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Part of the problem I think is that the Wizard has a really weak internal definition. Like.. it's dude who casts spells and has a spellbook but those are all pretty low level concepts. I feel like right now the Wizard is almost more defined negatively (as in, in terms of the things they can't do, like heal very well) than in terms of like... what they're actually selling.

Looking at other media, wizard fantasies either tend to be very generalist (the 'I know all the magic' type) or very specific (themed spellcasters) and the PF2 wizard kind of.. doesn't do great at either? Instead we get a class that's very self referential. It's the PF version of the D&D wizard and most of its mechanics are informed by the history of how D&D wizards have historically worked. Ironically despite the class being open ended and based on an archetypal fantasy trope I think the PF2 wizard is a really bad starting point for actually making something in line with the broader fantasy.

That said I think if the goal is 'fixing the wizard' some of the consideration here is too grandiose. If the class had more interesting focus spells and a few more unique feats it'd probably be fine. In terms of "right here right now" problems I'd say the main things are that the class just has such anemic focus spells and class features, the chassis is so empty.

It was a huge step back imo to remove school based class features in the PF1 to PF2 transition, and an even bigger miss to not reintroduce them with the way schools were redefined in the remaster.

I don't think they're being willfully obtuse. Paizo went out of their way to say "You can only add cantrips" and then decided to say "Hold" instead of "hold and learn" or anything more explicitly clear in their description.

I agree with you in how to run it, but the errata is genuinely terribly worded and we don't need to give Paizo a pass by pretending people are acting maliciously for reading it at face value.

I mean yeah, that seems natural, doesn't it? Spellstrike itself has nothing to cause provoke, but the subordinate actions might.

In the same way Sudden Charge could provoke from movement (twice even) but also still trigger like, an opportune riposte at the end with the strike.

Depends on the game it's being run in I guess. This would obviously bump up player power a bit since everyone's rocking optimal stats

There's also maybe a consideration of where the power boost goes. Giving characters an extra boost and flaw primarily benefits classes with obvious dump stats and does little for builds that don't want to dump anything. The latter builds are admittedly rarer, but also tend to be worse as a matter of course so like-... is that really a good direction to go for raising the power level? The game already makes building outside your wheelhouse kind of suck I'm not sure yet another layer of that is the right direction to go.

If we're looking at ways to hand out free power/more stat flexibility I think I'd rather see it go the other way and give some incentive to buff tertiary stats because right now that's just always the wrong choice.

but you are forced to decide whether you want to pick an ancestry that you actually want (i.e. flavor) or one that has the mechanical support your build could use (i.e. crunch).

Two free boosts already solves this problem (outside feat/heritage/size issues which are outside the scope of this discussion). You really don't need an extra layer of min maxing on top of that.

I'm not a fan of tying ancestries to classes, but with fixed boosts and flaws you're often pushed towards/away from certain ancestries for builds. The variant rule of two free boosts was introduced to remove that problem, yet never fully succeeded at it.

Like, why can't Kholos come with a Charisma flaw while Samsarans can? As a player you're forced to decide between an ancestry that works great and an ancestry that you like.

I don't think that's really reasonable at all. 2 boosts lets you do whatever you want. 3 boosts 1 flaw is just a slightly more min-maxed version of that.

The idea that 2 free boosts is somehow heavily restricting you feels really off base to me.

There's definitely a level of old school conservatism, but GnG to me feels noticeably worse than the books immediately before or after it almost across the board. The Inventor is a mess but the premaster Gunslinger was kind of a disaster too.

... Even by premaster standards stuff like Overdrive makes no sense. It was the first time we had an unreliable damage gimmick and yet it was also designed to be noticeably worse than most of its competitors at the same time. Rolling dice to get half into to damage was never not a joke.

Like, I think the biggest effect the Remaster had on the Inventor is that a lot of the other conspicuously bad classes (like the Swashbuckler or Alchemist and even the Gunslinger and Investigator to some extent) got genuinely meaningful improvements while the Inventor's updates didn't do as much to improve the core issues.

... Mark's suggestion of just nerfing all spellcasters in order to make Explode look better is kind of wild tbh.

The armor inventor especially suffers kind of hard from its design and system dynamics.

The class is pretty mediocre overall but at least adding traits to a weapon or commanding a companion can provide proactive benefits that feel meaningful (even if they're not super amazing either), but armor really suffers from just like... not giving you a lot of novel stuff. You're slightly tougher but also there's restrictions on that toughness because PF2 is really careful about handing out defenses and there's so little the innovation enables.

... You really have to wonder what happened when Paizo was writing GnG it's such an underbaked book.

To me I feel like the end result is pretty similar. Like- the other game has lots of one off setting pieces but Golarion has lots of semi-self contained regions that fulfill a similar purpose.

Hell, one of their favorite aspects of the "main" setting, they said, is that almost every adventure seems to take place within about a thousand miles

This is an interesting criticism to me because I feel like this has been a common complaint about Pathfinder, historically. That so much adventure content happens to take place in like, one designated area of the map.

... I also wonder what about your players make them dislike changing settings around the globe but like changing planar settings. Having a game move or take place in an entirely different reality seems like an even more extreme case of just having something happen in another country, so I wonder why one feels good and the other feels bad.

but it's not clear that interpreting the whole thing to be disrupted is invalid.

What's your argument here for why that happens?

a necromancer ability that's not a necromancer ability seems like a really clumsy way to try to try to build a restriction.

.. I'm not even sure if the 'broken' outcome is really a problem anyways. The corpse making strikes using its own statistics even when Commanded is both intuitive and mechanically reasonable.

- The reanimated creature gets all weapon/armor runes whereas Duplicate Foe only gets weapon potency runes.

A bit off topic but man what does that even mean for Duplicate Foe? How do you even adjudicate 'only potency runes' when monster statistics are so divorced from their gear??

I get wanting to future proof against hijacking abilities but I dislike how hyperspecific it ends up being. Since you need an enemy to be a heavy bruiser that relies on raw strike damage without critical gimmicks in order to have value.

I get why it's the way it is but I feel like it's going to be easy to end up in a lot of fights where there aren't great targets because you're fighting enemies whose power budgets lean heavily into gimmicks. Especially with how high level it is. Obviously there are a lot of good bruisers at high level too but idk feels like it could end up being annoying for all the wrong reasons.

Also I've seen some arguing over how it works with weapon based effects. Someone argued "don't apply added effects" is meant to be a hard rule while another person thought "the only magic items" and "since the creature doesn't have special abilities" should mean that added effects from weapons still work. I feel like it's pretty obvious but monster stat blocks intentionally don't really respect the gear/character split anyways.

I think you're overthinking it. Death is just Death.

It's not a death effect so you don't get to use anything that interacts with death effects, but it still just kills you at the end.

I'm excited for both classes but a little worried. They were rough in the playtest and the post playtest blog was not great. They're very mechanics focused classes but their mechanics did not come together very well. Both of them felt so conservatively designed after some of the recent Ws Paizo has put out.

Hoping that comes around for the final book.

So what, exactly, is your Wizard going to do when the boss battle shows up on combat 11 of your dungeon run? How about combat 26 of the day?

Probably talk to the GM after session because throwing the through 26 combats in a row with no rest is kind of demented. Especially if the wizard walked into the game expecting a normal experience.

We've had dev comments in the past alluding to one top level spell per encounter being a baseline balance assumption, going eight times beyond that starts to feel kind of spiteful.

Correct. Signature Spell just says "one spell of that rank" ... so you pick any spell.

Then at a later level when you have more room in your repertoire you learn the spell so you can y'know, use it and do all your stuff. No hot swapping required.

Agree with Teridax. Far from the worst class in the game but the Inventor only really makes sense if you stop thinking of it as an "inventor" and just start thinking of it as a plain ass martial with a slightly customized piece of gear.

you are only getting one spell of your new rank, which would mean that there's only one option for that signature spell.

Signature spell says spell of that rank not spell of that rank in your repertoire.

... Yeah I think communication in general seems pretty important? It's weird to me to imagine not like, talking out even the most vanilla idea.

That said I absolutely run into a lot of people who treat rarity as a Very Serious Warning List and see uncommon+ as a hard barrier and common as absolutely sacred and untouchable.

While rarity can be helpful, a lot of the new GMs I work with have to end end up training themselves off rarity at some point because the initial impression is so consistently to treat it as much more meaningful than it is.

And then the end result is the GM just hand examining everything anyways which kind of defeats the purpose of rarity as a shorthand signal.

I mean yeah the long duration spell that does damage every turn isn't very good if you're in a short combat and aren't able to hit enough enemies.

Also, water breathing sucks if you're on land and fly has marginal utility in narrow tunnels.

Teleport is the ur example of "Uncommon because of its effects on the campaign" and then they added a non-rarity locked wizard school that gives you teleport so like I don't even know what the hell we're doing with rarity anymore.

But its not 6d12 from an 8th rank slot. it's 6d12 per round, with a debuff on fail and also several other bonus benefits for the caster.

I dislike +2 scaling in general bcuz it makes odd levels so janky but that aside thunderbolt is still doing a lot here.

The rarity system is one of the many examples of tedium and conflict being excised from the 2e engine for the benefit of the GM...

As a forever GM I can't really agree at all.

The rarity system wears too many hats (an item might be rarity locked because it's narratively disruptive, because it's literally just less common, or because the devs couldn't be assed to balance it).

Worse, because it's a bespoke list of items, it's in my experience led players to be much more hostile to the idea of general ban lists. In every other system in the world, GMs tailoring options is pretty normal... but because PF2 bakes in GM-permissive options, it's led to players being much less comfortable with 'their' options (i.e. common things) being restricted.

... And then the whole concept of rarity as a mechanism for requiring GM permission gets nuked anyways because common options that grant access exist.

While self activation would be nice.. the scenario where nobody on either side of a combat uses any magic at all is so specific given how PF2 works it almost feels like something you'd have to try for most of the time.

Gunslinger is kind of the perfect second example here. "Fighter accuracy + extra" sounds really scary on paper but when you look at actual mechanics and weapon choice it's just... there.

Operative also gets the illusion of looking stronger than it is because in pure SF content it's the only martial with normal martial mechanics. When your competition as a striker are the envoy and solarian ... even inventors start to look kinda scary.

Even then the best things about the Operative is more a few specific feats than the base mechanics people are hyping up.

Seems to me the or/and is important. If you only have one: double range, -1 penalty. if you have both, quadruple range no penalty.

It feels like the main issue here is just that 10m blocks makes for a really awkward timescale... but that's not really new anyways. Premaster people were having this same conversation about medicine checks and lay on hands and normal refocusing.

The actual mechanical effect itself (more staying power in combats) has been extremely beneficial to most circumstances, and makes longer combats especially much less punishing for spellcasters.

The "glory days" you describe of casters falling apart in long combats and having overbearing pressure to make specific purchasing decisions just to compensate for failures in their features was, frankly, trash. The game is much better with a reduced pressure on that.

The characters who've generally been hurt by this change also usually suffering from a secondary problem. Characters with bad focus spells feel worse in a game where focus spells are more accessible, but... like the problem there is the class having terrible options. Obviously that's not going to be great.

It seems like a lot of groups will now blame the GM for this kind of encounter pacing any time it shows up

I mean yeah, if a GM starts running their game in such a way as that certain classes get much worse and unfun to play, people aren't going to be super happy about it. Especially if there's no forewarning about it.

Players might also get frustrated if they bring a barbarian to a table only for the GM to unexpectedly run a game with very few combats or physical challenges.

Or a wizard to a campaign that suddenly spends a huge amount of time in a dead magic zone.

Or an investigator to a campaign they thought would have intrigue but ends up consisting of lots of unconnected encounters and straight forward dungeon crawling.

It's the same system so we've more or less been letting people pick freely, relevant to tone and setting (i.e. tech weapons and gear are probably out in regular Ptahfinder content).

Class wise most of them drop in pretty seamlessly, except for ranged soldiers and ranged operatives. If anything the problem is less Starfinder content disrupting the game and more that Starfinder classes kind of suck. Dropping a Solarian next to a normal PF martial usually just means the Solarian regretting their life choices for half the campaign until they get some okay powers.

We hear about Razmir using a spell to destroy an entire city and everyone in it. These are that sort of spell, and it adds another layer of scam to what he's doing if his biggest feat of magic was a one-time-only trick.

... While it's impressive, leveling a single city is kind of... weirdly underwhelming for a spell that leaves your soul permanently marked.

Which is sort of my impression of the system in general. The spells are genuinely neat but some of them seem weirdly tame considering the metaphysical implications.

It sort of feels like the "once only" restriction is to just keep them from being abused but in a really over dramatic way that kind of overshoots.

BotBrain wrote:

I cannot see paizo launching their own SRD. They supposedly don't even have the funds to allow a third party website to use pictures due to the risk of unauthorised use, where are they going to get the money to launch an expansive website that would need constant updates?

The most that is going to happen is Paizo will christen demiplane as the new official source, and honestly I don't even know if they'll do that, at least not this close to the dispute with AoN.

It's not about "funds to allow a third party website to use pictures". It's about the cost of lawyers to draft special agreements (and maintain them) and also to monitor unauthorized use by other entities (which have easy access to the pictures for unauthorized use). I don't know what Paizo financial situation is, but I think you're grossly misunderstanding the scope of the cost to Paizo in terms of maintaining lawyers for this activity and defending against unauthorized use which can lead to battles and loss of ownership (if not executed in a timely fashion). For Paizo it likely boils down to not gaining much from this, while having this expense that doesn't generate much of a return. And, considering what AoN will actually lose (mostly pictures) it isn't a huge negative impact to the community or the usability of AoN's site.

An analogy (albeit a poor one) would be deciding to stop loaning your lawn mower to a friend who said they pay you every time they used it. Except they don't use it, so you don't get paid for it. And you actually have to pay for them not use it because you drafted up some legal documents that require you to pay fees for the arrangement. It's not that you actually care that much about them using your lawnmower. Or even not get paid. But you're kind of annoyed about having to pay fees to maintain an arrangement that isn't really benefiting you.

This is giving Paizo way too much deference here. Maintaining a long term stable license with straight forward terms should have a near zero cost.

Using your analogy, why are you hiring a lawyer to audit your lawnmower sharing agreement often enough that you're claiming it's a significant expense? That's weird af.

before AON got their partnership people linked to that (or d20pfsrd back in the day) so I don't really see that changing.

If you want official and online... buy stuff on Demiplane. That's your other choice.

I don't think there's anything to really 'refute' here. Yes, official backing is nice, but Paizo decided they don't want that.

I think turning away from AoN is giving the corporatocracy a win they don't deserve, but if it's a dealbreaker for you that's fair.

That said I feel like if you jump into rules discussions calling AON links fake, it's not going to be really helpful.

I'm not sure where people are finding such bad faith in the blog!

Between the very classically corporate ip theft/anti piracy talk, the questionable financial claims (how often are they reviewing the contract?) , and ending it by taking pot shots at AoN there's just not a lot to really make Paizo look good here.

If this really is a reaction to AoN's statement it's even worse because that means this is their idea of damage control.

I doubt there would be so much vitriol and threats of boycotting if this had been a unified statement of the evolving relationship between two parties instead of one dropping a bomb on a justifiably gun-shy community

I mean, yeah. I'm sure Paizo would have wanted more time to spin this but that's not really necessarily a point for them either. I'm certainly not going to blame AoN for Paizo's decision here.

I wanted to avoid passing judgement because I was sure there was more to the story but man that blog post is extremely disappointing to read.

Also things like the Reaper, like it doesn't adjust your martial proficiency in the same way the Warpriest does. It's just slapping medium armor and martial weapons on a 13th level expert martial progression.

This is wild in the same book as magus with the same casting progression and martial scaling.

It's clear where a single thing is an activity or the activity itself has the trait that is being disrupted, but it's less clear when its a subordinate action since the rest of the actions in it may not be impacted at all (and may not even be able to be disrupted by the reaction).

I feel like the answer there has to be that only the thing that actually interacts with the mechanic does. There's no real reason to assume disrupting a stride would necessitate disrupting whatever comes after.

tbh I really like the fact that the magus has some friction around its core mechanic. Having to consider my action economy frequently is genuinely interesting gameplay and something so few classes think about in PF2. I tried playing a starlit span magus once, where you just spellstrike and recharge every turn and it was honestly one of the worst play experiences ever (even though it was quite strong).

Plus like, nobody else is doing that. If you want a super reliable gimmick that works every turn, you've got basically the rest of the class roster to pick from. There's no reason to try to go after magus too.

I agree that having blood vendetta be permanent is clearly bad and not how the spell should be run but "it ends the effect rather than removes it" is kind of some really reaching logic too.

Since it's mostly more low level slots I don't think the buff is as huge as it might look initially.

But it does make me wonder if there's something we don't know about the Necromancer, because it was already kind of feeling like.

It'll be kind of goofy to see osteo armaments necros flailing around with terrible combat stats while magi get to cast as good as them while also being a highly competent martial.

People (myself included) always ask for new content for the old classes, but the common consensus of most of the new stuff that sneaks into each book (battle harbinger, munitions master, vindicator, etc) usually isn't well received, with only a handful of things in each book becoming liked by the community as a whole.

Yeah, but people being critical of bad content is not the same as people not wanting that content.

But "leaves a square during a move action" includes a move action, definitionally. The trigger was a move action, because you're leaving a square during a move action. Like it says move action right there.

Conceptually, it seems Paizo has been scraping the bottom of the class barrel for a couple years now

wild.

Friends, I know all the counter-arguments about leaving a square opening up the possibility for a critical-induced disruption. Even though it is not written like this in the feat.

I still stand by my reading as it makes the most sense to me. And it serves me well in this here case.

Genuinely confused at what you're suggesting her, the disruption is literally written explicitly into the feat. Like it literally just says "you disrupt that action" I don't really understand what the counter position here even is.

Unfortunately both your questions hinge on understanding how gravity works in encounter mode, something which is surprisingly poorly defined.

Under normal circumstances, I don't think gravity would trigger Tangled Forest, because gravity isn't something you try to do and Tangled Forest specifies 'tries to move', nor would it apply to Stand Still because falling isn't an action.

But the megaladon ability includes 'splashes back down into the water' is explicitly part of the action.

So I think the sanest ruling here is that the action is disrupted but then gravity operates normally because neither action would stop falling.

Since Tangled Forest only applies for the one action, normal gravity would activate immediately afterwards.

In practice this means most of the time both abilities would technically activate but provide no real benefits (depending on how you specifically adjudicate falling).

Usually they don't feel that much better than a normal spell, but only getting one use for much of your game, maybe two at certain levels, and hopefully three if you have a really long game, is noticeably restrictive.

I mean they probably shouldn't feel better than normal spells since they're encounter based... and with remaster rules, it's not hard to get 2/3 per encounter even at low levels.

The biggest problem I run into is that their balancing is so haphazard. One option might have a build defining focus spell that your whole character pivots around and one might have a throwaway utility ability you use once the whole campaign and sometimes those options are put right next to each other on the same class even... but that's kind of more a general problem with subclass design.

Mathfinder has a video up showing off some magus changes, looks cool. And it's confirmed it has psychic spell slot progression which is great for you magus players

Psychic continuing to suffer generational Ls in the remaster.

Man I was really curious what the "see how the devs have taken feedback" bit was going to look like. The class is in an alarmingly rough spot and I'm really curious if they're going to simplify it or let it remain complicated but improve the payouts or... just call it good.

I feel like right now the class has some interesting mechanical processes but it's... so bad.

In 95% of the games I run if a player said they wanted to play it, I'd either have to tell them no or ask everyone at the table if they want to change to the tone of the game into a joke campaign for this one.

lmao that'd be so mean to just do to someone. I get some people don't like bard style characters but just announcing someone's character idea is only suitable as a joke as like, a thing you bring up for table discussion is kind of ruthless damn.

I noticed that. I wonder if that means there are feats that the archetype won't be able to take because it requires the class only version?

Reminded of the int to medicine feat commanders have written so commanders can pick it up immediately but it's level 10+ for anyone with the archetype.

necromancer dedication with create thrall but no mechanics to utilize them at all you just get to create a square of difficult terrain with an action. No cantrip, maybe a skill. You have to spend another feat to get command but it's also nerfed in some way.

What are the practical implications of this distinction?

I feel like this discussion is kind of missing the plot a bit. Lots of arguing over whether or not certain things count as focus spells but as near as I can tell whether or not Courageous Anthem is a type of focus spell both doesn't actually matter (nothing changes either way) and isn't directly related to the issue with psychics (because amps are weird).