Teridax's page

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:

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 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:

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.

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.

My $0.02 on precision damage is as follows:

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:

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:

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:

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:

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.

I think I've come down on it definitely needing to scale off standard weapon attack proficiency. The goal is to compete with having an air repeater, not to make a wizard as good at using an air repeater as a fighter, better than most martials.

Although I fully support erring on the side of caution, I think it's worth mentioning here that a lot of the air repeater's power comes from its agile trait. A non-agile staff attack that keyed off of weapon attack proficiency would therefore be a fair bit below the power level of a simple weapon. Given how staves can't have property runes etched, I'd argue that's also a significant further downgrade compared to an air repeater getting damage property runes added on. I can't confirm this without playtesting, but my gut instinct says that you could get away not only with making the attack a spell attack, but making the attack benefit from the staff's item bonus to attack rolls, and it'd still not tread on the toes of a martial class and their damage.

Nor should they be, but that is orthogonal to the comment you quoted. A wizard with lots fighter feats is served fine by many of the proposals, whereas a wizard with that many feats taken from two or martial Archetypes has the same amount of "martial investment" but significantly fewer HP. That was what the counter-proposal at the end of my post sort to address.

That is fair, though I think simply granting Toughness and doubling its max HP increase, regardless of which archetype you take the resiliency feat from, and preventing stacking, means it wouldn't matter whether you get your resiliency feat from a Barbarian, Champion, or Fighter: if you get any resiliency feat, you get the same benefits.

Obviously, if they were giving X/level, they cannot stack. But their not stacking would also be a potential problem if we are making investment in relevant archetypes count again. Because a Wizard with 5 Champion feats and 5 Fighter feats is just as invested in being a front-liner as someone with someone with 10 of either, but under some of the revised proposals would have a lot fewer hp (obviously, that matters a lot less if we cap the number of feats that can contribute fairly low, but that seems unsatisfying to me).

I think that for better and for worse, Pathfinder 2e is a game that aims to prevent a Wizard from becoming as much of a frontliner as a Fighter, even if the Wizard opts into lots of Fighter feats. I'd thus be okay with capping the benefits of resiliency feats and preventing them from stacking, such that a Wizard could get partway there but not all the way.

That too is a fair point; expecting the main class to have Toughness in order to not get surpassed in Hit Points is risky even if Toughness is a common pick. I do want to keep the free Toughness, because it avoids having to pick two separate feats to achieve the exact same purpose, but I may then drop the scaling HP increase based on other feats and instead increase the Hit Points granted by the feat to twice your level.

And yes, I'm not changing the HP/level limit on resiliency prerequisites. The aim here is to get Hit Points closer to the class getting archetyped into, rather than exceed them.

Although I don't necessarily agree with all of the criticisms, I think the eventual Summoner remaster would be a good opportunity to improve a number of aspects of the class. Personally, I'd be interested in seeing many more eidolons, including an occult eidolon that's not just a phantom (like an aberration eidolon, for instance). I'd also quite like a proper synthesist class archetype or build for the Summoner, as that I think is a playstyle that could turn out really fun in 2e but would need a bit more support than just the Meld Into Eidolon feat.

These are fair points, and they also touch upon another aspect of resiliency feats that makes me a little uncomfortable still: at the end of the day, these feats accomplish the same purpose as Toughness, and anyone trying to stack more HP with a resiliency feat is almost certainly going to also have Toughness in their build (in fact, pretty much anyone will get Toughness at some point because it's one of the few good general feats). A similar thing could be said about Canny Acumen and save/Perception proficiency feats.

So, to take that, glass's, and Claxon's suggestion on board, how about this for a change to resiliency feats:

What if the resiliency feat added half the difference between your base class and the archetype's class hit dice in HP per level? And with 2 feats it brought you up to the archetypes HP per level?

It's a nice HP bonus, but honestly I don't think it's too crazy.

Heck, if you think my suggestion is too much then what about allowing resiliency to add +1 hp/level, and every archetype feat added an additional +1/level up to meeting the archetype class' hp per level?

That might be the better suggestion.

I like the idea of making up the difference by getting more feats, though I have mixed feelings about it being the difference between the base class and the one being archetyped into: in most cases, i.e. a 8 HP/level class taking an archetype of a 10 HP/level class, it'd just be 1 HP/level and you'd then pick 2 more feats to no longer have benefits that are flat-out worse than Toughness, so that in my opinion would still make the feat really weak in those cases. However, if you're something like a Sorcerer archetyping into a Guardian, that's 3 HP/level right off the bat, and then with a few more feats you'd go from being one of the squishiest classes in the game to having more HP than most classes. Even with the more gradual increase, I'm not sure that's a difference that ought to be made up in every case, as squishy classes IMO should probably remain on the squishier side, even if they can move around a bit in their ballpark of HP. I'd thus rather keep the HP benefits at a constant 2/level, which wouldn't necessarily be fantastic for a 4th-level feat but would at least be consistent and interesting to some builds.

One other alternative I'm thinking of could be to layer on benefits similar to Canny Acumen: currently a lot of MC archetypes grant master proficiency in a save or Perception if the original class is legendary, which I think is not that amazing for a 12th-level feat but could be more interesting if packaged into another. You could thus have the resiliency feat make you an expert in one of the class's two starting expert saves (or maybe also Perception if the class starts out an expert), and then make you a master if you're, say, 12th level and have a total of 3 of that archetype's feats. Thus, you'd be getting the benefits of two 1st-level general feats instead of one.

To your point Tridus, it'd almost be worth play testing giving Ward Medic, Continual Recovery, and Battle Medicine away to any player who meets the requirements (expert skill rank and level 2). In this way, it only costs skill proficiency bump to keep it relevant.

I think that's still a better solution than the proposed wand changes.

I'm fully in support in baking those feats into the base Medicine skill and its actions; I agree that they're feat taxes and that giving them for free to those proficient in Medicine would allow parties to recover properly without making characters feel like they have to sacrifice a large number of their options for the convenience.

I do, however, think that even after doing that, there's merit to changing how wands work, as I do agree with glass that they're disappointing. It doesn't have to be the OP's proposals exactly, and it doesn't have to be oriented towards healing, but if it gave wands more presence in a caster's build, all the better.

This is a valid point. I think the issue of stacking martial archetypes can be addressed simply by making resiliency feats not stack, but otherwise I agree it could be nice to try keeping the element of rewarding commitment, without either making the feat super-weak or having it grant so much HP that it would exceed the original class. I'm not sure how to thread the needle on that one, but even with the above proposal, I feel there's still room for something more on a 4th-level archetype feat.