Springboarding off of the samurai and ninja thread, one subtopic of that discussion was around the Eldritch Trickster racket: in short, the racket has the potential to satisfy a bunch of character concepts, among them that of a magical ninja, but more broadly that of a sneaky magic-user who uses a combination of skills, spells, and sneak attack damage to fight and navigate different challenges. In practice, though, the subclass has a few pitfalls: for starters, it interacts quite poorly with archetyping and Free Archetype rules, as it locks you out of other dedications. Perhaps even more importantly, though, it doesn't make the Rogue that much better at using spells in a sneaky way, as Hiding by default doesn't benefit your spells and the racket offers no special benefits in that regard. For this reason, the Eldritch Trickster has largely been left behind in favor of simply picking up a spellcasting archetype at 2nd level, and the racket hasn't been updated for the remaster either.
In my opinion, there are different ways in which the racket could be updated, but here I'm opting for an economical approach which I've outlined in this brew. In summary, here are the changes I'm proposing:
1. The dedication feat you get from the racket doesn't restrict you from picking other archetype dedication feats.
2. The racket makes enemies off-guard to your spells in situations when they would be off-guard to your Strikes. Additionally, enemies off-guard to your spells take an equivalent circumstance penalty to their saves against your spell DC.
3. The racket special-cases the Hide action so that you only become observed to creatures after resolving a spell you cast, while causing creatures you were hidden from to be off-guard to your spells. I honestly feel this could be made baseline to the Hide action, but it bears mentioning here.
4. The Magical Trickster feat, which normally just lets you add your sneak attack damage to your spell attacks, is replaced with the Spell Sneak feat, which adds your sneak attack damage to the damage roll of any spell (including save spells!) against creatures off-guard to your spells. It also uses the wording from the Sorcerer's sorcerous potency feature to ensure this only applies once per spell and per creature.
In summary, the above version of the Eldritch Trickster is made to play much better with Free Archetype rules, the Hide action, and a wider variety of spells, allowing Eldritch Trickster Rogues to benefit much more from all the usual means of rendering creatures off-guard. There are in my opinion many more ways to update the Eldritch Trickster, and another potential direction could be to make the racket a bounded spellcasting class archetype, but this version is aimed to be simpler and a bit more general-purpose, accommodating players who want to use their Rogue's spells for general utility or crowd control as well as direct damage.
The Investigator is one of those classes that could definitely use some kind of unchained rework in PF2e, and the Unchained discussion thread got me thinking about what that kind of rework would look like. I first wanted to break down the class's problems, particularly since despite some of those problems being obvious, others were a bit more difficult for me to clearly articulate in my head to start with. After giving it some more thought, I think the Investigator's issues come down to three major pain points:
What's Wrong With the Investigator?:
1. The Investigator is horribly MAD. This is probably the most obvious problem with the class: they rely on Intelligence as their key attribute, but also rely on the usual trifecta of Dex/Con/Wis for their defenses. That much is fine, but when you add the dependency on Strength when going for a melee build and Charisma when picking options like the Interrogation methodology, the class has the dubious honor of potentially depending on all six of the game's attributes at once.
2. The Investigator feels like a weaker, more niche Rogue. Another obvious issue, the Investigator in 1e was based off the Rogue, and in 2e it really shows: those skill increases and feats the Rogue gets? As an Investigator, you get some of those, but only to skills related to mental attributes (including Charisma!). The precision damage the Rogue can apply multiple times per round? You get to deal it once. Although the Investigator does have some things going for them, notably Devise a Stratagem's roll prediction, it's not enough to justify their limitations.
3. The Investigator has a ton of power locked behind a gimmick. Although the statement of fact might be obvious, I think there's a quandary here in terms of design philosophy: in theory, the Investigator ought to be rewarded for leaning into the roleplay of their investigations. In practice, however, the Investigator's performance varies wildly based on a largely arbitrary factor: many encounters won't relate directly to your mystery, and in those situations you'll be constantly action-taxed every turn and the bonus to your skills will be reduced. This in turn leads to either feat taxes as with the Person of Interest feat, or a lot of fudging that is likely to annoy the GM, on top of the many other class mechanics that require additional effort to make work.
The TL;DR being that the Investigator being tied to heavily to their minigame makes for a very gimmicky class that isn't terribly strong or even wholly functional, and that can be very annoying to GM for to boot. Although the Investigator ought to feel good when investigating, they shouldn't feel like a fraction of a class when their gimmick isn't relevant to an encounter or challenge, which is often.
Based on this problem statement, I've worked on a proof of concept for how the Investigator could be made to change: this is the result. The main points of change are as follows:
1. The Investigator's Pursue a Lead is essentially their current 19th-level class feature, and is completely decoupled from Devise a Stratagem and other encounter-related feats: you still get to be the best at investigating, and will always know when there's a clue to be found, but you'll also always have your free-action DaS and maximum bonus on your skill stratagem regardless.
2. The Investigator gets to use their Intelligence for every skill, as well as the damage roll of their Strikes instead of Strength. Not only that, they also get Untrained Improvisation and eventually trained proficiency in all skills, plus easier access to certain skill feats. In exchange, the class gets a standard number of skill increases and feats, making them specialists in a handful of fields and at minimum competent at everything else.
3. The Investigator gets a pass on many of their feats, plugging them into the game's existing mechanics instead of requiring the GM to constantly improvise on the spot. Both the class's methodologies and the Palatine Detective class archetype are implemented as a series of feats to the core class, giving them incredibly wide access to a different array of tools to use alongside their stratagems.
The TL;DR here being that the above brew makes the Investigator the most versatile skill-based generalist in the game, able to use a huge variety of actions at minimum decently. Their investigations and their performance in encounters are decoupled, allowing them to be amazing detectives during exploration while having a consistent and fully functional range of features in combat. Let me know what you think, and I hope you enjoy!
As with the Slayer, I've posted my playtest notes for the Daredevil. You can see the detailed feedback on that thread, but in my opinion the class has several key problems that really need to be addressed:
* The class is held back by so many arbitrary conditions and prescriptive limitations that they often end up not functioning at all, all while being taxed for attribute boosts and skill increases.
* The class is so fragile that they end up burdening their team, as the cooperative nature of PF2e inevitably means a Champion, Guardian, or healer will find themselves pressured to babysit the Daredevil to offset their excessive levels of risk.
* For all the high risks involved with the class, the rewards are poor. Stunt damage is weak and scales poorly, whereas many of the Daredevil's feats are outright worse than basic actions.
As I tend to do when a class's issues are this serious, I've mulled over what could change within the Daredevil to help them become the best they could be (or, rather, what I imagine to be the best they could be, which is a bit different). This is something I've also done for the Slayer, a similarly flawed class in the Risks and Rewards playtest for which I posted a proof of concept a few days before.
After giving it some thought, here is a draft for a proof of concept for an alternate Daredevil class. Surprisingly, I initially expected the class to have more going for it than the Slayer, but whereas my take on the latter revolved more around some (fairly serious) tweaks, my take on the Daredevil ended up being a near-total overhaul. The broad lines of the changes outlined in that document are as follows:
* Props are drastically simplified and expanded to include any creature with a level and any durable terrain feature of suitable size, allowing the Daredevil to consistently use their own party for their maneuvers when all else fails, regardless of size. Rather than deal stunt damage, the Daredevil can make free-action fist Strikes when they successfully maneuver enemies adjacent to props. Additionally, the Daredevil can use maneuvers on creatures of any size.
* Adrenaline is removed and the class instead gets a MAP reduction to all agile attacks, including agile Athletics maneuvers and other skill attacks.
* The class gets a once-per-round free action that lets them drop to 1 Hit Point and increase their wounded condition instead of dropping to 0 HP. They'd still be really squishy, but would be able to survive on the razor's edge for longer.
* The class gets auto-scaling Athletics and, exceptionally, five attribute boosts instead of the usual four, with two of them being locked to Strength and Dexterity. This reduces their attribute and skill taxes, and lets them pick up nice side options without tanking their defenses or baseline effectiveness.
* The class's feats are overhauled, featuring tons of action compression, greater rewards for incurring higher risk, and lots more Tumble Through actions instead of Strides to fight more consistently in different environments. Many of these feats have the Daredevil make tons of attacks, often with risks attached to critical failure and more impactful effects if you're making these attacks with a greater MAP.
The general idea of what I want the Daredevil to be out of all this is a chaotic class that chains tons of small actions on the same turn, moving around and maneuvering enemies dynamically according to whatever's available to them from round to round. I want them to be the class that makes the best overall use of maneuvers, and hurt enemies mainly with the chip damage of their agile Strikes by exploiting their positioning relative to terrain and other creatures. Ideally, the end result ought to be a really dynamic class whose constraints come from their positioning and the enemy's rather than artificial limitations, and with a truly high-risk, high-reward playstyle that should give players exciting highs and nail-biting moments when things don't go quite according to plan.
At this stage and after giving it some thought, it is my opinion that the Risks and Rewards playtest is the worst playtest we've received thus far for PF2e. Although some prior playtests also had major issues, like Battlecry!'s awful playtest Guardian, this to me is the first instance where both featured classes are duds. I think there are many reasons for this, including fairly uninteresting core themes, largely unoriginal features, and weak balance, but at the core of it I think is that you can often end up not being able to play your class.
Some of us have experienced what it's like to fight an ooze as a Swashbuckler: you can't deal precision damage to the thing because it's immune, but you also can't use most Charisma skill actions because oozes are mindless, so your bravado actions and finishers, the things that make you a Swashbuckler, don't work. In that encounter, you don't get to play your class. This is a deeply unpleasant experience that I don't wish upon anyone else, and one that I wish didn't exist at all in Pathfinder. It is also, in my opinion, unfortunately the defining experience of both the Daredevil and Slayer classes.
To summarize: the Daredevil is a class that makes use of props and maneuvers to move around, reposition enemies, and damage them by slamming them into said props. The Slayer, meanwhile, is a class that marks a quarry, adapts their toolset to them, and hunts them with exceptional speed. All else held equal, the core of these playstyles already presents interesting tradeoffs: the Daredevil is limited by the availability of props, the positioning of enemies, and their own positioning, so the core formula of "enemy + prop = success" is ever-changing based on a number of dynamic variables, and isn't always easy or even possible to achieve every round. The Slayer, meanwhile, has similar core limitations to the Ranger class in that they care especially about one particular target. If that was all that limited these classes, they would already be more restricted in what they can do than, say, a Fighter or a Rogue, and that would be fine.
Unfortunately, both classes are saddled with not just a few, but an almost comically large amount of added restrictions: the Daredevil's props are limited by relative size, for instance, the class can't use many of their features in terrain that doesn't let them Stride, and to top it all off they're action-taxed every round before they can even start using most of their feats. It is not rare to fight in an encounter where you have no props to work with, nor even enemies of a suitable size to maneuver around. The Slayer, meanwhile, needs to know which quarry they're marking ahead of time, has no inherent means of finding out which enemies are around or identifying said quarry (Monster Lore doesn't let you identify creatures), can only mark quarry of a certain level, and can't properly adapt to their quarry due to Reinforce Arsenal not being freely usable in exploration. It is not rare to fight in an encounter where you have no quarry to fight, which means you can't get quickened from On the Hunt. Even if you mark an ally as your quarry just to have access to On the Hunt's quickening, this means you don't benefit from the many quarry-specific effects of your tools. In those encounters, you don't get to play your class, and unlike the Swashbuckler fighting an ooze, this in my experience was not a rare occurrence.
And to be clear: my issue here isn't that the rewards didn't match the risks. Neither class felt very rewarding to play, and that ought to change, but I don't think any amount of reward would justify frequently ending up not being able to do the one thing your class is meant to be good at. To also be clear: my issue here isn't that you can have low moments as either class; I actually quite enjoyed the critical failure effects of many of the Daredevil's feats and how that added to their chaotic playstyle. My issue here is that there should never be a moment in Pathfinder where the player feels like they'd have been better off not playing at all. This is the kind of feeling that happens when your class gets completely shut down in an encounter with no real recourse, and I have never experienced this feeling as often as I did when I played the Daredevil and Slayer. Not getting to play your class isn't "high-risk", it's not a suitable tradeoff for a high potential reward, it is in my opinion simply bad design. If there is anything at all that I think the developers ought to fix when adjusting these classes towards their final release, it is this.
After covering the Slayer, here's a summary of the notes I've compiled from playtesting the Daredevil. As with the other posts I do for these, I'll split my post into sections, spoiler them, and add a TL;DR just so it's all a bit easier to navigate.
Methods:
Here are the methods I've used for my playtest:
* I ran my playtests across a series of encounters from levels 1 to 20, with more of a focus on lower-level play.
* Unlike the Slayer, who had some out-of-combat mechanics, I focused mainly on encounters with the Daredevil, and instead focused on different battle maps. Importantly, I deliberately included sparse battle maps and encounters against single-target enemies, as well as encounters with lots of enemies and terrain features, to test how the Daredevil would play in situations that didn't favor their playstyle. At higher levels, this included encounters underwater and in the air.
* I ran my Daredevil with a variety of party compositions, which often ended up including healers for reasons I'll detail below.
* I experimented with three builds: the first was a straightforward Strength-Dex-Con-Wis build for maximum effectiveness in encounters, the second was a Strength-Con-Wis-Cha build to try out some of the class's Charisma feats, and the third was a Dex-Con-Wis-Cha build to see if the class could work with low Strength. I detail my findings further down.
* I tried experimenting with one-handed weapons and a shield, keeping one hand free for the class's maneuvers, as well as a full unarmed build.
TL;DR I ran the Daredevil through a series of playtest encounters at all levels, using a variety of builds and party compositions. I made a point of trying out as wide a variety of encounter types and battle maps as possible, to see how the class would fare outside their mechanical "comfort zone".
The Daredevil's Restrictions:
The absolute first point of feedback I feel I have to give is just how many restrictions the class is saddled with. Here's what you need in order to work as a Daredevil:
* In order to start using most your class features and feats, you need to have adrenaline, which means you need to use a risky action and spend an action for it. If you don't, your class doesn't work.
* In order to actually use one of your stunt feats at level 1, that is to say a feat with "stunt" in its name, your target can't be more than one size larger than you. The Titan Wrestler feat, which you don't get from the class, can increase this to two sizes for Daring Stunt, but not for the other feats. If this isn't the case, then your only alternatives for risky actions at level 1 are Bold Bluffs and Breakaway Attack, otherwise you can't turn on your class's core mechanic.
* In order to deal stunt damage to creatures, you need a prop, which can be either a terrain feature or a creature that is larger than you. This is important, because it means that if you, say, Shove a Small enemy into a Medium creature and you yourself are Medium, your Shove will not do stunt damage. If you don't have these props, which can happen in sparse environments, against lone enemies, or simply against multiple enemies that aren't larger than you, you won't have an opportunity to deal stunt damage.
* Even if you do happen to have multiple enemies running around that are larger than you, they need to be close enough to each other to be realistically moved into one another via Athletics maneuvers, and if they're more than exactly one size larger than you, many of your feats made to do so won't work.
* In order to benefit from audacious combatant, the feat that reduces your MAP, you specifically need to make an attack as part of a press feat while having adrenaline. This means simply making an Athletics maneuver or using a Dirty Trick won't work, and if you didn't pick a press feat at level 1, you'll start off not being able to use this feature at all.
* In order to use nearly any Daredevil feat that has you move, you need to be able to Stride. This means that if you're relying on a Fly or Swim speed, as will happen in midair and underwater encounters, those feats stop working.
So just to summarize the above: in order for your class to work, you need to be fighting on the ground, in an encounter rich with terrain features or enemies close to each other that are exactly one size larger than you, you need to have picked a press feat that makes an attack, and you need to spend an action each turn just to gain adrenaline. If one or more of these conditions aren't met, or if you're dealing with enemies that are otherwise difficult to maneuver (such as incorporeal creatures without ghost touch handwraps or a weapon with a maneuver trait), the Daredevil starts to fall apart. All of this, by the way, doesn't guarantee that you'll deal stunt damage to enemies, as you'll need to spend additional actions after this (on top of the action tax for adrenaline) to position yourself and your enemies accordingly, which is itself highly situational.
TL;DR The Daredevil is saddled with an exceptionally large number of arbitrary restrictions that cause the class to stop functioning in large part or in its entirety in all but the most ideal of circumstances. Underneath all of this is, in my opinion, a genuinely enjoyable restriction of having to identify opportunities to move enemies into obstacles and each other, but this is wrapped up in so much mechanical red tape that the class really does not flow well, and feels barely if at all functional at the things its features say it's meant to do.
The Daredevil's Survivability:
I feel this merits a special section of its own, because the class's survivability isn't just awful, it's awful in a way that I found detrimental to the entire party and not just the class:
* The class's poor survivability for a martial class makes them a nuisance to their team. On paper, the class's poor Hit Points perhaps seemed justified given that they're meant to be a risky class, but in practice this simply ended up translating to the Daredevil needing to get babysat by their team, especially their healer. When left unassisted, the Daredevil easily ends up getting caught in a death spiral where they keep dropping to 0 Hit Points again and again from their messy playstyle, requiring increasingly urgent aid each time, and because this is a cooperative game first and foremost, the presence of a Daredevil in the party effectively ended up meaning that at least one other party member had to be on healing duty (or protection duty as a Champion, or both) just to postpone that death spiral. The daredevil's endurance feature helped very little with this, because Battle Medicine is a once-per-day effect unless you're a Medic and out-of-combat healing becomes trivially easy to apply fairly quickly.
* For similar reasons to the above, I struggled with builds that didn't boost both Strength and Dexterity at the same time. Sacrificing Strength meant my Athletics maneuvers were far worse (and thus so was my Daring Stunt), which greatly limited my options to the few Daredevil feats that let you maneuver enemies with Acrobatics, whereas sacrificing Dexterity meant my AC and Reflex saves really suffered, which made a big difference on such a fragile class, and I couldn't Tumble Through enemies as well when I really needed to get into a certain space. Although it might be still viable to pick up Charisma skills for feats like Don't Mess With Me, currently the cost to boost Charisma on this class feels far too high, and so the Daredevil feels constrained to a mostly physical stat-heavy build that gives the class nothing to really work with in social gameplay.
* Galvanized Mobility was quite a nifty little survivability benefit. Although Reactive Strikes aren't that common at lower levels, they hurt when they do trigger, and the Daredevil acts in a way that can trigger those a lot. Rather than make the Daredevil immune to those, I'm glad the class was instead giving a defensive benefit against them to keep their element of risk.
* Enduring Adrenaline made the class feel a lot more survivable when it came online, which was much appreciated. It doesn't make up for the Daredevil's fragility until then, nor does it paper over that weakness entirely, but it's something.
TL;DR The Daredevil's poor durability on paper may read as appropriate for a class meant to be high-risk, high-reward, but in practice it simply made the Daredevil an active burden on their team to keep alive, as their risk inevitably got partially offloaded to the rest of the party in this cooperative game. It also heavily constrained the class's attribute-boosting options in my opinion, where sacrificing Strength or Dexterity to boost Charisma was so harmful to the class's effectiveness as to feel like a false choice. While I enjoy the idea of the class being high-risk and want that to stay, I feel the current implementation of that risk is neither functional nor enjoyable, especially not to the Daredevil's allies.
Props and Stunt Damage:
Turns out, the Daredevil has a lot going on under the hood, and in addition to the overall restrictions of the class, I think props and stunt damage merit their own discussion:
* For starters, I genuinely liked the basic gameplay of being on the lookout for props to use for stunt damage. Ignoring everything else, moving into position to then try to move one or more enemies into terrain or each other was a fun bit of gameplay that I'm glad is getting built upon, and I do feel this can justify a whole class if done right.
* I talk about the limitations of props above, but I will also mention here that I do not find their implementation at all intuitive. Why does my own size matter for the purposes of stunt damage when I Shove an enemy into another enemy? For that matter, which does my being larger make me less likely to deal stunt damage in that scenario?
* The limitations of stunt damage have been detailed at length above, but part of the problem here is that on top of being fairly situational, stunt damage is also mediocre. Effectively, if you Shove or Reposition someone and make them go into an obstacle instead of actually moving them around, you deal a weak weapon's worth of damage that scales less well than Strike damage too, and doesn't double on a crit either. It's effectively often just a worse Strike with extra steps, which in my play experience often left me wondering why I ought to bother going through the often significant effort of triggering this when I could just Strike with a much less restricted class.
* In my playtests, I tried pairing stunt damage with other Shove-boosting effects, specifically the Centaur's Practiced Brawn (which turns Shove successes into critical successes) and the Guardian's Punishing Shove (which adds your Strength modifier to all Shoves, doubles that amount on a crit, and adds extra damage at higher levels). Although this made Shoves meatier when they did trigger stunt damage, the situational nature of stunt damage, lack of doubled stunt damage on a crit, and general scarcity of Daredevil actions that let you Shove enemies (there's Daring Stunt, Daring Reversal, Topple the Dominoes, and that's it) meant this still didn't feel as consistent as just Striking enemies.
* Propelling Strides, while a minor feature altogether, really made a difference in making the Daredevil feel more dynamic and on the lookout for props to help them move around. I feel this feature could even have been made stronger. Shoutout as well to Daring Stunt letting you use move actions other than Stride; if this had been applied to the class's feats as well I would've been very happy.
TL;DR Props in my opinion are not very intuitively-implemented, and their current definition makes for a lot of situations where it feels like the Daredevil should be dealing stunt damage, but can't. Stunt damage itself is weak in addition to being unreliable, to the point where it generally felt worse than just Striking. While it didn't combo as well as I expected with Shove-boosting feats from other classes, I feel that could easily change and become a problem if the Daredevil ended up dealing more stunt damage (which I'd like). Despite all this, I still found the core gameplay of trying to move enemies into props enjoyable, and I think this could become even more fun if the class's arbitrary limitations were lifted or at least relaxed, and if stunt damage itself were more rewarding.
Core Class:
With the above out of the way, onto the core class:
* While not a criticism of the class's mechanics, I can't help but feel that the developers walked into unfavorable comparisons to the Swashbuckler by giving the Daredevil's mechanics very show-off names like "props" and "stunts", which isn't helped by adrenaline's superficial similarities to panache. In practice, the classes play very differently, but I feel alternative terms like "obstacles" and "maneuvers" instead of the above would fit the class just as well while avoiding those comparisons.
* Adrenaline, despite being such a core defining mechanic for the class, felt worse than useless. Part of it is because the Daredevil's feats felt too weak to justify an additional hoop to jump through, and I'll talk about this more below, but part of it is because having to spend actions gaining adrenaline in extremely prescriptive ways often actively gets in the way of leveraging the Daredevil's remaining actions towards maneuvering enemies. It consistently got in the way of planning turns around trying to move enemies into props or exploit everyone's positioning in the current turn, the latter of which I found far more interesting and organic than whatever this feature is trying to do. It doesn't help that many risky actions don't feel especially risky either, so this mechanic to me works on neither a mechanical nor thematic level.
* Audacious Combatant, while mechanically useful in making attacks easier to chain, also implicitly requires press actions that are entirely possible for a Daredevil to not get at level 1. As with so much of the class (and the Slayer), it feels like there are too many arbitrary restrictions imposed upon this feature.
* Although the class's features are already really bloated at level 1, I find it strange that they don't get Titan Wrestler for free, as I found the feat a must-have in making Daring Stunt in particular work on more enemies.
* For some weird reason, the Daredevil is full of features lifted directly from other classes. Deny advantage is a Rogue feature, whereas stunt flexibility and improved stunt flexibility copy the Fighter's combat flexibility features at the same levels. These aren't bad features in and of themselves, and deny advantage was particularly useful in lessening the impact of getting swarmed by lower-level enemies (which the Daredevil will want to do if they can work as props), but it feels like the class could benefit more from somewhat different and less derivative features.
TL;DR Similarly to the Slayer, the Daredevil I think suffers both from feature bloat and unnecessarily derivative feature design. I despise adrenaline as a mechanic and found it actively got in the way of more interesting gameplay on the class, such that I largely experienced it as but one additional unnecessary limiter rather than a genuine power-up. For all the features the class get, I don't think they make the Daredevil all that good at the one thing they do even when they actually get to do it, such that I'd still find that niche currently filled more effectively by a Furious Bully Barbarian or a similar build.
Feats:
Covering the highlights of the class's feats:
* Mentioning this in priority: Caroming Charge I think needs an adjustment. It's not just that its damage can become genuinely excessive if there are a lot of enemies within two Strides of the Daredevil, the complete lack of rolling involved is the real issue for me and makes this feat really noninteractive. I feel this feat would be much better off working like Barreling Charge or the like where the Daredevil rolls Athletics or the like to deal stunt damage to enemies they move through.
* Speaking of Barreling Charge, the complete lack of alternatives to Strides in the class's feats means all of those feats end up becoming non-functional when fighting in water or midair, as mentioned above. This omission feels entirely unnecessary and in my opinion simply makes the Daredevil a less functional class.
* Similarly, the hard-set size restrictions on many of the class's feats, which can't be adjusted with Titan Wrestler, means those feats become a lot less functional at higher levels, where Huge and Gargantuan enemies are more common, unless the Daredevil constantly gets access to enlarge.
* The risky trait feels quite perfunctory. I don't see why only certain actions need to be used as openers, but in many cases risky feats aren't that risky, as they have no particular downsides or consequences for failure. Breakaway Attack doesn't really involve any mechanical risk, for instance, nor do Wall Slam or Escape Shuffle.
* Similarly, I don't feel Pressing Pummel or Trip Up really feel appropriate as press actions given their two-action cost, and it feels like the trait was simply slapped on to synergize with audacious combatant. In general, many of the Daredevil's press feats feel straight-up worse than regular, universally-available non-press actions, like Rebounding Fall Stunt being a far worse Trip action, or High-Flying Tumble Stunt being a worse Tumble Through.
* Although the Daredevil's feats may not be mechanically very strong, I nonetheless found many flavorful and mechanically interesting. Wall Sweep letting you use forced movement to your advantage was a personal favorite.
* Additionally, I did find the negative failure and critical failure effects on many feats interesting. Although I don't think the reward part of the class is really there, the risk in using certain feats felt appropriate for the class's theme.
TL;DR I think there is some good flavor to many of the Daredevil's feats, but ultimately most of them did not feel very effective to me at all, and in fact many felt outright worse than actions anyone else could access more easily, and use with fewer restrictions. I was expecting a class that could leverage press actions to make attacks and maneuvers with an exceptional degree of action compression, but what I got instead was a class that had to work harder to do less than other classes. Combined with the need to turn on adrenaline, it often felt like I was spending my whole turn trying to do just one or two things, and that ended up making the Daredevil feel sluggish, the absolute last thing I was expecting out of them.
The concluding TL;DR to all this is that despite really wanting to give the Daredevil the benefit of the doubt, I really did not have a positive experience with this class at all. There's some fun gameplay to be had deep down there somewhere, but it is buried under layers upon layers of unnecessary mechanical limitations that shut the class down, and when the Daredevil finally gets to do their thing, it's often a lot of sound and fury just to be less effective than a martial class that can do what they do better, and more on top. The Daredevil feels like an experiment in high-risk, high-reward design, yet I feel both components have failed: the class's risk as currently implemented is enjoyable neither to their player nor their team in my opinion, and the class very much does not feel rewarding.
I'm struggling at this stage to think of what an ideal Daredevil could look like, but I nonetheless do have some feedback on how I'd want the class to improve:
Recommendations:
Here's a few recommendations on my part based on my playtesting experience with the Daredevil:
* For starters, let me state that I believe the Daredevil should primarily be limited by their enemies' proximity to terrain features and each other, and little to nothing else. I believe the Daredevil ought to be the best enemy maneuverer in the game, and while they could stand to cover more than just that fairly narrow niche, they shouldn't in my opinion need to jump through that many other hoops to do their thing effectively.
* I think the Daredevil could straight-up get rid of adrenaline and be better off. This is but one of many hoops the class does not need to jump through in my opinion; the Daredevil I think could stand to use actions more freely and gain the current benefits of adrenaline by default without becoming anywhere near too strong, at no detriment to their existing gameplay.
* Audacious combatant I don't think needs to be limited to press feats, and I think the Daredevil should be able to synergize more naturally with attack actions like Dirty Trick.
* Props I think could easily just be defined as any creature with a level or a durable terrain feature of appropriate size. Really, I don't think the Daredevil needs to be limited by their own size; simply needing to get enemies close to terrain features, each other, and possibly even party members is enough. Also, "obstacles" I think is a better term here than "prop".
* I think daredevil's endurance would be better-of being replaced with either better defensive proficiencies or a feature that genuinely helps the Daredevil stay on their feet better. Giving them a reaction to drop to 1 HP instead of 0 and increase their wounded condition, similar to Orc Ferocity but without a frequency restriction, could significantly help them survive while still keeping them on the edge of death.
* I feel the class could receive Titan Wrestler for free, and in fact could have the size restrictions on maneuvers lifted entirely as part of their features. If a Tiny Daredevil wants to dropkick a kaiju into a building, let them.
* I feel the Daredevil ought to have more ways of dealing stunt damage. In particular, I feel they should have a baked-in and (mechanically) risky way of applying stunt damage to a single target even if there are no props around, with prop-related means being more appealing if available. If props are redefined to consistently include any party member, then stunt damage could become much more reliable to trigger without needing a dedicated action for it.
* I think stunt damage could stand to be improved significantly, and I also feel its damage ought to be made magical if the Daredevil is wielding a magic weapon or wearing handwraps of mighty blows.
* I feel the Daredevil could use some more original features than deny advantage and combat flexibility. Improvements to the class's mobility and perhaps Scrambling Retreat built-in for free would not go amiss, especially as the latter would help discourage the class from using a shield, which I don't consider very thematically appropriate.
* The class's Stride feats could easily benefit from Starfinder 2e's traversal trait or its equivalent mechanical benefit. I personally believe all the Strides in the feats could just be Tumble Throughs instead, which would make the class much more maneuverable.
* I mention above that the Daredevil could stand to ignore size limitations on maneuvers entirely, but even if that doesn't happen, its size-limited feats ought to at least interact with Titan Wrestler.
* The Daredevil's feats I think need a general balance pass, and in particular their press feats need to actually feature the power and especially action compression press feats tend to have.
The simple TL;DR here being to just please remove as much stuff as possible that just arbitrarily shuts the Daredevil down or gets in the way of them being able to do their thing. Even with no other limitations than the need for props, the class would already be more situational than most, and that's fine. In addition, I think the "reward" part of their high-risk, high-reward playstyle ought to be increased significantly, and part of that I think ought to come from much stronger feats, especially better press feats.
After posting my playtest notes for the Slayer, and before doing the same for the Daredevil, I thought I'd share a proof of concept for how I'd like the class to change. You can find my thoughts on the class in greater detail in the thread I linked, but here are the broad lines of my issues with the Slayer:
* The class's core features are largely derivative of the Ranger and Thaumaturge, which is a shame given how the class has some pretty original feats.
* The class has a lot of feature bloat, in large part because they have to present this entire monster parts system that's both complicated and limited in application. This is also a shame, because monster trophies are a mechanic that could benefit many more characters besides the Slayer, even if the latter should still find great uses for trophies.
* The class has a lot of arbitrary limitations that make it feel like less than the sum of its many parts, and its components don't gel very well together.
* Despite being called the Slayer, the class is actually pretty bad at slaying creatures. Its only starting option that gives the class more than a bare minimum of martial Striking power is the bloodseeking blade signature tool, and the added damage it offers is mediocre.
After giving these problems a bit more thought, I've put them down in a bit of homebrew that showcases how I think the class could change to address the above issues. Here are the broad lines of this proof of concept:
* I'd like trophies to be made into a mechanic separate from the Slayer, with items that plug into this mechanic. The Slayer would still be the best user of trophies, however, thanks to their tools.
* I'd like most of the restrictions on the Slayer's abilities to be done away with, so that the class plays more smoothly. This includes letting the slayer Mark Quarry in combat, expanding Monster Lore to humanoids and creature identification, giving Survey Wildlife to the class for free so that they can identify creatures ahead of time more easily, and making On the Hunt's quickening always-on instead of having it constantly eat up the class's reaction. Because Reinforce Arsenal would be usable at will during exploration, the Slayer would be able to Reinforce their tools much more easily.
* I'd like the Slayer to be able to execute their quarry when it's on low enough Hit Points, giving the class more baseline killing power and a unique, appropriate slaying ability that doesn't yet exist in PF2e.
* I'd like the Slayer's signature tools to instead be made into feats, with the class getting bonus feats to pick up more tools at 1st level and as they level up.
The general aim of these changes is to make the Slayer altogether more functional and more distinct from both the Ranger and Thaumaturge, shining through major amounts of agency, utility, and their ability to execute their quarry. If the class were to change as above, I think their features would work better together, and their core gameplay loop of identifying quarry, Marking them, Reinforcing their Arsenal to adapt to them, then hunting them and Claiming a Trophy from their kill ought to flow a lot more consistently. As with any creative work, this is but one out of many valid takes on how to implement the Slayer, so this isn't me trying to impose my worldview on Paizo, so much as suggesting a few concrete ideas for how to adjust the class based on my experience playtesting them.
Starting to share my feedback notes for the Risks and Rewards playtest with the Slayer class. I'll split my post into sections, spoiler them, and add a TL;DR just so it's all a bit easier to navigate.
Methods:
Here are the methods I've used for my playtest:
* I ran my playtests across a series of encounters from levels 1 to 20, with more of a focus on lower-level play. Unlike normally with my playtests, I also included scenarios from previous playtests to test the class's exploration mechanics.
* I ran my Slayer with a variety of party compositions, often a damage-dealing martial class and a couple of spellcasters.
* I generally tested the Slayer using melee builds, prioritizing Strength, and ranged builds, prioritizing Dexterity, with boosts to the usual Constitution and Wisdom. I tried both builds with boosts to Intelligence, and for melee builds sometimes boosted Dexterity more instead when I wasn't using Warded Mail.
* I experimented with a variety of signature tools, including different weapons to work with certain feats.
TL;DR I ran the Slayer through a series of playtest encounters at all levels, using a variety of builds and party compositions. Due to the Slayer's exploration-specific mechanics, I also included more fleshed-out scenarios and exploration.
Quarry Hunting:
There's a lot to cover in the Slayer's mechanics, and their loop of hunting their quarry I think merits its own section:
* When reading the class, I initially fear they'd be deprived of trophies due to their quarry's level restrictions. In practice, encounters that only featured enemies of a lower level than the Slayer were not all that common, so this wasn't as big a problem as I expected. I did, however, find the level restriction unnecessary in those circumstances, as it still deprived the Slayer of a lot of their mechanics.
* More problematic, however, was the need for the Slayer to know of their quarry ahead of time, which in many cases was not inherently possible by default and made Mark Quarry outright impossible to use, depriving the Slayer of a major part of their gameplay. Survey Wildlife quickly became very important in helping solve this issue, to the point where I feel that ought to have been made part of the Mark Quarry activity by default.
* Trophies felt extremely underbaked to me. I'll talk more about this further down, but keeping track of trophies required a fair amount of bookkeeping, all just to turn a few knobs on your signature tools in excessively constrained ways. I was personally really looking forward to an official monster parts system, and this feels far too limited to be fit for purpose.
* Reinforce Arsenal felt wildly situational. Even in the playtest scenarios I ran, Reinforcing with a trophy from one encounter did not guarantee an advantage against the next, and otherwise only being able to Reinforce once a day severely limited the Slayer's ability to adapt to future enemies. I'm not sure why this activity was kept so limited in this way. This also ended up making trophies feel a lot less valuable than they were supposed to, to the point where after Reinforcing my Arsenal with my initial trophy I often abandoned that part of the class.
* On the Hunt, while interesting in concept, felt quite janky to use: in particular, it didn't feel very effective against a higher-level quarry, because they were less likely to get critically hit. If there were no valid enemies to mark as quarry, that also ended up reducing its triggers, such that I eventually found it optimal to mark one of my own allies as my quarry, particularly as relentless actions aren't limited to the Slayer's quarry. That I could do this at all, let alone derive the most utility out of doing so, felt wildly inappropriate.
* When On the Hunt did trigger, however, getting quickened genuinely did feel like a rush, to the point where it felt more like adrenaline than the Daredevil class's own mechanic. When the Slayer's action economy opened up like this, the class felt at its most unique and effective in my opinion. I also liked how this made encounters with lower-level enemies markedly different from encounters against single targets, as the Slayer often ended up getting constantly quickened just from fodder enemies dying.
* I did not, however, enjoy having to keep spending my reaction to quicken my character, and the Slayer ended up feeling like one of the least reactive classes in the game as a result when On the Hunt kept triggering, which feels like the opposite of what ought to be. I feel On the Hunt would work a lot better as a free action instead.
TL;DR Marking Quarry and claiming trophies were mechanics that to me presented a lot of complexity for ultimately little in the way of agency, depth, or even functionality. Marking enemies as quarry is unreliable, Reinforcing with fresh trophies does not guarantee improved chances against upcoming encounters, and On the Hunt isn't at its best when marking higher-level enemies, such that I ended up ditching trophy-hunting entirely and marking an ally as quarry to proc On the Hunt as reliably as possible. This really messed with the vibe of the Slayer, in my opinion, and feels like a waste of a monster parts system that I think could benefit characters way beyond just this class.
Core Class:
With Mark Quarry and trophies covered, onto the core class:
* It's been said countless times already, but I think it bears repeating that this Slayer is extremely similar in theme to the Ranger, with a few bits borrowed from the Thaumaturge. I have played Rangers with near-identical flavor to that of the core Slayer class, and similar mechanics to boot when opting into the Monster Hunter feat line. I'm disappointed in seeing an upcoming class be so similar to one we have already, especially one so starved of fresh options as the Ranger, when Pathfinder 2e's class roster is already quite crowded and there are still plenty of totally fresh concepts yet to be delivered, including highly-demanded classes like the Shifter.
* Despite being called the Slayer, the class's damage felt on the lower end of the scale for martial classes, making them far from the best at slaying enemies. Instead, the class had a mix of different kinds of mostly selfish utility and plenty of sources of added survivability, so outside of one extreme outlier feat that I'll detail below, the class felt more like a utility-oriented off-tank than a proper damage dealer.
* Monster Lore, while helpful in identifying enemy weaknesses in combat as a universal Lore skill, felt excessively limited in a few key respects: not being able to use the skill on humanoids meant my Slayer was particularly inept against famously monstrous creatures such as giants, hags, and yetis. As mentioned above, I relied on Survey Wildlife to pre-identify quarry that I could mark, and Monster Lore doesn't inherently work with the RK action used for that activity.
* Signature tools, much like monster trophies, feel extremely underbaked, and above all rigid and weak. Their functions are fairly narrow in scope for what I expected to be a versatile toolset, and the ways in which they can be adjusted by Reinforcing are extremely prescriptive, which made them feel far less interesting to use than the Thaumaturge implements they seem based on.
* Bloodseeking Blade's ability to ignore resistance was useful, though mainly at higher levels when those situations occurred more often, rather than at the very early levels where it started appearing. Beyond that, its bonus damage on the first Strike did not feel significant enough to make the class a proper damage-dealer at early levels, despite this being ostensibly the premier damage-dealing tool, and Honed Strike, while situationally useful against concealment, felt often too costly to be used consistently in melee without being quickened from On the Hunt.
* As with Bloodseeking Blade, Chymist Vial's Cat Potion Chymist's Eye felt more useful at higher levels when dealing with invisibility, other means of obfuscation, and a greater range of special senses than at low level. Ignition Vial did feel good to use, however, and sometimes even felt like a better way to pump out damage in melee than with the Bloodseeking Blade in melee. Its frequency limitation, however, is a severe drawback at early levels, to the point where it feels you have no tools to work with at all after using the action.
* Consecrated Panoply is, in my opinion, awfully implemented. I initially saw this as my way of building Buffy the Vampire Slayer with her stakes, but the inability to etch runes onto the tools' spikes until 7th level causes them to fall severely behind regular weapons at levels 2-6. Even after that, they still remain inferior, because they can't be etched with property runes. I do not understand why this tool was implemented in this way when the thrower's bandolier exists, and the bonus to saving throws was in my experience generally too situational to justify using the tool.
* Warded Mail surprisingly felt like the most effective tool at early levels, despite also feeling like the least thematically appropriate as a defensive tool. The Shelter action providing a circumstance bonus to AC while leaving your hands free to use two-handed weapons meant my Slayer felt like they had the best of both worlds when using this tool, even without a quarry to resist physical damage against.
* Fated Foe feels like a band-aid to the Slayer's otherwise extreme rigidity when it comes to Reinforcing their Arsenal and the unreliability of Marking their Quarry. I honestly feel this ability could be a lot better if it just cut to the chase and let the Slayer adjust their arsenal on the fly in combat at will, though its anti-death effect was useful in and of itself.
TL;DR The Slayer's arsenal feels rather inflexible and diluted, with benefits that don't always feel useful for their level. As seems to be a running theme with this class (and also the Daredevil), many of the Slayer's features feel arbitrarily limited in ways that really damage their functionality, such as Monster Lore not applying to humanoids and the Consecrated Panoply tool making it impossible to etch property runes onto its spikes, nor even fundamental runes until level 7. Were it not for On the Hunt's quickening shaking things up, I felt like I would've had more options, and more consistent ones too, as an Outwit Ranger, whose theme is extremely similar to that of the Slayer. Strangely, the Slayer doesn't feel very damage-oriented, so much as focused on survivability and situational, self-beneficial utility.
Feats:
Covering the highlights of the class's feats:
* Arm Bloodburst Phial is a major outlier. I am putting this at the top, because the sheer amount of damage this thing deals, which is nearly all persistent to boot, is such a tremendous damage spike on a class with otherwise mediocre damage output that it does not feel appropriate. I do very much like this feat, though, and feel it would be appropriate if its damage were no longer persistent or if its persistent damage were reduced.
* On the flipside, shoutout to Shifting Combination, as well as Shifting Hunt, for bringing a bit of Bloodborne's trick weapon flavor into the Slayer. I can't say the feat is necessarily very strong, as combination weapons aren't amazing, and the three combination weapons with an agile configurations either have a d4 damage die or are advanced, but it felt really flavorful.
* In general, while I do think all of these feats could have been just as appropriate on the Ranger, I like that effort was made here to emulate mechanics from hunters in other games and fiction, particularly Witcher's Geralt and Bloodborne's hunters with the emphasis on blood, tools, and concoctions. All of these will make it easier to implement a darker kind of hunter that we haven't really seen yet in Pathfinder.
* I honestly question the necessity of the relentless trait, because only a minority of the Slayer's actions lack this trait and, in my opinion and from what little experimentation I've done, they would be completely unproblematic if they had it. Simply letting the Slayer use On the Hunt's quickened action for any Slayer action, without the need for a specific trait, feels like it would be simpler and just as balanced.
* Along with the above, I'm a big fan of the Slayer's spellcasting feat line, and find that being able to use it with On the Hunt has made for some very fun turns where I got to cast two spells at once. I would have appreciated an 18th-level feat that gave the Slayer a 7th-rank spell (and an 8th-rank spell at level 20) while increasing their innate spellcasting proficiency to master, but otherwise I feel their ability to double-cast better even than spellcasters is counterbalanced by their much weaker spell proficiency and restricted spell output. This was a bit of unique gameplay I really enjoyed on the Slayer.
* Crossbow Slayer letting you use your weapon's range increment for the thrown trait of your spikes means you're still adding your Strength to the damage roll while effectively firing a spike with a crossbow, which to me didn't make much sense in-fiction.
* Not specifically a criticism, but the Slayer's feats offering all of these different tools that could be individually reinforced felt like such a better model for their tools than the signature tools in their main features, and I found it much more interesting to customize my Slayer in a more fine-grained manner like this. I genuinely feel this could have been the way to implement all of their tools, to be honest.
TL;DR The Slayer's feats were by far my favorite part of the class. I enjoyed their Witcher/Bloodborne flavor immensely, liked picking individual tools that I could reinforce, and found their relentless spellcasting to offer fun gameplay I hadn't experienced in quite the same way before. Arm Bloodburst Phial I think is way too strong as currently written, and the relentless trait itself feels somewhat redundant when most of the Slayer's actions are relentless, but I otherwise really enjoyed the utility offered by these feats.
The concluding TL;DR to all the above is that I find the Slayer to be generally messy, weak, and excessively limited in many ways. Although I enjoyed many of the class's feats, I found their core features to largely be inferior derivatives of mechanics I'd already seen on existing classes, and a waste of a monster parts system. Despite my distaste for the Slayer's thematic adjacency to the Ranger, I don't think the class is unsalvageable, though I do feel they need thorough rewrites to their core features in the same way as the playtest Guardian.
As I've been playtesting the Slayer, I compiled a wishlist of general changes I'd like to see in the class. Unlike previous class playtests where I properly implemented and trialled adjustments, the following is a more broad-lines set of recommendations, which you can read if interested:
Recommendations:
Here's a few recommendations on my part based on my playtesting experience with the Slayer:
* Bake Survey Wildlife into Mark Quarry, so that the Slayer can find out which monster they're facing ahead of time, and let the Slayer use Monster Lore for its Recall Knowledge check.
* Remove Mark Quarry's level limitation. Any non-trivial monster I think ought to be viable quarry.
* Add some means of marking a monster as quarry during a fight as a core feature. It doesn't have to be as efficient as the Ranger's Hunt Prey, it just has to offer a fallback option if the Slayer didn't have the time or opportunity to Mark Quarry.
* Specify that you can only mark an enemy as your quarry. The Slayer should not in my opinion be able to mark an ally as their quarry.
* Allow Reinforce Arsenal to be used anytime as a 10-minute exploration activity, even when not having claimed a trophy.
* Make On the Hunt a free action rather than a reaction.
* Ditch the relentless trait, and allow the Slayer to use On the Hunt's quickened action with any slayer action (including Interacting to reload for Crossbow Slayer, Casting a Spell for Slayer's Tricks, and so on).
* Allow Monster Lore to work on all creatures, not just non-humanoids.
* Honestly, please just ditch signature tools, and instead implement them as 1st-level feats that offer secondary tools to be reinforced, with the Slayer being able to choose one of these tools as a free feat at 1st level. Alternatively, make signature tools significantly stronger and less limited in function if they're going to stay.
* I honestly would be fine if monster trophies lost their details, and Reinforce Arsenal simply let the Slayer spend a trophy to reconfigure one of their tools in whichever way they liked from a list of available options. This I think would go a long way towards making the class more adaptable to upcoming threats, while also reducing bookkeeping, and I think a proper monster parts system would be better-served by something more fleshed-out and independent of the Slayer class.
* The Slayer I think could easily do with more baseline power. I'm not sure which specific form this ought to take, but off the top of my head, bonus class feats to pick up more tools, making On the Hunt's quickening an always-on effect, or giving the class an execution ability that'd let them reliably slay their quarry once the latter is below a certain amount of HP could all go a long way towards making the class feel both better to play and more distinct from the classes it currently emulates a bit too closely.
TL;DR In my opinion, there are a lot of limitations to the Slayer's mechanics that would be far better off being removed, and I'd like the class's core loop of Marking and Reinforcing to be made a lot more consistent. In addition to this, there's a lot of room to buff the class in my opinion, as well as streamline several of its core features. Ideally, whichever buffs the class receives ought to double down on the things that make it different from the Ranger or Thaumaturge, such as by giving the class more tool feats, making their quickening always-on, or giving them a quarry-specific execution ability to make them much better at actually slaying their targets.
A while back, I posted a class on here called the Scion: starting from the Magus and as a thought exercise on how to design the class differently, that class ended up being an anti-Magus in many respects, using the framework of a martial-caster hybrid to do the opposite of what the class is known for. This class began from the same starting point: I was thinking about the Magus, and how the class could be done differently, except this concept ended up becoming what I would call a "hyper-Magus," an idealized version of the class that takes what it's known for to the extreme. Because it makes heavy changes, sacrifices, and tradeoffs, I again preferred to present this as its own separate class, rather than as a Magus rework.
Without further ado: introducing the Spellblade. If the document doesn't format properly on your display, which is likely to happen if you're viewing it on mobile or a browser that's not Chrome, you can find the PDF for the brew here. Here's a few more details about the class, which includes some gameplay elements you'll likely recognize with some key differences:
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* For starters, let's talk about what this class doesn't have: unlike the Magus, they don't have freeform spellcasting, they don't have Arcane Cascade, they don't have focus spells, and they don't have studious spells. Their baseline features are, in this respect, much sparser, but more concentrated, though many of these benefits, as well as mechanics you'd find in the Magus's hybrid studies, can be found in the Spellblade's feats.
* What this class does have, however, is Battlecast, an ability analogous to the Magus's Spellstrike. In addition to letting you use your Strike's attack roll for your attack spells, you also get to use your attack roll for save spells, granting improved synergy with a huge range of offensive spells. The class features a sidebar for how to handle spells with powerful critical effects like slow and synesthesia and rein them in.
* Though the class lacks freeform spellcasting, they instead have spellcraft spells, spells made exclusively to be used with their Battlecast. For quite a few levels, you only have one spellcraft spell slot to use for your Battlecast, though as a Spellblade you have the unique ability to prepare your spellcraft spells in-between encounters, allowing you to use those spells without worrying about daily attrition. As you increase in level, you unlock additional spellcraft spells, though you can never prepare the same spellcraft spell more than once at a time.
* Rather than require a recharge, using Battlecast makes you overloaded: this is a condition unique to the Spellblade that prevents you from using Battlecasts, and that you can reduce with attacks based on your degree of success. The more powerful the spell you use, the higher your overload condition becomes, making cantrip Battlecasts much easier to recharge than slot spell Battlecasts.
* The Spellblade features dozens of feats, many of which give you magical combat techniques to use in-between Battlecasts. Several of these feats are hybrid actions, allowing you to use either a Strike or a Battlecast as part of the activity. If you Battlecast with those actions, you become even more overloaded, making for even more intense bursts of power that are more difficult to recover from.
* Finally, the Spellblade has one of four spellbound arts to choose from: these are your subclasses which define the tradition of spells you can Battlecast with, and grant a benefit that makes those spells easier to use: the Soul Sculpting spellbound art, for instance, gives you access to occult spells and lets you bypass immunity to the mental trait when you Battlecast.
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Though the Spellblade may appear similar to the Magus, in my playtesting experience they ended up playing very differently: as a Spellblade, you'll have plenty of different ways of combining Strike and spell thanks to your expanded synergy and feats, and many of your turns will have you deciding whether to use a cantrip for a faster recharge, a slot spell for a more intense effect, or a hybrid feat for additional utility or mobility, all for a sliding scale of burst versus recovery speed. Though you won't have daily spells to use freely nor the benefits of a hybrid study by default, the Spellblade has many things to do even when not Battlecasting, and has a smooth action economy that lets them always attempt something useful, with room to incorporate many more skills in combat in addition to Strikes. Depending on how you choose to build, you can choose to gain a bit of more conventional wave casting, additional ways to blend magic into your attacks, and even unlock new playstyles, such as the ability to infuse spells into alchemical bombs. Let me know what you think, and I hope you enjoy!
As I'm playtesting the Daredevil, many of the class's limitations have become quickly apparent, and a particularly arbitrary one in my opinion is prop size. Specifically, what counts as a prop is based on the size of your Daredevil character, which leads to the following silly scenario:
Situation: Matt the Daredevil Shoves a Medium gangster into another Medium gangster. Does Matt deal stunt damage to this gangster?
Case A: Matt is a gnome. He deals stunt damage.
Case B: Matt is a human. He doesn't deal stunt damage.
For whichever reason, this situation is entirely dependent on your size, and not that of the creature being moved into an obstacle (and as a completely unrelated pet peeve, "obstacle" in my opinion is a much better name for what's being discussed here than "prop"). In my opinion, this makes strictly no sense, and leads to situations where by all rights the Daredevil should be dealing stunt damage, but can't.
This to me feels like a development oversight, but regardless of the reasons behind the current wording, I think the fix here is simple: instead of creatures only counting as props if they're larger than you, the Daredevil, they ought to count as props if they're the same size or larger than the creature colliding with the prop. If you're using a creature or terrain feature to push yourself off with Propelling Strides, you're colliding with the prop, and if you're moving a creature into something, that creature is what's colliding with the prop. Not only would this I think make what is and isn't a prop far more intuitive based on the situation at hand, easing the size restrictions as well ought to make for more props to interact with overall.
I recently did a general count of things you can reinforce on the playtest Slayer's signature tools: turns out, it's not actually a huge number of things, and many of these benefits are elements that could realistically be found on gear. Although this isn't a super-serious suggestion, this is a basic proof of concept to show how this kind of mechanic could be implemented as a general mechanic. Here's the basic idea:
* Adornments are special items you can attach to your gear. Each adornment counts as a property rune for the purposes of your weapon or armor's property rune limit, and attaching an adornment to your weapon or armor takes the same amount of time as etching a rune.
* Each adornment carries a special property that you can adjust by Adorning your Items. The Adorn Items activity is a 10-minute exploration activity that is expended once used, and you recharge it when you participate in slaying a creature of your level or higher as you collect a trophy from your kill (this is done automatically). The trophies you collect are displayed on your adornments.
Now with this basic premise, here's a few examples of adornments that would mirror the functionality of several existing signature tool effects:
* Energy Gland: The still-functioning organs of a slain creature coat your weapon in acid, venom, or another substance. Choose a damage type other than bludgeoning, piercing, or slashing; your weapon deals an additional 1d6 damage of the chosen type. You can change your energy gland's damage type each time you Adorn your Items.
* Gore Anointment: Smeared remains from a creature tied to the Outer Planes serve as a makeshift sanctification for your weapon. Choose holy or unholy; your Strikes with the weapon gain the chosen trait. You can change your gore anointment's sanctification each time you Adorn your Items.
* Tempered Pelt: Scale, hide, or carapace from a creature affords your armor additional protection against certain energies. Choose a damage type other than bludgeoning, piercing, or slashing; you gain resistance 5 to the chosen damage type. You can change your tempered pelt's damage type each time you Adorn your Items.
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The premise here is that these benefits would be generally less than what you'd find in existing runes, but would offer the advantage of being much more easily reconfigurable as you adventure. This would basically allow anyone to adorn their gear with trophies in a way similar to the Slayer, using a method of customization that'd be a lot easier to apply and generally more straightforward.
In the previous playtest, the Necromancer class suffered from an issue where their thralls were generally bound to the ground, making it effectively impossible for them to affect airborne targets in midair. Reading through the Daredevil's playtest packet, I was initially reassured when I saw that their Daring Stunt let you use alternative movement types; this made it feel like the developers had learned from prior design mistakes.
That quickly changed when I read the feats, however: Scrambling Retreat only lets you Stride, Caroming Charge only lets you Stride, Rushing Stride... well, you get the picture. With the exception of Flying Hurdle Stunt, which just has you enter your opponent's space, every Daredevil feat that incorporates movement has you Stride or Leap, with no option to use alternative movement. This means that in underwater or midair battles, which already tend to not feature the kinds of environmental features the class relies on, the Daredevil will also be unable to use a great deal many of their feats entirely. This is but one out of several limitations on the class that cause them to straight-up not function at all in many circumstances.
With this said, I feel there's a relatively straightforward solution to this: rather than have the Daredevil Stride, their feats could simply have them Tumble Through instead. This would lessen their synergy with haste, but would enable alternative movement types really easily while also letting the class maneuver more readily through opponents in the thick of battle.
Independently of playtesting the Slayer, the class I think has a lot of fun elements that I think are worth either including or developing beyond just them:
Monster of the Week Adventure Support
Full disclosure: I'm a big Buffy fan, so when the name "slayer" comes up, she's what comes to mind first. "Monster of the Week" is a format used for both shows (like Buffy the Vampire Slayer!) and games (it's even the name of a tabletop system purpose-built for it), and I'd argue it's both quite popular and quite good for tables wanting to play monster hunters of any kind, such as a Witcher-themed campaign. With some helpful guidelines on how to set up and run these adventures, maybe a subsystem to help, this kind of adventure format would be even easier to run in Pathfinder. As an added bonus, it would suit the Slayer's mechanics perfectly!
A Fully-Fledged Monster Parts System
I love the core idea behind the Slayer's trophies. So much so, that I think it ought to be developed much further as its own system: there's been a lot of demand over the years for a monster parts system, and third-party developers like Battlezoo have famously made excellent such systems. There are, in my opinion, a great deal many ways in which characters could make use of that kind of system, whether it's your monster hunters reinforcing their gear, some kind of blue mage build using monster trophies to emulate the monsters' abilities, or even a Dungeon Meshi-style feat to make delicious meals out of various monsters for lasting bonuses.
More Hunter's Edges
To this day, the Ranger still only has the three hunter's edges they released with. This makes me a bit sad, as the class could stand to have many more subclasses that let them hunt their prey in different ways. In fact, an edge that quickened the Ranger for actions against their prey in a manner similar to On the Hunt I think could work very well for the class.
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All of which is to say: the Slayer I think brings a lot of cool ideas to the table that haven't been all that developed yet in Pathfinder. Although some of these ideas ought to stay exclusive to the class, many I think have applications beyond the Slayer, such that it'd be helpful to have broader support for adventures where the whole party's hunting a new monster every session or so and collecting trophies for various purposes.
I came across this fairly recently and this definitely comes across as an exploit: by this point, many of us are aware that Mark Quarry is difficult to use in many situations, because parties don't always know which monsters are up ahead and many of them don't meet the activity's requirements. You know what does meet the activity's requirements, though? Your allies.
Turns out, there is nothing in the Mark Quarry activity that prevents you from marking an ally as your quarry. Why do that? The answer is: On the Hunt. There are effectively two major situations this covers:
1. If you do end up fighting a PL+ enemy, that enemy is much more likely to crit your ally than the reverse by default, so you get quickened more often by On the Hunt.
2. If you end up fighting below-level enemies, none of them could have been your quarry in your first place, so you get more opportunities for On The Hunt.
Worth mentioning as well that none of On The Hunt's actions are quarry-specific: you can Step or Stride anywhere you want, and relentless actions like Bloodscent or Sudden Pounce let you go for any creature you want.
But what about trophies, you ask? Well, when you do come across a quarry-able enemy, just use Instant Enmity when you think they're likely to drop, and you'll have yourself a trophy for the day.
So yeah, this doesn't seem part of the intended design at all, and I thought I'd bring it up here because I found it quite funny. It's not broken in the sense that it's too strong, as the Slayer I don't think is a very strong class in its playtest packet, but it certainly breaks what Mark Quarry is supposed to represent.
Posting this outside the playtest forums, as this is ultimately not playtest feedback. As has been mentioned a lot lately, the Slayer has quickly gotten a reputation for being the Ranger 2.0, with a similar theme of hunting monsters and heavy focus on a single marked target. I won't linger too much on that, as I think the parallels are obvious and there's lots of discussion on the subject already, but what I find more interesting are the arguments made to defend the Slayer's theme: specifically, the common defense is that the Slayer doesn't have to follow the Ranger's nature theme, and this I think is where the latter class in particular fails thematically.
Thematically speaking, the Ranger class has been a mess throughout tabletop system editions, because they were originally made to emulate the character of Aragorn/Strider from the Lord of the Rings, only to morph into this mishmash of quasi-Druid, terrain master, archer, beast master, monster hunter, and melee dual-wielder all in one. PF2e's version of the Ranger is arguably the best around, having succeeded at compartmentalizing most of that baggage into feats and edges, yet the core class still carries that legacy of being a warden of nature, a fairly specific character fantasy that many people don't find particularly appealing. It is understandable then that some people would want to play a character who hunts monsters, assassinates marks, or captures bounties without being saddled with that kind of flavor.
The thing is, though, I think the Ranger's nature flavor is something that really doesn't need to be core to the class: strip away the baseline Nature proficiency and flavoring of their class features, and what you get is a hunter, a class defined both thematically and mechanically by being extremely good at tracking and taking down single targets. This broader flavor opens the class up much more to your assassins, your bounty hunters, and your monster-hunting slayers, all of whom are just variations of this same kind of hunter template, while still leaving room for your nature-survivalist rangers still. With a properly-realized, multifaceted monster part system that wasn't confined to a single class's gimmick, it would be a lot easier as well to make the Slayer's current shtick a hunter's edge, where you just have these armaments that you can use monster parts to customize in order to take down your prey more effectively. All of these different characters could have easily just been one class, and that class would likely have had an easier time receiving new content over the years.
Part of the problem in my opinion, and a key reason why the Ranger tends to do poorly in other editions, is that the Ranger's core fantasy of being really good at navigating and surviving in the wild is ultimately an out-of-combat fantasy: this by itself is great, as not every class has a clear set of defining characteristics during exploration, but it also inherently conflicts with class design that largely serves to define what characters do during combat. I think there's also a similar problem with the Investigator, whose entire class fantasy hinges on things that are done largely out of combat, and whose combat capabilities are both thematically and mechanically weak. Were there a better separation between in-combat and out-of-combat character fantasies, then your hunter who marks targets to take down in encounters could just as well be a nature survivalist, a grimdark monster hunter, or an investigator on the case during exploration.
Relaunching this discussion with Maya's blessing: there's been a lot of discussion lately around the Psychic after their changes were leaked for the Dark Archive remaster. Just to avoid having to sift through another thread, here are the changes that were reported:
General Changes
The following are changes that apply to the entire Psychic class.
1. Amping is now defined as a free action, while still being incompatible with spellshapes. This prevents amping from being used on subordinate actions such as the spell cast as part of the Magus's Spellstrike, as well as out-of-turn actions.
2. Unleash Psyche's status bonus to damage is now tweaked to follow the same wording as the Sorcerer's sorcerous potency feature, meaning it now applies to the first instance of damage dealt by a spell. This allows the bonus to apply to spells with a duration.
3. The wording on verbal and thought components was updated to the remaster: although the Psychic doesn't need to use incantations to cast their spells, this no longer necessarily allows them to cast spells through silence.
Specific Changes
The following are changes that apply to elements of the Psychic's subclasses and feats.
1. Tangible Dream's imaginary weapon's damage dice are now d6s instead of d8s, and its damage type is changed to force instead of bludgeoning or slashing.
2. Distant Grasp's vector screen has double its current area width.
3. Infinite Eye now has locate instead of organsight, a Secrets of Magic spell, in its list.
4. Oscillating Wave has a reworked spell list: although most spells were converted to their remaster versions, the spell list now features blazing bolt, ice storm, frozen fog, and volcanic eruption instead of heat metal (an APG spell), fire shield, flame vortex (a SoM spell), and fiery body respectively.
5. Tangible Dream now has invisibility and resplendent mansion instead of mirror image and prismatic sphere, both Core Rulebook spells with no remaster equivalents.
6. The Violent Unleash feat is now a single-action activity that no longer stuns, rather than a free-action activity that leaves you stunned 1. This means you'll still pay the action cost if you're slowed, and can't use a quickened action to negate the cost.
7. The Whispering Steps feat now has the enemy Stride instead of Step; this is still forced movement.
8. Twin Psyche is now an 18th-level feat instead of a 20th-level feat.
9. The Become Thought feat no longer gives weakness to spirit.
10. A new 12th-level feat, Amp Focus, lets you fully recover all of your Focus Points when you Refocus, even if you've spent Focus Points on something other than an amp.
11. A new 20th-level feat, Autonomic Psychic Action, makes you permanently quickened; you can use the extra action only to use a psyche action.
Multiclass Archetype Changes
The following are changes specific to the Psychic's multiclass archetype:
1. Psychic Dedication no longer gives an amp or Focus Point. Everything else is unchanged.
2. Psi Development provides the amp for the psi cantrip you get from Psi Dedication in addition to its own psi cantrip, and gives you a focus pool of 1 Focus Point if you don't have one already. This means that if you already have a focus pool, you don't gain a Focus Point.
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And that's about it for the changes as far as I'm aware. I personally have some strong opinions about this set of changes and their impact, but would rather first open the floor for others to express their own opinions. Please bear in mind that however others feel about these changes is valid: we can discuss the facts and what they mean for the Psychic in Pathfinder, but whether people hate this remaster, love it, or experience anything in-between is entirely their prerogative. The previous thread devolved into heated arguments in no small part because a couple of people were trying to tell others how they should feel about these changes, dismissing others' concerns, and engaging in manipulative tactics to induce confusion and frustration, so let's please have none of that here this time.
Recently, a thread opened in the PF2e General Discussion subforum to discuss the remastered Psychic. As can happen on these threads, arguments started appearing, and eventually the thread got locked. Although this is nothing special, the reason I'm posting on the feedback subforum is because, in my opinion, it demonstrates a set of egregious behaviors that I keep seeing from certain usual suspects on the forums, behavior that I think is being unwittingly given disproportionate power by moderation.
Without naming names or pointing to specifics (you can find those in the thread, if you can stomach reading through it), there were a couple of people on that thread who were engaging in behavior that went beyond the usual stubbornness in an internet argument and into genuinely manipulative and destructive tactics. This included a consistent pattern of confronting people and then repeatedly shifting the goalposts throughout conversation to generate confusion and present a false narrative, making insincere requests for evidence, math, and other time-consuming justifications that were immediately ignored in favor of repeating claims that had just been disproven, and continually attempting to dictate to others how they should feel while dismissing their concerns.
However you want to call this behavior, it had a clear, destructive effect on conversation: because those individuals were continually attempting to center conversation around the same arguments, and kept ignoring or dismissing contrary evidence, conversation stagnated. Because those individuals were deploying tactics made to frustrate and dismiss, people got justifiably irritated, and in fact a whole bunch of individuals by the end were openly calling those people out for what they were doing. In response to a thread that had gotten heated as a result of transparently disingenuous behavior, moderation's response was to lock the thread, killing conversation entirely, and that was about it. This, in my opinion, was not a great way of handling the situation, and in fact I believe it risks reinforcing poor behavior, as has happened in the past.
To explain: when one party's position is "let's discuss this," and the other party's position is "no, we're not having a discussion, and I will do everything in my power to shut it down," then shutting down discussion punishes the party that wants to have a discussion, and rewards the party that acted to end it. It gives disproportionate power to people looking to stifle discussions they don't want to have, because if locking the discussion is the only outcome, then those people effectively have the power to end whichever conversations they like with impunity. From what I've seen, this is behavior that certain individuals on these forums have weaponized to get threads locked in similar fashion in the past, using similar tactics. What makes this behavior especially insidious is that in isolation, it can easily appear innocuous, and is particularly difficult to report, let alone identify, without connecting the dots across a person's posts in a thread and critically analyzing what they're doing throughout. This in my opinion is by design, and helps fly under the radar while engaging in behavior made to frustrate others and elicit the kind of heated behavior that gets those threads shut down.
With this in mind, I don't think the solution to arguments should just be locking threads when one or more bad faith actors are acting in a way that is actively derailing discussion. Although we could all engage with cooler heads, this really isn't a "both sides" issue to me when one side is expressly trying to frustrate the other. Although this kind of behavior can be difficult to untangle, it is still possible to identify, as happened on that thread, and I think taking steps to see where it's coming from and addressing it would help curate discussions, rather than kill them off. I certainly don't look forward to having future discussions on here and seeing the same people get rewarded when they try to shut it down, and seeing this happen is discouraging me from opening more threads.
To summarize the premise: the Dark Archive changes to the Psychic got leaked, imaginary weapon got nerfed to a d6 of damage, and I'm really not happy about it. The cantrip may be popular on the Magus, but it anti-synergizes with the Psychic's extreme squishiness and is resultingly very difficult to properly use on the class it's made for. I would have been much more comfortable with the damage nerf if it had come with improvements to the cantrip's safety, such as by making it ranged or giving the Psychic better protections, and so with this in mind I'd like to offer a different take on the cantrip to suit the Tangible Dream's theme of "impossible creations".
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Imaginary Weapon (Single Action, Cantrip 1) Traits: uncommon, cantrip, concentrate, force, psychic Duration: until the end of your next turn
You imagine a weapon, and it materializes in the air near you, ready to launch itself at a foe. For the duration, you can launch the weapon at a target as a single action, which has the attack and concentrate traits. After you launch the weapon, the spell ends.
When you attack with imaginary weapon, make a ranged spell attack against a target within 30 feet, dealing 2d6 force damage on a success and double damage on a critical success. You can coalesce the weapon into a more specific shape, allowing you to deal bludgeoning, piercing, or slashing damage instead of force as appropriate for the weapon and trigger vulnerabilities to specific weapon types, such as an arboreal's axe vulnerability.
While your psyche is unleashed, the first attack you make with imaginary weapon gains its status bonus to damage, even though the spell has a duration.
Heightened (+1): Increase the damage by 1d6.
Amp: You muster an unending barrage of dreamt-up weapons. You can attack with imaginary weapon immediately as part of Casting the Spell, and you can keep making attacks without ending the spell as countless new weapons materialize around you. You can coalesce the weapons into impossible shapes and energies, allowing you to deal any damage type instead of force with each attack.
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The basic idea behind this take is to make the psi cantrip safer and thus much more easily usable to the Psychic, but also lean into the Tangible Dream's theme of creation to let the class trigger weaknesses and vulnerabilities really easily. Rather than make one big attack, the cantrip would work a bit closer to biting words, letting you make multiple attacks within the duration. It wouldn't be as great for burst damage, but it could lend itself much better to heavier damage output over a couple of rounds, while giving a bit of flexibility by letting you stagger the action cost of the cast and the attack across those rounds.
Although I'm posting in the homebrew subforum, full disclosure: I don't have anything concrete to propose here. Rather, I'd like to open a discussion on how spells and abilities can be categorized a bit differently from what we have in 2e, the benefits and drawbacks of those means, and what that could look like.
To explain a bit where I'm coming from: PF2e splits its magic into four spell traditions, which cover a range of different types of magic that fall under a certain vibe. Outside of spells, character abilities are expressed through feats, especially class feats. Although this system works very well, I think it comes with a few drawbacks:
* Traditions are really abstract and, in my opinion, fairly arbitrary, which makes it difficult to apply them cleanly to every potential character concept. In the past, I've critiqued spell traditions and the way they're framed too closely around certain classes.
* Spell traditions make it difficult to create casters that are based around certain specific themes. We've seen a bit of this with the Necromancer class in the Impossible Playtest, where the class combines life-and-death magic with occult curses and mentalism in a way that really isn't served well by current traditions. Before then, there's also the problem of thematically-focused divine classes like the Cleric or Oracle, whose access to those themes is generally only through the superficial addition of a few spells rather than access to a wider range. The only difference between a Cleric of a fire god like Sarenrae or a water god like Lysianassa, for instance, is three spells among hundreds more in your spell list.
* Class feat lists tend to be painfully static. This is partially an issue with how Paizo prioritizes new releases over expanding some forms of existing content, but once a class releases, it can often take months or even years before they receive so much as a drip-feed of new feats. This also affects ancestries and heritages, whose feat lists also tend to be a one-and-done deal.
All of which is to say: although magical traditions help give casters new content whenever an expansion releases new spells, they're also quite rigid in that they cover certain class concepts far better than others, and don't easily allow for finer-grained approaches where a character has access to spells from a specific range of themes. Feats, meanwhile, seem to have a much harder time circulating across classes, ancestries, and heritages, which makes it easy to feel like entire reams of content get left behind as soon as they're released.
I've been thinking a lot about character themes and how to implement them differently, and one alternative system that kept coming to mind was the idea of spheres of power: the term comes from a massive PF1e hack that overhauls both might and magic to come from a specific range of themes, or spheres as they're called. This was a popular piece of third-party content during its time, and although it didn't get incorporated into 2e necessarily, I think it's influenced a lot of systems, including a lot of recent ones: Daggerheart, for instance, uses domains as the basis for its classes' abilities, and Trespasser has a system of crafts that do the same thing. To summarize how this kind of system works:
* Games with these systems feature pools of shared abilities based around a specific theme, such as healing, leadership, or open-hand combat. Each of these themes is much more specific than a spell tradition, but more abstract than a trait in Pathfinder, with abilities often working towards a similar purpose without necessarily sharing exactly the same rules.
* These themes tend to combine both magic and martial capabilities, along with other skills. Brute force and study are spheres of power in the same respect as curses, for instance.
* All characters draw from these thematic shared pools. A druid-type character might draw from themes of shapeshifting and the elements, for instance, whereas a rogue-type character might draw from themes of subterfuge and guile. Characters might still have unique abilities, including class-specific abilities, but a large number of their abilities come from these shared themes.
In short: these types of system combine both spells and feats into mini-traditions focused around specific themes, which all characters then draw from. In my opinion, this carries a lot of benefits: casters can be tailored to a much more specific range of magic, and could thus stand out much more easily from one another, whereas classes that currently use only feats would continue to receive new options as more content gets added to those shared ability pools. These themes combine easily with each other to create new class and character concepts, including martial-caster hybrids that many players love, and set a foundation where no class has to be created entirely from scratch, nor needs as much dedicated support to keep growing after their release.
This is also where I'm interested to hear more about what others think: in particular, I'm interested in hearing more from people who have played games with these thematic ability systems, and finding out more what the advantages and tradeoffs are. I'd be interested as well in knowing what kinds of themes people think could be used to categorize magic, skills, and abilities in PF2e, and how that could be applied to classes and even other aspects of the game, such as ancestries or archetypes. I'd also be keen to know if others have thought about this kind of concept with regards to 2e as well, and how the game's unique design could be leveraged in service to this kind of system, such as by using traits to create connections across thematic abilities or using the game's feat and archetype systems to allow even more mixing and matching of themes. I imagine the system also carries a lot of limitations that would make freeform thematic combinations more difficult to implement, in particular the niche protection implemented between martial and caster capabilities, and I'd be interested in hearing more about those too.
I've ended up writing homebrew reworks for a few Starfinder classes such as the Solarian, Technomancer, and Witchwarper, and this time I've been focusing on the Envoy and their own issues as a class. In summary, here I think are the Envoy's main problems in SF2e:
* The class can easily feel stuck in a rotation: Directives are at the core of the Envoy's identity, yet despite being such a central part of the class, Get'Em! tends to be far more generally applicable than alternatives, only few of which are obtainable via feats. Additionally, because Leading By Example with a directive now entails spending an additional action just to use the directive's prescribed action, instead of synergizing with composite actions, Leading by Example can feel extremely prescriptive, leading to particularly repetitive turns already marked by continuous action taxes.
* The class's design philosophy doesn't fully mesh with 2e: There are some aspects to this that are more obvious, like Dance Partner! talking about threatening enemies when this isn't a thing in 2e, but also more subtle elements, like Savvy Improviser granting multiple per-day uses of an ability instead of lowering its frequency restriction, or Inscrutable forcing failures on fairly situational social checks. The end result is a class that has a lot of feature bloat, but not necessarily as much functionality as all that text would suggest. In fact, it's not always internally consistent with the rest of SF2e, and an unfortunate side effect of directives being only auditory or visual is that deafblind vlakas get completely excluded from the Envoy's key mechanics.
* The class isn't all that unique: Since the playtest, the Envoy's directives ended up getting remodeled somewhat. They didn't get their action taxes reduced, which was one of the main issues highlighted in the playtest, but instead they got many more directives that had allies take actions as reactions, making them extremely similar to the Commander class's tactics in Pathfinder. Trouble is, the Commander has tons of tactics to choose from, whereas the Envoy gets three by default through their core features. Although they do have some unique aspects going for them, like adaptive talent, this is buried under the aforementioned feature bloat that, in my opinion at least, doesn't help make the class stand out as much as it could.
In short: the Envoy did not get very many of its problems addressed since the playtest in my opinion, and in fact I think got made somewhat worse on-release, with an even more rigid action economy in particular. This appears to be an opinion expressed by others as well, such that the Envoy doesn't really seem to come across as a particularly standout class. I feel this is a shame, as the Envoy otherwise strikes me as a class with the potential to really shine as a flexible martial support.
With this in mind, I've been experimenting with a brew in which I've changed some of the class's mechanics. Key changes include:
* Directives as stances: Rather than tax the Envoy's actions each turn, directives in this brew stay on once activated and grant persistent benefits. The main incentive to switch directives is action compression, since when you enter a directive in this way, you also Lead by Example as part of the same action. Outside of that, you can Lead By Example by using the listed action, which can be part of other composite actions.
* Comprehensive skill retraining: Rather than give the Envoy lots of skill increases and feats, the brew takes their adaptive talent and ramps it up to 11, letting the Envoy instantly retrain a bunch of skill increases and feats on the spot. Additionally, the Envoy can do this regularly in the day, making them extremely flexible with their skills.
* Hype auras and motivated allies: Included in the above brew are a few mechanics to both flesh out the Envoy's capabilities out of combat and standardize their abilities: the class exudes an aura of pure hype that lets them influence anyone who can perceive them (including through smell, so hooray for vlakas!), which also determines the range of their abilities and can be expanded further. Additionally, the class can spend time hyping up their own allies during exploration, even Livestreaming their adventure in the process, to Aid them with Charisma skills while also recharging a whole bunch of different abilities with limited uses in combat or per-target immunities.
Effectively, the focus here is mainly on giving the Envoy much more flexibility with their actions and skills, letting them adapt easily on the fly and mix and match their skills and other abilities without too many prescriptive action taxes. Despite not having a huge amount of extra skills at once, the class would still shine as a skill monkey by being able to come up with the right skills and feats on the spot in limited amounts. Additionally, the reworked class in my limited playtests got to integrate much better with 2e's gameplay out of combat as well as in combat, and got to feel like they were constantly the life of the party by using their Charisma in exploration as well as encounters, while never running out of things to do in the day.
This idea is based on this thread on precision damage immunity, as well as this ongoing discussion regarding instances of damage and how ill-defined those are in 2e, along with prior discussions regarding the same topic. To summarize, here are some of my criticisms with damage as it is currently implemented in 2e:
Criticism of damage:
* Damage being split up into separate types means damage can often double- or even triple-dip into resistances and weaknesses: on one end, hitting multiple resistances at the same time can mean some mixed damage gets negated entirely, and on the other, hitting multiple weaknesses can make certain bits of damage hit disproportionately above their weight, making certain effects deceptively swingy.
* Resistances and weaknesses being a flat amount I think runs into problems where certain attacks can all too easily get negated by resistance, which I've seen happen with Starfinder's guns and their low damage. In other cases, it means even tiny amounts of damage become disproportionately stronger if they hit one or more weaknesses, adding to the swinginess of damage.
* Immunities, when not used sparingly enough, can easily shut down certain characters and make them feel like they have no options in certain encounters. This can range from magic-immune creatures such as golems and will-o'-wisps, to oozes with immunities to precision and mental effects, plus certain damage types, that can hard-counter classes like the Swashbuckler.
* Because damage can easily be split up, it's difficult to define what an instance of damage is, and that can have a real impact when determining the riders that occur when dealing damage, such as adding damage of a certain type via one ability to a thing that deals damage of that type. Additionally, split damage can make damage rolls more time-consuming than they need to be when not relying on automation and having to tally reduction from resistances.
* In addition to the above, I feel classes that are expected to trigger weaknesses more easily, like the Alchemist, are often given weaker damage as a result, as the expectation is that they'll be dealing a ton of damage by triggering weaknesses from mixed and/or persistent damage. When a monster doesn't have those weaknesses, however, those classes can easily feel deficient.
* On a more minor note, I feel damage types, rather than traits, are legacy design, as resistances, weaknesses, and immunities already factor in traits and damage types tend to be redundant when there's already a trait for it.
TL;DR: Damage as defined right now I think is often more complicated and swingy than it needs to be, suffers from a degree of legacy design, and is loosely-defined in ways that can give both the GM and player a headache.
IMO these issues are largely baked into 2e's fundamental design and are thus unlikely to ever change, nor would it be easy to overhaul this system. However, I still think it's worth considering a model that tries to avoid these same pitfalls. Here is my take on a model that could help streamline damage and make it smoother to run overall:
The changes:
1. Remove damage types. Damage instead has traits, such as bludgeoning, fire, or magical, and this damage is generally listed in the same way: damage with the fire trait, for instance, could just be listed as fire damage. Damage can have more than one trait, and so a Wizard dealing asteroid damage with falling stars to an enemy in the center of its burst would be dealing arcane bludgeoning fire damage.
2. All current instances of mixed damage are combined into a single instance of damage, which has all of the traits corresponding to the mixed damage's types. Any rider that adds damage on top, such as from a spellshape, blood magic effect, or other mechanic, adds damage to that same instance of damage. When you would combine damage for the purposes of resistances, weaknesses, bonuses, penalties, or the like, that damage is one single instance of damage. This could in fact all be defined under a trait, e.g. "salvo," that simply combines all different sources of damage into one instance.
3. Resistances, weaknesses, and immunities are no longer flat amounts, but instead status bonuses or penalties to defenses against the listed traits, ranging from +1 for minimal resistance to +4 for maximal resistance and immunity (and -1 to -4 status penalties for weaknesses). As normal with bonuses and penalties, you apply the largest applicable bonus and the largest applicable penalty each time when multiple traits apply.
4. In the case of immunities designed to block certain mechanical effects beyond damage and spell types, such as immunity to critical hits or death, define those immunities as monster abilities instead. For instances, oozes could have an amorphous monster ability that has them reduce critical hits to regular hits, and the undead trait could include rules to state that they're not slain instantly by death effects unless the effect also brings them to 0 HP.
5. Adjust monsters and class abilities accordingly: for instance, Champion reactions that grant resistances could instead grant a retroactive +4 bonus to the target's defenses, potentially changing the damaging effect's degree of success to something less severe.
TL;DR: Condense mixed and composite damage into a single instance that inherits traits corresponding to its components, change resistances, weaknesses, and immunities to status bonuses and penalties to defenses against listed traits, and adjust monsters and abilities accordingly.
There's more to be built upon this, like condensing the damage component of damage property runes into additional fundamental runes and having the property runes simply add a particular trait with an additional effect, but the core idea behind the above is to condense damage into just one instance each time and simplify rolling damage greatly, with resistances, weaknesses, and immunities adjusting attack rolls and saves rather than damage rolls. This should ideally streamline dealing damage, but should also soften certain counters, such that a caster going up against an enemy with a +1 status bonus against all magic doesn't have to also get their mixed damage reduced to 0 by high resistances, or a ranged martial doesn't get their single damage die reduced to 0 by an enemy with even a moderate resistance at low level.
This is of course a fairly drastic change from what we currently have, and I'm keen to know more about outliers and effects that would need special attention: what would need to be done to prevent the above from breaking certain things? Are there unintended consequences to the above you can think of? Would there be ambiguity that would need clarification or further rules?
As for the reason why: Resiliency feats on multiclass archetypes are generally considered not very good, and in my opinion for good reason. At 20th level, you need 7 feats in the same multiclass archetype, including their resiliency feat, just to start breaking even with Toughness, a 1st-level general feat. Even if you were to commit 10 class feats towards that same archetype, I would argue that the 10 extra HP you'd get over Toughness would still not beat the latter's DC reduction to recovery checks. In other words: these 4th-level class feats require enormous amounts of commitment just to ultimately turn out worse than a 1st-level general feat on its own.
Thus, in my opinion, a simple change to make these feats a little better would be to just make them give twice your level as additional HP, which if you were 2 HP/level behind the class you were multiclassing into would bring you to their HP. In exchange for removing the requirement to commit large amounts of archetype feats, resiliency feats should instead not stack with each other. I ultimately don't believe this would make resiliency feats great, necessarily, but it would certainly make them not quite as weak as I believe they are now.
There's been a few Magus threads going around right now, and those have all fed into a core idea I'm interested in developing, so might as well start by explaining the thought process:
The Thought Process:
* There's player demand for the Magus to Spellstrike well with save spells and not just attack spells, especially as very few new attack spells see release.
* At the same time, the idea of the Magus being extremely good at both burst damage and crowd control, potentially even more reliable than casters against single targets, conflicts with the power they already have as spellcasters. Although their spellcasting isn't great and the class isn't excessively strong, this is the kind of change that could bring them well over the line.
* I feel the class has a bit of feature bloat: Arcane Cascade is good for triggering weaknesses, but otherwise really doesn't pair well with Spellstrike making a Magus often Strike just once per round, nor the class's general action economy issues. Conflux spells tend to feel underwhelming, and if it weren't for their ability to recharge Spellstrike I don't think the Magus would even need focus spells, given the existence of Spellstrike as a powerful and repeatable action.
* The class's spellcasting, while powerful and technically necessary for Spellstrike, I think meshes poorly due to the action's limitations and the pressure to boost Intelligence, making the class excessively MAD in most cases.
* I also think the Magus's hybrid studies limit the class's build freedom more than they help them due to how prescriptive they are with equipment: you can't really play a dual-weapon Magus very well, for instance, because none of the current hybrid studies cater to that particular playstyle.
TL;DR: The Magus has a lot of stuff at level 1 besides Spellstrike, but in my opinion a lot of that stuff feels so-so to use or just gets in the way. Meanwhile, the class's unique ability to seamlessly combine spell and Strike feels increasingly limited at a time when the game continues to receive new spells, few to none of which are attack spells. Although the class can have some amazing moments, they can also easily feel clunky, repetitive, and not as satisfying as they could be.
Based on this, and some suggestions made by different posters in other threads, the key idea here is: what if the Magus leaned even more into Spellstrike? What if the class dropped some of its other elements, or at least moved them to feats, in order to become far more versatile and effective at the thing people play the class for? This is the key idea behind a general set of changes that I'm keen to refine and workshop based on others' input:
The Broad Changes:
* Remove the class's spellcasting, including studious spells. You could still select feats to regain the Magus's bounded spellcasting in full.
* Remove the class's hybrid studies. You could instead select feats at 1st level and higher levels to gain similar benefits, like the ability to put staves to much better use in martial combat.
* Remove Arcane Cascade from the class's features, and instead make it a 1st-level feat. Ideally, rework Arcane Cascade so that it's much easier to use, either by removing the requirement or making it a free action triggered when Casting a Spell or Spellstriking.
* At 1st level, you choose two cantrips and one 1st-rank spell from the arcane list that are compatible with Spellstrike. Spellstrike is the only way in which you can cast these spells, and these are the only spells you can Spellstrike with. However, you don't use spell slots for these spells—instead, when you Spellstrike with a slot spell, the spell is expended and you recharge all such expended spells out of combat in one go. These spells are all heightened to half your level rounded up, and at higher levels you can choose additional, different spells of an appropriate rank.
* Rework Spellstrike so that you always compare your attack roll to the target's defense for the spell if you hit, even with a save spell. You'd then use opposite degrees of success for a save spell, so a success against the target's DC would equal a failure on their save and so on.
* If you Spellstrike with a cantrip, you don't have to recharge Spellstrike.
* Improve the Magus's base proficiencies a little bit, such as by giving them proficiency in heavy armor and an extra trained skill.
* Alter and expand the Magus's feats to build on all this: as mentioned above, you could have feats to give back what's taken out of the core features, like spellcasting, hybrid study benefits, or Arcane Cascade, as well as feats that let you play with your Spellstrike spells more, expand your selection, modify Spellstrike in interesting ways, compress Spellstrike's recharge into skill actions, and so on. You could even get let the Magus pick spells from across different traditions to incorporate into Spellstrike.
TL;DR: The key idea here is to drop most of the Magus's existing features, shift those to feats when possible, and instead allow Spellstrike to apply its accuracy compression to both attack and save spells, while letting the Magus Spellstrike with a smaller number of slot spells across encounters without long-term attrition. This would make the Magus one of the best single-target duelists, if not the best, giving them an unparalleled ability to apply both burst damage and crowd control to single enemies via a diverse range of arcane spells. Although this would allow them to potentially devastate enemies with crowd control from spells like slow in addition to burst damage, making each of those slot spells one-use per encounter ought to prevent them from getting spammed, and should push the Magus to Spellstrike with a more varied range of spells each time.
This is an idea I'd like to flesh out as a full homebrew concept, but first I'd like to smoke test this idea and see what others think about it: does the core idea appeal? Are there features talked about being cut here that are seen as essential to the core Magus? Is Spellstrike enough to potentially carry the entire Magus as a class?
Inspired largely by this other thread, the Magus tends to opt for the Psychic archetype and imaginary weapon in large part because having a powerful, resourceless attack spell is very desirable to the class, yet such a spell doesn't really exist in the Magus's own kit. Additionally, the class is known for its rigid action economy, especially when it comes to activating Arcane Cascade. The following proposes two different conflux spells to help with this:
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Cascading Energy (One Action, Focus 1) Traits: uncommon, focus, magus
Drawing on your study of material essence, you generate energy that you immediately cycle into your stance. You enter Arcane Cascade stance if you weren't already in the stance. Choose acid, cold, electricity, fire, or sonic when you use cascading energy; you can change Arcane Cascade's damage to the chosen damage type.
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Resonant Bolt (One Action, Focus 1) Traits: attack, concentrate, focus, force, magus Range 30 feet; Targets 1 creature; Defense AC
You release a bolt of force that can resonate with your weapon. Make a spell attack against the target's AC, dealing 1d6 force damage on a hit. If you use resonant bolt as part of a melee Spellstrike, increase the spell's damage dice to d12s; if you're also in Arcane Cascade stance, you can change resonant bolt's damage to the same type as Arcane Cascade's.
Critical Success The target takes double damage.
Success The target takes full damage.
Failure The target takes half damage.
Heightened (+1) Increase the damage by 1d6.
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The basic idea with these two is to provide a degree of convenience for the Magus: cascading energy would let you recharge your Spellstrike and enter Arcane Cascade in one action, while also letting you control the stance's bonus damage if you want to trigger a specific weakness or avoid a resistance or immunity. Meanwhile, resonant bolt would act as reliable damage option that would pair well with Spellstrike, and also let you apply various damage types based on Arcane Cascade. You wouldn't necessarily be reaching the same peaks of damage as with imaginary weapon, but you'd still deal damage on a miss, making for an especially reliable damage option on a class that can end up doing nothing with one bad roll.
Beyond this, I still have a few unknowns that I'm keen to hear more people's thoughts on: should these conflux spells be 1st- or 2nd-level Magus feats, or would resonant bolt be okay as a baseline option on the core class, even with it raising their focus pool to 2 Focus Points? Does resonant bolt's limitation to melee Spellstrike synergy make sense given the dominance of Starlit Span, or should it just work with all Spellstrikes?
Based on this thread, I observed that among all arcane casters, the ones that tended to draw criticism were prepared arcane casters specifically: arcane Sorcerers and Summoners were fine, but Maguses, Inscribed One Witches, and Wizards are generally thought of as problematic in some form or another. Specifically:
* Maguses draw criticism mainly due to their action economy, as well as their overall rigidity as spellcasters, to a degree where they're sometimes not even thought of as spellcasters so much as martials who can hit really hard and maybe sometimes deploy a bit of utility.
* Witches in general tend to not be seen as terribly strong unless you're using a Faith's Flamekeeper or Resentment patron, and the Inscribed One Witch is infamous for having a particularly weak familiar ability.
* Wizards have been criticized for a while, especially following the remaster. Though different players have different expectations out of the class, the consensus seems to be that the Wizard doesn't really shine at anything in particular, especially not at a time when there are many more four-slot casters around with strong class features.
As it so happens, these also all happen to be Pathfinder's current spellbook casters, i.e. casters who prepare from the limited selection of a spellbook (or familiar, in the Witch's case) instead of their entire spell list as would an Animist, Cleric, or Druid. This got me thinking: what if spellbooks were turned from a limitation to an asset? In particular, when the topic of prepared casters comes up, that often comes with the suggestion of giving those prepared casters spell substitution by default. Thus, the suggestion would be:
* Allow all prepared spellcasters to prepare from their entire list.
* If a spellcaster has a spellbook or similar mechanic, they could quickly reprepare spells into spells from their spellbook as a 10-minute exploration activity, much like the Wizard's Spell Substitution arcane thesis, or even do this repreparation while Refocusing.
I think originally, the limitation of spellbooks was imposed because the arcane and occult lists were thought to be too versatile to be given full preparation access, but over time every spell list has received so many diverse additions and improvements that even divine and primal casters can do many things outside their usual purview, and so I don't think the limitation holds as much currency anymore. Although the above change wouldn't necessarily fix all of these classes' problems or automatically bring them up to par with strong alternatives, it could add to their versatility and make spellbooks a means of quickly swapping out to a select few, favorite spells, giving those classes more flexibility within the adventuring day as well.
Additionally, I think the above kind of change could work with those casters in a variety of unique ways:
* Maguses adding studious spells to their spellbook would allow them to quickly swap out even higher-rank slots to those utility spells when needed, as well as adjust their studious slots in-between encounters as needed. As a side benefit, it could also let them prepare niche utility spells that they could swap out to more tried-and-true spells during the day or vice versa.
* Witches would naturally become very good at swapping out to spells learned from lessons without needing to take a Rites feat.
* Wizards adding curriculum spells to their spellbook would make them naturally very good at switching to spells of their school during the adventuring day. In fact, with this kind of change, you could probably even remove the limitation on their fourth spell slot per rank and allow the class to prepare spells into it freely, as they'd naturally lean towards their curriculum anyway.
This would likely need a bit of readjusting of other mechanics and some playtesting to make sure these classes don't suddenly go nuts in terms of sheer versatility, but if this works, it could potentially make these classes feel especially flexible, rather than exceptionally rigid. Because you wouldn't need a spellbook mechanic if you're preparing from the arcane or occult list, the upcoming Necromancer could thus easily be a prepared occult caster without the need for their dirge. Stuff to watch out for off the top of my head:
* Not a direct problem with this proposal, but the Magus would likely still draw criticism for other bits of the class, like their action economy or Arcane Cascade, so this proposal wouldn't fix that.
* Similarly not a direct problem with this idea, but the Inscribed One Witch would likely still feel quite weak. If I had to suggest an improvement, it would be to let Discern Secrets grant a free-action RK/Seek/Sense Motive the first time you Sustain it each round, and extend the Familiar of Flowing Script's flanking ability to 15 feet around the familiar.
* Learning a Spell should likely no longer add the spell to your spellbook, and spells should likely no longer be transferable from one spellbook to another. Grimoires and other spell books could probably still be useful if they let you use an alternative to your existing spellbook or familiar.
* Because spellbooks would be a buff rather than a limitation, multiclass archetypes may not need to offer spellbooks or spellbook-like abilities anymore, and if they do it probably ought to be in the form of a separate feat, e.g. a 4th-level Wizard archetype feat that gives you a book where you can start learning a limited number of curriculum spells.
* The Witch's Rites of Transfiguration and Rites of Convocation feats would need to be reworked, as you'd get the same benefits just from having your familiar learn those feats. You could probably just safely remove them and let existing Witches retrain to other feats instead, or otherwise rework the feats to let Witches reprepare to their Rites feat's spell as free action when rolling initiative.
* Giving the Wizard an unrestricted fourth slot would make the Flexible Spellcaster class archetype a significant nerf if applied to the class, as the latter assumes that prepared casters are always 3-slot casters. The archetype is legacy and in need of an update, though, so you could just lower the class's spell slots by 1 per rank and increase their collection's size by 50%.
* If the Wizard were to have an unrestricted fourth slot, the School of Unified Magical Theory should likely no longer give additional uses of Drain Bonded Item. Personally, I'd also scrap the 1st-level Wizard feat and let the Wizard add spells of their choice to their curriculum instead.
And that's about what I've got on the subject. Has anyone else considered this kind of change to spellbook casters at their table?
This is a collection of thoughts I've had over the course of many a session that have finally ended up coming together in some coherent way. I'd like to start by making it clear that although I'll be critiquing some aspects of Pathfinder's leveling here, I think leveling in Pathfinder is fine. This isn't a call to action for change so much as a reflection on what I think works and what works less well, and why.
Character levels are just about one of the most standard elements one can find in any RPG, and for good reason: it's a simple and immediately understandable way of marking character progression, plus it appeals to our monkey brains by making numbers go up. Like any RPG, Pathfinder uses levels, and it is by leveling up that our characters unlock new abilities, and rise from above-average adventurers to interplanar-grade heroes.
And that, I think, is where some of the limitations start to appear.
For starters, it's worth noting here that unlocking new abilities and becoming more powerful are two different forms of progression: although obtaining more tools that are better in different situations represents an increase in power, that is meaningfully different from, say, dealing more damage using the same ability. In Pathfinder, like in most RPGs, the two are part of the same progression: we gain more abilities, and our abilities become stronger. As you level up, you can't have one without the other.
The reason this is meaningful is because not every player has the same expectation for character progression on both fronts: some players might be fine with the official rate of progression, but some players much prefer to be able to unlock something new at faster intervals, and some I know prefer to run one-shots just so that they can try out entirely different sets of abilities fairly quickly. It's difficult to cater to the latter kind of player with faster leveling, because doing so would obviously raise their stats quicker in a way that would affect the math of encounters.
While one could adjust for this by simply using higher-level monsters to encounters, I think this hits a second issue, which is that doing so ends up changing the tone of the adventure: at level 1, a player character is a cut above average, and wild animals are dangerous threats to them. At level 20, the party can expect to fight primordial titans, deific avatars, and the Grim Reaper itself. Leveling up the party also means leveling up the threats and the stakes, which isn't appropriate for every story.
Because character levels are a marker of both power tier and character complexity, this makes Pathfinder less-suited to tell certain kinds of stories: you can't really tell a story that starts with immensely powerful characters only just getting to grips with their abilities, for example, because even a level 10 character is going to have a lot of complexity to contend with, whether it's feats, spells, or both. On the flipside, it's difficult to tell a story where the party remains just a cut above the average mortal, because disabling leveling to keep the party at that power tier also means turning off their capacity for character development via new abilities. What could in theory be a number of different levers for character complexity and power tier are just one lever, which fits some stories but not others.
And to be clear: this is fine. Although these are limitations of the system, that does not mean the system is broken or needs to change. However, I do think this has led to some problems in Pathfinder's development, specifically mythic play: mythic rules and archetypes are effectively there to bring the adventure up a power tier, but that's something already defined by leveling. Characters already gain a steadily larger influence on the world around them as they level up, because that is the natural consequence of being able to magically warp reality or cause earthquakes by stomping on the ground, which are powers that are already in line with those of heroes of myth. This, in my opinion, is one of the reasons why mythic play doesn't really live up to its name, at least in my experience, and I suspect also why low-level characters aren't given access to mythic destinies, as the stakes are simply too low at that power tier for what the developers had in mind with their archetypes.
Effectively, if power tiers for an adventure were a separate lever from character complexity, it would likely have been much easier to layer on mythic rules as another, even higher tier of power. Conversely, this would also make it easier to insert a power tier for "normal" characters and thus make it easier to tell grittier stories where the party isn't all that powerful, such as horror adventures. It would also give the GM more control over the pacing of character progression, such that giving the party new abilities more frequently wouldn't have to mean bumping them up a power tier. Pathfinder doesn't do this and instead adopts a one-size-fits-all approach to its leveling: again, this is fine, and in fact this works really well for the stories told in most of Pathfinder's APs, but it does mean there are stories that could be told with the characters and abilities we have where the game's leveling kinda gets in the way.
The Solarian I think has had a fairly troubled development in 2e: in the playtests, the class was weak, rigid, and outright non-functional in encounters against flying enemies, but at least had something unique going for them in the form of their AoE revelations. On release, those revelations got removed from the class, whose core chassis ended up becoming that of a worse Fighter in space. The class is heavily feat-taxed, needing Stellar Rush for the mobility they desperately need to close gaps and Solar Rampart for heavy armor proficiency, and generally appears to be quite stingily-balanced, with sub-par class features in a game where it's not uncommon for classes to become legendary in two different proficiencies. In my experience, the class's playstyle doesn't really flow well, and a great deal many feats don't make use of the Solarian's different attunements at all.
All of which is to say: I feel the class could have been done quite a bit differently, and this is a feeling I've expressed as well for other SF2e classes, such as the Witchwarper and the Technomancer. The Solarian brew I put together gives an explanation of what I was going for towards the start, but here are the general features:
1. The Solarian gets built-in flight and a Speed bonus at level 1, so that they can consistently get within melee range of enemies. It won't always be easy, but it would at least always be possible.
2. The Solarian only gets their solar weapon as a starting manifestation, but their solar weapon can be any melee weapon you can access. This means you can wield a solar doshko or a solar puzzleblade depending on your ancestry.
3. The Solarian gets heavy armor proficiency and Shield Block from the start. Further manifestation feats let you get a solar flare, a solar shield, and solar armor, which let you choose any ranged weapon, shield, or suit of armor you can access respectively, and a 6th-level feat lets you even choose advanced solar weapons.
4. The Solarian gets baked-in AoE from the start in the form of Stellar Nova, which has the functionality of both Black Hole and Supernova depending on your current attunement. Rather than a frequency, the action has the disharmony trait, letting you use it multiple times per combat.
5. In general, feats are completely redone to be more active, have you cycle much more frequently, and feature attunement-specific benefits whenever possible. To avoid having less to do in one attunement, feats that only provide benefits in one or the other particular attunement are condensed. In addition, many feats can be used even if you're unattuned, giving more options after using a disharmony action.
6. The brew adds a whole bunch of feats to further deepen your playstyle: feats like Spiral Arm or Music of the Spheres let you use your skills in uniquely Solarian ways, whereas the Broken Cycle feat at 1st level lets you commit to just one attunement if you want to play a purely graviton- or photon-based Solarian.
The general aim of this brew, besides making the Solarian more functional, is to give them a more distinct niche from the very beginning as this hyper-mobile, flexible stance-dancer who can provide both single-target Strike damage and AoE. Many of your actions would have the flourish and cycle traits, meaning each of your turns will often revolve around choosing which big, flashy move to use, and how to string those actions together to make the most of both your attunements. In my playtesting experience, this not only made the Solarian feel a lot better to play, but also made them feel more active and flexible overall, with much more of a feeling of flow when stringing cycle or disharmony actions in the right sequence.
2e is a system that, in my opinion, shares a lot of design principles with computer programming: many of its components are modular so that they can interact more cleanly with one another, its mechanics aim to follow consistent rules whenever possible, and its trait system allows mechanics to be categorized efficiently, while also making it easy to apply functionality through rules text across many different elements. Even so, there are bits of mechanical text that are often repeated, which in my opinion means there's opportunity to condense when possible via new traits. Starfinder did this recently with the traversal trait, which takes every mechanic that lets you swap out Strides for alternative forms of movement, as with Sudden Charge, and condenses that functionality into a trait.
In my opinion, there are still more opportunities out there to condense, as there are still some mechanics being repeated in certain effects. This is more of a thought exercise than anything else, but here are some I've spotted and traits I think could condense their functionality:
Evasive: These abilities are so sudden that they do not trigger reactions.
Examples: forced movement, Lightning Dash, Mobility (which could also gain the traversal trait!), Step.
Although Reactive Strike comes up less often than attacks of opportunity in 1e, it's still present enough that many abilities let you avoid triggering reactions, particularly when moving. This simple trait could condense that functionality and make it easy to add it onto other actions.
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Salvo: These abilities can damage the same target with near-simultaneous hits. If a salvo effect damages a target more than once, combine the damage for the purpose of resistances and weaknesses.
There are a few multi-hit actions in the game that can let you bust through a target's resistances, and sometimes that same bit of rules text helps avoid triggering the same weakness tons of times. This trait could condense that bit of text and unify abilities that can be used to focus-fire a single target.
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Taxing: These abilities involve repeated or especially powerful attacks that leave you unbalanced. Using a taxing action counts as two attacks when calculating your multiple attack penalty, but you don't increase your multiple attack penalty until you've made all of the action's attacks.
Essentially, there are a bunch of actions that are basically mega-attacks, either having you max out your MAP in one go, or having you make multiple attacks that don't increase your MAP until you're done. The above trait could cover both functionalities. This would technically mean you could use Whirlwind Strike against a single enemy and still max out your MAP, which doesn't happen right now, though let's be honest, you'd normally just make a single Strike anyway at that point.
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The general idea here is basically to find little bits of rules text that are repeated more or less identically and condense these into traits. I don't expect these traits to make it into anything official, as the content's already been printed, but it's still fun to find these opportunities all the same. Has anyone else thought of these kinds of repeated mechanics and how to condense them?
This has been in the works for a while, but I'm finally done brewing up a take on the Shifter class, which you can view here. If interested, I also made a Pathbuilder custom pack and a Foundry module.
In my opinion, the Shifter class is expected to do three things: people want a class that can basically use battle forms better than an Untamed Form Druid, people want a class that has its own special battle form, and people want the Shifter to be able to mix and match aspects of different battle forms. Here's how the above brew goes about doing this:
A dedicated Shifter aspect: Each Shifter gets an aspect, a specific creature that they can transform into using a bespoke Transform action. This aspect can be a beast, a dragon, or a fey, but also one of many other non-primal creatures such as an aberration, a construct, or a fiend. Each aspect comes with its own attacks and special abilities, gaining more as you level up.
Multifarious Form, a morph-based feat for picking battle form abilities: If you want to mix and match bits of battle forms together, you're covered with a 1st-level feat that lets you do exactly that. Further feats let you add battle forms to your list so you can choose from a greater lists of speeds, senses, and other abilities, and a much higher-level feat, Chimeric Form, lets you become a fusion of two different battle forms.
In-depth battle form selection and customization: For those wanting to opt into existing battle forms, a 10th-level feat lets you take on any battle form in your Multifarious Form list at-will. Additionally, many feats give you benefits specifically while you're in a battle form, offering you additional abilities, defenses, and utility.
Along with the above, you can opt into a feat line for innate spellcasting, which you can even use while polymorphed with the right feat. Functionally, the Shifter is a Constitution-based class with exceptionally large HP that makes them about as durable as a heavy armor Barbarian: while they lack significantly in damage compared to other martial classes, they have an exceptionally good amount of at-will AoE and utility, making them a disruptive tank with a large amount of battlefield presence.
This larger-than-average pouch contains a false bottom. When you invest the pouch, you insert a consumable item of up to light Bulk and of a level no higher than that of the pouch, which rests inside the false bottom and remains inaccessible while the item remains invested.
Providence pouches can be of any level, and typically have the lowest Price for permanent items of their level.
Activate--Just What's Needed (One Action) (manipulate); Frequency once per day; Effect You pull a copy of the consumable from the pouch. The copy functions like the original consumable in every way, except it uses a standard DC for the pouch's level if it uses a DC. The item disappears if the pouch loses its investiture or if you Invest the item anew, whichever comes first.
This conspicuously oversized pouch is the result of an inventor attempting to multiply the effects of a providence pouch by placing one inside of another. Inside this pouch's false bottom sits a providence pouch; the item works exactly like a providence pouch, except its activation has a frequency of once per 10 minutes, rather than once per day. Plentiful pouches are resultingly much more expensive, and typically have the highest Price for permanent items of their level.
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In summary: for the much heftier price of a permanent item, you'd get to turn your one-time consumables into once-a-day, or even once-an-encounter consumables, while upgrading their DC to be more relevant to your current level. Although the item itself would need to be upgraded (so that you can't get an infinite supply of level 20 consumables for the price of a level 1 permanent item), you'd get the choice to opt into more reliability, and even low-level versions would be useful for items that lack a DC.
Also worth noting that this item could be particularly good on Alchemists: not only would you get the consumables you'd be able to craft with quick and advanced alchemy, you could also store what permanent consumables you do get to Craft in these pouches for reuse. In fact, you could even use advanced alchemy along with a plentiful pouch to turn one temporary consumable into many more for the day!
This is an idea that came out of this thread: a few players have been criticizing the arcane list, and while I do believe the tradition is still very powerful, one of the facts that came about is that the arcane list features the smallest number of exclusive spells relative to other traditions. In particular, certain iconic spells from before the remaster, like power words, weren't kept in the jump, leading some to question what the identity of the arcane tradition is meant to be.
This is an attempt to introduce a few new arcane-exclusive spells, and so by creating a special new law trait:
Law: Spells with this trait alter one or more of the fundamental constants of the Multiverse, causing reality to reassert itself and temporarily prevent further meddling. A target of an effect with the law trait is temporarily immune to further law effects for 10 minutes.
In short, your spell messes with the laws of reality, and you can't do that to the same target too quickly... just like the old power words! Let's use that to try to create spells exclusive to the arcane tradition, defined by extreme reliability, but weaker effects:
Law of Inertia (Two-Action, Spell 3) Traits: concentrate, law, manipulate Tradition: arcane; Range: 30 feet; Targets: 1 creature
You strip the target of all motion, briefly freezing them in place. The target is stunned 1, or stunned 3 if its level is less than twice the spell's rank.
Heightened (8th): You can cast the spell as a single action. A target 3 or more levels below twice the spell's rank is stunned for 1 minute.
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Effectively, it's a weaker, earlier-rank power word stun, except instead of speaking a word of power you mess with the laws of motion. Let's try another:
Law of Entropy (Two-Action, Spell 1) Traits: concentrate, law, manipulate Tradition: arcane; Range: 30 feet; Targets: 1 creature
You increase the constant of entropy, instantly dissipating large amounts of the target's constituent matter. The target takes damage equal to five times the spell's rank (no damage type), or ten times the spell's rank if its level is less than twice the spell's rank. If this damage brings the target to 0 Hit Points, it is blasted to fine powder; its gear remains.
Heightened (9th): You can cast the spell as a single action. A target 3 or more levels below twice the spell's rank is instantly blasted to fine powder, regardless of how many Hit Points it has.
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So now we have power word kill! Let's do power word blind next:
Law of Refraction (Two-Action, Spell 2) Traits: concentrate, law, manipulate Tradition: arcane; Range: 30 feet; Targets: 1 creature Duration: varies
You change the way light bends so that it hardly reaches the target's eyes. The target is dazzled for 1 round, or 1 minute if its level is less than twice the spell's rank.
Heightened (7th): You can cast the spell as a single action, and the target is blinded instead of dazzled. A target 3 or more levels below twice the spell's rank is permanently blinded.
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Now, let's see how we can apply this formula to another effect:
Law of Coordinates (Two-Action, Spell 4) Traits: concentrate, law, manipulate, teleportation Tradition: arcane; Range: 30 feet; Targets: 1 creature
You rewrite the target's position in space, causing them to instantly reappear where you want them to. The target teleports up to 10 feet away from its original position to a location an unoccupied space within range you can see, or up to 60 feet away if the target's level is less than twice the spell's rank. If this would bring another creature with the target—even one carried in an extradimensional container—the spell is lost.
Heightened (9th): You can cast the spell as a single action. A target 3 or more levels below twice the spell's rank is teleported to any location within 1 mile. You don't need to be able to see the location, as long as you have been there in the past and know its relative location and distance from you.
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And hey presto, you get an extremely reliable reposition spell! Not as cheap as acid grip, but certainly more versatile and effective against enemies with high Reflex saves. Let's try something a bit different:
You weaken the constituent bonds holding the target together. The target gains weakness to damage for 1 round equal to the spell's rank, or twice the spell's rank if its level is less than twice the spell's rank. This weakness applies only once each time the target takes damage.
Heightened (10th): You can cast the spell as a single action, and the weakness is always twice the spell's rank. The spell's duration is 1 minute against a target of a level less than twice the spell's rank; if the target is 3 or more levels below twice the spell's rank, you can designate any number of additional targets in range of the same level or below with the spell.
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So with one casting of this spell, you create one round where everyone gets to significantly increase their damage. So far, we've done two-action spells that turn into single-action spells many ranks later; let's see if we can play with this framework a little:
Law of Negation (Reaction, Spell 6) Traits: concentrate, law Tradition: arcane; Range: 30 feet; Targets: 1 creature
Trigger: A creature Casts a Spell of a lower rank than this spell.
You erase the creature's magic from existence, as if the triggering spell was never cast in the first place. You automatically counteract the triggering spell.
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So with that, you'd have an extremely reliable, once-per-enemy counterspell for when you really need that Power Word Nope. It'd be stronger than nullify by virtue of being of a lower rank and not inflicting self-damage, but let's be honest: nullify isn't a very good spell to begin with.
In essence, the basic structure here is: with these arcane-exclusive spells, you get an extremely reliable effect that's counterbalanced by a relative weakness to other similarly-ranked effects that incur a roll, as well as a 10-minute target lockout. At higher ranks, you get a lessened action cost when applicable to cast these spells alongside others you might cast for added flexibility, while also getting a "nice to have" disproportionately strong effect against trivially low-level creatures. This would fill out the arcane list with a few more exclusive spells that'd make the tradition exceptionally reliable, giving arcane casters specialized tools to get a specific job done, and limited-use buttons to press in encounters that do exactly what's desired with perfect reliability.
Stop me if you've heard this one: you're walking through a corridor when a party member trips a wire. Blades immediately descend from the ceiling, damaging the whole party... who then promptly heals up as if nothing happened. Big whoop.
And as silly as this sounds, I think this is a pretty serious issue with simple hazards that makes them not work at all well as standalone threats in PF2e. As part of encounters, they can be really interesting as a way of spicing up the environment, and complex hazards are effectively encounters of their own, but simple hazards tend to be really binary: either they deal enough damage to wipe the party, in which case they're likely to feel extremely unfair, or they don't, in which case PF2e's general lack of attrition means their effects are promptly erased. It's pretty binary and generally out of place, which to me makes me feel like those traps are more the product of a design philosophy from prior editions than something fully-adapted to the current system.
It doesn't have to be this way, though, and I feel traps of any kind could be pretty threatening in dungeon crawls if their effects were about inflicting debuffs, rather than damage. If a damaging trap left you drained from blood loss instead of inflicting easily-negated damage, then even a simple hazard like that could have a lasting impact on future encounters, and the party would have a reason to pay even smaller traps more mind without having to dangle the threat of a TPK via a single hazard reaction or the like. Similarly, other hazards could inflict other conditions, such as hidden poison darts leaving you clumsy or enfeebled, or a haunt leaving you stupefied or frightened for an extended duration, and because those conditions generally require resources to clear, those could play into longer-term gameplay in a way damage just doesn't really achieve in 2e. This would also help enrich those simple hazards when used in encounters, too, as they could trip party members up in an even greater variety of ways.
So yeah, the TL;DR is that I think simple hazards as implemented now feel mostly like a relic of past editions than a fully-functional gameplay element in 2e, because just dealing damage or a very short-term condition isn't a threat in a game where Treat Wounds exists unless that damage is immediately lethal (which I don't think would make for a very fun simple hazard either). If simple hazards instead focused on inflicting lasting debuffs to the party that would be difficult or costly to clear mid-dungeon crawl, then they'd be much more relevant as solo threats to the party while also having their function enriched when used to spice up encounters.
This thread has been brewing for a little while, with this other thread giving me the motivation to write it in full. Before then, I also wrote a separate brew for implementing characters without attributes in PF2e, and that had a number of interesting implications for dedication feats.
To start with the problem: although archetypes in general vary wildly in effectiveness and desirability in PF2e, dedication feats in particular tend to be the most underwhelming part of many archetypes, especially multiclass archetype dedications. In theory, because we opt into multiclass archetypes to get a taste of what makes a certain class so interesting, the dedication feats ought to start providing a little bit of that: in practice, however, their benefits are often generic, repetitious across dedications, and rarely good in and of themselves, as if they were a price to pay to start accessing the more interesting bits of a class. Their attribute prerequisites are either trivially easy to meet or essentially impossible to fulfil without twisting your character out of shape, which makes many archetypes arbitrarily incompatible with many classes. When a multiclass archetype offers any tangible amount of a class's power in its dedication, that dedication becomes a notable outlier, and on the other side of the spectrum you can get clunkers like the Swashbuckler Dedication, whose extremely specific attribute requirements reward you with... one trained skill. That's it.
In my opinion, it doesn't have to necessarily be this way. Although it's important for these multiclass archetypes to respect niche protection in 2e, I think it's possible to change how they're written in ways that would make them less restrictive, more streamlined, and better-equipped to feature a taste of their class. Here are a few examples of how I think this could be implemented:
1. Roll class DC training into the multiclass trait
Starting with the small fry: every martial multiclass dedication makes you trained in the class's DC, so might as well roll that into the multiclass trait, e.g. "When you select a feat with the multiclass trait, you become trained in the class's DC." This would be the same kind of change as the remaster moving the three-feat investment requirement to the dedication trait, and its only change from now is that it would make you trained in the class DC of spellcasters too, a trivial benefit given how most casters don't use their spell DC at all.
2. Skill prerequisites, not attribute prerequisites or trained skills
Trained skills are a filler benefit in most multiclass dedications, giving a bit of power that is neither directly relevant to the class nor all that tremendously useful when skill increases and Untrained Improvisation are easy to obtain. Meanwhile, attribute prerequisites are at best arbitrary and at worst needlessly prohibitive, so it could be worth killing two birds with one stone here: rather than have certain attribute modifiers as prerequisites, multiclass dedications could instead require certain skills as prerequisites, typically the skills you'd become trained with when picking the dedication. You'd then no longer become trained in those skills from the dedication. On its own, this would be a nerf, but it would open up more space in those feats' power budget to give something more specific to the class (and, as a generic replacement, you could always give a 1st-level class feat instead). In general, this would remove the element of arbitrary restriction on certain class archetypes, and as a minor side benefit would make Intelligence characters particularly good at multiclassing due to their plentiful trained skills.
3. Initial spellcasting benefits
Spellcasting archetypes condense a lot of their benefits into spellcasting benefits, which helps avoid a lot of repetition, yet for some reason this doesn't extend to spellcasting dedications, which nonetheless follow an extremely standard structure. There are effectively three types of spellcasting:
Spontaneous spellcasting, where you gain a repertoire with two cantrips.
Prepared spellcasting, where you prepare two cantrips each day.
Prepared spellcasting with a spell repository, where you have a repository of four cantrips and can prepare two cantrips from your repository each day.
Listing these as initial spellcasting benefits, along with standard bits like becoming trained in spell attack modifier and spell DC, and being a spellcaster, would simplify the text of spellcaster dedications significantly, as well as make it clear which dedications currently offer more than others. In fact, this could probably even be taken further with the rest of the spellcasting benefits, as adding spells to your repertoire or spellbook/familiar when you gain more spell slots is itself pretty standard. So far, the only non-standard dedication is the Witch Dedication, which has reduced benefits to make up for the fact that you get a familiar, but implementing suggestion
#2 would free up room for both that familiar and the above initial spellcasting benefits.
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And that's about it for suggestions. These aren't huge, game-breaking recommendations, so much as a few suggestions to improve multiclass dedications so that they're a little less feeble, repetitively-worded, and arbitrarily limiting.
Harm and heal are, in my opinion, two of the best-designed spells in the game. Their flexible action costs and variable effects give them a large variety of different applications, and as the iconic vitality and void spells, they're perfect mirrors of each other, affecting the living and the undead in opposite ways, and each applying healing and damage. Surely, this must mean they're equally good?
Well, not really, and in my opinion this is because parity is broken on the two-action version, in a way that favors heal much more than harm.
Heal is, as the name indicates, a healing spell first and foremost: party members are generally much more likely to be living than undead, and the damage against undead is more of a side benefit: this makes its two-action version really good, because the boost to healing caters directly to its main function. It doesn't really matter that the healing doesn't get increased, because you'd be using the two-action version to heal and will probably have other spells to blast instead.
Harm, by contrast, is a damage spell first and foremost: although this can be used to heal party members with void healing, even heal an entire undead party, that requires a lot of party buy-in and limits other healing options, so its main purpose is to damage the living. So when the two-action version boosts its healing, but not its damage, that doesn't cater to its main function: although it's really good when you do heal an undead party member, 1d8 void damage per spell rank is barely above cantrip damage, making its two-action version quite a poor blasting option.
This disparity I think matters because of the Cleric's divine font: it's generally known among experienced players that heal font deities tend to offer more benefits than harm font deities unless you're running a party setup specifically built to benefit more from void healing, simply because heal is the best healing spell in the game, whereas harm... well, it's not that great a spell. Although the two are treated as equal, one spell is markedly better than the other, and this imbalance has a meaningful impact on deity and build choices.
With this in mind, here's the fix I propose: have the two-action version of both spells increase the damage by 1d8 per spell rank.
... and that's it. The single- and three-action versions would remain unchanged, and that's fine because they offer benefits in action economy and massive AoE respectively. While this would buff heal, an already strong spell, that buff would be a lot more situational than for harm, whose two-action version would become a solid blasting option against the living. Whereas a heal font Cleric would be a top-tier healer, a harm font Cleric could become a solid single-target blaster, able to also heal undead party members while still generally lacking in AoE blasting until later on.
The Druid is a relatively polarizing caster in PF2e: although some do love the class's flavor and some of the builds that can be achieved, they also have a reputation for lacking "wow" features on the same scale as, say, the Cleric's divine font slots or the Bard's compositions. They're not the weakest caster around, but they also often underwhelm due to a perceived lack of standout features. My opinion has always been that the Druid is equipped to do their job as a primal caster: they have the HP, armor proficiency, Shield Block feat, and ability to build Strength to get up close and personal, which means they can do stuff other casters can't always do as well, like use gouging claw without exposing themselves as much as a 6 HP/level cloth caster, and their starting package is solid enough for the class to feel substantial. However, playing a Druid at high level has changed my opinion of the class somewhat, and after giving it some though, I think I've figured out why.
Essentially, a lot of the Druid's "unique" power can be obtained through general or class feats at a very early level, and these feats tend to be at their most effective at early to mid levels. Just to explain where I'm coming from, let's do a comparison between the Druid and the most obvious alternative, the Cloistered Cleric.
Just to highlight the commonalities: both are 8 HP/level Wisdom prepared casters. Both have similar proficiency tracks, including fairly early Fortitude expertise at 3rd level, who can prepare from all the common spells in their spell lists, so those benefits can be crossed out on either side of the equation (though the spell list makes a difference and I'll get to that). Both also get at least one focus spell to start with (though I'll talk a bit about those too). The main asset the Cloistered Cleric has is therefore their 4-to-6 divine font slots, a notably powerful feature. How does the Druid compare?
Well, the Druid starts trained in light and medium armor, going up to expert at 13th level. This is effectively the benefit of two Armor Proficiency feats.
The Druid gets another 1st-level class feat from their subclass. If we're going to be generous, we can bump this up to a 2nd-level class feat given that Order Explorer is the feat used to access it from outside that subclass.
The Druid's save and Perception proficiencies are generally more front-loaded: they get Perception expertise two levels before the Cleric and Reflex expertise six levels before, though Will save mastery two levels later.
The primal spell list is arguably a bit stronger than the divine spell list even when factoring in Cleric spells granted by deities, though this gap has significantly lessened post-remaster. The Druid's focus spells are also arguably a bit better than domain spells, though that gap has also lessened following the remaster's buffs to the latter.
The Druid knows the Wildsong, I guess.
So if we tally this all up, the Druid's benefits compared to a Cloistered Cleric come down to: three 1st-level general feats, two 1st-level class feats (one of which is more of a ribbon ability), and a minor ribbon feature, with perhaps a slight advantage in spell list, focus spells, and front-loaded proficiencies. This is a whole bunch of stuff, and it does make a difference at early levels when you're wading into melee and putting yourself at more risk, but at high level most of these benefits vanish: you end up with the same AC as a Cloistered Cleric, your Perception and defense end up being the same as well, and focus spells become less important when you have lots of actual spell slots to use... but the Cleric gets 6 max-rank slots to cast heal with.
All of this raises the question: is four 1st-rank heal slots at level 1 worth five, maybe six 1st-level feats? At that stage, perhaps yes, and so the Druid gets to perform well at early levels. Are those same six 1st-level feats worth six 10th-rank heal slots at level 20? In my opinion, absolutely not. I'd even go as far as to say that from 15th level onwards, the Druid has nothing in their class features to really distinguish them from any other caster. Although they have flavorful feats and a good amount of build diversity within their own class, in terms of features they ultimately end up as generic as they come.
As for what to do about this: I personally don't think the Druid needs a huge amount at early levels, necessarily, because that's when they're at their most unique. Perhaps they could start trained in martial weapons to complement their melee playstyle, but in my opinion it's at later levels that they need some kind of boost: in my opinion, what I think could do them the most good is if they broke the mold of other casters and got master Fort saves, but also potentially even master attacks at a very high level, such as 17th or even 19th level. Not only would this guarantee that the Druid's above-average survivability for a caster would remain a feature at all levels, it would also make them unique in a way that could complement their abilities a bit better, particularly their battle form spells. The Druid would still obviously not hit as hard as the average martial, as they'd be behind on their physical attributes and would lack the damage-boosting features that set martials apart, but they'd stand out by having comparable survivability, and the ability to become much better at Striking with the right spells.
Trying to take attributes out of Pathfinder 2e is, in my opinion, a very bad idea. Trying to do this in earnest will likely not leave you or your players happy, and I wouldn't recommend it.
The name of the game here is explicitly to brainstorm how one would go about implementing this terrible concept while breaking as little as possible... but also poke holes and see what these ideas inevitably break. This can be as little as "there's a +/-1 difference in the math at this level" and as large as "X class just stops working entirely". So long as the criticism is accurate, it's valid!
Participation is encouraged. If you want to poke holes at what exists, that's good. If you want to come up with a solution to fix what you or someone else broke, that's also good. If you want to come up with your own implementation and post it here, that's also good!
Now with this in mind, I'll start:
The Assumptions:
The basis of the following take hinges on a few assumptions:
Players are generally assumed to boost the "big 3" attributes on their characters (Dex, Con, and Wis) every time they get 4 attribute boosts per level, with exceptions for Dex on classes that can wear heavy armor. This implies defense and Perception modifiers converge towards similar amounts at higher levels.
Players are generally assumed to boost their key attribute whenever they can, such that their attack and/or spellcasting modifier and class DC follow a pretty consistent progression.
Players are generally assumed to boost their skills relatively freely, such that there's a fair amount of variance between skill modifiers.
Based on these, and when factoring in item bonuses (but obviously not status or circumstance bonuses), there's the assumption that character modifiers and DCs tend to end up at one of five ranks:
Untrained: "I didn't increase this skill," with a final modifier of 0.
Trained: "I'm not very good at this," usually up-to-expert proficiency and the attribute isn't your key attribute, with a final modifier of 12 + your level.
Expert: "I'm okay at this," usually up-to-master proficiency and the attribute isn't your key attribute, or up-to-expert proficiency and the attribute is your key attribute, with a final modifier of 14 + your level.
Master: "I'm good at this," usually up-to-master proficiency and the attribute is your key attribute (and sometimes up-to-legendary proficiency and the attribute isn't your key attribute), with a final modifier of 16 + your level. You can sort of kludge spellcaster proficiency into this category even though spell attack modifiers get stuck at a -1 relative to martials.
Legendary: "I'm exceptionally good at this," with up-to-legendary proficiency and the attribute is your key attribute, with a final modifier of 18 + your level.
You'll notice that if you shave 10 off most of these ranks, the numbers end up the same as regular TEML proficiency bonuses! This is the fun part where we take that observation and run way too far with it.
The Concept
With the above assumptions in mind, here goes:
Get rid of attributes and attribute boosts and flaws, but also the item bonuses and apex attribute boosts you'd see replicated in Automatic Bonus Progression (plus the stuff that got missed like the Kineticist's gate attenuator bonus). Appropriately reduce the item bonus of certain mutagens and other effects that aim to provide you an item bonus over the baseline.
Your proficiency bonus past untrained equals your level and a half, rounded up, plus the usual increase from your rank.
Your level 1 proficiency rank for saves, Perception, and attacks is equal to the highest proficiency rank you can get (and the Fighter gets their weapon specialization moved to level 1 so they're legendary in just that until 19th level). If the proficiency relies on an attribute that isn't any of your class's possible key attributes, reduce that proficiency by one rank. Remove any current standard means of increasing your proficiency in these abilities beyond trained rank.
Your level 1 proficiency rank for spell attack modifier, spell DC, and class DC is one rank less than the highest proficiency rank you can get, to a minimum of trained.
Your level 1 proficiency rank for armor and unarmored defense is one rank less than the maximum you can get (so most casters would be trained, most martials would be experts, and Monks and Champions would be masters).
Remove any current standard means of increasing your proficiency rank in anything except a skill beyond trained rank. You still get improvements to your saves' degrees of success, and Canny Acumen could still boost your Perception or one of your save proficiency ranks from trained to expert (and nothing more).
Leave skill increases unchanged, so you increase them to the same ranks at the same levels.
Increase the Hit Points you get from your class at each level by 5. Increase the prerequisites for resiliency feats accordingly.
Remove attribute prerequisites from feats. When appropriate, include skill proficiency prerequisites instead, and don't grant training in those skills in the dedication.
Give classes that currently have Intelligence as a key attribute 7 extra trained skills at level 1 (or less down to a minimum of 4, if you're feeling stingy).
Change the weapon specialization track in the following way: if you have expert or better weapon proficiency, you gain a starting feature at level 1 that adds 4 to your melee weapon and unarmed damage rolls, increasing to 7 at 7th level, 10 at 15th level, and 13 at 20th level. You deal additional damage with your ranged weapon and unarmed attacks at those levels equal to 0 / 2 / 6 / 6. If you have legendary proficiency, increase the bonus by 1 at 7th level onwards, or by 2 at 15th level onwards, and if you only have trained proficiency (i.e. you're a caster), the additional damage is just 2 at 13th level.
Remove fundamental armor and weapon runes, save for weapon potency runes, which also add 1d6 to your weapon's damage rolls instead of giving you an item bonus to attack rolls (and unlike striking runes, these oughtn't count as weapon damage dice to avoid buffing things like the fatal trait). Weapon property runes that give you bonus damage instead convert this bonus damage from one of your weapon potency runes into their damage type.
Remove the base item bonus to AC, Dex cap, check penalty, Speed penalty, and Strength requirement from armor and equivalent items. Unarmored items that would normally accommodate armor runes instead automatically let you etch one armor property rune from the start. Light armor lets you etch two armor property runes instead, and medium and heavy armor lets you etch three. All heavy armor gets the bulwark trait, which gives you a +1 item bonus to AC, but a -2 item penalty to Reflex saves and a -5-foot penalty to your Speeds. Change the Kineticist's Armor in Earth to give you bulwark armor immediately, and change Hardwood Armor and Metal Carapace to just give you a (better) shield.
Whenever a weapon or armor specialization effect, or a similar effect such as the Kineticist's critical blast effect, would refer to an item bonus, just use +3 instead.
This is a bit of a laundry list, which is already a point against it, but just to pick a few examples:
Let's say you're a Ranger:
You're a Strength/Dex class with up-to-legendary Perception, so you start off a master.
You're a Strength/Dex class with up-to-master Fort saves, up-to-legendary Ref saves, and up-to-expert Will saves, so your Fort and Will saves remain unchanged while your Ref saves go to legendary.
Your starting skills remain unchanged. If you increase your skills, you might end up getting higher modifiers on skills that would otherwise not use your key attribute past certain levels.
You're a Strength/Dex class with up-to-master attack proficiencies, so you start off a master in those (and thus get a comparable starting modifier relative to now).
Your AC proficiencies go up to master, so you start off an expert in those for the same starting AC.
Your class DC goes up to master, so you start off an expert in class DC.
Effectively, your essential proficiencies would remain consistent, with your Perception modifier starting off more pronounced, your class wouldn't get the same proficiency and item bonus bumps they do now, and their progression in those stats would instead just be pretty consistent. You wouldn't be able to boost Intelligence as a fourth stat for more trained skills, but your Outwit Ranger would be able to get between a +2 and a +10 to all of their edge's boosted checks against their prey.
Now, to pick a caster, let's say you're a Wizard:
You're an Int class with up-to-expert Perception, so you remain trained.
You're an Int class, so your saves remain unchanged.
Your additional trained skills go to 9, 3 more than you'd normally start with.
You're a caster, so your attack proficiencies remain unchanged.
You're a cloth caster, so your AC proficiencies remain unchanged.
Your class DC is perma-trained, and stays that way.
Your spellcasting proficiency goes up to legendary, so you start off a master (and thus get a comparable starting modifier relative to now).
Even simpler here, you'd stick to your basic proficiencies and would just get lots more trained skills to play with by virtue of being an Int class. As a bonus, your spell attack would be just as accurate as any typical martial class's weapon attacks at all levels (like the Ranger's!).
Now with this entire wall of text out of the way, let's hear what you think!
A common discussion that crops up in these spaces (and that just cropped up again recently) is that of the Oracle and how they were mishandled in the remaster. The criticisms throughout are pretty consistent:
Although numerically strong, the Oracle lost a lot of the uniqueness and functionality of their old mysteries, and so feels a lot more generic and less differentiated based on their subclass.
The new subclasses are wildly imbalanced among each other, with some curses being almost entirely inconsequential (e.g. Cosmos) and others being utterly devastating (e.g. Ancestors), and often anti-synergize with their own cursebound feats.
The Oracle's class-defining aspects, i.e. their cursebound feats, are easy to poach but also easy to ignore.
Many PFS players got their Oracle builds severely messed up in the jump.
The question that doesn't get asked very often, though, is: what would an ideal Oracle look like? Different players have expressed different opinions on this, whether it's a revert to the premaster Oracle with some buffs and QoL improvements, a series of adjustments to the current Oracle, or a new model entirely, and I feel it's worth discussing here what players feel is important to them in an Oracle, and what they'd like to see in an ideal implementation of the class. It's worth bearing in mind a few considerations, too:
Many long-time fans of the Oracle are dissatisfied with the current class because it differs so much from the Oracles they played with until recently, and would probably want an Oracle that's more compatible with their premaster builds.
Several players have now tried the new Oracle and enjoy the class, and so would likely find themselves in the same situation as the premaster Oracle fans if the class were to change in such a way that it'd break their builds.
Effectively, the class is in a tricky situation right now where there are two fairly different communities of players wanting very different builds out of it: ideally, there could exist an Oracle that satisfies both, but could such a class even exist in PF2e? If so, what would it look like?
Now that the playtest period has concluded for the tech classes and the feedback forums have died down once again, I think it's an appropriate time to share some thoughts that go beyond the playtest's scope. I did a similar thread for the Witchwarper, and it seems I ended up with a similar document for the Technomancer as well.
Much like the Witchwarper when the original playtest launched, the Technomancer has drawn a significant amount of pretty consistent criticism. The main axes of complaints are:
The class doesn't deliver enough on its technological theme: In addition to threads directly criticizing this, other more comprehensive more reviews point out that the Technomancer doesn't really do all that much with tech. An oft-repeated impression is that although the Technomancer does have the flavor of using tech to hack into magic thanks to their excellent feat and feature names, they don't deliver on using magic to hack into tech, which is considered an important part of the class fantasy.
The class's core mechanics are far too hungry for actions and spell slots: As also noted in severaldifferentthreads, the Technomancer's core features are extremely expensive, requiring a lot of actions and also a lot of spell slots to work. This doesn't work well on a class that is meant to sometimes use other actions, like Striking on DPS++ or Commanding a minion on ServoShell, and has only two spell slots to begin with. To make matters worse, the class lacks the fallback options common to other classes, as their focus spell is a spellshape, and the feat they get from their subclass is another spellshape.
The class's subclasses are dysfunctional: Probably the biggest issue overall with the Technomancer is their subclasses, whose problems range from "cache spells don't work with their own spellshape" to "has entire core components that do not function at all". Viper, for instance, requires items that are too expensive to reasonably purchase at early level, yet also lacks the scaling class DC to make effective use of their mechanic that lets them turn spell gems into grenades. ServoShell is in an even worse position, because its overclock effect does literally nothing without a tech minion, which the Technomancer does not offer.
In addition to the above threads, I made note of these issues in my own assessment of the Technomancer, and in it I mentioned a few adjustments I made towards the later part of my playtesting to see how they'd affect gameplay.
Here is the finished document. To summarize the main changes I experimented with:
I replaced the Technomancer's spellshape feats with 1st-level class feats that let them do something with tech and synergized with their subclass: DPS++ gets to use more tech weapons, FORTRUN gets to wear better tech armor, ServoShell gets a tech companion, and Viper gets to make a temporary 1st-rank spell gem of the same spell in their database each day.
I changed Download Spell and each overclock into focus spells, giving the Technomancer 3 Focus Points at level 1.
I took Jailbreak Spell out of the Technomancer's core features and combined its functionality with Double Spellshape, turning both into a focus spell that lets you layer increasingly more spellshapes onto your spell.
I added a handful more tech-oriented feats, including a tech familiar feat and one that lets you cast spells from nearby tech you can access. This isn't meant to be a comprehensive list of things a Technomancer could do, so much as a few examples of what a tech caster could do with tech.
I implemented a few other changes as well, like a scaling class DC, but otherwise the general intent was to lessen the Technomancer's spell slot costs, improve their subclasses' self-synergy, and integrate them more with tech while still preserving the option to become a great spellshaper. In my opinion, these changes had a positive effect: the class became much more functional at level 1, felt much less starved for actions and spell slots, and had more synergy with tech.
To be clear: there are many more ways in my opinion of improving the Technomancer, so this isn't meant to be a set of hard instructions for Paizo to follow. Rather, this is my take on how the Technomancer could be adjusted to better fit their theme, as well as play more smoothly. Regardless of whether or not any of the above gets implemented, I do look forward to seeing how the final version will turn out on release, as I think the Starfriends have done a great job of integrating feedback and adapting to the new system.
Pathfinder 2e is a tabletop game known for its engaging, tactical combat, and its centerpiece is melee: by nature, melee combat tends to require actions to get in range, but Paizo added a huge amount of depth and options to this with various skill actions, particularly Athletics maneuvers but also Feinting for Charisma classes, and positioning-based flanking. The end result is a combat system that is hugely diverse, with plenty of room for smart plays, tons of mechanical hooks for characters to build upon, and melee builds that can easily feel amazing at what they're meant to do.
... and then there's ranged combat. Although some skill actions can be used at range as well as melee, many can't be used at range without specifically committing to certain build options. The only ranged-exclusive mechanic is cover, a situational mechanic that often harms more than it helps, since having cover from an enemy means that enemy also has cover from you. As a result, ranged combat doesn't have that same diversity, those same mechanical hooks, or that same depth of play.
For a while, this was largely fine, as Pathfinder's combat is primarily melee-based (this is likely also why melee received more attention). However, this is becoming increasingly less true in a system that has expanded a lot since the original release of the CRB:
Case 1: Starlit Spam and Other Martial Turrets:
Because ranged combat doesn't emphasize positioning in the same way as melee, and many enemies are mostly melee, it can be all too easy in some encounters for a ranged character to plant themselves the whole fight and attack as much as possible. This doesn't stop casters from having fairly diverse turns, because they have a wide range of spells to choose from, but it does sometimes lead to them not feeling like they have particularly great uses for their third action, a problem most melee classes don't have given how they're often spoiled for choice. Where it starts to take a real turn for the worse is with martial classes, who don't have that same range of options: because ranged weapons are balanced around melee weapons mainly by being made a lot less damaging, this leads to the general perception that ranged martials underperform somewhat, as they have fewer things to contribute and often only in lesser amounts. If nothing else, though, MAP means you are unlikely to spend a third action attacking if any other option is more attractive, so not every ranged character will play like a turret.
That is, of course, unless you're a Starlit Span Magus. Like a melee Magus, the class will want to spend two actions using their uber-powerful Spellstrike, and then another action to recharge. Trouble is, whereas melee Magi will usually want to stagger Spellstriking and reloading across different turns due to the need to spend actions on other things in melee, such as repositioning, Starlit Span has no such incentive. Thus, they get to spend all three actions Spellstriking and reloading on their turn, then all three actions Spellstriking and reloading on their next turn, and the next, and so on and so forth. What should have been a subclass that gained extra range in exchange for weaker ranged damage instead become the most damaging subclass by far, but also by far the most repetitive and least tactically engaging. Its cousin the Eldritch Archer archetype suffers from the exact same problem, which highlights a fundamental issue with ranged builds in 2e: unless the developers specifically force diverse turns into a ranged martial class or subclass, that build will always be at risk of devolving into extremely repetitive and tactically uninteresting gameplay.
This bodes particularly poorly for the one ranged-centric martial class in Pathfinder:
Case 2: The Gunslinger:
By default, Pathfinder martial classes focus on melee combat, with ranged combat being something you opt into, or sometimes a thing your class simply avoids putting at a disadvantage (for instance, a Precision Ranger or a Mastermind Rogue). The one major exception here is the Gunslinger, a class that revolves entirely around the use of ranged weapons.
Now, it wouldn't be fair to pin all of the Gunslinger's problems on ranged combat: the class has a lot of problems by itself, including the need to accommodate an intentionally undertuned range of weapons, and many threads discuss these problems at length, such as this one. However, 2e's ranged combat design certainly doesn't make things easier: firearms operate on an even lower baseline than other ranged weapons, which already deal a lot less damage than melee weapons, so the weapon type normally known in fiction for its high damage often ends up feeling particularly anemic. Although Gunslingers rarely have the same rotation of actions each turn, this is often only because their need to reload after every shot has them Strike->Reload->Strike on one turn, then Reload->Strike->Reload on the next. The class tends to be compared quite unfavorably to a ranged Fighter, and generally struggles to offer the same depth of play or major contributions as other martial classes. Although their subclasses and feats do give them additional things to do, the general lack of mechanical hooks to ranged combat severely limits their ability to build upon aspects of ranged combat that are inherently interesting, which is probably why so many Gunslinger ways push the class into melee range.
Case 3: Starfinder:
Up until this point, you could probably be excused for saying: who cares? Surely, if this problem affects mostly just one class and some subclasses, that means it can be avoided, right? And you'd be right: 2e's ranged combat may be somewhat lacking, but that's not a huge problem, so long as combat remains focused around melee, as is the case in Pathfinder.
Notice how when I mention ranged combat, though, I mention "2e's ranged combat" and not "Pathfinder 2e's ranged combat". I've phrased it this way specifically because as of last year, 2e is a system that spans not just one, but two official Paizo games with the upcoming release of Starfinder 2e: unlike Pathfinder, Starfinder's combat is centered around range and its sci-fi guns, and with the exception of the Solarian, even martial classes are ranged by default. Despite these changes in meta, SF2e aims to be compatible with PF2e, using the same core rules and following similar, though not identical balancing. How then does its ranged-centric combat hold up?
In my playtesting experience and that of many others: not terribly well. It's not just that ranged combat inherently lacks depth: because everyone has Pathfinder-grade survivability but largely only ranged-grade damage, combat encounters are incredibly drawn out on top of being repetitive, a problem made all the worse by it being far too easy to get entrenched in cover. Guns, the bread-and-butter of Starfinder's combat, feel weak by virtue of sometimes dealing only a single point of damage on a hit, and this weak ranged damage faceplants against enemies with Hardness or resistance, grossly imbalancing certain monsters and build options. The Starfriends have done a fantastic job of adapting so much of Starfinder's content to 2e and making it fun, but there's only so much that can be done when you're building on top of a weak foundation.
And I guess this is what ultimately motivated me to make this post in PF2e's general discussion subforum: 2e's ranged combat needs more meat on its bones, starting with Pathfinder, because on top of this affecting many builds in Pathfinder, I fear this is going to really hurt Starfinder when its second edition releases. It's not just that many Pathfinder classes and subclasses could benefit significantly from more in-depth ranged combat rules: for Starfinder, I think they're a necessity. 2e is no longer a system that can afford to flesh out only part of its combat: if the system is to succeed with both a melee meta and a ranged meta, both forms of combat need the same amount of baseline mechanical depth and rewarding gameplay.
To resume with a TL;DR: 2e did an awesome job of fleshing out its melee combat, but ranged combat is significantly underdeveloped by comparison. This is not great for ranged-specific martial classes and subclasses in Pathfinder, who often struggle to contribute as meaningfully and play as interestingly as their melee counterparts, but is especially bad for Starfinder, whose ranged-centric combat fails to offer the tactical depth and diversity of play needed for what is meant to be its core gameplay. I don't necessarily know how Paizo could go about addressing this cleanly, if there is even a desire to change or expand ranged combat rules in the first place, but doing so would in my opinion bring major positive returns to many character builds in Pathfinder, and significantly increase the success chances of one of Paizo's biggest upcoming products.
There's a fair bit of player demand for PF1e's Kinetic Knight, a Kineticist archetype that trades off some class features in exchange for elemental weapon abilities, elemental defenses, and some of the Samurai's defensive features too. To its credit, PF2e's Kineticist already incorporates many knightly elements, such as armor infusions, master armor proficiency, extremely strong Fort saves, and even weapon-shaped Elemental Blasts, so it's not too difficult to approximate that kind of character using existing methods. However, there's room to explore a more gish-oriented playstyle I think, specifically one that incorporates Striking and not just weapon-like elemental blasting: Elemental Blasts famously do not interact very well with Strike effects, and so accommodating elemental Strikes could open the door to playstyles the Kineticist isn't designed to accommodate.
With this in mind, here's a one-page Kinetic Knight brew. This is a class archetype for the Kineticist, and changes the base class in the following ways:
You no longer gain the 6 extra impulse feats from your class features, nor do you gain the ability to bypass a creature's resistances and immunities or swap out your impulses with reflow elements later on.
You gain a full martial chassis, i.e. trained-to-master Strikes with up to martial weapons, weapon specialization and greater weapon specialization, and medium and heavy armor proficiency.
You gain the ability to infuse elemental power into your Strikes, making them deal one of your Elemental Blast's damage types and letting you Strike when you activate your kinetic aura. The dedication feat lets you charge up your Strikes for bonus damage after spending at least one action on an impulse.
The archetype's feats give you the Fighter archetype's Fighter feat access, letting you easily opt into maneuvers alongside impulses.
The general idea here is that although you can still use impulses really well, you have much less breadth than a regular Kineticist and will instead want to alternate between impulses and Strikes. Access to Fighter feats means you can start building around your martial fighting style in addition to your element, combining both for a hybrid playstyle. Let me know what you think, and I hope you enjoy!
Finishing up this round of playtesting feedback with the Mechanic. As with the other write-ups I've posted, I'll split my post into sections, spoiler them, and add a TL;DR just so it's all a bit easier to navigate.
I ran my playtests mostly across levels 1-15, as I ran them mostly using the official Starfinder playtest scenarios and field tests. I ran some playtests at higher levels using Pathfinder content, but treated those as secondary to the playtest scenarios.
I ran my Mechanic with a variety of party compositions, mostly with just other Starfinder classes. I eventually started adding Pathfinder classes into the mix, and treated those playtests as secondary.
I tested my Mechanic using different Starfinder ancestries, including ancestries from the Galaxy Guide.
I ran the scenarios RAW for the most part, only adjudicating when something broke or was missing from the rules (or the class's core features). I then started playing with certain parameters, chiefly the Mechanic own features, and treated those findings as secondary.
I generally tested the Mechanic by prioritizing Int, then Dex, then Con, then Wis, but also tested out a zero-Int Mechanic on a few occasions, the results of which I'll detail below.
I tried a variety of guns on the Mechanic.
TL;DR I ran the Mechanic through a series of playtest encounters from low- to fairly high level, using a variety of ancestries and party compositions. After a little over a week, I started experimenting with altering the Mechanic's features to see how that would affect their gameplay. The most unusual aspect here is that I sometimes dumped the Mechanic's Intelligence for certain tests, and I'll explain why further down.
Core Class:
Splitting my feedback on the class's core chassis and feats for readability:
I really liked having a large baseline complement of trained skills and mods. It definitely felt like I was playing a utility character, though unlike full-on skill monkeys my contributions came from a mix of skills and mods.
Although I can sort of understand why the Mechanic was given legendary Perception (so that they can find and disable traps), I don't think it makes much thematic sense on the class. By contrast, I would've quite liked it if their class DC had scaled to legendary, as that would have let them make better use of grenades, area weapons, and other bits of tech.
At first glance, I thought the Mechanic would play similarly to Pathfinder's Inventor, but in practice they play very differently due to Modify. Because modding takes an action and lasts only one round, I often spent a whole turn modding my exocortex and using it, which felt appropriate for the class and felt like my biggest contributions were area control and utility, as opposed to the Inventor's more straightforward Strike damage and unstable actions.
Although I'm personally quite okay with modding being so short-lived, I'm not a huge fan of the generic damage boosts, which I think led to more repetitive and less interesting turn rotations oftentimes. I'd rather have mods be more situational or utility-centric, though still powerful enough to justify spending actions modding.
A strange quirk of the Mechanic is that they have no core class mechanic that uses their key attribute. Some subclasses like the Mine and Turret exocortex do have Intelligence scaling, but the Drone exocortex doesn't outside of certain options, which meant I could bring my Mechanic's Int to zero with the latter subclass and suffer no major consequences besides having only slightly fewer feats to choose from (and I could still pick most available feats just fine). Something as basic as giving the Mechanic a number of starting mods equal to 2 + their Int mod or the like could probably address this.
Before talking about subclasses, a very minor gripe: "exocortex" absolutely did not feel like an appropriate name to describe the Mechanic's subclasses, as none really had anything to do with having complex machinery sitting on top of your body. "Rig" would be a much better name in my opinion.
The Drone exocortex is basically just the Inventor's construct companion, except done much, much better. I enjoyed being able to choose from a variety of different chassis and customizations, and would like that amount of player options to perhaps eventually make it back to Pathfinder's construct companions.
The Mine exocortex felt like trying to reinvent grenades, only clunkier and with far fewer options. I love the idea of being able to control an area with lots of explosives, but found the implementation really janky and needlessly isolated when this could've easily been about generating lots of grenades for free and modifying them in different ways for area control.
The Turret exocortex is interesting in how it lets you shoot from a different location, but I don't think it did all that much beyond that. The biggest issue I had was that, RAW, the turret stopped working entirely below half HP when it got broken, but there wasn't really anything you could easily do to get it working again at low level. Very quickly, I houseruled that you could use Deploy Turret as a two-action activity to heal it to full HP and redeploy it regardless of how much HP it currently had, and that solved that problem.
Though not a huge criticism for what is ultimately a fairly tightly-scoped playtest, I would like to see future subclasses that don't necessarily revolve around area control. A utility subclass that can dish out temporary upgrades to allies could be really cool, as could an actual exocortex subclass focused on cybernetic enhancements.
I'm not normally a fan of a class having lots of core features that might as well be feats, but here I think it works. Being able to mod your tech increasingly easily did make a difference, and made the class even more flexible in a way that felt like a natural part of their core progression.
TL;DR The core class I think is pretty solid. It's not perfect, and I do think the class needs to guarantee that Int will directly contribute to their class features (it's not really the case for the Drone subclass), but overall the Mechanic felt like its own class with a unique niche and interesting choices to make when they weren't just adding their Int to their mine/turret damage.
Feats:
I mostly focused on level 1-14 feats during my playtests, owing to the level range at which I mostly played:
Let's get this out of the way: the Drone's feat progression is completely borked. Even after the recent wave of errata, the feats are at the wrong levels and there's no indicator for what an advanced companion is (is it like an advanced construct companion? If so, why is this a 14th-level feat?). I do not understand why the developers didn't just copy-paste the companion feats from Pathfinder, and that's what I very quickly ended up doing even before the errata.
Broken feat progression aside, I quite liked the range of feat options I had for the Drone exocortex, in particular the special customizations. For the Mine and Turret subclasses, I felt I had a fair bit less choice, and I feel both could have plenty more options if, say, the Mine exocortex let you create temporary grenades and the Turret exocortex let you deploy any gun you had as a turret.
I liked most of the mod feats that were made available, and would definitely like more. There's a lot of room for exploration here, I think.
One feat I think needs a rejig is Critical Explosion. Specifically, it has the same problem as Expanded Splash on Pathfinder's Bomber Alchemist, in that more damage to your core ability (and especially +4 damage at level 1) is such a no-brainer that it effectively becomes a feat tax. Persistent damage on a crit fail is fine, but if the mines need more damage, that ought to be a part of the base package.
Auto-Target I found a really interesting take on ranged Reactive Strikes. It's still quite powerful, but rather than work as a free Strike each round, it specifically controls against movement, which made for actual counterplay. I'd be comfortable setting this as the model for other ranged Reactive Strikes, as I don't think it makes sense to have that reaction trigger at range from shooting when moving or shooting is what everyone's going to be doing practically every round.
I'm a bit confused by Tactical Team-Up, specifically in relation to Coordinated Fire: although there's perhaps a case to be made for triggering a weakness twice, the feat is otherwise straight-up worse than a lower-level feat that does the same thing. I could be wrong, but it feels like one feat was an updated version of the other and the original didn't get removed when the playtest launched.
Because so many of the feats cater to a specific exocortex, I wish there were "baby subclass" feats that let you access a much weaker version of an exocortex, much like the Prototype Companion feat on Pathfinder's Inventor. This would allow a Mechanic to more easily branch out into more feats.
Additionally, and this is also an issue I had with the Technomancer: I wish there were more feats that interacted with ambient tech, whether it's computer systems, tech hazards, enemy gear, and so on. I guess it's difficult to playtest when the bulk of playtesting tends to revolve around encounters, but I hope for more of those kinds of feats in the release version.
TL;DR Although the Drone feat line is completely garbled right now, even post-errata, I found the Mechanic's feats quite fun to choose and use. I'd like to see more mods and more feats that work off of environmental tech in the release version, but otherwise I have no huge criticisms to make here.
The concluding TL;DR is that in contrast to the Technomancer, who I think misses the mark as a tech-focused caster, the Mechanic I feel delivers much better on their class fantasy. Overall, the class's design and balance feel much closer to PF2e in many good ways, and sit much closer to what I expect from 2e classes. There are still some flaws, but most I think are fairly easy to address, and the core mechanic of modding and deploying stuff feels both fun and novel in my opinion. I think the Starfriends did an excellent job with this class overall, and I look forward to seeing what gets added to it on release!
After playtesting the new classes a fair amount, I think it's time I wrote some playtest notes. This is something I've done for other classes and elements of the Starfinder playtest, and you should be able to find the list below. I'll split my post into sections, spoiler them, and add a TL;DR just so it's all a bit easier to navigate.
I ran my playtests mostly across levels 1-15, as I ran them mostly using the official Starfinder playtest scenarios and field tests. I ran some playtests at higher levels using Pathfinder content, but treated those as secondary to the playtest scenarios.
I ran my Technomancer with a variety of party compositions, mostly with just other Starfinder classes. I eventually started adding Pathfinder classes into the mix, and treated those playtests as secondary.
I tested my Technomancer using different Starfinder ancestries, including ancestries from the Galaxy Guide.
I ran the scenarios RAW for the most part, only adjudicating when something broke or was missing from the rules (or the class's core features). I then started playing with certain parameters, chiefly the Techomancer's own features, and treated those findings as secondary.
As per standard, I maxed out the Technomancer's Intelligence, then Dexterity, then Constitution, and finally Wisdom.
I settled for the most part on a laser rifle to "cast gun". While trying out different subclasses, I went out of my way to try to accommodate their item needs when possible, such as buying a spell gem at level 1 for the Viper subclass.
TL;DR I ran the Technomancer through a series of playtest encounters from low- to fairly high level, using a variety of ancestries and party compositions. After a little over a week, I started experimenting with altering the Technomancer's features to see how that would affect their gameplay.
Overclock Gear:
There's a lot to be said about Overclock Gear, in my opinion. It might not seem it, as the mechanic doesn't have all that much text to it, but that I think is part of it:
First, let's talk cost. Overclock Gear requires you to cast a non-cantrip spell, which means that your choice is to either cast a slot spell, which is particularly costly at low level when you have only 2 to begin with, or to cast your focus spellshape for the sole purpose of activating this feature. I order to overclock consistently, I ended up using the latter, which on some level did feel hack-y and thus thematically appropriate, but for the most part felt wasteful, especially when there wasn't much else I could do on that turn.
At low level, DPS++'s weapon overclock felt genuinely really good to use, as my attacks were hitting more often and dealing a higher minimum amount of damage, and it was one of the few overclocks I could put to immediate use by Striking as my third action. At higher levels, though, my Strikes were so weak compared to other things I could do that I ended up overclocking mostly just for Jailbreak Spell.
Fortrun was more consistently useful for its +1 to AC, if not its retaliatory damage on a ranged and extremely squishy class.
ServoShell was literally useless due to not having a permanent tech minion.
Viper ended up having the most useful overclock at higher level (in fact, the versatility it provided was perhaps a little too strong), but at low level was prohibitively expensive to use due to the cost of spell gems.
Although activating Overclock Gear is necessary to use Jailbreak Spell, I mostly ignored this at low level, because I simply did not have the resources to do both consistently enough (and especially not if I used my focus spellshape to overclock). Instead, I stayed overclocked for as long as I could when using DPS++ and Fortrun. At higher levels, though, I started overclocking purely to jailbreak, and disliked this, as overclocking felt like the only aspect of the Technomancer that actually has them use magic to interface with tech and not the other way round, and I didn't enjoy it being used mostly just as a means to something else.
One thing to note is that if you jailbreak a slot spell, you can Overclock Gear on the same turn to regain your overclock effect. This will effectively negate the benefit of jailbreaking as a free action, but lets you save resources. This is one of those hackier elements of the class that I found both nifty and a little awkward at the same time.
A more minor gripe I have with the mechanic is that you can overclock any gear, not just tech gear. This means you could overclock analog or even archaic gear, which to me feels like a bit of a thematic miss.
In general, I felt there was something lacking to this mechanic. I really wanted to overclock more stuff, and just interact with tech a lot more. Instead, I had one designated way of overclocking, with other "overclock" effects just being focus spells with the word in the name and no mechanical relation.
TL;DR Overclocking felt underbaked, and more as a means to the end that is jailbreaking than its own mechanic. Although Viper's overclock shines at high level and DPS++ at low level, the mechanic felt inconsistent in its power scaling, costly to use at low level, and ultimately really limited on what is meant to be the tech caster. I really feel this mechanic could use more love, as I think there's so many different ways to overclock, so much more tech to play with, and the current overclock focus spells could be tied into Overclock Gear better too.
Jailbreak Spell:
I have a fair bit to say about Jailbreak Spell, which I also discussed in a separate thread, so I thought I'd give the feature its own section here:
For starters, and to make one thing clear, this feature is very fun to use. This is by far the most powerful way of modifying a spell in 2e so far, and feels like a major power-up when you get to add lots of riders to your spell (and as a free action, too!).
The big caveat here is that this feature is very fun to use... when you get to actually use it. At low levels, I barely used Jailbreak Spell at all, because setting it up typically requires spending a spell slot, and you need another slot spell to get the most bang for your buck. At 3rd level in particular, I had only 5 spell slots to work with for the entire day or scenario, so despite how strong the feature felt, I couldn't justify spending a huge portion of my limited resources on it.
While Jailbreak Spell is quite impactful, it's also fairly complex and takes some getting used to. On my first few uses, it took me a little while to track all the moving parts, particularly when factoring in subclass features. Every spellshape also ended up becoming quite a bit more complex and wordy as a result of needing a special jailbreak entry.
On a similar note, I also felt that some jailbreak options were more restricted than the mechanic would suggest. The jailbreak effect on Incognito Spell, for instance, could have been an amazing spellshape on its own, and in practice felt like a poor fit for a base spellshape that's meant to allow spells to be cast unnoticed.
TL;DR Jailbreak Spell succeeds at its goal of providing a spellshape that feels super-powerful, but at the cost of significantly complicating the Technomancer's spellshapes and amplifying their low-level resource problems. As much as I like the mechanic, I question its place as a core class feature.
Core Class:
Splitting my feedback on the class's core chassis, subclasses, and feats for readability:
I'm personally actually quite a fan of the class having lower base stats than the Starfinder playtest classes. This new baseline feels much more appropriate, and while the class felt squishier than others, that squishiness wasn't a dealbreaker by any means either, and made sense on the Technomancer. I'd even argue that the class could stand to lose its light armor proficiency and work as a full cloth caster, much like a Pathfinder Wizard.
Much like Pathfinder's Wizard, however, I'm not a big fan of the 3 + Int mod skill proficiencies at level 1. Just because an arcane caster uses Intelligence doesn't mean in my opinion that they should have less than the minimum number of skills; their Intelligence and higher number of trained skills I think is meant to be part of their advantages. Not a dealbreaker, though, and more of a pet peeve.
My experience with the Technomancer's spell slots is as follows: on its own, I actually quite like that the Technomancer isn't yet another 4-slot caster, and think it's okay for the class to have fewer spell slots. However, the class is chock-full of mechanics that push them to use spell slots, which made them feel resource-starved at low level, and I don't think those mechanics necessarily make up the gap in power either. That, however, I think is a problem with the class's other mechanics, not their spell slots, and I'd personally want them to have less dependence on limited resources at low level than more spell slots, as I think they do fine with those at higher levels.
Download Spell is effectively what I've wanted from Pathfinder's Wizard and Spell Substitution for a long time, and the reasons why are clear on the Technomancer. It feels fantastic to switch to a reliable and thematically-fitting spell on the spot, and this has subtly been the most impactful mechanic on the Technomancer in my opinion on several encounters. It definitely does feel like the Technomancer's hacking into magic.
The Technomancer's focus spellshapes feel great... at high level. When you have spell slots to spare, it feels great to have lots of ways to modify your spells. When you don't, it means your only resourceless ways to contribute are the bare minimum of guns and cantrips, and even with overclocking that does not feel very good. It also means that with overclocking and jailbreaking, a huge portion of the Technomancer's power is contingent on their use of spell slots, which prevents them from making full use of their mechanics at low level.
While the Technomancer's ability to hack spells definitely felt well-established, their identity as an actual technomancer, i.e. a character that uses magic to act on tech, did not. Overclocking is the only core mechanic that lends itself to this, and I think it falls short for the reasons detailed in its own section.
Reinforcing the above I think is the class's DC. It's bog-standard for casters in that it remains stuck at trained, which means the Technomancer's accuracy with grenades and many other tech weapons drops off quite significantly over time. Adding insult to injury, the Witchwarper gets a class DC proficiency that scales up to master rank, making the latter better at using many kinds of tech than the actual Technomancer.
TL;DR The core Technomancer in many ways felt like they had everything I always wanted from the Wizard, with a better Spell Substitution mechanic and lots of spellshapes to begin with. I think this sits well with their lower durability, and leads to a class that feels like they get a lot of control over their own magic, which is great for a caster that's being put forth as a spellhacker. However, the class has way too much pressure overall to use spell slots and poor resourceless fallback tools, which does not sit well with their 3 spell slots per rank. Additionally, the core class didn't really feel like a technomancer, at least not the view I had where they could interact with tech in plenty of different and impactful ways.
Programming Languages:
When playtesting the Technomancer's different subclasses, I felt there was enough variance to them that it was worth talking a bit about each of them individually:
I'd first like to start by mentioning how much I love the subclass names. The references to actual programming and scripting languages are fantastic, and really helped sell the class's theme in my opinion.
Although spellshapes can be quite useful, I did not get that much use out of the subclass spellshape feats. Again, I think this is because the Technomancer has too few spell slots and is pushed to spend them in too many different ways, which led me to feel that the class had all of their eggs in one spellshaping basket when they could have benefited from a little bit of diversification.
DPS++ felt like one of the more functional subclasses at low level, mainly because their overclock felt genuinely impactful and their cache spells were pretty directly useful. However, thermoelectric phase change does not interact with supercharge weapon, the subclass's 1st-rank cache spell, so I started off using that focus spellshape purely to overclock. At higher levels, by contrast, I ended up overclocking purely to jailbreak, as my Strikes felt really limp and inaccurate even when overclocked.
Fortrun succeeds at making you feel pretty durable, particularly when you can give yourself a +2 bonus to your AC (+1 status from protection, +1 circumstance from overclocking). However, same as with DPS++, there is no interaction between this subclass's focus spellshape and its own 1st-rank cache spell (nor any of its other cache spells, for that matter), which reinforced the notion that a lot of the class was clashing with bits of itself, especially at low level. My small handful of attempts to test out the retaliatory damage ended up with my character getting chunked and dealing only piddly damage, so I ended up ignoring that entirely and instead using a jailbroken Denial of Safety (which, again, has no interaction with the subclass's cache spells) to yeet myself out of an enemy's melee reach if they ever got that close. I could've made more use of overclock armor to protect my HP and active defense firewall to prep a nasty spell and get more bang for my buck, but I honestly believe both work better as situational precautions rather than tools you'd use to actively put yourself in the front line.
ServoShell is just not fit for purpose. The Technomancer has no inherent means of obtaining a minion that can be Commanded, rather than Sustained, so its overclock effect is nonfunctional. Summon minion, while obviously appropriate for the subclass, makes it impossible to use on a turn where you want to overclock (which you might want to do to jailbreak). Signal relay has the benefit over DPS++ and Fortrun of actually synergizing with the subclass's 1st-rank cache spell, except it is so overly reliant on it that you must summon a minion first before getting to make any use out of the spellshape, a significant resource cost that is far too large at low level.
Finally, Viper I'd say is the subclass that comes out on top, but only at higher levels. At low levels, even your lowest-rank spell gems will be prohibitively expensive to buy constantly, even when you get to stretch their use out a little more with dynamic frequency scaling. When you do get to consistently use spell gems, though, Viper becomes immensely versatile, and because their subclass features actually work with each other, the subclass feels really good to use. At higher levels I ended up becoming a bit of a do-everything caster, particularly with higher-rank focus spellshapes letting me heighten non-arcane spells from spell gems and temporarily add them to my spell cache. I will say, however, that the jailbreak benefit dropped off quite significantly in effectiveness at higher levels given that I was making Area Fires with my perma-trained class DC, so that didn't feel so good.
TL;DR The Technomancer's subclasses have a lot of potential, and can genuinely impact the class's playstyle, but are also incredibly janky, especially at low level. ServoShell in particular felt almost like I was playing with no subclass at all, and Viper struggled with gem costs at early levels before shooting into hyper-effectiveness at higher levels. There is a shocking lack of synergy between many of the subclasses' spellshapes and their own cache spells, particularly at low levels, and I would have much preferred to have had feats that actually benefited my subclass rather than more spellshapes.
Feats:
I mostly focused on level 1-14 feats during my playtests, owing to the level range at which I mostly played:
First, let's start with the positives: there's a vast number of different spellshapes, many of which feel impactful and novel, and this makes me very happy. I've always wanted more spellshapes for Pathfinder's Wizard, as I think there's a lot of untapped potential to those, and it's good to see that potential tapped here, even if it's on another arcane caster class.
Second, and this I think bears mentioning: the feat names are awesome. Starfinder's ability names are at their best when they lean into the material they dig into and reference stuff we players are familiar with, in my opinion, and as a programmer I found it particularly appealing to identify and recognize all of the tech references. This I think really helps drive home the Technomancer's flavor.
On the more critical side, I was very disappointed to see so few tech-centric feats. The bulk of the Technomancer's feats are about spellshaping or playing with spells, and my expectation was that the class would also have many feats that would let them interact with tech-based items, hazards, environments, and so on in unique ways, much like how Pathfinder's Druid and Ranger have tons of feats that let them interact with natural features. This to me reinforced the notion that the Technomancer wasn't really living up to their name, and felt more like a Wizard in space with a bit of tech flavoring.
Adding to the above, it didn't really feel like I had many feat paths to focus on my gear if I wanted to. There are a small handful of gun and grenade feats, the latter of which struggle against the class's perma-trained class DC, and that's about it.
There is a sore lack of feats for tech familiars and robot companions, which is all the weirder considering how the Mechanic has a robot companion feat line. Either would've been a great 1st-level feat for a ServoShell Technomancer and would've solved a lot of their problems.
An issue I ran into with spellshape feats was how packed each one was. Each feat was basically two spellshapes rolled into one, and I feel there could've been a simpler way to do this that would have avoided that kind of bloat. Specifically, Double Spellshape at 4th level feels like it could've worked well as the baseline model to follow for jailbreaking.
On a much more minor note, Sudo Spell does not do what the name suggests it does. "Sudo" is a command that's generally known for running programs with maximum user privileges, and has no inherent link to duplication. It feels like "Copy and Paste" would've been more appropriate for that feat, and "Sudo Spell" could be a fitting name for the Root Level Access feat that gives you an extra 10th-rank spell.
TL;DR The Techomancer's feats offer a ton of fun spellshapes and have quite possibly some of the best feat names I've ever seen. However, there is a serious lack of feats that interact with tech of any kind, and in general it feels like there was far too much of a focus on manipulating spells, which feels more appropriate for a Pathfinder Wizard than a class that's meant to also have an affinity with tech in the same way a Druid has an affinity with nature.
The big TL;DR to all of this is that based on my experience, I think the Technomancer needs a lot more work unfortunately. They're among the weakest and least functional classes I have ever playtested at low level, and even at higher levels I never really felt the class was fully living up to their fantasy. Part of this is because I expected the class to interact much more with tech, when in practice the class hyperfocuses on spellshapes and uses its overclock mechanic more as a means to that end, rather than as its own fully-fledged aspect. There is far too much pressure on the class to use their limited spell slots on their class mechanics, and I feel this problem would still exist at low level even if the class were a 4-slot caster. My biggest recommendation would be to take at least a few eggs out of that spellshaping basket, and instead put them into the class's tech aspect, if only so that they can have more useful abilities at level 1.
If interested, here are the notes I compiled on adjustments I made to the Technomancer that worked well for me:
Adjustments and Recommendations:
I experimented with converting Overclock Gear and Download Spell into single-action focus spells, dropping their current restrictions on frequency or needing to cast a non-cantrip spell. This in my opinion made the Technomancer feel much more functional at low level, because they could overclock much more easily and without added resource expenditure, giving them the fallback tools they currently sorely lack. In general, it made the class more flexible and I think made the focus spellshape more palatable, as it didn't feel like you were being locked out of a useful focus spell at low level.
I experimented with swapping out the spellshape feats on a few of the subclasses and instead giving them feats that synergized with their other mechanics: with ServoShell, I gave them a basic robot companion, and that made their spellshapes and overclock so much more functional from the get-go. With Viper, I homebrewed a feat that let them choose a 1st-rank arcane spell, and become able to create a 1st-rank spell containing that arcane spell for free each day: this made a massive difference as well, because it allowed the subclass to function without imposing a huge credit drain on itself. My recommendation at this point would be to take out all spellshape feats on the subclasses, and replace them with other feats more directly beneficial to those subclasses.
I tried splitting up spellshapes and their jailbreak effects into separate spellshapes that I could then mix and match with Jailbreak Spell, as with Double Spellshape. This definitely made the Technomancer more versatile, but also just gave them even more spellshapes to play with. I didn't experience anything unbalanced either, so I'd go as far as to say that cutting Jailbreak Spell as a core feature and instead having Double Spellshape be the way to mix and match spellshapes could make sense on the class.
I experimented with giving the Technomancer a class DC that scaled at the same rate as their spell DC. This generally did not actually make a huge difference, other than it made a few grenade-based features and feats more functional and meant grenades were always a viable option on the tech-based class. I do think this could be added to the base class without unbalancing it, and doing so I think would guarantee that it would interact properly with certain tech items.
TL;DR In my playtesting, I experimented with making the Technomancer less of a hyperfocused spellshaper, and instead turning some of their existing features into a deck of magic hacks that could be used without needing to expend spell slots. I also gave them a scaling class DC so they could use grenades better, and swapped their subclass spellshape feats with feats more directly synergistic with their subclass features. This in my experience led to a significantly more functional class, especially at low level, that felt like it could play at least a little more with tech. This may come down to taste, but I didn't feel the reduction in their spellshaping aspect that strongly, because at lower level I did not have enough spell slots to spellshape much anyway, and at higher levels I had so many spellshapes to choose from that I could easily become a master spellshaper if I so wished. Based on this, my recommendation would be to force less of a focus on spellshapes on the base class, and instead give them the tools they need to make more use of tech and still be effective at low level when not expending spell slots. Because many bits of tech don't use daily resources, and existing feats in 2e allow the generation of daily resources for free, I think the two go hand-in-hand.
Haven't seen a thread for this specific mechanic yet, so here goes: Jailbreak Spell is a core class feature the Technomancer gains at 3rd level, which lets you trade in your gear overclocking for an action compressor on a spellshape, plus an additional jailbreak benefit, plus an additional benefit if you use a specific spellshape granted by your subclass. This probably starts to get to one of the things I want to discuss, but just to lay out the steps, here's how you jailbreak and what you get out of it:
First, you cast a non-cantrip spell. Because your only non-cantrip spells from your class at lower levels are spellshapes, it's likely going to be a slot spell.
Then, you use Overclock Gear, another Technomancer class action that grants a specific persistent benefit to some of your gear based on your subclass. This and casting the spell will likely take up your entire turn, and you must do both on the same turn.
On some later turn in the same encounter, you use Jailbreak Spell. This ends the overclock effect on your gear.
You then get to apply one of your spellshapes as a free action.
In most cases, your spellshape will also have a special jailbreak benefit, which you apply to your spell in addition to the basic spellshape effect.
If you're jailbreaking your spell with the spellshape gained from your subclass (not the focus spell, the other one), you also apply another jailbreak benefit from your subclass, for a total of four separate benefits.
Now, I'd first like to start with the positives: when you do get to use this, it does actually feel like you're jailbreaking your spell. The Technomancer gets lots of juicy spellshapes that add cool new effects to spells, adding another jailbreak benefit pushes the spell modding element even further, and doing all of this at no added action cost really feels like a huge boost. In the very limited few times I've used this mechanic so far, it felt like a really high moment, and I think the Starfriends really aced the design of a class that can hack magic with this mechanic.
Now, the less positive stuff: as the above should hopefully indicate, the process of jailbreaking is... well, it's a lot. The mechanic is complicated to set up, can be fairly complicated to use, and importantly, takes up a huge number of actions and resources to put to full use. At 3rd level in particular, your Technomancer will only have 5 spell slots, so you're not exactly going to be able to blow 2 spell slots per encounter at that stage, nor would you necessarily want to. This, along with a bunch of other mechanics on the class, I think contributes heavily to them not feeling fully functional at low levels, because they lack the resources to make proper use of their class mechanics, and have no real fallback options when they run out. It's also in this respect fairly encounter-centric, given how you need to power up and cast another spell beforehand, when I think there's space for jailbreaking spells outside of encounters and in situations where you wouldn't be doing all of that setup (for instance, Incognito Spell in a social encounter).
The other issue, in my opinion, is how this contributes to another problem some others have brought up: sacrificing your overclocking to gain this benefit puts some of the Technomancer's mechanics directly at odds with their ability to do more with tech. In my opinion, it's part of the reason why the "techno-" aspect feels like it's playing second fiddle to what otherwise plays like what many have wanted an Experimental Spellshaping Wizard to be this whole time.
Finally, and on a much more minor note, I feel the way jailbreaking is currently implemented is a little... restricted? Most jailbreak effects feel like they could just be regular spellshapes in their own right, and in fact the Double Spellshape feat you can get lets you apply two spellshapes instead of one spellshape and its jailbreak benefit. The same also applies to that extra effect you get from jailbreaking your subclass's spellshape: you might as well just be layering two to three independent spellshapes on top of one another, and breaking some of these jailbreak effects into their own spellshapes and implementing the effect of Double Spellshape as a baseline by letting you mix & match could both avoid overloading individual spellshapes and make it much easier to add new ones in the future, while also unlocking even more options.
TL;DR Jailbreak Spell giving the benefit of essentially two to three spellshapes plus action compression feels like a major power-up. Unfortunately, I also think right now it's a bit clunky to use and super resource-hungry. I really like the mechanic and definitely should stay on the Technomancer, but ideally I'd like it to be a bit more straightforward to use, and not come at the expense of their interaction with tech.
In short: the Witchwarper gets a scaling class DC up to master proficiency, presumably because their 1e version was also good with explosives, whereas the Technomancer's class DC gets stuck at trained proficiency, making the Witchwarper better at handling common bits of tech than the tech-themed caster class.
Beyond the bit of grumbling around theming, this is also mechanically relevant, because several of the Technomancer's abilities rely on grenades: the Viper subclass's Jailbreak Spellshape function has you make an Area Fire action as you treat a spell gem as an electromag grenade, and the Grenade Spell feat at 8th level also lets you infuse a burst spell into a grenade, which you throw with the Area Fire action. Because the Area Fire action uses your class DC for its Reflex save, you'd be using your trained DC both times, making both actions scale extremely poorly.
With this in mind, I think it would be to the Technomancer's benefit for them to receive a scaling class DC. Unlike the Witchwarper, I think it could even go to legendary, and I don't think this would break anything: the class is clearly good at AoE and is intended to do well with AoE weaponry, so being good at Area Fires ought to be an intended strength, and archetype or ancestry feats that rely on class DC almost always let you use your spell DC instead, so there would be no change there.
To begin: this thread is an offshoot of this homebrew thread from A Butter Idea, whose concept serves as a starting point for this one. I very much recommend reading their post first, as they cover several issues with detection and senses in Pathfinder 2e really well, and that thread gives context to what's being presented here. I initially thought of posting this concept on their thread, but didn't want to crowd out their work with my own divergent homebrew, so I decided to post it here instead. With that established, let's go over a few points of criticism I have for senses and detection in PF2e:
What's Wrong With Detection Rules?:
I think the most obvious way to highlight the problem with detection in Pathfinder is to ask the simple, relatively common question of "How well can I target this creature in the encounter?" and list all the elements that factor into it:
You have different conditions marking states of detection, from observed to unnoticed.
You have different senses, which each have different states from precise to vague (with an implicit fourth state for not having the sense at all).
You have different conditions determining how senses are impaired, i.e. blinded, dazzled, and deafened. There's no conditions for other senses, and more conditions against sight than against hearing.
You have different conditions determining how detectable, rather than detected, something is. This overlaps heavily with detection conditions, and as A Butter Idea points out in their thread, there is a significant bias towards sight over any other senses (both the concealed and invisible conditions affect how others can see you).
You have environmental factors that can provide various conditions, generally localized to the bit of the environment. These can be conditions that impair senses, conditions that affect how detectable someone is, or both (and often it's both). The mist spell, for example, conceals creatures inside from creatures on the outside and vice versa.
You have different player mechanics, such as spells and ancestry abilities, that allow you to counter some of those environmental factors that would hinder your ability to detect others, low-light vision and darkvision being the two most obvious ways of doing so. There is, again, a heavy bias towards sight here.
So from all of this, I think we can draw a few conclusions:
This system is pretty complicated relative to the simple question it is generally meant to answer.
There is a huge bias towards sight: creatures are assumed to rely on sight by default, and the bulk of conditions and mechanics around detection play with sight rather than other senses. A Butter Idea tackles this bias in their homebrew, and correctly points out that this limits the ability to play Daredevil-like characters who rely on senses other than sight, while potentially complicating play in Starfinder 2e when so many creatures across the Universe and beyond have special senses of their own. More specifically, it means having any precise sense other than sight is far more powerful than it needs to be, because that lets a creature bypass the entire current system of counters and counters-to-counters built around sight.
These mechanics and conditions are almost completely dissociated from the game's usual system of bonuses and penalties: the concealed and hidden conditions impose flat checks, for instance, which force rolling twice for the same effect each time instead of leaning into the game's robust system of status and circumstance modifiers.
There's a lot of ambiguity around certain interactions: the Hide action, for instance, again relies heavily on the assumption of trying to escape from sight, so the GM has to start doing a lot of legwork to adjudicate when a creature can Hide when senses other than sight are involved.
In short: detection and senses sit in this little island of highly complex, overlapping, yet also sometimes confusing and ambiguous rules mostly separate from the rest of the game's mechanics. There's a lot to take in, but even then the question of whether or not one can detect a creature or Hide from them isn't super-clear, particularly when senses other than sight get involved. A Butter Idea addresses the bias towards sight in their brew, and I think we can go even further and streamline these rules even further.
Before listing specifics, I think it's worth listing the general roadmap of what I'd like out of an ideal detection subsystem in a game like Pathfinder, which could take on a variety of implementations:
I'd like the process of detecting and targeting creatures to be straightforward, or at least as straightforward as any other general mechanic in Pathfinder.
I'd like modifiers to detection to rely on Pathfinder's overarching system of numeric bonuses and penalties, instead of imposing their own separate checks.
I'd like the subsystem to be open-ended and flexible enough to be able to easily handle a potentially infinite variety of senses.
Here's how I'd go about trying to implement the above:
Binary Sense and Detection States:
The basic rule I'd like to apply here is: either you have a sense or you don't, and either a creature is hidden to you or it's not. What are currently imprecise senses could thus just be senses like your sight, albeit with more limited ranges or other restrictions, and vague senses could either not exist or be even more limited, such as only being able to smell a creature if they're adjacent to you for instance.
As for detection, the principle would be: unless a creature is trying to escape detection or is under some kind of stealth effect, you can just target them normally if they're within range of your senses (which is usually the case if you can see them), and if you can't sense them at all, then they become hidden to you.
What does it mean to be hidden? What about concealment? This is where the next part comes in:
New and Updated Conditions: Disabled & Hidden, Impaired & Occluded:
This is the bit where I'd want to start tying detection states to bonuses and penalties, while opening the system up to work consistently for any sense. Let's start with the hidden condition we mentioned earlier, and its counterpart for turning off senses, the disabled condition:
Hidden: When you're hidden from a creature, that creature doesn't know where you are, or if you're even there at all. A creature you're hidden from is off-guard to you, and you're occluded 4 to it (more on that later); if it tries to target you with an effect, it must select a space it thinks you occupy and the GM makes any rolls for the effect in secret, trying to affect you if you do occupy the space. Because area effects do not target creatures, a creature does not need to select a space when you're in the area of one of its effects, though the GM still rolls in secret to determine how you're affected. You may be hidden to only one or some of a creature's senses and not others, in which case you're not hidden from that creature unless you're hidden from all of its senses. Creatures whose senses you're hidden from are immune to your effects that rely on that sense, such as the visual trait if you're hidden from sight or the auditory trait if you're hidden from hearing.
Disabled: When one of your senses is disabled, it stops working. All creatures and objects are hidden to that sense from you, and you can't use that sense to Seek or Search.
Effectively, the hidden condition would include a bit of the undetected condition, and would be able to cover the invisible condition plus any counterpart for other senses, while the disabled condition would uniformly cover any kind of condition that stops your sense from working, like blinded or deafened. For softer conditions, let's follow up with the occluded condition for being concealed from a sense, and the impaired condition for partially blocking that sense:
Occluded: When you're occluded from a creature, it's harder for that creature to sense you. The occluded condition always includes a value up to 4. You gain a circumstance bonus equal to your occluded value to your defenses against that creature's Seek actions and actions that target you, as well as your Stealth checks against that creature, and a circumstance penalty to your occluded value to the checks and DCs of your actions that require the creature to sense you, such as a visual action if you're occluded from a creature's sight. Because area effects do not target creatures, you do not gain this circumstance bonus against area effects. You may be occluded to only one or some of a creature's senses and not others, in which case your occluded value against that creature is equal to the lowest occluded value you have against any of that creature's senses that can sense you. For instance, if you're occluded 2 to a creature's sight but not occluded to its smell when within range of that sense, you're not occluded to that creature. If you're occluded 4 to a creature, you're hidden from it.
Impaired: When one of your senses is impaired, it's prevented from fully working. The impaired condition always includes a value up to 4. All creatures and objects are occluded to that sense from you, with an occluded value equal to your impaired value.
And with that, that should be a pretty simple, yet flexible way of expressing how well you can detect something with a sense: effects that currently conceal you could instead make you something like occluded 2, and depending on the effect you could choose whether this occludes you to sight, hearing, multiple senses, or just a certain subset. Similarly, the dazzled condition could just make your sight impaired 2, and you'd suddenly have plenty of room to easily apply this to any sense you'd like. While not strictly a part of the above, this kind of framework could also easily lead to other mechanics (and please excuse the weird formatting, it seems lists and spoiler text don't mix well):
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If you wanted to express senses becoming less accurate over a distance, much like range increments on ranged attacks, you could have your impaired conditions for your senses increase with each of their respective increment, with the value capping at 4 and making creatures hidden at that point. This would likely require tweaking senses to have shorter ranges, and giving sight an explicit range increment (which wouldn't be a bad thing, as it'd help adjudicate certain long-distance scenarios a bit better), but could add even more depth to detection using the same rules.
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If you wanted to condense different sense-based traits, you could just have one sense trait that specifies one or more senses each time, and requires creatures to have that sense (or those senses) to be able to be affected, so the visual trait could become "Sense: Sight", the auditory trait could be come "Sense: Hearing", and so on. This could more explicitly tie those effects into specific senses and the conditions that affect them, while making it easy to create new traits for other senses, such as "Sense: Lifesense" for an effect that relies on that specific sense.
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You could easily implement a whole bunch of effects that'd mess with senses. If you have a cold or are in a cold environment, for instance, your smell could be impaired, a short-sighted creature could have their range increment on their sight reduced, or a creature that's hard of hearing or just has a really weak sense of hearing could have the sense permanently impaired. By contrast, creatures that have some kind of natural camouflage or register more dimly to certain senses (for instance, a creature that evolved to muffle its own sound, or an assassin trained to hide their thoughts from thoughtsense) could be occluded to those respective senses. You could potentially even go in the opposite direction and give a negative occluded value to creatures that are particularly detectable through certain senses, like xulgaths with their stench, or create a separate condition just for that.
More Consistent, Flexible, and Streamlined Environmental Effects:
With the above conditions established, let's see how this can be used to simplify how the environment affects senses (and again, apologies for the strange formatting):
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Some environmental features could provide occlusion to certain senses, like dim light or darkness against sight. Occluding terrain renders all creatures and objects inside occluded, with a value determined by the intensity of the occlusion. Standard occlusion, like dim light, could make creatures occluded 2 to the applicable sense, and greater occlusion would make creatures hidden (or occluded 4, as both would be the same).
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Sometimes the occlusion is two-way, as with magical darkness or the area of a silence spell. Just call this kind of terrain two-way occluding terrain, meaning all creatures and objects inside are occluded, but all creatures and objects outside the area are occluded to those creatures too.
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Effects that ignore concealment or let creatures perceive clearly in certain environments could just let you ignore the occlusion of certain terrain: low-light vision could let you ignore the occlusion of dim light, darkvision could let you ignore the occlusion of nonmagical darkness and dim light, and greater darkvision could let you ignore the occlusion of all darkness and dim light, including magical darkness.
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Cover does not automatically provide a bonus to Stealth checks. Instead, opaque objects and surfaces that often provide cover instead often provide occlusion to sight as well, with the objects and surfaces affecting the occlusion: simply having a wall in-between you and a creature may create two-way occlusion, but standing on the transparent side of a one-way mirror would provide one-way occlusion. If a terrain feature that provides two-way occlusion has an opening that takes a bit of positioning to sense through, such as a keyhole in a door, you can Take Cover behind the feature to sense through the feature normally, though the GM might determine that this focus occludes other creatures that you'd normally be able to sense.
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This ought to make adjudicating how terrain affects the senses both fairly flexible but also quite easy: you could have terrain that hinders everyone's senses, like a loud crowd impeding hearing, and certain situations where you're occluding yourself to someone else's senses while keeping your own clear, like concealing yourself behind a bush. Depending on the intensity of the effect, the GM could even scale the occluded value accordingly. For existing effects that create occluding terrain, it'd be easy to describe it as such: a mist spell, for instance, could just provide two-way standard occlusion to sight, and that would be enough to describe the spell's functionality.
Updated, Less Binary Hide and Seek Actions:
Hide is currently an action that's both fairly binary and also quite ambiguous when it comes to hiding from certain specific senses. With the above, this no longer needs to be the case. For instance:
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Hide (One-Action) Traits: Secret
You attempt to escape a creature's senses, if only momentarily. When you use this action, choose up to two senses you're trying to Hide from. Typically, you'll be trying to Hide from sight and hearing, though you may choose to Hide from other senses instead. You can choose up to three senses if you're an expert in Stealth, four if you're a master, and five if you're legendary. The GM rolls your Stealth check in secret and compares the result to the Perception DC of each creature that can sense you. You automatically critically fail your check if the creature can sense you using a sense you're not trying to Hide from.
Critical Success You become hidden to that creature until immediately after you take an obtrusive action that it can sense. This is typically a hostile action against the creature, but also includes other actions that are highly noticeable, such as Casting a Spell. If you try to perform an otherwise noticeable action in a particularly unobtrusive way, such as trying to quietly trying to Disable a Device, the GM might require you to perform another Stealth check to Hide from detection.
Success As critical success, but you become occluded 2 instead of hidden.
Failure As critical success, but you become occluded 1 instead of hidden.
Critical Failure You fail to escape the creature's senses.
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With this, you'd no longer need to specifically be in cover or specific terrain to successfully Hide, though you'd still benefit from all of that, you'd have a range of effects depending on your degree of success, and you'd be explicitly stating which senses you're trying to Hide from. Seek could be even simpler:
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Seek (One-Action) Traits: Concentrate, Secret
You scan an area for hidden creatures and objects. The GM attempts a single secret Perception check for you and compares the result to the Stealth DCs of any creatures within range of any of your senses.
Critical Success The creature loses the hidden or occluded condition against you that it gained by Hiding from you. The creature does not lose either of these conditions that are gained from other effects, such as terrain or a spell.
Success As critical success, but the creature remains occluded 2 to you if it was hidden.
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So you'd just extend all your senses and potentially catch creatures trying to Hide from you within their range.
The TL;DR to all this is: rather than have lots of discrete states and conditions for senses, detection states, and levels of impairment or occlusion, use a circumstance bonus instead to determine how much a creature resists targeting and detection, with one single condition for being completely hidden, and have all of those different factors tie into that same bonus in the end, with conditions being able to apply to any sense in particular or in general as needed. Not only could this streamline what already exists and clarify certain specific points, it'd make it much easier to play with detection and stealth via new mechanics, with the GM having many more tools at their disposal for affecting senses and detection situationally. Although the above is quite a significant departure from what we'd got, it'd be a relatively simple process to map this new subsystem onto what already exists, such as by using the occluded condition instead of concealed (and using occluded 2 by default), or impaired instead of dazzled.
A quick introduction: this homebrew started with the Magus, and how to do the Magus differently. Starting with the foundation of the Magus, I wanted to let the class opt into different traditions, perhaps even emulate the features of other classes besides the Wizard's spellcasting, while also leaning more into utility... and realized that what I was developing wasn't the Magus at all, but something entirely new.
From this concept came the Scion, a completely different take on a gish class. The Scion is a hybrid class in purest form, in that they draw from the power of two separate classes, one caster and one martial, and combine spells and Strikes in combat in their own unique way. Here are the highlights:
Hybrid, class-based subclasses: The Scion has two dimensions of subclasses with their hybrid focus feature, and the class chooses one magical focus and one martial focus as their two subclasses. These foci each emulate an existing class, determining your proficiencies, your spell tradition, whether you're prepared or spontaneous, and give you a few of those classes' features as well. This is more than you'd get from a multiclass dedication, but far less than what the original class gets, and you don't get the scaling damage boosters of your martial focus's class or the spellcasting proficiency or spell output of your magical focus. With 14 magical foci and 20 martial foci to choose from, you get 280 different subclass combinations!
Spell Combat: Drawing from a key feature of 1e's Magus, Spell Combat is an action compressor action that lets the Scion cast a Strike and a cantrip against a single target at a reduced action cost. Because you start out only being able to use this with cantrips, your bounded spell slots become much more valuable for utility, but at higher levels you get fusion spells, special spell slots that let you cast spells with Spell Combat, and only with Spell Combat.
50 Feats: Many feats allow the Scion to modify Spell Combat in various ways, draw more power from their spell tradition, and mix magic into their skills in order to make more use of skill actions, among many other effects. In addition, your hybrid focus lets you take feats from the classes you're drawing from, making the Scion one of the most customizable classes in the game.
In short, the Scion is a class that shines not necessarily through raw power output, but through versatility and breadth of options. They're not a class I'd recommend to a player new to Pathfinder, but they have the ability to let players play a character that's split about 50/50 between two classes, rather than the typical 75/25 or so split you'd normally get from multiclassing, and that combines different class features into a harmonious new playstyle. Let me know what you think, and I hope you enjoy!
There's been a lot of discussions around the Wizard since the remaster, none of them all that positive. There's a consensus that the class has changed for the worse, and that the general landscape has evolved in a manner that's left them behind, which does not bode well for what seems to be an otherwise flavorful expansion themed entirely around wizarding academies across Golarion. For those who aren't familiar with the discussions already, here I think are some common points:
What's Wrong with the Wizard?:
Because the Wizard's arcane school slot got changed to work only with a limited curriculum of spells, rather than an entire OGL school of magic, the Wizard received a substantial nerf to their versatility. In some cases, this also came at a minor yet symbolic loss in power, as schools like Battle Magic force the class to prepare spells into lower-rank slots that become obsolete when not heightened enough.
Meanwhile, the remaster has seen most other casters buffed, sometimes substantially. The Oracle is now a four-slot caster, the Mystic and Witchwarper from the Starfinder playtest are both four-slot casters, and even the Sorcerer received a wave of buffs. Less directly, non-arcane spell lists received significant benefits with the addition of spirit damage and a host of new and improved spells, shortening the gap between traditions. This has left the Wizard's four-slot casting feeling much less unique, and has made players increasingly question the restrictions placed both upon the class's fourth slot, and their spell slots overall due to the limitations of their spellbook.
Although the Wizard did receive some positive changes, including some better feats, many issues remained largely unaddressed. Experimental Spellshaping is still not a very popular arcane thesis, Spell Substitution still competes with Refocusing, many school spells still aren't very useful, and the class still has only fairly few feats to choose from, especially for what is meant to be one of the four iconic spellcasters for their respective traditions (they have around half the amount of feats as the Bard, Cleric, or Druid). Unlike other spellcasters, they still can't get a pool of 3 Focus Points without taking an archetype, nor can they access the features of a different subclass, such as the curriculum or school spell of a different arcane school. This has led many players to feel like the Wizard has been neglected.
A lot of players have started to reexamine the Wizard in a more critical light: specifically, the class's overwhelming focus on casting arcane spells does not come across as truly unique in a game with plenty more arcane spellcasters. Similarly, their identity as a student of magic, and an intellectual class in general, doesn't particularly get to shine given how they lack feats that let them Recall Knowledge better, or more broady allow them to do more things that don't just involve casting spells.
Despite what appears to be fairly common ground for criticism, there doesn't seem to be much consensus over which direction to take the Wizard: some people want the class to remain a four-slot caster, others don't. Some people want the class to specialize in a particular school of magic, others don't. Some players even challenge the Wizard's spell preparation, as they dislike the inflexibility of Vancian spellcasting. It seems there are about as many different identities for the Wizard as there are players with an opinion on the Wizard, which makes it difficult to come up with a solution that satisfies everyone.
In short: the Wizard fell behind at a time where every other caster pulled significantly ahead, and as a result people are questioning their place in a game where their power struggles to stand out, and their flaws have become much more apparent. Lots of players want a new and better Wizard, but nobody can agree upon what that Wizard would look like, and so most threads critiquing the class often devolve into squabbling.
With this in mind, I can't really claim to offer a one-size-fits-all solution, because I don't think one exists for this particular problem: I do, however, think there is an approach to take here that could satisfy a greater number of players, and that is to let the player choose what they want the Wizard's specialty to be. If you're interested in specific details, I wrote a 25-page Wizard homebrew that adopts this approach. Beyond those specifics, here I think are the broad lines of how the Wizard could be improved, in whichever form that takes:
Power Concentrated into Arcane Thesis: On one hand, players can't seem to decide what the Wizard is meant to excel at. On the other, many players also want their arcane thesis to be more impactful. I think the Wizard's arcane thesis is the key to giving players what they want here: by no longer making the class a four-slot caster by default, that I think leaves a lot more room in the power budget for much stronger theses. Do you want to cast spellshapes as free actions from level 1? Do you want to shake off the limitations of prepared casting and gain the benefits of flexible spellcasting, without the drawbacks? Do you want to remain a 4-slot caster, but don't want your fourth slot to be restricted to a curriculum? In all of these cases and more, I think there's ample room to deliver that with a playstyle-defining subclass choice.
More Schools: One thing I think many of us are waiting for is a larger number of arcane schools, particularly as the Wizard ended up with fewer schools post-remaster, and the only school they got since is a reskin of the School of Mentalism. I suspect this is something Rival Academies will help with, and I think there's a prime opportunity here to take the Elementalist's elemental schools and make them proper schools for the core Wizard, as well as adapt the Runelord schools to a post-remaster 2e as arcane schools of their own.
More Feats: You can't go wrong with more feats, and with the Wizard there's a lot left to explore, in my opinion. In particular, I think there's plenty of room for feats that improve the Wizard's Lore skills and ability to Recall Knowledge, feats that let a Wizard gain some benefits from a different arcane school, and feats that build on the Wizard's arcane thesis.
In short, give the Wizard lots more options, but also make their arcane thesis the main feature that defines what the class excels at. I think there's room for more specific changes, like making Spell Substitution core to the class instead of their arcane bond feature and allowing the Wizard to substitute spells while Refocusing, but otherwise this sort of framework where each arcane thesis gets a lot more power I think would have a much better chance of tailoring the Wizard to the specific desires of different players than their current structure. You could have your spell battery Wizards, your spellshape-centric Wizards, and even your specialist Wizards all in one, and each would get to shine in their own specific way.
It feels like a good portion of criticism of the Necromancer class revolves around the static and largely inanimate nature of their thralls: the reasons behind that are mechanically understandable, as the class is built to just create more thralls instead of controlling them all on an individual basis, but thematically that's chafed with quite a few players, who see the class more as this more generic token-mancer than the master of an undead horde. I imagine it feels like something's missing in that respect, and I wonder if that's a gap that could be filled with an extra starting grave cantrip. For instance, something along the following lines:
With a command, you spur a thrall to action. The thrall Strides up to your Speed, or Burrows, Climbs, Flies, or Swims instead of Striding if you have the corresponding movement type. If the thrall ends its movement adjacent to an enemy, it can make a melee unarmed Strike using your spell attack modifier for the attack roll. This attack deals your choice of 1d6 bludgeoning, piercing, or slashing damage. This Strike uses and counts toward your multiple attack penalty.
If you have the expert necromancy class feature, you can command up to two thralls, increasing to three if you have master necromancy and four if you have legendary necromancy. A target can't be targeted by more than one thrall's Strike at a time, and you do not increase your multiple attack penalty until all of the Strikes have been made.
Heightened (+2) The damage increases by 1d6.
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Effectively, instead of creating an existing thrall, you could move one around and have it make another attack from potentially farther away. This'd probably still not be a great ability to have at low level, especially given how a lot of thrall-based abilities have such short ranges, but with multiple thralls, this could potentially get more interesting as you make more attacks. Thralls right now have the problem of being permanently ground-bound, which makes the Necromancer quite difficult to play at higher levels when flying enemies become more common, so having them potentially inherit a fly Speed you may have could help alleviate that issue. Most importantly, though, this cantrip could let you do more with your thralls besides just consume them, and this time it'd be your thralls actually doing something too. What do y'all reckon, would this help make thralls feel a little less like static tokens?
This is more of a manifesto and a proof of concept than a brew in its own right, so I'll start with the point I want to prove: in a future Pathfinder edition, I think characters ought to be resourceless by default, because it's much easier to convert a resourceless character to daily resources than the reverse. To prove this, I homebrewed a class archetype for the Kineticist called the Kinetic Mage. The full details are in the linked document, but here are the highlights:
You no longer get impulse feats from your class features, and instead you get special slots called impulse slots, which work much like spell slots and are used to cast a certain number of daily impulses. These impulse slots determine the level of your impulses and their effects, much like heightening a spell, and you can still select at-will impulses using your class feats if you want.
You can choose to be a prepared or spontaneous Kinetic Mage. If you're prepared, you prepare impulses into your impulse slots each day, and if you're spontaneous, you have a repertoire of fixed-level daily impulses you can use impulse slots with, along with signature impulses that level up automatically based on the impulse slot used to "cast" them (just like signature spells!).
Instead of reflow elements, your daily impulses all go up in level, up to 2 extra levels. Because Kineticist impulses are generally balanced to be a rank below slot spells of your level range, this makes your 9th-rank impulse slots equal in power to 9th-rank spells.
There's a few details more, like getting an Elementalist focus spell to start and an improved Kinetic Activation feat in your dedication, but that's the meat of it. Beyond letting you play a Kineticist more like a traditional spellcaster if you're so inclined, this should also hopefully demonstrate how the slot-based caster framework is fairly simple to describe and apply to a class suited for it in 2e. If a spellcaster were designed using a framework like the Kineticist's, any player wanting to play them with a more traditional, daily resource-based playstyle would be able to easily opt into that, just as those wanting to avoid daily attrition would easily be able to get what they want as well. The reverse isn't as easy, however, and although it's somewhat possible to take daily attrition out of current spellcasters, it's much more complicated to pull off in my opinion and comes with its own issues.
Worth noting is how the above also enables a lot more customizability, as well: the Kineticist's framework lends itself easily to thematic specialization, so starting from that baseline could make it much easier to develop any kind of thematic caster. I chose to make my archetype a 3-slot caster, but it would be fairly simple in my opinion to make it a 2-slot caster in exchange for some buffs (for instance, a snall handful of free at-will impulses, or more gate junctions), or even potentially a 4-slot caster with some more tradeoffs (for instance, by nerfing the class's durability while forcing them to opt into a dual gate). In an environment where there's been increasing player demand for thematic casters and casters without the daily attrition of spell slots, the solution in a future edition could be to make thematic, attrition-free frameworks the default for any magic-user, and enable hyper-versatility, daily resources, and Vancian preparation through character options.
Of all the news we just got from the latest Paizo blog, this one's my personal favorite:
Paizo wrote:
One new element we'll be introducing is the traversal trait. This new trait mostly applies to player-facing rules that reference Stride. When it applies, traversal allows the use of alternative movement types (burrow, fly, and swim) to be used in place of land Speed, akin to how Sneak works. Expect to see this greatly impact some abilities used by the envoy and solarian (to name a few).
One of the many things I love about 2e, both with Pathfinder and Starfinder, is the system's modularity and its ability to compress a lot of meaning and functionality into traits, akin to functions in programming. This new addition, in my opinion, is a shining example of this, and how powerful 2e's system design is. I've been wanting to see exactly this kind of trait in a game that has a lot of movement abilities, and am very happy to see this, as this will not only improve many mechanics in Starfinder, but could also benefit several in Pathfinder too. Thank you for this new trait, Paizo; I look forward to seeing it in effect!
The premise here is fairly simple: the Battle Harbinger is meant to be a divine class who can fight well in martial combat and deploy auras. As it so happens, there's a divine martial class in Pathfinder that already comes pre-packaged with an aura and even spell proficiency progression, specifically the Champion. The latter class even comes with causes and tenets that spur them to action, much like a battle creed, and they can even take up oaths to combat specific foes! Thus, with just a few feats, I think the Champion could be easily made to fit the Battle Harbinger's niche much better than the Battle Harbinger themselves. Here are my suggestions, with a TL;DR below:
Aura of Devotion, a 1st-level feat for picking up aura devotion spells:
Aura of Devotion (Feat 1) Traits: champion Prerequisites: champion's aura
You can allow your deity's power to radiate from you, bathing creatures in your aura with divine energies. You gain a devotion spell based on your deity's divine font: beatifying aura if your deity allows heal, or execrative aura if your deity allows harm.
Beatifying Aura, an aura buff devotion spell:
Beatifying Aura (One Action, Focus 1) Traits: uncommon, champion, concentrate, focus Duration: sustained up to 1 minute
You bask in your deity's glory, spurring creatures within your aura to fight with renewed zeal. You and allies within your champion's aura gain a +1 status bonus to attack rolls, damage rolls, or saving throws, which you choose when you Cast the Spell. Once per round on subsequent turns, you can change the effect to a different option when you Sustain the spell. Beatifying aura can counteract execrative aura.
Execrative Aura, an aura debuff devotion spell:
Execrative Aura (One Action, Focus 1) Traits: uncommon, champion, concentrate, focus Defense: Will; Duration: sustained up to 1 minute
You exude your deity's hatred for its enemies, impeding foes who dare to exist in your presence. Enemies within your champion's aura must succeed at a Will save or take a -1 status penalty to attack rolls, damage rolls, or saving throws, which you choose when you Cast the Spell. Once per round on subsequent turns, you can change the effect to a different option and force enemies in the area that weren't yet affected to attempt another saving throw when you Sustain the spell. Execrative aura can counteract beatifying aura.
Radiate Exultation, a 6th-level counterpart to Tandem Onslaught:
Radiate Exultation (Free Action, Feat 6) Traits: champion Prerequisites: Aura of Devotion
Trigger: You deal damage to a creature with a successful Strike, and your beatifying aura or execrative aura is active.
As your blow lands true, your triumph reverberates across your divinely-suffused aura and renews it. You Sustain the triggering aura.
Redoubled Devotion, a 8th-level feat to apply multiple aura buffs or debuffs:
Redoubled Devotion (Feat 8) Traits: champion Prerequisites: Aura of Devotion
You reaffirm your commitment to your deity's cause with even greater fervor, channelling even more of your deity's glory or hatred. When you Cast beatifying aura or execrative aura, and each time you change the aura's effect, you can choose two options instead of one.
Empowered Exultation, a 10th-level counterpart to Empowered Onslaught:
Your greatest triumphs against your foes saturate your aura with even more intense deific power. When you Radiate Exultation and critically succeeded on the triggering Strike, increase the triggering aura's status bonus or penalty by 1, to a maximum of 4. This value remains for the rest of the aura's duration.
Trinity of Devotion, a 14th-level feat for even more aura effects:
Trinity of Devotion (Feat 14) Traits: champion Prerequisites: Redoubled Devotion
Your commitment to your cause is unquestionable, and your deity grants you unlimited sanction when you channel their power into your aura. When you Cast beatifying aura or execrative aura, and each time you change the aura's effect, you can choose three options instead of two, and can choose from all the options listed in both spells. Choosing to impose a penalty causes enemies not yet affected by your aura to make a Will save, even if your spell wouldn't normally induce a save.
Divine Clarion, a 16th-level feat for a free-action aura cast on initiative:
Divine Clarion (Free Action, Feat 16) Traits: champion Prerequisites: Aura of Devotion
Trigger: You roll initiative.
Your aura of devotion is like a battle cry from your deity itself, surging from you at the first sign of combat. You Cast beatifying aura or execrative aura.
Harbinger of War, a 20th-level feat to enable wave casting when archetyped with a Cleric:
Harbinger of War (Feat 20) Traits: champion Prerequisites: Master Cleric Spellcasting
Your closeness to your deity has made them choose you as a representative of their faith, granting you even greater magic that can be changed in preparation for warfare. You gain a 9th-rank spell slot from Master Cleric Spellcasting, in addition to the spell slots it normally provides you.
Each time you make your daily preparations, you can choose to prepare for war. If you do so, you lose all of the spell slots you gain from cleric archetype feats of 7th rank and below, and gain an additional 9th-rank spell slot from Master Cleric Spellcasting. If you have the Divine Breadth feat, you also gain an additional 8th-rank spell slot from Master Cleric Spellcasting. These spell slots last until the next time you make your daily preparations.
TL;DR: With just a few feats, you could easily have the Champion use their aura to buff or debuff to an even greater extent than they do now, and so more smoothly than with a Battle Harbinger. In fact, with just one capstone feat that would reward a 5-feat commitment to a Cleric archetype, you could even go full Battle Harbinger with wave casting!
