TheOneGargoyle's page

Update: we had our session 0 last night, although with only 2 PC's, myself and the thaumaturge.

The thaumaturge decided to start with the weapon implement, and I decided to give Shadow a go with a bastard sword.

We had a few faux combats to get a feel for how the system worked. One was a couple of giant rats, one was a Wolf, and another was an Orc Warrior.

The rats and wolf encounters were fine, but the Orc warrior really showed me first hand how susceptible to AoO's the magus is. Now I understand the value of a reach weapon, I'll probably swap to a polearm once monsters with AoO's start showing up more often.

Also I got to experience for myself how painful it is to miss with a spellstrike and why frightened, flat-footed, Aid, etc are so important.

Given the concern I had about the action economy of the Magus that had me originally start this thread, I found in actual play that even though I never had as many actions as I wanted, working out what to do with the ones I had was enjoyable, both tactically and thematically. I felt like I had useful and powerful options at my disposal, and I felt like a warrior-mage mixing it up with spell and sword. All in all I enjoyed it immensely and think I'll be very happy playing a Magus.

We learnt lots about the PF2 system too. For example, looking through the Bestiary for simple enemies to fight, there aren't really any boring monsters - all of them have interesting abilities, mechanics & so on that make them more than just plain attack and deal damage fights. That's quite different from 5e monsters.

Also the thaumaturge player was quite surprised to work out that it might be a more optimal use of their third action to aid me if I'm doing a spellstrike that round, than to just attack a third time at -10 and almost certainly miss. In 5e it's never worth aiding another character.

None of the enemies we picked to fight had a weakness for the thaumaturge to exploit, or for me to target, but we got to see how it might work if we had.

Out of all of it though, I think the biggest thing we learnt was that even a moderate encounter can turn scary really fast if you have a few rolls go against you. The second round of combat against the Orc was literally if we don't take it out before it's turn, we're probably both dead. That's another big difference from 5e combats!

All in all, our first impression was that the combat system in PF2 was fun & interesting and way more than just attack & deal damage.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to this thread and helped me understand the class & game system enough to proceed with it. Huge appreciation! :-)

<lots of really useful & thought-provoking stuff

Thanks Unicore. This all makes a lot of sense.

I think you are right, and as we are all just beginning in PF2 I will have a chat to the DM about the possibility of us respeccing if we need to once we've played for a couple of levels. I'm pretty confident that they'll be ok with it.

Also as you say, the AP means I will start w/ Wizard FA, so it will be a few levels until I need to worry about another archetype and alternative focus spells, so I think I'll have time to get a feel for how the initial ones play out first.

I'm leaning pretty heavily towards picking up Force Fang at L2 so that I have 2 focus points to play with, and more options of what to do with them.

We're getting together tomorrow night to do a bit of a Session 0 type setup and the DM has said they might even do a couple of faux combats for us to get a feel of how our characters play in a fight.

I'm pretty sold on a Str-based 2H wpn build. I'll just need to make the final call on Shadow or Iron and I keep flip-flopping on which way to go with that.

There seems like such good arguments on both sides, but in summary, how I'm viewing it right now:

Shadow:
Pros - higher mobility due to conflux spells, flexibility of 1H/2H wpn options (bastard sword maybe? unarmed ?), thematically appealing to me
Cons - speed bonus from AC can be replaced with Wand of Lonstrider at L2, bonus dmg has restrictive constraints (empty hand & flat-footed)

Iron:
Pros - higher durability from temp hps (& self-healing a high levels)
Cons - locks into 2H wpn only, conflux spells lackluster, will struggle more with action economy

Did I miss anything in the pros & cons ? Would you add or change anything there ?

It's worth mentioning to your GM that the encounters are all balanced around having a 4 person party, so even built perfectly your group will be under-strength.

Yes, thanks, we have talked about this. I think we're going to do a few made-up background-y type encounters first to get the hang of the system a bit, then level up to to L2 before we start the AP, so we'll be consistently 1 level higher throughout. Not sure if this will be enough but we can adjust further if needed. I saw somewhere a recommendation to apply the Weak Template to everything to further compensate but that seems like a lot of work for the GM so not sure we'll use that, but I guess it's an option.

Using a reach weapon and having the Free Archetype that SoT grants are both very nice, and I think will smooth out a lot of the usual Magus worries around AoO and spell selection. It's also worth remembering that SoT puts more focus on both skills and nonviolent solutions than most APs, so you can get away with a little less combat optimization.

This is very good to know too. Are there any non-combat things worth covering or doing specifically ?

Wow, thanks everyone for such a warm welcome and for all that advice !

Feels nice to be part of a community like that :-)