ScooterScoots's page

exequiel759 wrote:

We had this discussion in the past multiple times already, but I feel people overvalue the exemplar dedication a bit too much taking into account that, by taking it, you are restricting yourself from taking other archetypes until you take at least two other feats from the exemplar archetype, and if you look at exemplar feats you'll notice they only pretty much only work for exemplars. For the rest of classes they are either bad or simply don't work at all.

While I would agree if you were using Free Archetype, at which point it is a significant downside, for some classes (kineticist come to mind, but any class can fit the bill) you simply do not have the feats to spare to go deep into archetype feats, and getting the most out of a dedication is crucial. I know I outright avoid asking my GM for the Exemplar dedication bar very special occasions because of how incredibly powerful it is. The laurels or the aegis are ridiculously good on literally any character.

This is false.

Most characters in the game benefit from archetypes, with or without exemplar archetype in play. A primary skill of charop in pf2e is when and how you weave your archetypes around the 3 feat rule because for almost all characters there’s something (usually several somethings) archetypes can offer that class feats can’t.

If you’re not taking archetypes because you don’t understand how to make them work for you, exemplar is pretty good as it’s a very simple and easy to understand benefit, but the better you are at using archetypes the more competition exemplar has.

ScooterScoots wrote:

Investigator is pretty underrated, mostly cause they have a central problem - what to do when stratagem will miss - that needs to be solved. And if you don’t they’re a bit sucky.

It is a quite solvable problem though.

I didn't play Investigator so maybe I'm wrong, but isn't the point of being ranged that you can switch target and thus not use your bad roll ?

That’s definitely one thing you can do but the specific build I was thinking of used bombs - though I remember there was some weirdness in the remaster with devise and bombs

From what I've seen, the necro healing focus spell doesn't destroy the target thrall and provides the target with fast healing as long as it remains within 15 ft of the thrall. If you get the undead familiar, you can target it with your abilities as if it is a thrall. So you could make it independent and have it follow the healee around to keep the fast healing going. The familiar should be much harder to get rid off than a thrall.

Sounds like a great use case for a familiar tattoo. Or an empty pocket, if someone else needs the healing.

Investigator is pretty underrated, mostly cause they have a central problem - what to do when stratagem will miss - that needs to be solved. And if you don’t they’re a bit sucky.

It is a quite solvable problem though.

25speedforseaweedleshy wrote:

so magus still suck and need archetype to get attack focus spell

why is paizo writer so stubborn

why do they obsess with useless nonsense like arcane arcade and conflux spell recharge spellstrike

Magus never sucked and has been significantly buffed, both with better feats, more spell slots, and more spells that are useful for magus. no idea what you are talking about.

No they definitely did suck, especially the full half of subclasses that fundamentally didn’t work with the magus chassis or who’s most straightforward build path didn’t work.

At it’s best pre-remaster magus was a moderately lower DPR fighter with cantrips, 4 spells a day (which often had to be DCless because boosting Int took away from martial power), worse defenses, worse reactions, worse feats, and a core damage routine extremely susceptible to disruption by enemy action.

Now it gets a healthy amount of spells, essentially being a 3/4ths caster, and has a spellstrike recharge feature that goes a long way to fixing it’s action economy problems- not entirely, but honestly with the spellcasting it’s enough. They mostly fixed it but it was not good before.

On a side note, I'm hoping Unicore at least moves his position a bit that wizard is fine. This thread and so many other aspects of the sorcerer and spontaneous casters is why I think the wizard needs some serious redesign to make it competitive again. It's a sad thing to see the iconic wizard relegated to the low tier caster.

Wizards should always be one of the highest tier, most effective casters in any edition. They are the iconic caster class of fantasy.

Specifically gates wizard is fine, since it solves the main issue with wizard’s 4th slot (lack of good spells to use at all levels) and has BALLER focus spells.

You could fix wizard by fixing all the schools individually, but tbh I’d prefer to see something like spell combination introduced as a base feature.

Spellshot isn't even close to magus in gameplay, and eldritch archer is an archetype, I'd hope they don't act as better magi than magus.

Eldritch archer arguably already is a better spellstrike character than magus as you can put it on fighter for a plus 2 to hit or investigator to only shoot it when it will hit.

Hard to fit in with the other archetypes you need though.

Magus being as bad as inventor is a wild take. It was bad before, C maybe D tier, but not inventor bad!

It’s probably a solid B now with all the spells and the stride-recharge feature.

ScooterScoots wrote:

Tridus wrote:

That is one of those "be careful what you wish for because you might get it" situations: if Spellstrike is effortless to use every round, it's also going to get nerfed because that would be completely busted in its current incarnation.

I have done the math on this and a magus spellstriking every round and getting a free map-10 attack after to boot does less damage than a well built fighter… without any of the fighter’s reactive strikes.

https://paizo.com/threads/rzs7njyq&page=10?Whats-this-issue-with-Magus- and-Gunslinger#461

I sure f**king hope so. Lol. They don't have spells

*Magus* barely had spells before the recent changes. The fighter also gets two reactive strikes, more crit effects (i.e. rooting), better saves, more action economy flexibility, doesn’t lose anywhere near as much of their DPR if they got slowed or restrained or otherwise subject to delirious effects from enemy action, etc

Magus is on much better footing now that it actually gets a good amount of spells but it suffers considerably in martial power compared to a fighter for it’s getting those. Which is fine, it’s a reasonable trade - it just means magus isn’t some OP damage king, which is what people have claimed in the past.

That is one of those "be careful what you wish for because you might get it" situations: if Spellstrike is effortless to use every round, it's also going to get nerfed because that would be completely busted in its current incarnation.

I have done the math on this and a magus spellstriking every round and getting a free map-10 attack after to boot does less damage than a well built fighter… without any of the fighter’s reactive strikes.

https://paizo.com/threads/rzs7njyq&page=10?Whats-this-issue-with-Magus- and-Gunslinger#461

ScooterScoots wrote:

Enemies with precise hearing - which can be countered with a scroll of silence

Enemies with precise scent - which can be countered with a scroll of remove scent, or whatever the spell is called

Or you can just take the Foil Senses skill feat lol.

Foil senses lets your stealth actions counter senses (though hearing is one you really shouldn’t need the feat for anyways, anyone who’s being sneaky is “taking precautions” against hearing).

What it doesn’t do is make your invisibility grant you hidden automatically without using any actions, and even after making an attack or otherwise being discovered. For that you need to also be invisible to their hearing via silence or some equivalent method.

Wizards, by contrast, are known for being a weak class, but I think that at high levels they're actually quite powerful, even if that doesn't excuse their weakness at early levels.

Shift spell is single-handedly carrying high level wizard on its back. You want a reason to play a wizard it’s that. And gates wizard I suppose.

Spell combo is neat too but really should have been a base feature. Make it a base feature and buff the weaker schools and wizard is in a great place.

Unicore wrote:

An arcane trickster rogue is probably one of the lowest damage rogues you can build. It is essentially just any other rogue with a class feat early and maybe wisdom as a kas. I think you can still build a cool one, but it’s not the rogue people are talking about in a tier list

That is a weak rogue archetype.

Seen multiple level 18 to 20 thief rogues. Just an insanely brutal martial class. Basically, invisible all the time with very few means to detect. They can snipe for full sneak attack very easily at that level. As a DM going against high level rogues, it's quite rough.

I will say at levels 8 to 11, rogues can be kind of squishy. Probably squishy up to legendary stealth at 15. Then once they get legendary stealth with a good stealth enhancing item and maxed out dex, nightmare time for the DM.

A properly built level 20 ranged stealth martial can solo multiple of most level 20 monsters at once without ever getting a scratch on them.

Invisibility + a proper stealth kit + countermeasures to invisibility defeating abilities + high movement results in a character who at most times occupies an unknown square in a large possible area (possibly 3d with flight). The area is typically large enough that guessing with an AOE (or the 15ft burst seek gives for that matter) will usually miss, or for smaller rooms would require placing the AOE in middle of the room on top of one’s self. Practically speaking this character is targetable only by readied attacks directly after attacking, with a 50% miss chance built in from the invisibility.

Any ranged martial can do this but it’s easiest for rogue as they have sneak savant without archetype, more skill feats, and can get blank slate instead of a mind blank wand (the mind blank wand is usually enough though).

The only enemies that counter this are:

Enemies with 10th rank truesight (there’s like two) - this only defeats blank slate, the wand/scroll of mind blank will still have good odds against this.

Enemies with precise hearing - which can be countered with a scroll of silence

Enemies with precise scent - which can be countered with a scroll of remove scent, or whatever the spell is called

Enemies with other precise senses - which are often limited range. Oh and your stealth package still kinda works on them because of foil senses, you just don’t start out hidden for free on your turn.

ScooterScoots wrote:

Ingest magic is great when the enemy actually has spells on them, but most don’t and you often don’t know when enemies have spells on them. So it’s very niche.

Oh no, the cheese-able thing with the Silt Frog is removing negative effects from allies.

Someone got hit with a spell that's given them a detrimental condition that they'll carry into the next encounter, or even longer? No need to burn money on scrolls or expend precious spell slots, just have the frog nibble them repeatedly!

Oh my god you’re so right. Beating myself up for not thinking of that.

It works on all magical effects to, not just spells like dispel magic would.

Oh wait ingest magic can turn off truesight. Which (at high levels) is often underrank - most enemies with true sight just have 6th rank truesight. Sometimes 7 or 8, and there’s like two guys with 10.

They really did just make the invisibility spam companion, that’s hilarious.

Also the companion Silt Frog's Advanced Maneuver Ingest Magic is incredibly powerful for its level, since it is a resourceless, no cooldown, magic counteract available from level 8. Similar abilities usually turn up around level 16 for PCs.

Ingest magic is great when the enemy actually has spells on them, but most don’t and you often don’t know when enemies have spells on them. So it’s very niche.

The actual killer ability on the Silt Frog is its support ability, which makes the enemy deafened when you hit them. On its own this is pretty worthless, but it’s extremely funny when combined with the invisibility you should already be using at high levels.

The real killer app would be infinite wall of stone construction but unfortunately that’s a three action spell.

Infinite 7th rank invisible object is kind of spicy though. Maybe that’s why all the art depicts people without helmets - they actually are wearing them, they’re just invisible.

There aren’t that many good spell combos but the ones that do exist are quite potent.

Slow + Ranage's Circle is extremely potent lockdown and so is containment + frost pillar.

You get to take spells that are already great and slap another whole spell of riders on for no action cost.

Double disintegrate is a classic.

Procyal Philosophy + 4th rank invisibility is a good buff combo, probably the best buff combo.

Slow + Ranage's Circle is pure single target lockdown, pretty much just improved slow

Containment + Frost Pillar is just improved containment

Command + Laughing fit is good, same for command + roaring applause

Command + Fear works

But monks don't cast spells. So now you need both permission from the GM to use legacy content as well as a heavy archetype investment.

You need five feather wreath spellheart on your gauntlet (or a wand if prebuffing, which you often can) and either a divine/primal spellcasting archetype or the trick magic item you already needed for all your wand buffs anyways.

And you don’t need permission from the GM to use legacy content. You need them not banning it. Which they could, but that’s not standard.

There isn’t really a (good) reason. Arbitrarily rarity decisions are part and parcel in 2e, best you can do is to simply ignore them.

Champion is good as with most casters, the CHA requirement is a bit rough but getting a reliable reaction on an otherwise mostly reactionless caster is amazing. It can also give you heavy armor with an armor proficiency general feat after, which is nice.

I have personally timed how long I can do jumping jacks while holding my breath and while I’m sure the oxygen usage in the stress of combat is higher so are the con scores and class levels of those involved. I should not be beating them.

What they really need to fix with the drowning rules is the whole speaking/breathing out makes you instantly unconscious thing. Anyone who’s ever been swimming can tell you this is nonsense. It’s simply not how water works. Why did they decide to make swimming a death trap?

A plausible rule is to just halve the remaining duration if you speak/exhale instead of going unconscious instantly. That patches the instadrown exploits and makes drowning less stupid OP in general.

Doubling the duration for which you can hold your breath for would also be nice, it is strangely short, but that’s more of a secondary thing.

I didn’t say to include all of them. I specifically said that in most campaigns most enemies wouldn’t use the dying rules, and you should use them for enemies that might be subject to healing magic or other special abilities that interact with the dying rules, which is right in the rules Tridus citied.

I'm not aware of one.

Is there a reason why the Legacy Death Knell shouldn't continue to be used?

Edit: A reason other than that the spell is incredibly hard to use as a PC. Most NPC enemies die immediately when they reach 0 HP, so who are you targeting with the spell?

If true, why is the stabilize cantrip a thing. Only for PCs? Idk man a lot of NPCs seem to have it.

Enemies bypassing the dying rules is a convenience for when the dying rules aren’t worth the overhead of tracking, which is a large portion of the time. Often most of the time, campaign dependent. If they would matter for a specific combat (because of healing, orc ferocity, etc) you should be using them.

No, it’s begging for a nerf on the drowning rules. Those are the actual problem, this is just one of the ways to exploit them. Hell they’re problematic even when not actively exploited.

In other words, the party can default kill any solo boss who breathes (most of them!) as long as they can survive one round and the fighter can land one hit. Which they already have to do practically regardless of how they’re fighting this boss.

If the boss has minions, they can spend a character’s turn and a reaction from another character to probably knock them unconscious and disarmed, and use up one or both minion’s actions saving the boss.

Assuming the minions even save the boss, as they’ll have to travel to him (with swim hurting movement!), drag him out (do they even have the bulk capacity? Are they using reposition here?), and do all that without being disrupted by the rest of the team.

ScooterScoots wrote:

Errenor wrote:

ScooterScoots wrote:

The Raven Black wrote:

You would have waken up as soon as you took damage though.

You’d still be underwater without having held your breath. This causes unconsciousness in and of itself by the drowning rules.

If you’re taking damage from suffocation, you are by definition held unconscious by the suffocation.

As I've already said, good thing that helding breath is automatic unless written otherwise.

Yep, including while unconscious.

I’d like a rules citation on holding your breath being automatic even when unconscious. I don’t see any lines stating this.

Regardless, as I said in my above comment, you don’t take the damage that would wake you up unless you’re already suffocating. And if you’re already suffocating you are by definition out of air with which to hold your breath.

Not that any of that matters anyways in the mask’s case, since the mask explicitly removes the air from the target’s lungs, they don’t have anything to hold onto even if they could keep holding their breath while unconscious.

A bucket of water in the face would wake up a sleeping character without doing any damage. The question is who gets to decide whether the condition that is going to begin suffocating the character would wake them up first or not.

As a GM, I would maybe allow this "super exploit" to work if the target was already having to hold their breath for some reason, and then the character with the mask hit them and triggered it.

But if any ally pulls them to where they can breathe again, they are going to wake up right away, and the fort save starts at DC 20, so it is going to take many rounds for anyone to die this way. As a once a day ability and so many ways that it isn't an insta-death, It would take a whole party going all in on trying to do this (like everyone getting the masks) to make me think I need to nerf hammer it somehow, which would really take the form of a conversation before the next...

Here’s the set up. My ally casts pillar of water on the enemy. They must now hold their breath or immediately fall unconscious. Let’s say they choose to hold their breath.

Now, on my turn (immediately after my ally’s) I hit them with the mask. This rips that held breath right out of their lungs, rendering them unconscious. Normally, they’d start breathing again and wake up in a round, if dealt damage, or in a couple other circumstances.

Unfortunately for them, they’re sitting in a manmade lake and there’s no air. They’re underwater, without any held breath. By the drowning rules, this results in unconsciousness until such a time as they regain access to air. The only way they’re getting out of this situation is via a minion dragging them out, and my other buddy prepped wall of stone and/or containment today.

The suffocate spell and drowning rules both refer to holding your breath as a positive choice, not a passive thing that happens automatically. But it’s irrelevant regardless as the mask bypasses all that, doesn’t matter if you were or were not holding your breath when you have it forcibly removed.

ScooterScoots wrote:

The Raven Black wrote:

You would have waken up as soon as you took damage though.

You’d still be underwater without having held your breath. This causes unconsciousness in and of itself by the drowning rules.

If you’re taking damage from suffocation, you are by definition held unconscious by the suffocation.

As I've already said, good thing that helding breath is automatic unless written otherwise.

Yep, including while unconscious.

I’d like a rules citation on holding your breath being automatic even when unconscious. I don’t see any lines stating this.

Regardless, as I said in my above comment, you don’t take the damage that would wake you up unless you’re already suffocating. And if you’re already suffocating you are by definition out of air with which to hold your breath.

Not that any of that matters anyways in the mask’s case, since the mask explicitly removes the air from the target’s lungs, they don’t have anything to hold onto even if they could keep holding their breath while unconscious.

You would have waken up as soon as you took damage though.

You’d still be underwater without having held your breath. This causes unconsciousness in and of itself by the drowning rules.

If you’re taking damage from suffocation, you are by definition held unconscious by the suffocation.

If you feel battle oracle is too weak (which it is), you can homebrew any number of things, and of course you can allow sure strike not to have a cooldown for battle oracles - you don't have to find a loophole based on the limitations of natural speech for that.

Ah yes the loophole of the feature directly saying immunity doesn’t apply to spells that would affect you, straightforwardly printed right in the text. That loophole.

Because talismans and other magic items being “linked” makes some sense. You used the magic, it’s gone. Whatever’s left over isn’t doing anything useful for you. A bullet, on the other hand, is just a bullet. It being removed from the original copy or other clones is about as stupid as a shadow knife hit by a rust monster degrading the original, and there’s not really any fine line between them in terms of what’s actually happening in world.

Angwa wrote:

Well, to be fair, for Moment of Renewal it's just the oracle that becomes immune so it's a R8 slot and 2 actions to get con mod x lvl hp's and lose some conditions just for yourself if you cast it a second time.

Meh, heals less than Heal and clearing/lowering conditions would be very situational in encounter mode, and outside encounter mode you will have better ways of dealing with these. Definitely not TGTBT in my opinion.

Nothing currently would really be TGTBT if you allow this, but yeah, that would mean the battle curse comes with a little bonus advantage unlike all the others which does feel unintended.

On the other hand it actually makes Battle feel more like the old Oracle curses and I wouldn't mind the other Curses also having perks like this. It feels in theme for a battle oracle and it's a fun, cool perk, but nothing more, so I'd allow it.

Like Exemplar's Ikons, the problem is that anyone can grab this through archetype and enjoy the unintended benefits.

The benefit of *checks notes* the pre-nerf version of true strike almost nobody had a problem with to begin with? And a few much more niche benefits? For an entire archetype? That really doesn’t seem that big a deal. Especially when you’re also putting yourself at risk of getting slapped with hostile spells bypassing immunity.

My Starlit Span Magus would love to be able to put Sure Strike in all their slots again, plus a few scrolls. But indeed Too Good To Be True.

TBH having to take oracle dedication is a fair price for being able to do that. Magus is extremely archetype hungry and adding oracle requires serious cuts.

I don’t think ammo counts as a limited use ability, not any more than throwing the knife you pull from a shadow sheath is a limited use ability.

So it should work as written, and it’s certainly not OP given the weapons it works with. I’ve seen it used on builds to good effect but they’re not particularly strong builds.

I don’t know the intent, but it is straightforwardly RAW that it disables all spell immunities. If it was only for immunity removal that hurt the player (which would be weird to define since this is situational) it would say that. But that’s not how it’s written.

Too good to be true doesn’t come into play as AFAIK there are no immunities to be removed that are too powerful for one fairly middle of the road caster subclass to ignore. Sure strike spam on a caster base class gish isn’t going to break anything.

ScooterScoots wrote:

Huh, learn something new everyday. Either way the mask still rips the air out of your lungs, so it wouldn’t matter much for this item.

But only the instant it happens. It doesn’t keep your breath for the duration of your unconsciousness, it’s just that the stealing your breath is what makes you fall unconscious in the first place.

I could see that argument stopping remove air -> place water. Which doesn’t mean much since you just place the water first.

Huh, learn something new everyday. Either way the mask still rips the air out of your lungs, so it wouldn’t matter much for this item.

Going monk archetype hence losing a feat and archetype locking yourself to make one enemy a day miss one turn doesn't seem very worth it unless you're in a campaign where you're reliably fighting one person per day.

You don’t have to be a monk to use the mask. It works for anyone. Additionally, you can have it for multiple - buy a few copies and swap them out.

gesalt wrote:

Unicore wrote:

I mean the ability specifies that you regain consciousness at the end of the users turn, if not woken earlier. I am not sure how many GMs will not allow for getting dunked in water or any environment that your body functions radically differently and not have that wake you up.

This whole thing sounds like a rules lawyer player trying to auto kill enemies by bludgeoning their GM with rules that defy common sense, and then suggesting it’s a massively broken ability that needs errata.

Yes, you would wake up from the item's effect, but you have a second source of unconsciousness being applied to you by the drowning/suffocation rules. It's those rules that keep you asleep, same way as if you were under two sources of any condition and one went away while the other did not. You wouldn't suddenly recover from both.

There is no rule for suffocating when you are not holding your breath. Unless being Unconscious means you start out of air ?

There is a rule that if you speak you lose all the air in your lungs and instantly start drowning. The mask also takes all your air. And of course holding your breath isn’t a passive thing, how are you supposed to do that while unconscious?

Uncanny breath combos with water to instadrown, which is the main issue, and also combos with tactical reflexes to end an enemy’s turn and cause unconscious for quite an long time off nothing but a successful tactical reflexes reactive strike.

As I’ve said earlier in this thread wind ocarina is meaningfully more toxic than wall of wind - anyone can use it, 5ft emanation means you just can’t target the guy even if you walk up on him., he can reposition at will, etc. And to be clear I think regular wall of wind is also broken in near the same fashion and should be changed to something like a minus 5 penalty instead of full immunity.

You say that but wind ocarina and mask of uncanny breath both survived the remaster unscathed, and so did all the battleship stealth tech. I guess phantasmal doorknob got a nerf but that was merely overtuned, not actually game breaking.

You wrote that “ Security Badge is broken because it is a custom AP item.”

Along with other arguments that AP items are often busted OP.

Gestalt wrote that busted OP items aren’t limited to AP content, which itself isn’t that strong of an argument on its own but is expressing support/agreement with my prior evidence that AP items are not any more busted than non-AP items (in the form of finding plenty of busted non-AP items that’s roughly proportional to the amount of non-AP content vs AP items).

If you have additional busted OP AP items please share. If you can find those in sufficient numbers to be well above the amount you’d expect if both populations (AP and non-AP) were equally likely to be busted, then your argument has some merits. Otherwise it’s pretty well disproved by the empirical evidence I’ve presented and a few others have supported. (I do think you have a case for unique items, though idk that it would break down on AP lines)

ScooterScoots wrote:

Wind ocarina completely negates archery attacks for 50gp with no counter. You’re just immune to being shot. Situational, but it completely shuts off the encounter type. And worse it’s so cheap and effective the BBEG has effectively zero excuse to not distribute these to their minions, at which point the archer PC may as well not be counted in combat balancing.

I think you overvalue them. First, archer characters are weapon users, so they have options. It's not like antimagic for casters which breaks them completely. Secondly, effect of Ocarina is mostly just Wall of Wind, scrolls of which are even cheaper. Yes, the Wall is stationary, scrolls need spellcasters, effect of the ocarina is stronger in some cases, but very comparable.

Wall of wind is problematic as well but can be countered by running up on the caster. The wind ocarina completely shuts off the bow, it is impossible to use. They’re protected even if you walk behind them, next to them, wherever they want to move, etc. If you’re an archer PC and the BBEG’s underling pulls out a wind ocarina, you are now playing a runeless mostly featless probably low STR version of your class. You literally can’t use your main weapon, that’s utterly crippling.

And don’t tell me it’s fine because they can have a backup weapon, outside of ABP that shit costs way too much and shouldn’t be forced by a 50gp hard counter consumable. And that doesn’t help with the fact that your feats are irrelevant and your ability scores wrong.

I certainly hope so

ScooterScoots wrote:

Anyways my prediction is that this is going to be a total nothingburger, just at cost or mostly meaningless discount upgrade rules.

Divided on if that’s technically an improvement (if not one that actually fixes the core issues) or overall bad for the game as it doesn’t do much good but *does* allow security badge, ashen rune, and probably a handful of other outright broken fixed DC items to be a problem at all levels.

Security Badge is broken because it is a custom AP item.

And if an Item like Ashen rune was broken on level, that was merely hidden by the bad DC scaling. That especially should be fixed.

No, it’s broken OP and it happens to be an AP item. Being an AP item is not very probative of being broken powerful, the rate of brokenness among AP items is not much different than among all items.

For truly game breaking items the list is very short and IIRC this is the only one from an AP, which is probably underrepresentation compared to the total fraction of AP items.

Some examples of broken op non-AP items:

Aforementioned ashen rune is almost as bad, same bullshit control but it’s just a rider on your strikes now - actually it might be worse!

A 4th rank invisibility scroll (or dust of disappearance) is actually more broken if you know what you’re doing and grab the supporting infrastructure. Security badge doesn’t let you reliably solo several level 20 enemies at once without a scratch.

The mask of uncanny breath of instadrown fame is worse too, and not from an AP.

Some would argue that contingency + containment is too powerful, allowing you to spring up full cover and negate any hit or spell you can see coming as a reaction. Especially for a gates wizard who can teleport out easily next turn. Personally I think it’s fine, but it is pretty cracked.

Leaching fangs gives half damage heal on all hits, which is practically immortality on a fighter or barbarian, obtained without having to do anything (besides activation) to disrupt or change your already extremely powerful actions lineup.

Wind ocarina completely negates archery attacks for 50gp with no counter. You’re just immune to being shot. Situational, but it completely shuts off the encounter type. And worse it’s so cheap and effective the BBEG has effectively zero excuse to not distribute these to their minions, at which point the archer PC may as well not be counted in combat balancing.

So that’s 5 or 6 right there, and I don’t think AP content is less than 17% of printed content. Doesn’t seem like a trend towards busted OP AP items, just the normal amount you’d expect if they were about as likely to be busted as any item.

Anyways my prediction is that this is going to be a total nothingburger, just at cost or mostly meaningless discount upgrade rules.

Divided on if that’s technically an improvement (if not one that actually fixes the core issues) or overall bad for the game as it doesn’t do much good but *does* allow security badge, ashen rune, and probably a handful of other outright broken fixed DC items to be a problem at all levels.

You'd need to discount it to make it actually viable. It can't be automatic because then the game instantly becomes buying up level 1 items and reaping the benefits of the improved scaling.

You have 10 investment slots and 2 hands. And limited actions. First level items that autoscale may be cheap, but higher level items generally have better effects. That gives plenty incentive to use them when gold isn’t your only limit.