Is now when I fight for a coloring book.......
Coloring Wayne Reynolds art? That sounds fun!
Search Posts
What if you were crafting the wands yourself? Wouldn't that reduce the time it takes to be able to earn enough gold to then keep buying more? Base crafting doesn't save you any money, so not unless you spend additional days working on it to lower the price. If you spend a month making a wand, you can put a real dent in the cost. Course, crafting is a downtime activity measured in days, so your GM may rule you can't spend an hour activating wands while you're crafting wands, in which case there's a crossover where you wind up losing more income than you gain in cost savings, at which point you should outsource the wand creation. Wow, this really is an incremental game!
I generally value Con over Dex on a summoner. The former helps both the eidolon and the summoner whereas the latter only helps the summoner.I tend to prefer Dex over Con. HP is something that is easier to compensate for in the game, whether with feats, items, or spells, while the options to compensate for a lower AC are a bit more restricted or expensive. Summoner is a bit of an odd beast that way though, because there's two of you that can get hit. Only one of those benefits from DEX in terms of how tough you are. Both benefit from CON. You also have more control than some other characters in terms of "avoid getting hit", because you can build one of you to Trip/Grab/Be Really Big And Get In the Way and thus make it harder for enemies to get to the other one of you. That gives you some control over where attacks go that another class has to rely on other players for. It's not foolproof and you don't want to just totally tank your AC, but it's extremely important for Summoner's ability to be effective that the Eidolon be able to withstand an assault and CON is the ability that actually helps with that. Hell, the Summoner in my Ruby Phoenix game went so far as to make his Apex Item a CON one. Obviously trading Summoner offense for durability there, but wow was he hard to take down, especially when I would finally get him low.. and then he'd bust out Moment of Renewal, which is a heal that does scale with CON.
Once combat starts this works fine. You have a quickened action that can be used for a composition. You can use that at any point mixed in with your other actions. So yes, Fortissimo, Composition, Cast a Spell/Stride/Whatever works normally. The only thing you can't do is have a Fortissimo Composition up before combat starts, as you can't do Fortissimo as an Exploration activity.
Didh't they playtest the rules for guns alongside Gunslinger? They did, with a handful of available firearms. And yeah, not playtesting mythic was a mistake... though I'm not sure something fundamental like the inverse-scaling on mythic proficiency (overwhelmingly powerful at low proficiency vs a moderate bonus at high proficiency) would have been fixed even with a playtest since it's kind of a fundamental part of how the mythic rules work. But it wouldn't have hurt, that's for sure. The problems with something like Beast Lord are apparent very quickly as soon as you try and use it against a mythic enemy and a playtest would have caught that real fast.
James is right - "before you learn the result" effectively means "before the GM tells you what happens". You get to see the result on the dice before deciding to use it. Compare to something like Halfing Luck, where you get to know specifically that you failed before you can use it, or Amp Guidance, where you need to know that this is a situation where you can use it (meaning +1 would make a difference to the outcome). You might already know the result based on the die roll because the Kingdom DCs are largely already known before you roll, but that doesn't count as the GM telling you the result.
Molten Wire or whatever the fire/metal impulse was called suffered from the same issues, has that been errated? If so, I'd simply use the same logic there.Live Wire? I don't think it ever had these issues. It had the attack trait and also specified what happens on a crit. Live Wire's issue was that its scaling was completely out of whack compared to other cantrips, and that did get an errata. Ah. Yeah, that doesn't seem to do anything different on a crit. I can't say I care for that, crits are fun. I'm not sure how I'd handle the extra damage with a crit on this one. Persistent damage that isn't the result of a crit generally would double, but this isn't technically persistent damage either. These little inconsistences sure do add up, eh?
To be honest, this is why I think I'll kinda pass on playing future APs that start at level 1. The damage / HP math is so absurdly bad that it's just not fun once you learn that your are one zero-agency 5% chance roll away from Dying 2 at all times. Level 1 is brutal. There's cases in the first chapter of APs where if you follow RAW, you can literally kill a character outright in one attack from full HP. Extinction Curse has one with a Creature 3 NPC with 2nd level Shocking Grasp. Crit that (which given the NPCs stats is not that unlikely), and a good damage roll is going to invoke the massive damage instant death rule. I house rule that way because it basically can only happen at level 1 and I hate that, but it is a symptom of how swingy level 1 combat is. In general I don't think any Creature 3 should be used at level 1 as their crit rate is too high and it just feels bad when even the toughest character in the party can't take a single attack.
Timber Sentinel annoys me so much as a GM. In fights with things like mindless creatures that can't reasonably deal with it, it can effectively trivialize entire encounters because it stops absurd amounts of damage and unlike Protector Tree the spell, is infinitely renewable.Maybe the feat (not the spell) should get the sure strike treatment. Would that balance it somewhat? That would probably push it too far in the other direction. A 1/fight Protector Tree as an Impulse is not going to feel great, especially since in a number of encounter situations it's not really useful at all. It just happens to have some other ones where it's exceptionally good. It's kind of a hard one to rebalance well because it's annoyingly powerful but not at the "this is way out of line" level, so it's easy for a nerf to overcorrect and make it feel weak. Adding Overflow to it might work, or reducing the scaling speed of the Impulse so it's not just a max rank spell all the time.
I told my player when he took it that I reserved the right to house rule nerf it if it became too much of a problem. I haven't done that, and the fact that it's effectively saving the lives of other characters is a lot of the reason why. Another player in that game is relatively inexperienced and is playing a Monk as basically the party frontline (along with the Kineticist, the other two characters are a Cloistered Cleric and a ranged Medic Investigator). When things go sideways, the Monk tends to get beaten up, and the tree is making a huge difference in terms of the Monk still being alive. This is much more fun for the Monk player than the alternative. So yeah, "oh shirt" indeed! If something is going to be on the "might be too powerful side", support abilities are the best things to have it on since they ultimately help the rest of the group do stuff. I definitely wouldn't want to over-nerf that.
I don't know. Timber Sentinel is two actions. That's a sizable investment in action economy and removes a lot of other impulses as options on that turn. Players need to stay near it for it to work. It's definitely good, especially on a Summoner who still has two actions for their Eidolon to do stuff, but I really don't feel like it makes Champion obsolete. Champions only needing a reaction means they can have their full turn. At low level with only one reaction it can feel somewhat lopsided, but Champions can stack this way up at higher level. Champions that lean fully into it can block absurd amounts of damage. I had one in Extinction Curse that at high level had 3 reactions and was doing combinations of Retributive Strike/Shield of Reckoning. With a Sturdy Shield and a Mending Lattice the sheer amounts of damage mitigated got wild.
Molten Wire or whatever the fire/metal impulse was called suffered from the same issues, has that been errated? If so, I'd simply use the same logic there. Live Wire? I don't think it ever had these issues. It had the attack trait and also specified what happens on a crit. Live Wire's issue was that its scaling was completely out of whack compared to other cantrips, and that did get an errata.
Shifter would also have a niche to fit into in PF2 since Druid isn't that good at "shapeshift and be a frontline melee" type of characters anymore. A class archetype that trades in a bunch of the spellcasting for more martial power would fit in there pretty well.
YuriP said dual class, not archetype. A dual class Inventor with Rogue/Investigator gets Rogue/Investigator skill progress and thus gets an expert skill at level 2. If they pick Crafting, they can take Reverse Engineer at level 2. That obviously isn't what the class intends with the level, but it is a way for an Inventor to get it at level 2.
It's also oddly a class much easier to play in person than on a VTT because the VTTs just get all the permissions and automation wrong for it, and I play online so I keep seeing how messy that can get when the player is also trying to learn the controls in a new VTT. Guilty, lol. Though most of the time that's because whoever is expected to be up front opening the door isn't paying attention and people get tired of sitting around waiting for them to wake up. Especially if it's not the first time and you've already prompted them that session. Which is also another problem with VTTs and screens at game: there are a LOT of distractions readily available. It can lead to more people ignoring whats going on when its not their turn, then having to catch up when it is their turn, as well as generally not paying attention during exploration mode and either falling behind or not knowing whats going on. Theatre of the mind exploration mode helps a fair bit I think, as opposed to doing full VTT map exploration all the time. But if you have the map in a dungeon crawl it's pretty easy to use it... I did that on a current campaign, the DM was so disgusted that he asked me to switch my FA.That's the fun and interesting part. You are not your own ally but your eidolon is, so you can apply effects that usually are forbidden to be self applied to your eidolon.Okay, next Summoner I play I'm gonna free archetype into wood kineticist so I can protector tree myself... Timber Sentinel annoys me so much as a GM. In fights with things like mindless creatures that can't reasonably deal with it, it can effectively trivialize entire encounters because it stops absurd amounts of damage and unlike Protector Tree the spell, is infinitely renewable.
I think the lack of the attack trait on the Archive's of Nethys entry is an error on AoN. The Demiplane Nexus entry shows it with the attack trait. AoN agrees with the physical War of Immortals book: no attack trait. I don't see anything in the errata, either. So I don't know where Demiplane is getting that from. Right now based on the first party sources available, AoN is right and Demiplane is wrong. I feel like it probably should be there given how spell attacks work and would run it that way simply because it makes the spell work consistently with everything else, though.
Brothers and Sisters greetings and once again I come to you seeking knowledge. If you were playing a prepared caster what are you go to 1st and 2nd level spells assuming you know nothing about what is going to happen that day?1st rank: Force Barrage, Runic Body/Weapon, Heal, Soothe and that's all. And also Illusory Object if your GM is super nice with it. The rest of first rank spells are either too weak to consider or interesting at higher level when they are not taking your top slots. I personally never use any other spell during the first couple of levels. They said in another comment that they're level 10, so they're never going to use rank 1 Runic Weapon and would need to be truly desperate to use a rank 1 Soothe.
Also somewhat campaign dependent. I get far more use out of Air Bubble in Kingmaker than in a lot of other adventures, though its not an Occult spell. Just serves as an example of something that is useless in a lot of campaigns but has literally saved my character's life twice in an adventure where water hazards come up.
I must have missed the Mythic Rule playtest. I guess I wasn't paying close enough attention. I do want a more usable Mythic ruleset than PF1, but I don't want it to not feel very mythic. I guess I'll see when I use it. You didn't miss it: there wasn't one.
3. There's two of you. Two sets of stats, different things each one of you can do, and being in two places at once. This is super useful, but it also means two sheets for a new player to track and more things to have to understand to play. This is harder to do well than any character that only has one thing to track for someone learning the game.For this one, at least, things like Foundry are making life easier. Click the roll and it figures out all - well, most of - the relevant adds. Once you learn Foundry, yes. It's got its own learning curve. Great product and I GM with it even for in-person games, but I also have a player that is absolutely tech-phobic. :) I just hope the presence of such tech doesn't make RPG designers make their systems overly complicated. Fingers crossed the next 10 years won't see new tabletop RPGs which are too complicated to play using pen, paper, and actual table. Game design seems largely to be going the other way and getting simpler, at least mostly. Really complex games are out there but they don't seem to be the industry trend. In the case of Paizo specifically, so long as PFS is a thing they want people doing we're probably okay.
Fair to say that we've had very different experiences with new players and Summoner. :) I've seen people show up with one they did on their own and it was not a good experience. Given some guidance it goes a lot better, but the track record of just letting people figure it out on their own in my games is pretty poor compared to something like Fighter/Rogue/Cleric (which are generally pretty easy for a new player to build).
For some reason you assume, more than once, that anyone who disagrees with you hasn't played Summoner. Except I have. I've played it many times and I've GM'd a game with it. There's a reason why I like the class. But it's a lot to give to someone who is playing PF2 for the first time, with more things to understand and more ways to do things wrong than a simple class. That's just the truth of the class. There's nothing wrong with a class being more complicated to play, but a new player probably should have some guidance when getting started with one.
They did not give the animal companion the ability to penetrate Mythic DR? That is not great. Nope. It doesn't become a Mythic creature, you can't use Mythic Strike for it, and none of the destiny feats give it anything to get around mythic resistance. Against a mythic enemy, it really doesn't have much going for it (and against a non-mythic enemy you're basically a normal PF2 character with an animal companion). Meanwhile Ascended Celestial is like "for one action I get haste, temporary HP, physical damage resistance, and a free shove/trip every time I hit something." It doesn't even cost a mythic point. Or you can no-sell a crit, turning it into a hit and gaining resistence. Or attack every target in your aura (which can be 60') with no MAP. Or you can give your allies +3 to attack/skills for a minute AND frighten every enemy in your aura (which can be 60'). Like was said in another thread: the gaps between these are not what people are used to in PF2.
Some stuff always slips through because it's just the nature of product development. But I really feel like things have been worse in the last few releases, especially in the second half of 2024. A LOT of stuff came out fairly close together and it felt like there was a significant increase in obvious problems making it through. Some of this stuff clearly could have used more time in the oven.
Which destinies would you consider weak if I may ask? Beast Lord stands out as particularly egregious in its lack of helping your companion survive against mythic enemies and its lack of helping your companion hit/damage mythic enemies... and companions already tail off in power at high level so this destiny doing basically nothing to address that is a crippling deficiency. If you compare what Beast Lord does to some of what Ascended Celestial can do, they're not in the same league. Considering how much effort PF2 goes to reduce these kinds of gaps between classes, having one this large in two things in the same book is... something.
It's genuinely weird how the Beast Lord is written to be "you and your animal companion are two halves of one whole" but while you're significantly harder to put down in a way that lasts, your companion is not. So you're going to be replacing your wolf/cat/bird/bear/whatever with some frequency because, being mythic, you find yourself in more dangerous situations than a normal PC does. Plus your companion isn't Mythic and doesn't have a way to bypass Mythic Resistance that I can see. Add how companions naturally tail off in normal PF2 at high level on top of that, and it's an incredibly underwhelming package. That's kind of an issue of "it doesn't do what it says on the tin." 100%. Nothing leads to a player having a bad time faster than "I expected my character to be good at X because the game told me I would be, but I'm really not."
Well, here's your chance. The boards are listening! The con is pretty clear: you must roll two saves and take the worst rather than roll one save. So what's the pro that offsets that? See, this is an awful lot of detail that you didn't put in before that drastically changes the context of the advice. Because in a normal circumstance "you want to have both of you in the AoE" is terrible advice as it makes the save substantially harder. It's also assuming there is nowhere to spread out except to "where all the other players are", which often isn't true. What you're effectively really saying is "don't clump up with all the PCs in order to stay away from your Eidolon." But in terms of difficulty in general... Summoner is one of the more difficult classes in the game for new players for several reasons: 1. It's got a lot of trap options. Caster Eidolons are bad and the game dangles them out as if they're equal. Every time I see someone take one of those, it leads to a bad time. New players don't have a good way to know this. That's also true of things like feats, where there are some real standouts and some not that. This isn't a problem for experienced players because they'll know what to build around. But compare to something like Fighter which is much more newbie friendly because unless you do something like tank your Strength on a melee character, it's hard to make a bad Fighter. 2. Very limited spell resources. You need to pick and ration your spells pretty carefully for maximum impact as you just don't get many of them. Compare to something like Oracle where very quickly you wind up with piles of spells and you don't have to manage them nearly as carefully. 3. There's two of you. Two sets of stats, different things each one of you can do, and being in two places at once. This is super useful, but it also means two sheets for a new player to track and more things to have to understand to play. This is harder to do well than any character that only has one thing to track for someone learning the game. It's a really good class, but people arguing that it's not difficult to play are coming at it from already having experience and system mastery. Tell someone completely new to PF2 to make a Summoner and from experience watching people do it, they've got much higher odds of running into problems than someone doing the same thing with a simpler class.
Sigh. I wasn't a great fan of First Edition mythic rules. But after reading War of Immortals, I started to think First Edition mythic rules were quite good. Second Edition mythic rules don't let me feel like I am a truly mythic, powerful being at all. I honestly have no idea why people hated First Edition mythic rules so much nowadays. As someone who ran a PF1 Mythic game, that ruleset becomes literally game breaking past a certain power level. PC get the ability to do so many "instantly end a combat" type of things that it becomes incredibly hard to challenge them at all without crossing over into overwhelming them with even more "instantly end a combat" enemies. PF1 already has a rocket tag feel at high level, and mythic made those rockets bigger. So it was really hard on a GM to get the balance right and that's where a lot of the disapproval for it comes from. That said, it definitely conveyed the feeling of "I'm a super badass figure of myth fighting against odds that mere mortals couldn't stand against" really well. And while I wouldn't run a lot of mythic campaigns, the one we did do was a success in large part because it delivered on that feeling for the players. I don't think PF2 mythic delivers that same feeling very well, especially on the weaker destinies and on classes that don't interact properly with it.
Great idea! I know players frequently ask "where are we", and I often have a hard time orienting them outside of the Inner Sea region, which is generally well mapped. This is the best resource I've found currently: https://map.pathfinderwiki.com/
This. Kingdom Assurance works like Assurance does and thus shares this problem. Assurance is good for Medicine because it has so many flat DCs that Assurance can actually get ahead of them. On any DC by level check, Assurance basically never works unless its an Easy or below level check, and those are cases where if you're actually good at the skill you're highly likely to succeed anyway. Kingdom building has the exact same problem since most things are on the Control DC: it's usually not going to work. It would help you with easy buildings since those are flat DCs, but not a lot else. So yes, it is a bad feat... but I don't think that's due to an error. It's just porting over a PF2 skill feat that itself is only sometimes good and putting it into a context where it's generally worse... and then slapping a cooldown on it for some reason. The kingdom rules have a lot of design problems and this is one of them.
This may seem like a minor semantic or even pedantic argument, but for those who are precise readers of game mechanics, this presented quite a problem, as the entry on p.413 would seem to disallow using Hero Points right away after you GAIN the dying condition, restricting its use for at least another turn until the dying value you gained would INCREASE. Your dying condition has a value. It going to 1 is an increase if you didn't have it before, since it was effectively at 0. So you can use it here. But in general, you said it yourself: this is a semantic/pedantic argument. PF2 is not written in super precise, technical terminology, and trying to parse it that way is going to result in a bad time. In general the main reason to do this is that you're about to go to dying 4, so waiting until the start of your next turn before doing it makes very little sense in practice. That's more likely the reason why the "start of turn" part was removed.
And get Shoony in there!
I struggled really hard to think of something... but I don't really want "new products" right now. What I really want is a really big FAQ/errata update that addresses both long standing points of confusion (like "instance of damage"), and also takes a stab at adjusting systems with significant problems (like mythic or the kingdom rules). That won't happen, and I get why: the business pays the bills by selling new stuff. Devoting major time and energy into fixing existing stuff helps improve the game's reputation, but it doesn't pay the bills in the same way. But as the amount of existing stuff with major issues that I have to work around/house rule/replace goes up, I find my desire to spend money on more stuff I need to fix is waning pretty quickly. That's probably because several of the recent releases have felt disappointing, like mythic and the "we're going to fix this by throwing all the interesting ideas out" remaster Oracle. At the end of the day, what I really want is for less stuff to come out but that stuff to have more time put into it, along with more product support for existing stuff.
I don't think the PFS rule makers intended this specific outcome.Curious why. It seems pretty unlikely that when they were coming up with how to handle remaster updates in general, "nerf Summoner" was on the list of considerations. Likewise when they were changing the monster ability since that's primarily used by monsters and I doubt how Summoner would be impacted crossed anyone's mind. So that's why I don't think it was intentional. Course, in the Oracle case their response to cases of characters effectively being broken was basically "too bad, buy a rebuild", so what do I know?
Except you get it MUCH later (level 10 vs level 2), and you have to start with a single Eidolon attack type to get it, or spend a second feat to get Trip on any of the other attack options. At the same level as Eidolon gets that, Fighter is getting Crashing Slam and not having to roll the Trip at all. It was closer to being equivalent before the nerf than it is now.
There is also the fact that the "alchemy book" was probably treasure vault. That's pretty much it. That book already exists in Treasure Vault. Doing one now would require reprinting a LOT of stuff that already exists or would have to create so much new alchemy that it would just feel bloated. As it is, there's already so many alchemy items that a lot of them are buried in the list and never really see use.
Is that how PFS handles it? Yes, that's the PFS rule. It impacted a number of things when an option was reprinted and changed significantly. The most dramatic being Oracle Mysteries, where the mystery change was "errata" and you had to use the new version no matter how badly it messed up your character. (It was argued those should be considered "class chassis", where you could still use the old one, but the PFS folks said no. It was a whole thing.)
Agreed, which is why I don't do it in my home games. I am not given that option in PFS. I don't think the PFS rule makers intended this specific outcome. They were dealing with a lot of stuff changing and wanted to have something consistent for GMs to work with, which created some unfortunate edge cases like this.
I don't see why not. Cosmos Oracle and Cosmic Caravan feels like a pretty natural fit, as an example. :)
Medic. More healing, more often, in fewer actions. That's all upside for anyone that wants to be good at it. The bang for your feats is huge.
The class is compatible with remaster. For instance it works just fine with remastered spells. For home games you have to discuss it with your GM just like you would any build. For PFS you would have to ask someone else, I don't do that. But my quick google tells me it's an accepted class choice there too. It's PFS legal. Anything that was reprinted with the same name is treated like errata in PFS. So for example Weighty Impact gives the Knockdown monster ability, which was changed in the remaster. (It used to just Trip, now you have to roll Athletics to trip with no MAP.) In PFS, Summoner has to use the new version. In a home game, ask your GM. I know I still let players use the old version since I don't think a change to monster rules was actually intended as a player class nerf. But anything that isn't reprinted uses the original version with remaster updates for things like traits that were renamed and such. Summoner is actually quite a good PFS class in my experience because so many PFS scenarios value flexibility and the ability to be in two places at once/do two things at the same time can come in REALLY handy at times. (The flip side is that when you're escaping a collapsing ruin and needing to make reflex saves to avoid damage, since you're rolling those twice and taking the worse outcome.)
That, and as a player, rolling a giant handful of d12s makes crits super fun. :D My son's Fighter in Extinction Curse was up to 14d12 by the end. There's nothing quite like it.
It does. You're doing Cast a Spell as part of doing Spellstrike, as Spellstrike says. Cast a Spell takes on the traits of the spell you cast, including Manipulate. It can get really rough playing a melee Magus in some encounters because of that.
Very clearly works RAW. Given that it's been this way since AFAIK the original Core Rulebook, I don't think there's much of a case to say it's not RAI, either. It's good, but its a Press action so the miss chance is higher. It requires a fighting style that anecdotally I don't think is very popular on Fighter (1h/free). The "it works on any size" part is only really saving you a skill feat since with Titan Wrestler size is rarely an issue anyway unless you decide this is the chance to make a Sprite Grappler... and hey, go for it! I don't think there's any issue that needs addressing here. TBH, I'd rather take Slam Down and get the reactive strike.
You're not missing anything. It's also come up in this thread. A lot of those other options are incredibly underwhelming since Rewrite Fate lets you do it only when necessary because you rolled a 3, rather than burning mythic points on something you'd have succeeded at anyway because you rolled an 18. Mythic has quite a few problems and this is among them.
A companion that can cast Moment of Renewal. ;) I view them as two halves of a whole. Playing the class optimally requires setting yourself up to get the most out of both of them. It's not really the same as with a companion, where if you don't quite get it into position this turn because you want your actions for yourself, its not that big a loss. Companions are useful, but they're very much secondary. The Summoner by itself is a weak caster. The Eidolon by itself is a weak martial. What makes them work is that they can be both things at the same time, in a single turn. That's what I saw out of the one in Ruby Phoenix. A turn where you Weighty Impact hit/trip the big bad while also putting out a big Heal on the Fighter is a good turn.
That's why I think the current system is not that far from being in an optimal state. A mythic character in the current system without even a single mythic feat is stronger than a non-mythic character only for the existance of Rewrite Fate, but the feats and callings do need a revision since they are not only subpar but also useless when Rewrite Fate exists. That's why I think taking the reroll effect of Rewrite Fate into the callings and feats while taking the roll with mythic prof effect of most feats and callings into Rewrite Fate is a nice and elegant homebrew solution if you don't want to make a new system from scratch. Yeah you're definitely right about Rewrite Fate. Any option that is "roll this skill check with mythic proficiency" isn't great when you already have "if you don't like the first roll, reroll it with mythic proficiency" that applies to so many things. Plus if your first dice roll is good you don't need to use any mythic power since you're probably succeeding anyway. There's some real work needed to improve this system, since the callings are mostly uninteresting/niche while the destinies are wildly unbalanced with each other (among other things). What I will say for PF1 Mythic is that when I ran it, the players had a blast. I'd never do it again because the line between "this can actually challenge them" and "this will be a TPK" was razor thin and it was a nightmare as a GM. But it did its job on the player end of "we're super badass legendary figures." I don't think PF2 Mythic gives that same feeling... especially for the classes that don't get much out of it and against monsters with the ability that shuts down critical hits and anything with multiple Mythic Resilience (the case with all 3 of them is a middle finger to casters).
I kinda been going back and forth with mythic since, even when I think that it fails to achieve the things it wants to achieve, its not that far from being in that nice sweet spot of being "good" but not "so good it becomes mandatory for power gamers" that I think its what Paizo wanted to avoid. Shouldn't it be, though? What's the point of Mythic if not "you're a step beyond everyone else and thus can face the challenges normal heroes can't?" Its not like power gamers can just go out and pick mythic feats at random normal campaigns. This is only available at all if the GM wants to be and thus everyone knows going in its a mythic campaign. PF1 Mythic was super broken as you went up the tiers, but it did a great job of actually feeling "mythic" with absolutely bonkers characters facing off against massively dangerous foes. PF2 mythic just doesn't do that and the constraints put on it, probably trying to avoid balance issues, are a big reason why. So the fact that internally it's not balanced with itself at all and some things are way beyond others is really disappointing.
This is super handy for Battle Medicine. You can get silly with it if you get Godless Healing on your Eidolon. And if your Eidolon is one with hands and your GM falls on the "Eidolons can use mundane items but not magical ones" side of that... well, have fun! At the most basic level, most people likely give AC's far more autonomy then the rules give them. They are not their own living beings, they are a low impact resource that you need to spend actions on to do anything with. This includes exploration activities. They also don't scale very well after level 14, with STR based ones being much worse. I think I get what you're trying to say, but Animal Companions are Animals, which are very much living beings per the rules. Otherwise you wouldn't be able do things like use Treat Wounds on them, which you most definitely can. You're correct that they don't get exploration activities and until Mature can't act at all without their controller spending actions. But I'm not sure this is actually a thing people are doing wrong in large numbers?
Amusingly, I find the table harder to read now because it's throwing so many numbers at you, some of which are on a different scale than the others because some are ranks and some are levels.
My question is with all of the restrictions on the Summoner and Eidolon (same health pool, limit on actions, limit of spells) how is it any better than a normal full caster with an Animal Companion. Please bear in mind I haven't run a Summoner but I have been in groups with them but again I fail to see a huge benefit overall. It's not. It's different, but its not "better". It could be worse, if you make a poor Eidolon selection, and there are definitely poor Eidolon selections. Spellcaster Eidolons in general are not great, which is why so many of the people talking up Summoner are talking about more martial focused Eidolons. Summoner gives up a lot of casting power in exchange for a significantly more capable of companion in the Eidolon and more action flexibility. Not more actions, though: a full caster with a mature animal companion has the same number of actions. Summoner is just a lot more flexible in how they get split up, and Tandem actions let you get more out of them. One often overlooked feature here is that Summoner can take two Exploration activities at level 1, since both the Summoner and Eidolon get one. This can be quite helpful since you can do things like have two checks to find things, have one track while another scouts, etc. Animal companions fall off at high level while Eidolons do better at keeping up. Conversely, Summoner has fewer and less potent spells than a full caster at those same levels. I had one in one of my Ruby Phoenix games and it was an effective character, but didn't have some grand advantage over everyone else in most situations. Aside from the weaker Eidolon options acting as something of a trap, I think the class is in a pretty good place where it offers something unique without balance issues. (I also don't think casters tend to get a ton out of animal companions. The Rogue got more out of his than any caster I've ever seen with one.)
Yes, because:
Accursed Shriek has the [Occult] trait, which says that anything with it is magical. That makes this a magical effect that deals damage.
Counteract rules say this: "Otherwise, halve its level and round up to determine its counteract rank (minimum counteract rank 0). If an effect's level is unclear and it came from a creature, halve and round up the creature's level." It's a Creature 10, so 5 is your target counteract rank.
This is a perfect exhibit for why this kind of thing can't be codified. If it is, someone will try and twist the words in ridiculous ways. If the caster doesn't know everything in the area is immune to fire, then they're very much attempting to cause harm because that's the only purpose of hitting someone with Fireball. The fact that they failed is irrelevant. Also, Fireball definitely "can harm or damage another creature". By this logic if I Strike someone and fail to get through resistance that I didn't know they had, "stabbing someone in the back" isn't a hostile action. Or hell, what if i just miss? Strike isn't a hostile action if you roll a nat 1? It's completely absurd and any GM worth their salt is going to shut down this attempt at rules lawyering real hard.
When an action as universal as throwing something creates the paradox, I don't think it *can* be made mechanistically consistent (without giving the PCs a very blank check). No, it can't. And that's probably good. This is a "I know it when I see it" type of thing. Trying to codify that is doomed to create loopholes and problematic outcomes. It's better not to, since a table will figure out together what that means if it actually comes up, which a lot of these scenarios just never actually will in practice.
But escaping is breaking the hold on an enemy that is holding you down. It is using physical force against an enemy. There are reasonable ways to consider escape hostile.Escaping is a contest against another creature. Its harming you, you have to harm back to get out of it. No, there aren't. You're not doing anything to the enemy. You're getting yourself free of their grasp. "Hostile" implies intent, and there is no hostile intent here. This isn't actually about them at all: its about the person being held not wanting to be held and getting out of that. There's no harm done to them, since that's a mechanical absolute in this case that we can readily prove. So there's no hostile intent and there's no harm done. The only justification here is a made up "well you must be doing something to get away so it's hostile" that has no basis in the rules. And it's still gross to say "me not wanting to be held by you and getting away means I'm hostile." I don't know if people can't hear what they sound like or if they've just never been in this situation in real life.
It's probably worth noting that we're actually talking about "hostile action" here, not "using any kind of resistance whatsoever." "Hostile action" is the actual standard on Invisibility that kicked this whole thing off. Me escaping from you is not a hostile action, unless your definition of hostility is "you're allowed to do whatever you want to me and I'm not allowed to avoid it." Which is, frankly, gross. But even if we take this to your own level: there are lots of ways to break a hold without causing any harm. And if your standard has now shifted all the way to "if you do anything to resist whatsoever then you're causing harm and have hostile intent", then there's simply no point in continuing this discussion because you've set an impossible (and pretty awful if applied to real life) standard and created a rule that doesn't exist to try and justify it. Any discussion on that is a waste of everyone's time because you've thrown out the parts of the rules that don't suit what you want to say and replaced them with new ones. Problem with that statement about measurable injury or harm is that its going back to the damage argument. Harm is listed in the definition for hostile actions as separate from damage. Either damage which is measurable in numbers or harm which might not be measurable but can be determined by the kind of action taken. Fighting someone off you is harm even if its justified and warranted even if its not leaving any damage. If I haven't harmed you and I'm not attacking you, I haven't done anything hostile. So yeah, harm is relevant here because without it there's no justification whatsoever for escaping being considered a hostile action. All I've done is stopped you from holding me. You have no demonstrable harm done out of this, and I'm not attempting to attack you. If there's no measurable harm, then you can't say harm is being done because you're just inventing something that doesn't exist. That's not how rules work, even ones that require GM interpretation like this. And as already explained, the Attack trait doesn't mean its hostile. Using Healing Bomb has the Attack trait because you're Striking with a bomb. But that's obviously not a hostile action on an ally, right? All the Attack trait is doing in this case is making MAP apply.
Both of these statements are true, heh. Remaster Oracle is one of the best spellcasters in the game with a lot going for it. If you want to play a divine spellcaster, you'll happy with what it offers. Distinctive subclasses and flavor are no longer on offer, though. All you're doing when picking a mystery now is choosing between a really bad curse for specific revelation spells/divine access options (and avoiding cursebound abilities) or taking a curse that doesn't really matter (and being able to spam cursebound abilities with impunity). The ones that used to actually give you alternate gameplay options no longer really do that, to the point of not being good at the thing the description says they want to be good at in the case of Battle and Life. And that's why people that were already playing Oracle when it came out mostly went "what the hell is this?", as trying to update to the remaster version effectively broke a lot of characters in a way that nothing else in the remaster really did.
|