Raisengen's page

Yeah, a relatable damage calculator guy on the discord Rama bomber with sticky and the splash feat, he’s in line with a basic bow martial making two attacks vs one VV and one QV. plus your other tools.

For what it's worth, my own spreadsheet gives a (2-action, Lv1, single-target) damage comparison of

Longbow (no volley) = Quick Bomber vial bombs > Shortbow > non-QB vial bomb > Crossbow > Hand Crossbow.

At Lv5, you have Bomber/Calculated Splash online, and the Deadly trait hasn't scaled, so bows slip a bit and you have

QB Bomber >> QB other > Longbow > non-QB Bomber = Shortbow > non-QB other.

At Lv8, we say that the bows get a property rune adding 1d6. Now the ranking is

QB Bomber = Longbow > Shortbow > QB other > rest as before.

At Lv12, I'm going to assume the bow users picked up a second damage property rune. Deadly also gives another d10 on crit. However, Expanded Splash is also now available. This gives us

Expanded Splash QB Bomber > Expanded Splash QB other = Longbow > Shortbow > Expanded Splash non-QB Bomber = QB other without Expanded Splash.

I'm going to stop there. For some limitations: I've let the Longbow ignore volley. I've not included any Str bonus from composite bow options. I've not factored in the value of the crit effects of the runes, since most of them are non-damaging. I've not seen the new alchemist goggles myself, so I've left them out. I've not factored in the value of hitting additional targets with splash. I've given everything a 60% chance to hit on the 0 MAP attack. I've not compared at levels where the vial bombs lag behind on potency runes, where they have an innate -1 to hit.

I think this indicates decently enough that vial bombs can keep up against a runed ranged weapon.

There's another point to make on the cost of runes: an Alchemist is not a martial. Their weapon strikes are weaker, and weapon strikes are not their main activity. Plus, their skill actions can be as strong (statlines depending), so the opportunity cost is cheaper when an Alchemist passes up a strike in favour of a skill action when compared to a martial. All in all, the Alchemist is not going to be making as many strikes as a martial. However, they still need to pay the same amount for the runes, which gives them a worse cost:benefit ratio.

I wouldn't necessarily say the upkeep of bombs is free, though. If you're using Expanded Splash you should also be seriously considering buying a few backfire mantles for the party so that you're not doing more for the enemy's DPR than your own.

On the subject of contact poisons, the remaster changed the rogue Poison Weapon feat in a couple notable ways. First change is that the poison is just applied to the weapon like normal. There's no longer any clause about the poison having to be delivered quickly or expiring early. The second change is that the strike no longer specially exposes the target to contact poison, even though that's still an option to apply to the weapon. Are you supposed to apply contact poison then hope the enemy picks it up?

I think it's pretty safe to say that the contact exposure functions as before, otherwise it's painfully misleading. Besides, the Contact trait doesn't flag up that you can't get poisoned by contact poison on a weapon, it flags up that it's too tricky to get the poison on to the weapon in the first place without self-poisoning and wasting it. Since this feat gives you the skill to get it on the weapon without killing yourself, everything else is fine.

Well, except for the bit where the contact poison has a 1-minute onset period, so it's not really for use in combat. (Come to think of it, it's a rather funny design choice; by saying the exact same things applied to both injury and combat poisons, it gives you two completely different abilities involving both (in-combat action compression vs. out-of-combat assassination utility).)

Has anyone seen news of what happened with Enduring Alchemy?

It went unmentioned in the BadLuckGamer comprehensive video, so I think it's safe to assume it's unchanged. Meaning we can't take that quick vial from Double Brew over to the next turn.

Knuckles and plain Gauntlet are B weapons, so that leaves Spiked Gauntlet to apply the poisons.

I think it's worth noting that this is a 1d4 agile weapon, with no finesse trait. So if you want to hit with it, you'll need to invest in Str, and then your "power" strike is running off a smaller die than you'd use otherwise.

Any Alchemist that doesn't have a piece of equipment occupy their hand slot could now wear two spiked gauntlets pre-loaded if the GM allows the gimme of re-making and loading the 10-min VVs.

(This used to compete with Gloves of Storing, an unexpected boon of the OGL shift to the Retrial Belt)

Another use is to stick your weapon runes on the gauntlet, even if you're Dex, then use doubling rings to swap between different melee weapons, potentially having multiple pre-poisoned, or using an agile weapon to land poison and a non-agile one for better damage.

Something else I thought of to get around the action cost of setting up Double Brew: having a familiar with Independent+Manual Dexterity that uses its actions to either take the weapon from your hand or put it back. So if Toxi starts empty-handed with a familiar holding a weapon, they can either Quick Bomber Double Brew (and incur MAP) or Double Brew and drop the item for someone else to pick up and use later, have the familiar put a weapon in their hand for free, poison it for their second action, then make one Strike for their third.

I've been trying to figure out the "point" of the Toxicologist's field vial action with a friend, and we're both stumped, so I thought I'd ask if anyone here has ideas.

To recap: for 1 action, you make a quick vial, and for 1 action you apply it to your weapon like it's an injury poison. On the next strike with that weapon before the end of your turn, you also deal the vial bomb's initial damage (no splash). In other words, you take 3 actions to do a single strike, and if it hits you do 1d6 extra damage per weapon die. If it missed the effect is lost. Since it's not an actual poison with a save, it doesn't interact with any of your other features or feats except the 1-action-to-poison and the resistance bypass.

The damage just doesn't seem good enough to make it appealing. You start with it at lv1, so it should be useful then, right? Well, it's just about better than triple-attacking with a dagger on 0 Str, sure. But the damage-per-action of double-attacking with a dagger is about the same, so it's only worth it if you've really got nothing else worth doing in your turn. And you need some reason to not just chuck a vial bomb + strike for 3 actions instead, which has better damage. Maybe it's melee, you have flanking, and don't want to splash yourself + allies?

If you have Quick Bomber, of course the damage from a triple vial bomb throw does better. (Don't think about what happens when Bomber starts using Int for splash damage...) What if you took a high-Str low-Dex build and can't throw bombs? Then you'll still do better swinging multiple times to add your Str repeatedly.

What if you spent all your vials on prebuffing, and now you want to hang back outside bomb range and snipe? If you're using a 1h crossbow, then it takes 4 actions to make the attack. This gives you 2 attacks at 0 MAP over 2 turns for 3d6, which improves over 2 attacks at 0 MAP and 1 at 5 MAP. Or, you could use a 2h crossbow and get as much or more damage from the improved die size. If you picked up bows from ancestry or archetype feats, then their triple-attack is also better DPR than one Toxi-shot.

At level 11 it upgrades to also do the bomb's splash damage as persistent damage. I.e. 1 persistent damage per die. That's nice, but then you look at the martials and realise that by this point your 3-action is doing as much damage as their 1-action. Is this damage really the best use of your actions?

(If the idea of adding d6 + persistent damage to a weapon strike for 2 actions sounds familiar, you may have seen a Magus cast Gouging Claw spellstrikes before. Only, at lv11 the Toxi is adding 2d6 + 2 while the Magus adds 7d6 + 7. Of course, I don't expect the Toxi to be outblasting the Magus, of course. But, wow.)

At level 17 you start getting a quick vial for free each turn, but that's level 17. And you can't benefit from producing quick vials during Double Brew the way a Chirurgeon or Mutagenist can, since it's too action intensive (and needs you to have a weapon in-hand to poison).

I don't need this to be amazing or anything, I'm just trying to answer, when would I ever want to use this? When would it be worth me remembering it exists? And so far I've only got the most marginal situations that don't seem worth the effort.

(I also know Mutagenist didn't get a great deal either, but at least it's got something going on with Double Brew by level 9...)

Raisengen wrote:

(I'm not sure by what you mean by bombs that would've been worth AA reagents but not QA vials, particularly now Quick Bomber's been buffed. Either it's the best bomb you can pick in the moment or it's not, right?)

After you throw your QA +additive bomb, is it worth quick bombing another bomb with no additives for the cost of a VV? You used to be able to throw raw bombs from your daily prep batches or perpetuals but now its either VVs or Quick Vials.

Ah, that's fair. The VVs let you go all-out in a fight without worrying about resource cost, but it's a resource pool with basically no scaling so your endurance at lv1 is almost the same as at lv15. So I can see the worry that at higher levels you'd more often find yourself not burning through items as fast as before.

The loss of infinite skunk bombs does sting too, particularly since this is a support class, though hopefully most fights are short enough that on average I won't notice.

Also, I noticed with the way they changed how you know all versions of an alchemical item (lesser, moderate, greater & major) coupled with alchemists "not having any weapons", You do have some gold for permanent consumables.

Toxicologist... once metaphorically the poorest subclass... now literally the poorest subclass...

The more I dig into the new Advanced Alchemy and Versatile Vails the more problems I see. Because you don't craft AAs in batches anymore, you can't fully buff your team 24/7, not without sacrificing your max versatile vials by reapplying them every 10 mins even then you can only have 2-3 buffs. Also, there are A LOT of alchemical items with more than 10 min duration that are simply not worth the 1 out of possibly 8-16 (with 2 feats) AAs that you have:

-Antidotes, Antiplagues
-Most Contact, Inhale, Ingest Poisons
-Most Bombs (I get that there's VVs for these but some aren't worth the VVs/Action either)

If you wanted to buff your party of 4 with antiplague which lasts for 24 hours you'd need ALMOST HALF your AA supply. I get that the old infused reagents got you 60+ items per day and that's absurd but this just doesn't look sustainable.

In some ways I think this is a necessary trade-off with Alchemists getting a lot more in-the-moment flexibility. Particularly in exploration mode, where you can pull out any of your many known items at zero notice and regenerate the vial almost-instantly. Previously you might afford a couple of reagents for high-significance actions, but now you can be much more liberal in your usage, comparing to Rogues and Investigators with their large numbers of skills and skill feats they can draw upon. Spellcasters wish they had this flexibility.

Overall I think that's winning trade, but there's certainly a bunch of long-term buffing you do lose, which was previously one of those things the Alchemist was best-in-the-game at. That's not an easy change. There are also a good number of exploration mode items that just don't work with the 10 minute limit that you also won't know to prepare from your daily pool, so it's not a universal win on that front either. I don't know when I'm going to need to preserve a corpse ASAP with Timeless Salts, for example.

I think there's going to be a whole lot of existing Alchemists flicking through AoN to figure out what they can/can't do, and trying to understand the best use of their dailies. I know I'm going to be assembling a list of items that got broken by this change, at least.

(I'm not sure by what you mean by bombs that would've been worth AA reagents but not QA vials, particularly now Quick Bomber's been buffed. Either it's the best bomb you can pick in the moment or it's not, right?)

shroudb wrote:

Construct trait is not a "nerf".

While you cannot give them elixirs of health, you can Quick Repair them, and they get a host of immunities as well.

You may not like it, but it isn't a nerf.

It's instant death at 0 HP if fully applied, vs dying and wounded values that apply to PCs, normal familiars, and animal companions.

The remastered Construct trait is now flavour text, with nothing about being destroyed at 0 HP. That text is instead in Getting Knocked Out, which is in the same paragraph as talking about how most creatures die at 0 HP, and immediately followed by a paragraph about how the rules for PCs and their companions are different. So they won't instantly die, and go through the PC dying process as normal.

That said, the complaint about healing immunity is real. That takes out pretty much everything a party normally has to heal downed members, except for Administer First Aid to stabilise the familiar's dying condition. If you want to be mean, most "repair" effects also target objects only, and your familiar isn't an object. There may be some specific rules about Repairing constructs, though I haven't seen it, and it seems obvious there should be some option beyond letting it recover naturally through rest.

Otherwise, the plethora of immunities are nice, if you play in a way that puts familiars at risk. It does mess with the flavour choice players had previously though, and I don't think it would've hurt to make it optional.

I guess what I’m getting at is that Familiar abilities are largely there for classes that get familiars. This isn’t an Alchemist specific ability (unless I’m misunderstanding things). So, it shouldn’t be judged solely on whether or not it solves everything for the Alchemist. As a Witch, I might be regularly sending my familiar out anyway. I could have it deliver a healing potion to a downed opponent, and then trigger its ability with a Hex. Or I might need to both deliver an item and sustain a spell.

Alchemists having other ways to do their thing is fine. And maybe this isn’t worth the investment for them. It doesn’t mean that the Familiar ability is useless for everyone or that Paizo made some mistake with the way they constructed it.

For sure, it's a broader ability, and (presumably) anyone with a familiar can take it, and everyone can judge based on their needs and use cases. Since this is a thread about Alchemists, though, I don't think it's unreasonable for people here to judge it specifically from the Alchemist's perspective.

At the risk of opening up another can of worms, is there any formal notion of how much bulk a familiar can carry? I would think they'd have the same bulk rules as other Tiny creatures, but their lacking a defined Str makes the bulk calculation awkward. Valet and Toolbearer both restrict them to dealing with items of Light bulk, but you can argue those are for more specific balance reasons.

This one's inspired by the annoyance of Toxicologist wanting to have a reusable melee weapon, but Double Brew wanting you to have both hands free. If you've got an Independent+Manual Dexterity familiar you can have them take or return your weapon for free 1/turn, but I'm wondering whether there are any limits on how heavy those weapons can be.

(The other options I can see are to invest in Str (expensive) for the free-hand Spiked Gauntlet, invest in Monk archetype (expensive) for the free-hand finesse Tekko-Kagi, or buy a weapon harness and strap a dagger to your wrist, dropping it for Double Brew then spending the action to regrasp it when you next need it (cheap but costs more actions).)

Wouldn't the advantage of sending your familiar to deliver an item be that you have one action left to do something else?

If you deliver the item, then you 1-action take the item out, 1-action Stride to your ally, 1-action deliver the item.

If your familiar delivers it, then you 1-action take the item out, 1-action command the familiar, and still have 1 action left for whatever (Throw a bomb or whatever you want). Sure, your familiar is a move action away, but if you needed/wanted to do anything other than deliver the item that round, you have an action to do it.

I don't disagree that it's weird that your familiar can feed someone else an elixir, but it can't feed it to you, but just in terms of why you would want to use the ability, it does get you an extra action that round compared to delivering it yourself, and sometimes that matters.

I'll admit, I'm not super familiar with Alchemists currently, so maybe I'm missing something obvious. If I understand the new familiar ability correctly, it's not limited to Alchemists, and I can see my Witch making use of it in some situations.

That's the basic value offer, as far as I can see. (Though you probably make the item with Quick Alchemy rather than drawing it.) You've then got 1 action left to do something else, e.g. make a 0 MAP strike or use a second item you made with Double Brew. You can then either leave your familiar sitting in the middle of nowhere, or spend an extra action on a later turn to call it back, so it's overall more flexible.

As I understand, the issue people have been debating is whether that's worth the investment of a class feat and the risk of getting your familiar attacked as it walks about. If your ally has a hand free, is able to act, and doesn't need the item's effect before the start of their next turn, you can just chuck the item to them for another 2+1 action split that needs no investment and doesn't stop working for a week because a purple worm ate it.

The condition removals that need to be applied mid combat are probably better delivered by a Chirurgeons special abilities.

The Chirurgeon doesn't have any ranged abilities to deliver general condition removal, afaik. Their field vial action just does chip healing and can reroll a Will save with feat investment, and Healing Bomb only works on Elixirs of Life, and since it's Additive you can't use the other Additive feats that let you add bonus condition removal to your healing elixirs.

How do versatile vials work for the Investigator alchemical sciences field? Do they still recover 2 every 10 minutes?

I've not been looking much at the new Investigator, but to my knowledge it's pretty much the same. They haven't been given regenerating vials, but they haven't been given the associated 10min duration limit either. No big surprise, since vial regeneration is such a powerful feature.

I guess my approach to the ruling here would be to clamp down on the item retrieval part, and say that no, PCs can't grab off other PC's belts mid-combat so easily, so neither can familiars. We have the list of Interact options here that include taking held items from another creature, which is a lot more limited.

I don't like the idea that a familiar could pull out a potion from your belt and chuck it down your throat for 1 of your actions, particularly because it would bypass going through your hands entirely. Having both your hands occupied increasing the action cost of other stuff seems like a pretty dangerous thing to mess with to me.

So clamping down on at least some parts of the pipeline seems worthwhile, but not necessarily all of them. I'm at least partway there; I'll give it some more thought. Perhaps all it takes is some nasty held item with no investment trait and a sustained/repeatable activation to really ruin things.

(Turns out you need a free hand even to activate your own worn items, I hadn't spotted that before.)

The mismatch between the rules and the way people actually play is why I hate familiars.

They should also write alchemists the feats that just do whatever these pet abilities are supposed to accomplish. Instead, they could shut down Lab Assistant by making it a Command, like Valet.

I think this is maybe one of those things where the designers couldn't not have some sort of pet/familiar system without disappointing a bunch of people that their character concept wasn't supported, but then actually finding a position where it's good for the system ended up being awkward.

I'm personally happy with them being shoulder decorations that spout out a few fixed abilities, and as an Alchemist I'll try to use them for what they're worth, but from a design perspective they'd be a lot cleaner with much less of the messy action economy interaction.

No.

It is a core rule, with the text being as insistent on giving as hard a no as I have ever seen.

Ah, sorry, I did in fact miss your post. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction. I spotted the posts about the word-of-god videos and assumed they were citing the best source we had.

That is a pretty definitive statement, with the best counterargument I can think of being that it may have a more narrow intended interpretation based on its presence in the Companion Items section, full of permanent worn items with activations that the PC has to take instead. There's also the possible specific-over-general of Manual Dexterity, though there's room for ambiguity there. (Or there's the fact that your pet monkey is unable to feed itself your journeybread, and will now sadly starve to death.)

But then again, if you've got a designer asserting the stricter interpretation, then yeah that's fair evidence of RAI matching.

While GMs are free to say that's dumb, even I acknowledge how serious of an explosion of power it would be for familiars to do. One need only gesture at things like Oil of Haste, Necklace of Fireballs, etc.

I confess I'm not convinced at a glance that a class feat giving you two "free" preselected consumable activations per fight would be gamebreaking, though I appreciate that it may be outside of typical design specifications and need closer examination. Though, eliminating the draw costs of two preselected consumables via familiar hand-off is apparently fine?

I’ll add you to the “mad” column.

Not so much mad as surprised that people were claiming "RAW" off a video. Which, it turns out, they were not. My bad for responding too quickly.

So it's not so much "rules as written", but "rules as based on what a dev said one time, based on nothing written prior, and henceforth passed down as verbal tradition"? That's, uh... well, it's something. I guess you can call it RAI, though I'd be more convinced it's rules as intended and not just a misspeak if they took the time to write it down anywhere. Maybe if they'd had a project where they revised and republished all their core rules...?

a)by RAW nothing in either Manual Dexterity or Lab assistant allows a familiar to Activate an alchemical item to Administer it.

b)even if you houserule it to be ok, you still need the familiar to do 3 actions to either mak or take the item, then move, then administer, this compresses said 3 actions into 2.

Even just the new option to Command: [Q-Alch] + [Feed me] would be a game-changing action save nearly akin to Quick Bomber for self-used items. It would even be quite balanced due to the familiar's 0 reach.

You seem to be in agreement on this point; could I ask where you're getting this from? Because I've not been able to find anything.

Manual Dexterity lets the familiar take manipulate actions, and elixirs just take a 1-action manipulate (Interact on older ones, which is itself just a manipulate action) to use. Assuming they work like potions, you can feed them to another willing creature with the same action you'd otherwise use to drink them yourself.

I see stuff saying familiars/pets can't benefit from item bonuses and can't make strikes, but nothing banning them from using items (at least, once you've given them Manual Dexterity). So what's stopping you from spending 1 action to telling your familiar to QA an elixir and feed it to you?

(I admit I forgot that they have reach 0 so can't pass to adjacent allies normally, so they'd need to be able to make a ranged attack roll to do so. But feeding it to someone in the same space as them should be fine.)

Does everyone interested in familiars just never move? The action savings of any of the proposed options is easily lost if you ever have to command your familiar just to keep up with you in battle. Familiars are tiny, with default 25 speed and 0 reach. It's easy for a familiar to get left behind, even if it can be Independent. It must be in your space to use lab assistant, and must start in your space for item delivery. Item delivery then requires it to reach the target's space as well. It sounds like spell delivery for items. It's nothing to get excited over. It's not a substitute for real QoL options for the alchemist.

Familiars are one of those bits of the game where the writing is weaker. There's not anything in the rules explicitly permitting it, but it seems pretty common that tables let them ride on the PC's shoulder for free, and ignore them when it comes to AoEs—at least until you start sending the familiar out to do fancy combat things, like a Witch might.

There are reasons to think this is RAI, some of which you've noted. Things like the Valet action are a minor action saver, letting you draw 2 items at any time during your turn for the cost of 1 action... but if you need to command your familiar to run up to you every time you move, and then wait a round to actually use Valet, why would it ever be worthwhile? There's also stuff like the Kitsune Star Orb feat giving you a familiar that's a rock with move speed 0 and one of its two ability slots taken up, and that you can later use as a focus to cast an innate spell. There's some light wording hinting it's more like an item, but not as much as you'd expect if familiars were meant to be banned from being carried around.

It's also pretty common to let the familiar riding on your shoulder ignore AoE effects and never get targeted by enemies. This is less in the spirit of the written rules, but it's often justified on the basis that it's pretty annoying to have a class feat that has risks shutting down for a week every time someone uses a breath weapon or casts Fireball at you.

Btw, half of the worries I had about Action Efficiency are mitigated by the new familiar ability "item delivery"

with a command (so 1 action): the familiar takes an item you are holding, use a move action to get to a target, and then gives the item to the target OR administers the item.

the poison familiar ability also helps, but not as impressive: doesn't require command, is just a single interact, so it can be done with Independent, and basically applies an injury poison you had prefilled it with to an ally's blade (I guess here a familiar's ally, so that would include you, but the wording may imply that for some reason the familiar can only poison your ally's weapons and not yours, not sure about that)

that said, here we go again having a familiar being kinda mandatory if you're not a bomber as a negative, but at least action efficiency is now very good.

In terms of action compression, the delivery service doesn't sound too impressive. Lab Assistant + Manual Dexterity already lets a familiar make + admninister elixirs for 1 action, or... hm. I wanted to say that they can make + chuck the item to someone else with Interact, but the Interact action says you "typically" need to pass a DC 15 ranged attack roll for that. Familiars are Pets, and Pets can't make Strikes. However, it's just a raw attack roll, not a Strike action (you're not trying to deal damage). However however, the familiar doesn't have an attack modifier, so it's going to have a hard time actually making the DC. (Even for PCs, does an attack roll interact with MAP if it's not part of an action with the Attack trait?)

That said, I feel like this was probably an oversight, and that a more permissive GM would allow it. Point is, this is competing with existing action compression that's potentially more useful (1A elixirs on yourself and adjacent allies, or 1A make+pass off at some range.)

(I guess this also means a familiar can produce + feed a quick vial to a Mutagenist for 1 action, which makes their drawback suppression only cost 1 action. That makes it a bit more attractive IMO, particularly once it starts giving physical damage resistance. I don't think this works for Toxicologist though, since the familiar doesn't have your 1A weapon poisoning, before you get to whether it's allowed to take the field action at all.)

Overall I don't mind the familiar being a useful action compressor—there should be a reason it's worth taking, after all. Design-wise, it does run into the trouble that it's non-obvious for a new player what the benefits of a familiar might be, and the value also varies strongly on how much your GM ignores familiar targeting/movement/AoE damage in combat.

For Poison Reservoir, I agree that the free poison application is nice, but it's a bit of a one-trick pony as Poison Reservoir + Independent use up both your familiar abilities, leaving it with nothing else to do. ...Also, it requires a poison to be pre-installed in the familiar. Even if you accept that a QA'd poison doesn't disappear at the end of the round once it's been put on a weapon, I think it's harder to argue (RAW at least) that sticking it in a reservoir to change its activation preserves it. That means you'd need to make it with AA, which loses you the damage-on-save additive feat effect.

This brings up a wider point. There are a bunch of alchemical permanent items that work by loading in an alchemical consumable, sometimes two of the same consumable, to fuel an activation later in the day. Previously, this just meant that you made the items during daily prep and loaded them, then used it as needed. All good, it costs you 0.5 or 1 of your many reagents. Now, however, you only get 8ish stable items per day, so it costs a lot more opportunity-wise to make use of them. (With a couple you can just buy some lv1 bombs from a shop and be fine, but with most it gets more awkward.)

This issue also applies to the Toxi's Lv20 feat Plum Deluge from Fists of the Ruby Phoenix. It requires 3 units of a contact poison, which previously meant 1 of the Toxi's 26+ daily reagents; now it means 3 of your 9+ daily AA items.

Using finite resources to poison ammo has always been pretty dodgy economics, since you need to hit AND you need to make the save for that resource to not be wasted. You also don't want to be attacking with MAP, since that makes it even more likely you waste your resource. Perpetual poisons made it work, since there was zero cost to just poisoning every arrow the party owns. The loss of perpetual poisons means that Toxicologists have a harder time using ranged weapons, or supporting ranged weapon users.

Poisoning melee weapons or returning thrown weapons is much more cost-effective, particularly mid-combat, since you can keep on swinging until you land a hit. In particular, it used to be that the Thrower's Bandolier was a great pick for a Toxicologist, since you could have multiple thrown/melee weapons poisoned and runed, and even if you don't use returning runes you can just magic your missed shots back into the bandolier for the next fight. You could also use Valet on a familiar or Quick Draw from the Duelist archetype dedication to improve your weapon draw speed, as well as supporting drawing other prepared items / prepared bombs respectively.

...I'm not sure how much that applies now. You have fewer day-long items, and making poisons in daily prep means you lose out on the new additive feat anyway. That means if you are pre-poisoning weapons, you're doing it from your limited per-encounter pool, so you'll only use a few. Still, it saves actions, so it's better than doing it mid-combat.

(It's funny that the Toxicologist gets a reduced action cost to apply poisons, but still everyone wants to avoid using in-combat actions to do so. Funnier still is that Rogues and Poisoner archetype users get an even better action compressor that also lets them use contact poisons on weapons.)

(Please don't use contact poisons mid-combat. Forget I told you about that. They have an onset time of 1 minute. One of you should be dead by then already.)

All that said, the Thrower's Bandolier + Quick Draw now has the advantage of making it easier to keep your hands completely free so you can exploit Double Brew's interaction with Quick Vials and Quick Bomber. Yes, it's awkward that you need a weapon in hand to use the Toxi's field action, but I'm not sure how much you want to be using that anyway.

Dont't forget the Coffee, a vitally important staple for all the Agents of Edgewatch ;)

We can't let the Investigators know that we can make coffee, they'll never leave us alone if we do!

QVs are NOT a substitute for a weapon. They can never benefit from runes. The moment Double Brew becomes available at L9, weapons will already be getting their elemental Property runes.

Are they not? I think that they make going without a weapon a legitimate possibility, at least if you're not a Toxicologist. The splash damage puts them ahead of other simple options innately, and that's before adding Quick Bomber's action economy. Maybe you can do a bit better by investing in Str and a bunch of weapon upgrades, but this is Alchemist, their normal weapon attacks suck compared to martials. They'd rather be doing anything else, it's just before they didn't have anything else. And I'd rather spend that weapon upgrade money elsewhere.

As long as your table is OK with legacy content, you can still take Calculated Splash for +2 or +3 to splash damage, and Expanded Splash is still available at higher levels to boost bomb splash further. Friendly fire is a worry for non-bombers, but Directional Bombs can control that while letting you further exploit the AoE, or you can just use some of the money you saved on not buying weapon runes to buy some Backfire Mantles.

I won't deny that there's jank here, particularly with Double Brew + Quick Bomber strongly favouring 2x free hands for action economy, but the QV bombs feel like a serious leg-up and something the Alchemist really needed. There are issues with how the benefits are spread across the research fields, but it's still very nice for everyone to have IMO.

This change of the "1A elixir" method into a 2A routine also prevents me from using it alongside cantrips or any 2A option anymore.

Can't you still get a familiar with manual dexterity + lab assistant to QA and administer/pass an elixir on your behalf? I appreciate that shifting away from prepped items has weakened a bunch of action savers, but I feel like elixirs is one place that hasn't been hit so hard.

Okay I think I get that now thank you

I think you may have also missed that Double Brew isn't a feat; it's a class feature, so every Alchemist gets it for free. The old Alchemist had it too, so I expect people are talking like everyone's familiar with it already.

Double Brew is also a lot more versatile than just throwing bombs. As long as you have both hands free, it bumps the number of any alchemical consumables you can create and use per turn from 1 to 2 (assuming they both take 1 action to use). Bombs, elixirs, mutagens, quick vials, smokescreens, glowsticks, cake, salad, ice cream, whatever.

I don't think this has been linked yet: a video from BadLuckGamer giving more a more systematic coverage of the changes. In particular, starting halfway through you've got a more thorough go-through of all the new/changed feats, rather than just highlights.

There are a couple of things I hadn't seen elsewhere, like a Level 2 Additive feat that lets QA poisons do their item level as damage if the target succeeds their initial save. (Any poison, not just injury poisons.) But more than any one thing, it's nice to have a more comprehensive video that doesn't seem likely to have missed anything big. (I'll still want the full text in front of me before figuring out finicky stuff, like whether you can draw a versatile vial from your toolkit as part of using a field vial action.)

i think if you are doing X melee damage and Y poison damage with 1 attack will outdamage doing X melee damage and Y poison damage +1-4 splash but one of the attacks with MAP.

Basically you combine the two sources of damage in the same strike, which should be overall better, especially when you consider things like flanking affecting the weapon strike.

Assume you're using a dagger, since that's as good as it gets. What you gain from the Toxi field vial is an extra 20% chance to hit/crit with the dagger (20% of expected damage if you hit on a 10, going up to 40% if you hit on a 6), and what you lose is a 95% chance to land splash damage on at least one target.

A dagger's only d4, so you're getting somewhere between 0.5 and 1 extra damage per die... but hitting on a 6 seems pretty optimistic to me. Meanwhile the splash is 0.95 extra damage per die, so it usually outperforms. (This compares to the toxi field vial 3-action doing 6 per die on a hit.) Even moving up to a d6 isn't enough to save you.

If you start your turn in flanking and don't want to do anything else, then yes, you'll get up to 0.75 extra expected damage per die and also avoid splashing yourself + allies. But I feel that's rather too niche for the first 10 levels of a level 1 subclass feature, and I'm struggling to think of anything else to do with it.

For the infinite VVs, it does explicitly say that the substance becomes "inert" at the end of your turn, so that seems pretty clear to me that you have to actually hit the enemy in the same turn you apply it.

Nevermind, I scanned through the Rules Lawyer video and realised I misread you here. The vial poison explicitly only lasts until the end of your current turn, and adds its poison damage directly rather than forcing a save like normal poisons. (Good for reliability, but means it doesn't trigger the lv13 double-target effect.)

It's... kinda meh? 3 actions to make 1 strike, which deals the damage of your (one-handed, simple) weapon plus the damage of the bomb, minus splash. That's most likely 1d6+1d4 melee, or 1d6+1d6 if you levelled Str or make this cost 4 actions by going ranged. And since you're losing out on splash... it would actually do more expected damage to just take 2 actions to throw the vial, then another action to attack with MAP. And that's before you start thinking about Quick Bomber.

I suppose this has the niche of avoiding splashing allies and letting you get off-guard via flanking, but I'm having a hard time convincing myself a Toxicologist would actually want to use this much until you hit level 11 and turn the splash damage into persistent damage. (It's also killed off the Quick Draw Toxicologist, since you need to already be holding the weapon before you can poison it.)

Mind you, the Toxicologist isn't alone here. The Mutagenist's field vial is 2 actions to remove a mutagen drawback until the start of their next turn, which I can't imagine is getting that crowd excited.

The action economy on the vial-poisoned weapon is affected by an element of their field benefit that I don't think I mentioned - you can apply the poison to a weapon as 1-action, not 2. My understanding is then that it should be:

- 1 action to use Quick Alchemy to make a Versatile Vial and have it in hand (IMO it'd be a pretty wild GM call to say that the thing you just made is not in your hand); this can be skipped if you're using one of your actual VVs, but I imagine you're more likely to use the action to make it into a better poison in that case
- 1 action to use your field benefit to apply the Versatile Vial to your weapon
- 1 action left to Strike with the weapon

In terms of pre-buffing with the poisons, I'd like to make clear I'm guessing here; I only have a screenshot of the actual toxicologist sub-class. Standard VVs have their effects expire after 10 minutes, but there's the perennial question of "has a poison taken effect when applied to a weapon/ammo, or only when it has hit someone". If you go for the former, there might be more cheese available? For the infinite VVs, it does explicitly say that the substance becomes "inert" at the end of your turn, so that seems pretty clear to me that you have to actually hit the enemy in the same turn you apply it.

Oh right, I forgot I was assuming Toxi still got the 1-action apply too. Not that it ever really came up in my experience, since applying was usually done before combat. Sounds like it's the exact same economy as before.

For the duration of applied vial poisons, if there's nothing mentioned in your screenshot then that's useful info too, since it means it should (probably) be determined by the generic QA rules. The wording for temp QA vials going inert is the same as for other QA'd items, so it's (probably) the case that your answer to "do vial poisons stay on the weapon for more than one round?" is the same as your old answer to "do perpetual poisons stay on the weapon for more than one round?". (Assuming there's not some drastic change in damage output, at least.)

...Admittedly, the 10 min time limit on the QA effect duration might mean it's annoying for the Toxicologist in question to be wiping goop on their knives every few minutes "just in case". It might be something you only pre-buff with if you know a fight's coming.

I've got the screenshot open in front of me, and the specific language is:
- Infused poisons can ignore poison immunity
- If it would be more beneficial for you (GM call, typically due to weaknesses or resistances), your infused poisons can instead deal acid damage instead of poison damage

Their field vials also get the choice to do poison damage if you want to, and can poison a weapon or piece of ammo to deal the initial damage of the vial as an injury poison (later they also take persistent damage equal to the splash damage). Later they get poison resistance (half level), and finally they get the ability to potentially poison two enemies from one strike; when someone fails a save against one of your infused injury poisons, you can choose for it to spray to an adjacent creature, who is also exposed (but you can't do this a 2nd time for 3 targets).

Thaks for this. Ignoring poison immunity is really nice, of course, particularly when there were some poisons that did other damage types but were still blocked by immunity due to their trait. Depending on the wording it might extend to skunk bombs too.

Poison vial bombs probably won't shake things up too much, but it's nice synergy with the poison resistance to be able to bomb a target without splashing yourself.

Do you know what the action economy on the vial-poisoned weapon is like? If it's the full bomb damage I doubt they'll be letting us pre-buff a bunch of weapons with it, but it'll be interesting to see how much of an edge it has over just bombing the target (at least until you get the persistent damage perk).

The final part sounds a lot a better version of the Chemical Contagion feat. It's nice to see them free up some of that feat space, as well as maybe tune things up since it was pretty situational before.

As a side note, everything that has come out is such a huge boost for alchemists that I am honestly shocked to see a bunch of the negativity on this thread.

Speaking only for myself here: I'm well aware that Alchemist has its problems, but in playing it I've grown attached to the few high points or funny pranks it gets. So when a rebuild comes out that makes things overall a lot better but means that my fond memories are now stuck in the past, it's bound to feel bittersweet.

Give me some time with the full text and I'm sure I'll come to a new understanding eventually, and find myself looking back in horror at how bad things used to be.

I'm a little disappointed by the 10-minute duration restriction on Quick Alchemy, though that might be because I hyped myself up on all the free buffs the party would get otherwise. Still, losing the extra duration on higher-level mutagens and certain elixirs feels a bit funny.

Hemming and hawing over what this means for combat aside, the recharging vials are amazing for all those weird out-of-combat items. (Well, all of them you don't mind fading after 10 minutes. Not-so-Timeless Salts.) As long as you're not expecting combat too soon, you can dig deep into your formula book for help with all sorts of exploration problems without taking from your combat resource budget.

I guess the other angle on making those 2 vials every 10 minutes work is to keep drinking the same pair of elixirs on repeat just as you finish the new vials. That way you can still keep two "free" buffs on you or another party member without digging into your combat resources, though you'll need to drop it if you want to use utility items outside of combat like above.

I'll also be curious to see what they gave Toxicologist for its new field benefits. It was hardly a graceful beast before, but the 10-minute limit looks like it could really kill the approach of using perpetuals to slather infinite low-level on a bunch of arrows or knives. You also lose the spontaneous use of most ingested poisons, since they usually have onset times of 10 minutes or more. (I'm actually a little confused why they nerfed a bunch of injury poisons in the first wave of the remaster. I assumed it was a prelude to making it easier for Alchemists to abuse low-level poisons, not harder.)

Has anyone seen if powerful alchemy (i.e., L5 feature that sets the item DC to your class DC when you use quick alchemy) is still there? That was a critical feature of quick alchemy, otherwise a number of static DC alchemical items become duds.

Any news on Class DC progression (same?) or expert scaling on bombs/unarmed/simple weapons (L7?)

Someone on the PC2 product thread mentioned that Powerful Alchemy is still there. We can also guess from Alchemist getting Master weapon proficiency 2 levels behind martials that they're probably still getting Expert 2 levels late as well.

On the rules front, there's nothing saying what can or can't happen between the reload actions and actually attacking with the weapon, where you'd expect any restrictions to be mentioned. But that's just omission, so for some explicit points: the Gunner's Bandolier has an activation that leaves you with a loaded firearm or crossbow stowed in the bandolier, and the Drow Shootist archetype gives you a quick draw-style action that lets you draw and shoot a hand crossbow in the same action.

More vaguely, you also have that the Gunslinger has Quick Draw as a class feat while being built for the use of firearms and crossbows. If that doesn't work with their main weapons, that's an exceptionally cruel trick on Paizo's part. Similar goes for all the Initial Deeds letting you draw your weapon when rolling initiative—if that weapon is expected to be unloaded, it would have been worth a clarifying note at the very least.

So on the rules/mechanical front, keeping your worn weapons loaded looks to be allowed. Or at least it is for the major groups of crossbow + firearm, but there's nothing to suggest we should discriminate between other types of reloading weapon.

In terms of flavour: since a sling is pretty much just a leather pouch with two bits of rope attached, I think it would be pretty easy to keep it pre-loaded. Just tuck the folded pouch into a belt or pocket with the ropes coiled up next to it, and you can grab everything easily then let the pouch fall to a resting position, ready to go.

I agree with people who say shoving a loaded crossbow into your pocket is a very bad idea for everyone involved, but given that it's got explicit mechanical support I would be happy to hand-wave that you've e.g. got the bolt tucked under the string and you pull back the string as part of your draw action. You can't do that with a real crossbow, but then you can't reload a real crossbow in 2 seconds either.

Indeed, that's the essence of it.

Using Double Slice in a normal fashion: I have two weapons, and I want the best chance for each of them to hit.

Using Dual Onslaught in a normal fashion: I have two weapons, and I want the best chance for each of them to hit. On the low chance both rolls fail, I have insurance to change one of the misses to a hit.

Using Dual Onslaught in a strange fashion: I have one strike that I really want to land, enough that I will burn an extra action and wave around a second weapon I'm not using.

(I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations for the Investigator, and the Dual Onslaught routine looks to be equal or higher expected-damage-per-action than just a normal DaS + Strike, which is possibly a sign it's malignant/outside expectations.

As you might expect, the ratio favours Dual Onslaught more strongly the lower your base hit chance gets, which means you're more likely to be burning all three actions just to make one strike. Normally an Investigator has more free actions against high-AC foes (since they can read the bad roll and not attack) to do other stuff, so this might turn out to be a tactically bad idea anyway.)

Aside from Thrash/Collateral Thrash, you could also treat it as a normal unarmed strike, just reflavoured as head bonking. That said, grappling twice is already 2 actions, so to make 2 strikes (one per enemy) as well they would either need the quickened status or something like Flurry of Blows/Flurry of Maneuvers.

But if you're not looking for specific class feats or builds and just want an improvised action, I imagine it would be pretty safe to let the player roll 1 unarmed attack against the higher AC, then split the damage evenly between the two targets. That's already 3 MAP-inducing actions in one turn that all need to succeed, so even if it causes problems it's going to be hard to exploit.

However, also in this instance...would it really matter?

Strategic Strike only adds damage to the first attack after Devise a Stratagem, and it's enough to roughly double the expected damage. Since the first attack is that much stronger, hitting with the second strike is going to be less damage than you'd get from missing twice (unless you crit, probably).

(Assuming you read Strategic Strike as applying properly after Dual Onslaught. I see there's another thread going on about the exact nuance of Dual Onslaught, but I'll leave that debate to that thread.)

I confess I haven't actually calculated quite how much of an expected damage boost this strategy gives the Investigator, but I suppose if it ends up off-track then asking them to wield a secondary weapon they can't use normally would be one way of restoring balance. Dual-wielding already looks pretty good on an Investigator, but that would stop then using it "normally".

So the rough guidance is to still require a roll, but allow the character to worsen the result one step (either on a to-hit, or for a save)

Good point. I suppose it's a good idea to get the player to declare the downgrade beforehand, so they don't get to option select if the second attack rolls a Fatal crit...

The Dual Onslaught feat from the Dual-Weapon Warrior archetype reads

When you lash out with both weapons, you leave no room for the target to escape your attack. When you use Double Slice, if you miss with both Strikes, choose one of the two weapons and apply the effects of a hit with that weapon. You can't choose a weapon if your attack roll with that weapon was a critical failure, meaning you still miss entirely if both attack rolls were critical failures.

Suppose you’re an Investigator who just rolled a 3 on Devise a Stratagem, or an Alchemist who really wants this next bomb to land. While this feat is meant to support dual-wielding, as written there’s nothing stopping you from burning an extra action on Double Slice to make your first hit almost certain to land… as long as you can make sure your second hit is a miss.

I’m not aware of anything in the rules that lets you deliberately fail an attack roll. (Why would there be? Normally, if you don’t want to hit you just don’t attack.) However, you can still pick a secondary weapon that minimises the odds of landing a hit. Ideally something you don’t have proficiency in, but failing that you can stack non-agile + no runes + shoddy + non-lethal attack + using lower of Str/Dex for a really pitiful modifier.

It’s mechanically sound, but now we’ve got a situation where your character earnestly decided that making a swing with the wrong end of a flickmace was the best thing to do, and that this somehow pays off in securing their other hit. It's an odd image, to say the least.

Firstly, am I reading this right? Secondly, if so, what do you think the appropriate response to this setup is?

Personally, I’m not sure whether it’s better to take it as supported by the rules and streamline by allowing an auto-miss (call it a telegraphed blow to draw the enemy guard, say), disallow it as clearly unintended behaviour, or make the player play it as written and explain what exactly they are doing with that tactical toothbrush.