I think the fundamental problem with that particular bit of the PFS ruling is that it specifically affected players who had a premaster Oracle: I don't think it can really be said that those players disliked the premaster Oracle, because they were playing one in Society play. Allowing the remaster Oracle in Society certainly benefited players who disliked the class's previous version, but proscribing the premaster Oracle exclusively affected those who liked the class beforehand and the characters they could make out of it. While I can understand the general merits of wanting to keep a single source of truth, I think the more pragmatic solution in the case of a divergence this extreme would have been to let players keep their builds, rather than brick them entirely and cause the backlash we've seen. Even if PFS wanted to avoid players creating premaster Oracles after the remaster launched, grandfathering in existing premaster characters would have similarly been less disruptive than the decision we got.
And to tie this back to the main topic, I think the treatment of the Oracle in both the remaster and subsequent Society play has created a perception that the class, and by extension its associated community, have been neglected. For a company that relies heavily on customer goodwill, I'd argue this is a concern that is worth addressing sooner rather than later, such as by prioritizing errata around the Oracle even if there are more egregious mistakes out there. Addressing the discrepancy around their spell repertoire would have been an easy win, just as leaving it unaddressed worsens the perception of neglect, regardless of what valid reasons there may be for prioritizing other work. The fact that Maya had to personally go and investigate what was going on with errata out of xyr own initiative also suggests there's a degree of siloing around the process that could be improved upon in the future, particularly as there's an active community of people effectively doing the work of identifying typos and rules discrepancies for free.
ACs are set so high that even with double slice, you're looking at a 40 to 60 percent miss rate on unbuffed CR+2 to +4. That means even with Double Slice, you're missing half the time. All this for a lower damage die and less ability to use maneuvers for an occasional advantage against resistance.
Putting aside how 0 MAP is literally the highest baseline hit rate you can have unbuffed, if you're Striking a CR+4 monster without you or the party applying any bonuses to your attack roll or any penalties to the target's AC, then having picked Double Slice is the least of your problems. I certainly agree that the raw damage it contributes, which is considerable, isn't always as useful as the utility you can get from a free hand or a more utility-oriented feat, but it is nonetheless effective at what it offers.
The 1st-rank spell Mindlink appears to be a one-way version of what you're suggesting, so making the communication two-way and extending its range a little could easily warrant a bump up in a single rank. If you want something with planetary range, you could look at Dream Council, an 8th-rank spell, as another example.
Press Strike rotations are one of the more powerful ways to build Fighter, and they still have to deal with resistances double dipping on their damage. I would think the advantage of Double Slice over that would be more accurate attacks, not necessarily piercing resistances.
I think you and WatersLethe are both correct: Double Slice helps provide more accurate attacks for dual-wielders, and also acts as one of several possible tools to deal better with resistances, even if martial classes don't strictly need those actions either. On the flipside, it also limits burst damage by preventing double-tapping resistances or double-dipping into sneak attack damage or the like, so it makes those actions more consistent both ways.
I'm not even angry or upset, as much as just..confused and disappointed. Maybe Paizo really hasn't learned anything, and we were just projecting a new design philosophy on what they see as a mistake.
My hypothesis is that these changes came about precisely because the Starfriends are learning, though specifically in a way that's aligning their balance closer to Pathfinder's. I think a lot of us have been hoping for SF2e to feature a radically different balance and design philosophy that would free us from 2e's usual constraints, and this was initially supported by a lot of mechanics that were noticeably above the curve by Pathfinder standards since the playtest. What I think is becoming apparent, however, is that these mechanics are more likely to be bugs, rather than features, and we're seeing an attempt to return to a more familiar standard. It makes for better consistency, and to some extent signals a willingness to improve compatibility between Starfinder and Pathfinder, but this consistency is also coming at the cost of the freedom and power levels several of us would be core to the game.
While your proposal would certainly be more Starbuilder-friendly, letting characters do stuff as a free action rather than a reaction does change the math in the sense that it radically alters action economy around the Envoy. I also think this is the sort of massive buff that benefits everyone but the Envoy, as the class would be the only one not to feel the benefits directly. Thus, I'd rather not include that change, even if I am absolutely in favor of giving directives an indefinite duration. Problem is, though, that would only benefit some directives in current form, which I imagine is why you proposed action economy benefits to the others.
While I'm certainly in favor of keyhole changes in general, I feel the issue with the Envoy isn't even necessarily related to their raw power, so much as their feel: their action economy is clunky, many of their directives aren't terribly exciting in the niche they cover, their features are bloated with cruft, and several of their subclasses offer largely redundant benefits. Perhaps there's a way to fix this all neatly with one small change, but some of these I think require larger-scale work. You could certainly settle for partial fixes with a few smaller-scale changes, but the inconsistent model for directives I think risks making some of the underlying problems worse without more comprehensive adjustments.
A bit late to this, but answering the questions in order:
1. You get a second chassis immediately that you can command your drone to reconfigure into as a 2-action activity. This is in addition to being able to reconfigure your drone into any chassis as a 1-hour activity.
2. Yes, using the 1-hour activity.
3. This I think is perhaps where the rules are more ambiguous. I would personally rule that you choose the size for each chassis independently of each other.
4. This I think is also where there might be an oversight. I would personally rule that the two-action activity wouldn't change your drone's Hit Points, but the 1-hour activity would affect its maximum Hit Points without necessarily affecting its current Hit Points.
5. Indeed, this seems like an oversight as well, and I'd personally have liked it better if there were better accompanying means of changing customizations and weapons.
You definitely have some points about the rotations and the overlap with the commander. And the commander doles out extra reactions to their allies to respond with; I don't think the Envoy has that? While the other Starfinder classes actually have quite a few good, frequently triggering reactions. (Like Hair Trigger..)
They do with Fast Synergy at 18th level! My suspicion is that the Commander's design ended up heavily influencing the Envoy's, to the point where the latter's directives just ended up being mostly just more tactics.
Ascalaphus wrote:
Nitpick: your listing of class abilities you lose seems to be just about all the non-proficiency ones and a few proficiency ones. But I had to carefully compare them to the class listing one by one because I think you alphabetized them? It would have been easier if you'd just kept the same order in which they appear in the class. Maybe even just shown the class feature table with strikethrough lines?
Motivate Allies: this is basically a "Refocus" ability? I feel like flavorwise this is something you should be able to do stationary, but maybe also on the go (livestreaming your exploits). But it shouldn't come at the cost of being able to do one of the regular exploration activities, it's super annoying when your class tells you that you must do X instead of Search, Avoid Notice etc. Maybe this could be built a bit like the alchemist restocking materials on the go?
Considering how generously the healing connection mystic can try counteracting some effects, I also see room for the envoy to talk people into "walking it off" in between encounters, beginning with counteracting mental effects but maybe with feats also other things.
Immaculate: this seems to have fallen off the page somehow? It's shown weirdly off into the margin, so I can't really read what it does.
Hype Aura: I dunno if this even needs a range tbh. The mystic's vitality network works anywhere on the same plane. I'd be fine with the envoy's abilities working as long as you can communicate with your allies over comms. For affecting enemies 60 feet seems like a decent default range, it could be a cute class feature that other social stuff like Demoralize is also at least 60 feet for you. Would fit with the turn towards ranged combat in Starfinder.
Improvise Talent / removing lots of skills & skill support: For me, getting a skill increase every level was definitely part of the appeal of the class. I don't like moving around too many skills per day, because what skills I have and what skills the rest of the party has, has probably stabilized a long time ago. Moving more than 1-2 skills and skill feats around isn't really needed. I think those features for the envoy actually worked quite okay. So trading all that for Improvise Talent is a big downgrade for me.
I also don't like seeing leadership styles removed completely. Maybe tuned a bit, but overall I liked the theming implied by saying "I'm playing a Guns Blazing envoy". It could maybe be done a bit more Bard/Druid style where it's more like an initial kit and you could later buy into a second kit or double down on your current one.
Answering these as best I can, in order:
* Yeah, it's a quirk of mine to want to alphabetize things when it would have been simpler in this case to probably clear the lot and state which features stayed. A big part of the aim was to clean up the Envoy's feature bloat, and listing cut features would've probably been better-suited for smaller-scale removals.
* Motivate Allies is a pseudo-Refocus, yes, and like all exploration activities, it is meant to be doable while traveling. However, it also provides its own mechanical benefits, as you're continually Aiding your teammates using a Charisma skill, essentially an exploration-centric One For All: while Livestreaming on top of another activity should be fine, this particular benefit I think was significant enough, and already better than Refocusing, that I didn't want to layer it onto other exploration activities.
* Totally agreed on the Envoy being influential enough to warrant a feat that lets them counteract longer-lasting conditions.
* A consistent issue I've encountered with the Homebrewery, the word processor I used for the above document, is that its formatting tends to break when not used on a laptop and in Chrome. I'm still figuring out how to make the formatting work for mobile displays, but in the meantime, I would recommend reading the document on Chrome and your PC if that's not something you're doing already.
* Agreed on the Envoy's hype aura potentially being able to extend the range of Charisma skill checks. Being able to hype people over comms could be fun as well, but I'd rather have that be a feat than a core feature unless there's a need for more in the base kit.
* It is fair to want to keep the Envoy's additional skill increases. My experience with classes that do this in Pathfinder is that although the Investigator or Rogue can cover many skills, there inevitably comes a situation where a particular skill proficiency or skill feat would have helped that they lack in the moment. Although that model leads to skills being set early on, I also think that can lead to skillsets becoming ossified in parties outside of organized play, where players become reluctant to try skills and feats they deem too situational to be worth taking. I very much enjoyed the Envoy being able to switch up their skill feats, and felt being able to do the same with their skill increases during the day would let them be a skill monkey class that shines through adaptation, rather than being good at lots of different things all at once.
* I can agree that there's flavor in subclasses. My issue as I was going through the Envoy is that their leadership styles featuring unique directives effectively meant that the majority of the class's directives, their defining mechanic, were inaccessible. The only other benefits offered by the subclasses are skill increases and feats, which even in the original class are covered by other features. If I were to keep those subclasses, I'd want to have them provide unique benefits that can't be obtained elsewhere, though a Bard/Druid-style structure where all of their benefits can be poached could also help Envoys access more directives.
* I think it's important to remember that courageous anthem, and compositions in general, are balanced to sit in the kit of a 3-slot caster, who has a vast array of powerful spells at their disposal. The Envoy, by contrast, is not a spellcaster, and so I think their directives ought to be stronger than compositions. I would argue that many other directives also offer extremely powerful benefits, such as everyone being able to RK accurately against a creature no matter what or gaining a +1 to AC and saves, though if there is a discrepancy, I would prefer to buff other directives further than nerf the Envoy's bread and butter, particularly as this martial class otherwise has no great access to damage.
* I wouldn't be opposed to giving the Envoy more directives for free, though past a certain point they wouldn't be allowed to be as powerful. I also just don't think the Envoy needs to follow the Commander's model in general, and would prefer to leave the complexity of prepared tactics to the latter class while letting the Envoy follow a different structure. So long as the class has enough buttons to press, which should include directives but also skill actions in and out of combat, I think they're likely to feel like they have enough going for them.
Your mileage may vary, but my personal opinion on the Witch is that the class is fairly in the middle of the pack in terms of power, certainly behind staples like the Bard or Cleric. I think that if you were to switch the class's key attribute to Wisdom and give them a couple of extra trained skills, the class would still be within that ballpark despite those changes being a fairly decent buff. There are likely different takes on this, however, and I imagine that others would likely be more reluctant to buff the Witch if you were to pick a notably powerful subclass such as Faith's Flamekeeper or The Resentment.
Changing the Witch's key attribute would be pretty easy I think; you'd just use Wisdom instead of Intelligence for your spellcasting, grant an attribute boost to Wisdom instead of Intelligence, and that'd be it. Changing the class to a spontaneous spellcaster would be slightly more complex, given that they have a pseudo-spellbook mechanic, but it shouldn't be too difficult. Here's what I'd suggest:
1. You start with a repertoire of five cantrips and two 1st-rank spells of your patron's tradition, instead of your familiar knowing spells.
2. Each time you gain a spell slot, you add a spell to your repertoire of the same rank. Each time you gain a level and learn new spells, you can also swap out one of your old spells for another of the same rank.
3. At 3rd level, you gain the signature spells feature, letting you pick one of your spells at each rank to be a signature spell.
4. Whenever your familiar would learn a spell, such as from a lesson, you instead add that spell to your repertoire.
5. Disallow feats that specifically require you to prepare spells, like Rites of Convocation.
And that I think should let you play a Wisdom-based, spontaneous Witch!
I think the notion of meaningful combat here isn't unitary: a combat encounter can be meaningfully enjoyable and tactically engaging, but meaningless to the narrative of an adventure, just as a narratively meaningful battle can feel meaningless on a gameplay level if the encounter is trivial or excessively samey. One of the major issues underpinning the other thread was that Seisuke's GM appeared to be treating Pathfinder's encounters like a single-speed system, when in practice combat offers many ways of being fine-tuned to the party's tastes: contrary to general expectations, making those encounters easier could likely have made them more meaningful by virtue of making them less frustrating, but even within that same difficulty range, changing enemy distributions and levels would also have made combat more diverse, and given that player's character a bigger chance to shine.
For me, there are many ways in which an encounter can be made more meaningful, whether by making it more mechanically interesting or tying it more to the narrative: ideally, a meaningful encounter should introduce something that invites the party to play a bit differently during combat, whether it be an enemy's special ability, inter-enemy synergy, or an environmental feature, as well as introduce an element to the narrative that gets the party to think about how the encounter fits into the story: even a bog-standard encounter against some low-level skeletons can be meaningful if this is the party's first time dealing with the skeletons' resistances that adventure, and if the skeletons serve as foreshadowing that the party's going to be dealing with more necromancy later on. So long as the encounter adds something to the session, it has some degree of meaning, and the more it can be tied to the story and made interesting for the party to fight, the better.
I've ended up writing homebrew reworks for a few Starfinder classes such as the Solarian, Technomancer, and Witchwarper, and this time I've been focusing on the Envoy and their own issues as a class. In summary, here I think are the Envoy's main problems in SF2e:
* The class can easily feel stuck in a rotation: Directives are at the core of the Envoy's identity, yet despite being such a central part of the class, Get'Em! tends to be far more generally applicable than alternatives, only few of which are obtainable via feats. Additionally, because Leading By Example with a directive now entails spending an additional action just to use the directive's prescribed action, instead of synergizing with composite actions, Leading by Example can feel extremely prescriptive, leading to particularly repetitive turns already marked by continuous action taxes.
* The class's design philosophy doesn't fully mesh with 2e: There are some aspects to this that are more obvious, like Dance Partner! talking about threatening enemies when this isn't a thing in 2e, but also more subtle elements, like Savvy Improviser granting multiple per-day uses of an ability instead of lowering its frequency restriction, or Inscrutable forcing failures on fairly situational social checks. The end result is a class that has a lot of feature bloat, but not necessarily as much functionality as all that text would suggest. In fact, it's not always internally consistent with the rest of SF2e, and an unfortunate side effect of directives being only auditory or visual is that deafblind vlakas get completely excluded from the Envoy's key mechanics.
* The class isn't all that unique: Since the playtest, the Envoy's directives ended up getting remodeled somewhat. They didn't get their action taxes reduced, which was one of the main issues highlighted in the playtest, but instead they got many more directives that had allies take actions as reactions, making them extremely similar to the Commander class's tactics in Pathfinder. Trouble is, the Commander has tons of tactics to choose from, whereas the Envoy gets three by default through their core features. Although they do have some unique aspects going for them, like adaptive talent, this is buried under the aforementioned feature bloat that, in my opinion at least, doesn't help make the class stand out as much as it could.
In short: the Envoy did not get very many of its problems addressed since the playtest in my opinion, and in fact I think got made somewhat worse on-release, with an even more rigid action economy in particular. This appears to be an opinion expressed by others as well, such that the Envoy doesn't really seem to come across as a particularly standout class. I feel this is a shame, as the Envoy otherwise strikes me as a class with the potential to really shine as a flexible martial support.
With this in mind, I've been experimenting with a brew in which I've changed some of the class's mechanics. Key changes include:
* Directives as stances: Rather than tax the Envoy's actions each turn, directives in this brew stay on once activated and grant persistent benefits. The main incentive to switch directives is action compression, since when you enter a directive in this way, you also Lead by Example as part of the same action. Outside of that, you can Lead By Example by using the listed action, which can be part of other composite actions.
* Comprehensive skill retraining: Rather than give the Envoy lots of skill increases and feats, the brew takes their adaptive talent and ramps it up to 11, letting the Envoy instantly retrain a bunch of skill increases and feats on the spot. Additionally, the Envoy can do this regularly in the day, making them extremely flexible with their skills.
* Hype auras and motivated allies: Included in the above brew are a few mechanics to both flesh out the Envoy's capabilities out of combat and standardize their abilities: the class exudes an aura of pure hype that lets them influence anyone who can perceive them (including through smell, so hooray for vlakas!), which also determines the range of their abilities and can be expanded further. Additionally, the class can spend time hyping up their own allies during exploration, even Livestreaming their adventure in the process, to Aid them with Charisma skills while also recharging a whole bunch of different abilities with limited uses in combat or per-target immunities.
Effectively, the focus here is mainly on giving the Envoy much more flexibility with their actions and skills, letting them adapt easily on the fly and mix and match their skills and other abilities without too many prescriptive action taxes. Despite not having a huge amount of extra skills at once, the class would still shine as a skill monkey by being able to come up with the right skills and feats on the spot in limited amounts. Additionally, the reworked class in my limited playtests got to integrate much better with 2e's gameplay out of combat as well as in combat, and got to feel like they were constantly the life of the party by using their Charisma in exploration as well as encounters, while never running out of things to do in the day.
The doc you posted is formatted weird and the second column of text on each is cut off, could you edit it? I would like to read all of your ideas.
This is a common issue when reading Homebrewery articles on phones and browsers outside of Chrome, unfortunately. If you're not doing this already, I'd recommend reading the article on a computer monitor on Chrome, which should feature the correct formatting and let you read the document in full.
I did not play the Sorcerer. It was another player in our group. Dragon Sorcerer with a focus on doing fire damage. Worked as bad as you might imagine. But I have to admit that our GM really had a thing for rolling high on saves. We are playing online on Foundry btw. and we can see the final result of the GM rolls in combat. So no funny business there. Just a lot of bad dice rolls.
Alright, in which case either an Imperial or Draconic Sorcerer ought to help significantly. This may be something your party might already be doing, but in encounters like these with smaller numbers of enemies with high defenses, it will be extremely useful to reduce their defenses via skill actions like Bon Mot, Demoralize, and Dirty Trick, which you as a Sorcerer could contribute with your Charisma. In cases like these, it's useful to soften up your opponents a little first before blasting them, which is where another supportive caster with synesthesia would come in really handy.
I will say, there is no cure for unfortunate rolls, but statistically speaking you're not actually cursed to roll low or have enemies roll high all the time. If you're an arcane caster in particular, your party should normally be working to identify the monsters' weakest saves so that you can target those, which can net you a significant advantage even compared to the party martials. There's of course stuff to do as a support, but that's not a role you have to be relegated to as a caster, as everyone can and should contribute utility to combat.
Out of curiosity, which Sorcerer did you play, OP? If having enemies succeed against your spells often is a downer, then an Imperial Sorcerer could help with their ancestral memories focus spell. If you're feeling like your spells aren't dealing enough damage even when enemies do fail their saves, then an elemental Sorcerer might be able to help in that respect. Perhaps these are options you've already tried out, though, in which case that may not be enough to help.
I feel hazards aren't really such a big part of the game that every party makes sure they get a legendary Perception class just to pass the detection gates. It doesn't seem to make weaker classes like the Gunslinger or Investigator that much more desirable, nor is it really a major reason why strong classes like the Rogue are strong in my opinion. I don't get the feeling removing that gating would meaningfully affect party choices when determining their compositions most of the time.
Here are a few of the benefits besides the Focus Point:
1. Like any conflux spell, it recharges your Spellstrike.
2. It automatically deals damage, no need to roll or have your target make a save. Though the damage may not be the highest, guaranteed damage can be extremely useful when an enemy needs to be finished off right now before they can do something awful to your party.
3. It's more damage as a third action on a class that is terrible with save spells and will usually not have room to make further Strikes on the turn where you've made a Spellstrike.
While I agree that there are sometimes better uses for that Focus Point, force fang is one of the few conflux spells you can plausibly use on the turn where you Spellstrike to recharge the ability and do something else on top. I'd thus rank it among the better conflux spells out there.
I found this combination last night, that can work with a Dex, Int build.. Networked Android, Infosphere Director gives Digital Diversion a 30-foot range and doesn't require having a hacker's toolkit or free hand. It is also a lot less situational than the default requirement of the opponent being adjacent to you. So this is more versatile than just using Create a Diversion.
If this were for an Int-based character, I'd agree, this makes Computers a much more versatile skill. As an Envoy, though, training in Deception and Computers will net you even more versatility without requiring that same investment, and your mod when Creating a Diversion will be higher. I think the build you're suggesting would work very well on a Mechanic or Technomancer, though, or even a Witchwarper given their Int key attribute.
I've had very similar experiences, particularly with lack of time pressure making it fairly trivial to step out of hazards and wait for them to stop. Part of the issue with complex hazards in my opinion, aside from what feels like legacy design affecting how they can be handled, is that they're often expected to be standalone encounters, which means they need to single-handedly bring a degree of engaging and dynamic gameplay that you normally get from a cohort of different monsters, all while being static and repetitive by design. I don't really know of any quick and easy solutions to the problem, but in my opinion complex hazards ought to tie in closer to dungeon design where they make the dungeon harder in general by adding some general complication, such that the only way to make bits of the dungeon easier to navigate is to disable the hazard and solve the puzzle it represents. Haunts in particular really should have some effect on the environment around them even when not triggered.
The main difference is that whereas previous directives let you use different actions, including composite actions that might include the triggering Lead By Example action, the new model only allows you to spend an extra action to use that one action. Additionally, leadership styles previously let you activate the Lead by Example benefits using other actions, which in one particular case even let you do so as a free action (Infosphere Director, Recall Knowledge using Automatic Knowledge); that is no longer a thing. The new directives are therefore far more prescriptive and rigid as a result, and block synergy between those directives and abilities that might include action compression of their own.
I kind of feel like at least the bracing trait might allow you to get an action discount specifically for bracing at weapon. One action to brace instead of two. Maybe it negates the MAP penalty, but then we're getting closer to installing Reactive Strike as a weapon trait again.]
I really like the idea of the brace trait letting you Ready a Strike with the weapon as a single action. In my opinion, you wouldn’t even need the MAP negation or bonus damage for this to be a fun, versatile trait that unlocks a few extra options.
Heroism Range touch; Targets 1 creature. It's got a bigger bonus than Get Em! But range is touch and only affects 1 PC
The spell's duration is 10 minutes, though, meaning it can be easily cast before battle. At higher levels, casting lower-rank versions of the spell becomes so cheap that it becomes fairly easy to keep the buff on whichever party members you want.
Personally, I feel the base bonus doesn't even really need to be to attacks, so much as damage rolls: a major problem in my opinion with Starfinder's combat at early levels is that guns feel like pea-shooters, because they only deal a single and relatively low die of damage with no modifier. If Get'Em! provided a bonus to damage rolls from its base effect (and to all damage rolls, to avoid the issue Kitusser mentions of not benefiting AoE attacks), then having an Envoy on the team would likely make gun-based combat feel a lot more satisfying, and their Lead By Example's bonus could be a lot higher instead.
This might be something for another thread, but based on the feedback given here and some long-standing feedback from other discussions, I've come up with a homebrew Envoy rework that I'll be starting to playtest. The basic principles behind this rework are: directives are stances that provide team-wide buffs, so you no longer get action taxed each turn (but you do get action compression when switching directives), you get to retrain your skills as well as your skill feats on the fly, and you also get to hype up your allies during exploration to Aid them using your Charisma skills. As an added bonus, your effects no longer require only sight or hearing to be effective, so your deafblind vlakas don't get excluded from the Envoy's mechanics.
I will say, of all the things to criticize about Paizo, unionization ain't it, in my opinion. This is probably not something that really ought to be discussed on these particular forums, given that the topic is both inherently political and a question of basic human rights, but I also simply don't think the facts line up, as Paizo unionized in 2021, long before any perceived drop in quality this year, and unionization didn't stop developers from doing reported 55-hour work weeks either.
Even more broadly, I don't think the blame game in general really helps here: I don't think the designers are to blame, as I suspect they're significantly overworked and are doing the best they can, and while I would be more inclined to raise an eyebrow at management for putting in place what is clearly an imperfect production pipeline, I can also understand the pressures that would lead to it. Rather, I'd be more interested in understanding the processes behind these problems that are leading to drops in quality and lapses in promised content, as well as the decisions that led to them. I don't expect to find out any of those, nor are any of us on the forums entitled to that knowledge, but I can't help but want to understand better what's going wrong.
The problem with status bonuses to attacks is that they're not that uncommon: notably, heroism is a frequently-used source of this, such that Get'Em!'s contribution ends up becoming significantly overshadowed by divine and occult casters later on. While I'm more or less okay with an Int skill-based subclass on a Charisma class, as the Envoy does have the skill increases to not need to commit attribute boosts, Digital Diversion is one of the most useless skill feats you could give to said Charisma class, who can Create a Diversion just fine already with a much larger modifier.
Driftbourne wrote:
After rereading it a few times, it seems the intended use is to make an adjacent opponent off guard without being flanking them.
This is effectively what the Feint action does already for melee attacks, which the Envoy is also particularly well-equipped to do as a Charisma class who will almost certainly be at least trained in Deception (and who also gets bonuses to checks for that skill from their class). I personally love Digital Diversion's flavor as well, but of all the Starfinder classes who'd benefit from it, the Envoy in my opinion is not the one.
That's fair, in which case option #2 might be a better alternative by comparison. There are only very few effects that let you crit on a 19 or lower when you hit, and one of those effects is on the Swashbuckler class itself, so you could conceivably give those classes this special, ultra-rare trait that boosts their crit rate without boosting their hit rate (unlike the Fighter's improved proficiency, which boosts both). Not only would this avoid interfering with other circumstance bonuses to Strike damage, this would synergize particularly well with on-crit effects like the deadly and fatal traits (which, in my opinion, do make sense on these classes), and feed into the Investigator, Rogue, and Swashbuckler's ability to output utility or debilitations via crit spec effects in addition to their own tools.
Why circumstance bonus instead of just plain additional damage? Additional damage is already the default way to handle martial gimmicks, and making it a circumstance bonus would just make rogues and investigators not benefit from a handful of feats and buffs, which doesn't feel necessary.
This is perhaps my own excessive personal tendency, but I'd prefer it if bonuses were more consistently typed and tied into existing systems, as it would limit stacking and allow existing effects to be stronger if needed. Strikes in 2e I feel already have a bit of an issue with tracking in that they eventually end up with this rainbow assortment of damage from property runes that can each trigger different weaknesses, resistances, immunities, and other effects. Although I know of several different status bonuses to damage, I'm struggling to think of that many circumstance bonuses to damage besides the forceful or twin traits, though this is likely more my own ignorance than anything else, as those feats and buffs likely do exist.
* We already have another mechanic to represent hitting a weak spot, and that's critical hits. This is presumably why oozes are immune the the effects of those too.
* We already have another mechanic to represent dealing more damage, and that's status and circumstance bonuses. Despite how damage bonuses tend to always be typed on spells, as with the Sorcerer's sorcerous potency, there's a lot of untyped bonus Strike damage running around willy-nilly on top of precision damage.
So to me, precision damage as a mechanic is somewhat redundant, because it tries to do something that other mechanics already do, and arguably better as well. Were I to replace it, I'd do it in one of two ways:
1. Option #1: change precision damage to a circumstance bonus to damage to represent hitting a more vulnerable spot. This would avoid going up against immunity unless a monster happens to be immune to circumstance bonuses to damage.
2. Option #2: invent a new trait, let's call it precise, that on a hit, adds its value to the attack's die roll; if the total is 20 or higher, the hit becomes a critical hit. For example, if you hit with a precise 1 attack and rolled a 19, for instance, you'd add 1 to the roll of 19 and get a 20, turning your attack into a critical hit, though if you'd rolled an 18 you'd only still get a regular hit. If this replaced precision damage, then Investigators, Rogues, and Swashbucklers would land critical hits more often, though not more regular hits, and could also leverage greater benefits from critical specialization effects and deadly or fatal weapons such as guns. They'd still get shut down by critical immunity, but in a manner much more similar to Fighters and other martials.
In both cases, it would help avoid singling out precision damage as this bonus damage that's easier to shut down than any other similar mechanic. Option #1 would likely be the most straightforward replacement, whereas Option #2 would change the gameplay of precision damage classes by quite a bit in ways that could impact their build decisions, even if it could result in the same overall damage output.
Agreed. I try to normally avoid saying things are entirely bad because I think it can get hyperbolic quickly, but this one is pretty bad.
I feel the same way as well. Although this isn't the end of the world either, I'm still fairly concerned by what feels like a lapse in both quality and quantity of development. Normally I'm one to caution against excessive negativity towards Paizo, but despite the errata feedback threads being highlighted, shelving them because they're not considered an emergency still feels like a dismissal. Those scheduled errata were never meant to be about emergencies to begin with, and there are still glaring issues with core classes that could be easily rectified, yet have been left unaddressed for over a year. That we're not getting even a drip feed of information for a major sourcebook whose playtest happened last year is similarly concerning to me, especially when the developers having such packed schedules as to take errata off the table would normally suggest more news on that front instead. This, coupled with a new storefront that feels even worse than its antiquated predecessor and almost like a vehicle for customer-unfriendly practices, hasn't really ended the year with the most confidence in Paizo on my part, especially as the company's main draws for me normally are its high quality standard and general customer-friendliness.
That feels really strong for a level 1 at will reaction available to any dwarf. Amped Guidance does this but it costs a focus point and is only available to psychics (and multiclass psychics.) Well, it also applies to more rolls and to your allies, but I think the point remains.
To be clear, I think the original heritage is fine; the purpose of this thread is to work with LordVanya to find ways to buff the heritage in a manner he would find enjoyable at his table, as per his stated intent. Really, just shifting the trigger to after the result is determined would be both a significant buff and a major quality of life improvement, as it would guarantee that the reaction would always be effective when it triggers.
Because the buff would be specific to that one table, I don't think it's all that important if the buff makes the ability stronger than it normally ought to be unless it becomes a game-warping outlier. We're not balancing the heritage for the whole playerbase, we're just working to make it feel better for someone who has given criticism of a mechanic and wants to work to change it. I also don't consider it particularly helpful to dismiss OP's endeavor out of personal disagreement, so if you don't think the Ancient-Blooded Dwarf heritage needs a buff and aren't willing to work with the OP to develop one, that's fine, this thread just isn't for you.
Well suppose you're fighting a zombie, which has weakness to slashing 10. Are you being forced to have a slashing weapon? No, but the zombie does have a LOT of HP for its level.
Now you're fighting a skeleton and it resists piercing and slashing. Are you being forced to have a bludgeoning weapon now? Note that the skeleton has really low HP.
I feel this makes a great case for why resistances and weaknesses make for better puzzle monsters than immunities, IMO. The skeleton and zombie are still puzzle monsters in the sense that some damage types and strategies work better than others, but not showing up to the fight with the perfect answer doesn't prevent that fight from being winnable, it just makes the fight tougher. By contrast, when you get an extremely prescriptive list of immunities, as can happen with golems or oozes, those fights I think tend to be much more binary, so even if the party overall will still have the tools to beat the enemy, individual characters may end up feeling completely ineffective, which I think is a feeling worth not engineering in this kind of heroic fantasy game. In general, I think puzzles that can be solved in different ways tend to flow smoother than puzzles that can only be solved in a single, specific way, so even if both can be stimulating and rewarding when solved, one model I think lessens the frustration element by quite a bit compared to the other.
Thank you for the feedback; the idea of developing on different abilities that would counter specific bonuses is interesting as well, in my opinion. I do think though that if a monster has enough of a weakness to have a -4 status penalty to fire, then that +1 fire damage would be even more disproportionately powerful now, as it would turn into something like 23 damage against a level 20 enemy. This can make something like an otherwise weak consumable disproportionately effective, whereas now that consumable would have a higher chance to hit and crit, and therefore deal damage proportionate to its own.
I do agree with making immunity rare, though still present. My issue with it now I think is that immunity, on top of being overused, has some overlapping meanings at the moment: on one hand, it's used to represent a monster taking no damage of a certain type, e.g. fire immunity, but it's also used to state that a monster is unaffected by certain mechanics, e.g. immunity to death. I personally think immunity ought to be extremely rare, and when it does apply it's often better-served by a bespoke mechanic: this is already the case with undead and void damage, for instance, where the void healing ability of undead states they're unaffected by void damage, instead of providing generic void immunity. In many cases where immunity is currently applied, I do think strong resistance would be a better fit: for instance, elementals being immune to their own element to me makes about as much sense as a flesh-and-bone creature being immune to unarmed attacks from other flesh-and-bone creatures, so while resistance might be an intuitive thing to apply in my opinion, total immunity not so much.
The reason I don’t think kiting really works here is that if your Swashbuckler is making themselves very hard to catch up to, the ooze could always just move to someone else, and if they do that the Swash can’t do much about it. Ideally yes, someone else will have AoE, but that still leaves the Swash in a position where they themselves are next to useless. The Swashbuckler is unlikely to be fighting that ooze alone, but then no character should ever feel disempowered to that extent, in my opinion, as the anti-fun of that I think surpasses the fun of defeating the monster.
I don’t know of blanket immunity to all physical damage, but some monsters are immune to two physical damage types, like the aforementioned verdurous ooze. The Swashbuckler could attempt to kite the thing, but that I think requires the GM throwing the player a bone when the class’s mechanics could often easily end up being completely ineffective. It really is possible for a character to have no options here.
This is also IMO why “monsters as puzzles” only work when the solution to the puzzle is readily available. If the monster is resistant to stuff but vulnerable to a particular thing like cold or silver, a party without that will have a harder time but can still stand a chance without having to rebuild. If a monster is immune to a particular thing but otherwise vulnerable to other things that are universally-available, that can prevent some strategies and favor others by comparison. When a monster is immune to everything but a few specific and character-dependent effects, that I think is when the puzzle becomes so overly prescriptive that some characters just cease to be able to play the game properly for a bit. This is why I generally feel like resistances, rather than immunities, are generally better at discouraging certain strategies, because you can still favor certain tactics and characters without ending up with situations where other party members effectively just have to sit the encounter out.
This idea is based on this thread on precision damage immunity, as well as this ongoing discussion regarding instances of damage and how ill-defined those are in 2e, along with prior discussions regarding the same topic. To summarize, here are some of my criticisms with damage as it is currently implemented in 2e:
Criticism of damage:
* Damage being split up into separate types means damage can often double- or even triple-dip into resistances and weaknesses: on one end, hitting multiple resistances at the same time can mean some mixed damage gets negated entirely, and on the other, hitting multiple weaknesses can make certain bits of damage hit disproportionately above their weight, making certain effects deceptively swingy.
* Resistances and weaknesses being a flat amount I think runs into problems where certain attacks can all too easily get negated by resistance, which I've seen happen with Starfinder's guns and their low damage. In other cases, it means even tiny amounts of damage become disproportionately stronger if they hit one or more weaknesses, adding to the swinginess of damage.
* Immunities, when not used sparingly enough, can easily shut down certain characters and make them feel like they have no options in certain encounters. This can range from magic-immune creatures such as golems and will-o'-wisps, to oozes with immunities to precision and mental effects, plus certain damage types, that can hard-counter classes like the Swashbuckler.
* Because damage can easily be split up, it's difficult to define what an instance of damage is, and that can have a real impact when determining the riders that occur when dealing damage, such as adding damage of a certain type via one ability to a thing that deals damage of that type. Additionally, split damage can make damage rolls more time-consuming than they need to be when not relying on automation and having to tally reduction from resistances.
* In addition to the above, I feel classes that are expected to trigger weaknesses more easily, like the Alchemist, are often given weaker damage as a result, as the expectation is that they'll be dealing a ton of damage by triggering weaknesses from mixed and/or persistent damage. When a monster doesn't have those weaknesses, however, those classes can easily feel deficient.
* On a more minor note, I feel damage types, rather than traits, are legacy design, as resistances, weaknesses, and immunities already factor in traits and damage types tend to be redundant when there's already a trait for it.
TL;DR: Damage as defined right now I think is often more complicated and swingy than it needs to be, suffers from a degree of legacy design, and is loosely-defined in ways that can give both the GM and player a headache.
IMO these issues are largely baked into 2e's fundamental design and are thus unlikely to ever change, nor would it be easy to overhaul this system. However, I still think it's worth considering a model that tries to avoid these same pitfalls. Here is my take on a model that could help streamline damage and make it smoother to run overall:
The changes:
1. Remove damage types. Damage instead has traits, such as bludgeoning, fire, or magical, and this damage is generally listed in the same way: damage with the fire trait, for instance, could just be listed as fire damage. Damage can have more than one trait, and so a Wizard dealing asteroid damage with falling stars to an enemy in the center of its burst would be dealing arcane bludgeoning fire damage.
2. All current instances of mixed damage are combined into a single instance of damage, which has all of the traits corresponding to the mixed damage's types. Any rider that adds damage on top, such as from a spellshape, blood magic effect, or other mechanic, adds damage to that same instance of damage. When you would combine damage for the purposes of resistances, weaknesses, bonuses, penalties, or the like, that damage is one single instance of damage. This could in fact all be defined under a trait, e.g. "salvo," that simply combines all different sources of damage into one instance.
3. Resistances, weaknesses, and immunities are no longer flat amounts, but instead status bonuses or penalties to defenses against the listed traits, ranging from +1 for minimal resistance to +4 for maximal resistance and immunity (and -1 to -4 status penalties for weaknesses). As normal with bonuses and penalties, you apply the largest applicable bonus and the largest applicable penalty each time when multiple traits apply.
4. In the case of immunities designed to block certain mechanical effects beyond damage and spell types, such as immunity to critical hits or death, define those immunities as monster abilities instead. For instances, oozes could have an amorphous monster ability that has them reduce critical hits to regular hits, and the undead trait could include rules to state that they're not slain instantly by death effects unless the effect also brings them to 0 HP.
5. Adjust monsters and class abilities accordingly: for instance, Champion reactions that grant resistances could instead grant a retroactive +4 bonus to the target's defenses, potentially changing the damaging effect's degree of success to something less severe.
TL;DR: Condense mixed and composite damage into a single instance that inherits traits corresponding to its components, change resistances, weaknesses, and immunities to status bonuses and penalties to defenses against listed traits, and adjust monsters and abilities accordingly.
There's more to be built upon this, like condensing the damage component of damage property runes into additional fundamental runes and having the property runes simply add a particular trait with an additional effect, but the core idea behind the above is to condense damage into just one instance each time and simplify rolling damage greatly, with resistances, weaknesses, and immunities adjusting attack rolls and saves rather than damage rolls. This should ideally streamline dealing damage, but should also soften certain counters, such that a caster going up against an enemy with a +1 status bonus against all magic doesn't have to also get their mixed damage reduced to 0 by high resistances, or a ranged martial doesn't get their single damage die reduced to 0 by an enemy with even a moderate resistance at low level.
This is of course a fairly drastic change from what we currently have, and I'm keen to know more about outliers and effects that would need special attention: what would need to be done to prevent the above from breaking certain things? Are there unintended consequences to the above you can think of? Would there be ambiguity that would need clarification or further rules?
If the damage comes from striking runes, then what benefit to higher level staves? Aside of course from the staves having some better spells, maybe the range increment also goes up for higher level staves? Combat arenas also tend to get bigger at higher level (consider the fly speed of dragons..)
Assuming this attack benefits from both the staff's fundamental and property runes as WatersLethe mentioned, then the benefits would be the same as for other weapons, and you'd just always have a decent single-action attack as a caster. My guess though is that this kind of effect would make the biggest difference at lower level, rather than high level: at higher levels, casters have so many strong single actions that this kind of attack I think would be more of a last resort, rather than a first option. At lower levels, though, casters don't have all of those great options in those same amounts, which is why many currently equip weapons that they abandon later on. Giving them staves from level 1 that they can use to make more magical attacks would, from what I'm seeing at least, give casters a nice little third action that'd feel properly magical.
The current game design is kinda harsh on single-strategy characters like the strict fire-only kineticist. It only takes one level 1 feat to be more versatile but I guess you could be dead-set on being fire-only. And then some fights you'll be useless.
To me, the problem with this is that the fire-only Kineticist who doesn't pick that 1st-level feat is a build the game readily offers to the player. It's also not a terribly niche build: you just pick a single gate, and pick some other 1st-level feat, so unlike the hypothetical caster who prepares nothing but fashionista, the single-element fire Kin is very much a build that can easily happen in the wild and not just in online discussion, especially when a player has a specific pyromancer theme in mind and believes that's something the game will let them do. I wouldn't overhaul PF2e to prevent this from happening, but I do think there's a degree of false advertising in enabling ultra-specialized builds such as those in a game that can punish players quite hard for that same kind of specialization. "Screw you for playing this build we offered you" is really not 2e's general style, and the fact that it otherwise makes an effort to make most player characters decent at minimum right out the box I think is to the game's credit.
Putting aside the specifics of 2e's immunities for a moment, the notion that players must be punished for committing to a specific theme is one I question: although this is certainly part of Pathfinder's legacy, the concept of a bag-of-tricks Wizard who has lots of different spells up their sleeve isn't one I personally consider more interesting than, say, a mentalist spellcaster who's all about weaving illusions and tricking the mind. I don't think one concept needs to be elevated above the other, and I certainly don't think being a generalist needs to be the default. If someone really wants to play a fire-based character and commit to a theme, my first instinct as a designer would be to make sure that character gets lots of different options so that they don't just use the fireball effect every time, and that is something I think PF2e does already with a variety of spells and impulses that use fire as a medium for area control, damage over time, mobility, and debuffing. Punishing a player for bringing a perfectly valid character concept to life just because it's not "correct" to me just comes across as arbitrary at best, and at worst needlessly petty in a medium that otherwise celebrates diversity of choice. It's not like the game doesn't enable simple concepts either, as Fighters and Barbarians are extremely straightforward classes that are nonetheless really strong and unlikely to get completely shut down. Were this extended to a greater range of classes, more likely in a future edition than the current one, I think it would be to the benefit of diverse and interesting gameplay, not its detriment.
I feel that the issues with the class in the playtest weren't actually addressed and the class kind of feels worse.
This is my feeling for a lot of SF2e's content, tbh. Perhaps I'm not seeing the full picture, but it felt like the community across all discussion spaces gave pretty clear and unified feedback on a lot of issues that barely affected the final product at all. The Starfriends did include a few improvements here and there, including the Envoy's extra directives, but in my opinion it wasn't nearly enough.
When I posted my playtest notes for the Envoy, my assessment was pretty positive: compared to some other classes especially, the Envoy had some good things going for it, and the main problems that needed to be solved were feature bloat, a lack of directives, and a rigid action economy. The class got more directives, but retained all of its bloated features, and worst of all I think its action economy got even worse, with the new directive model making the class's actions far less flexible and lending themselves even more to fixed rotations. Really, switching to Commander-style tactics with allies doing things as reactions I think was a major step down, because it not only made the class a lot less unique in my eyes but also took away what I thought was a very interesting model of having persistent buffs interact with a variety of actions. Although the class does have some things going for it still, like the combination of watered-down tactics with a skill monkey chassis, I'm much more tempted now to recommend a Bard or Commander instead to provide a more fully-formed version of what the Envoy has to offer.
I think the mechanical principle of "try something else" is good to have in a game that's meant to encourage tactical flexibility, but it also entails certain responsibilities on the part of monster design: for starters, the intended targets need to have other things to be able to try that are comparably effective, if not necessarily optimal in a frictionless vacuum. I do think this is still the case with the Investigator, Rogue, and Swashbuckler, but then I think that ends up hitting another risk factor, which is that every time you build a "try something else" into your monster design, you reduce the number of options available against that monster, so that monster normally ought to make sure that the number of options that remain are realistically available to any character. Thus, when your verdurous ooze is immune not only to precision damage and mental effects, but also to piercing and slashing damage, each of those immunities that could individually be fine reduces options down to such a small number that your Swashbuckler's contributions largely just end up being whichever damage property runes they have on their weapon (except for corrosive runes, against which the ooze is also immune). This in my opinion does not necessarily make for tactically interesting, let alone enjoyable gameplay.
In general, the risk I see with immunities is that they make gameplay more brittle: whereas soft counters like resistances generally allow a minimum level of effectiveness for suboptimal tactics, hard counters such as immunities shut those options down completely, which increases the risk of completely hard-countering a character if there isn't enough room for other options. If we're treating combat in the game as a puzzle to be solved with lots of different tools, that's fine, but then that implies that these counters should always leave characters with enough options to solve the puzzle given to them, which clearly isn't always the case. I also think that broad, hard counters to an entire range of mechanics, like fire or mental, is incompatible with thematic builds that focus on one of those mechanics, e.g. a mentalist or a single-element fire Kineticist, so a game that has these hard counters in place is a game that implicitly bans certain characters from play in adventures featuring lots of those counters.
The other issue I personally take with immunities is how they interact with common class mechanics: it never feels good for a caster to waste most of their turn and an entire spell slot, particularly a high-rank one, and having that happen due to immunity can be particularly frustrating. A martial class being unable to put their smaller subset of feats and mechanics to effective use because the monster hard-counters them all is also in my opinion not a great feeling, because at that point "try something else" doesn't work when that is the monster's answer to everything you do. There's a subtler problem at hand here as well with mixed damage types going up against mixed resistance, which if the resistances are high enough can effectively turn into immunity all the same as Ascalaphus mentions.
This is probably worth a separate discussion, which I think has already happened as well, but on top of instances of damage being poorly-defined in-game, the fact that damage is broken up into separate types that then each hit separate resistances, weaknesses, and immunities can make dealing damage far swingier than is healthy in certain instances, which also carries balance implications that I think negatively impact classes meant to excel at hitting different weaknesses, like the Alchemist. It also pushes martial characters towards the rainbow damage builds commonly seen on weapons, which prevents those classes from getting their Strikes 100% shut down but doesn't always lend itself to the most interesting build decisions either in my opinion.
Question: suppose we had a weapon trait, let's just call it "enchanted", that allowed you to use your spell attack modifier in the place of the normal attack modifier for the Strike, and allowed your attack to be counted as both a Strike and Casting a Spell. How powerful would this trait be compared to, say, the agile trait? Because if we're valuing this hypothetical trait as less than or equal to agile, then adding that to this hypothetical d4 staff attack would put it on par with the air repeater, give or take the power of dealing energy damage. If it's stronger, then either the attack would need fewer of those benefits, or some kind of drawback trait to compensate. Depending on what the intended result is, each of these could be a valid approach.
I do personally find the legendary solar weapon proficiency at level 19 a bit awkward, because being a proficiency rank above others in Strikes is generally a class-defining strength that is applied much sooner, as with the Operative's proficiency track. Giving the Solarian that proficiency bump does make an impact, but it occurs far too late to define the class's strengths, and in my opinion only contributes to the general feeling that the class's core features are basically more jumbled-up versions of the Fighter's from Pathfinder, from the equivalent of Reactive Strike at level 1 to the equivalent of Battlefield Surveyor at level 7. The class in practice ends up playing differently thanks to their AoE feats, but that takes time and feat investment to come about, and anyone who happens to not take those feats can easily find themselves just playing a worse Fighter in space.
I like the new effect, as it would help avoid critical failures and would apply to multiple saves. If you want to buff the reaction further, one thing you could do is change the trigger to after you roll the save and get one of the results you could affect: that way, you'd never waste your reaction on an effect that wouldn't change the result of your save, and the reaction would become much more efficient as a result. This could also allow you to change every degree of success with a +1 or a +2, so if the trigger was "you would fail a saving throw and a +2 circumstance bonus would improve your degree of success," getting that +2 circumstance bonus on that reaction would be guaranteed to help you significantly.
Dungeon Core. An expansive guide on how to create your own dungeons, from small-scale ones to full-on megadungeons, with in-depth guidelines for layouts, playing with light and the environment, setting up upcoming threats, villains, and hidden treasures, as well as how to have monsters use the dungeon to their own advantage, Tucker's Kobold's-style. The book could feature tons of new and updated hazards with extended rules and guidelines on how to use them, from simple hazards to spice up encounters to complex hazards. There'd be room in my opinion to have rules for converting simple hazards to complex hazards and back, as well as for adapting simple damage hazards to better work out of combat, e.g. such as by applying a debuff or condition other than damage, or giving upcoming enemies some kind of advantage such as by alerting them (and the book could give out guidelines on how to have different parts of a dungeon interact with one another). The book could introduce simple additional subsystems for creating pressure, from clocks to measure time pressure to more traditional attrition-based mechanics, with rules on how to factor in conditions and debuffs into the difficulty of subsequent encounters.
Although I can understand where you're coming from, OP, I do think some of the assumptions made here aren't necessarily accurate, and the proposal I think may actually be a nerf. I'll explain myself as best I can:
* Although many classes have strong reactions, reactions in my experience are not a given and a lot of casters in particular don't have as many reactions. There is therefore room for reactions, and that I think is less costly than a single action.
* Although there are broader reactions, boosting your save isn't an excessively narrow trigger in my opinion, and it does trigger fairly regularly.
* Although the bonus doesn't increase, it very much does scale, as that +1 remains relevant at all points in the game due to the way 2e's accuracy works.
* By bumping up degrees of success only on a successful save, the proposed new action prevents the Ancient-Blooded Dwarf from turning a failure into a success, or a crit fail into a failure. Because the single action is a higher cost, this may in fact be a reduction to the original feat's power.
Thus, if the feeling is that the original reaction is too weak, I'd personally be more inclined to just increase the circumstance bonus. In all cases, I'd recommend putting the vanilla reaction to more use first to get a better feel of it. I don't think it's the strongest reaction around by any means, but it can be quite useful.
As a side issue (not really applicable to swashbucklers), I also think that a Fire Kineticist should be great at fighting fire elementals, not near-helpless against them. She is a master of fire, and they are literally made of the thing her whole class is all about! However, I seem to be the only one who thinks that.
You’re not alone, I feel the same way. A Kineticist encountering an elemental in the wild, let alone one of their element’s plane, ought to feel really good about it in my opinion. Right now, though, it’s more a case of “well, at least I have this action that helps me not be completely useless.”
I also think you highlight a good point that immunities tie into two aspects of the game that are in tension with each other here: there’s immunity as flavor, i.e. “this monster has X immunity because it makes sense for them to have it,” and then there’s immunity as a mechanic, i.e. “this monster has X immunity to force the player to use different tools at their disposal.” My impression is that Paizo takes a flavor-first approach to giving out immunities, and that could be fine if players always had enough tools to deal with the mechanical implications. The problem is that this isn’t a guarantee, as the above examples show, whether because the immunities are too broad on a monster or the characters being countered don’t have enough strong alternatives. I feel there’s also a degree of legacy design at play here, where certain monsters have certain immunities just because that’s what they had in editions past, even if the resulting gameplay doesn’t work super-well with the rest of 2e.
Personally, I’d be interested in seeing what the game would look like if immunities didn’t exist at all: striking an ooze’s weak point for precision damage, instilling fear in a mindless undead, or burning a fire elemental might all sound unlikely, but I also think adventurers in Pathfinder are just that good and can regularly achieve the unlikely. It may not be easy, and those monsters should probably be quite resistant to those things in particular, but it would never be totally impossible, and so no character would ever get completely shut down.
Its just that must is an imperative. You can't qualify it in general English except when you include words like unless.
I agree with this, though the word "must" is also used to indicate a necessary component to produce a desired result, e.g. "you must break at least one egg to make an omelette." My impression is that this is the meaning here, i.e. "You must use a spellshape action directly before casting the spell you want to alter in order to apply the spellshape's effects to the spell," except the sentence as written is overly terse and thus lends itself to a different interpretation in isolation. The subsequent text, however, makes it clear that it is in fact possible to use actions other than casting the spell you'd want to alter.
I think that if the rules stated "You must use a spellshape action directly before casting the spell you want to alter," without any of the following text, then I would interpret that as there being no choice but to use the relevant spell after the spellshape. Because of the text stating that the benefits are lost when using another action, however, that to me implies that it is possible to use a spellshape and then do something else that doesn't gain the spellshape's benefit, like the combo mentioned in the OP. It's very silly and highlights why certain benefits are generally tied to casting spells with a minimum action cost, but it also looks like a lot of fun, especially at 20th level.
I find the idea that it'd be a crisis if something was somehow resistant to rage damage to be somewhat exaggerated. The game has been doing that to casters for years and they deal with it.
I think the key difference here is that casters are made to work with hard counters, unlike martials. Outside of the admittedly many egregious hard-counters to all magic like golems, will-o'-wisps, and the leydroth, most enemies with immunities can be approached in alternative ways with a diverse enough array of spells: if a Sorcerer's fireball doesn't work against a devil, for instance, that can be fine, because they could just cast lightning bolt instead, or one of several more spells in their repertoire. By contrast, enemies that are completely immune to Strike-based damage tend to leave martial classes with very little recourse. Martials can and should have backup weapons at the ready, but if your main weapon deals slashing damage, your backup weapon deals piercing damage, and you're up against a verdurous ooze, your Swashbuckler will be reduced to slapping the ooze with unbuffed unarmed attacks, and taking acid damage each time for the privilege.
With that said, I also agree that it sucks to get hard-countered, and even though casters have the means to deal with it, that still doesn't make it much fun. It's also in my opinion the single biggest obstacle to any kind of thematic caster with a specific theme, because it's very easy for that theme to get completely shut down. Any kind of mentalist class is obviously going to suffer against the game's large number of mindless enemies, and builds centered around a particular element or ailment, like fire or poison, will have very few options against enemies immune to those. In a gaming environment where increasingly more players want to commit to a particular theme or emulate a character that's similarly good at a specific niche, something that's easily achievable with martial characters but not with casters, it would be to the benefit of a future edition to let players do that without feeling completely out of options against some enemies.
This may go a bit beyond the scope of this particular brew, but how about this to increase the synergy between staves and spell attacks:
* All full casters become experts in spell attacks at 5th level, masters at 13th level, and never legendary. Anyone who goes up to master instead becomes an expert at 11th level and never a master. This decouples spell attack proficiency from spell DC proficiency.
* Prepared staves grant their attack bonus to spell attacks.
With this, you could have that particular spell attack make full use of all the staff's runes and also keep spell attacks as accurate as martial Strikes, without exceeding their average accuracy either. With a d4 damage die, that should make staves fairly reasonable for making ranged attacks as a caster.
I'm of the same opinion, and I think it's one of those cases where flavor clashes with gameplay enjoyment: it makes intuitive sense that a formless blob would generally have no weak points, but it feels awful to play against when your class's entire damage mechanic is precision damage. Paizo and players have talked about premaster golems and their legacy design shutting down a lot of player tools, but oozes I think have a similar problem where the combination of precision immunity and mindlessness means a huge number of abilities won't work on them at all, and Swashbucklers in particular will be hard-pressed to make much use of their kit.
In general, I think precision damage would be much better off changed as precision resistance, as even a high resistance for a creature's level would be less punishing than immunity. I also think incorporeal creatures shouldn't have precision immunity at all; rather, that should just be a part of their normal resistances that vanish when you use the right damage: your rapier might not do much against a ghost, but if it's got a ghost touch rune, then you should have no trouble piercing their ghostly heart.
Although this is a broader topic to discuss, I'm also just generally not a fan of hard immunity: so long as immunities to large swathes of abilities like mental or poison exist, the game can't properly accommodate a mesmerist or poisoner class unless they have a built-in means of working around that immunity. Immunity to fire on creatures like devils also prevents single-element fire Kineticists from doing much at all in certain encounters and campaigns, and generally creatures built to shut down most means of dealing with them, like will-o'-wisps, I think tend to make for encounters that are more annoying than engaging. This is probably something that is only likely to change in a new edition, but I'd like that new edition to redo immunities and resistances so that there's more emphasis on soft counters, rather than hard counters, so that some strategies are more or less effective depending on the enemy but no build ever gets shut down completely.
There are a lot of possible takes on an archmage, and I think if one were to take the Wizard as a base, you could have an archmage take their arcane thesis to an unprecedented level, e.g. being able to reprepare spells instantaneously or blend spell slots with no restriction.
Personally, I think if we go for Unified Theory and apply it to spells, an archmage could potentially be a Wizard whose mastery of arcane magic is so advanced that they can cast literally any spell from any tradition. There are of course ways to develop this further, but I quite like the idea of an archmage being able to generally transcend the normal limitations of magic, and having a comprehensive understanding of magic in its totality.
