Squirrel_Dude's page

Linkified it for ya.

Although your guide might be better served with putting it in the 3rd party section of First edition, as long as people are fine with it being in advice, who am I to gainsay that? ;p

Thanks for linking it. Forgot to preview before I posted.

I just figured I'd post it here because that's where Jackiscool's guide was initially posted as well. Also I do want feedback and to help more folks so I want more eyes on it.

I think it's pretty solid and pretty complete. Feel free to tell me where I'm wrong. I still tinker with it every so often.

Anyway, I was about to pick up playing Pathfinder again and wanted to play a Psychic Warrior. I decided to look up some of the handbook and was disappointed to see that they were incredibly incomplete and old enough that they were unlikely to ever be updated. The lack of a focus on feats was particularly problematic for a martial character class. So, seeing as I was going to take the time to be reading every option of the class anyway, I decided that I would make my own.

As proof of my bonifides,I have collaborated with other posters to make a proper Psion handbook for Pathfinder. I'd love to get some criticism about my ratings and prose and really anything else. Contributions are also appreciated and will be credited.

[url]https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wsCSnQJh_tg9fV9PYXd4QAEmQq_g92onanBa9fS LF9c/edit?usp=sharing]Memory Muscle, a Psychic Warrior Handbook[/url]

What's been done so far.
Class Overview (General Advice, Ability Scores, Chassis and Class Feature review)
Paths breakdown
Racial Choice
Class Skills
Traits
Feats
Powers

What's left to do
Archetypes
Prestige Classes
Gear and Equipment

I'm making reviews based off of what is printed in my copy of Ultimate Psionics. I do not have 7th Path, and haven't yet looked through it's material that's online.

1. Yes

2. Yes

3. Haven't played 'em enough to form an opinion. I didn't like 4e at first, but I'm starting to think it got an unfair shake when it came out.

4. I'm looking for a game system where the saving throw and armor class math isn't broken on a fundamental level. I'm looking for a system that doesn't require me to track 25 +1/+2 bonuses

5. If you don't want your game to be accessible, then you're probably in the wrong business

6. This is a dumb question and poses things as if it's a one or the other choice, and it never is in reality.

7. It's a playtest. I need to be willing to play an alternative ruleset.

8. Weapons and armor tables that aren't simultaneously pointlessly detailed and unrealistic for the first time in D&D/Pathfinder history.

A video relevant to the topic that I've posted elsewhere.

Wearing armor would have some impact on the person's top speed and their ability to do cartwheels or other acrobatics. I suspect anyone who can do acrobatics in full plate armor would do them better outside of plate armor. However it's not as absurd as a 40% reduction in speed -5 check penalty and a in a game where bounded accuracy makes that an even larger penalty than it would be in previous games.

Deadmanwalking wrote:

Candlestick wrote:

It's the same for plate armor once again having the ridiculously high check penalty and slowing players to a crawl, really. I mean we've all seen the people in super heavy armour lumbering around with an axe the size of the player in RPGs, but that's not 'just' plate armour. That's like, stoneplate or something. Both of these things contribute nothing. It's not fun, it's not realistic, it's not adhering to tropes. Who is the nerf to longbows pleasing?

Plate Armor sort of needs to have penalties so everyone who can afford it doesn't wind up wearing it (which would have thematic problems). It's not good for realism but is good for game balance.

I have yet to be convinced that the longbow's problems present a similar advantage, Or not to the extent necessary to justify their harshness, anyway.

First off, the balance is that it costs a lot. "Wait, but that's not a lot of money!" Well yeah, it ain't, but then if it wasn't the best then why would it be the most expensive? Fact of the matter is that sometimes "nope it's just better" makes sense.

What thematic problems? In the first place, you're straight up worse off wearing full plate than half-plate if you have any sort of Dexterity to speak of - and considering the way that ability scores are off the wall, you most likely do. That's assuming you can wear heavy armor to begin with. It makes perfect sense that frontliners what the best protection available. When was the last time you saw a champion of the realm in scalemail during a duel (except when he was doing it to show off, or when plate armor didn't exist)?

It's also not just plate armor. The top armor of every armor category has a negative trait. Breastplate makes you clumsy. Chainmail and chainshirts make you noisy. And I can't find a way to get rid of those negative traits, either. Who was asking that the better armors be worse?

I didn't mind breastplate or chain shirts just being good, but I can understand people wanted more variety in their armor selection. I just don't think giving the most expensive armors negative traits makes sense.

Seriously though, why is Half Plate just better than Full Plate? What even is Half Plate by the way?

So let's get a couple disclaimers out of the way.

• I was always going to be biased against a weapons table that has "longsword" and "bastard sword" as two separate weapons or an armor table that make biker gear the preferred armor compared to gambeson. It's not fair, but those are also annoying cliches.
  
• This is one of the first places I turned to in the book. I hate gear porn in games as a design philosophy, but it's something I generally enjoy looking at. There may be context that I am missing here.
  

The weapons table

Before I nitpick, I'd like to propose a larger change. Instead of separating weapons by Common/Simple-Martial , Uncommon/Simple-Martial-Exotic, I'd separate them first by category. Something that that looked much more like this in form but obviously not in style

That isn't an ideal solution, but that's partly because there are categories that seem to serve one weapon. Brawling is just variation of fist, hammers are just variants of the warhammer, picks are just variants of the pick. At least for myself, I find it an easier way to find the weapon I'm looking for than having to divine which proficiency a weapon is in.

That larger formatting suggestion out of the way, let's get to the petty nitpicks.

• Why are Bastard Swords only piercing damage? Are they a giant rapier? What?
  
• What is this? I'll let it slide that Katana are listed as a 1 handed weapon even though they aren't. However, Versatile P is absurd. They're a single edged sword. Oh also they're just a longsword that costs twice a much.
  
• There are too many polearms and too many knives. There are 6 different knives that deal 1d4 P damage. I understand that weapon traits make them different, but I don't care.
  
• In an edition where you want to simplify the game, having 31 weapon traits and 13 critical effects to consider for your weapon choice in addition to damage and cost and bulk maybe isn't they way to go. Many are repeats or do useful things, but it still feels overly complicated
  
• On cost: Don't have things priced 2, or 7, or 12, or 18 or 23. Just make it 1, 5, 10, 20, 25, etc. Some stuff needs to cost Copper. Fine. The math doesn't need to be this granular because weapons shouldn't be balanced by their base item silver piece cost. And this doesn't just make the initial purchasing of gear easier, it makes the bulk sales of weapons or bulk purchases that can occur after scavenging and bunch of thieves easier later on as well.
  
• Can we finally just call the Longspear a Pike?
  

I like a lot of flavorful weapons being moved out of the exotic category, though. That's nice.

The armor table
Why is it that the most expensive armors in each category are also the ones that have the negative traits? It's not for th sake of "realism" because otherwise all the heavy armor would also be noisy, and so would scale mail. Instead Chain shirts and Chainmail just have a detriment on them for some reason. I honestly don't understand how breastplate makes someone "clumsy" when chain mail and half plate don't. I'm not going to quibble over outdated the trope of armor being horribly clumsy or severely limiting, and I won't deny it should have some impact on the person's ability to swim and run or sneak around. However, that I can't seem to get rid of the trait my making the armor made of magical mithril or specifically tailored to my character's body is dumb.

[sarcasm]One thing I'm glad to see hasn't changed is Full Plate continuing to be overpriced garbage for the experienced adventurer. In previous versions of the game it was because the maximum dexterity bonus was so low that many character would accidentally eclipse it and gain the same overall armor rating and more valuable touch AC by switching to cheaper armor. Now we don't even have to wait to get a significant dexterity. We can just use Half plate from the word go! What wonderful efficiency[/sarcasm]

More seriously, though. Half plate has the same maximum armor value of 7, costs less, has the same TAC bonus, has a lower check penalty, weighs less, and doesn't have a negative trait like very other armor in its range. The lack of clumsy could be an editing error. In that case, just use splint mail which even cheaper and thus better than half-plate.

Can't the best stuff in each class off armor just be the best stuff in each class of armor?

I'll repeat the disclaimers again. I might be missing something here that will become apparent when I play it. I do plan to properly playtest the game with some experienced PF 1e/3.5 players once we've wrapped up our Divinity 2 Co Op campaign in a weekend or two.

Sounds like you will play a bunch of people hiding.

Because fighting other people at any point before the final standoff is a bad strategy when it can be avoided and you don't need equipment.

Druid. Become a hawk and hide in a tree during the day, and become an owl and hide in a tree during the night. Wait until everyone kills each other.

Doing a kickstarter for a new or reorganized core book would possibly be a good idea, to test the waters.

I would be a bit annoyed by a successful company doing a kickstarter for a project that they have the ability to back regardless of its success. If you want to do something to gauge public interest, do a poll of customers have purchased your product.

Squirrel_Dude wrote:

Eh, 9 levels worth of gear (or whatever the npc math would end up equating it to) would probably result in it being pretty lopsided victory for the fighter.

Total WBL for an 18th level NPC is only 75,000 gp. Each 9th level PC has 46,000 gp worth of gear, so a party of 4 has something like 2 1/2 times as much stuff.

It's really not much different than if the NPC were an 18th level Warrior with some random circumstance bonuses to attacks and AC. That's how bad the fighter "PC" class is.

While the total gear would be less, NPCs dont' necessarily need to have the glut of random crap that player's do that eats away at their WBL. It also increases the cap on what the NPC character can have in a single item. And again, they wouldn't be needing to spend as much of their money on the defensive items they might normally need because they're so much higher level than the player characters. The fighter would be fighting a 9th level party, not an ECL 18 encounter like the party would.

At this point we're more talking about how gear can influence an encounter, and I would agree that most other classes would offer a much larger challenge than the fighter, who is only throwing around more numbers and not new abilities.

Pathfinder didn't grab part of the market by saying "buy the exact same game," they did it by saying "It's the game, with changes to make it better, and some backwards compatibility."

I would also appreciate the market research you did that shows Pathfinder 2e is more likely to fail than succeed.

NPC statblocks have long, in every tabletop RPG, contained rules inconsistencies and suboptimal builds.

They have never been a basis for overwriting rules.

This is not a request for rules clarification, but a request for rules alteration. Rules always supersede NPC statblocks.

Squirrel_Dude wrote:

JonathonWilder wrote:

When it come to character creation I personally have players roll for their stats, unless the insist on using point buy, having them roll 4d6/reroll 1s and 2s once. I have considered The Focus and Foible system from Way of the Wicked for my campaigns more recently.

I have never been a supporter of the Point Buy system.

I will take this time to suggest that you definitely do use the Focus and Foible system. It's is an awful system that doesn't know what it wants to be. While I tend towards wanting to use a point buy, I hold no ill will towards anyone who prefers rolling dice. Rolling dice is fun, and there can be some inspiration gleamed from the dice you roll. You can even do 4d6 drop lowest in order for all I care, with one very important caveat.

Rolling dice character generation ONLY works well if players are allowed to pick their class after they see their statistics. Focus and Foibles does not do that.

Focus and Foibles has players declare which stats are going to be important to them, which is completely dependent on the class they are going to play, and then they roll their remaining stats in order. But hey, it's not like they use a d10 for no adequately explain reasoned, which would actually increase variance because you're rolling fewer dice. Can you imagine playing a fighter, and your 2nd roll is an 8? I sure hope you picked constitution as your focus, and not strength or dexterity like 90% of players will. If you didn't, you now have an 8 Con fighter, and are total garbage.

What an awful character creation system.

aT WHICH POINT you declare that your fighter caught a flu bug and died on the way to 1st level, and you start over.

:) If the GM forces you to use the character, just get him killed off in the first play session, and THEN start over.

==Aelryinth

At which point I feel it's safe to ask why did we even roll stats in the first place.

MMCJawa wrote:

Kirth's True seeing example seems find to me: a veteran fighter at a certain part of his career has probably seen enough illusions and fought enough invisible creatures to get around those problems. It's also a trope frequently employed in TV, movies, comics, etc. Although I would probably have an intermediary step which which might give a percentage of concealment and moving to True Seeing at some higher level.

Absolutely. True seeing is (minimum) a 5th level spell; I wouldn't have it as an at-will option any lower than, say, 11th level.

I'd probably remove it from the game, to be honest. It needs a massive reworking. A single spell shouldn't be able to negate an entire school of magic.

See Invisibility might be a pretty good at-will power for martial characters, though.

A greater emphasis on school specialization would be great, even if the generalist option was kept. One of my favorite parts of the 3.5 & DSP Psion is the discipline system that forces you to specialize or lose free access to some of the best powers in the game.

Want to shapechange? Better be an Egoist.
Want to mind control people? Better be a Telepath.
Want to know everything with psionics? Better be a Seer.
Want the best overall powers/abilities for a Psion? Better be a generalist, but you lose all the unique power access.

I think my last wizard was a Divination "specialist" because of the stupid school power that gave the bonus to initiative. Almost every spell I learned was from the transmutation or conjuration schools, aside from the best divination spells to take advantage of the free spell/day. That's hardly a specialization.

Atarlost wrote:

The Jian is almost identical to European longswords. Maybe they ran out of ways to justify different stats for exotic versions of perfectly mundane martial weapons.

The european longsword is much longer heavier than a fantasy longsword. The closest weapon in Pathfinder to a longsword would be a bastard sword.

This has always driven me insane about the weapons tables in 3.X games. Every time I see "longswords" and "bastard swords" listed as separate weapons, I get a little irrationally annoyed. Next thing you know we'll see a "Hand and a half" sword.

My biggest issue with the discussion is that it appears most notably at levels that I never play at. Why do I care about Wish, Create Demiplane, Simulacrum, etc., when I never see characters at that level?

One of my annoyances about the boards is that it seems that so many people appear to only play level 20 / mythic rank 10 characters when most of my game play is at the lower levels.

I'd say it starts being apparent around levels 5 or 6, and kicks into full gear at levels 7 or 8, depending on caster progression.

Haste, Fly, Scry, Dominate Person and Dimension door completely change the game.

I'd say that one FUNAMENTAL caveat is that we're not accounting houserules

One should build their house on rock not sand.

I can't be sure overall. But from what I see of builds on this site, most of the over-powered-ness is due to using 20 and 30 point builds against Adventure Paths that expect 15 point builds.

No one uses 30 point buys with the expectation that the game is going to be gritty or challenging.

The Average output of 4d6 drop lowest is is 15.95, 14.45, 13.23, 12.03, 10.66, 8.72. If we round those numbers to the nearest whole number value we get 16, 14, 13, 12, 11, 9. Coincidentally an array of 16 14 13 12 11, 9 is valued at exactly 20 points. A 20 point buy shouldn't be breaking any adventure.

I agree with the rest of your points, however.

I find this funny every one is talking about 25 or 20 point buy. I use 15 point buy in my home games and I have yet to see a full caster start with less then a 18 in their casting stat.

Considering that the average output of 4d6 drop lowest 6 times is ~ a 20 point buy, it seems to be a pretty good baseline to talk about.

I was mostly joking, but collaborations can be helpful when you're trying to grow an audience because you'll be drawing from one that most likely has an interest in what you do because they've already sought out similar content.

Clearly the answer is for you two to fuse together and become one single super-blogger

It's odd how a blog (people writing their opinion) seems like a strange thing for a Patreon, but a podcast or a vlog (people speaking their opinion) seems like a perfectly reasonable thing. I'm not a person who thinks there is a "right" point to start trying to get subsidized, so I don't see anything wrong with starting a Patreon with so few viewers (yes ~1000 is small in the vastness of the internet).

Though before you commit to asking people for money, I'd make sure that you'd be able to actually continually support the blog after you exit college. Life changes in weird ways. It's Patreon, and you wouldn't be charging a subscription, but charging/accepting payments for content does imply a standard of quality.

His Counter Monkey segments used to be interesting or funny, but Spoony is not good unscripted. Like, at all.

The last few I watched over a year ago were just him reading random bits from random rulebooks (and spending several minutes trying to find the right page) for an hour.

Yeah. Unscripted Spoony isn't great. I also like wrestling and movies and can't stand his blogs about either of those things. Too long and meandering for my tastes.

He's a bit grognardy, but I still watch to hear a perspective that's going to be different from mine.

I don't think they will. Or at the very least it looking much like 3.5 or PF. It makes no sense to make another 3.5 clone at this point imo.

They are also in a boat similar to Paizo and the discussion of a 2nd Edition. Why make their own game system, with all of its problems, when you're unique contributions (Path of War/Psionics/the upcoming stuff from Akashic mysteries) already work and are bought by their fans?

There are of course other practical reasons for not doing it.
- Not having the creative staff on hand to put out adventure path supplemental material like Paizo is able to
- It would be splitting an already fractured market, as they would basically be targeting a subset of the Pathfinder community.
- Expanding to that degree would be VERY expensive and VERY risky.

Eh, Kikko armor probably isn't worth it anymore, but it was fun while it lasted.

Maybe I'm a little bit old-fashioned (strange for me to say having been introduced tabletop rpg a couple years ago) but I don't see what's inherently wrong with Vancian casting? To me it's just What Wizards Do and so forth.

The problem that I have with Vancian casting is that it doesn't really relate to any magic in fiction outside of D&D-based fiction. It's also not a very intuitive system for any spell-caster besides wizards or other memorization based casters, and maybe clerics or Druids (depending on how arbitrary you think deities/nature should be).

For example: Sorcerers. Does it really make intuitive sense that they aren't able to cast 1st, 2nd or 3rd level (less powerful) spells when they still have the ability cast 4th, 5th, or 6th level spells that day?

Ooh, I rather like the weirdness that necromancy is the magic of life and death, yet for some reason all healing spells are conjuration... which, uh, makes things and calls outsiders. Nnnnoot really sure how fixing someone's body has anything to do with conjuring things. I mean, Infernal healing? Yeah sure, that makes sense as a healing spell in conjuration, you're calling on devil blood. Probably an imp as that's the first thing with fast healing that comes to mind that's a devil. But cure spells? Pure positive energy, the energy of life, really should be necromancy.

It's because somewhere along the line Necromancy came to be a synonym for EEEEEEEEVIL!

But yeah, it's dumb.

So to try and get back onto topic. Earlier in the thread (there are too many pages for me to go back and find the quote, sorry) postulated that the reason there were so many nerfs was because Paizo was trying to bring the games overall power level down.

Let me ask the community: Is bringing the overall power level of the game down a peg a good thing? If so, are there better ways to accomplish it? What better ways would you suggest trying to do that?

Bandw2 wrote:

HWalsh wrote:

I should note, I, and many others, get shouted as though we committed high blasphemy when we point out that the GM should be doing thingd to stop the disparity...

Then he says:

"To a large extent as well the responsibility to keep things fair and fun for all involved lands on the GM's shoulders."

Which pretty much states exactly the same thing. If there is a caster disparity at your table then the GM's not doing their job.

we just point out that that's not an excuse, the game shouldn't require an experienced GM to function, maybe some people get a little flustered when it's ignored time and time again, but what can you do.

The GM is the most important thing in the game. The game is intended to work with an experienced GM. The GM should be the most experienced guy at the table.

I'm not going to disagree with you here. I'm instead going to ask you a question:

- How good is the Core Rulebook/Dungeon Master's Guide in any edition of D&D or Pathfinder at actually teaching someone how to GM a game? Not how good is it at giving them the rules for environments, or some prestige classes (seriously 3.5?), or a random magic item table, or any of the other random crap they put in the GMs section. How good is it at teaching a GM how to craft an encounter, and adventure, and the narrative that connects everything together?

I should note, I, and many others, get shouted as though we committed high blasphemy when we point out that the GM should be doing thingd to stop the disparity...

Then he says:

"To a large extent as well the responsibility to keep things fair and fun for all involved lands on the GM's shoulders."

Which pretty much states exactly the same thing. If there is a caster disparity at your table then the GM's not doing their job.

It's not a problem because it's my job to fix it. Got it.

The only classes I want to see now are Ultimate Prestige, where they take prestige classes and make them base classes. So we can build Arcane Tricksters, Theurges, Dragon Disciples, Lorenasters, Shadowdancers, and tons of others.

I'm a big fan of being able to play your concept at the start of a game, so I'd be okay with this.

Eh, some of the classes in the ACG, the ninja and the samurai should only count for 1/2 because they rip so many mechanics from other classes.

I see your point, though.

I'm just curious, would the Dex to Damage fans be okay with a Feat that allowed Str for Init, AC, and Refl?

It would probably need to be separate for a couple of them. Dex to damage usually needs a dex to hit feat, too. In general I'd be okay with it, though.

graystone wrote:

Archpaladin Zousha wrote:

graystone wrote:

Archpaladin Zousha wrote:

So...from what I understand Slashing Grace now requires you to keep your other hand free to benefit from it?

Darnit now I can't play sword-and-dagger characters like Valeros! :(

Not just free but unoccupied and only one weapon. No torch, bite, ect. Disarmed and you have to draw another weapon and no dex to damage that round.

...Why?!

They seem to hate dex to damage with a burning passion and want to make it as unappealing as possible? Unless you've taken 3 levels of the only class allowed to have an OK dex to damage option, the unchained rogue, you are pretty much expected to pretend you only have one arm, can't flurry, TWF, spell combat, use natural weapons or pretty much anything else.

If you're asking why mechanically, that's how they worded the 'errata'. They had to make an explicit exception for the swashbuckler offhand items to work as they where broken too. Even carrying a pretty flower in your off hands prevents Slashing Grace.

Or because they wanted to give Rogue a unique feature that no one else can get. Giving other classes full rogue dex to damage for a feat is a little like giving Inspire Courage as a feat. Yeah, you could probably do it without being too unbalanced. (for example only giving the first level, not scaling.) But you would be giving away one of the unique things that makes bards bards.

If another class relies entirely on a single feature to make it interesting, then it's a bad class that doesn't deserve niche protection. Paizo has often (everything in the ACG) shown a willingness to give out class features from Class X to a new class in order to try and do something different with them.

That's of course besides the fact that the Unchained Rogue didn't need help because the Core rogue just isn't very good.

Squirrel_Dude wrote:

A small point of contention here. Weak options are not the same as trap options. A weak option, especially if it's weak because it's situationally useful is fine as long as the rules are clear about what it does. Trap feats are things like the original prone shooter which don't offer any benefit, or when feats can through certain synergies actually make your character worse.

The issue is the perceived prevalence for the former, not the existence of the latter.

An option does not have to actively make you worse to be a trap option. If I presented you the option to take the 3.5 wizard class or the PF wizard class, the 3.5 wizard class would be a trap option since it just has less/worse features...

Yeah. That's not a trap option at all because there is nothing deceptive about it being weaker than the Pathfinder version. It'd be pretty obvious to anyone looking at it.

Is it a weak option? I guess, it's still a wizard after all. Is it a trap option? No.

I think a lot of the mechanical problems in the game are due to a large subsection of the gaming population optimizing too much, and judging the game's options based on that.

Not just players, either, but DMs and entire gaming circles.

If you look at the base line Bestiary, published Iconics, published designer characters, etc, you can immediately see that the game is being run in a manner that is for all intents and purposes, lighter.

Many players don't even look at 15 point buy. And I include myself in this group. My players use rolled stats that are probably similar to 70 point buy, and I buff up monsters all the time with gear and resources.

But to use an analogy, if you are designing a car that you expect to drive between 30-50 mph, and you test it at 60 mph (for optimizers), you might determine you have a satisfactory, well built machine. Then when your average customer starts it up at 80mph, and the real vocal ones like to drive around 150mph, you're going to have a lot of complaints. Is the answer to make them a car that can handle 80? One that can handle 150? Or make it so that your car can't even go faster than 60?

I don't honestly know the answer to that question. I do know that you max out point buy at 102, and they suggest 15. And that's just right from the get go. I wonder if a lot of 'nonviable' options don't become more viable in an environment where losing initiative isn't the same as a TPK.

I'm actually not going to disagree that optimization, and the community's emphasis on it has highlighted the problems with the rules. I think that battle is over though.

I think a more productive solution would be to bring down the optimization ceiling a bit, but to also raise the optimization floor of the game so that GMs of even moderately optimized players don't need to do so much work to make resources like the Bestiary and NPC codex usable.

It would be nice if Paizo could start posting "updates" on the erratas so we know where they're at and where they're heading.

A simple blog post detailing some of the more in depth changes (witch doctor, Wyroot, paragon surge even) when errata comes out would be really nice.

Not that their justifications mean much... Paizo is usually either dishonest or just incompetent when it comes to errata.

The Crane Wing stuff into oblivion because it's easier than actually trying to do proper game design. They nerf balanced tools that were causing no problem to make new classes seem better, not because the nerf made sense. Remember how they nerfed animal companions' armor proficiency to make the Cavalier look better? Or when they nerfed the Paragon Surge exploit because it stole the thunder of Arcanists (that one actually needed nerfing, but I really freaking doubt that's why they did it, considering how long that loophole went untouched). Now, I don't doubt they nerfed SWD to make Kineticists look better. That's paizo "errata" policy 101.

I'm tired of it... I no longer trust the design team. I had hopes things would get better with the addition of Mark to the team, but I was obviously wrong.

This is how Paizo "balances" the game:

1- Write a bunch of class features with no care if it's balanced. Be sure to ignore all feedback that goes against your initial impressions.
2- If a new option sucks, instead of actually improving it, nerf everything else that is remotely similar.
3- If a new caster option is too good. Let it be... Until some other similar caster option comes around, in which case, go back to step 2.
4- If a martial option is anything better than mediocre, curb stomp it into the f%$&ing ground, spit on it and set its body on fire! Then kill its family. And its dog.
5- Tell anyone who disagrees with the errata that they are MMO. rollplayers that are playing the game wrong and only care about DPR.
6- Profit.

There's some comical exaggeration there, of course... But only a little.

Yes, I'm bitter. Why do you ask?

While I disagree with your hyperbolic, almost paranoid, position, I will agree that the current state of things isn't a very good look.

Age of Nerfs?

Still better than Age of Sigmar.

I came into this thread and posted in it thinking that someone had just made a typo in the thread title and meant to talk about the Advanced Class Guide.

But wow, RIP scarred witch doctor. A nerfed caster. It's one of the interesting ones that got nerfed, but hey it's a start.

Steve Geddes wrote:

My personal view would be that the online presence (lurkers and regular posters combined) is a tiny fraction of the gaming base

That is an excellent point, that's helpful to keep in mind for a variety of topics that are discussed on these message boards.

It's interesting, but it's not the most important point.

Whether or not the size of the community is small, what's most important is whether it is a representative sample of the community at large.

Sepherum wrote:

DM_Blake wrote:

By "APG" did you really mean "ACG"?

Oh, yeah. Too much coffee.

Apparently it's hard to make one post without majors errors so perhaps Paizo's doing better than you think?

He's not getting paid or asking for money for his posts.

But keep trying.

HWalsh wrote:

Kudaku wrote:

52-102 damage? In a single full attack!?!

Sure, these are impressive numbers you're throwing around but can a 15th level fighter really put out this much damage every round? I think you need to show your math here.

Easily. I'm not even trying that hard to get that.

Okay so:

15th level Fighter gets 3 attacks:

15/10/5

Double Shot feat adds one extra attack, at full bonus, but all attacks take a -2.

So 13/13/8/3

A compound bow gives a strength bonus to damage, in this case we went with +2, at 5th, 9th, and 13th they get an additional +1 cumulative bonus to a weapon. In this case the bow. Weapon Specialization and Greater Weapon Specialization add more.

Many Shot makes the first shot double damage as well.

Gravity Bow gives the bow's 1d8 an upgrade to 2d6.

So 4 shots:
4d6+18
2d6+9
2d6+9
2d6+9

10d6+45 damage

So a 15th level Fighter with a bow enchanted with a level 1 spell permanently (Very within the realm of possibility) can get between 55-105 damage every single turn.

BWA HA HA HA HA HA!!!

That was the sound of the point flying straight over your head with a pinch of ridicule from Kudaku. 100 DPR is absurdly low for a 15th level fighter. Average DPR for a 15th level fighter is closer to 250.

But this illustrates the point beautifully! Your complete and total lack of system mastery is on full display. You have no idea what you are yapping your flapping gums about. You are in fact SO OVLIVIOUS to the pathfinder system that you didn't instantly recognize absurdly wrong numbers for your 15th level fighter (neither when you said them nor when they were tossed back at you.) You have no idea about what makes a good caster in pathfinder. You have no concept of what is actually allowed by the rules when players actually read the full spell descriptions.

Don't be a dick.

You should let the new player play whatever character they want to play...

but maybe not the class the to play.

Exactly what would you call a person who can take a full spray from an assault rifle at close range, and shrug it off?

A cybered up Troll street samurai.

Well if they are not going to offer anything new then why even bother in the first place. I have no interest in another mostly 3.5. rehash with better production values and new art. I'm all for backwards compatibility if their market research shows that the majority of their fanbase uses it. If out of 10 fans 2-3 use 3.5. I don't see why they need to cater to such a small group. I get the point about books not being invalidated and the investment put into buying the books. I rather buy something new that at the very least fixes some of the flaws. Why would I buy the same set of rules with the same flaws. Of had to cater to both old and new fans. Offering nothing new when 5E fixes some of the flaws is not the wY to go. It's not like it was when Worc released 4E. With them no longer supporting 3.5. With a edition that did not go over well for some. I think some in the hobby need to look at the hobby as a whole and not just their bookshelves.

The only solution is more books like PF Unchained. Otherwise they really should not waste time and money on more of the same.

This is kind of how I feel about it. I don't need a 3rd attempt to "fix" D&D 3e that is just another revision and cleaning up of rules text.

The major problems people have with 3rd edition aren't sloppy rules or formatting issues (though those do show up occassionally), it's fundamental elements of the game.

The massive number of +1, +2 and +4 bonuses that character get to everything? The power of spells vs the power of feats/skills and some class features? Problems like those would require more than a revision

The Fighter never had a real niche, either mechanically or fluff-wise, so removing it wholesale would change exactly nothing.

This is going to sound counter intuitive, but not having a niche is the fighter's niche, both mechanically and in terms of flavor. It's supposed to be generic in mechanics and flavor so that the player is completely free to tinker around with it as they see fit. It also makes them very good as a way to add basic combat prowess and feats to an NPC (like what sorcerers used to be with magic).

That's not to say that the class isn't without problems, but that's mostly because feats are a complete mess. There are far too many feat chains where the pattern seems to be Good --> Junk --> Junk --> Good, the vast majority of fighter-only feats aren't worth having the 7 to 16 levels of no real class abilities, and most feats just add more numeric bonuses to the pile of numeric bonuses that the class already gets.