad is for them to do half-damage on a miss. It uses the same four degrees of success mechanic as save DC spells, and raises the baseline effectiveness floor without benefiting optimization too much.
It's true, a martial will have more opportunities to throw the spell than a caster will. Has that been a problem in your games? My pount was that true strike is better on a martial than a caster, which is my two cents in a thread criticising the true strike spell. I didn't account for accuracy because it's a complicated mess, and highly dependent on exactly which enemies (and thus which AC) you're up against. Also, a well-run caster is going to be throwing vs-AC spells (and thus, potentially, True Striking) against enemies that have relatively low AC compared to their pertinent saves, while a martial is going vs-AC (and possibly True Striking) regardless, thus throwing off the numbers further. I also didn't include anything to adjust for the nullification of circumstance penalties or flat checks from concealment/hidden. If you're trying to math things, you gotta stop somewhere. I get that the game math is hard, especially with so many variables, but saying a single Strike from a barbarian deals less median damage than a caster's highest-level spell has nothing to do with true strike, which is about accuracy. You didn't stop somewhere as much as did not even start & then claim the math proved you right.
You forgot to account for accuracy, somehow. Also, casters run out of top-rank spells before they run out of castings of true strike. That's 3/day, max? Martials can have 6.
A martial's Strike generally does more damage and only costs one action, so it benefits more from true strike. True strike + Strike takes 2 actions, but true strike + takes an entire turn. True strike is a 1st-rank spell fhat doesn't require any spell DCs, so martials can pick it up fairly easily. True strike cast by a martial, especially one that has a powerful attack, is much deadlier than the same spell cast by a spellcaster.
What I dislike about true strike is that martials benefit from casting it more than spellcasters do, which is an odd position for a spell. Another issue is that true strike isn't available to all casters While attack spells need a rework, I really don't like adding item bonuses to spell attqck rolls.
I think so, or else it's just redundant language from Player Core 1 reminding people how Attributes work. or is kineticist the only class that gets this therefore having +4 modifiers over everyone else. I doubt it.
That said... what about the Alignment tips did folks find most useful, beyond us suggesting which of the 9 alignments are best to play? Does the rest of the Player's Guide do the job as a whole helping to guide a cohesively themed party that'll fit well into the campaign (as I suspect it might)? The most useful part about alignment tips was setting expectations. In Agents of Edgewatch, the campaign benefits from clearly establishing that the PCs are not meant to be brutal or bitter police officers. The Blood Lords player's guide is correct when it says that neutral or LN PCs work well in the campaign (although I can't for the life of me imagine an LG PC for that campaign). Hell's Vengeance deserves special mention for walking readers through playing an evil PC without disrupting the group. That said, it seems that the alignment advice for every Adventure Path can be boiled down to "The PCs should be motivated to follow the plot, accept quests from NPCs, and players should not use alignment as an excuse to be disruptive (no evil PCs without GM & player buy-in) In the future, I recommend focusing on what sort of motivations, goals, or attitude a PC should have (which the Player's Guides do to some extent). Each adventure path could have some point of disagreement that player could have (tradition vs. modernity, war vs. peace, free will vs. destiny, patriotism vs. self-advancement, etc.)
I played a swashbuckler from levels 1-20 in Age of Ashes. It's a fun and flavorable class, but it suffers at low levels. I would change it so that finishers didn't need to be your final attack in your turn, and instead just make it so finishers could only be used once per turn. Finishers aren't quite good enough to justify only getting a single attack. Swashbuckler should have scaling proficiency to Acrobatics, like what inventors have with Crafting or thaumaturges have with Esoteric Lore. Currnetly the Acrobat Dedication allows this, but it's too good to not take, so it might as well be a core feature. I would also grant panache if you fail, but not critically fail, the appropriate skill check. That way swashbuckler would be effective against foes that are higher level than they are.
I recommend allowing people to just choose what they want, with the understanding that if things get out of hand (you hit any pitfalls or combat is trivialized) then you may ask them to stop. You could also limit your players to a single archetype. I limit PCs to a single archetype to start with, chosen from a pre-approved list of archetypes selected for matching the themes of the campaign. I also tie some of them to Backgrounds.
The reason that martial abilities that are 1/encounter or 1/day are few and far between is that D&D 4E had a unified system for spellcasting and martial exploits and it wasn't popular. RPG players have a tolerance for Vancian casting for tradition's sake, but Vancian martials never took off.
Its also nice that all parts of this forum will remain up even if you cannot post because the thread is locked. Unlike reddit where the PF1 subreddit is perfectly accessible, but the PF2 subreddit cannot be accessed at all because boycott. The PF2 subreddit is open. It's only inaccessible on Tuesdays.
You could start out combat with the enemy spellcasters already buffed. Spells like L4 invisibiilty, fly, or haste are hard to overcome unless your party is liberal with dispel magic. Offensively, spells like L6 roaring applause, crushing despair, L7 paralyze, prismatic spray and even L3 fear will debuff the entire party. Use cone of cold, chain lightning and the like to inflict mass damage. You can also give your casters PC feats like Quicken Spell, Mobility and Effortless Concentration. I generally prefer to confront my PCs with mixed groups of foes that work well together - just like the PCs themselves!
Sure, but your experience isn't universal. I'd go on, but it would be OT for this thread.
Which ones? IME full-casters are kneecapped by low HP, AC, MAD, weapon proficiencies and saves, which stops then from Striking or withstanding a meleee.
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Venture-Lieutenant, Virginia—Richmond 1,114 posts (1,117 including aliases). 7 reviews. No lists. No wishlists. 34 Organized Play characters. 1 alias. 