Seltyiel

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WarDriveWorley wrote:
Ryuhi wrote:

I was curious given the changes to the harpy reported from the beginner box bestiary.

Is harpy song also removed in the bestiary?

I found that ability very badly written and honestly would not mind it seeing completely replaced.

I also was wondering, I think I read that there was a „Stone Bulwark“, which I assume is a stone golem replacement? If so, how many of the other golems got one in this?

How is it with Undead and bleed immunity? Do all have it spelled out now like the mummy from the preview? Or are there some (maybe vampires and Ghouls?) who can be hurt by bleeding?

I am also going to look forward to seeing if anything changes in terms of precision immunity all around since many found it a bit too common.

New harpy has no Song. Has Hungry Winds (pulls a target within 20' to adjacent to the Harpy) and adding a disease to their bite.

The undead that are immune to bleed have it spelled out in their immunities. Vampires don't have it, skeletons do. Haven't checked all undead though.

That is great to hear, thanks!^^

I remember the first encounter I ran against a harpy, that was in an earlier adventure when we all were still relatively new to the system and I think we solved it by going "oh, wait, bard, you could have used countersong for this, let us do that retroactively".

It also honestly fits better. SIRENS have the song part, not harpies. ^^ ;

Also glad for the bleed immunity. Spelling it out on constructs but not undead made zero sense.


I was curious given the changes to the harpy reported from the beginner box bestiary.
Is harpy song also removed in the bestiary?

I found that ability very badly written and honestly would not mind it seeing completely replaced.

I also was wondering, I think I read that there was a „Stone Bulwark“, which I assume is a stone golem replacement? If so, how many of the other golems got one in this?

How is it with Undead and bleed immunity? Do all have it spelled out now like the mummy from the preview? Or are there some (maybe vampires and Ghouls?) who can be hurt by bleeding?

I am also going to look forward to seeing if anything changes in terms of precision immunity all around since many found it a bit too common.


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Xenocrat wrote:
Ryuhi wrote:

Player Core Page 437:

Quote:

Drowning and Suffocating

You can hold your breath for a number of rounds equal to
5 + your Constitution modifier. Reduce your remaining air
by 1 round at the end of each of your turns, or by 2 if you
attacked or cast any spells that turn. You also lose 1 round
worth of air each time you are critically hit or critically fail
a save against a damaging effect. If you speak (including
Casting a Spell) you lose all remaining air

Given that all spells require incantations now, this really should be cleared up. Are you meant to immediately start suffocating and fall unconscious when casting a spell underwater?

I think this is not very realistic (try talking underwater in a swimming pool for fun, you will not immediately risk drowning) AND not really very fun in play.

It would really be nice to get something on this, especially with the change to spellcasting.

It's pretty clear. And RoE gave us Deep Breath as a cantrip, in addition to Air Bubble as a rank 1 spell. Paizo helps those who help themselves.

Then they should get rid of the "Reduce your remaining air

by 1 round at the end of each of your turns, or by 2 if you
attacked or cast any spells that turn.".

Saying that you loose 2 rounds of air AND all remaining air is completely redundant, given that the case of spells not requiring you to speak does not really exist anymore, save PERHAPS depending on GM fiat for a player who creates a mute character and decides on something like "tap with your staff in a specific sequence" to deal with it.

Furthermore, the rules create a technical issue that casting Air Bubble would immediately make you fall unconscious. You cast the spell obviously before it takes effect. You will then regain consciousness, but you would suffer all ill effects from falling unconscious, dropping prone, dropping what you are holding...

In either case, even if the rule is supposed to stay as it is, the section in bold should be removed for clarity.


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Player Core Page 437:

Quote:

Drowning and Suffocating

You can hold your breath for a number of rounds equal to
5 + your Constitution modifier. Reduce your remaining air
by 1 round at the end of each of your turns, or by 2 if you
attacked or cast any spells that turn. You also lose 1 round
worth of air each time you are critically hit or critically fail
a save against a damaging effect. If you speak (including
Casting a Spell) you lose all remaining air

Given that all spells require incantations now, this really should be cleared up. Are you meant to immediately start suffocating and fall unconscious when casting a spell underwater?

I think this is not very realistic (try talking underwater in a swimming pool for fun, you will not immediately risk drowning) AND not really very fun in play.

It would really be nice to get something on this, especially with the change to spellcasting.


The easiest fix would have been to simply move the proficiency increase for unarmed defense AND barding to specialization, remove the dex bonus / add a strength bonus...

Given that they noticed, rather late, that nimble getting the AC bonus was maybe a bit much, I really have trouble understanding why they neither touched impressive, nor the discrepancy with the specializations.

Are animal companions so much out of focus for the developers?


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Just based on my own group, I can say that cantrips still are used at level 12.
The "cantrips are not meant to be used past earliest levels" argument really does not fly for me.
I also find it rather weird since, for Magus, with its very limited spells, cantrip spellstrike is apparently seen as a solid base line.
Yes, Magus gets better action economy and better to hit bonus, but it seems weird to argue that saving throw cantrip + attack on a caster is completely non viable.
Same for Eldritch archer, which has even less high level spell slots.

Why the effort on here to wrangle some sort of justification for caster damage nerf?

The complaint about cantrips was pretty much always "other cantrips do not compare to electric arc and acid splash, daze, etc. are aprticularly weak".


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Captain Morgan wrote:
Ryuhi wrote:
Captain Morgan wrote:

Again, please remember that of the like 4 or so cantrips we have seen, one does better damage than cantrips did before with a longer ranger, one does more damage in melee than it did before, and the other two are multi target.

I think it is safe to assume electric arc will be nerfed, and we all would have preferred other cantrips to have been elevated to its level instead... But this doesn't feel like the huge step back people are making it out to be.

The previous highest damage (telekinetic projectile, gouging claw) dealt 1d6+X, heightening at +1d6.

Compare that to the 3d4. That is equal damage. If the heightening is just +1d4, it very quickly falls behind. There are other things to make up for it perhaps, but so far NO cantrip deals the damage telekinetic projectile or gouging claw did.

Those "other things" you're glossing are things that effectively increase your damage: range, weakness potential, and (compared to TKP) crit riders. And again, you're looking at an incredibly small sample size and comparing it to the highest damage options of everything else that came before it feels overreactive, especially when your citing a cantrips from a book that isn't being remastered and will therefore probably survive unchanged. (Gouging Claw.)

Seems a bit disingenuous as you are in returning glossing over telekinetic projectile's ability to select between three types of physical damage, thus being able to trigger weaknesses and avoid resistances in a significant way.

1 persistent bleed damage also is one of the weakest crit effects we have, compared to both Ignite / Produce Flame and gouging Claw.
Gouging Claw by the way which also can flank and choose between two damage types.

Also, you said " one does better damage than cantrips did before with a longer ranger", cantrips, plural. Longer range, sure, damage, no.

And it seems a bit interesting to point to the "small subset", given how the cantrip design so far has pretty much pushed everyone to focus on that small subset for very obvious and valid reasons.

On top of that: Arguing that Gouging Claw will not be changed (which still has to be seen, it could very well just get a normal erratum on it) is not exactly the best argument in favor of the new cantrips.

People have very good reasons to see this as a bad change. People should complain. I do not think trying to downplay it, especially with these arguments helps the situation.


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Captain Morgan wrote:

Again, please remember that of the like 4 or so cantrips we have seen, one does better damage than cantrips did before with a longer ranger, one does more damage in melee than it did before, and the other two are multi target.

I think it is safe to assume electric arc will be nerfed, and we all would have preferred other cantrips to have been elevated to its level instead... But this doesn't feel like the huge step back people are making it out to be.

The previous highest damage (telekinetic projectile, gouging claw) dealt 1d6+X, heightening at +1d6.

Compare that to the 3d4. That is equal damage. If the heightening is just +1d4, it very quickly falls behind. There are other things to make up for it perhaps, but so far NO cantrip deals the damage telekinetic projectile or gouging claw did.
And I expect likely no cantrip will do as much damage against multiple targets as electric arc.

To Paizo, I can just say: Please stop this.

I think if there was any majority opinion on caster damage, it would be that it was too low (taking into account accuracy).
Making it even lower, especially for early levels is not a good change.


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Just look at the NPC stats:

Commoner:

Str +3, Dex +1, Con +2, Int +0, Wis +1, Cha +0

Beggar:

Str +1, Dex +3, Con +2, Int +0, Wis +1, Cha +1

Farmer:

Str +3, Dex +1, Con +3, Int +0, Wis +2, Cha +0

Those are level -1 or 0 NPCs and the range is from seven to nine ability boosts. Higher level NPCs get more.

PCs start with 2+2+1+4 ability boosts.

PCs thus are at best two boosts above the average man.^^

NPCs rarely have a -1 and less seems to not really appear on a humanoid creature.

So, 10 may perhaps be the human average in theory, but in practice, a 10 is putting you on the level of the lowest score a typical person on the street may have, with maybe a rare few having less.


I was honestly at a bit of a loss as to how this ability was meant to be handled, given that on a failed save and without anything but the harpy attacking breaking the effect, it is I think more devastating than it should be...

I used two harpies in an encounter, first song got successfully averted by countersong on the bard, second song got to two characters out of four.
Because of the confusion about fascinated and the spell effect, I went with allowing a new save each time an ally was targeted by a hostile action, I do think otherwise that encounter would have been unwinnable.

To be fair, it is not the only monster, a Vampire's command can be similarly deadly, but I am admittedly a bit confused given that it seemed to have been the goal, at least with spells, to have a lot less of those "fight enders" at a lower level.


The issue with the short adventuring days is not just "can the players rest and continue after eight hours of sleep?", but also a much more common thing:

Do I have to make sure every day in game has several encounters so I do not end up making it trivial because of player resources?

My experience with Pathfinder 1e was that this WAS a big issue.
Lots of abilities were based on daily uses so if you did not include enough battles per in game day to actually challenge the players to not be able to always be under Bard song, always be raging or always use one of your best available spell slots each turn, this had a really big effect on balance.

Having a lot more resources that are expected to usually recover between encounters or be based on action economy is a VERY welcome change there.
It is really hard to balance strategic daily resources. Not unless you want to take away a good bit of flexibility for the game master to create his story as it makes sense.


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I was really, really disappointed when I had my suspicion confirmed, that they removed spells scaling by level.

So many people have already said how this has been in 5th Edition DnD and you can pretty easily just go through the numbers in your head.

This is exactly not how you solve the balance issue between casters and martial characters...

At the core, it is about trade-off.
If two characters both fill a similar function (dealing damage, doing battlefield control, soaking up attacks, solving various out of combat problems), there should be balance to their pros and cons at their respective job.

One thing of course always is what other functions they also fill, but assuming balance there (with both having equally valuable other areas where they contribute), we would want to have a relatively steady level of trade-off at every character level.

Scaling Cantrips I personally like because they mirror scaling attack damage.
But combining that with fixed damage spells leads to a weird thing where it always centers around the highest spell slots.
Cantrips outclass the level 1 damage spell at some point and then you have no use for such a spell ever again.

Could we not instead have a system, where a level 1 spell always does at least X% more damage than a cantrip?
It would not be all that hard and I think it would smooth out damage a lot more than slowly having damage spells of low levels peter out into uselessness.

My experience from other systems usually is that the way to deal with the imbalance between the magical and non magical is not such a tough issue.
And damage usually will always be the easiest part of it, given how quantifiable it is.