Teridax's page

From a balance perspective those effects look pretty fine, I'd say! Here's the criticism I have:

You're right! As difficult as it is to make the Magus more versatile and utility-oriented when they're built around Spellstrike, taking that big action and its associated power out with a class archetype could be just the ticket for allowing them to do a variety of other different things, and shine at those too. If you want, go ahead with the arcane crit effects you had in mind and I'd be happy to give feedback: whether they're undertuned or overtuned, having an extra pair of eyes on it could help give you some extra opinions to work with.

I think the three major pain points with the Psychic right now are their focus pool, Unleash Psyche, and their multiclass archetype:

I personally quite like this idea. I don't know if it would still feel like a Magus by the end of it, but having a megabuffed Arcane Cascade for super-strong magical Strikes would definitely feel fun to play in my opinion, especially if you could change your damage types on the fly and adapt to an enemy's resistances and weaknesses. Definitely sounds like a fun space for a class archetype to explore.

I will second the notion that despite Pathfinder 2e's excellent balancing across most metrics, I think ranges and monster Speeds are kind of all over the place. While it does make sense for dragons to be terrifyingly fast in open air, there are few official encounters that make use of this, as most AP encounters put the players and the enemies in fairly small spaces. While the counter to the dragon's flight is mainly earthbind, often a high Speed just means "don't bother imposing a Speed penalty on this thing". In the situation where you're playing a homebrew adventure, you're facing a dragon without good access to earthbind, and the GM is running the dragon "smartly" where the it stays airborne and delivers breath weapons and lethal spells from a safe distance above, then you'll likely just want to run, but otherwise have that spell ready, especially against the remastered dragons and their (generally) weaker Fort saves.

You can get adress that problem by having selection tiers and prereqs.

Only options relatively the same in power are in a specific tier.
Each option could have prereqs of some kind that might make some mutually exclusive.

Okay, let's go with that: at what levels do the tiers for Super Special Mechanics appear? Because in most cases, the mechanic that makes a class special appears in full at 1st level. In others, like the Fighter's accuracy or the Barbarian's Rage damage, it requires features at higher level to keep that bonus going. How many Super Special Mechanics would a class be allowed to have under this model?

As someone who likes classless systems and wonders sometimes how Pathfinder could be made classless, I do agree with Squiggit that one of the benefits of class-based systems is that they're able to deliver a package of power that works well without being prone to min-maxing. Importantly, classes in Pathfinder 2e tend to have this One Special Thing that no other class has in addition to a range of other class features that help round them out -- there's no "well my character has the Fighter's legendary attacks and the Barbarian's Rage damage, but makes up for it by having no flavorful class features" or similar setups that do one thing too well and nothing else, which helps avoid a lot of the pitfalls of PF1e. You could avoid this problem in your classless system by creating a much flatter customization framework where options are purely about adding options (and thus horizontal power), rather than vertical power increases, but that makes it more difficult to add those iconic, character-defining mechanics that make you super-special at a specific thing. Not impossible, mind, just more difficult.

I was thinking more Eagle Knight or Vigilante, but you're right, most archetypes with Quick Draw aren't necessarily great with darts either. The better option may simply be those magic items instead.

One of my players is currently playing a (homebrew) synthesist summoner and I feel besides the obvious flavor that comes ingrained with the archetype that's what the people that don't like spellstrike (or don't want it as their main gimmick) want out of a gish class. My player went for a plant eidolon and frequently casts nettleskin and/or haste on himself while still attacking thanks to Act Together and he's dealing some serious damage.

I feel a side of the magus that wasn't ported over from PF1e was spell combat, which was a feature that allowed the magus to attack and cast a spell at the same time. A reflavored synthesist could fit that niche with Act Together perfectly.

This is a bit beside the point, but would you happen to know which homebrew your player's using for their Synthesist?

I'd argue all class archetypes except for flexible spellcaster and wellspring mage are kinda lacksluter. Avenger is a rogue with access to some ranger feats and the option to sneak attack with greatswords (which IMO should be errata'ed into the ruffian by giving them a hunt prey-like action or similar. Even if its through a feat or something). Battle harbinger, elementalist, seneschal, spellshot, and warrior of legend are traps, bloodrager is not bad but its design feels weird in a few spots, I just remembered palatine detective was a thing but it seems fine?, and vindicator its technically good for what it wants to do (though its design feels weird too) but its fails in being an inquisitor. I hope runelord becomes the new standard for class archetypes.

I can agree with at least part of this, it does feel like class archetypes have been tuned to be weaker than the main class for the most part. That, and their features and feats often straight-up forget to give them the power boosts necessary for the archetype to function properly, like Palatine Detective leaving you stuck at expert spell proficiency without a higher-level feat for the master spellcasting benefits, or Battle Harbinger forgetting to switch your key attribute and give you martial-grade weapon specialization damage.

The Vindicator and Battle Harbinger to me are semi-close seconds/thirds for poorly-designed archetypes: the Vindicator as you mention fails at emulating PF1e's Inquisitor, but also forces this niche of being good at focus spell accuracy when most of the Ranger's most iconic focus spells don't use spell proficiency at all, gravity weapon being the most obvious example. It feels like the archetype ought to give the option to gain spell slots, but it doesn't, and despite including a deity's favored weapon and even the Deadly Simplicity feat for it, the only part of its kit that incentivizes using that weapon at all is a PFS-limited 8th-level feat. Meanwhile, the Battle Harbinger is missing most of the benefits it needs to function properly as a gish, including benefits the Warpriest gets at level 1, and loses a ton of power and synergy with Cleric feats in exchange for being forever stuck with 1st-rank spells that don't heighten as their font.

This gave me a mental image of an impulse that literally wraps a creature in metal, similar to Metal Carapace, and now I want that to be a thing.

There's this one particular moment in the Legend of Korra that reminds me of exactly this, and that to me is reason enough to include this kind of impulse. Wrapping a creature in metal to physically trap them and render them vulnerable to metal-exploiting weaknesses I think would make sense on the metal element, and would address its major problem of having very situational synergies: if you're fighting an enemy with metal armor or the metal trait already, great, but if not, you'd have the option to spend a few more actions turning on that synergy, which in the case of some adventures may let metal Kineticists exploit those synergies for the first time at all.

If we're including archetypes: Warrior of Legend. Imagine Achilles, if his Achilles' heel was his Achilles' everything, and he kept getting pincushioned with arrows every time he set off into battle, and each of those mundane arrows brought him perilously close to death. Oh, and he can't wear his bronze armor or use his iconic shield effectively, because this Fighter class archetype strips you of your heavy armor proficiency and Shield Block. Don't fret, though, because in exchange for removing several of your class features and proficiencies, forcing you into one of two weapon groups, and giving you a crippling weakness to one of the three most common damage types in the game, you get... a general feat and a skill increase! Oh, and if you somehow manage to not die for 14 levels, you can get an actual good survivability feat, and if you manage to live long enough to level 18, you get to pick their capstone feat... which is straight-up worse than a class feat the base Fighter can get at 16th level. Yay!

So yeah. This class archetype could have easily catered to a whole range of famous characters with one notable weakness, including Achilles, Siegfried, Balder, even the Witch-King of Angmar, but instead it tunnel-visions entirely on Achilles. Not only that, it tunnel-visions on Achilles in ways that actually prevent you from playing like Achilles, and in fact make you the opposite of any of these characters by making you exceptionally fragile, for no particular reason or meaningful benefit. Some archetypes fail by offering too little of what they're supposed to, like the Inventor or Summoner archetypes, but this one in my opinion completely misses the mark on both a thematic and mechanical level.

I'd say a key advantage Ocean's Balm has over lay on hands is that whereas the latter is a focus spell that costs a Focus Point a pop, Ocean's Balm is an at-will action you could apply to your entire party, including yourself. Each target gets locked out of the healing for ten minutes, but that's also ten minutes the Champion would need to recover a single Focus Point, so it's tricky to make that impulse stronger for spot healing in combat without also making it just blow all other sources of healing out of the water out of combat. I'd quite like to see them get stronger healing still, but I'm not sure how to go about that with those balance considerations in mind. The alternative could be temporary Hit Points, but Pathfinder treats those with extreme caution for whichever reason.

While I'm fully in support of more Kineticist impulses, and even in fact brand-new elements, I question how much those impulses would need to round out existing elements. If mono-element builds are so constrained that they're a lot weaker than multi-element builds in spite of the extra junctions they get, then sure, but I don't know if that's really the case now.

I'd also say that if current elements are meant to be good at something, but aren't, then that is a separate issue from them needing more things to do. If water is meant to be really good at healing and lacks good healing, for instance, then the solution oughtn't to be to make its current healing options obsolete with better impulses or let water do a bit of everything, but to buff the weak impulses accordingly so that a dedicated water Kineticist can be an excellent healer (and terrain controller). I do think each element offers enough to let a character specialize into a niche that is worthwhile in and of itself, so if that specialization isn't being rewarded enough, I'd like that addressed first before more stuff is layered on top.

This may not make everyone happy, but I think it might be worth considering what would happen if the suggestion of banning focus spells on the Magus were taken one step further, and Spellstriking were to only work with cantrips. Although archetyping into the Psychic every time for their amped imaginary weapon isn't good for the Magus's build diversity, it has the advantage of shifting the Magus's burst to a renewable resource within the day, putting less pressure on the class to burst with spell slots and instead letting them use their extremely limited slots for other kinds of spells. That in itself I think is more desirable than a state of affairs where the Magus doesn't necessarily need to burst with spell slots, but will still incentivize the player to put all their eggs in one basket and fill their four slots with attack spells.

And yes, that would be a nerf... which is great! It would add to the budget of good things that could be given back to the Magus in different ways, which could perhaps mean less clunkiness and fewer action taxes, but could also mean a better Arcane Cascade (because you're already not breaking the ceiling of acceptable damage in a single hit, at least not by quite as much), perhaps a Spellstrike that's even stronger and more versatile in other ways, more impactful conflux spells, and so on and so forth. Done right, it has the potential to be one of those win-win scenarios where the Magus gets much more diverse gameplay and feels better to play from moment to moment as well.

On the topic of simplifying things, I'm also starting to wonder if the Psychic really needs the base augmentations to their cantrips: for the most part, they're small fry changes like increased range or 1 Bulk added to what you can carry with telekinetic hand, which isn't super exciting, and the real improvement comes from the amps, which often turn the cantrip into a different spell entirely. Although the idea of amping your magic is good, I don't think the execution on the Psychic has necessarily panned out in the best way, and a simpler way to do their amps could be to just give them uber-powerful focus spells separate from their cantrips, without the base augmentations. Again, these shouldn't be accessible via archetyping, and what power is lost from those augmentations could be fed back into the class through, say, improvements to Unleash Psyche, or access to actual spellshapes that'd only work on cantrips and make them much more effective.

I'd allow it, or at the very least try to accommodate it by orienting your character towards one of the many archetypes that have the feat through FA. Alternatively, if I wanted to enable your build without homebrew I'd make sure your Cleric of Irez quickly gets their hands on a thrower's bandolier and a returning rune. Darts are such an infamously unwieldy weapon group that I think it's okay to take special measures to accommodate them.

My 2 (3?) cents:

Worst class in terms of performance: Inventor. The Inventor really feels like half a class to me, in large part because I don't think they deliver at all on their fantasy of letting you be creative and invent things on the fly. In my opinion, they could be this fantastic provider of diverse item-based utility, but in practice it feels like they play like a clunkier, less reliable, and generally less effective Barbarian, the absolute last class I would normally want to compare to a brainy inventor type. I don't find the class at all fun to play, and although I can acknowledge that they're not completely useless, it feels like other classes do what they can do better and in more interesting ways.

Worst class in terms of flavor: Oracle. When Player Core 2 was on the horizon, I was really hoping for the Oracle, a flavorful but otherwise really weak class, to receive targeted buffs that would let them feel really powerful for leaning into their curse. What got released instead was a class that was undoubtedly very strong, but that in my opinion took the main thing that made the class unique, and sidelined it almost entirely. You can completely ignore the class's curse mechanic right now, and you'd still be one of the strongest casters around due to your 4 spell slots per rank and beefy base stats, and what's worse, it's often better to play the class exactly like that. What was once one of the most flavorful and interesting spellcaster classes became the most generic, and that makes me a bit sad.

Worst class in terms of mechanical design: Animist. In terms of flavor, the Animist I think is incredible, as they bring this whole new dimension to divine magic and shine as a mortal link to the divine that differs radically from the Cleric. Communing with ancient apparitions and having them as your traveling companions makes for some amazing roleplaying opportunities, and gives additional characters to forge bonds with over the course of the campaign. Except, unfortunately, the class's mechanics don't focus on any of this at all in my opinion. Instead, the Animist to me is the ultimate Main Character Syndrome class, no small feat given that they were released in the same book as playable demigods. The class is designed to step on virtually every niche in the game, lets you tread on multiple niches simultaneously, often lets you tread on a niche better than the actual specialists in those niches, and as the icing on the cake, lets you completely swap which niches you want to step on from one day to the next. The fact that the Animist can swap out not only their spells, but also their apparitions and even their class feats from day to day undermines any roleplaying that could have come from committing to specific apparitions and bonding with them, but also means all Animist builds inevitably converge into the same build, particularly as nearly everyone picks the Liturgist for being so head-and-shoulders above the other subclasses. The class is far too versatile for their own good, and in my opinion is grossly overpowered in a manner that heavily threatens the play experience of their teammates. Were the class more popular and less inaccessible due to their significantly above-average complexity, they would probably be causing far larger balance problems right now.

While an amped imaginary weapon obviously makes for meaty Spellstriking, I'm struggling to think of an unamped cantrip that would rival, say, gouging claw. Imaginary weapon is probably the one that comes the closest, and persistent bleed damage I'd argue is more advantageous overall than the extra die size step. A Magus who couldn't Spellstrike with FP spells would probably still have reason to archetype into a Psychic, but more for stuff like the Infinite Eye's amped guidance than more damage, so unless there's something I'm missing, I'd say that the proposal by itself could introduce more diversity to the Magus's build choices overall.

... but also, and going back to the Psychic for a moment, I also think this shows that the Psychic isn't really "the cantrip class". They're perhaps angling for the best focus spell class, a niche undermined by their archetype giving out their amps, but their augmented cantrips by themselves are often not a huge power boost, especially as so many of them just have increased range as their base improvement. The Psychic IMO needs to use their Focus Points to truly shine, and while that in itself is fine, that also means that their amps probably shouldn't be made accessible to other classes, even if their augmented cantrips are okay to hand out. Ideally, if they're going to be the best users of Focus Points out there, they could probably stand to have a full set of them and even better Refocusing from the start.

Also also, on the subject of improving the writing of older mechanics, I do think that instead of amps, we should just have amp, an actual spellshape focus spell. Right now, amps are spell modifiers that require you to spend a Focus Point to improve a cantrip, but don't have that usage codified at all: you can't amp a cantrip and also use a spellshape on it (and I've seen this trip a lot of people up, including experienced players), but amping isn't itself a spellshape. Although amping is basically a pseudo-free action, it's not codified as any kind of action, which is why the Magus can maximize their burst damage with a Psychic archetype even though they can't normally apply spellshapes to their Spellstrike's spell. Making amps a singular spellshape focus spell that modifies different cantrips differently, and isn't accessible via archetyping, would close those loopholes and in my opinion introduce much more clarity. Even if we introduce a different amp focus spell for every cantrip, that would still make things clearer than they are now, and perhaps give more room for variance where certain amps may have greater action costs for stronger effects.

Not to bring back the full Magus discussion again, but as someone who would like less clunkiness on the Magus, my personal expectation isn't actually for the class to Spellstrike every turn, because I just don't think that is something that will happen consistently on a melee class with a two-action activity. Sometimes, your best-laid plans will go awry, and so you might need to spend actions standing back up, moving into position, or doing something else that's particularly urgent before thinking about Spellstriking, and at that point you'll likely have to wait another turn, which is fine. Less fine I think is when this gap is imposed via intentional clunkiness, only for more natural limitations to kick in on the turn where you're "expected" to Spellstrike and you find yourself not really doing the thing your class is entirely built around doing.

Starlit Span doesn't have this same issue, because ranged characters don't have as much incentive to move and aren't threatened as much, but that I think is a problem with ranged martials in general. If I had to hazard a suggestion, though, it would be for the subclass to respect range limitations on spells instead of bypassing them: a ranged class sniping from a large distance should probably not be dealing melee-level damage, not even from cantrips or spells, and the fact that they can also consistently Spellstrike every turn is a big reason why they grossly overperform on damage, and why they're so repetitive as well. If they were limited to ranged spells, they'd still have good options, but wouldn't be able to inflict gouging claw from 60 feet away before switching over to imaginary weapon.

I also think Squark suggests a really good alternative where we instead fully embrace the on-and-off-turns of the Magus, but then lean even more into that by making conflux spells take up most of your turn and do something much more impressive as a result. I'd personally quite like to see that as well, especially if it meant the Magus had more things to look forward to doing besides just Spellstriking.

Are there any rules for a ranged character to use a reaction to shoot an opponent who moves on their turn?

The classic example is a Western gun fight with one shooting from behind a water barrel, and another from behind a water trough. The Barrel guy uses his turn to prepare to shoot the trough guy, who uses his turn to reposition to behind his horse. When trough guy moves, Barrel guy shoots at him.

Would that be worth a feat, or should it just be a rule?

Not in Pathfinder to my knowledge, but there is in the Starfinder 2e playtest with the Hair Trigger feat on the Operative:

HAIR TRIGGER [reaction] FEAT 2

OPERATIVE
Trigger The last creature you aimed at since the start of your last turn uses a manipulate action or a move action, makes a ranged attack, or leaves a square during a move action.
Requirements You’re wielding a gun.

You attempt a ranged Strike against the triggering creature. If the attack is a critical hit and the trigger was a manipulate action, you disrupt that action. This Strike doesn’t count toward your multiple attack penalty, and your multiple attack penalty doesn’t apply to this Strike.

For context, this is the errata'd version, and the Operative class has an Aim action that adds bonus damage dice to your Strike and lets you bypass cover. I will also, however, add the caveat that this feat is utterly busted, at least in my experience: both pre- and post-errata, the trigger was far too easily met in my playtests, and so this basically guaranteed an extra MAP-free Strike most of the time. If you want to integrate it in Pathfinder, I'd make it a higher-level feat and would probably reduce the conditions significantly. Even if it triggered just from movement, though, I'd probably try to limit it to one target at a time (say, the last target of one of your Strikes) so that it doesn't trigger every round.

Teridax, I really like your Aim Feat, Your Critical is also very good.

What do you think about a Run and gun feat for Archers where you Stride and fire in one action and a companion feat 3 levels higher that lets you stride twice and fire for 2 actions or stride once and fire twice for 2 actions.

Much appreciated, thank you! For the run and gun feat you mention, my main point of comparison would be Skirmish Strike: because Striding is generally stronger than Stepping, I could see allowing a Stride+Strike combo as a single-action flourish as a higher-level feat on the Archer, say 12th level. By contrast, Striding twice and Striking once for 2 actions is actually something melee characters can do at level 1 with the Sudden Charge feat: although being able to make a ranged Strike would be a lot stronger due to the easier target access of ranged attacks, I could see that two-action activity being a lower-level feat than the single-action flourish. Because Hunted Shot is a 1st-level feat that lets you shoot twice in a single action, I'd say a two-action activity that lets you Strike twice while Striding once could similarly be okay to implement as a low-level feat.

As for the Gunslinger needing better feats: yeah, I completely agree. I think part of the problem is that ranged characters don't have all that many mechanical hooks to build upon: whereas melee characters can easily accommodate feats that let them Stride up to enemies, exploit flanking in some way, incorporate an Athletics maneuver, or take advantage of the limitations of short melee reaches to do something really powerful, ranged characters don't really have any of that, so it's difficult to give them many diverse mechanics without creating those from scratch. Ideally, with some extra basic actions, conditions, and other mechanics around ranged combat, that could offer more things to play with and develop through feats.

I'd say the niche of being the best focus caster in the game is always going to be threatened so long as other classes can poach your focus spells through archetyping. Not only could the Psychic afford to lose their current restrictions to their Focus Point recharge (you could probably even give them 3 FP and a full refill on a single Refocus from level 1), the Psychic archetype should probably never give out amps, just the improved cantrips. This would incidentally also curtail the Magus's overuse of the Psychic dedication for maximum Starlit Span burst damage.

The Magus I think could use a few more pushes towards being able to use more than just attack spells in a game that's more or less deprecated spell attacks over time. Despite taking issue with the class's clunky action economy and wanting to see improvements to Arcane Cascade in particular, I'm not holding my breath for a large-scale rework that would solve all that, as I think the class is unlikely to lose their clunky turns without also losing their ability to output massive burst damage via Spellstrike.

The Summoner and Thaumaturge I think are both in much better spots, and I think could just use a bit more content and a few updates to their wording in some instances (such as Implement's Empowerment, as Ascalaphus mentions). Both could benefit from more subclasses, in my opinion, and I'd like to see several more eidolons and implements, including more than just one type of celestial eidolon.

I do think that if it involves a Strike, it may not need to have a separate Deception roll on top. An alternative could be to reframe the attack as more of a warning shot than a full-damage, MAP-free Strike with crowd control layered on: without damage getting involved, you could make the Speed penalty much steeper, potentially even interrupt the move action entirely on a crit success (or limit it to a Step), without it also contributing lots of additional damage.

Another alternative could also be to just not have the Strike ignore MAP. That way, it would take up one of the actions you'd use to Strike, and you'd be using a reaction to gain the benefit of sabotaging an enemy. This would also be closer in function to the Ready action, which preserves MAP if you Ready a Strike.

Taking a shot (pun intended) at writing this as an ability;

Baiting Shot (1 action, flourish)
Skill Feat - Trained Deception

You present yourself as a target to an enemy, baiting them into coming after you. Choose an enemy. Until the start of your next turn, that enemy gains a +2 circumstance bonus on melee attack rolls against you, and you gain the following reaction:

Shoot in the Foot (reaction)
Trigger: the baited creature starts a Stride, Fly, Climb or Swim action.
Effect: if the baited creature is within the first range increment of a ranged weapon or unarmed strike you're wielding, use it to Strike. If you hit, the creature takes a 5 foot circumstance penalty to all its speeds until the start of your next turn; this also reduces the distance it can cover with the triggering action. This cannot reduce a speed the creature has below 5 feet. If you are an expert in deception, increase the penalty to 10 feet, or to 15 feet if you are legendary.

On a critical hit, you can double the penalty. This replaces any other critical hit specialization effect you might have.

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While this doesn't interact with MAP, it's a flourish so it shouldn't excessively stack with powerful class abilities. It replaces critical hit spec effects because being able to stack this with the bow spec of stapling someone to the ground would be too intense.

I quite like this proposal. Here's the feedback I have on this:

Yeah, this is probably an entire discussion by itself, but I think Speed penalties feel inconsistent because there's such a large spread of different monster Speeds that a flat penalty can sometimes achieve essentially nothing, even if it can also be debilitating in other instances. That they're also short-lived and often easy to work around adds to the problem, though hopefully penalizing someone's Speed as a reaction after they've committed to a move action, rather than before, would sabotage their plans as you mention. In general, reactions have this huge potential to disrupt a target's best-laid plans by affecting them mid-turn, and that's perhaps something ranged martials could perhaps be allowed to tap into some more.

Useful ranged combat reactions are lacking.

On that note, I'm surprised there isn't a reaction that lets you take cover. Being able to reactively Take Cover as soon as you're targeted by an attack would be a useful action economy benefit for ranged characters, and could be made just situational enough that it wouldn't be a must-pick.

Riffing of the theme of ranged reactions, how about:

Perhaps you should lead with what you'll give to ranged martials in exchange for their range getting axed.

Gladly!

I do think a high ground mechanic can work with existing encounters and terrain. To bring back an example condition I brought up earlier:

Exposed You have the low ground, causing gravity to take the force out of your attacks and add it to oncoming hits. The exposed condition always includes a value. You take a circumstance penalty equal to this value to the damage rolls of attacks against targets you're exposed to, and the range increments of your attacks against those targets are halved. Creatures you're exposed to gain a circumstance bonus equal to your exposed value to the damage rolls of attacks against you, and the range increments of their attacks against you are doubled. You're automatically exposed to creatures who have the high ground against you: the GM determines what counts as a sufficient difference in elevation to expose you; this is usually at least 5 feet for every 15 feet the creature is from you for you to be exposed 1, with each additional 5 feet per unit of distance increasing the condition's value by 1.

This would actually be really simple to integrate. Fighting indoors? Leap onto a table or other piece of furniture and gain a small circumstance bonus against your enemy. Fighting in a forest? Climb a tree and exploit your vantage point. Defending a town? Great, that front gate you've reinforced will also help your archers perched on top to deal more damage to incoming enemies. In most of these cases, though, you'd need to move in order to make use of this bonus, and so in ways that could also be countered by enemies moving in response to you. The reverse is also true: if ranged enemies are fighting you from one of these vantage points, you will want to try to avoid staying in the low ground for too long, something melee characters will automatically do by closing the distance with those enemies, but something ranged characters will need to find a way to do without necessarily getting in melee range.

Even if the details may need adjusting, the base idea I think would lend itself to more interesting and variable expressions of damage than, say, bigger damage dice, and would also encourage more movement from ranged characters. To address Bluemagetim's concern, it could also be to the benefit of casters, because they too could exploit the high ground, particularly early game with their attack cantrips. Even melee characters could situationally exploit this, including reach weapon wielders stabbing at enemies from on high. Although I don't think realism is by itself a solid argument in support of this, I do think this could also encourage a few tactics you'd see in actual combat, while also mirroring scenes in fictional combat ("It's over Anakin, I have the high ground!").

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A suggestion to make combat in general less static.

Right, I'm going to take Ascalaphus's suggestion to heart and answer this succinctly: all of the suggestions you have made here are self-serving, and ultimately fail to make ranged combat less static. In fact, in this very example you cited, your very first sentence in that quote explicitly states you think ranged combat should be static. When you're demanding that Paizo revamp their encounter design, their class design, and their core mechanical design, all to accommodate a state of affairs that has already been proven not to work, and all while insulting their competence, you should probably be asking yourself if you're acting reasonably. Making character attacks, for instance, and specifically accusing me of being argumentative while you yourself are presently embroiled in multiple simultaneous arguments across different threads, is not behavior I would call reasonable. You can do better than this, and insulting everyone who does not share your wonky worldview will leave you with few supporters. It certainly hasn't gotten you any in this discussion.

Casters are still ranged characters. They're not the subject of this discussion as they have more options and thus don't tend to get bored, but you should have ranged threats attack your casters often enough that they have to spend resources on defence.

That is literally what the quote you're responding to says. When there are ranged enemies around and they're capable of basic tactics or observation, they are more likely to target the casters than the ranged martials, so the problem of ranged martials being too safe remains unaddressed. Incidentally, casters don't have the same problem as ranged martials because many of their basic spells, especially cantrips at low level, have short ranges that prevent them from sniping.

Yes, in the current design paradigm.

If you truly think it is fun to play a character that doesn't get to use their abilities, I'll be happy to run that exact encounter for you. You can be the Barbarian.

The fix is that we should design melee martials so they have impactful things to do outside of melee range (probably tied to a resource like focus points), or we give them gap-closing moves that let them cover that ground faster.

I'm sorry, why do we need to upend the design of a whole bunch of classes just on the off-chance that they find themselves at ranges that few APs ever include? Would it not be more reasonable to just not have melee martials start miles away from ranged enemies, and instead adjust range increments on ranged weapons to better reflect Paizo's combat zones?

You defeat gap closers by exploiting terrain, moving back as they try to advance, or by sending your own melee out to meet them. Gap closers don't invalidate ranged threats; they simply ensure that trying to be a turret is a poor play unless you're set up in a great defensive position.

If you can defeat gap closers through simple means, then we're back at square one and melee characters would suck at the ranges you're proposing they fight at. What you're saying also doesn't address the issue I've raised, which is that if gap closers can let melee characters close several turns' worth of Strides in one go, then you've essentially made distance irrelevant, so map scale doesn't matter when every character can just move from end of the map to the other within the same turn. Might as well keep maps at the size they are now and shorten range increments.

So we need to make fights close ranged to cater to melee, and this isn't an encounter design issue, but suggesting that we fix encounter design to engage ranged characters doesn't count because...

Because your suggestion doesn't fix encounter design, it demands rewrites of dozens of classes all to make encounters play the exact same as the thirty-by-thirty-foot battle zones we have now. It's not that it doesn't count, it's that you have no valid fix to propose, and your incredibly convoluted solution is all being deployed to avoid admitting a basic discrepancy between ranged weapon increments and Paizo's encounter map sizes.

We already have specific encounter designs in published material, both due to page space and a desire not to force melee characters to spend even a round not being awesome. PF2 is built to make melee feel good and doesn't spend enough time either in encounter design or specific rules to ensure ranged feels the same way.

And what exactly do you propose to make ranged characters feel awesome, then? It's super weird that you would treat the fun of playing melee characters in Pathfinder as a bad thing, and I really don't see the value in trying to frame ranged and melee fun as a zero-sum game here. I and others have proposed ways of making ranged combat more fun by way of more options and less excessive safety: it seems like you view this excessive safety as a feature and not a bug, which is why you've chosen to make this your hill to die on here. Why is it so important to you that ranged martials be unassailable and require encounter design to bend over backwards to accommodate them?

The AP enounter designs suck and are the biggest issue with PF2. Fixing this fixes ranged martial's feeling bad at the table. A mix of close and open encounters means that both ranged and melee characters get their chances to shine.

Open encounters that place the party at extreme distances from the enemy suck for the melee characters, and using them frequently would in my opinion lead to far worse encounter design than whatever it is you're attributing to Paizo now. If you want a game that does that more, play Starfinder 2e instead, which caters to ranged combat primarily, and see for yourself how lacklusted ranged combat is even when it includes your "fix". Your solution ain't it.

Thanks Teridax. I am getting a lot of thoughts from all of this so i apologize if its coming up a bit scattered. Some of this is a response but some of it is just you making me think.

Ok so with those considerations what should a ranged character add to the fight? I think already they add damage, less than melee but without much draw on resources like healing. But it seems they do draw on other resources as in actions like grapple and movement to position or spells from allies to keep enemies from moving to them and the casters.

Anytime! I'd say ranged characters generally should be able to do similar things to melee characters, just in less intense amounts in exchange for the reliability that comes with ranged target access. That does still mean that ranged characters should be able to output good damage, apply some crowd control and utility, and so on, and so against exactly the targets you'd want, even if melee characters should have stronger moves.

Ranged do usually have to move to maximize their damage though. They wouldn't want to fire into lesser cover from allies in the way if they can move once to get a better direct line of fire. If GMs are not using enemy actions to get lesser cover again then maybe thats something a GM can do in the creatures interest that will get more movement from ranged PCs its as little effort as a step most times? Not exciting though.

I don't think lesser cover is usually an issue unless enemies are positioning themselves specifically to put melee party members in-between themselves and the ranged characters. Melee party members tend to not get in the way of their ranged allies if they can avoid it, and if an enemy does try to make them get in the way, that usually means they've also moved out of flanking, so they're liable to reposition anyway.

As RPG-Geek pointed out If enemies have ranged attacks in good positions the ranged PC is in danger if they dont use cover. so moving to cover and taking cover become important for as long as the ranged enemies are still a threat. Maybe not always an option to add in given the space.

This assumes the ranged enemies always go for the ranged martials, which I think is actually a rarity if your enemies have enough tactical acumen to focus on specific targets, as the party caster tends to be a much juicier (and squishier) target in the immediate. Even in the case of ranged characters targeting each other, the problem with cover is that taking cover gives enemies cover against your attacks too, so even if it does mitigate the damage of a really threatening ranged opponents, it's not a great option in and of itself either.

But there is still a glaring issue you raised even if the GM changes things up. A party that protects the backline well creates the environment where ranged only needs to reload and fire or just fire fire fire. I have gotten around this with creatures that have different ways to move like burrow flight and teleport but I dont do it all the time for many reasons.

Exactly, this has also been my experience. I've tried switching things up when the ranged martials at my table have been getting bored, but it's also difficult to keep adding ranged enemies who attack them or enemies who bypass the advantage of range in some way without making those players feel like they're being unfairly targeted.

No, but that's what they get for being melee only and not carrying any backup ranged weapons.

Who said they had no backup ranged weapons? Do you think that the Barbarian is going to have a good time just because they'll be spending an action a turn plinking with their under-runed bow for the next two to three turns they'll spend trying to catch up to that enemy?

It's also a system issue if melee characters don't get good gap-closing abilities from level 1.

It is a system issue if every character is built to make distances and range irrelevant. Gap-closing abilities exist as 1st-level feats like Sudden Charge: these are meant to be optional feats to aid against specific situations, not must-haves to paper over systemic problems.

Part of the design problem is that Paizo builds encounters badly and doesn't use enough variety of spaces or the correct mix of range, melee, and evasive threats to ensure that the front liners can't just keep everybody in front of them, so ranged characters don't need to move. Hence a fix is for GMs to correct this poor design themselves, no different than a GM using any other fix found in this thread.

And again, that is not a problem of encounter design alone if encounters need to be designed in a highly specific way to avoid the pitfalls of the system they're dealing with. I also don't think what you're saying is true either: when encounters are cramped, ranged martials are in fact vulnerable to attack when they're a Stride away from the enemy, so the issue of excessive safety disappears. The problem there is that these encounters consistently take away the advantage of long range increments, so ranged martials just often end up playing like weaker melee martials. It's why volley weapons like the longbow tend to be seen as trap options by more experienced players as well, because something like volley 30 feet means you'll nearly always be shooting with a penalty in a 30-by-30-foot battle arena. Range increments and the size of AP encounter areas don't match, is the point.

Make larger maps on two-page spreads, make half-scale maps and make the GM blow them up before combat, or include full-sized fold-out map sheets with APs. Paizo has options and chooses not to use them.

Right, and as mentioned already, there's probably good reason for this. Imagine your melee party members constantly starting three or more Strides away from the enemy; do you think they'd be happy?

You don't need to add ranged enemies to every fight, but you should add them to encounters if you have a ranged character with a bored player. The game caters to melee in a way that no other edition has, but has done so by removing power and options from ranged characters while also allowing them to function in melee without issue. It's a baffling design choice and one that has very obvious drawbacks.

What you're suggesting is sound advice for a GM wanting to make play more interesting for their ranged players, but ultimately what you're suggesting is a GM workaround to a design problem being discussed on this thread. This isn't the advice subforum, this is general discussion, and having the GM work overtime to make the game work well is precisely the kind of thing 2e tries to avoid.

That's still pretty static. A step better than PF1, but still basic. Adding +1 to Ac per 20 ft. moved in a turn would be better at showing how well running works to keep you harder to hit. If it also gave an equal penalty to attacks, you'd more closely approximate the tradeoffs made in a fight.

I guess we have different standards for what counts as static, but regardless of our differences in opinion, I think it stands to reason that ranged characters could be made to move with a frequency at least slightly more comparable to melee characters, and that would improve their playstyle significantly.

This stems from poor encounter design and too few ranged enemies invested in making life difficult for you. Toss in a few PL-2 ranged threats where you can, and you'll see ranged characters more engaged.

As others have mentioned already, I don't think the solution is to throw in a bunch of ranged enemies when most AP encounters are cramped enough as-is. I don't think ranged enemies make that much sense in a bunch of encounters either (which ranged animals are you thinking of including at levels 1-3?), and ultimately melee characters don't need enemies of a certain type to work, so I don't see why ranged enemies should be required to paper over the excessive safety of ranged party members.

The game does a poor job of making you want to move. Even melee characters often only need to take a five-foot step back to force the enemy out of using 3-action attacks. If the team wanted movement to be key, they needed to make that a core design goal.

I don't think this is true at all, at least not for melee combat. Putting aside how you need to move into melee range to start attacking in melee, flanking means there's constantly an incentive to move to either get into flanking position or avoid getting flanked. Even just a five-foot Step is movement, and that melee characters would do this to mess with an enemy's turn does show in my opinion that movement matters in melee.

In addition, Sibelius makes a good point that even if it isn't true now, it is still something worth advocating for. A lot of the problems of ranged martials stem from their excessive safety, as they mention: ranged martials can feel boring to play when they fight at long range, because they're too safe from enemies and thus don't feel in real danger. Ranged martials can also feel boring to play because they just stay in place and do the same thing, and that's because their safety gives them no incentive to do anything different from turn to turn if they can avoid it. Ranged martials can also feel boring to play because they tend to do a lot less than melee martials, but they can't really be allowed to do more when they can make themselves so safe (and again, at no tradeoff given how large range increments are). A game in which ranged martials were less safe is a game where they'd be more likely to do more things, including move, and would be allowed to do more too.

Ideally, ranged martials should have reasons to move not just reactively when an enemy gets too close, but also proactively to make themselves more effective against their targets. Even if we put aside ranged flanking, people have brought up weak spots, I mentioned high ground, and there are likely other ways of encouraging positional play at range, all of which could make ranged characters want to move and feel better for positioning well. I can't speak for everyone, but I'd personally prefer a world in which ranged martials were mobile and constantly under threat in combat (though slightly less so than melee characters), but also got to pull off some really impressive plays through good positioning and have varied turns. It'd certainly be more interesting to me than the current world in which those characters are liable to just stand in place and go through the same rotation every turn from a position of excessive safety, unless you box them in and negate the advantage of their range with a small battle arena.

Ok , I have a question.

For those who have the experience of standing in a safe location all the time and firing away.
What leads to that being your choice?

In my experience playing ranged martials and running them, the ranged characters might throw out Demoralizes against whichever enemies they can instead of making a third attack, but are still quite static because they have no incentive to move. When they're about fifty or more feet away from the enemy, who'd have to wade through the rest of the party to get to them, the only things that might reach them are the odd ranged attack or spell, and that's not something movement would help with. Moving closer to the enemy or to a different vantage point brings no benefit either, so movement at that point is a wasted action.

In several cases, though, characters stay put because they really can spend all of their turn just attacking. When a friend played a Pistolero, their basic loop in combat was just shooting and reloading as much as possible, and Demoralizing was just an incidental benefit of their subclass's reload. In another group, the Starlit Span Magus basically did the same thing every combat because they had exactly enough actions per turn to Spellstrike and recharge. Nothing else came close in terms of power they could output, certainly not moving.

What are the creatures doing?

Are other characters more threatening than your ranged character?

The creatures in those cases were usually fighting the party members much closer to them, and often yes, those characters were more threatening, because getting tripped and grabbed while also eating lots of melee attacks is about as threatening as it gets. Sometimes, those monsters did break off and attack the party casters, who were often about 30 feet away at earlier levels, and if a monster had ranged capabilities they'd definitely target the Starlit Span chunking their side of the fight, but rarely did a monster have the ability to move all the way through the party to the ranged martial without shooting themselves in the foot, nor was there reason for most monsters to do this first thing in the fight even if they were sapient, so the party's ranged martials tended to get the least amount of attention. This sometimes changed based on the monster's abilities, and a dragon encounter had the monster Fly to the Starlit Span mid-encounter and get all up in their business, but that was very much the exception and not the norm.

Do the melee and casters just make it too costly for creatures to come after you?

Maybe another reason?

That was part of it. When you have a Barbarian restraining you and also punching you in the face, your priority is probably not going to be chasing after the Gunslinger standing so far away you'd need to spend your whole current turn moving to them, and so assuming you somehow Escape the Barb on the first try. Breaking off to move towards a nearby caster in one Stride and attack them at least once was a more realistic prospect, however, which is why it happened more often.

I question the claim that combat should be static: from the point of view of trying to win, sure, I don't want to move if I can spend that action hurting my opponent more directly instead, but from the point of view of wanting fun combat, I think movement is one of the most fundamental ways of making encounters feel more dynamic. The fact that ranged characters often move very little is a big reason why their turns tend to feel so repetitive, in my opinion, and I'd want to give ranged characters more reasons to move, ideally at ranges that make them approachable to melee enemies. Although some characters could set themselves up to snipe, no character should be able to just opt out of putting themselves at risk entirely, certainly not as a default part of their playstyle.

In general, safety I think is a strength that should only go so far: being able to create some distance between yourself and your enemy is fine, so long as that enemy can then catch up to you relatively quickly by default. It should then be up to your character build, your team, and your use of the environment to stretch that further, but I think that baseline should be one Stride, not two and certainly not eight (25 feet against the sukgung's 200-foot range increment). Creating more distance should come at a cost to your own effectiveness, and I think even ranged characters need to be under some amount of constant risk if they expect to pull off really effective plays.

I also think there's a degree of doublethink in Paizo's design that ought to be addressed here: on paper, ranged weapons are capable of shooting accurately from truly ludicrous distances. In practice, those truly ludicrous distances rarely materialize, at least not in most of Paizo's APs where encounters happen in spaces so tight you're unlikely to ever shoot an enemy outside of your first range increment. If those range increments are supposed to be a meaningful part of play for ranged martials, then Paizo needs to release more large battle arenas in their Pathfinder APs and create more occasions where the party starts off far away from the enemies in the encounter (which would probably highlight the problems with range increments going that far). If fighting across large distances is in fact not how Pathfinder plays at its best, then we may as well adjust range increments to more closely match AP encounters and rebalance ranged weapons around that more accurate standard.

From my reading of this part of the rules:

Weapon and worn ikons are tied to items of power. When you select one, you gain a non- magical, level-0 item of your choice that matches its usage entry. Providence ensures you come across these items; you might be traveling along a path to find a spear in a tree that only you can dislodge, or you might awaken holding a gleaming sash you saw in your dreams.

Each weapon and worn ikon is its own item. You obtain each ikon you pick as a separate item when you start, and can refashion a subsequent item into one of your ikons. Though this isn't explicitly outlined, I do think this indicates that the same item can't be multiple ikons. I would also argue this aligns with RAI, because transcendence forces you to switch up your gameplay based on the ikon you switch immanence to, a gameplay mechanic that would be undermined if you could just keep transcending into the same weapon to maintain its additional damage.

The trick is doing so without simply making ranged stronger. We don't need power creep.

I agree. I think this conversation would be a lot easier to have if weapon range increments were lower, so that the optimal shooting range were always within a Stride of your opponent. It'd add more risk to ranged combat, take power away that could be added back in more interesting ways (like ranged flanking or Feinting), more easily justify doing things that shouldn't be too safe or reliable to do, and also more closely match the size of most combat areas Paizo tends to implement in their APs. I'm not even sure why range increments were made so large in the first place, tbh, the only explanation seems like a realism argument based on a misunderstanding of medieval bows, which are horribly inaccurate even at 50-70 feet and were only used at long distances as part of massive arrow volleys.

I feel new actions to deal max damage and such aren't really a fix because those would compete with the actions most classes get through feats and, in some cases, it could make taking those feats as bad options if they are worse than these new actions (which is IMO kinda bad for homebrew to do).

Those particular actions I listed wouldn't interfere with your use of weapons feats in most cases, as they modify your next Strike. Rather than perform a Skirmish Strike and another Strike, for instance, you could Aim and then Skirmish Strike for the same number of actions and the same final MAP. Even in the worst case where your feats would make those actions obsolete (and both are made to be weaker than class feats), you'd effectively be where you are now, except ideally with the benefit of more other ranged options still.

The issue I take with ranged Feinting is that on its own, it doesn't necessarily solve the ranged turret problem, and may in fact reinforce it. A ranged martial who currently spends two actions Striking or the equivalent and one action doing whatever else may find themselves just Feinting and Striking twice each turn. If Feinting takes two actions and is still worth using, then a ranged character could just Feint and Strike each turn, and if two actions makes it not worth the action cost, then it may as well not exist as a baseline ranged option in most cases. Ideally, there ought to be something out there that competes with ranged Feinting each time just like flanking in melee, so that Feinting is a good action to use, just not all the time.

I'm personally okay with the flavor text on monster stat blocks delivering just the essentials of the monster's behavior and significance, because most lore tied to monsters in my experience tends to be quite dependent on context and setting. Monsters from one place to another may have different names, connotations, and relationships to the setting's inhabitants, to say nothing of specific areas where they can be found and local folk tales around them, and that I think is the kind of worldbuilding that is better-suited for a world guide. If I want to homebrew my own setting, having just the monster's essentials listed means I get to quickly have a clear picture of what they're supposed to be about, and from there I can dress them up in my world's context however I want. If it also means more space for more monsters to choose from in the same book, all the better.

I think what made this errata so contentious is that a lot of people saw in the new Runelord a fix for the Wizard, and put all of their eggs into that basket. While I don't necessarily think the errata was wholly justified (I thought the class archetype's staff-based flexibility made the Runelord play really smoothly and suitably powerful for an arcane caster that traded off a fair bit of versatility), I also don't think it would have led to a very healthy state of affairs for the best Wizard playstyle to be a rare class archetype that shines by essentially being the opposite of the base Wizard in many ways. Let's let the Runelord be strong maybe, but let's also not put all our hopes and dreams on that one class archetype being the solution to all of the class's problems, and then be surprised when it gets equalized with the base class. If the base Wizard were made stronger, perhaps that would allow the Runelord to have their errata partially or fully reverted as well.

While Create a Diversion does let you apply off-guard from range, it only applies to one attack, and after that every enemy in the encounter, not just the one you targeted, becomes significantly harder to divert in the same way. Thus, I don't think it compares all that favorably to Feint for applying off-guard specifically, even though it's really powerful in entirely different ways.

Re: ranged Feinting with tradeoffs, although I do like the idea of allowing Feint to be used at range with penalties and/or greater costs, I do still think the secret ingredient here is making it compete with other actions, specifically Striding and other forms of movement. In my opinion, one of the reasons why Feint is a healthy action in melee is because flanking is pretty easy to do, and ultimately a much more reliable and economical way of applying off-guard: if you're the first to reach an enemy and want to get something like a sneak attack in, then Feint is perfect for that, but the next ally who moves into flanking position will automatically get the maximum benefits without needing to roll a check. Thus, despite Feint being an action you can use as many times as you want, it works more as a situational action for when there's no flanking than a dominant action you'd want to take every turn. Because I'd want to make sure ranged martials move around a lot, I'd therefore want to give them ways of using their positioning to get targets off-guard to their attacks, with Feinting being a good option for when that sort of positioning isn't possible in the immediate. At that point, even with minimal tradeoffs Feinting wouldn't necessarily be the dominant choice each time, just a good situational action.

The main caveat to ranged Feinting in my opinion is that whereas it competes with flanking in melee, it competes with a lot less at range. In melee, the purpose of Feinting is specifically that you want to make a very specific target off-guard to your own attacks, and that target isn't being flanked by an ally: effectively, of all the relatively easy ways of making an enemy off-guard in melee, Feint offers a way of making the exact target you want off-guard, except less reliably and usually in more limited amounts.

By contrast, there currently is no ranged flanking, so the action would let you apply off-guard when at the moment there is no universally-available means of doing that, short of opting into a specific archetype and/or class feat. I suspect this is why the action is currently so tightly gated and only allowed at range on one class feat: were ranged flanking a thing, then I could see ranged Feinting also becoming a thing too, but on its own it runs a high risk of being a must-pick (and to an extent it already is on the Gunslinger with Pistol Twirl). Definitely not a hard "no", but more of a case where I think this option needs more competition to not dominate build choices.

You're right that this sort of action is normally the kind you'd find in class feats, though I'd personally want to make them universally-available actions: right now, one of the big problems with ranged combat in my opinion is how few options there are innately for ranged combatants, which I think limits both the diversity of their gameplay and their ability to make diverse contributions as well. By giving them a few more baseline options (which IMO are weaker than actual class feats; compare Aim to Vicious Swing for instance), ranged martials would have a few more things to do from the get-go. Incidentally, so could melee characters, who'd be able to use these actions too, though they'd often have more reliable ways of dealing damage or applying crowd control already.

I'm personally a big fan of incentivizing ranged characters to reposition in order to make the most out of their attacks. Even more broadly, I'd like to reframe ranged combat so that the main advantage it provides isn't so much safety as agency: while fighting at range will always be inherently safer than melee, past a certain point that safety becomes powerful in all the wrong ways. If an enemy has to spend most of their turn, possibly several entire turns, wading through the front line just to chase a single character (who, if they're a martial, won't necessarily be that squishy either), most enemies will be neither able nor willing to do that, which gives ranged martials in those situations license to go full turret. That kind of situation should be a rarity that ought to only come from exceptional foreplanning, which is possibly also why Paizo often negates the advantage of range increments by having many AP encounters happen in fairly tight spaces.

However, I also think that there's this Goldilocks zone in ranged combat where a character has more freedom than anyone else to move around the combat zone and pick a more advantageous position, and I think that zone sits about a Stride away from melee. Because you're not being immediately threatened by enemies or possible Reactive Strikes, moving around by itself is pretty safe in the immediate, which should give ranged characters more opportunity than anyone else to exploit positioning and terrain features. Trouble is, positioning isn't really rewarded at range in ways other than "more distance = more safety" right now, so there's no real incentive to stay at a distance that could get an enemy to move into melee range at a moment's notice. Were there mechanics that genuinely encouraged this, like cover leaving openings to be exploited, high and low ground mattering, or ranged characters benefiting from flanking at very close (but still ranged) distances, ranged characters would likely be encouraged to be a lot more mobile and to fight much closer to melee, albeit still farther away than actual melee characters.

I also still think all of the above would be helped significantly if range increments were nerfed: if 30 feet were the standard range increment instead of 60 feet, your shortbow martial wouldn't be able to sit two or more Strides away from a melee attacker without taking a penalty to their accuracy. The flipside to this is by mass-nerfing the range of ranged weapons in this way, this could allow that lost power to be fed back to them in ways that would make ranged combat more exciting, including ways to obtain more damage through positioning, and at least slightly better access to a measure of utility. Rather than function as static sniper turrets, ranged martials especially could perhaps play a bit more like Legolas from LotR: definitely still accurate, but constantly on the move, rarely all that far from the melee, and always trying to use their mobility and positioning to their advantage.

You're basically looking at crossbow (bleed), bow (immobilized), or firearms (stunned). The bleed effect for crossbow is probably never worth it. For bows it's situationally useful (where I want it to be from a design standpoint), and for firearms it might be too strong to cause stunned 1 (even with a save).

I'm actually afraid the 1d8 bleed damage could be too strong at levels 1-3 when your attack deals only one die of damage (and often less than a d8!), but then I'm also not sure whether we really need to hold the absolutely awful damage of ranged weapons at those levels as the benchmark. I do agree though that making the crit spec effect of crossbows almost identical to that for darts is a bit of a wasted opportunity when there aren't that many ranged weapon groups to begin with. Having the crit spec effect for crossbows impose a penalty until the target takes an action to remove the bolt lodged in them (perhaps enfeebled 1?) would offer a more varied spread of negative effects, with the common theme of making the target waste actions one way or the other.

Much appreciated both! And I agree as well that on its own, it wouldn't necessarily solve the problem of ranged action diversity: if there's one thing ranged combatants can do consistently, it's output damage, so while this would help quite a bit under certain circumstances (I tested this out on a bunch of enemies with Hardness in a Starfinder adventure and it was a game-changer), there's still room for actions that would let ranged martials in particular output a measure of utility too. It doesn't have to be in the same amounts as a melee character with Athletics either, so long as it's still useful.

While we're brainstorming, how's this for an additional Perception "skill" action:

Critical Opening (Single Action)
Traits: concentrate

You ready yourself to take advantage of an opening in your target's defenses and fully exploit your weapon's potential. Attempt a Perception check against that target's AC. On a success, your next Strike this turn against the target applies its weapon or unarmed attack's critical specialization effect on a hit. Regardless of your result, your next Strike this turn counts as two attacks when calculating your multiple attack penalty.

---

Following the same basic model, here you'd be trading off the damage of a second Strike in exchange for more reliable access to some utility. You'd still need to succeed on at least two checks (and sometimes have your target fail a third), so this wouldn't be quite as direct as an Athletics maneuver, but this could let you do stuff like use your bow to catch an enemy and pin them to a wall, stun an enemy with your firearm, or just inflict some bleed damage with a crossbow or dart. As with the above, this too is something you could have as a trait for weapons meant to fire once per turn, with those kinds of weapons focusing on utility more than direct damage necessarily.

I definitely think there are different starting points here: when you take a weapon like the shortsword, the weapon by itself is already fully functional and smooth to use, and the many different builds you can create off of that weapon using different classes all focus on making that weapon even better. By contrast, guns are not that smooth to use as a baseline and need a lot of build support to get properly going, with the Gunslinger being a class made up almost entirely of remedial mechanics for firearms. This means that unless you're going for a Gunslinger or some extremely niche build that's designed to work around a firearm, you're likely to have a much better time with other weapons that play similarly without as many of the drawbacks. Even the Gunslinger struggles to stand on their own two feet, because they're too busy making firearms more workable. It would be to the benefit of build diversity as a whole for guns to be easier to pick up without needing to also use the dedicated gun class, the subclass specifically designed to work with that one firearm you were thinking of, and so on.

So here's the thing: I don't think jailbreaking can work at level 1, not unless you have the spell output to support this. The Technomancer by nature does not, because their current focus spell is a spellshape, their only other core abilities are overclocking and spell substitution, and they start with just 2 spell slots. Even at level 3, jailbreaking is not something you can do very well, because it requires a whole turn and a prior non-cantrip spell to set up. It feels awesome to when you do get to use it, but that by itself I don't think justifies its current implementation or even its place as a core feature.

"The whole reason the class was cool" I think is also a problem to fix, not necessarily its own feature: the Technomancer, in my opinion, does not need to be "the spellshape class" to be cool, when their theme of combining tech and magic is already cool and full of potential the playtest class doesn't explore in great detail. Part of the reason the class doesn't feel all that cool otherwise isn't just that they don't do that much with tech, but that spellshapes are such an all-consuming part of their power budget that they were simply not given the room to be more functional or to work better with tech. One of the reasons why I made Jailbreak Spell a feat was because I literally could not make it a class feature, especially not at level 1, without either gutting a whole bunch of other stuff on the Technomancer at level 1 or making them grossly overloaded.

There is precedent for classes having awesome and iconic feats, and I don't think Jailbreak Spell need be an exception to this: it should definitely be available for Technomancers who want to spec into a spellhacker build, but it shouldn't dominate their design to the point where they can't be anything but a spellshape-centric class, which I think is currently one of their biggest issues. I can't speak for everyone, but if I had to choose between a class whose design is bent out of shape around one cool ability, and a class that sacrifices that ability as a core feature in order to play a lot better, I'd personally go for the latter without hesitation.

I think second bodies in TTRPGs are a fairly thorny problem, so I don't blame Paizo for coming up with a solution that doesn't feel amazing even if the end result avoids other critical problems: when your character can bring essentially another character into play, whether it's a companion, an eidolon, a familiar, or a summon, the mere act of doing so is quite powerful due to the things a character can do just by existing (i.e. Strike, flank if they can also Strike, project auras, work with other special abilities, and so on).

Additionally, previous editions have demonstrated how overwhelming it can get when you can add HP and actions to your side, and that's something you're bound to do with a companion. When that bag of actions can also contribute supplementary damage via Strikes when your third action will normally be spent doing something other than deal damage, that creates a lot of risks: balance too generously, and your extra character will boost you by so much that you'd beat any single other character in the party. In the worst of cases, that extra character may even outshine another party member entirely, which has happened in past editions.

Because companions therefore mess with quite a few of 2e's other constraints, I think there's justification for them breaking the rules on feats as well and requiring feat taxes to stay relevant. Effectively, you're transferring a portion of your own power into your companion. Perhaps there's a more elegant way to do this, and I can certainly agree with other people here that companions would feel better with more customization options (just like the Mechanic's drone companion in Starfinder 2e!), but as it stands, despite not feeling quite as strong as in other games, animal companions remain popular in Pathfinder all the same.

Going back to the topic of an additional action for ranged characters to play with, how about this as a Perception "skill" action?

Aim (Single Action)
Traits: concentrate

You search for a weak spot in a target's defenses, preparing to hit it for maximum damage. Attempt a Perception check against that target's AC. Regardless of your result, your next Strike this turn counts as two attacks when calculating your multiple attack penalty.

For all the improvements the Alchemist received with the remaster, I agree with the OP that some glaring problems remain. The class's action economy is still terrible, and while that could perhaps be framed as a deliberate weakness to counterbalance their versatility, it still means the Toxicologist has to spend their entire turn making an injury poison, applying it to their weapon, and making one Strike with it. Even that could possibly be worth it were it not for the fact that the Alchemist's Strikes are not very accurate, injury poisons are often not worth the extra hit on their own, and their Fort saves tend to be extremely easy for enemies to beat. Adding to this, the class still has several feat taxes, Quick Bomber being the most obvious, and as also mentioned in the OP, their subclasses vary wildly in effectiveness and functionality, so the Alchemist I think could certainly do with another pass to smooth those bits out.

To preserve the classic fantasy feel, ranged weapons need to retain some disadvantages relative to melee to avoid melee becoming a bad option. This is also for the benefit of players; facing packs of minions that can trip you from across the map encounter after encounter is going to make combat a slog unless everyone uses ranged, after which the game becomes a comedic shootout.

It is desirable for ranged to need to move away from melee and for melee to chase ranged, but this is movement and not just simply stopping melee from making progress.

Melee maneuvers are heavily focused on controlling movement and positioning so they can maximize the melee attacks, not just debuffs. Melee also sometimes has the risk of active defenses, such as spiked hides, while ranged mostly just has to worry about monks catching their ammo. Using a melee maneuver typically comes at a cost to damage or other desirable traits, such as with the empty hand requirement.

As such I really don't see a need for more free abilities for ranged unless they're highly limited or costly, like a sniper opening attack. New feats and archetypes or weapon traits, special ammo, oils, etc. are always welcome.

I agree with this. Being able to attack from a distance is a massive and often-underrated advantage that needs to be factored in somehow; I just think that shouldn't preclude ranged combat from being as varied as melee, including at low level. I would go as far as to say that ranged combat is in fact too powerful even now in certain ways, or at least that some of the ways its power is implemented doesn't make for the healthiest gameplay: weapons should probably not be fully effective at ranges that would take most creatures two full turns of pure movement to close against a stationary target, yet many ranged weapons have those kinds of ridiculously large range increments, like the sukgung. Even the shortbow's range increment of 60 feet means many melee creatures would have to spend two actions closing the gap, and that's without factoring how difficult it may be to wade through the party. A simple, surgical nerf to ranged weapons could be to make range increments shorter, so that ranged martials would need to skirt the edge of danger to make the most of their attacks, and would otherwise pay a greater price in accuracy for attacking from an unassailably safe distance.

A game where most ranged martials are an enemy Stride away from getting directly threatened, not counting things the party can do to hinder that, I think is a game that could probably afford those classes more options, particularly if positioning becomes more important. Positioning-based mechanics like flanking or high ground could be one way of going about this, and would push ranged martials to spend more actions moving, but I do think in all cases there's also room to spend two actions and two attacks' worth of MAP on one attack that does something a bit different: spending an action to make your next ranged Strike count as two attacks for MAP and have it deal a bit of extra precision damage, for instance, would be very useful for dealing with resistances and Hardness even if the total damage dealt is less than two Strikes' worth. Doing something similar to force-trigger a crit spec effect would similarly be inferior to making two Strikes, but could be situationally useful to contribute some utility, especially if you're wielding a bow and an enemy is adjacent to a surface.

In all cases, it shouldn't be about just giving ranged damage more raw power: rather, it should be about giving ranged martial classes incentives to spend more actions to maximize their playstyle, and specifically evergreen actions rather than just the single-use, expensive, or highly situational actions available to them now. The flipside to this is that it should also mean that planting oneself like a turret the whole turn ought to be the exception, and not the norm in a ranged martial's playstyle. If this happens, then Starlit Span and Eldritch Archer would immediately become much healthier playstyles, as they'd have much more pressure to do something other than their current full-turn rotation. The Gunslinger would have many more mechanical hooks to play with, as well, and Starfinder's combat would be a lot more dynamic.