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Giving full proficiency in one or more advanced weapons "for free" to characters from 1st level is better than what the fighter gets. This is missing a necessary addendum though that what the fighter gets wrt advanced weapons kind of sucks. Most of them aren't really any good anyways.
I can't find an explicit once only limit, but the language surrounding familiar abilities could potentially be read that way. Pet/Familiar says you "choose two" of the following abilities, and things like improved familiar say you gain "an extra abilitiy" You could argue that this naturally precludes taking an ability multiple times, since you're being asked to choose 'two' or "an additional" ability, which you sort of aren't doing if you're picking the same ability again (skilled nonwithstanding because it carves out an exception). No direct "you can only take each ability once" statement though.
I've noticed this seems to come up semi frequently. You sometimes assume an exception to a general rule exists, and then call something 'ambiguous' when there's no explicit rules text denying the exception you think should be there. It's happened more than a few times and every time it seems to rely on an ambiguity you've assumed into the system, sort of demanding a solution to a problem you've handwritten into the game yourself, and then getting flummoxed when people can't provide you one because why would they be able to. And I don't understand why everyone seems to be taking that request as me being malicious or hostile Because insisting people prove a negative is a fairly common bad faith argumentative tactic. Rather than trying to prove that your novel interpretation of the rules is correct, you're demanding other people prove that it isn't. I've seen you post enough to assume you're not being malicious... but this thing you keep doing feels kind of like insisting dwarves can fly because there's no line in their ancestry entry saying they don't get a fly speed. Or maybe to be more on topic with spells and durations, demanding to know how many hits Courageous Anthem lasts for. It doesn't specify, after all!
Why would a spell need to specify that it doesn't end early?
Reaper/Scythe Wielder: Playtest partially covers this. An archetype for martials might work best, but I'd also like an expansion/tradeoff much like a Warpriest. Before we start talking about making tradeoffs they should start by just making the relevant feats good.
I mean they could just do it the other way around. The developer creates their vision and then we add some flexibility onto it at the end. I really dislike the argument that this is somehow a zero sum game though, that by letting players be more flexible with their character creation we've somehow stolen something from the developers. IDK why you'd want to construct such an antagonistic relationship here. I also just don't think the premise is real. The witch started out with "it can never be divine" and ended up "of course it has divine options" and its core concept didn't suddenly disintegrate as a result. In fact it didn't really change anything at all, other than open up some new options for people.
Out of combat vs In combat is some of it... but only some of it. Ascended Celestial for instance, provides good in combat benefits, but also has some out of combat options, like permanent truespeech and access to a celestial advisor that can give you extra knowledge or information about a situation. Beastlord on the other hand is primarily combat based and a lot of those combat options don't work well... though a lot of that stems from the fact that they just forgot to improve your companion in any meaningful way to make it mythic.
There's a fundamental difference, imo, between a feat not providing much benefit to a class because of the features available to both, and hand writing in a sidebar specifically to make a certain archetype give less benefits to a specific class. Its only Spellcasters archetypes that add more slots but those are still lower level slots and require several feats per archetype. Do you think the game would be better if characters with innate spellcasting were barred from picking up extra slots with spellcasting archetypes by a special new rule? That's essentially what's being done here. It's just a really bad design choice that benefits the game in no particular way.
Though back then if you let Munitions Machinist stack with Alchemist Dedication (and the feats to boost the advanced alchemy level), you would get an absolute truckload of expensive ammo. Who said anything about stacking? They're separate abilities, treat them separately. It's weird and unnecessary to have a clause that basically just removes part of the archetype if you're an alchemist.
Such a weird design choice. Were they really that scared of alchemists and investigators with chef dedication?
I think its very likely that the class is going to have subclasses on release. It just doesn't in the playtest because I think its quite common for playtest classes to not have them. The only class I recall having subclasses on the playtest itself is the kineticist and exemplar, but I'm pretty sure the thaumaturge, psychic, animist, guardian, and commander didn't have them. Only the latter two we don't know if they are going to have them or not. I'm not sure where this is coming from. Playtest thaumaturges had implements, playtests psychics had both conscious and subconscious minds, and animists had both spirit selection and a specialization. Often times a class comes out of a playtest with more subclasses than were playtested, and a couple times the structures of classes were altered because of playtest feedback, but I've never heard of them just intentionally withholding a whole class feature like that. Like this just hasn't happened.
"AoE attacks are great when there are lots of enemies" and "the more you have to move the less damage you do" aren't really the profound revelations you seem to think they are. Like, yeah, obviously? I feel like you keep stating these really basic ideas and then presenting them as these hugely disruptive concepts when no one's been arguing otherwise in the first place.
One of the problems with DPR is that it can be easily misapplied, but the people I see using it inappropriately the most often are people who hate DPR calculations in the first place. Like someone will run some math comparing two feats or class options and how they perform in a similar situation and then someone else will jump in and get mad and start talking about some completely unrelated scenario that has nothing to do with the math being done and try to tie it back to the original calculation. One place DPR can be really useful though is in assessing a lot of vibes-based assumptions about classes. Often there's something people 'know' about how a class works or how certain options are valued and then people do the math and it turns out there's nothing correct at all about the more 'intuitive' assumption. Like when PF2 was brand new there were a lot of really strong assumptions about Ranger edges floating around the internet, and then people did the math and it turned out a lot of those assumptions were just wildly incorrect.
I am officially sick and tired of not getting official rulings on these sort of questions. You say that, but I can't imagine the people upset here would be happy if Paizo came out and said the ability worked the way it says it does and that 4 is not 4 per die. This is kind of a recurring problem when wishful thinking gets tangled up in rules questions.
Distribution is interesting, and can be useful to talk about in terms of how it effects TTK. But one problem is that generally speaking SD isn't really a factor in how features are designed. Like with weapons, a d12 weapon has a wider distribution than the d6 weapon... but that's mostly just a quirk of the larger die size. The minimum for both is the same, and the average and peaks are higher on the d12, it's just better but also happens to come with more variance. There aren't a lot of situations in PF where you get to make meaningful choices about your damage distribution on its own. So while distribution is a factor in actual play, it's somewhat harder to theorycraft around because it's just a thing that happens, imo.
Gunslingers aren't amazing but useless against hard enemies is kind of a weird take, imo.
I like how no one, even the people who mentioned liking the video, have said a single specific thing about the actual content the OP wanted to share (yes I know I'm being part of the problem here).
Lots of classes have bad combinations but I don't think it's controversial to suggest that it's kind of crummy design for an option to combine badly with itself. We're not talking about cherry picking some obscure thing here. I don't get why anyone would defend this.
However you construct this hypothetical, what is the result when a Reaction renders the trigger invalid for completion? Not talking about the specific disrupt clause of RS. I mean there are only two outcomes that make sense here. Either the reaction entirely pre-empts the trigger, in which case no action is taken. Or it doesn't and the action happens normally. There's no prescribed system for having a Readied action both happen after a trigger but also before it at the same time. It's just something you've kind of made up. If the RaW is bad The RAW is fine. It's just that nothing you've been talking about is RAW. To be clear, despite your weird straw manning. It's not an "actions vs activities" issue and it's not about people being "scared" ... it's just a rules issue. So far you haven't really shown anything to support the interaction you want to happen. That's all.
Two issues. First, "GM decides" means that your position that a certain outcome is definitely RAW is incorrect, because the RAW is that anything can happen depending on how the GM is feeling. Second and more importantly, you posted rules about disrupted actions. Bangles don't disrupt actions. So that doesn't really have anything to do with the topic at hand. I absolutely think a good GM with balance concerns might rule the "Yoink upon foe swing" results in the action cost of the disrupted swing being refunded, but that the foe progresses MAP, or some other similar custom outcome. Maybe, but to be clear I'm not talking about any potential balance concerns here (given the investment, the combo seems kind of whatever to me). I'm talking about the rules, which have nothing in them to support your conclusions, much less make them obvious or forgone conclusions as you've implied.
Ineligibility doesn't make sense, because if they're unable to take the action, then they can't... take the action. Either the creature has spent an action on a strike, in which case of course they'd make the strike because that's what they're doing, or they haven't and they don't 'lose' an action because they haven't spent it yet. Trying to argue the action should both happen in response to a trigger yet also pre-empt that trigger doesn't really make sense and isn't supported by anything either. Disrupt is a specific mechanic operating in its own rules space, and trying to extrapolate anything general from it is a mistake. Either they Strike or they don't.
tbh I don't even really blame them. Canny Acumen literally does nothing once you hit expert naturally, and some of the other listed options aren't that much better. It'd be great if we played a version of PF2 where characters didn't end up with suddenly dead feats because of goofy scaling quirks and conservative feat design, but since we're in that world I can't blame people for wanting to ditch bad options. More than any other system I've played PF2 really suffers from the issue of having characters that you'd just build completely differently depending on starting and endpoints, because so many things have awkward or irregular scaling. It kind of sucks.
I sort of get wanting to keep a hands off approach so as not to put the thumb on the scale too much, but I definitely sort of miss it. For me I think it's especially frustrating when there's something unclear in the playtest, a rule people don't know how to adjudicate properly or a vague ability. It feels hard to playtest something when you don't even know how it's supposed to work and feels bad when the developers just decide not to let anyone know. It can't be good for the data in the end, can it?
Gunslingers don't get a firearm. Champions get neither armor or a shield. A Cleric doesn't get their deity's holy symbol or anything else to use as a focus component for their spells that might need them. Bards don't get a musical instrument. The only one of those that's really comparable is the firearm. Clerics, Bards, and Champions all function without. 'Function' is the key word here. Obviously you want armor on your champion. Musical instruments suit bards just fine... but in terms of core class features actually working at all, they can do without. The Alchemist however, literally cannot use their primary class features wihtout a toolkit or lab. The Gunslinger cannot utilize its martial mechanics without a gun. Pretty clear distinction there. The only classes I can think of as an exception are the Thaumaturge and the Inventor. Weapon Thaumaturge starts with a free weapon, and Inventor can start with either a free weapon (free for level 0 only) or free armor. Giant Instinct barbarians also receive their oversized weapon for free. So we have Wizards, Giant Barbs, Weapon Inventors, Thaumaturge Implements... Gunslingers and Alchemists actually seem like the odd ones out here in terms of having class features that rely on items but don't get basic support for free. Your point here is what actually changed my mind, originally I was going to post something similar to what SuperBidi said, but from your examples it's pretty clear that this is both not a great design choice and also somewhat aberrant with how a handful of other classes work.
I mean that strikes me as a good argument for giving them both.
The primary benefit imo was cleaning up the gap between best case and worst case investigator. The new language and phrasing gives GMs a lot more permission to be nice to Investigators in ways the class desperately needs it. But also for the most part the class' very low ceiling didn't get removed. A number of feats remain as feast-or-famine as ever. It's probably the worst martial in the game in combat and still relies very heavily on the GM to throw them bones for their out of combat 'advantage' to actually come into play. Skillful stratagem is technically something of a boon, but it hasn't felt super high impact in practice for us. Play experiences should be more even (we were already generous to the investigators at our tables so not much changed) but... it's still the worst class in the game by a noticeable amount.
A, especially if the campaign has downtime issues. IF there's a ton of downtime anyways I might go with B. Generally like being a bit loose with retraining because I don't see a lot of value in leaving a player with feats they don't like or don't benefit them anymore. Plus I really dislike the way Paizo built certain options to have level breakpoints where they might be useless because of goofy scaling quirks.
... What are you talking about?
The current runesmith definitely has some balance and design issues that need fixing, but I'm kind of baffled by the idea that it would somehow be better if we stripped out so much of its toolset to just give it a damage bonus on strikes. Like isn't one of the top complaints about the Inventor that it ends up being just a mostly generic martial? Why would we want to do the runesmith dirty like that too?
I don't think this is intended, no. The language around ikons seems to heavily imply they're all separate items. It's not super explicit but from reading over everything I don't think so. The language tends to use ikon and item interchangeably and really seems built assuming they're all separate That said... it might not be a bad idea to allow this. As long as you don't fundamentally change how ikons work in general... A) Running two weapon ikons is somewhat uniquely bad because you have to be holding them to activate their transcendence and wielding them to benefit from their immanence. This adds extra action cost to something that's just not super great to begin with. B) There are a handful of weapon ikons with very situational effects, and being able to more easily have access to a general use option would make them a bit less bad. Though on the other hand, this would make it somewhat easier to chain weapon ikon effects, since you don't have to worry about hand economy. You can already do this with dual wielding or unarmed ikons, but running it this way would definitely make it a bit easier. Given that this is linked to higher levels and feats I'd say that you cannot utilize the same icon for multiple immanence abilities as they would according to the rule all activate at the same time (which is linked to the higher level feats). I'm not sure that's really a problem. The feats are tied to ikons, so even if we allow one item to contain multiple ikons, the feat would only acitvate if the spark was assigned correctly.
That's sort of the opposite of what happens with the buckler though. Nothing interferes with using a weapon, but the weapon interferes with using a buckler. You can wield the weapon just fine, you just can't do things with your shield until you let go of it.
I think that's the opposite of the direction I want to see. One of the fun things about the PF1 Mesmerist was that it was slightly more martially inclined, it even had some archetypes that really leaned into letting you wield a sword along with your magic, good stuff. And spontaneous is basically always better than prepared. That said I don't think a class archetype would make sense. While the two share a lot of thematic similarities, bard feats and bard class features just don't really line up with the mesmerist fantasy very well.
... So the red flag is that it's...not more generic and homogenized with other martial characters?
"Vastly subpar" exequiel, really? The difference between Dragon and Fury is one singular point of damage until greater specialization. It doesn't really need it, but that's also like... as minimal of a penalty as could possibly be imposed here. The difference between Giant and Fury is more significant, 3 to 6... but you're also eating an AC and Reflex penalty there, and you generally can no longer wield weapons you loot (ymmv on how big of a deal the last one is). There should be some meaningful advantage there because it comes with a meaningful decrease in survivability. Fury isn't the best instinct, but the reactions in this thread are really bizarre given how actually small in practice the gap between it and other instincts are. From reading the thread alone you'd assume Fury was virtually unplayable and has a note from a developer in it that just says "I hate you" written in it. The reality is that with the remaster changes Barbarians have fairly tight subclass balancing.
Point 6 seems wrong, Release is a free action, not an action. Otherwise that seems mostly correct.
Is it? I feel like having a strong alternative action that's actually worth the investment cost to use would largely be considered a good thing. We have plenty of ways to play a character who just strikes most of the time if you want. The Runesmith needs some balancing, particularly with their ability to load up burst with out of combat engravings, but Trance being a good and viable part of your action routine is not one of those problems. Ironically, pivoting away from Trance would make Engraving Strike more problematic, but at that point it's something of a self fulfilling prophecy.
Nothing in the system works like that On the contrary, there are more than a few things that work like that. Gunslinger is full of feats and options that give you an extra thing when you reload. A monk's core mechanic is two strikes for one action and you don't even need to succeed on the first one to get the second. Silencing Strike is literally just a better strike. Moreover, as pointed out in this thread, Runesmiths don't always even want to Strike in the first place, meaning part of the tradeoff is choosing to take that action in the first place.
Unfortunately the rules don't really say I see, so your position is that once you grab a shield that hand is occupied forever because Release doesn't free your hand up?
If all of the newly remastered wizard schools just end up being better implemented as individual classes, then I really do wonder if the wizard has a place in PF2 at all any more. I mean you can look at the Necromancer playtest and the Wizard right now and see they have virtually nothing in common whatsoever other than that they both cast spells.
Unfortunately the rules don't really say I'm not sure they need to. If you Release an object your hand is now free. There doesn't need to be a special carveout for shields because nothing about that interaction changes.
Besides, if you want to talk weapon ikons that desperately need help, Hands of the Wildling needs it way, way more than Harvest. I mean it's not a competition. Hands being garbo doesn't stop Harvest from also being garbo too. Though Hands' unsafe damage is really frustrating... the base damage isn't great either, but at least you get a tiny bit of pity damage on a miss, which helps mitigate the reduced primary damage a bit (more or less depending on the enemy's AC). The Transcendence really should be party safe at the very least though. It's basically not a functional ikon unless you're the only frontliner. TBH I think in general 'aoe only transcendence' is something of a design issue because Exemplar design doesn't really make having multiple weapon ikons feel good in the first place. I feel like Noble branch too is just underwhelming with its transcendance. Dealing 1 damage per dice with an action cost. It's damage dice, not number of damage dice. Atleast mortal harvest breaks even with the regular 2 per dice as long as you have 4 persistent damage effects active. Number of effects only dictates how many times you can strike a single target before losing your bonus. You still need the enemy to take two turns and fail one check to break even (with an asterisks that 'breaking even' is still kind of behind since everyone else gets their damage right away) and three for there to be any advantage to your immanence. edit: this is maybe getting a little too fixated on weapon ikon discussion, we're sort of going past the scope of errata questions (though several of the ikons mentioned definitely could use a second pass)... might be better to move the more technical ikon discussion somewhere else.
... Having a monster fail to react to Feint because they're already distracted might help reinforce the redundancy of these actions in a way that's more palatable than what might feel like being dictated to by another player... To clarify, I'm not saying the GM should negate the player's actions. I'm saying the GM should make it clear through in game descriptions that applying off guard a second time doesn't really change the immediate circumstances in any way, because that is in fact the mechanics of the game. Noting that they don't seem any more vulnerable is simply describing what's actually happened as a result. Not doing so is basically lying to the player. Furthermore, off-guard is not the only possible result of a feint. Both Goading Feint and Overextending Feint allow replacing off-guard with a penalty to the target's attack roll rather than AC (via off-guard). Okay, but that's not the scenario the OP described, so it has nothing to do with anything here. Like, completely and utterly irrelevant.
The trouble with "great to cleave mooks" is that mortal harvest needs that mook to stay alive for at least three rounds before adding any value (while also hoping they fail their flat check every time), which is somewhat antithetical to what a mook represents. And while putting up a rainbow of persistent damage with energized spark is genuinely really cool (it's what attracted me to the ikon in the first place)... in practice what that means is you're spending a feat for every additional strike you want to make against a single enemy, which gets really expensive really fast. It doesn't really go insane against weaknesses either, because you could just be triggering the weakness normally by hitting someone with a good ikon, potentially multiple times in a round with multiple strikes. Noble Branch can auto-trigger a second hit of weakness with its transcendence before Harvest has even triggered it once. There's also the general issue that hitting every enemy one time is not a good routine to begin with, so any build around that tactic needs an extra boost to justify itself, which means doing slightly more raw damage in a hyper specific scenario (fighting a huge swarm of oddly tanky mooks) still doesn't really come out in Harvest's favor, because you're making what would otherwise be bad decisions to get there. Unfortunately this is a common problem, Paizo almost always undershoots build options that support something you normally wouldn't want to do by seemingly forgetting that fact. Ultimately the issue is that when it comes to repeatable damage modifiers on strikes, Persistent damage is a downside (because it's delayed and doesn't stack), but here it's treated like an upside and halves your bonus damage instead. ... Though the broader point here was less to talk about Mortal Harvest and more point out that I don't think comparing everything to Gleaming Blade makes sense, because balance options are all over the place generally. Though as long as we're here one can hope they fix Mortal Harvest in an update, it's in a terrible state rn. Considering what Gleaming Blade does Part of me feels like the most likely outcome of negatively comparing everything to gleaming blade is that a future errata nerfs Gleaming Blade, because it turns out Gleaming Blade is just generally the correct choice.
In another world, I think most spellcasters should be pick a tradition unless there's some extremely compelling reason not to allow it. But given that Paizo puts a lot of value on nailing certain classes to certain traditions Occult is really the best choice here.
So a couple observations
...I remember in one game a couple months ago, there was an Alchemist who used Alchemist's fire every combat: against goblins, against bandits, against beasts, they really liked getting that persistent damage rolling... except the one time we encountered a troll, they suddenly switched to frost vials until someone rolled RK. Second,
I almost lost a new player in a Lancer RPG campaign because one of the more experienced players was so helpful he'd loudly remind the new player of all the best choices to make every round of every combat. I feel like the best time to discuss this stuff is after the combat, in the form of gentle reminders and tactical considerations. Make it a group effort "we might want to try this" rather than simply pointing out all the things the player did wrong. ... I also like the suggestion upthread of seeing if you can get the GM in on this. Having a monster fail to react to Feint because they're already distracted might help reinforce the redundancy of these actions in a way that's more palatable than what might feel like being dictated to by another player. Third,
Granted, from personal experience anti-metagamers are often the worst roleplayers (because they're too busy metagaming) but there's no reason to just assume your new player is like that. I think it's worth trying.
I think the subclass thing is more reflective of a general issue that Paizo's QC seems to diminish on the intra-class level. Oracle Curses, Sorcerer Bloodlines, Rogue Rackets, Witch Patrons, and so on likewise suffer from having weirdly terrible options alongside obviously excellent ones without any real hint as to why the balance is so haphazard. ... Though in this particular case I think the issue is a little overblown? Premaster Fury was in an extremely sorry state, but post-remaster. Your rage damage bonus is better than animal's, the same as spirit's and mostly tied with elemental (1 less damage before 7 and 1 more damage after), and you're only one damage behind Dragon for most of the game (it's admittedly a little weird for the final bump to be smaller). And in return you get a bonus feat. That's not super amazing, maybe even a little disappointing, but... idk 'dragon barbs do one extra damage for most of the game' is not really something I'd say really rises to the level of being cursed or unplayable.
While I 100% agree that Paizo should do a better job centralizing rules clarifications, isn't "you can't prove it" somewhat backwards when we're talking about whether or not the RAW is accurate?
I'd like to see more noise from the developers in future playtests. I know communication in general can be hit and miss, but this playtest was long enough that I think a little more back and forth could have been stimulating. From where I was sitting interest in SF2 dropped off pretty sharply, not because people were hating the system but because there was just no buzz about it, no news, no information. What errata we did get was somewhat sparse, which led to some head scratching and frustration over what was chosen to be addressed and what wasn't and what that meant. I could be misremembering but I felt like the Pathfinder Playtest was much livelier, which helped keep interest going. I know SF2's playtest is a lot less extensive because the core system is already in place, but for round 2 it would be cool to see a little more commentary or noise. Like I personally found the sidebars discussing class goals to be really interesting and informative and would have liked to see more insights as the playtest developed and metas formed and opinions coalesced.
For the purposes of errata, I don't think it makes much sense to compare the two. Paizo has consistently been more than comfortable letting a class' internal options be wildly unbalanced with each other.
Not all. Barrow's Edge is 1 which upgrades to 3 against low HP enemies. Mortal Harvest is 1 and persistent which means it comes with additional downsides on top of doing less damage, which is probably another good example of supposing balance being a bad idea.
While I agree with you on the RAW, "this feature stops functioning if you use your gear normally' is pretty bad and obviously a design issue. Even moreso when you look beyond Blessed Armament at other similar abilities, like Kindle Inner Flame. Strict RAW, heightening that ability is actively detrimental. This is clearly broken and not well thought out. And again, the shield option is right there to compare against. Exact same idea where you can potentially no longer benefit from the free rune, but are still awarded w/ a functional bonus in that circumstance. Well, not exactly the same in one critical way. The shield ability has an explicit contingency for what to do if there's a stacking issue. Blessed Armaments in the same situation just breaks part of its benefits.
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