Squiggit's page

I think that one of the key skills a wild shaping druid has to learn is when they should shift and when they should stay a spell caster.

In a broad sense I agree but I'd like that to be more an issue of moment to moment tactical choices. The action economy problem feels more game-y to me and therefore more frustrating.

By and large I think the game should encourage people to do the things they want to do. Pushing someone outside their preferred comfort zone is something that should happen for specific reasons, and like... the action economy just sucking and encounters being undertuned so you don't have time doesn't really end up feeling like that to me.

re: "make sacrifices to be good in melee"

... A full untamed order druid is spending up to half their feats and devoting a big chunk of their ASIs and buying extra gear other druids wouldn't, and essentially giving up their ability to cast spells in encounters whenever they shift. ... That's not even counting any extra feat expenditure they might go through for other martial augmenting abilities.

... Now they're still full casters, and that has to count for something but most people aren't saying they should be as good as barbarians out of the box.

But it's clearly not correct to suggest they aren't paying for their melee abilities. They generally pay about as much as anyone could possibly hope to without some bespoke penalty.

... At the same time I do kind of think the handwringing is a bit overblown. Untamed is imo one of the better orders (with some non-hostile GM adjudication at leat. Some people seem to want to make it bad for some reason). I'd much rather have Untamed Form and Shift than... Rising Surf or Heal Animal.

I would really like to see Untamed Form dropped to one action though. Having a two action setup makes turn one essentially dead and Paizo has a lot of APs littered with extremely short encounters, which means you end up with a lot of fights where you don't even get to do your thing.

Fittingly I think this whole thing just kind of highlights that Paizo's historically been kind of bad at judging risk/reward. Options with narrow utility or that encourage you to make objectively bad decisions rarely give enough benefit for them to actually make sense (see: every spellcaster with a feat that gives them melee combat benefits).

So you get two classes that want fairly specific things but don't even get to punch that far above their weight class when those things are true.

Not much else to add but the OP is spot on here.

I mean any level where you don't get your +2 it doesn't matter because you'd just be using the other number anyways. That always felt like a weird thing for people to get hung up on.

I would really push back against the idea that this is in any way unintentional

I get where you're coming from and it's clearly something that would have been fixed a long time ago if it was. It's definitely a thing, but it's also undeniably kind of half baked and under implemented.

Why do we have simple/martial/advanced area weapons if proficiency isn't supposed to matter?

Why is the only class that can't use advanced area weapons properly the one class built around area weapons? If the proficiency is for niche protection this seems completely backwards.

Why are there advanced weapons with the performance trait if proficiency isn't supposed to matter?

Why has it been so hard to get any discussion on it? I know there's a few comments scattered around the internet now, but people spent the whole playtest asking about it and the devs were weirdly evasive the whole time. This somewhat stands out because parts of the playtest were actually fairly well documented in terms of explaining certain ideas.

None of this really speaks to a well planned and thoughtfully implemented design choice.

TBH it feels like you just want all Gunslingers to always get a free action each round to reload. Which would just make them OP.

The wild thing is... not as much as you'd think?

You'd expect doubling the gunslinger's action economy would be insanely overpowering but guns are so mediocre it's actually way less of a big deal than you'd think. It shows how underbaked the reload mechanic is.

The PF2 Slayer doesn't need to be more like the PF1 slayer because the PF2 ranger is already the pf1 slayer.

If the mechanic is bad and has problems, which seems to be the case, what's the problem with removing it?

I mean like I just said, it's a very core component of how the class works right now. That it's slightly underpowered means it could stand to be buffed.

It's like saying you could fix the alchemist by getting rid of alchemy and replacing it with some always on bonus. Yeah maybe it might be mechanically stronger, but..

Flavor-wise there's no change at all.

It significantly changes how you interact with the world so that's clearly not the case, because flavor and mechanics inform each other. If one character is maneuvering around terrain to create benefits and the other is standing completely still and just making things happen there's no real room to call them thematically identical.

I honestly think the whole concept of props should be scrapped, while keeping their flavor by incorporating it directly into the abilities themselves. What I mean is that, instead of having codified mechanics for characters crashing into environmental objects, players could simply describe their character pushing someone into scenery that was already part of the environment but not important enough to be mechanically defined. These would be elements that don’t occupy a square on the grid or impose penalties like difficult terrain, but still help sell the cinematic feel of the action that the class seems to push.

Doesn't that kind of remove one of the main conceits of the class though?

YuriP, that's a very well thought out and logically consistent argument.

I don't really agree. The narrative that there was some stigma about 3.5 that's holding people back isn't really accurate to the era at all. They claims it's the core reason for the naming choice when it's an argument I've never even heard before now.

The position also hinges on the idea that PF2.5 is objectively more clear of a name than PF2 Remaster and using the novel argument above as a bait and switch.

The immunity part of battle medicine has nothing to do with the degree of success, so I don't know why we'd assume a feat that changes the immunity would have to be.

Also just looking at the mechanics, increasing the lockout timer on your feat by 23 hours if you roll a single failure seems kind of insane??

Why would they?

greater darkvision is cool if you have a cheap reliable source of magical darkness and teammates who can play around it. It's also good if you fight lots of enemies who use darkness offensively to negate their tool.

... But none of those things are super reliable in PFS.

Squiggit wrote:

Druid's kind of a bad class so there's definitely some room to streamline untamed, even if it's just extending the useable form range so you have fewer dead zones (which imo is the biggest issue).

Failed my will save so I am compelled to point out that a well built druid is most certainly NOT kind of a bad class.

They're a three slot caster with no gimmick. That automatically puts them toward the lower half of things simply by virtue of not having anything else going on. They're a bit tougher, but that's not something that defines characters or usually is the reason you win fights.

Druid is mostly carried by having a couple orders with strong focus spells that can help carry them early game and not having much competition since there's no other dedicated primal caster. Even then I've run into a surprising number of players who've independently decided the best way to be a druid is to reflavor their sorcerer and it's hard to blame them.

Teridax is right, the class has some serious scaling issues. A lot of their unique points either lose value as you level up (their starting defensive benefits) or are actively negative (very cool being the only class in the game with a focus spell that requires feat investment to heighten).

Druid's kind of a bad class so there's definitely some room to streamline untamed, even if it's just extending the useable form range so you have fewer dead zones (which imo is the biggest issue).

One awkward thing about the elemental druids is that they were built to use the elementalist focus spells, which were republished in Rage yet they were oddly omitted from. So while they haven't been remastered their focus spells were. It's not an end of the world problem but it does make me wonder what Paizo might do.

I'm not convinced that people are so glued to the idea of spending Focus points on Spellstriking that they would reject it being removed, if the damage boost it provided was replaced with a way to get to that level of power or close to it while getting to keep their Focus points for other things.

If it was just a damage boost at least personally I would be. One of the most fun things about focus spellstrikes is how it frees up your slotted spells for other stuff. For all the talk about build variety, the era of shocking grasp in every slot was clearly the low point for the magus and some of the ideas around removing focus spellstrike seem to want to bring that back, which is tragic.

not because it feels good to dump the whole Conflux mechanic in the trash. Do you disagree?

I'm not sure I even agree with the premise. I still see good conflux spells being used with some frequency. The ones that I routinely see getting ignored and dumped in the trash are the ones that just don't work very well, but nerfing a magus' focus spell options won't make anyone care about Thunderous Strike.

Enemy numbers that trigger OTH would seem to trigger RS too, and earlier.

I mean, RS is more about enemy behavior. If you're fighting a bunch of melee-focused combatants who don't need to worry about striding much it can sometimes be a pain to get RS. It's not super rare to have entire fights where you might never get an AOO off. That's just the nature of the beast.

That said it's clearly a much better reaction in general for the reasons stated, just figured it was worth mentioning that OTH does have a little bit going for it.

I made a thread this but 'the old standby Haste' ends up really being another point of frustration because it makes the power of the ability kind of scale against your access to quickened. It'd be like if a fighter's bonus to hit was a status bonus so you couldn't benefit from courageous anthem.

... That said, one thing I will say about OTH compared to Reactive Strike is that the former seems a lot easier to trigger. Enemies dying is something you expect to happen, while reactive strike is a much more sometimes move... though how much On The Hunt you can get depends a lot on encounter design which is also a little awkward (though I guess the same could be said of Reactive Strike). Still, from my limited testing it's not that rare to see OTH proc almost every round if there's a good mix of of enemies, which boosts it a bit here (nonwithstanding my initial complaint about nonstacking conditions).

They can't give clarifications in the format "yes, the text means what the text reads" for any little and even big thing

I mean I'm not sure that's a relevant argument here.

"damage that isn't damage" is neither an intuitive statement nor explicitly clear within the text.

DC adjustments are entirely within GM purview so strictly speaking yeah you could if you want adjust DCs for someone using a lore like monster or bardic... but the fact that they work so broadly kind of definitionally contradicts the idea that they're specific, doesn't it?

I think the last thing the Slayer needs is add even more specific restrictions to the class like forcing you to pick an enemy type.

Monster Hunter knowing things about Monsters is pretty reasonable, I don't really agree that any of these things are an issue. Especially the Int criticism. It working like a normal lore in that respect grounds it a lot more imo than Thaumaturges knowing everything about every subject because they're good at socializing or something.

The definition of attack roll was changed to specifically exclude athletics maneuvers, which while attacks are not attack rolls, per the like... very first CRB errata, so your initial assessment was correct.

What if when taking a trophy, you record the level of the creature you took it from with the other elements recorded for the trophy.

You may continue to use any trophy you have as long as it is of at least your level -1. When you advance a level you may if you want, pick a trophy you are personally vested in, and its level for record purposes becomes the your new level.

I've thought about this, but the numbers just don't add up and such a restriction ends up being really brutal for Slayers with a lot of trophy slots in their equipment, and it makes the class even more campaign dependent since now you need a constant stream of appropriate enemies with appropriate narrative notification just to keep your mechanics rolling.

Even if they were to go that route, level -1 is way too brutal. Like just to fill up one tool case and a single tool you'd need three trophies per level from on level foes to keep up (and even then you'd be losing a bunch of trophies per level so not really)... the "slayers at higher level" note in the trophy section is one trophy per two levels. So you'd have to be earning trophies six times faster than that expected baseline.

What I'm suggesting is that you're injecting a bunch of stuff that has no mechanical presence in the ability. Stuff that you may be able to plausibly string together by inference but does not exist within the monster's entry. There's no mechanical guidance for how to run any of that at all, so you're ending up adlibbing a bunch of new power into an ability and the calling it overpowered based on that.

The phrase "buried alive" appears nowhere in the statblock, so no.

And again, another piece of load-bearing evidence is that the system literally does not support splitting multi-type spells, etc, into multiple separate instances, as there are no rules to handle the traits, attributes, etc.

The immunity rules literally cover the idea that a spell with multiple effects can have those effects treated separately though.

I'm sort of confused at all the hype this ability is getting. It's basically just a free action grab at the cost of only getting to strike once that turn because it's a three action move/strike/move routine.

Good skirmishing. Good for battlefield control, but not really that out there unless you start adding extra bits and bobs to it as a GM... and if you're doing that it's not really a statblock problem in the first place.

Beating my "Core class features shouldn't be typed" drum again that I know some people disagree with, but-

I really dislike that On The Hunt confers the quickened condition, because it's a nonstackable commodity that already exists in the game as part of a support toolkit. At low levels quickened is rare so it's not a huge deal, but at higher levels in parties that can apply quickened more easily (say via heightened haste), on the hunt can end up a depreciated class feature, which is really awkward. In parties that don't have that, it's less of a problem but I also think that creates unnecessary volatility because On The Hunt is a baseline class feature whose value can change dramatically depending on who's buffing people (if anyone).

I know buff stacking can be a problem, but there's a reason full martial gimmicks are basically never typed benefits, because you don't want class features to potentially turn off depending on party dynamics.

Also I'm not sure this class is encouraging good things anyway. I feel like this class pushes GMs into throwing single boss encounters at the PCs which I don't think is a good thing to encourage. These encounters are the weakest types of encounters in PF2e.

While I think mark quarry is in an awkward spot I think this issue is being overstated a bit. You don't need a single boss enemy, Quarry works on anything your level or higher.

On The Hunt also gives you really good tempo against mooks (at least at low levels), which makes them better in multitarget scenarios than something like a Ranger or Thaumaturge that has to keep reapplying their gimmick.

Except they just tried almost exactly what you suggest and the community exploded in outrage.

The conclusion you're drawing here is extreme. The specific implementation presented in the pre-errata was kind of unpopular. There's nothing to generalize from that.

The solution to "This rule didn't work well" is to try again not to just abandon the idea of having a general rule.

I don't see why Wheeling Pull would benefit from agile. Inheriting agile is a specific feature of the weapon trait or free hand requirement, neither of which apply here.

Yeah I think there's a real threat, especially if you aren't grabbing a ton of extra tools, to be in a position where you find a few decent tools and then you just no longer care about collecting trophies.

I think it’s very likely that Paizo chose not to include a way to auto-scale Athletics or Acrobatics in the playtest in order to streamline builds. By effectively encouraging playtesters to take those skills, feedback is more likely to focus on how the class interacts with them and whether that interaction feels satisfying. Feedback about daredevils prioritizing unrelated skills like Thievery, for example, is probably less relevant for evaluating the class’s core design.

Intentionally playtesting a version of the class you don't intend to publish seems like it would just taint your playtesting data, especially when it's something so minor like this.

But if the summoner procs it twice, why doesn't Magus wielding flaming sword and spellstriking with fireball proc a fire weakness twice? They're both wavecasting gish-designs intended to fulfill the 'cast and strike' concept in different ways. They both roll separately for the spell and the strike. But from what you said about Magus, you want that to only proc it once.

I mean, there is the diagetic answer here. A Magus is described as making a strike that contains the power of their spell, with the two effects being resolved together. IT's baked into the flavor the ability.

So there's some room for the Summoner to be making two entirely separate attacks without breaking the logic here.

I think it's better to just remove the size requirement entirely. It just doesn't make sense to create a scenario where the daredevil's whole core conceit stops working.

I honestly kind of don't even know how it got this far. "All your features and feat disable against enemies that are past a certain size" is absurdly debilitating.

Looking at a few APs there tends to be a pattern where the game telegraphs a monster but puts them deep into a series of encounters which means you're 'missing' interim fights.. or it's an AP where you just open a door and there's a random monster inside.

If I was playing Abomination Vaults as a slayer the best way to manage the mechanic would be to invest in stealth so I can peek into rooms and then leave for ten minutes before immediately coming back which just... feels a little silly.

I said it before and I'll say it again; GMs and AP designers aren't going to change how they design maps for a class that is going to come out 9 years after the release of the system.

I mean, you don't need the daredevil to exist to have an excuse to not design bad maps.

So it seems like the main thing missing is crit damage on stunt damage.

It's also worth noting a Daredevil can take both for some pretty good shove damage.

Daring Stunt > Daring Reversal actually kind of crazy on a centaur daredevil with punishing shove (assuming you can find flanking to walk into but still).

I understand wanting to play a monster hunter, but do I have to be one that collects mementos?

No you don't. There are 30 other classes you can pick that are all some flavor of monster hunter (because that's just a thing you do in PF) that don't.

But the Slayer's singular unique feature is empowering themselves by taking totems from defeated enemies. So like... there's kind of a critical mismatch here.

Also, small quibble, but it feels odd you can't get acid as a damage type from a trophy. Harvesting some kind of acidic gland sounds like exactly the kind of thing you'd want to harvest.

Can't you? A trophy gets damage types from any type of damage the creature could do that isn't from spells. Acid just isn't on the list of options for your generic free trophy.

So, I'd note that slayer's trophies are hard capped at 5 in reserve, plus whatever are currently on tools. There is no way to increase this limit that I can see. That keeps the tracking to a more manageable level imo.

Also, there's only like 3 feats specifically for each tool, most of the feats are not tied to anything in particular.

On the flip side, with only one per tool and five in reserve in the right campaign it seems like it's going to be not hard to cover all your bases relatively quickly. Unless you're chasing very specific abilities it feels like you could just ... finish your trophy mechanic by like level 6 and then just not do that anymore.

Yeah in general I'd like to see more weird stuff with Trophies worked into the design.

I also think that the starting trophies for higher level characters should maybe be a "work with your GM to pick your monsters" kind of thing. It adds overhead to building the class... but it really kind of bugs me that a Slayer built at level 10 is likely going to have worse class features than a Slayer built at level 5 and played to 10. Loot and stuff can obviously have a big effect on power level, but it's a little awkward when we're talking about a core feature of the class imo

The ability to trigger weakness or resistance a bunch of times within an attack was odd... but I feel ilke this is a slightly overcorrection in the other way by having unrelated elements combine, but disconnected sources, like the spell and strike in spellstrike or the damage from flame wisp (which seems phrased to be a separate thing) could still trigger weakness multiple times.

The spellstrike example is especially odd because strictly speaking they're not even the same source (one is spell damage, the other is a strike).

Is this going to mean that every activity that includes multiple attacks should treat combining weakness/resistance all flurry as a general rule?

Or is this more unique to Spellstrike because of the underlying idea that you're delivering the spell through the strike?

TBH I had always thought being good at double tapping weaknesses with spells and stuff like arcane cascade was an intended benefit to being a magus, but eh.

Thank you so much for the further clarifications on weakness and resistance.

The trophy mechanic seems central to the class' identity. You hunt monsters and take parts from them to celebrate the kill and make yourself stronger by reinforcing you gear. It's neat, it's cool, it's like their one singular meaningfully unique thing.

But there's a hard cap of 5 unused tools and then reinforcing your actual tools, but also a soft cap based on the number of tools you have and what their mechanics are.

It seems like it in practice it wouldn't be especially hard to softcap your tools, or even hardcap them by midgame and reach a point where you have to throw away old trophies or just stop using the mechanic.

In the most extreme example I feel like in its current form I could take bloodseeking blade, pick electricity damage for my starting trophy (because electricity is cool) and only claim another trophy if I get another slot (which could hypothetically be never) and be fine.

That's an extreme example, but just broadly I think the current setup makes it too easy to eventually just be 'done' worrying about trophies long before a campaign ends.

The description of the item made me think like, this was the thaumatuge-adjacent setup (as opposed to the alchemist-y one or the weaponmastery/pf1 ranger one), but the action just doesn't really make a lot of sense to me.

Having a backup weapon always on hand is kind of neat, but daggers are low damage an their throwing increment is really low.

The castlevania subweapon vibe is kind of fun, but they don't have the range or damage or utility to really work like that.

But if part of the design is to create something that engages more with the environment, making it work better without scenery would be kind of antithetical to the function.

Maybe it's okay to start saying that empty squares with a bunch of enemies on one side are not good map design.

You don't really. These are variations on a theme. Certain characters will work better as a Daredevil than they would have as a Swashbuckler or Monk or whatever, but there's no profound paradigm shift here.

In Paizo's defense, does there need to be though?

... The Slayer does really just feel like Paizo's own Revised Ranger thing though, yeah.

The daredevil's terrain based mechanics are really interesting to me because I feel like historically PF2 has done very very little to like, encourage environmental interaction. Most classes stand still and hit things and a distressing number of battlemaps are near featureless rectangles.

It does make me kind of wish some of this was more system level stuff, because it's using a class to address what I think are more basic design concerns, but it's cool!

... I'm struggling a bit with the Slayer. The concept space is really cool but I'm having trouble with the execution. Big parts of it really do hit my initial concern that chunks of the class feel like another try at the Ranger, which is frustrating from both ends.

Chymist's vial is kind of a let down. I get why it has the direction it does, but I kind of wish it integrated more with actual alchemy mechanics.

I also think these threads get a bit silly but OP feels kind of bad faith idk if we really need to try to dunk on people who don't like certain class names.