Roadie's page

Just to be clear--as someone who's not an expert on this stuff and hasn't been following along--what about the new license would prevent Foundry if not for Foundry's partner status? Is it the fact that it's not sold on Pathfinder Infinite? What does that mean, practically speaking? Could a version of "the next Foundry" simply be released via Infinite, or is that not tenable?

It's deeply untenable because PFI isn't made for software distribution. As soon as you want things like automatic updates or being able to select addons from inside the app (which are at this point just basic requirements most people expect out of software) you need an actual software distribution channel.

I agree that both should be supported. It would be good territory for a minor class archetype to support "pacifist" lazylord builds, for when you want the cheerleading mascot, rather than a Princess Leia type who isn't as directly combat focused but still directly takes part in attacking things.

Could you could build a guardian who never attacks?

Pure 100% tanking and taking hits, and still be viable.

I doubt it. The class just doesn't have enough health and damage mitigation to actually focus entirely on taking hits, so if you build entirely around things like Taunt, Shielded Attrition, Area Cover, and Intercept Strike/Intercept Foe/Quick Intercept, you'll go down extremely fast and end up contributing very little to the combat.

Taunt sucks, but that's because its mechanics are deeply underwhelming, not because it "doesn't make sense". It makes plenty of sense as an attempt to distract the attention of a given creature from one's allies (no mind control or "pbbbt neener neener" needed), and you check out literally any high-skill basketball or hockey game for obvious examples. Don't get hung up on the name and think it can only be your extremely specific conception of what characters are actually doing.

Instead of Taunt, why not have some ability that let the Guardian designate a ward to protect, and then if the ward is attacked, the Guardian can use their reaction to stride adjacent to their ward, and take the attack instead of the ward. This could be augmented as they level, or via class feats so that they can also strike the attacker, or push the ward to a different space.

So, Intercept Foe and Intercept Strike, and the combination of both if you take Quick Intercept? It's also mechanically underwhelming (too much feat investment, too small of a range, you don't have enough damage mitigation to make it really useful), but the base mechanics literally already exist in there.

This could also work if you want to keep the martial flavor. Could even have different effects so it's a bit more varied, like when you use Bane you can apply property runes to your weapons, and rather than working just on your target, it works on all similar or associated creatures (which helps differentiate it more from similar abilities from other classes).

That's about what I was thinking, yeah. Something where you can activate a bane effect targeting one creature trait (not a specific creature) and then it stays on for, say, 1 minute. That strongly differentiates it from the creature-specific abilities like Hunt Prey, and eases up significantly on the class' action economy in a way that helps make up for the lack of all the multi-action feats that the pure martials get.

I think a simple first step here would be to dump all the weakness stuff all together, and give the class a bane-type ability instead, similar to the bane ability that 1e's inquisitor gets. In one fell swoop all the nonsensical gameplay issues with Find Weakness go away, and the class instantly feels more like an actually Charisma-based concept because you're inflicting something rather than "finding" weaknesses.

I think the issue is it just needed a bit more description. It seems like a bit more limited version of resplendant mansion. Its foot print is 300 feet on a side but can be multiple stories tall. Given the description of the thaumaturge version part of what they can claim is a 200 square foot piece of property. So we know the foot print of this is 200 square feet but that does not indicate that the interior volume is limited to that. It could like the resplendent mansion be multiple stories tall.

I think for the full release this does need some work like some portal that you can use to get back to it or it needs to be movable earlier. Possibly add another tier first tier like level 4 or 6 gives you a cabin basically level 12 it upgrades to a tower and 20 it upgrades to a full on mansion.

Or keep it small but have it larger on the interior than its exterior size would indicate. A 200 foot cabin is not a demense.

"200 square feet" is not the same thing as "200 feet on a side". A resplendent mansion, at 300 feet on a side, is 90,000 square feet per floor.

Ok, but put it in Brooklyn and you can charge $3k a month

You'll have to train up Landlord Lore to Earn Income from it, though.

First and most obvious: it's a 200-square-foot building or property... so, it's a shed. I mean that literally: 10 ft by 20 ft is one of the standard sizes for a backyard shed. Put a couch, a table, and a cot in there and you've already filled the place up; you might need to rearrange the furniture if you want to give your party enough places to actually sit.

Second, it's statically placed. Great, cool—so that makes it basically useless in the vast majority of campaigns. What's the value of spending a class feat on a cool hangout that's the size of a shed and that can be mostly replicated through rituals? By the time you can spend a second class feat on it at level 20 (out of eleven total, just to make this one shed do something useful), the wizard in the party has been casting magnificent mansion since level 13, and the only downside in the comparison is that when you stay in the mansion you have to take some time to dump all your stuff back into bags of holding when you leave.

Many of us already deeply dislike the preponderance of secret checks and the critical failure effect of Recall Knowledge (and extra burden that both issues put on GMs). Automatically getting Dubious Knowledge exacerbates both issues (not to mention it immediately being self-contradictory because you need to know the real result to know whether you can use Esoteric Antithesis), and it really makes me feel like Paizo hasn't bothered to look at the complaints that people have already had about this stuff.

Personally, I feel like the best approach here would be to ditch the whole weakness-causing thing entirely and replace it with something that gives a damage bonus against a specific creature trait, in the style of the bane rune (but with a broader choice of traits). Or, in other words, basically take the bane ability from 1e's inquisitor and stick it on Thaumaturge. Same end result in the generic case (assuming the amount of bonus damage is balanced correctly), less janky against enemies that already have weaknesses, and better encourages actually targeting weaknesses instead of sidestepping them.

Roadie wrote:

I feel like there's another really strong argument for this class being Wis- or Int-based instead: the Trick Magic Item feat. This is the strongest existing precedent for making broad use of magic items without being a spellcaster... and what's it based on? Intelligence (Arcana or Occult) or Wisdom (Nature or Religion).

Use Magic Device was CHA-based in PF1.

So? Trick Magic Item is the de facto replacement for UMD in 2e, and it's dependent on Wis- and Int-based skill checks.

I feel like there's another really strong argument for this class being Wis- or Int-based instead: the Trick Magic Item feat. This is the strongest existing precedent for making broad use of magic items without being a spellcaster... and what's it based on? Intelligence (Arcana or Occult) or Wisdom (Nature or Religion).

I feel like if you take a chunky hit in the middle of your sneak it is unlikely to make you want to change your course of action, because finishing your action hidden and/or behind cover (and probably out of melee range) is better than not when you're hurting. Even if the hit knocked you out, I could even see a GM ruling your skids to a halt at or near where you were aiming for.

But you only know if you take a chunky hit in the middle of your Sneak after the Sneak at the end of your Sneak, because you can't be attacked if you're undetected.

Let's take a look at the Sneak action.

At the end of your movement, the GM rolls your Stealth check in secret and compares the result to the Perception DC of each creature you were hidden from or undetected by at the start of your movement.

Success You’re undetected by the creature during your movement and remain undetected by the creature at the end of it.

So, when you Sneak, you roll at the end of your movement. and this determines if you're undetected during your movement.

Consider the case of a creature with a reaction that interrupts movement (similar to the Stand Still monk feat). If you Sneak past it and are successful, you're undetected and it can't use the reaction against you... but despite the movement coming from the Sneak action, you only roll to see if you're successful at the end of your action, after reactions have already resolved.

How is this supposed to work? Did the writer of Sneak just forget that reactions exist?

If I understand correctly, a companion book that cross references updated stablock for NPC, DCs for skill check and updated XP rewards to the original work much like an errata would be fine?

Humbly,
Yawar

The Content Guidelines page specifically notes as an allowed option:

a streamlined, bare-bones conversion guide for someone who already owns the classic adventure (i.e., encounter-by-encounter conversion notes with any Pathfinder Second Edition stats needed, leaving out all other content)

I feel like the most useful format for this kind of thing might be page inserts that could be slipped into a physical book or combined with a printed PDF in a binder.

For me there's two basic problems with Starfinder as-is:

- Low level to mid level personal combat is boring, because of the basic way character progression is designed (you get all of one, maybe two things you can actually do well, so combat at levels 1-4 is just doing those over and over every turn, and mid level combat can have the same problem depending on the obviously optimal selections for a given class).

- Low level starship combat is boring, for the same reason (pilot stunts, engineer diverts power to shields, everyone else shoots, repeat every turn).

Also, operatives are the just plain best class for most purposes (most damage, biggest numbers for everything, best class ability selections), but still manage to be really boring at low levels because you're just using the same trick attack every round.

Fundamentally fixing these problems would take a fairly deep redesign of how character progression works to better reflect something like the PF 2e model, where most "big numbers" options just don't exist and the game actively hands you several things to do per combat right away.

Will the interactions with finesse and "maneuver" weapon traits also get clarified or fixed? Not being able to apply finesse on Athletics maneuvers is a pretty huge blow.

I'll second this question.

So... any news on actually getting these changes into the errata page? It's about to roll over into September and there's still no good source of before-and-after changes.

When you Sneak, you roll Stealth at the end of your movement, but the hidden or undetetected condition granted by it applies "during" your movement, e.g., retroactively.

Consider the following time paradox:

- You're in concealment and hidden, and Sneak through the melee reach of a enemy with Attack of Opportunity, towards a square where there's an effect that (unknown to you) gives you a penalty to Stealth.

- The Attack of Opportunity enemy attacks you, succeeds on the flat check against hidden, and hits you for X damage. He uses a secondary ability with AoO to make you stop your movement in that square.

- The Stealth roll for Sneak is successful, making you undetected—"during" your movement. Which means that the Attack of Opportunity guy can't have hit you and made you stop, because he wouldn't have been able to trigger Attack of Opportunity in the first place.

- This means you take your full movement, ending in the square with the Stealth penalty. You fail on your Sneak attempt, making you only hidden again—"throughout" your movement.

- This means that during your movement, the Attack of Opportunity attacks you, succeeds on the flat check against hidden, and hits you for X damage. He uses a secondary ability with AoO to make you stop your movement in that square.

- Without the Stealth penalty, the Stealth roll for Sneak is successful, making you undetected—"during" your movement...

Maybe Golarion blows up from the feedback loop? Groetus is probably pretty annoyed that somebody's stolen his job.

Is there an intended resolution for this kind of thing that was never printed? Did the designers just forget about reactions when writing up the Sneak action?

For getting players used to things other than just making the maximum number of attacks all the time, it's also useful to put hazards onto battlemaps to complicate positioning and for PCs to Shove enemies into (or risk being Shoved into themselves!). The APs seem to be leaning pretty hard into this, since about 40-50% of the encounters I skimmed through included at least one triggerable hazard as part of a fight.

Itzi wrote:

...the content creators have a lot of clout when it comes to the control of the license.

FYI, while we at Paizo are happy to provide our opinions and advice to our licensing partners, we don't dictate how they run their businesses.

While I'm sure that's true, I'd also find it really unlikely that HL people aren't paying some kind of licensing fee to include all that unredacted text, including the deity names, etc left out of the SRD.

the supposed benefit is they have reduced overhead from developing for linux, windows and mac versions and instead everything is run from a server and displayed via html so they only need 1 version of the software for all devices.

there's really no consumer benefit, and they're unlikely to do an offline model unless they completely abandon the current model as they would gain nothing if they also had an offline system.

The consumer benefit, at least nominally, is the stuff you already named: the same web app now runs on all platforms, instead of needing to adapt the system to multiple platforms as native apps (like how they never released an Android app, probably because the iOS one sucked up all the time effort available to work on mobile stuff). I've worked on phone apps, and even simple ones can eat up a ton of time and duplicated effort if you're trying to keep functionality in sync across multiple platforms, so I'm not at all surprised that they'd want to move away from that.

The problem here isn't really the subscription stuff, IMO, but that whatever server setup they're using has just enough lag in making changes that it just doesn't feel good to use. There are contrasting examples in many online-only shared wiki apps (for example, Notion), which have editing that feels real time enough that you don't notice it, even though it's also live updating for any other users looking at the same page.

If they could fix that, I feel like a lot of other complaints might vanish because it would then feel 'good enough' to make a daily driver despite the other shortcomings of a web app.

I would disagree that liberators can't try to talk someone out of making certain choices. They cannot 1) force someone to act a certain way or 2) threaten someone for not acting a certain way.

That does not seem to preclude attempting to reasonably convince someone not to act a certain way; trying to talk someone out of something is not "forcing" anything.

To me, that seems like it leads some real weird places in behavior. Consider a liberator paladin confronting a mugger: he can't actually tell the mugger to stop, because that would be forcing him to act a particular way! At most, he can politely ask the mugger to stop, then beat him up if he doesn't.

Uh...no? Nothing in the Code prohibits negotiation or giving orders

If you're ordering someone to do something, and they haven't already agreed to follow your orders (e.g. soldiers and the like), then you're forcing them to act in a particular way. Again, consider a liberator paladin in the role of a police officer: the police in conflict situations are all about ordering people to act in particular ways with the implicit or explicit threat of force.

I have to wonder how those pikas are even alive in the first place. Shouldn't they each be dead already from waking each other up at one point or another in the normal course of life?

I don't see the problem with Craft being a make-anything skill, because the kinds of characters who are built as PCs and given full access to Craft anything by the GM are the kinds of characters who can make anything anyway. A level 10 PC with master or legendary rank in Craft isn't a historical artisan, he's a medieval-aesthetic Tony Stark.

Hero points allow all characters to reroll d20s. The problem is, many skill uses have the secret trait, so you never actually see your skill roll to know if you should reroll it. Hide and Sneak are probably the most prominent of these, since they'll be happening regularly for ranger and rogue characters. Is it intended that these skill uses just can't benefit from hero points?

They said combat maneuvers are still in, and supposedly decent at all levels. Kinda wanna see this to see what the Fighter will really be capable of, since I figure he'll be the best at them.

I can't trust this estimation until I see the spell list, because if they repeat stuff from PF1 then wizards will get just-as-good combat maneuvers with no investment as soon as spells like Black Tentacles are available.

The info available so far sounds less than appealing to me. The closest thing to filling any of the many, many gaps existing fighters have is the mention of Debilitating Shot, and that still doesn't seriously help unless there are a ton of 3-action spells.

Where's the ability to smash stuff and thereby create difficult terrain for enemies? Where's the ability to interrupt movement over a large area so the fighter can actually bodyguard the wizard? Where's the ability to force enemy movement? Where's literally anything that actually helps the fighter do anything beyond "attack and deal and damage"?

Over my years following Pathfinder, I've accumulated more rulebooks than I can count, containing dozens of classes, hundreds of archetypes, and countless other options. The result being, I'm probably never going to see most of them in action. A new class came out in Ultimate Wilderness, the Shifter. It's kind of cool. I like it. Am I ever going to play it, or see anybody in any of my gaming groups play it? Probably not.

The problem I have with stuff like Shifter is less "it exists" and more "I can already do the same thing, easier and better, with other content I'm already familiar with". The real problem with the "splat treadmill" isn't that more content exists, but that most of that content is just a marginally different retread of previous content, and when some original things do show up they don't get enough support to be useful.

Consider, for example, how many spells are basically identical in mechanics with slightly different fluff, and then look at the way ranger traps offered an entirely new playstyle that nobody ever used because they were never actually made useful enough to bother with.

A standard rogue that's not terrible.

Though, really, the easiest way to do this would just be to take everything from the rogue class, smush it onto the vigilante class, and then turn the dual identity stuff into a talent tree instead of a default feature.

To me, the oozemorph feels totally backwards. It should give you gradually better abilities to be an ooze, not gradually better abilities to NOT be an ooze.

If it's not too strenuous can somebody let me know what archetypes/talents the Rogue has been given?

Rogue archetypes:

- Desert raider: lose trapfinding, trap sense, and one talent; gain immunity to dazzled, the ability to hide in plain sight in bright light as a -5 penalty (but not against creatures immune to blinded/dazzled), and a Perception bonus to avoid being surprised. Extremely useful with the right party composition (e.g. a caster with lots of light spells), but ONLY with the right party composition, unless all your adventuring happens at high noon.

- River rat: lose trapfinding and trap sense; gain a bonus on Swim checks, ignore difficult terrain caused by "light undergrowth and shallow bogs", and gain a bonus on saves vs disease and poison. Incredibly campaign-dependent. How many people actually run campaigns in a swamp? How often does disease actually matter beyond one encounter at a time?

- Sly saboteur: Lose trap sense, uncanny dodge, and improved uncanny dodge; gain increasing amount of normal movements in difficult terrain (including 5-foot steps), and the ability to rig mundane devices to fail and deal sneak attack damage, and to rig magic items to fail as extremely complex mundane devices and deal untyped magic sneak attack damage. The difficult terrain part is handy, but the rest seems overcomplicated and useless, since you're basically rigging up traps that aren't even as good as normal (borderline useless) traps.

- Sylvan trickster: Lose trapfinding, uncanny dodge, and improved uncanny dodge; gain wild empathy, the ability to pick witch hexes instead of rogue talents (including major hexes eventually!), resist nature's lure, and DR/cold iron. Seems extremely good to me, nearly on the level of a must-have unless you're in a game where trapfinding is actually important, especially since the witch hexes in the same book include one that's a Fort save or all special sight senses are disabled for 1 minute (darkvision, see in darkness, etc), and since the Animal Skin major hex (beast shape II at will) is huge amounts of utility for a rogue at high levels.

Unfortunately, the final result is that the shifter is like the Feral archetype for Hunter, except worse in almost every way. Minor aspects are like animal focus, except you have to pick them in advance and they have a time limit per day, and the wild shape is more limited and not as good as normal druid wild shape.

Stuff the shifter gets that the feral hunter doesn't get:
- Two claws that get up to 1d8/x3, and you can replace the base damage of two natural attacks in wild shape with them
- The ability to use multiple minor aspects at once
- The monk AC bonus
- Another +5 BAB
- Trackless step

Stuff the feral hunter gets that the shifter doesn't get:
- No time limit on animal focus
- The ability to pick which animal focus to use each time it's used, rather than being set in advance
- Wild shape up to Huge size and beast shape III
- Wild shaping into any animal type
- 6th-level spells

@Roadie: Anyhoo, the way I see it is that it can't shift into everything, but it can do unique things with shifting other classes can't like combining the forms and class is built around natural attack combat, so doesn't sound that bad for me even if it can't turn into all animal kingdoms in cool attack pattern. Helps I didn't have much of expectation besides it being a class build around shifting, so I'm not disappointed it not having only four different forms at level 20 if I understood right?

It really can't combine them, though. It's not mixing abilities you'd normally see on different creatures, like you could with a beastmorph alchemist or an agathiel vigilante (for example, getting swim, fly, and climb all at once). It's just wild shape for a single form at a time, and you get to add minor bonuses from your other aspects... but most of those minor bonuses are just +2/+4/+8 enhancement to a stat or +4/+6/+8 competence to a skill, both of which overlap with the bonus types from magic items.

The natural attack part also really isn't anything special. It just boils down to getting claw attacks that ignore some DR types, and with damage scaling you can use in place of the damage of other natural attacks in wild shape... but a beastmorph vivisectionist alchemist is getting sneak attack and an agathiel vigilante can take the lethal grace talent to get tasty damage bonuses on all their natural attacks, so neither cares about DR or base damage in the first place. Even that shapeshifter ranger I previously mentioned can get all-the-time damage bonuses with Improved Natural Attack as a bonus feat.

Seeing the backlash, I was first worried its another case of "devs avoid really hard making new class op, so people will complain about it being underwhelming" like people complained with vigilante, but it seems like its more of "people expected shifter to be able to change into more than few animals" kind of deal? That doesn't sound that bad.

The problem is that the set of options you get is just so tiny. It's a class supposedly based around shapeshifting, but for most campaigns you'll only ever get to turn into three or maybe four different things in total, and the class totally lacks any access to scaling secondary abilities that even plain old monk or fighter gets (ki powers, advanced weapon training).

Compare to, for example, a beastmorph vivisectionist alchemist. The alchemist gets to turn into lots of different man-beasts via mutagen AND has access to a bunch of self-polymorph extracts (including beast shape I through IV), and even when the alchemist can't publicly turn into stuff for social reasons he can still contribute with other extracts and with sneak attack. The only thing the alchemist doesn't have an easy thematic equivalent to is hour/level duration polymorphs... and even then the beastmorph mutagen eventually gets to an hour-plus duration.

Or for another comparison with a focus on a single animal identity, consider agathiel vigilante: you get to turn into an animal at will with no X/day or duration limits, you get your pick of abilities from beast shape I-IV spells, and you still get 10 social talents and 5 vigilante talents and vigilante specialization.

Roadie wrote:

The ranger doesn't get the hour/level of wild shape, but otherwise is roundly better off, and is actually better at shapeshifting into random things than the shifter because of spell access.

Basically someone got extreme of tunnelvision and no external feedback so we ended up with some weird class that's very unflexible. What's even more damning is the presence of additional shape changing spells. Why couldn't the Shifter be the class that can turn into just about anything as it's whole deal?

What I'd have really liked to see would be something like a druid with the casting and animal companion removed, but wild shape broadly expanded with the ability to emulate lots of different polymorph effects, including weird stuff like Cloud Shape, spells that divine casters normally don't get like Monstrous Physique, utility powers like "turn into a Tiny animal and get a free Nondetection effect along with it", etc.

To me, the Shifter feels like half a class: as in, somebody forgot to add the other half of the class features.

A 20th-level shifter has:
- Track
- wild empathy
- woodland stride
- 1d8/x3 claw attacks that ignore most DR
- the Monk AC bonus
- trackless step
- 5 aspects, with minor forms she can use for 23 minutes a day
- Wild shape 8/day, only as beast shape II, with extra benefits from her major forms but limited to only those five

Compare to a 20th-level shapeshifter ranger:
- Track
- wild empathy
- woodland stride
- evasion and improved evasion
- swift tracker and improved quarry
- hide in plain sight
- hunter's bond (an animal companion or granting buffs to allies)
- 5 natural weapon combat style feats (which can grant claws and ignoring some DR with claws)
- shifter's blessing 4/day, chosen from 3 forms, which can act as beast shape IV
- 5 favored enemy types, up to +10
- spells up to 4th level, which include various polymorph effects with freely-chooseable benefits (for example, greater animal aspect)

The ranger doesn't get the hour/level of wild shape, but otherwise is roundly better off, and is actually better at shapeshifting into random things than the shifter because of spell access.

Reynard wrote:

I have always thought there was room for something like Alternity's skill tricks in 3.x/PF. In that system, once you reached a certain level of skill, you learned some special uses of the skill analogous to feats. Stuff like Diversion is perfect for that.

I'm guessing that you haven't had a chance to look at Pathfinder Unchained since the Skill Unlocks option is pretty much exactly this.

The difference is that in Alternity, it's automatic instead of having to spend a limited resource on it.

For the Envoy, I feel like there's some big, interesting possibilities in giving it some supernatural improvisations and talents that give at-will or constant abilities, including utility effects and passive (but temporarily dispellable) buffs. Basically, borrow heavily from the Kineticist, the 3.5 Warlock, and the third party Avowed.

If they're good enough, this would give the class a substantial power boost and make it much more distinct from the Operative, while still having a fair distinction from the Solarian in theme because of the difference in combat focus.

Multiweapon Fighting in Starfinder is basically reversed compared to Pathfinder.

In Pathfinder, using multiple weapons gives you more attacks, but increases your attack penalty.
In Starfinder, using multiple weapons doesn't give you more attacks, but decreases your attack penalty.

Personally, I like the change, since it means that TWF/MWF is no longer the "must have" choice for certain character types (e.g. anyone with sneak attack or similar damage bonuses). Instead, it becomes another trade-off comparable to other elements of character creation.

Does anyone else think that when you get stellar revelations you should be able to choose 2 at a time instead of 1? There are 23 total and you only get to choose 10 total. Basically 5 per side. You are leaving a lot of the table basically.

It's especially painful when you consider that in Pathfinder even the poor, underwhelming kineticist gets 10 utility talents and 8 infusions (attack talents).

Sounds like the Flavor of this class ie build a Jedi is fine but the overall power is a bit lacking. Guess I will go with the operative.

Personally, I think that the class that has the best potential to be a Jedi is actually the Envoy, at the moment. We just need somebody to write up a bunch of (Su) talent options for it that work like 3.5 warlock invocations.

To me, overall, the Solarian suffers from the same basic issues that monk does:

- for some reason, the writers keep overvaluing being able to do equipment-related things without equipment, and

- for some reason, the writers keep overvaluing at-will abilities, even when they're weaker than what level-comparable equipment can do.

It gets to 70 at CR 30, not by level 20 for the PCs, the Median you listed still has it in the 50s.

Whoops, thank you.

My point still stands, more or less: CMD ends up drastically higher than AC at basically anything past CR 10, and once you get into "end campaign boss" territory of CR 20+, it scales up so high that it's completely useless to consider using combat maneuvers unless you can get double-digit extra bonuses on top of your CMD.

Even that is assuming that you've got full BAB and can focus exclusively on a single attack stat (e.g. Strength). If you're a rogue, well, there's a reason that the Filcher archetype is the only 1PP rogue that can actually successfully use Steal at pretty much any time past 5th level.

for a massive scaling +2 bonus on all combat maneuvers that stacked with the fighter's weapon training, for a total bonus of +11 at high levels. Effectively, it traded a weak defense for the best maneuver-based offense in the game.

A mere +11 to combat maneuvers is still on the weak side, given that just in Bestiary 1, median CMD by CR gets to over 70 by CR 30, while median AC only gets into the 40s.

Archery is still the most powerful combat style in the game. This isn't even a nerf, as most archers at a level where this would be relevant have clustered shots anyway.

Then why even have it, though? It's an absurdly over-fiddly thing that's irrelevant in the vast majority of cases anyway.

Metamorph gets to shape change at 1st level, and will always have more uses per day than the Druid, and gets mutagen on top of the shifting for the ability to double up on STR bonuses. Alter self is a huge combat buff at first level, with many forms giving three primary natural attacks with darkvision and a +2 bonus to STR. Discoveries can add more to this as well.

"It can pretend to be a knockoff barbarian at low levels" is not exactly a ringing endorsement.

I am tremendously underwhelmed by most of the archetypes, and even more by how blatantly out of whack they are as compared to each other.

For example, there's the Metamorph Alchemist, which gives up bombs and extracts completely for a limited set of self-polymorph spells X/day, starting with just alter self. Then compare that to skinshaper druid, which trades wild shape for a scaling alter self X/day ability... and still gets full spellcasting and animal companion.

Even the much-hyped vigilante archetypes dip into terribleness all over, like how the brute vigilante gets pretty much all negatives from their transformation (Large size but no ability score increase, rage-like penalties but no buffs, you have spend a talent just to make armor fit you) and has to make a Will save every single time they use their vigilante identity or attack their allies.

I don't know, it is probably just me, but again... a customisable weapon may not be worth a class's main ability in some people's minds.

Giving out 4 weapons is plain out overpowered, even at 2 blade-skills above and beyond the normal. It makes wealth by level a joke and puts crafting feats feats to shame.

A 3+ armed soulblade should probably be an archetype that doesn't play well with most others quite frankly.

I personally see nothing overpowered about it. It does mean that a multi-armed soulknife will spend less on weaponry than, say, a multi-armed psychic warrior... but the soulknife is going to be using that extra cash anyway to cover for all the stuff that he just can't do, while the psychic warrior can pick up offensive precognition to enhance the attacks of all his weapons at once and then still has 19 other powers he can take.

i like shields

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DjOL2we8ko

basically its the centipede synthesis, but with shields instead

Yeah, aside from it being shields specifically, and being able to completely ignore TWF penalties, it's more or less a standard Kali-type eidolon build.

I went for the staidly cautious version here, but depending on your specific intepretation of Shield Master's wording, this might apply to *any* attack penalties with a shield - at which point there's assorted shenanigans with using Power Attack, Combat Expertise, Dazing Assault, fighting defensively, etc all at the same time.

This idea came to me when I looked at the Shield Master feat and realized something.

You do not suffer any penalties on attack rolls made with a shield while you are wielding another weapon. Add your shield’s enhancement bonus to attack and damage rolls made with the shield as if it were a weapon enhancement bonus.

So... what if you only wield multiple shields? Lots of them? Lots and lots of them?

Here's a very simple try at a build demonstrating this, put together to maximize the number of multi-weapon-wielded shields, assuming:
- a 20-point buy
- that synthesist eidolon BAB can be used to qualify for feats (albeit ones that will only work while the eidolon is active)
- that retraining has been used to select multiple feats that require BAB +11
- that the extra attack from Improved Two-Weapon Fighting applies once to each off-hand weapon (e.g. multiple times with extra sets of arms)

Of course, one complication here is that buying magic shields by the dozen gets really expensive, on top of the cost of keeping Dex high enough to qualify for Greater TWF with the eidolon active.