Witch already gets a decent number of trained skills (it doesn't get docked for being int based like the Wizard or Magus), so I don't think it needs more. Plus Wisdom is generally the better stat anyways so you don't really need to layer more on top of it imo... though if you really feel the need an extra trained skill or something wouldn't really amount to a lot.
Dragonchess Player wrote: I believe, as it was raised in the other thread, that the GM is confusing "meaningful" with "difficult." TBH I think this is reinforced somewhat by how the game is presented. When's the last time an AP had a combat that wasn't just fighting a group of enemies in a box? Tougher is basically the only knob some GMs might realize exists. For being such a combat focused game it's weird to me how little PF2 considers environmental design or alternative objectives or monster gimmicks when presenting combat design.
Perpdepog wrote:
I mean isn't hiding the trap what the dc is for? Perception gating doesn't mean it's hard to detect the trap, it means you are literally not allowed and utterly incapable of detecting the trap if you decided to play a fighter with a gun instead of a gunslinger even if you beat the dc by 10 or 20 or 50. Diagetically you can only really describe it as some sort of divine intervention, not the trap being designed more sneakily.
having guaranteed damage in your pocket for when you run into low hp enemies can be pretty great, tbh. More than a few times bad MAP or just luck has given like a 2 hp enemy an extra turn. And while the damage looks abysmal on paper, it's actually not quite as bad as it looks when you normalize for accuracy. Also being one action just makes it kind of a convenient for helping manage action economy.
Unicore wrote: No one in the party have perception on a fast proficiency track is a choice about as sensible as having no healer or no tank Anyone can be a healer with a little bit of feat investment in PF2. Having fast proficiency track is a choice of playing one of a very few specific number of classes with very specific mechanics and themes. If having someone with high proficiency is intended to be an adventuring requirement, Canny Acumen needs to give master perception and legendary at 13. Telling someone that a party must have a gunslinger or rogue or whatever because someone at Paizo decided to hard gate this one specific type of check is a clown show.
To be honest I think hazards are only part of it. Hazards are uniquely problematic because of how much they centralize mechanics (a hazard tends to stand alone a lot) but like- In general I feel like PF2 APs do a shockingly poor job of thinking through their combats. So many fights lack any dynamic components and tend to be wildly all over the place balance wise. I was recently chugging through an AP that kept insisting on using encounters with one or two level -1 enemies against a full party of people. So I'd send everyone to a battle mat, they'd all roll initiative, kill the enemy in a single hit before it could take a turn, and then move on. There wasn't even like a narrative pretense or mechanical gimmick to it the creature could only strike for like 1d4-1 damage and had no bearing on the plot. I've been playing APs since PF1 and across like a dozen of them I think there are maybe like... four or five good encounters across all of them. For how combat centric the game is there's a shocking lack of thought or effort put into fight design. Ascalaphus wrote:
i think simple hazards make the problem even worse, because a lot of simple hazards are just one shot maybe a party member takes a huge amount of damage and then it's over. The time decreases, but the interestingness craters even more. For me the best hazards are complex hazards with some interesting gimmick or important narrative feature to them. Since you can kind of play around hazards since they're stationary you want them to be something that entices the group in some way. Simple hazards tend to be the worst at this because it's just like... you open the door and the trap rolls high and now you're at low HP or maybe dying (... hell, one of the early PF2 playtest adventures had a trap that could massive damage someone to death if you found it early). Finoan wrote:
This flies in the face of the fact that hazards often have proficiency gating that sometimes means certain parties cannot solve the problem. You can run into a trap that nobody is allowed to detect because nobody decided to play one of the small handful of classes with high proficiency. So that's just not true. Besides, the solution to that is to make the hazards more dynamic and have more ways to overcome them.
Wendy_Go wrote: A small amount of fluid that only does damage because of how your physiology reacts to it, doesn't have any baseline effect; its effect is entirely due to your "weakness" to it. I mean yeah but that's not how Poison works in pathfinder. There's no physiological component. There's no selective immunity based on species, it's not like a substance commonly used by elves is poisonous to leshies. Poison as a damage type is indistinguishable from fire. You can even take instantaneously contact damage from poison just like a firebolt. Damage weaknesses don't really make sense and damage types don't particularly comport to reality... there's no real sense trying to force it by scrutinizing the logic.
BotBrain wrote: If the choice is between errata and people getting paid a better wage, I'm not going to go to miss the errata lmao. Luckily it's kind of hard to argue that's even a real choice to begin with. It's not like Paizo had some reputation for agile, responsive, and comprehensive errata in 2022 or 2021 or the 2010s that suddenly went away. Bringing up the union at all just feels like weird agenda pushing.
JiCi wrote: But you are readying to prepare for a charge, not reacting to it. ... What do you think the part where the pikemen plant their feet and adjust their grip and wait for the enemy to charge them is? Like I kind of get where you're coming from and Brace is not a good trait but this is like... the worst possible example you could pick because you're describing people literally readying and waiting for the enemy to come closer.
Teridax wrote:
There's a handful of specialty feats, most notably like ancestry feats that give you a circumstance bonus against a certain type of enemy. It's not common though. While I agree broadly about limiting stackability, I feel like it's not a bad design principle for martial class features to be uncategorized because they're more about the baseline assumptions of the class. Sneak attack, rage, exemplar immanences, etc. aren't really buffs they're core to how the class operates. Creating scenarios where rogues can't use the twin trait feels janky to me rather than sensible, even if it's somewhat of a niche issue.
Xenocrat wrote:
50 page thread with hundreds of FAQ requests where nobody can figure out how a certain ability works that gets hit with a "no clarification needed" post after like three years.
PossibleCabbage wrote: Weapon traits being very niche is just a thing. Like how often does Disarm or Razing come up? Sweep and Shove are nominally useful on paper but I've never seen them used to good effect. I mean that's fair but the nodachi also pays a huge amount of trait budget for brace so it's not mutually exclusive to also be a little bit down on that reality. It's an advanced weapon that is generally just worse than its martial counterparts if brace isn't working.
One problem with assigning like, prescriptive benefits like that is that players don't have that much control over their builds. You can't choose to switch out your precision damage for something slightly worse or different to better handle oozes, you just don't get your damage... and precision damage isn't widely available enough that balancing how much to invest in it is a consideration you can even make. Plus enemy typing just isn't consistent enough to even be able to make those balance calls. Many campaigns will never encounter precision immune enemies in any serious encounter. Some campaigns will be stuffed full of them such that you're advised to just not play those classes at all, so it doesn't really work as a balancing measure. Like an Ooze's statblock could just say "takes less damage from rogues, swashbucklers, and investigators" (maybe a couple other things that I'm missing) and practically very little would change. That's kinda stupid.
The communication is a bit of a bummer. I mean I will always want more rules discussion and errata and am somewhat confused by what Paizo's workflow looks like with the way some questions get handled. But finding out it's been canceled only because a CM started digging around, only a few days before the last possible interpretation of fall, when the implication seems to be that they decided against publishing Fall errata a while ago but didn't want to bother saying anything is kind of a bummer. Especially considering the last errata was on the small side, and that this whole periodic errata thing was an idea the company itself put out there and has already seemingly decided to move on from. Everything else aside, the vibe I keep getting that like... every few months we send Maya into the offices to skitter around looking for clues to bring back to us is jut a little... weird? There has to be a better way to deliver information.
exequiel759 wrote:
The phrasing is a bit adversarial, but brace does mean you're spending actions now for an attack that might never happen. If you get your readied action and reactive strike off it's pretty powerful, but that's still a lot of work and a gamble and pretty late game (since you need multiple reactions to get both). Deadly is okay, but it's ultimately kind of a wash, good burst but the lower base damage tends to average out not in favor of the deadly weapon unless really skew accuracy in your favor. A braced nodachi crit is basically the hardest hitting weapon attack in the game, which is cool, but brace is so hard to work with and as a daily driver it has on real advantages over any of the stock d10 polearms, which feels a bit bad when it's an advanced weapon so even being able to wield it is a chore.
tbf d8 two hander is a bit of a hard sell, especially on an advanced weapon. the deadly mostly makes up for that, but you can access d10 reach without having to buy advanced weapon proficiency. Ofc Nodachi has brace, and gets the honor of being the highest damage brace weapon in the game, which by extension means it's the best weapon for readied strikes in the game... but idk how often I see readied strikes and I don't think I've ever seen the brace trait used in a real game. So it's kind of... extremely good at a very niche activity in a game where investing in a weapon is a massive budgetary bottleneck. Rough. Better than the glaive at least, since deadly d12 is actually enough deadly to balance out the trait cost.
benwilsher18 wrote: What does everyone else think about precision immunity? Bad mechanic that just makes certain classes weirdly terrible in certain encounter setups. PF2 doesn't have the per-character tactical nuance to make this kind of encounter fun, so you end up just feeling s~#$ty whenever this happens. Same reason premaster golems sucked, because if you were the wrong kind of caster you could easily end up with just a fight where you can't meaningfully participate.
Perpdepog wrote: Do we have a definite date for Tech Core yet? It could have been pushed back to make room for the playtest. [url]https://paizo.com/releasedate[/url] runs through march 2026 and there's no mention of tech core... or any major new PF2 rulebook release (there's a new lost omens book in march though). Hard to say if anything's been pushed because or not because all we know is it exists and there is/was supposed to be a ship playtest. Paizo's been even less talkative than normal post sf2/battlecry/draconic codex.
I have to agree that examples are a pretty decent stand-in because they at least tell us where the developers' heads are at. One of the problems with this discussion is the single example in the book completely skirts around the part people are actually confused about. Trip.H wrote: The very opening line of Resistance clearly shows that you can only ever reduce damage via type-resistance to 0. Well yeah, that's the RAW/RAI, but you've been sitting here insisting that people can't/shouldn't break the damage up into individual blocks, in which case you can absolutely reduce 5 from the total number... the fact that you're immediately falling back to breaking the damage into individualized blocks to handle resistance kind of shows why that framework doesn't work well when applied rigorously. No disagreement that this described approach makes more sense. Quote:
I dunno, if I'm reading this right this scenario leads to damage punching past resistance that should negate it because the single resistance 'slot' is being applied elsewhere, and it involves making an ad hoc decision on absolute resistance vs practical resistance that doesn't actually exist in the rules. Both of these are definitely problematic and neither issue occurs if you just individualize the damage types. There's further weirdness in the way you can manipulate those numbers too. Increasing the fire damage by 5 (so 6 F 5 B) increases the actual of the damage of the attack by 4 but converts it all to bludgeoning. This doesn't really feel like 'it just works' territory when the interactions are so obtuse.
Trip.H wrote:
But in turn your proposed change has other knock on effects, like letting you resist more damage than you take (if an enemy has fire resistance 5, adding 1 fire damage to an attack is actually a debuff), makes creatures with previously stackable weaknesses stronger and ones with previously stackable resistances weaker, and makes the thaumaturge notably worse by making their martial buff compete directly with other forms of weakness. It's definitely a solution, and maybe even better overall if implemented properly, but it's not some consequence free panacea either. The first problem alone I know has been enough of a dealbreaker in previous discussions to just leave some people playing it the other way instead.
Trip.H wrote: If that procedure is being run without special pleading hypocrisy, then every type-instanced bucket is genuinely a separate instance, and each one gets reduced by the Holy resist independent of each other. I think one of the reasons you tend to have so much difficulty with the rules is that you like to get away from arguing the actual point of contention and instead create these fanciful edge cases that do not actually exist to debate instead. Like, nobody does this and there's no RAW or RAI anywhere to suggest you should apply the same resistance ten times to a single attack or whatever. It's not a thing. When a major component of your rhetoric involves inventing positions that nobody made to argue against, it might be worth reconsidering your approach, because it means you're either building a strawman or fundamentally misunderstanding the entire topic. Neither of these are great things for building understanding of the game.
Trip.H wrote:
Almost none of this is correct
Finoan wrote:
Nah, more like I just found the logic of "foes and enemies mean different things" to be really weird to parse and sort of an objective-first reading so I was curious what your broader logic was. Thank you for sharing it!
I'd be kind of fascinated to sit in at one of these tables where a dude with trick magic item, alchemist and psychic dedications is completely trivializing the game because it's so far away from any experience I've ever had as a GM or player, but some people here seem to swear by it. Tridus wrote: It gives you a LOT for a single feat, including the signature ability of the class. I don't agree with the 'signature ability' part. Amps are a unique presentation of the mechanic, but focus spells are basically never gatekept. Being able to pick up a psychic's focus spells via dedication is wildly unremarkable, you can do this with almost any caster. The bigger problem with the Psychic itself is its innately better focus recharging is relatively much less valuable post remaster and Unleash simply does not carry weight for the class' inferior spellcasting and weak chassis. But no amount of nerfing the dedication will improve those things.
Finoan wrote:
What do yo think the word means, then?
In addition to issues with the mechanics definitions and errata, it's also just sort of awkwardly implemented and leads to odd scenarios that feel more like clumsy happenstance than well thought out design by making class feats and archetyping awkward, and interacting weirdly with certain items or features that key to class DC. It just doesn't feel like intentional or clever game design when a druid passes over on something because it uses the class dc that doesn't scale for them, or when a high level artifact with a class DC feature is best used by a Soldier or Kineticist. It's also not really a diegetic feature and nothing you can ever improve directly, so a lot of times when I'm actively dealing with class DC it's in an instance where an unclear interaction or dumb quirk causes it to make the game worse in some small way.
benwilsher18 wrote: they also alter it so that it can't be used with Focus spells full stop. If the concern is magi archetyping too much a better fix would be to add an in class focus attack spell. That would take pressure off archetyping without gutting certain cool build designs or any other fallout.
Kalaam wrote:
I mean to be clear, psychic dedication is a feat for a focus spell. That's a very nice feat, but not particularly out of bounds with other focus granting options. It's op compared to fighter dedication, but only notably good when we focus on feats that people actually want to take. Do you want Blessed One nerfed too? Quote: Alchemist shouldn't give you full alchemy that easily. I admittedly don't quite get this one. Alchemist archetype never gives you full alchemy. You can sink as many as six feats into trying to upgrade your alchemy and still only have a fraction of the crafting power and wore DC scaling than a normal one. That's a far cry from full alchemy for no investment.
I'm not sure broad changes are warranted here. Psychic dedication is cool and unobtrusive in many of its use cases. Removing the amp makes a lot of nonproblematic builds worse and less interesting, while also doing nothing to buff the psychic itself either. The problem here is the very specific mix of imaginary weapon on a starlit span magus. and even that is more about starlit span and the magus' limited good internal focus options (really the magus in general) than it is about IW (though IW's amp is obviously still a lot for them). Nuking psychic dedication just feels like a lot of extra collateral damage and doesn't even really solve either of the big problems here.
glass wrote:
Pretty sure that should be 120 GP, or double the price of a PF2 wand. A scroll of cl1 clw is 25 gp vs 750 for a wand, so 30x the price. A first level PF2 scroll is 4 gp so that'd be 120 for a wand.
Loreguard wrote:
In PF1 a wand costs 30x what a scroll costs. There's a pretty notable bulk discount there, but that also makes them rather pricy. Ported 1:1 into PF2, a wand of a 1st level spell would be priced similarly to a 4th-5th level magic item, and a wand of a 4th level spell (the cap for PF1 wands) would be priced like a 12th level magical item. That means they aren't super affordable until you radically outlevel the spell being cast. On level magic items are pretty pricy from a wealth perspective too, so you're looking at waiting even later before they become particularly affordable. This makes the PF1 wand mostly useful for a spell you want to spam but has enough of an evergreen effect that you don't mind if the spell itself is way out of date. The classic PF1 example is cheap wands of healing that you can spam to quickly get people to full hp, but that's less enticing (though still somewhat appealing) given how many other forms of cheap healing exist in PF2... though I guess you could flip that around and say that something like this means a mid level party would be less pressured to have feats invested in out of combat healing. PF1 wands were also good for very low end utility spells with static or semi static effects where you didn't need any kind of scaling. A lot of these don't exist in PF1 (heightened awareness, rope trick), or would be better as PF2 style wands (2nd rank tailwind, alarm), but there's still some stuff that might be appealing (like fleet step). In PF1 that's kind of where the value of wands ended, because DCs rank based and boosting CL on wands was expensive... but PF2 doesn't have CL and proficiency gives spells automatic scaling, so PF1 wands in PF2 would be really good on spammable buff/debuff spells. A wand of third level fear would give you 50 castings of a reasonably good AoE debuff. A wand of first level bless would let you stand in for a Bard, a little bit. Stuff like that. There's definitely some edge cases that might be weird and toe-stepping here, but potentially you can also kind of see a way in which these wands might let you use low level spells to stand-in for certain party composition features, once the party is high enough level to make them cheap, at least.
I think the better solution to this kind of problem is to just provide classes with more internal complexity knobs, tbh. Separating them into bespoke tiers does the system a bit of a disservice because in many respects complexity can be non-diegetic and because of that there's no reason separate tiers of complexity shouldn't be able to co-exist (like they can already do right now!). Creating a separate 'lever' for complexity that also comes with its own narrative implications just creates a new way to restrict players because now you're tying some narrative element to character complexity when there's no reason for that connection to exist. Ironically I feel like in a way it's just short of shuffling around the existing problem. Instead of it being difficult to up-complexity a barbarian or down-complexity a wizard this just moves the issue to some other narrative abstraction.
One upside to focusing on inter-class balance and putting things in unique buckets is that it sort of limits the amount of damage a single flawed option can cause by making it not load bearing. Like, bad balance sucks, but having a really bad option within a class is somewhat mitigated by prioritizing some level of functionality between the classes, since it's more likely to just kill a specific idea than kill an entire class. Balance within each silo is definitely PF2's weakest area... and sometimes I really wonder how they justify publishing certain options that seem so much worse than their counterparts. PF1's problem was largely in the latter respect, where at some level certain classes or concepts couldn't avoid a bad option because the good option didn't exist. Like:
Sigh wrote: On the one hand, yes I do believe that PF1's ability to make Level 20 Angel Summoner as well as the ability to make a Level 20 BMX Bandit to be a strength of the system rather than a weakness partly due to the system being more simulationist and based on a player's freedom of choice to build their character however they want. But I mean this is kind of a lie, isn't it? They can't "build their character however they want" you can build a character to whatever standards of content Paizo chose to publish, with certain characters having more of a gradient than others. The ultimate tragedy of the whole Angel Summoner/BMX bandit thing is not that the Angel Summoner can be strong, but that there's an arbitrary cap on how good the Bandit is allowed to be. You can build Angel Summoner down to a level of acceptable play to be nice to the Bandit, but you can only build the Bandit up to a certain point, after which no particularly empowering options exist. There's no mechanical or narrative necessity to this, merely a quirk of the fact that the company publishing the game didn't write similar options for the Bandit. Bust-R-Up wrote: To a player who "wants to cast spells" those classes represent the same thing but take different levels of player effort to get the same in character results. .. Do they thought? The underlying mechanics are similar but the fantasy and type of things being done between the two classes are significantly different. Very little I want to accomplish by being a Wizard is redundant with what I want to accomplish as a Bard. Asking me to play a Bard instead of a Wizard does nothing for me if I wanted something similar to the Wizard. Trip.H wrote:
IDK I feel like this assesment comes on a little strong? It's not a good feat, and I'm a little bewildered at who decided it should be 1/day. It definitely should be 1/hour or 1/ten minutes or something but... I'd probably still pick it over Inured to Alchemy. Arguably the worst thing about this feat is that Guidance exists which makes any other form of +1 to skill checks feel kind of redundant. Though even then an hour long bonus might be okay if you're making checks frequently.
Sigh wrote: the complaints of 1e GMs who came to Paizo complaining that their players had too many ways of affecting the narrative in any meaningful fashion. This is such an oddly antagonistic way to describe the GM-player relationship. Plus you realize a 1e GM can effortlessly stop you from doing anything they don't want to at any time too, right? You're always constrained by what the table will allow you to get away with in every system.
Witch of Miracles wrote: These kinds of commenters aren't unique to PF2E. What's unique to PF2E, though, is the quantity and concentration of them. It's... really not. Like even remotely. 5e forums are this way. Lancer communities are this way. PF1 and 3.5 were this way when they were more popular. Even more expressively narrative systems like World of Darkness get this kind of talk. "TTRPG company released something that's really good/really bad and people are talking about it" is just like, a standard component of discourse in these kinds of games. The variance you see is mostly a matter of how crunchy the system is, you see it more in PF2 and less in PBTA, because the system rules are more/less weighty. But like... people talking more about the crunch of a crunch heavy system than a system that isn't meant to be crunchy also is kind of a self evident revelation. Like IDK you're just describing one of the most normal aspects of online discussion for crunchy TTRPGs and then framing it as something special about PF2. The reality is this is just how people talk about games like this. Like people complaining about how bad the 5e ranger is is basically its own meme.
Witch of Miracles wrote: The balance-heavy ethos draws in a crowd that's fairly picky about how different classes and options stack up against each other; a single option out of whack really starts to dominate the discussion. I'm really confused as to why you think this is some special feature of PF2. Like I can't really think of any crunch heavy, splatbook based tabletop where people don't talk about new options in a power sense if they're really out of line one way or another. It would be really bizarre if people didn't. The only TTRPGs where this doesn't feature prominently are ones that aren't mechanics forward and/or don't rely on splatbooks (and even then you'll still find mechanically minded discussions on stuff, just less). Quote: If I were paizo, I don't know if I'd want to make another system where I'd have to keep such a tight eye on the content of every single splatbook to keep those more vocal parts of the playerbase from being annoyed .. I also don't really get the suggestion that quality assurance is primarily an issue of staving off angry fanboys. Do you think there isn't any inherent value in trying to deliver a well written product? .. I'm also not even sure if the idea lines up with reality. Paizo gets dinged in community circles arguably even more often for being too conservative in its design choices, not too out there... Paizo products also come out with a lot of editing mistakes that sometimes get corrected very slowly. Not that they're releasing bad products, but it doesn't really suggest there's some intense hypervigilance in QA and editing that's being implied here.
Castilliano wrote: It's that unarmed attacks are not weapons, natural or otherwise. They're also not attacks... and they function like weapons in every way except in ways specific to weapons themselves. The terminology is kind of terrible, tbh. Can't blame people too much for struggling with the wording a bit.
I kind of really dislike the notion that because they primarily use as same language they "never progressed as a culture" as if they're like fundamentally stunted in some way. Language is an important part of culture, but there are dozens of societies both in game and in real life that share languages in common while still having deep and rich cultural uniqueness. I really dislike and vehemently disagree with the suggestion that not having a unique language makes some group culturally stunted or lesser.
pauljathome wrote:
I sort of disagree. Supernova is a nice feat, but I also think that if broadly speaking a class doesn't work right unless you take certain specific load bearing feat choices it's still probably fair to call the class generally undertuned. The really good classes in SF/PF2 have a wide variety of options because they just work on a basic level. Like there's no way we can call a class healthily balanced when the advice starts with picking some very specific feats and probably ignoring a bunch of your core class features in the process.
Tridus wrote: But in this edition the class has really lost its way. I mean let's be real here, it never really had a way. The biggest thing PF2 did to destroy its 'identity' over older editions was make it less overpowered, which says a lot about what the class actually does. That said, having a class that's generic and self referential isn't necessarily bad. The wizard is mostly just a little bit underbaked and saddled with a terrible casting mechanic.
Red Griffyn wrote: The fact that people deride the attempt to structure arguments and cite rules is insane. For me, any attempt to state what is RAW with no reference to actual rules text is a big red flag for 'this is just my opinion/homebrew'. Think there's something about stones and glass houses here, since most of your position is kind of just... vibes based and has nothing to do with RAW. Don't get me wrong that's a fine way to make judgements on ambiguous stuff like this for your games, but it's weird to try to assert some sort of moral superiority about RAW here when you're drifting off into irrelevant tangents about real world historical techniques and 'metas' that don't really have anything to do with rules either.
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