Squiggit's page

If you don't like bombs you can always buy a weapon like a proper martial.

I was kind of hoping PC2 would do more for weapon wielding alchemists. Some of the changes help a bit, but the new alchemy mechanics make it even more compelling to have both hands free.

That along with the buffs to bestial (and apparently non-buffs to weapon-based alternatives) really pushes you hard into the unarmed or bomb space instead... which was already the best way to play an alchemist anyways.

"increasingly breathless posts" indeed.

This is incorrect, the current implementation requires you to have been conversing with the creature

Okay so I say hi to them then activate the ability if they say anything. This is not really a meaningful change, again especially in the context of information gathering.

Like the fact that I can use it to generate off-guard is nice but also immaterial to the issue of how a creature should respond do it or whether it breaks campaigns.

There is no core mechanic that forces an answer out of anyone.

The Coerce action not only allows me to question a target but doesn't even give them the opportunity to lie. "The target gives you the information you seek" on a success or critical success.

I think at this point, it's becoming painfully obvious that there's a lot of wishful thinking going on in this thread, which is why a bunch of people are willing to argue desperately, suspending all logic and grasp of the facts along the way, to get what they want.

Or like, some people don't think the feat is as much of an issue as you do. Don't really get the intensity of the reaction here. Not caring if a wizard can hit the AC cap slightly earlier with an ancestry feat doesn't make someone delusional or desperate.

Like... come on.

I'd sort of quibble with "reimplemented" ... the only meaningful change to the ability post-remaster is that it now makes targets offguard when you use it. That's nice, but not especially significant especially in the context of what's being discussed in this thread.

but a lot of their abilities seem to be designed around forcing the GM to divulge information on the spot, which sounds irritating to deal with and liable to make certain adventures much less interesting for everyone involved.

I mean, this ability just lets you try to interrogate someone. It provides mechanics for something that, in a less structured way, any normal character might want to do (though probably more slowly than an action)

I dislike framing this as somehow strong arming the GM because that pre-supposes the thing you aren't supposed to do when the Investigator succeeds, which is give out false information with no recourse no matter how well the character rolled or how poorly equipped the target is to resist, is somehow a reasonable or good behavior in the first place.

Like, no, that's crap no matter what class is being played.

I could forgive the GM for ruling it that way, though, because this looks like one of several character options that are set to make the remastered Investigator especially irritating to GM for.

That phrasing suggests this is some natural quirk of the class that just might be awkward to play around, but that's not really the case here. This is a broken interaction that's only really a thing if you squint at the rules a certain way and have a GM willing to play along.

"Roll diplomacy to force enemies to forfeit their turn" is not a real mechanic here in the fist place.

first new school ever recycling focus spells is not a good look.

Why make this uncommon spell thing hard? If you don't want it, tell the player and offer alternatives. Problem solved. Player can decide if they want to stay or not after you tell them and they consider the alternatives.

It's not hard in practice, but it is another layer in which the Wizard requires special attention from the GM to function and another way in which the schools feel a little underbaked.

I figure the main reason to MC monk now is for qi spells or grappling stuff.

Or maybe the parkour stuff, there's no alternative to martial artist for those.

A class archetype could solve some of these problems, but "buy another book to make this thing from the first book work properly" feels pretty bad.

And an archetype that gives you weapons turns weapon trance into even more of a disaster.

What the GM should or shouldn't do is besides the point, tbh. I think teleport is a fine spell and with some work a GM can make sure it doesn't break their campaigns and only serves to help reinforce the PCs growing power.

But the whole concept about rarity to limit usability and restricting spells based on their campaign influence comes from Paizo, not me.

A GM who, by perfectly normal RAW, denies a boundary wizard teleport is now doing something that can directly feel like a personal restriction on the wizard.

A GM who decides to give the wizard permission to take it because it's on their list might now have to deal with a spell they otherwise weren't comfortable with.

Whether or not teleport is actually problematic or if you're a bad GM for not wanting it or whatever doesn't matter. It's the fact that the game is both putting it out as a class feature, while also flagging it with a GM-facing warning, while also being nonspecific on access.

The issue here is entirely the framework the game built for itself.

I'm kind of morbidly curious about the conversations that led to weapon trance existing. Like, how is it considered mechanically sound and well designed, given how unremarkable its benefits are and how comparatively steep its costs? Spellcaster with a martial weapon is not remarkable or punching above your weight, it's the bare minimum of investment someone without proficiency can manage. It's a single general or ancestry feat.

Like in what world is this fun or evocative for players? How is this going to excite anyone?

... And who was worried that the Oracle spending a focus point and an action every combat just to wield their weapon would be overpowered, such that the spell needed to also have a sustain requirement? At some point in the design process, this was a legitimate concern. How? Why?

... I'm sure we all have things we wish were different about Pathfinder, but I'm sure many of us realize a lot of those gripes are matters of taste or design preference or table variation more than anything else.

But Weapon Trance? I can't even find a starting point for where this focus spell makes sense.

exequiel759 wrote:

Zoken44 wrote:

I can't name any specific weapon, but some of them need a trait that will allow them to be used for "dirty trick". It is being talked about as comperable to "Grapple" or "Trip" but both of those have weapon traits that allow you to use the weapon to do that, including the item bonus of the weapon.

I actually didn't think about that. Which kind of weapon would make dirty tricking easier though? Technically all of them could, but which one in particular would do it better? Also, would Paizo add a trait that benefits a single skill feat?

My suspicion is that they will do the same thing they did in PF1 when they added Reposition as a combat maneuver. Rather than add a Reposition property they declared that weapons with the Trip property could also be used to Reposition.

So my expectation is that they'll make either the Trip trait or the Disarm trait work for Dirty Trick.

dirty trick is a special ability from a feat I don't expect them to ever add it to weapons.

And it might be counted as a net gain if we see more Oracles in actual play.

I think it will, it seems like a stronger class, and is definitely simpler and more intuitive.

It's just sort of a shame because, as I said earlier, it's very much a change for people who didn't want to play the Oracle in the first place.

Then I expect that you can also understand what my actual point is - that the existence of Teleport and Mind Reading on the curriculum lists isn't justification for assuming that this is a typographical error and that the game devs didn't really mean to give any Uncommon spells

... Are you doing that on purpose? None of the people you've been replying to these past few posts have called it a typo.

The Ars Grammatica school gives the Wizard access to Veil of Privacy, Dispelling Globe, Truespeech, Planar Seal, and Detonate Magic specifically.

I had another GM express interest in restricting some uncommon wizard spells and while trying to argue with them noticed that the curriculum entry doesn't actually spell out access, nor does it directly give you the spells as some other options do, so it's more unclear than you're giving it credit for (and the way focus spells work has pretty much nothing to do with it).

Given that teleport is both on this list and has been called out specifically in the past as a spell that's been made uncommon so GMs can keep it out of their games, it's hard to say what the designers really want here.

It's just another unfortunate side effect of the questionable writing in these new schools.

Is there an action saving feat for applying poisons?

Poison weapon lets you draw and apply a poison as one action, that's two actions saved over normal.

It's just a rogue feat so you have to archetype to pick it up.

At this point I Just assume that's the design goal. The wizard, more than any class other than maybe the investigator, is stuffed full of features that rely heavily on GM buy-in to work in a satisfying manner.

It's not a class you're supposed to just bring to a table and play like a fighter or cleric or druid or sorcerer or gunslinger.

The gap between the 'bare minimum' (highly irregular adventuring days with no foreknowledge, little to no time to learn a spell, basic curriculums with no uncommon spells) and the 'high GM buy-in' (lots of room for preparation and foreknowledge, plenty of time and money to add extra spells, flexibly curated curriculum additions) is just too significant, even before you consider the more mundane table variations everyone has to deal with.

Treat the wizard not as a normal class, but as a project between the player and the GM.

Oracles losing their unique mystery mechanics was kind of a worst case scenario for me. This is a big shame. Not sure why Paizo decided to make them more like sorcerers instead of leaning into their unique powers.

That's a huge boost, how is it a question if they've improved?

Because a lot of those fixes are ultimately kind of marginal or within the purview of what was already available pre-remaster (and still don't really go the full way of addressing some of the class' underlying mechanical or narrative issues).

It's not that the changes are bad, it's just that they're remarkably conservative and light touch, which feels weird given the state of the class and given some of the more cavalier improvements to classes that were already excellent.

Anyway, this has been going for a long time and it looked pretty balanced.

This line makes the whole post kind of hard to take seriously. For the entirety of the d20/3.5/PF1 lifecycle Wizards have been considered vastly superior to Sorcerers. This is the first edition where the idea of the opposite has even been on the table, and by any reasonable metric the gap between the two is much smaller this edition.

I sort of wonder how Paizo chooses their priorities here.

Like no shade, but in what world do Barbarians need sweeping unequivocal buffs while people are still trying to figure out if the Investigator is even really meaningfully better at all.

It's a little bit bewildering, especially considering that the pre-remaster Barbarian was already largely considered one of the game's better classes.

PC1 was in a similar place too. Nobody had "rogues get better saves while wizards get their fourth slot restricted even more and crossbows get the most conservative adjustments possible" on their bingo card when it was announced.

I struggle to really make sense of the design direction.

Because the defining feature of the fantasy RPG wizard is “casts spells from a spellbook.”

Really? The PF wizard doesn't do that. The spellbook is just something you reference each morning, you never cast from it.

That aside, I'm not really seeing a connection between "casts spells from a spellbook" and "one of your slots is super limited" those are kind of unrelated thoughts (if anything, it decentralizes the spellbook slightly because that slot benefits less from having a bigger book).

IDK. I think it's just okay to acknowledge that the Player Core schools are kind of a flop. We went from "spell schools are being completely redone" to "actually the same thing as premaster but with a smaller spell list"

... You don't even get to poach spells like other full casters do with their bonus lists. It's just kind of shoddy all around.

6 bombs per combat without even touching daily resources is a huge plus for a low level bomber, kind of excited about that.

Though the shift from daily resources to encounter/constantly regenerating resources seems potentially less useful for lower-consumption builds. Hopefully a lot we haven't seen but nothing discussed in this thread gets me super excited for, say, my friend's toxicologist getting a glow up.

Which sort of feels weird to put on paper because bombers were already good and some of these other builds less so.

What's the point of being unbound by attrition? Like, realistically, how many encounters between long resting are you actually want to play in a session that casters need to lose their ability to nova or provide stronger utility in exchange for like, what? Being able to run 10 encounters in a row?

The point is that the number should be determined by the needs of the party and narrative design, more than by the design flaws of a specific class. Reducing reliance on attrition means I can more effectively design shorter or longer adventuring days catered to the story being told, without having to worry about completely obliterating game balance or making someone's day miserable.

Is that honestly what people even want when playing this game? More Combat?

I mean, the total number of combats doesn't have to change at all. Nor is the rate of real-time combat in any way really connected to the rate of in-game rests. Plus not every encounter or scenario is even going to be combat in the first place.

The prepared felling of druids and clerics are different from wizards and witches because druids and clerics already know all common spells of their lists.

Yeah this is a big one. The wizard (and witch) kind of get the short end of the stick on prepared casting because they also have an extra system for learning spells.

Out of the box the wizard only has a handful more spells than the sorcerer does, which creates another way in which they're reliant on the GM to provide them room to grow.

Honestly given how GM and campaign dependent they are, maybe Wizards should be uncommon. Makes more sense then the rarity tags on inventors, gunslingers, or exemplars, who are all much better thematically and mechanically at fitting in any campaign.

Right now in pf2, even the small 10 min pauses can often break the suspension of disbelief, but as of now they do not seriously threaten game balance. More than not threaten it, I would say that the balance of pf2, at minimum, seriously encourages the 10 min pauses.

I think it's even critical in certain circumstances. If I knew ahead of time a GM didn't like allowing rests between encounters, I probably wouldn't play a psychic, their gameplay experience just goes into the toilet if they don't have ready access to their focus spells.

It gets worse when you remember than 10m is an interval, not necessarily the total rest time. If you want to heal multiple people or regain extra focus points it can easily turn into a 20m, 30m, even an hour break.

It's to the point where a lot of the groups I run into with new players or new GMs have essentially just houseruled away the time component entirely and just let everyone regain their focus points and get a round of healing and simply pretend no meaningful time has passed. Like it's actually surprising how often I see that houserule being completely independently developed by radically different groups.

TBH I kind of wonder where Paizo came up with that 10m number, because it's a very inconvenient time interval for storytelling purposes, which somewhat suggests they're meant to be used sparingly, but the game also just frankly doesn't run well if you play that way either.

Spellwrack wouldn't trigger because it only activates when the target becomes affected by a spell, but the persistent damage rider would reduce the spell's duration since the reduction just applies to spells (plural) affecting the target, timing doesn't matter.

Notably, a lot of games that used to use mana have gone away from it-- MMO characters frequently still have them, but the actual play is more about managing cooldowns or build-and-spend resources (usually both), which is a more rigid version of spell slots, but they refresh more frequently too. Persona SP is mana, but its characters also burn health for physical attacks.

Though ironically a lot of MMOs have done that for the same reason as this thread, addressing the friction between game balance and selective attrition.

I'm not really saying this is better -- what surprises me is *they already designed this* as something that feels like an academic school. So when they needed to pivot to making academically themed schools *why not use the model you already made*.

Probably because it's even easier to not change anything at all. The schools we got are the same framework as what we had pre-remaster, just with bespoke spell lists. Many of the focus spells are even exactly the same.

I think the goal was to just publish something rather than really come up with a meaningful solution to any of the thematic issues with the wizard. PC1 just did not have a lot of time to cook.

That's why the mechanics of the minions are ingrained outside of the encounter mode, simply because the minions were not made to work outside of this mode

Don't really think that's correct. The rules are nebulous outside encounter mode because the game in general is more nebulous outside of combat.

Familiars aren't designed to give you extra exploration activities, but they aren't designed to stop functioning either. So in practice, a player says they want to do something and the GM figures out how to adjudicate it and we go from there. So RAW being "The GM decides" isn't that big of a deal because that's how that section of the game is meant to be handled anyways.

All this hemming and hawing over strict adherence to RAW capabilities is more like a forum fiction that makes for an interesting debate subject, but it has nothing to do with actually playing the game.

Finoan wrote:

That seems a bit of an exaggeration. Though GMs may vary, and are technically allowed to ban anything for any reason.

My reading on "remastered" character would be "one who doesn't use legacy material". So if you're using the legacy versions of the spells, you're not a remaster character, which is fine.

Then you couldn't play a Magus in the first place...

It's sort of interesting to note that if you do take those descriptions of holy/unholy as prescriptive it does make 'stupid evil' kind of the norm for certain deities.

Like an Asmodean cleric can't simply believe in order at any price or the importance of strong leadership, but they have to actively show "devotion to victimizing others" ... which means pain and suffering is no longer simply an acceptable means, but now an end in and of itself. It makes the whole religion a bit pettier and more nihilistic as a consequence, though that's not necessarily a bad thing for storytelling purposes. It does have the potential to make them feel a bit more cartoonish though.

I might actually play an oracle now.

I'm going to need to heavily rebuild my Oracle. These are certainly interesting changes but I'll need to see the full thing before speculating if ill like them.

I loved my oracle, but man... I am going to have to think about whether she will still work after the remaster. I may decide to keep her unremastered.

... It does kind of feel like the Oracle remaster was designed for people who didn't want to play Oracles in the first place, which is certainly an interesting direction.

I'm hoping they at least retained the positive mystery mechanics within the mysteries rather than just reducing them to spell lists. Though the fact that they didn't mention mystery mechanics outside of changing curse progression to purely be negative is I guess slightly worrying. It does sort of give the impression mysteries are being reduced to spell lists.

So you're both right. 5 is 1 more than 4 and also "nearly 50% more" because 50% more would be 6.

That is not a well designed class if DM Fiat is what is necessary to make them on par with other classes.

Good design or bad design it's fundamental to how the Wizard is built. Its primary strength in spellcasting mechanics is being able to change out its options daily from a potentially broad lists, so a GM who makes that information hard to come by and/or limits the ability of the wizard to grab new spells is making them much worse in the process.

For better or worse, Paizo clearly doesn't mind designing classes that aren't going to be suitable for certain campaign types or are sensitive to GM considerations.

... So before you play a wizard it's important to check with your GM to see if it's going to be a wizard friendly campaign or not.

The reason you don't want to make "pure blaster" or "pure smasher" a good thing to have in the party is that those characters are inherently boring whenever the task at hand does not involve blasting or smashing.

... Isn't fun something that should be on the person playing the character to judge?

... also it feels weird to throw in "pure smasher" there because that's how a lot of barbarians and fighters end up, on purpose.

They can still prepare every other type of spell.

This argument never really made sense to me. IF you're casting blasts from all your good slots, then no you're not preparing other types of spells, by definition. You might at some time in the future, in a different scenario entirely, but then you aren't a blaster either.

"X spell has to be bad because you could have prepared Y spell which is good instead" just makes zero sense, but it comes up constantly. I've even seem developers echo it.

Like if preparing a certain type of spell is a bad idea and you should be preparing something else, that's not serving some high concept purpose that's just bad balance.

This is a direct result of PF2E's design principles.

I don't really agree. The PF1, 3.5, and even 5e Wizards are best played as obtuse and flavorless generalists too.

PF2's design principles at worst simply make it harder to bulldoze past the issue by stacking badly designed mechanics on top of each other.

What are the actual game design problems with Vancian-styled casting (by which I mean both proper Vancian casters and other slot-based casters like spontaneous casters)? Yes, "feeling bad" is a valid design critique to an extent, but Vancian style does not feel bad to everyone, and is certainly not the cause of the actual problem being discussed (see 5e and Pf1e where casters use the same system and are gods among men).

Disagree with the last part of your assertion quite a bit. PF1 and 5e prepared casters are much stronger, which allow them to brute force past some issues, but discussions over caster longevity and resource management are not unique to PF2 either. They were very much part of the discourse around Pf1/3.5 (albeit generally considered less of an issue because of said power discussion) and to an extent 5e too.

The issue of caster power and caster resource management are connected insofar as that one can server as an enhancing or mitigating factor for the other, but they are still distinct considerations, and it is simply incorrect to suggest that this is some new contrivance of PF2's. The whole "15 minute adventuring day" discourse predates it by decades.

The cursebound stuff looks really cool and I like the extra control it gives over managing curse level. I especially like the idea of some feats giving bigger benefits the more cursed you are when you use them, gives a fun incentive to go deep on curses.

Slightly worried that some of the more interesting mystery-specific effects might get lost if curses are turning into pure negatives, but we'll see.

My point was more "Urgathoa should allow for non-sanctified clerics" and not "I don't understand sanctification".

I kind of don't understand sanctification. Like, the description of the trait implies a clear moral standard in line with pre-remaster good and evil, but Paizo elected to not attach edicts or anathema to the act of sanctification, which weirdly suggests that unholy clerics who are sweethearts and holy clerics who are evil manipulative monsters are both valid (if odd) conceptual spaces.

As stated, the trait definition does suggest some moral boundaries, but... this is also specifically what the anathema system was created for and the omission of any coverage of sanctification there is very conspicuous.

Debate about stealth aside, I think the important takeaway here is that as a Wizard, your biggest strength is your ability to prepare from a wide list of spells... and conversely one major weakness is that you're stuck with whatever you prepared (unless you're spell sub and have time, but even still).

So the more foreknowledge you're able to get as a Wizard, the better your class is going to feel by giving you more opportunities to exploit those strengths.

And this is definitely something to talk to your GM about, because the difference between a wizard with full knowledge and a wizard with no knowledge is fairly significant.

I don't know what happened with Paizo in the APG but the classes from that book feel like they didn't have any playtesting at all.

To some extent they didn't. The Witch, Investigator, and Oracle all saw substantitive changes to core mechanics before printing. While those changes were based on playtesting, those new versions of the class were never playtested, obviously.

The Swashbuckler kind of had the opposite problem. Lots of people looked at the class, saw it had an interesting new mechanic, and then turned their attention back to the much more obviously broken other classes. People didn't start really deep diving on the Swashbuckler's math, feat, and skill issues until months after the APG came out.

Qaianna wrote:

I know this is emant to be a wizard thing, but should archetypes be brought up? I know Alchemist is popular, and I was sorely tempted to try Cleric.

Yes this was about the wizard class. If a class needs a Multiclass archetype to be strong, then the people saying that the wizard is too weak have proven their point.

This doesn't really track for me. If there's an archetype that's good on a wizard, why wouldn't people talk about it?

You make it sound like taking a dedication is somehow cheating.

This doesn’t just apply to casters though, does it? A Barbarian who refuses to have decent Dex and backup weapons will also struggle with certain encounters. A Rogue doing nothing but Strikes + Sneak Attacks with no focus on skills of any kind will also struggle due to how common Precision and Off-guard immunity is (especially in APs).

A thematically built blaster caster will likely struggle about as much, and I don’t think that’s a reflection of a miss in the game’s balance or anything.

Conceptually yes, but practically the game handles those fairly differently. The combat where a Barbarian cannot strike anything because they don't have a ranged backup weapon is incredibly rare in AP design. It's just not really a thing adventure designers do very often.

Precision damage immunity is also something they've generally been making a bit less common... but it's also just flatly a terrible mechanic so no real arguments there.

So like, yeah in theory there are ways other characters can run into trouble too for not diversifying themselves, but generally speaking adventure design is much more comfortable inconveniencing spellcasters than it is inconveniencing our melee only martial.

Abomination Vaults alone had more combats that either restricted or prevented our party spellcaster from participating than pretty much every AP we've played put together had that's prevented one of our martials from hitting things with a stick... and the caster in question wasn't even a specialist.

The culture is just completely different.

I don't really agree with the idea that a combat as war mentality is at odds with having attrition as part of your design constraints. In fact I would argue attrition needs to exist for that mentality to come into consideration in the first place?

I might have phrased it wrong. It's not that combat as war, or combat as a vehicle for storytelling is at odds with attrition.

I believe it's at odds with how selective that attrition is, which makes certain classes overly sensitive to changes in encounter structure that should be narratively, not mechanically driven.

If I give my players reason to tax themselves and push on into longer adventuring days, it's the party Wizard who's going to have a really bad time, while the Barbarian hardly cares... and even other spellcasters like the Psychic or Druid can continue to operate pretty effectively for much longer... if the latter three get regular short breaks to refocus and heal they can continue almost indefinitely (though it's worth pointing out that psychics have the opposite problem and turn pretty miserable if they can't get those refocus windows).

It's not that I think attrition is inherently bad, but that if I create a higher-attrition environment, it's often one specific party member that feels the strain while others are only marginally affected, which both undermines how much the attrition is felt and can lead to that one player feeling stuck or having a uniquely unfun experience.

That's also why I think something as simple as more consistent focus spell design would go a long way to alleviating the problem, because having those reliable fallback options stabilizes classes significantly.

It feels like a lot of y'all would hate on someone playing a game like Breath of Wild differently to how the creators of the game intended it to be played.

Take a breath. No one is saying you can't be creative, or hating on you for what you're doing. Most people are just offering different perspectives or talking about some of the system's underlying math. Of course those aren't hard and fast rules, and of course you can change things to better suit your table.

Also maybe take a step back and look at what you're saying here again in the context of the mindset you approached your fourth player with.

You kinda just erased the context of their quote to make it mean something else entirely?

No, I was putting emphasis on the part of the post I had a problem with. You can't say people are flouting the guidelines or pushing the needle too much when Paizo has done such a poor job communicating those positions in the first place. It's sort of a shame you feel the need to lead with the bad faith, especially when you seem to have so much to actually say on the topic.

The goal is to move away from a "combat as sport" mentality where the day is tightly designed for the players to succeed, and move towards a paradigm where players' in-universe goals and meta-knowledge inform how long the adventuring day needs to be.

And that's a commendable one, but also fundamentally at odds with using attrition as a form of game balance (but only for a couple specific classes). Hence... this whole issue.

It would be pretty weird if you wouldn't notice the difference given the significant mechanical differences between how their damage gimmicks work.
Like even at a most basic level rogues want to land as many attacks as possible in a round while Swashbucklers are built around setting up one augmented attack.

I can't even fathom how you wouldn't notice that in play...