SpontaneousLightning's page

I also really don't like non-scaling items. If I am a player I always never end up using any item activation because they never feel worth the actions it takes to use them when I get the item, let alone a few levels later. When I am a GM, I never see players use items either, unless they are consumables like healing potions.

I think a good thing to introduce to your games are relics. These are special items that grow stronger with your character, and they unlock new abilities as you level up. For example, you could have an axe that is an earth/plant relic that starts with the ability to spray pollen at level 1, and then at level 5 gains the shattered earth ability, letting you create difficult terrain.

Player Core 2:

I have seen some confusion in whether or not sorcerous potency stacks with the sorcerer's angelic halo focus spell. One is a status penalty to your spell's healing, and one is a status bonus to hp a target regains.

Specifically, the confusion is in whether or not the status bonus applying to you (sorcerous potency) stacks with the status bonus the target has (angelic halo).

Personally, I don't think these are intended to stack as they are both status bonuses, but I have seen enough people be confused about this and argue for both them stacking and not stacking, so I wouldn't mind official clarification to put this debate to rest.

We do have a dragon for practically every plane now. Even the dimension of time has a dragon. It would make sense to have a Creation's Forge and a Void dragon imo.

Personally I am loving all the new information on the Draconic Codex. I was worried that it would only reprint dragons from the three 2e bestiaries, but I am glad that there are some returning dragons from 1e like the time dragon, and brand new dragons like the mocking dragon.

if we assume that we are not mythic creatures and...

Mythic Resistance only being bypassed by Mythic Strike and Mythic weapons that would makes it more inline power vise to Mythic Resilience that screws caster over big time.

If you weren't mythic characters, then Mythic Immunity would either make the monster completely immune to all of your spells or all of your unarmed strikes.

and if i dont misremember where there not a few low level mythic weapons in that book aswell? so its not only level 20 items.

Even if the interpretation of "PC's who use mythic rules are not mythic characters" is correct, I think there is exactly one (1) mythic weapon that is not level 20: the gut-ripper, a level 7 mythic ogre hook that must kill at least one creature every day or be reverted to a non-magical ogre hook. So low-level players wouldn't get many ways to bypass mythic resistance anyway.

The GM would then be forced to make a few homebrew mythic weapons for low level characters then, but War of Immortals also never added any rules for making homebrew mythic items.

I personally find it rather unclear what would make an item mythic or non-mythic in the first place. For example, if the party goes on a harrowing quest to find a legendary sword blessed by Heaven in order to help slay Vulot, would this be a mythic sword... or just a normal non-mythic Chalice of Justice? What sort of powers would differentiate the two swords?

I would unironically love a feathered dragon though. It would be so fluffy. Plus it could be a nod to the theory that some dragon myths originated with dinosaur bones, and that birds are related to dinosaurs.

Copy/pasting my post from the spring 2025 errata suggestion thread:

Book: Rage of Elements

Rule: A few kineticist feats such as Counter Element, Elemental Overlap, and Elemental Transformation have a prerequisite of "exactly one kinetic element"

Problem:: What happens if someone took one of these feats and then later gained a second element? For example, a single-gate earth kineticist taking Elemental Overlap at level 8 to gain the earth/metal composite impulse Whirling Grindstone, and then later at level 13 Forked the Path and gained a new kinetic element (which may or may not be the metal element).

I have seen some people say that they can no longer use the Whirling Grindstone feat, as they no longer meet the prerequisites of "exactly one kinetic element", and I have seen some people say that they could still use Whirling Grindstone because their character met the prerequisites at level 8 when the feat was taken, and losing your feat because of a natural choice you made during a later level up (which might be months or even a year in real life, during which your character would be constantly using the feat) is too bad to be true.

Personally I would really like to see the five esoteric dragons (astral, dream, etheric, nightmare, and occult), the five outer dragons (lunar, solar, time, void, and vortex), and the nine planar dragons (apocalypse, bliss, crypt, edict, havoc, infernal, paradise, rift, and tumult) dragons before any new dragon types, as these have still not been converted to pathfinder second edition even after nearly six years.

The outer dragons might have a shot of being released in a later starfinder second edition book (although it seems that they won't be in alien core), but the others might literally never get another chance.

The dragon codex only having what is probably 21-25 total dragons with 16 of those likely being the dragons from monster cores 1 and 2 seems like a complete waste to me. 25 dragons would have been enough for all the 19 unconverted dragons plus a couple of new ones, like skymetal dragons.

So if Monster Core has eight dragons, and Monster Core 2 claims to have eight more, does that mean only around four new dragons will be in the Dragon Codex, as the twenty dragon statistics includes expansions on those sixteen dragons?

ServoShell's overclock needs to be on a minion with the tech trait, but technomancer has no way to permanently have a tech minion such as a familiar. As such, the only way for them to benefit from their overclock is the following:

Turn 1: the technomancer summons a tech minion from a spell like summon robot. They cannot overclock, because summon spells are 3 actions and overclock costs 1 action: the technomancer does not have any leftover actions.
Turn 2: the technomancer casts a non-cantrip spell. They can then overclock their minion. However, if they had cast a 2-action spell, their minion immediately disappears because the technomancer never spent an action to sustain their minion. So the technomancer is forced to cast a 1-action non-cantrip spell this turn.
Turn 3: the technomancer can finally start benefiting from their overclock and can potentially jailbreak a spell.

I think that this is incredibly inflexible compared to the other programming languages. For example, DPS++ can overclock their weapon on turn 1 and doesn't need to use two spell slots to do it. Simply giving the technomancer (or at the very least, the ServoShell subclass) a permanent tech familiar would solve this problem.

Some less intelligent dragons, not necessarily drakes, and a civilization with a culture around becoming worthy by becoming a dragon rider.

This actually already exists on the planet Triaxus, with dragonkin and ryphorians (also known as triaxians).

I mean my assumption is that diabolic dragons just *are* the new infernal dragons & there was a redesign for either creative or legal reasons.

They aren't the same! Luis Loza confirmed it back when diabolic dragons were announced back in 2023.

The exact post can be found here!

I would really like the planar dragons to return! Stuff like the apocalypse dragon from Abaddon, havoc dragons from Elysium, and tumult dragons from the Maelstrom. I really would like to know how infernal and diabolic dragons interact with one another, as both species are native to Hell.

I absolutely want a book focused on dragons. There are so many cool dragons that have not appeared in pathfinder second edition (such as the planar and esoteric dragons), and there are a bunch of new dragons that could be introduced as well, such as an orichalcum dragon or siccatite dragon (as we already have gotten one skymetal dragon with the adamantine dragon).

I also would like a Lost Omens: Saga Lands book. Irrisen and the Land of the Linnorm Kings in particular are settings that I really like and would want more focus on.

Book: Rage of Elements

Rule: A few kineticist feats such as Counter Element, Elemental Overlap, and Elemental Transformation have a prerequisite of "exactly one kinetic element"

Problem:: What happens if someone took one of these feats and then later gained a second element? For example, a single-gate earth kineticist taking Elemental Overlap at level 8 to gain the earth/metal composite impulse Whirling Grindstone, and then later at level 13 Forked the Path and gained a new kinetic element (which may or may not be the metal element).

I have seen some people say that they can no longer use the Whirling Grindstone feat, as they no longer meet the prerequisites of "exactly one kinetic element", and I have seen some people say that they could still use Whirling Grindstone because their character met the prerequisites at level 8 when the feat was taken, and losing your feat because of a natural choice you made during a later level up (which might be months or even a year in real life, during which your character would be constantly using the feat) is too bad to be true.

Clarification on which side of the debate is correct would be greatly appreciated.

I would really like rules for building your own custom weapons. Additionally, I would also like new weapons that use the more underutilized traits.

For example, looking at the Archives of Nethys, the resonant trait exists on exactly two weapons, the wish blade and the wish knife, both of which are uncommon ancestral weapons. The vehicular trait was introduced in treasure vault is on weapons that are supposed to be attached to vehicles or worn by a mount, but the only vehicular weapon is a battle saddle (to be used on a mount), so there aren't any vehicular weapons that can be used on vehicles.

According to the Archives of Nethys, other traits that are only represented by one or two existing weapons include: brace, climbing, cobbled, double barrel, jousting, recovery, and training.

A lot of these can be used to make some really cool weapons in my opinion. For example, a double barrel shotgun does not currently exist. Another example is some sort of whip that has the training trait.

SpontaneousLightning wrote:

Finoan wrote:

pauljathome wrote:

It takes a bit of careful parsing to realize this but the key is on the “can move through”. Note that a developer confirmed that this was deliberate and the reason they added tumble through to the play test version so this is NOT rules lawyering away from RAI.

Do you by chance have a link for that?

If I did this correctly, this should be an exact link to the exact discord post.

It tells me that I don't have access to any text channels or none exist.

I will be honest, I have no idea how to help with that problem, sorry. Maybe the problem is that you are not in that discord server?

This discord server is specifically the pathfinder 2e's discord, which I originally found via the pathfinder 2e subreddit. The current link shown on the subreddit is actually invalid at the moment, so I won't share that one. I quickly generated a new link for it here, which hopefully works and shouldn't expire anytime soon (if not, then I am sorry).

If you are in this server and the link isn't working, then I really have no idea what is going on. Maybe you could find it via discord's search function? The post was from Michael Sayre in the War of Immortals thread (under book spoilers), on October 25, 2024.

pauljathome wrote:

It takes a bit of careful parsing to realize this but the key is on the “can move through”. Note that a developer confirmed that this was deliberate and the reason they added tumble through to the play test version so this is NOT rules lawyering away from RAI.

Do you by chance have a link for that?

If I did this correctly, this should be an exact link to the exact discord post.

The elemental spell list automatically contains all spells with the air, earth, fire, metal, water, and wood traits, even if they were released after Rage of Elements (its most recent update).

A necromancy spell list could work similarly, and contain all spells with the spirit, vitality, and void traits.

Yeah, it would be pretty disastrous if someone could pick up this kind of burst from archetyping—especially someone with Legendary class DC, like a kineticist.

Usually archetypes will come with their own class DC. For example, the inventor archetype makes you trained in inventor class DC, but you can't be an expert in inventor class DC until level 15 (assuming you have the brilliant crafter feat). Even if a kineticist took the inventor archetype and took the Explode feat at level 8, their Explode action would use their inventor class DC, not their kineticist class DC, so the DC would end up being much lower than their impulses.

The kineticist archetype itself also works like this. Their level 12 feat Expert Kinetic Control makes you an expert in kineticist class DC, which is used for any impulses you would gain from the archetype.

There is no reason to think that the runesmith archetype wouldn't work the same way, so a kineticist with the runesmith archetype wouldn't necessarily become a lot more powerful via runes like Ranshu or Atryl, where you want to invoke the rune.

I think that runes that are more "passive" like Holtrik will be a more popular pick for those with the runesmith archetype, as you don't need to worry about your class DC for those.

I had the same thought, short of sticking to a free-hand weapon like a gauntlet or Engraving Strike becoming a mandatory pick, you're forced to choose between the things you're supposed to be good at.

Funnily enough, I don't think that Engraving Strike lets you Trace a Rune without a free hand. All it allows you to do is Strike and Trace a Rune for one action instead of two. It is a really powerful feat, but it doesn't let you Trace Runes while wielding a hammer and a shield. Unless that shield is a buckler I guess.

Smithing Weapons Familiarity is also kind of weird to have there. The Necromancer one I got, but Runesmith already has martial weapon proficiency, there's only a handful of advanced knives (none of which particularly fit the flavor) and two advanced picks with ancestry traits, and the feat doesn't grant you critical specialization like the ancestry ones do. What do you actually gain out of this?

Yeah it is kinda weird that this level 2 class feat feels similar in power to a level 1 ancestry feat. That is actually one of the reasons why I think making it so that smithing weapons count as holding an artisan's toolkit would be a good change.

On one hand yes but wouldn't that be a little strong considered you can now wield both a shield and a melee weapon, tracing 2 runes as part of striking and raising a shield meaning you get 4 actions for the cost of 2 actions?

Fortifying Knock and Engraving Strike could just gain the flourish trait. That is in line with other single actions that let you do two actions at once (e.g., twin takedown, doctor's visitation, dastardly dash).

I also think that there should probably be an option to move a thrall at least a little bit. The problem is having to move maybe like a dozen thralls all at once at higher levels (since you can create up to four thralls at once at level 19). A solution would be to only be able to move a number of thralls at once equal to the amount you could summon (one at level 1, two thralls at level 7, three at level 15, and finally four thralls at level 19). I would even settle for an absolutely minuscule speed (like 10 feet).

Removing thralls is also a must. I haven't had a chance to playtest it yet, but I feel like there is a non-zero possibility of the necromancer accidentally filling up the entire space of a room in a dungeon or something because they can't get rid of their thralls or move their thralls.

I also agree that they should have a listed AC and saves, even if every attack against them is a hit and every save they make is a fail. You mentioned Tumble Through, but there are other actions affected by this too. What if an enemy wants to Shove or Reposition a thrall? What do they compare their athletics check to? The spell DC of the necromancer? 10 because an unlisted DC might as well be 0? Clarification would be nice.

When I was reading the playtest, one thing that I thought was really weird is that the runesmith must either have a hand free or be holding an artisan's toolkit to use their Trace action or at least one of their class feats (Return unto Runes). Possibly more class feats in the final version of the class too.

The class seems to have a lot of support for shields, such as the Shield Block general feat, a few runes that affect shields, and a couple of feats that help with the action economy with shields such as Fortifying Knock (one action to Raise a Shield and then Trace a rune onto your shield). But the 'sword and board' style of using a shield and a weapon is practically unusable. I guess you could forgo tracing your runes, but then you are not using half of your class. Additionally, one of the artworks that is being used to showcase the runesmith appears to be a dwarf wielding a maul, a two-handed weapon. Yes, I know that this was preexisting artwork. But why choose to show an artwork that doesn't fit the class?

A solution that I came up with to this problem is having the hands used to hold smithing weapons also count as holding an artisan's toolkit. What are smithing weapons? They are the weapons referenced in the Smithing Weapon Familiarity feat. So weapons in the hammer, pick, and knife weapon group. My thought process here was "the exact tools in an artisan's toolkit depends on what craft the toolkit is for. A runesmith, being a smith, would likely have them be smithing tools, which would contain tools like a hammer."

I was wondering what other people's thoughts were about this idea?

The biggest erratas that I think are needed are the definition of what an instance of damage is, what happens if you become stunned on your turn (since you cannot act, does this mean your turn is instantly over?), and an errata for some premaster books to help them fit into the remaster (like how we got an errata for the dark archive and secrets of magic so that their cantrips would fit into the new remastered guidelines, i.e., no more spell mod to damage).

An example would be that some crossbows are still in the bow weapon group like the taw launcher and sukgung. Or how the hallowed necromancer dedication is a level 2 feat that has four requirements (expert in religion, good alignment, able to cast spells with spell slots, and able to cast necromancy spells), two of which are no longer make sense in the system (good alignment and able to cast necromancy spells), and the other two requirements cannot be met by any character at level 2 (a rogue or investigator are the only classes that can be an expert in religion at level 2, but neither gets spell slots).

I feel like looking at the Starlight Sentinel archetype from Tian Xia Character Guide would also be useful. As far as I'm aware it's the first instance of a ranged attack that uses your melee attack bonus to Strike, and also has a longer range than the solar shot, though I don't believe it has increments.

Solar Shot doesn't have range increments either. Graviton attunement has a maximum range of 15 feet (just 5 feet more than what you would have if your solar weapon has the reach trait!) while photon attunement has a maximum range of 30 feet.

If starships are going to be in the Starfinder Player Core or GM Core, then the playtest will probably have to finish in December, at the same time as the current playtest (since Player Core and GM Core are releasing next summer).

In that case, maybe the starship playtest will be released in October? That is when the other two playtest scenarios and the other playtest adventure is released. Maybe those have starship stuff?

Otherwise, I believe I heard that starship combat will not be a part of the same playtest as the mechanic and technomancer (although I do not have a source for this and I could be wrong). This might mean that we don't get starship combat until that playtest is complete.

SpontaneousLightning wrote:

The striker operative also has weird weapon proficiency. They end up with legendary proficiency with unarmed attacks

They actually do not get legendary proficiency with unarmed attacks. They start level 1 at expert with them, sure, but then only melee agile weapons and simple guns scale to master at level 5, unarmed attacks do not.

I actually missed that. That is probably a typo, but definitely needs to be addressed for the full release. I do stand by what I said when I said that their weapon proficiency is weird:

- Legendary in agile melee weapons (but not finesse melee weapons, which is strange because most pathfinder 2nd edition abilities that reference one also references the other, see the rogue's sneak attack, the investigator's devise a stratagem, or the swashbuckler's precise strike, all of which work with agile and finesse weapons).
- Legendary in simple guns, since they only trade their martial gun proficiency.
- Legendary in advanced guns, since they get that as a level 19 class feature.
- Master in unarmed attacks, despite starting as an expert.
- Master in martial guns, despite the fact that they are legendary in advanced guns. If you take a weapon familiarity feat, they usually state "for the sake of proficiency, treat advanced weapons as martial weapons". A striker operative with a weapon familiarity feat that gives them familiarity with an advanced gun (such as the aeon rifle from unconventional weaponry) is worse at using that weapon than a striker that doesn't have a weapon familiarity feat.
- Master in all other weapons.

The striker operative also has weird weapon proficiency. They end up with legendary proficiency with unarmed attacks and one-handed melee agile weapons, legendary proficiency in simple guns, master in martial guns, and then legendary in advanced guns (from the galaxy renowned feature). It seems strange that they are more proficiency in using advanced guns than martial guns.

It doesn't seem like anything stops you from have 4x Wands of Shardstorm rolling.

The rules of wielding items states

Some abilities require you to wield an item, typically a weapon. You’re wielding an item any time you’re holding it in the number of hands needed to use it effectively. When wielding an item, you’re not just carrying it around—you’re ready to use it. Other abilities might require you to be wearing the item, to be holding it, or simply to have it.

You can still get 2x wands of shardstorm online. Once you switch hands you are no longer wielding two of your wands and you no longer benefit from their free missiles.

Ever since the kineticist playtest was released I have been thinking of a goblin fire kineticist with the oracle archetype to get incendiary aura at level 4.

After watching Nonat1s kineticist preview, this idea seems like it will be even better, since kineticists now use con to hit with elemental blast (so they are less MAD then the playtest), and when they create their elemental aura, they can also use a one action elemental blast for free.

Burn It! would also increase the persistent fire damage (but sadly not the fire impulse damage) dealt by my arsonist goblin.