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How does the Solarian compare to the Ranger? A lot of people consider the Ranger Class to pretty much be exactly at the middle of the pack for Martials. The very definition of not exciting but perfectly usuable in all but the most hyper-optimzed campaigns. If a class is as strong as it or stronger it's probably fine. If it's weaker it needs some help. So where does the Solarian stand. On par? Above? Or Below?
It's in GM core. Here's the Archive of Nethys Link.
That would fit some people's vision of the shifter but not everyone's. A lot of people advocate being able to shapeshift individual bodyparts in different combinations. For example: shifting the head into a spitting cobra to spew venom at people; shifting the arms into wings to fly; and shifting the legs into squid tentacles to grapple. All at the same time.
I think you misunderstand. The failure chance of the feat isn't because the Akashic Record can be wrong. It's because the character using the feat is trying to sift through functionally infinite amounts of information with their very finite mind. The challenge is to just get the knowledge you need without getting it scrambled with countless other bits of unrelated trivia. In a lot of harsher systems and settings trying to accomplish such a thing wouldn't just risk getting the wrong data but having your conciousness obliterated by accidentally "pouring an ocean into a teacup."
It seems to me that the Hellknight order that came closest to representing their platonic ideal of LAW was the Order of the Godclaw. They studied all aspects of Law from deific representatives of Heaven, Hell and Axis equally. They were also mostly about self-perfection rather than imposing their beliefs on others and usually only got involved in worldly affairs when another order asked them for backup. I agree that the other orders studying Hell alone was a recipe to get manipulated. Interestingly right now during the Hellfire Crisis it's the "Good" Orders like The Scourge and the Pike that are under the most direct threat from Cheliax's Nationalization. It makes you wonder if they'll still be Hellknights when it's all over.
Also if the gods know anything it’s not all of them. Some were as affected as badly or worse than any mortal. Cayden Cailean went on a trauma bender for a century over losing the memories of so many mortal friends and companions. When his clergy finally got him to sober up he admitted the Gap was just as much a mystery to him as anyone else. Wether the truly ancient primordial deities like Desna and Asmodeus were affected the same way or were able to resist is unknown.
Battlecry Page 152 The Name Pendants bonus to saves against mental effects is untyped. Protective Netting has a Level of 3+ implying it has higher level versions. It does not.
With the asterisk that Deities are influenced by their worshipers in some fashion. For example Baba Yaga figured out how to ascend to godhood millennia ago but refuses to do it because she wants nothing to do with a worshiper connection.
That's correct. They're basically high-tech versions of the same sorts of runes from PF2E. They're a bit of a pain point for me, honestly, because the upgrade system in SF2E lumps straight damage boosters, like the element modules, in the same slots as things that are essentially gun accessories, like bipods and uniclamps. SF2E's got stiffer competition for those slots than PF2E does, meaning more flavorful upgrades are more likely to get left out in the cold. IIRC in Pathfinder 2Es first year a few people ran the numbers on monster HP and came to the conclusion that the developers assumed that every martial damage dealer would have at least two damage enhancing property runes. Not everyone agreed with that conclusion. But when Alien Core comes out it might be interesting to do a similar HP analysis for SF2E and see if people think the same.
The O-Yoroi Heavy Armor (Treasure Vault Page 11). Is just straight up better than Full Plate in every way. Sure it's one bulk and 5 gp more but both of those diminish in importance quickly with every level. Full Plate just has Bulwark O-Yoroi has Bulwark and Laminar with no other drawbacks. By contrast Fortress Plate and Bastion Plate have 5 bulk and cost a bit more gold than Full Plate. They also have Bulwark and another positive trait. But are each offset with a negative trait. It's a small imbalance but it is noticeable.
For reference:
Having Bulwark and Laminar on the same armor with no drawbacks aside from the standard Heavy Armor speed penalty was always good. But given how much the Guardian wants to dump Dex and has so many of their abilities tied to their armor it might border on outright nerfing yourself not wearing it if you play that class. If you don't like the aesthetic. Too bad. Also does anyone else find it strange that O-Yorori is just Full Plate but Better and didn't get a drawback trait in the Treasure Vault Remaster?
SPC Page 134-134 The Analyze Target Cantrip mention calls it's bonus both status and circumstance in seperate sentences.
14 days remain and... I'm pouting. I've seen some Battlecry! stuff, but so far, no Starfinder. The Gaming Gang put out a First Look video of the book yesterday. Although some people have accused them of breaking embargo they claim they went over Pazio's email and other materials with a fine toothed comb and found no mention of one.
Are there any content creators that get the book early to do previews? I'm chomping at the bit here! Yes, several have mentioned that they already have their review copy on Reddit. But they've also said there's an embargo until the 24th.
Once again Paizo has opted to put out news on its social media but not its own website or forums. Bluesky Link Apparently someone is going to roleplay one of the Iconics with a Vtuber model while they play video games.
This happens basically every weekend when the mods aren't here to zap them as soon as they appear. It's worse than usual but not unprecedented.
I think what they were going for is that she protects the helpless against hostile aggressors. But, she knows said aggressors are still people with friends and family of their own who will suffer from their deaths. However I agree the wording is muddled and confusing.
This part: Ulka knew her limits. She had no chance of unraveling the truth in her current position, with her current skills and knowledge. Rather than let herself be used as a pawn, to let others make her pain into another tool, she chose to flee Urgir. Implies that she suspected she was being used in some greater scheme but lacked the ability to prove it. So rather than continue to suffer being manipulated or used as a scapegoat she left. Defiance not cowardice.
IIRC Andoran like any country has multiple political factions with different ideologies. There are in fact people who want to spread "glorious revolution," all over Avistan to convert everyone into republics. But they're a small minority of no real power at the moment. However one of the consequences of the Godsrain is individuals and groups who were previously insignificant players getting their hands on Mythic Power and radically disrupting the status quo...
General consensus in PF2 is that Level - 4 creatures are basically speed bumps. Because you’ll almost certainly beat them in initiative and then fry them all with an AOE that they will crit fail their saves on before they can act. I wonder if SF2s larger ranged combat oriented maps that lets them spread out a lot more will change that.
That's because Adamantine is from Mythology. It can't be trademarked.
Sure, why not? Stories are alive and they change over time. The OG western dragon was a legged serpent the size of a horse known for its terrible venom. When a creature is completely fixed in its portrayal that means its irrelevant and dead in the public conciousness. By the way I'm not going to bother getting into a back and forth recursive argument with you. It's clear you have no interest in a debate. You just want someone to say you're right. So no point. Have fun getting the "last word."
(The wyvern/amphithere/dragon/linnorm thing you've got up there was literally made up by this one English fantasy author.That’s generally how it goes with fantasy-someone had to come up with the idea of a wyvern at some point, which is exactly why definitions matter. In real life, I can just show you a duck because we have a physical reference for what it looks like. But fantasy is different. We don’t have actual dragons to compare, so if we don’t protect those definitions, we end up with Smaug being redesigned and depicted as a wyvern-like creature instead of the dragon he originally was. Maybe you don’t see it as a big deal, and I get why no one likes feeling like their freedom is being limited. Still, there’s a reason definitions exist and why they need to be respected. If fantasy terms aren’t protected, they eventually lose all meaning. Movie Smaug is explicitly a bad example for your argument. Because it wasn't arbitrary. There's plenty of interviews explaining that his initial design was based on the original four legged artwork but they couldn't get the model skeleton to move naturally and he came across as a blatantly artificical. The "wyvern," redesign was as much a practical decision based on technical limitations as anything else. Given that Smaug is what a lot of people consider to be the best thing about those movies. Often citing how impressively he moves. It was almost certainly the right choice to change him.
So, as a lot of people have observed what often makes or breaks a spellcaster at low levels is if they have a good focus spell that is consistently useful. Now that people have had some time to play with the new wizard schools. Which ones have focus spells that work well?
I'm having a similar issue where the Forum link also takes me to "Not Found," but refreshing the pages fixes it. But having to refresh every single time is annoying.
Wasn't one of the big criticisms of Necromancer is that there was no way for the thralls to help with flying enemies as levels got higher and that became more common? Or being a completely dead feature in an underwater campaign? Surprised that wasn't mentioned at all.
So for people who haven't heard it turns out that Echolocation is a skill humans can learn and teach. That sounds like something that would be useful to adventurers. From what I've gathered: There's passive echolocation that uses ambient noise. There's active echolocation where the user relys on things like clicking their tongue or tapping their feet. Now for a starting point we have the level 1 Awakened Animal ancestry feat Natural Senses that grants 10 feet of Precise Echolocation as an option. As well as the level 5 Beastkin ancestry feat Greater Animal Senses that grants 30 feet of Imprecise Echolocation. Finally we have the human Ancestry Feats General Training and Advanced General Training that imply General Feats and Ancestry Feats are considered roughly equivalent in power. So the Homebrew seems fairly straightforward. Basic Echolocation General Feat 1
Advanced Echolocation General Feat 3 (Would 7 with an upgrade be better?)
This splits the difference between the two existing Ancestry Feats. Given the precedent of giving Deaf Characters the Sign Language Skill Feat for free it would make sense to be able to have echolocation as a blind character from level 1. Something like: As an optional rule if your character is Permanently Blind at level 1 they can take Basic Echolocation for free and have the option of trading their level 1 ancestry feat for Advanced Echolocation as well. The real world version of this uses human audible sound unlike say a bat's ultrasonic echolocation and is a conciously used skill. Giving it a Concentration Free Action to turn on and a penalty to stealth checks would likely fit. But would that be too fiddily or make the feats too weak? Other opinions? Sources: Also I remember in the mid 2000s to early 2010s there was a story about an ATV racer who could use passive echolocation from his and competitor's engine noise so well he could use it to race at over a hundred miles an hour. Implying that yes if you get good enough it can be predcise and fast enough to use in combat. But I can't find it. Anybody have any better luck with Google?
I can understand making Freedom require Mythic because you can have as many tries as you want before your Crit Fail and screw yourselves. But Imprisionment requires the party to keep the subject pinned in a specific 10 foot area for an entire day. Pulling that off on a Mythic Monster with Mythic Resilience is such an incredible feat that the people doing it pretty much already need to be Mythic themselves anyway. It just feels like denying an option to non-Mythic parties for particularly hard to kill non-Mythic monsters.
Did Champions and the Blessed One archtype get the Lay on Hands enhancing feats like accelerating touch and amplifying touch back?
It doesn't get you 1 extra/additional Ikon but a 4th one. You can't HAVE a 4th one, if you don't have 3 others... It's just how English works, so I don't see that this needs any errata as it gives its prerequisites in its wording. I can't see how someone could claim that they can gain a 4th Ikon through the multiclass archetype with a straight face. The Devs have said in the past that they only care that someone found something confusing enough to bring to their attention. They don't care about or want disenting replies questioning if something is "really," in need of errata because it clogs up the thread and makes the posts they're interested in harder to find.
IIRC there was a proposal to make Kineticist blasts a type of unarmed strike and their impulses a kind of innate spell specifically so they would integrate with the exsisting system smoothly. But, the majority voted for completely unique mechanics and we are where we are.
Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if the previous level 26-30 creatures were re-balanced to be level 21-25 but with many new Mythic abilities put onto them. Their increased threat level would still exist, but it'd exist under the framework on the PF2E system instead of what they were in PF1E. Yeah, from the various hints devs have been giving that's my impression as well. If Baba Yaga or Varklops are statted in 2E their math will be that of a level 25 creature, not 30. But they'll have rulebending Mythic Abilities that will have the likes of Treerazer going "Wait, you can do what?" Before squishing him like a bug.
Tod Culter's Weird Weapons Playlist is made for threads like these. Now that Starfinder 2E has introduced the Breakdown trait there's no reason we can't have a spring-loaded mod for polearms.
Count me in on the camp that thinks the current version of multiple limbs is fine for level one but the ancestry feats to expand them at higher levels could use some work.
I hear that post level 10 incapacitate spells actually get better because the Creature Meta changes. As PCs get more and more abilities to compress actions and leverage teamwork solo bosses the ones functionally immune to incapactiation become much easier to deal with. By contrast creatures with weird esoteric abilities that don't interact with the system math much or poweful support abilities become more common. While HP inflation makes damage AOEs less reliable at clearing them out quickly. As such large numbers of lower level creatures are much more dangerous than they are at earlier levels. So having an incapacitation spell that can just take one or several of those especially dangerous "mooks," off the board in one turn can be encounter changing. To the point of turning a potential TPK into a cakewalk. When comparing a party that has access to such a spell to one that doesn't.
2E already does this to an extent. Check out the Surgeon. As a character they're level 2 in combat but level 6 in medical matters. This is another way to distinguish NPCs and PCs. NPCs as a rule of thumb are specialized and leveled in a narrow focus of expertise and lower level in everything else. PCs are generalists and are their level in everything they do and every ability they have. As a side note does anyone else find it hilarious that a Dancer a professional entertainer is just so damn fit that they're just as capable in combat as a professional guardsman like I linked in my earlier post? An Acrobat even more so. It's no wonder that in Extinction Curse the Circus is the one to investigate the local monster attacks.
Page 145
But does not actually say anywhere that the feat can be taken multiple times. Yes, it's implied but not explicitly said. Page 237
One way of looking at it is comparing say a Level 1 Guard and a level 1 Fighter. The combat numbers are about the same. However the Guard is trained in 3 skills, the Fighter is trained in 6. The Guard has one good save. The Fighter has Two. Both have AOO/Reactive Strike. But that's all the Guard has while the Fighter has an Ancestry Feat, Skill Feat and Class Feat on top. Against a gang of simple bandits both will be about equally effective. But against something weird like an Akata The Fighter is much more likely to have something in their tool kit to handle things while the Guard could be out of their depth. So a PC and NPC of the same level are about the same in terms of raw combat power. But the PC is far more versatile and can handle a much wider range of problems and threats. So that's why towns hire Adventurers rather than use their own guard. To deal with things that are abnormal.
I mean "Achaekek cannot kill gods" is a good reason not to write the books in an objective voice. My understanding of Achaekek's timeline goes something like this. Achaekek is one of the OG eight deities created at the dawn of existence by Pharasma's ritual and he was some kind of cosmic judge. Achaekek has an experience that drives him mad and turns him into the barely sapient God Of Monsters. Lamashtu obtains godhood via the murder and theft of a deity's power. A large collection of gods realizes this could lead to Open Season on all deities and needs to be prevented from happening again. They subdue Achaekek and get to work on restoring his mind. But they also install a bunch of directives into his head to make him the perfect divine assassin and control him. Around the same time they create Grandmother Spider as a servant and implant a bunch of control directives into her as well. Grandmother Spider proves to be much smarter than these gods intended or realized. She deeply resents having her free will restricted and sees Achaekek as her spiritual brother since he's a victim of it too. She's cunning enough to figure out loopholes in her directives and tricks those gods into freeing her and Achaekek ascending to godhood in the process. The now sane and free Achaekek considers things and concludes that the chaos of rampant god murder really would undermine reality and takes on the directives he was given voluntarilly. So killing deities is Anethema to Achaekek because he considers it important to reality's functioning to not do that. But the part where he was forced to do it without a choice is long gone. Still he's been known for resolutely sticking to his personal code for eons. So whatever made him change his mind must be a pretty big deal. If he's not being impersonated or something that is.
I disagree. PF2 has basically embraced the idea that high level fighters draw on mythological heros like Beowulf. Who once swam in armor for two weeks straight without stopping and slew a dozen sea serpents along the way. Also, unlike the Greek Demigods Beowulf didn't have any connection to a greater power he was just that badass.
We’re also closely examining the numbers of the guardian’s Taunt ability, with the hopes of creating something that will really sing. That does not sound like they're going to make it optional. It implies that enough people are fine with it in the surveys so far that it's not going anywhere.
There were Mutagens in Howl of the Wild which is a full Remaster Book. They're still item bonuses.
Howl of the Wild is a Remaster Book and it has a few mutagens in it. Examining those might tell you what the new expected baseline is.
Linkified
Howl of the Wild that released today reminds us that in it's expansion Taldor displaced and took over the ancestral lands of several nonhumans by conquest. One notably being the Centaurs who were driven into Verduran forest. One thing Eutropa could be doing that would piss of the nobles is attempting diplomatic apologies and reparations to those peoples. It's also noted that there's an extremist faction among the Verduran Centaurs who utterly depise Taldor and Andoran and are obssessed with revenge. They and other factions like them in cultures with similar circumstances would likely see such any "apology," as a mocking insult and want to return Eutropa's diplomats to her in a pieces. An act the hardliner nobles would likely ruthlessly exploit to undermine her rule.
I believe the PDFs are unlocked manually when the Paizo staff enters the office. I think they open at 10:00 am Pacific Time.
One initial thought is that the Banner's 30 ft. range is fine for first level but as the monsters get bigger the Commander might run into the same problems Champions have with their reactions at high levels where Huge and Gargantuan creatures take up so much space that it's really hard to stay in formation against them and party members are often out of range. Yes I know there's a 20th level feet to expand it but that's 3 or 4 sessions of playtime at most and the problem pops up much earlier.
One initial thought is that the Banner's 30 ft. range is fine for first level but as the monsters get bigger the Commander might run into the same problems Champions have with their reactions at high levels where Huge and Gargantuan creatures take up so much space that it's really hard to stay in formation against them and party members are often out of range.
Yeah the E-Book has pretty much eaten the paperback's lunch. |
