Ryangwy's page

My theory for why they don't want divine necromancer is twofold - first, by simply having a giant stack of harms, the cleric is already really, really good at keeping your stack of animated bones alive and it's going to be hard to top that (see: Battle Harbinger vs Warpriest). So they just... don't let that comparison happen.

Secondly, their way around the 'all minions are secretly powerful because they are bags of hp' issue is probably that whatever the necromancer has is not going to be healable, or else have too little hp to be worth using the main strength of the divine spell list for necromancy on. In which case you might as well give them a different list.

Now Arcane vs Occult is definitely a more dubious call, list-wise, but I think the vast majority of undead with spells are occult spellcasters, not arcane, and many of the undead AP archetypes are also occult over arcane, so probably this is one of those things they have been trying to do for a while.

For what it's worth, when my players decided to camp outside the stairs leading to the final boss (of EC5, if anyone cares) and toss as many 10min and 1min buffs as they could, the boss took that opportunity to cast 9th rank Heroism, Blass, Bane, Benediction, Malediction, True Seeing and a nasty invisibility spell on himself, plus 6th ranked heroism on his minions. For the first three turns of the battle, the PCs were absolutely on the backfoot, since the boss's counteract was higher than theirs.

As it turned out, it was not the stack of buffs on either side that determined the fight, but the barbarian rolled high on Seek, pointed out, then the cleric casted True target and critted 9th rank holy light, then the next two also casted 9th rank holy light (campaign thing) before the boss could take a turn.

I think there's room for an arcane buff-focused martial. But it really can't be the Magus, because yes, spellstrike does kind of warp the class around it but a less powerful spellstrike also kind of just sucks (remember the playtest, guys?) and the Magus has a substantially larger fanbase than the Oracle (NEVER FORGIVE) plus spellstrike genuinely being, like, really neat in it's current existence.

Also, let's be real, a buff focused arcane martial would look like the Battle Harbinger. Very much a 'think carefully' thing. I don't think it's unworkable, I'm fairly certain the vast majority of buff spells either have no target or are willing creatures only, and arcane (and primal) have the advantage of not having to budget around someone putting heroism in every slot, but it's A Thing.

To go one layer deeper to harp on about as to *why* prebuffing is a problem:

The GM is the one responsible for setting the combat balance / difficulty to maximize the party's fun.

The answer you are missing here is 'do whatever makes sense for your players and makes GMing not a chore'

So long as you have consistent-ish rulings, your players should be satisfied (and if they aren't you have bigger problems). You could rule that all 1min buff have the secret 'only when in an encounter' trait. You could have a single buff stack outside of combat rule. Do whatever is best for your table... but not all tables are the same. A buff bag is a lot better on a party with few casters... but at high levels those parties have issues anyway, so why not?

Foundry VTT makes it easier to implement than on the table, but when people prebuff, if they do so right outside if a door they suspect an encounter is in, they get to cast 1 round of spells, chug potions, whatever, then I engage the encounter, and if the encounter has special rules for a distracted enemy they get 1d4 rounds of setup.

If they want to cast safely then advance, I charge them 1d4 minutes for every chunk of area they walk through that would count for one Search/Investigate (and, of course, they aren't doing any exploration activities, they're rushing!). 10min durations might last two fights, or five. Who knows?

This is obviously an abstraction of the battlemap, which technically can be crossed by a character in combat mode in less than a minute, but I always assume encounter mode is high intensity and no one can actually walk 90ft a round if they aren't engaged in an actual battle.

If movement is a issue for many magus, maybe a feat to give a free Step with Arcane Cascade? It'd buff the weaker Magus subclasses and not really impact the stronger ones.

I'm going to generally agree that 10 min buffs are prebuffs and 1 min buffs are meant for use in actual combat, with maybe one cast before combat that triggers the combat, and that does creates a bit of an issue for the battle auras at higher levels when your divine caster has so many better things to cast.

I feel like Battle Harbinger really, really wants to go ham and stack at leas two auras each battle, but that takes two turns and most combats don't last long enough for that to pay off. It really needs some way to reduce the action cost of it's font spells - one action cast on rolling initiative, two action cast and Strike, cast now for one action flourish but become slowed 1 next turn, basically anything that means you can reach the battle while still casting your 'signature' spells.

Also, being able to raise the status bonus/penalty is a good idea and it's a shame it's locked behind the unlikely event of critting on a Strike.

exequiel759 wrote:

GameDesignerDM wrote:

I've never had any issues with Fighter flavor or anything like that when it comes to adventuring, or anything else, really. In fact, the Fighter to me is one of the easiest classes to justify being just about anywhere, anytime, in any place.

Exactly. The whole thing about the fighter is being vanilla, precisely to fit everywhere.

That's the problem, it doesn't excel at being unique.

For the only class to obtain Legendary Proficiency for weapons, NOTHING capitalizes on this. The whole "weapon master" aspect is non-existant.

You want something unique for the Fighter compared to other classes? Here are some suggestion:
- Adding the Deadly or Fatal trait to ONE weapon of their choice
- Adding the Agile trait to ONE weapon of their choice
- Adding ANY trait to ONE weapon of their choice

These ALONE would be more interesting, because it would show how the Fighter can use one weapon WAY better than other classes.

That's the Inventor, though. Like, seriously, customising a single weapon is the Inventor, I'm not sure why you think it's a fighter. The fighter can already 'add' the trip and shove trait to two handed weapons, the parry trait to one handed weapons, super agile, isn't that a better demonstration of their weapon mastery?

Everything the life essence covers is in the domain. The class would likely combine things from archetypes like hallowed necromancer, reanimator, a tiny bit of what the animist does with one of it's subclasses, and so on. It's actually extremely huge if we aren't narrowly focused on the least interesting aspect of "makes undead"

I suppose the issue is that everything outside of 'make undead' already exists on the Divine/Occult list, or us very specific anti undead/haunt niche stuff. We just had a speak-with-spirit Animist subclass and it's not, like, popular or anything. The only thing not already enabled by the pile of BotD archetypes is precisely the 'make a lot of undead' thong which is why most people think of that when you ask for a full class.

Ryangwy wrote:

Nobody is allowed to complain that Paizo hates their favourite class unless it's wizard or oracle.

Also, please find some way to glue the cool premaster oracle benefits back.

On a more positive train of thought, there really is a lot of desire for some kind of 'smite' that is usable by martials with divine influence. I wonder if an archetype that would provide a 'smite' focus spell could be added, that requires divine casting and a focus point pool, that would be suited for Champions and monks but also be usable by other martials who acquire divine focus spellcasting somehow. The feats would give bonuses vs various thematic enemies and/or expand the list of bad things you can inflict.

Isn't sanctification to Holy an appropriate 'smite' vs foes with weakness to Holy ?

I think the 'smite' most people imagine looks more like... uh... oh, it's now called inner upheaval. That, except meant to work more generally with any weapon (or even not making a Strike subordinate action and making it apply to your next Strike, but that benefits Fighters more than Champions)

Nobody is allowed to complain that Paizo hates their favourite class unless it's wizard or oracle.

Also, please find some way to glue the cool premaster oracle benefits back.

On a more positive train of thought, there really is a lot of desire for some kind of 'smite' that is usable by martials with divine influence. I wonder if an archetype that would provide a 'smite' focus spell could be added, that requires divine casting and a focus point pool, that would be suited for Champions and monks but also be usable by other martials who acquire divine focus spellcasting somehow. The feats would give bonuses vs various thematic enemies and/or expand the list of bad things you can inflict.

I've never gotten that impression from PF1E—that diegetically, a 20 Fighter should be as strong as a 20 Wizard. I don't think PF1E intends them to be the worlds apart they are, but the tropes PF1E emulates consistently have wizards at the top of the totem pole in power, and most of the 1E APs and stories I've looked at indulge these tropes. Magic is typically stronger than the mundane in high fantasy. (Admittedly, by incorporating so many wizard and magician tropes at once, PF1E blows out the high fantasy scale and ends up in its own world. But anyways.) The game does bear that out mechanically, and the gap only gets wider as levels progress. I think every game designer can tell you the class with wish (or even just limited wish, when it becomes available) blows out the class without it. You'd have to ascribe incredible ignorance to a designer to think they were trying to balance fighter to be exactly as strong as wizard and gave you PF1E fighter and wizard. I would assume PF1 designers wanted to lessen the gap, but knew they could not (and did not even try) to remove it entirely with spells as they were. You'd have to break 3.x compatibility to do that. (And PF2E did, and succeeded almost too well at balancing them.)

I mean, in that case the majority of world shaking level 20s should be clerics and druids, the universally acknowledged strongest classes. Instead, it's wizards and alchemists, the latter definitely isn't anywhere near the top. I think PF1e intends for Int classes to be more narratively relevant, as distinct from being rawly stronger, so even though a level 20 fighter, cleric and alchemist are of the same power, only the alchemist will have a strong legacy.

That's distinct from 'the designers deliberately made it such that a level 20 fighter can't win against a level 15 wizard' which was the PF1e as-played.

(There's an aspect of 3.PF1 that's really simulationist, and it's the skill system. Tragically, basically nothing except the nonmagical skill monkey classes interfaced with them as expected. I supposed a PF1e where magic does not exist would be simulationist...)

I want to play a champion of (insert chosen deity here), their is a class that is supposed to do that.

But yea probably a me problem, my head is wired weird, I do get caught in 'rpg rules as in universe science', I know I do, doesn't mean I can actually stop doing that...

I think that you're getting a bit caught up in the word Champion here. Championing things isn't the sole prerogative of the Champion any more than fighting things is the sole prerogative of the Fighter, but they need to stick a name on 'the class about divine patronage and being really defensive'. But yes, you can be an Avenger or Warpriest or take a Fighter and bolt on some appropriate dedication (Undead Slayer has been a lot of fun) and champion the cause of a deity without needing to mechanically use the Champion.

Ryangwy wrote:

snip

• Likewise, PF1E is notoriously imbalanced, and it's also true that not all ways to spend XP are equal; class levels in wizard are comedically better than class levels in rogue. This is further reflected in many narratives: there are a whole lot of dangerous wizard BBEGs, but not so many rogues, because they just don't inspire the same kind of fear and literally aren't as powerful or dangerous. We don't really know if this disparity was intentional or not, but we can certainly say it ends up being simulationist of the...

I, uh, think you missed my point. PF1e is not a simulationist system because the diagetic of PF1e is that a level 20 fighter and a level 20 wizard are equally strong. This is not true.

PF2e, where a level 20 fighter is about as powerful as a level 20 wizard which is about as powerful as a level 20 monster that was built by the monster building guidelines, is better at simulating how Golarion as a fantasy world relates to level than PF1e.

Alternatively, WoD goes all in on the fact that XP is not equivalent. There are builds that can earn XP faster. Monster design don't get pegged to XP, they get pegged to stat thresholds and number of abilities.

There is a homebrew world somewhere where wizards mind-control peasants to take NPC classes at level up to serve as XP pinatas for their apprentices, where the calculus of warfare includes how many level ups your opponent's PC party is likely to get, where you can get kicked out of an adventuring party for taking the wrong class level. PF1e would simulate that world well. That world is not Golarion.

Not very simulationist in what way? There are absolutely more simulationist games than it, but I feel like saying the system isn't at least on the simulationist side of the simulationist/gamist spectrum is a stretch. What would you say makes you feel the game isn't very simulationist?

As a person whose played a heavily homebrewed game of 3.PF with a worldbuilder whose heavily into simulation, a huge issue is that PF1e simulates things that are not true of the world as described. PF1e is very simulationist if class levels are a true statement about life, if XP really does accumulate from doing certain things, if picking the right next class or class archetype or feat is really part and parcel of the level up process and that it's known and accepted that the wizard 2/fighter 2 is a person who has simply made less good choices and hence is weaker than the wizard 3/magus 1 despite both having a combined level of 4. It would be a world where countries with good background traits do in fact become military powers on the basis that their people qualitatively have +2 initiative instead of +1 to confirm crits.

But it doesn't! PF1e treats level as an equal measure of power, considers all choices as equal, doesn't care that a certain country has everyone have Diplomacy as a class skill, and so on. It treats a barricaded ritual site with 1 hour to completion as a dangerous threat that requires careful time management, not prebuffing for 1 minute then 5 minutes of running and fighting.

PF1e is simulationist in the Dwarf Fortress way, that it gives a lot of modelled behaviour that each individually make sense but often mesh to give irrational results. That's fine for Dwarf Fortress because it represents itself, the fact that the drawbridge atomiser exists doesn't affect the setting because you are the setting. But PF1e is supposed to represent PF1e adventure paths... and it's very, very bad at that.

(A truly simulationist game would be more like World of Darkness, where you can deliberately give yourself nightmares to gain XP, or stopping people's time stops them from getting XP, and that not all ways to spend XP are equal power-wise, and that's all true in-universe, that people will legit do those things to better themselves.)

It sounds like build mastery is part of the issue. To REALLY make a Psychic pop you have to poach bunches of stuff. The psychic that I was enjoying had Live Wire, Electric Arc and Tentacular limbs. The first 2 pretty much meant that I was contributing SOMETHING even on my post unleash cool down rounds, Tentacular Limbs combines wonderfully with imaginary weapon.

In my experience (NOT saying others experience was wrong, just stating what mine was) combats were usually decided (not finished, but decided except for mop up) in 3 rounds (1 prep round, 2 with psyche unleashed).

In the exceptions it was often the case that things went long enough for me to Unleash, recover from unleash, and Unleash again. The group was running away, regrouping, fighting very defensively in the middle rounds anyway.

I was also reasonably lucky with my stupefied rolls. As I recall I never flubbed a spell that I REALLY wanted to cast.

Vanilla psychic has the same issues as premaster investigator - what happens on your off turns? You can build around it, obviously, but none of the recommended stuff were native to the psychic, so often the 4th turn of battle is just 'eh, whatever, cast Glimpse Weakness and hope I make the flat check'. It doesn't help that your Psyche actions have to share space with the cool spells you want to cast while Unleashed!

While it'd severely uppend the class, I think Psychic would be a more elegant class if Psyche actions instead worked while you're stupefied.

Driftbourne wrote:

So weapon group is a purely game classification for weapon crit effect, and not related to weapons that would use similar skills.

I don't think so.

And several things, such as Fighter's Weapon Mastery ability uses Weapon Group as a categorization tool.

I think weapon groups in general are about natural groupings in people's head first and actual skill in using them second. Two-handed weapons are generally more similar to other two-handed weapon than they are to one-handed weapon in use, but greataxes and throwing axes are lumped together because we look at them and think 'axe'. That's why the crit specs are flavour-first.

This, of course, causes some issue for more niche weapons, so 'club' and 'flail' end up being wastebasket taxons for 'thing that goes bonk' and 'thing with a flexible part in between' despite them looking a lot more different than, say, swords.

I suspect that weapon were assigned to groups with the fantasy of the crit specialisation as the main concern - see how crossbows had to pick up a new crit specialisation when they got separated out. If you hit a person really hard with a frying pan, a staff, and a club, would something different happen? Probably not.

Teridax wrote:

... a 2nd-level dedication feat adding 8 spirit damage to Strikes and thinking it was okay.

That's an overly simplified way of presenting it.

The dedication feat does not add any spirit damage to any strikes. It grants a choice of an ikon.

Only weapon ikons grant additional damage.

If a player chooses a Worn or Body Ikon, they get zero additional damage for their 2nd-level dedication.

The additional damage of weapon ikons' immanence is not a flat +8 damage "as a 2nd-level dedication," but +X per damage die. Which means that, generally, at most, if taken at Level 2, it will be +2 damage to start! And it won't scale to +8 until level 19 (barring early access to Major striking runes).

And they aren't all +2 per damage die. One is 1 persistent damage per die. A couple are 1 splash damage per die. And etcetera.

None of the weapon ikons give a universal damage boost. Each only apply to a subset of weapons.

'You might not only get +2 damage per weapon die on the only weapon you use, you might also get some other equivalent effect that's even more synergistic with your character' isn't the slam dunk argument you're presenting here.

But no, seriously, what are you trying to argue here? You haven't meaningfully disproved that Exemplar Dedication can grant 8 spirit damage to Strikes to a wide variety of builds or that +8 spirit damage per Strike at 19th level is above the curve.

Yeah, looking at the Ikons again after the playtest, I don't really think the issue is the mechanical power imbalance offered by the dedication feat, it is the fact that we basically have a class offering extra special magical items which are not usually a resource tied to class feats and class abilities.

I personally just don't think such a class needs to offer a dedication at all, because we already essentially have magical items and artifact rules to cover "My X class character finds this really cool item that they invest a part of themselves into and grows over time."

The whole Ikon system feels like a way to have a class that just uses magic items differently, which is cool, but letting other classes access that through a multiclass dedication was always going to be a disaster (hyperbole in the extreme, really "a power balancing issue"). The problem here is that the disaster errs on the side of making characters too powerful instead of too weak, like the kineticist and alchemist MC.

Thaumaturge/Inventor: Am I a joke to you?

There is absolutely no issue with a class having an item-shaped power boost that can be gained via their multiclass archetype, because they did it twice with no issues. They just, for some reason unknown to mankind, decide to give ~3 multiclass feats worth of upgrades plus unbounded scaling in the dedication itself. Somehow.

Fundamentally, the issue is that Exemplar is a good class, Exemplar dedication is a good idea, someone wrote the dedication feat while drunk and we're now left in a situation where the extremely illogical choice of having to ban the dedication feat of a perfectly functional class.

And that is fine. PF2, as a system is not falling apart. A rare option in a book a lot of folks are excited about has the potential to cause a really minor game balance issue, that will probably be most egregiously felt when one player takes this dedication and potentially out performs other PCs in a manner that feels defeating for them. Maybe some folks who were excited to immediately roll into Mythic/godsrain play have the wind knocked out of their sails, and have to talk with their tables about how to handle some new options that don't feel as tight as the rest of the game. I get how frustrating that can be, but GMs deciding just to not let players use the Exemplar dedication for now, or not using the whole class even, was probably always going to be a possibility since the class was rare from the beginning.

I feel that you're, like, severely downplaying the impact of this broken option being a multiclass archetype. Because the thing is, of all the mechanical parts of of PF2e, the core player-facing part, the one that balance and flavour hinges on primarily, is classes, and multiclass dedications are tightly tied to classes in a way nothing else is, to the point the core book, both premaster and remaster, had them when no other dedications existed yet.

It doesn't matter if it's common or uncommon or rare or even Starfinder - classes and multiclass archetypes are the core player mechanical experience of PF2e and every new one released affects how people perceive balance. No amount of 'I, the enlightened GM, will simply ban it as I need to and discuss with my equally enlightened players' changes the fact that this new multiclass archetype changes the established balance in a way that's very unnerving to people.

I don't think we will really see that much of the exemplar spam though because the dedication is rare and, minimally, players are going to have to really justify and sell it to their GMs to get it. That doesn't mean it won't eventually get an errata, just that it is not something that desperately needs a fix because GMs who feel it is a problem already have a rules method for dealing with it.

The big issue is that exemplar dedication exists alongside, well, Exemplar, plus several other rare archetypes (like Seneschal). It's going to be very hard to rarity exclude Exemplar dedication without also excluding Exemplar and the other rare stuff from that book, and that's going to be far more of an issue that the previous few obvious math errors (6P and prov were AP backmatters, but I think a lot of people just blanket banned Firebrands stuff which wasn't a huge loss then because it was just scattering of feats, but an entire class is going to be a much bigger hit).

On the other hand, I wonder if maybe this isn't intentional. A common complaint I've heard is people thinking their damage is too low, and "a feat for +2-8 damage" isn't exactly game-breaking, even if it is an autopick for a number of classes.

If it is intentional then Paizo has gone off the deep end. Intentional power-modifying stuff should be specially laid out game rules like Mythic, not yet another rare archetype in a book full of variably balanced and undertuned rare archetypes and classes. PF1e sure had a lot of 'intentional' martial damage enhancers hidden in between piles of useless feats in some splatbook somewhere and that sucked.

Imaginary Weapon and Ancestral Memories are problems too, but they're problems two feats deep into archetyping and draws from the same focus pool many of your cool in-class stuff draws on as well. Exemplar Archetype gives its main benefit immediately and said benefit is a passive that works perfectly with no action cost on whatever your class wants to do. It's a significantly bigger problem.

I think the issue with treating Exemplar dedication as a rarity discussion is that Exemplar itself isn't unbalanced and there isn't a logical reason to separate Exemplar from its dedication.

Like, yes, there's a few really good dedications out there, but Exemplar dedication is the only one that allows you to take the entire martial 'damage' booster straight out at 2nd. The only dedication that does that flat out is premaster monk... at 10th level, with at least one other feat in between.

You're also left with the awkward situation that if Exemplar is legal in your game, it's significantly mechanically better to be anything then multiclass Exemplar than Exemplar multiclass anything. Which was memed about for Champion and Magus but is actually a real concern here. Maybe there's a PF2e where Exemplar dedication makes sense but the current one, where multiclass rage never increases, where multiclass sneak attack is one dice only, where multiclass Spellstrike is 1/battle, and where many ckasses just flat out dont give away their accuracy and damage boosters, it really doesn't make sense that the Exemplar's damage booster is poachable in its full form with a singke feat.

Here's the thing to know about reddit threads: never base balance decisions on reddit threads. Reddit is a format where each individual thread quickly creates their own echo chamber, even within the same subreddit. If a thread gains traction for criticism, you will in fact find heavily upvoted people arguing for completely different fixes that would oppose each other. Also, it's a jujutsu kaisen meme, a lot of the people laughing about it would stop doing so if they thought their memeing might actually cause changes to the magus.

There's a 'handful of hyper-vocal defenders of the class on this thread' because the Paizo forum is tiny as s+*@. Try posting your OP in reddit and I assure you you'll get 3000 people telling you why your fixes are wrong, actually.

I'm not sticking my head in the sand, if you've actually read my full comments you'll see I advocate for a wider variety of conflux spells and two action activities involving recharge or Arcane Cascade to incentivize 'off turns' rather than trying to crank recharge with the most boring method possible.

People like spellstriking, though. This isn't Oracle, you're not taking an unpopular class well below the power curve and juicing it up in the process of ditching it's identity (I say this as a person who likes old Oracle and hates new Oracle). Magus is popular, and spellstrike is very much at the ceiling of action economy and power. You can't make it any more action efficient (that means no free action Arcane Cascade, please) and there will be a lot of backlash if Spellstrike gets reduced in power like all the cantrip suggestions would do.

Paizo could probably reshuffle some things to make some people happier with the Magus, but that'll make a lot more people unhappy. That seems like a very poor decision. Of course, as an Oracle lover, I've already lost one class to the call of 'giving the same options as other casters', so I'm not very keen on the Magus getting ripped apart just to match some theoretical level of martial variation.

I'm saying that even for the usecase you've described, your proposal is insufficient. Your proposed class will get, what a dozen level 1 class feats that are skill feats? It has a completely bespoke proficiency because you're trying to match PC proficiency to the NPC proficiency chart?

It's not 'a book of profession specific content is junk', it's 'making deliberately bad class chassis with deliberately underpowered class feats is junk'. The two are distinct. Remember, all classes are still performing math operations involving level on attacks, saves and skills. It is not particularly easier to make a level 4 rogue PC with appropriate gear than a level 4 NPC with sneak attack, battle medicine and a +1 striking rapier.

Print skill feats as skill feats, archetypes as archetypes, and provide a recommendation for which columns in building creatures to use, that's what I'd recommend.

But why do you need a class with proficiencies and everything? What merit is there to printing so much niche, specific junk (because look, it's junk, you're describing skill feats and math fixers as class feats) and slap it onto a terrible chassis, so that you can... avoid looking up the monster stat by level chart (and instead look up a completely different chart)?

Like, seriously, you described a bunch of Survival skill feats (several of which are peculiar to a specific subsystem you have in your head, like the random encounter one). You made a bespoke mechanic to create a worse than PC proficiency growth to avoid looking at a simple chart.

I've built NPCs in systems that do identical PC/NPC advancement (WoD and 3.5e) and your suggestion would be terrible even by those systems' standards, let alone PF2e.

I think there's a difference between having a full class and a few poachable abilities. A full class nobody uses (and that is balanced for PC assumptions) is a total waste of page space. A skill-focused archetype that can have it's feats reused as NPC abilities has a lot more value.

But, like... we have those already? There's a Wandering Chef archetype, crafting in general has so many archetypes (Alchemist, Inventor, Talisman Dabbler, Snarecaster and so on) that even if the specific item category doesn't have one you really shouldn't have any issue making, say, a brewer NPC. If a concept is intellectual in nature, you could use spells to represent it - Eldritch Researcher and Oatia Skysage comes to mind as templates for that. Heck, there's plenty of weird NPCs with bespoke profession abilities turned combat trick, like the Hellbound Attorney.

There really doesn't need to be a book to do all this. Maybe a 3rd party supplement.

Maybe Mythic will unlock the fabled 'summon creature of same level as you'

I'm just going to opinion that the action cost of everything in Magus is already about right and Starlight Span getting a 'free action' Arcane Cascade (because they get no benefit from it) is one of the reason they're so samey.

We certainly could use more AC+something or recharge+something actions, as feats or features, but free action AC is just making thing more samey and slapping an arbitrary two turn break on Spellstrike is an uninteresting NPE.

I rather have thing like Arcane Rush (AC, move, Strike as 2 actions) or Guarded Recharge (2 action recharge, raise a shield, parry or take cover, it lasts until end of your next turn and also gain status bonus to AC against reactions until end of your next turn) to give tempting two-action reasons to not spellstrike than forcefully dictate when and how Magus are allowed to Spellstrike

Slam Down/Double Slice Fighter raises their hand. And Combat Grab and the other press feats too, to think about it. Having run for a Slam Down Fighter, the only time they don't Slam Down is if the enemy is already prone, or they're Whirlwind Striking instead.

"A build that works without requiring a higher level of knowledge of the game's systems."

I don't think that's a bad definition, especially if you want to involve a more nebulous sort of measurement like "player skill." But I do wonder if it rules out entire classes like the wizard or alchemist.

Wizard and alchemists were mostly feasible even prior to remaster so long as you had the stat and action check - notably, that meant, for the alchemist, thinking about what your main Strike action was, especially after you ran out of reagents, which isn't a problem anymore thankfully. Wizard with electric arc worked pretty well, and now they get frostbite too. Frankly, from my limited experience, it's actually premaster cloistered cleric/divine sorcerer that had issues, due to divine lacking a decent repeatable cantrip for a long while.

We may just never agree on these things as my definition removes the actual player understanding of the rules. What you call a "not feasible build" could be "feasible" to me because the math and rules of the game allow it to.

The issue is that your definition is so broad that short of games that let you literally cripple or kill your character in chargen, you could say anything is 'feasible' so long as it's buildable. I've ran multiple 1HP characters in past D&Ds back in the days of rolling sats and HP, one even managed to level up and become a decent character, but I would not say their lvl 1 selves were in any way expected to survive. To use OP's terminology, they were 'Low Performing', which was absolutely part of the point of those old school games but I would hesitate to call them feasible even if it's true I played them.

A player who is making these choices with no goal or intention is a separate problem from the build. I don't know what you'd want to talk about. We can just lambast players for not reading the rules, but is that really fruitful? What do you want this line of thinking to move into?

I've been mentioning it all the while? My understanding of 'feasible', and what I've been discussing, is that if a player that's not particularly in tune with the game can take the character and a list of actions and feel like they contributed, it's there. So a Barbarian who made serious investment into things with the concentrate trait (like, you know, Recall Knowledge) is 'not feasible' - you can make it work with judicious use of Moment of Clarity or deliberately delaying your Rage (though that's worse remastered) or remembering you're only ever doing it outside of combat but playing it 'as is' is likely going to result in dissatisfaction.

'Not feasible' builds are builds that result in anti-fun, whether because you're secretly locking away half of your kit when using the other half or because your defences are low enough you'll spend a substantial amount of the time on the floor when a more regular build would not. And yes, there are players who don't mind that anyway, but there are also plenty of players who do and shouldn't that be the focus?

Jank idea: Going into Arcane Cascade recharges your spellstrike.

I think the line between optimal vs feasible vs unplayable is most relevant to players who aren't very good with rules or character building - if you remove those people from the equation, there's not much of a conversation to be had. So yes, the build has problems because the player has problems, but if the player didn't have problems their build wouldn't have problems either (something you yourself state).

I haven't been trying to pull a "gotcha" with anything I've said. Like, if we are starting from a position of someone who doesn't know the rules of the game then the problem isn't the build, but the player so that's a different topic, right?

We could spend pages upon pages talking about poor performing builds, but if it turns out that it was just a player who randomly assigned every choice and never learned the rules of the game that they play X number of hours a month, then what is even the discussion? Like... don't do that, I guess.

But there are players that do exactly that. I run for a guy who I had to pick every aspect of his character for him, and later found out he increased Int for recall knowledge... on a Barbarian, because he repeatedly forget that barbarians can't recall knowledge (he won't switch class either). You can get these players to not step on rakes via, well, the kind of heuristic I posted.

It's certainly more of a conversation than discussing players with full system knowledge. The gap needs to be 3.5e monk vs druid wide for those kind of players to be unviable.

Frankly speaking if you play to your class and feat choices it's hard to be unfeasible, hence why it's frustrating to be told 'but what if they player knows what they're doing' because in PF2e that's good enough. So long as your martial picks a weapon usable with their feats and features and don't +0 their to hit they'll be fine.

Hmm, an actually unviable Fighter that looks functional on paper would probably be... one that takes a offensive cantrip from ancestry or archetype and uses it as their main offense, using a shield plus the last wall feat line to let them hit+raise shield in one action, so you theoretically are combining a save spell and a Strike in one turn but in practice you're wasting the +2 of the fighter and could have just played a Druid or Cleric instead. IIRC that setup needs a stance so you'll spell+stance, spell+move, then finally spell+bonk, so that's a lot of wasted turns. And it all looks synergistic on paper.

Fighter. How do you make one that drops under feasible?

Also I agree that we should assume were talking about players that know the game they are playing.
Assume at least +3 in KAS, go

I think for martial characters, assuming the ability scores are settled, the most obvious pain points are going to be picking weapons that don't work with your class/feat choices. Don't pick a simple weapon if you could pick a martial weapon that has al the same traits (longspear ruffian rogue is the exception that proves the rules). Make sure your weapon qualifies for your class damage booster (agile/finesse for the expected, non-agile for barbarians, one handed for thaums, etc) Yes, there's exceptions to these rules but frankly I'm sick of having to put that disclaimer since it just shuts down discussion in favour of 'everything is possibly feasible' so assume I have that scribbled somewhere.

For fighters, their feat selection tends to fall into several silos. Obviously, don't take two handed weapons if your feat choices need a shield or free hand! More subtly, taking Vicious Blow on a weapon with low damage is a poor choice, since that additional +1d4 isn't much of a deal. I feel like an easy way to get an unfeasible build that doesn't technically violate your feat choices is to go for a freehand build using a one handed, non-reach weapon with non-damage traits - I'm thinking the flail, kuriki, sai, nunchaku and main-gauche here, from player core, but there are others in splats that are even worse. The 'problem' is that your free hand already has, essentially, trip/shove/grapple/disarm/agile/monk/versatile B+nonlethal already, so picking a weapon that overlaps that wastes their trait budget. This is going to be very on the line - you're a dice or two behind a freehand build that picked a better weapon, and there's going to be times your free hand is occupied with a potion or something and you'll clap for having trip on your weapon, but you'll be doing a lot of lugging around traits that don't have a use.

Hasn't Paizo been fairly clear that Starfinder 2e is only balanced internally? That while yes, the underlying rules are compatible, bringing content from one game to the other is not for the faint of heart?

That seems to mostly come in the way of inflated HP pools for backline characters and making multiattacking with ranged weapons easier. If the remaster Oracle and the upcoming Animist weren't 4 slot then maybe, but since they are it seems pretty clear that 4-slot spontaneous is apparently standard which makes the wizard not quite having a full 4 slots and also not having any particular class features other than 'more of a specific kind of feat' or 'if you do the hokey pokey you get one more top rank slot' even more grating. Either the value of the 4th prepared slot is so much bigger than the 4th spontaneous slot that the wizard needs 100 restrictions on them... or the wizard has issues.

As a melee Magus, your 'off-turns' are, between Arcane Cascade and having access to top rank self buffs, also pretty decent? You're not Champion tier nerfsticking, for sure. Like, yes, if you never Arcane Cascade and never self-buff and throw all you actions into spellstriking and recharging turn after turn the occasional off-turn will suck horribly but that was your choice to make in not interacting with the rest of your kit.

This whole conversation loops back around to why I find the "you require X, Y, and Z to be feasible" to be uninteresting. It shuts down character concepts before they can even begin. That's not to say that others can't play that way, but when it becomes holy writ it's frustrating.

A witch with the Dandy archetype and a high Charisma is a fully-functional and feasible character. It's not even on some low scale of "can't do anything it sets out to do." But because that CON/DEX/WIS lags, it's called a liability because "the math is so tight," which is an accurate statement, but is not the whole picture.

These little catechisms get circulated around the community until it goes from "Yeah, you might take a bit more damage from a nasty save," to "This character cannot function because they will be dead." It negates player agency and choice and also makes a game that we love look like a pile of incredibly difficult math. As someone who regularly gets new players into games, the reputation that Pathfinder is one wrong number away from impossible is frustrating to have to surmount, especially when it leads to confirmation bias after poor play or poor luck.

I mean, once again, the 'stat check' isn't all feasible builds, but it does more or less guarantee a build is feasible. It's also very much not difficult math. If you're an experienced GM who can shape everything for your players then sure, go ahead, but when a random person shows up to ask why their character keeps not being able to do their thing pointing out they're an Int/Cha character with no real plan who probably should consider seeing if they could cut one of those is important and more helpful than talking about theoretical feasibility.

Yep, and both edges and animal companion mechanics all perform objectively better when you play a melee build.
The majority of ranger combat feats require melee, there are no agile bows and all combat pet feats are based around you being in melee with them and flanking is of course significantly easier to position if you're melee.

Ranged ranger might be "great", but melee ranger is just always better :(

I'm struggling to understand how you got to this conclusion. Hunted shot is strictly better than twin takedown (what with not needing a second weapon), most of the warden spells would prefer to not be in melee with a potential RS user, Snap Shot lets you use reactions (normally a weakness of ranged builds in general)... like, if you just dislike ranged builds in general that's fair, but the ranger has the most support for ranged builds of any core class. You don't need agile or off-guard to function, you're not the rogue. Like, genuinely, how can you look at the class that gets Snap Shot and one feat per level that says 'ranged weapon' and claim it is designed for melee.

Ryangwy wrote:

You can sus out 90% of feasible characters by just looking for a few key points:

See, I think I just disagree with this fundamentally - asking that players build in specific ways to be "feasible." This leaves us with a "Con, Dex, Wis, and KAS" cookie cutter that gets brought out at character creation and leaves little wiggle room for player input. It feels like a starting from mechanics and working backwards to a concept which clashes with what so many people come to the hobby for.

I run PFS and am a big advocate for PF2 and when I get new players (especially players coming from another popular game), then tend to say "I have been told that PF2 is very restrictive and I have to do X, Y, and Z." While this is good advice (keeping an eye on your defenses, having a plan for your actions, etc) it's an unnecessary barrier when the game functions just fine without checking these boxes.

I did say 90% for a reason. The remaining 10% has no easy heuristic and will require significantly more system mastery... but for the purpose of OP's question the 'stat check' is an easy way to see how much attention you need to give a build

You can sus out 90% of feasible characters by just looking for a few key points:

Do you have maximum possible KAS and, if it's different, attack stat?
Do you have max AC and are upping your saves (exception: reflex on bulwark) when possible (yes, some builds cannot do the first and the second, that's usually a sign it needs a lot of system knowledge)
Do you have a constructive 3 action and 2 action plan, for when you're next and not next to an enemy?
(Spellcasters) Did you remember to pick decent combat spells, targeting at least two different saves?

Now, there's 10% of characters who fail one or more of the above but are still feasible if played well, and it's important to note that 'feasible to play' and 'the player will actually play it well' might differ (see: Warrior Bard, but also finesse builds that drop Str) but that guideline really is most of it.

I wouldn't mind this, and had this been the basis of the Wizard from the start, we would've had both a much more distinct class and a much less overloaded arcane spell list. I'll have to find the specific reference, but at least one developer flat-out said the arcane list was designed around the Wizard, and specifically had to include plenty of spells of each legacy school so that they'd be about equally balanced next to each other (this was one of the major problems with the legacy schools of magic). Had the arcane list been made much leaner, the Wizard would likely have been able to prepare freely from that spell list and use their spellbook to write down off-menu spells, instead of needing a spellbook to restrict the entire range of arcane spells they can prepare like any other prepared arcane caster.

It's interesting that they didn't do that for the remaster - the remaster schools all have at least one spell that you wouldn't normally think is part of the school, but needs it's own bespoke line in the school description to justify (notably toxic cloud, which requires a pretty big reach on both the school and the spell). My gutsense is that they designed remaster wizard after the spell list was settled, which is why the schools have unbalanced picks including uncommon spells and weird, poorly justified stuff.

I gave the XP for the haunt when my players got to the place in the day and determine they weren't going to come back. You might also be missing the Slurk, another easily avoidable monster. In general, I award XP for any encounters not met or fully completed

For the 1st level, I'd give all the spare XP once they've

Not really a class option but we need more incarnate spells and more illusory creature like spells (proposed spells: animate plant, invoke elemental figment, animate weapon), then we can maybe have a summoner class archetype and a wizard school + maybe class archetype for it. We're so close to being able to fill entire spell lists with summon themed spells that do what you expect (respect to all the people who make summon spells work but ho boy are they a pain as a GM)

I used to think being a merchant was a perfectly valid way to play Pathfinder, but I guess not. Things have changed, and TTRPGs as a whole seem to have solidified into a "right way to play" that mostly revolves around encounters.

I'm going to do things backwards, so firstly, TTRPGs have actually diversified greatly. If you want to play a merchant or whatnot, there's plenty of non-d20 games that are specialised in that direction. It's great. But also, the d20 system has always been about encounters. Static price lists and 'sell for half price' have been there since, uh, forever? You could not have ever, by the book alone, played a merchant in Pathfinder, without some bespoke subsystem that exists for a single AP or niche splatbook, because you cannot buy (or, for that matter, craft) items for less than you can sell them for, RAW.