Tridus's page

It's clunky wording, yeah. You can use it to make ammo (consuming a versatile vial) for sure. But I think you can still use Quick Alchemy to make a quick vial, since what that creates has the Bomb trait so is technically a bomb.

While there's a rigorous RAW that aligns with you, Raven, there's also the more natural reading that it's telekinesis and independent of the state of one's body. Paizo has explicitly tried in PF2 to avoid writing to the lawyers plus likely felt they didn't have to spell out the basics of a trope such as telekinesis.

Also, there's the awkward situation that a Sprite casts this spell worse than a Jotunborn when they're otherwise equivalent casters (even with Weapon Storm & weapons of much different size.) IMO, if it wanted size of the caster to matter, they'd kind of have to spell it out, even if redundant by rigorous RAW.

That said, it may have been more balanced if there'd been a size limit that increased with Heightening. Unsure though, given the action & opportunity cost. I guess one could spam it too easily, say with cheap scrolls or a staff. Hmm.

When it comes to RAW, Raven Black is correct. The spell says you're doing a Trip, so the rules of Trip apply. The spell grants an exception to use Spell Attack instead of the usual check, so you do that, along with a range exception because the spell has a Range. There's no exception for any other rules of Trip/Grab/etc.

Now, should you run it that way? I probably wouldn't because doing so really limits what the spell can work on without taking Titan Wrestler. That'd be a house rule, but it's a totally reasonable one.

People just need to keep the two distinct.

I'm confused by what you mean here. The Clockwork Macuahuitl is a level 8 item, so slapping +1 striking on it doesn't lower its price to 100g because it's still a level 8 item after you add the runes. Unlike say a longsword, which goes from level 0 to level 4 when you add the runes.

Additionally, the "base magic weapons" where the savings come from say they cover common weapons:

Many magic weapons are created by etching runes onto them. The magic weapon stat block covers the Prices and attributes of the most common weapons you can make with only fundamental runes.

Theoretically you'd get a discount here when you put +2 on it, but given that it's a rare base item you could exclude it from the "basic magic weapons" formula entirely.

The answers above are pretty much all correct. I just choose to ignore them, hah. In my games, you can try again on a failure. You lost an action and got nothing, that was punishment enough.

That also makes Hypercognition worth casting far more often since the cases when you actually need it are usually against harder enemies where you're more likely to fail.

A GM creating a high level NPC who could very reasonably have Kip Up is not a crazy or unfair notion.

How often you fight NPCs like that (as opposed to creatures or NPCs who wouldn't reasonably have Kip Up) is very campaign dependent.

An urban campaign is very different from a dungeon crawl is very different from a wilderness campaign.

The fact that a level 7 feat (Kip Up) which has low feat cost significantly weakens prone is a factor, though. Just like you'd expect a high level NPC to have stats accounting for stuff like Fleet and Toughness.

Only having 3 skills and needing Acrobatics to be one of them is the biggest limiting factor here.

Creating a NPC with it is perfectly reasonable. MOST of the NPCs having it is not. It requires Master Acrobatics, which is something a pretty wide swath of NPCs will never have. And if you built them as PCs they'd still not have it because those skill increases are needed in something else.

That's the disconnect here: the impression your giving is it's being handed out all over the place and that's just not how creature building is supposed to work.

CaffeinatedNinja wrote:

I think that might be your GM making life harder for you hah. I GMed that and can't remember a single npc with kip up, certainly not almost every significant humanoid having it!

TheFinish wrote:

Without spoiling anything since you're still playing it, I will say this is 100% down to your GM. No enemy in AoA has an ability equivalent to Kip Up in the entire Adventure Path.

Welp. The ** spoiler omitted ** stand out right off the top of my head.

I don't think those NPCs actually have it in the book, though. It's an extremely rare ability on any NPC, and I don't think either of those have it.

Your GM seems to either be adding it all over the place or is making a mistake in understanding that it's not something just any character can do.

And again, I'm used to most players taking it if they're martialish, and even many non-martials.

That's not even remotely my experience but there will be table variation in what PCs do.

Which means it feels like prone is just less significant at higher levels (not a bad thing) but it means Crashing Slam needs to be a bigger improvement to be worth taking given that.

It's not when the PCs are inflicting it. It's still a very strong debuff even at high level. Unless your GM is just giving everything an automatic "nope" on it, at least. But there's literally no ability in the game that wouldn't look weak if your GM actively lets everything easily counter it.

Is there anything with a weakness to holy and to spirit damage?

Everything that has Holy weakness if you've got a Shining Symbol.

Allow other alchemical dedications/class features to recharge versatile vials for their specific feature. This brings them in line with the (freshly edited errata for) Firework Technician. Herbalist, Investigators, etc.

This was just removed from Firework Technician except for its pyrotechnics specifically, so I doubt anyone else will be getting it.

I do not get how a burst that hits "a much larger percentage of the individual members of the swarm" and that deals persistent damage is not dealing it to the same much larger percentage of the individual members of the swarm that makes it qualify as "area of effect".

We have nothing in the RAW saying this persistent damage is not area damage too.

Nothing in RAW says persistent damage is area damage. Persistent damage is a condition and that governs how it works. Noting in there says that it behaves differently if the source is a burst or a single target attack.

Since nothing says it changes based on the source, RAW it doesn't.

And it is not persistent damage that has an area of effect. It is the source of the effect. Same as for the initial damage.

If the source makes the initial damage "area", then it should do so for the persistent damage too.

RAW? No. Because it's just applying the condition and from there it's the condition doing the damage.

Narratively? I'd 100% run it so that it does.

Would persistent damage from a holy source not trigger weakness to holy each time the target takes damage ?

If the persistent damage still has the Holy trait, it would. But if it's fire damage from a flaming rune crit? Probably not, depending on how it became holy. Champions add Holy to their strikes, but the Persistent Damage condition is not a strike and Flaming rune is not Sanctified. So it wouldn't carry over there.

Mature Animal Companion was also updated

Page 130: The Mature Animal Companion feat’s wording didn’t work as intended for animal companions with Speeds beyond land Speeds. Replace the second sentence of the second paragraph with the following: “During an encounter, even if you don’t use the Command an Animal action, your animal companion can still use 1 action that round on your turn to Strike or Stride (or Burrow, Climb, Fly, or Swim if it has that Speed).” Note: The 2nd printing mistakenly excluded “Fly” from the list.

RAW no. Persistent damage is a condition and it lacks the area trait.

Narratively? It absolutely makes sense that if you set them on fire with an area/splash effect, that trait should carry over to the persistent damage.

GMs should feel encouraged to say "that makes narrative sense so I'm going to give it to you."

Balkoth wrote:

Claxon wrote:

I personal find Disruptive Stance and Tactical Reflexes to be a bit overkill, but I can't say it's a bad choice.

How is Disruptive Stance overkill? Interrupting spells on a hit, not just a crit...

Honestly? My experience was that I wasn't in position all that often for it to matter. What you say is absolutely true. And to me the main attraction is disrupting without having to crit, but poor position (maybe my fault?) meant it just didn't come up as often.

I was the main front liner, so I was strategically placing myself as a wall for squishier party members. As a consequence, I wasn't in a position to disrupt casters usually.

Disruptive Stance really shines with a Reach weapon because they can't just step away from you and avoid reactions entirely.

Amusingly given this thread, it also works great with Prone enemies who also have a hard time getting away with you. Crashing Slam is nice if your goal is to make enemies Prone and someone else isn't doing it for you. Since the reactive strike with a d12 2h weapon is going to hurt a whole lot when they stand up.

People in this threads often view these things as either/or choices, but players in my experience are a lot more likely to view this and go "why not both?" Even if it takes a few levels to get both of them online, it can absolutely ruin the day of whatever you hit with it.

(I also find it really amusing when people claim stuff like every martial has Kip up. I'm GMing two games and playing in one and across all of those 14 characters, literally one has Kip Up. Lots of players never put enough into Acrobatics to get that and you can go for entire chapters of APs where literally nothing will try and Trip.)

Slow isn’t the spell you would use if the success result was removed from the spell but the failure and especially critical result was far more likely.

Paralyze or coral scourge would be the more beneficial 3rd rank spell. You’d pick spells based off the best critical result.

True, yeah. I stand by Dominate though, that would be silly.

You guys are really trying to nerf Spellstrike now, do you...?

Save spells, when used with Spellstrike, should be 10 times harder to resist. You should trade the target's saves to their AC when it comes to save spells using Spellstrike.

- Give it a penalty to their saves equal to the Magus's weapon or spell proficiency bonus, which doubles on a Critical Hit.

OR

- Make the target's result one stage worse, which becomes an automatic Failure on a Critical Hit (rolling only to avoid a Critical Failure)

How broken would THAT be, seriously? If I'm spellstriking with Frostbite, which used to be an Attack spell called Ray of Frost, either the target CANNOT COMPLETELY negate the damage or it's gonna have a HARD time doing so, but it's not balanced to give the target "a fair chance" to resist when the Magus has to use a Strike.

If this is how Spellstrike works, every smart Magus is going to prepare multiple slow spells. This is so comically busted that it would be the best thing to do since it'll win fights.

Hell, slap a Dominate on there while you're at it.

Attack rolls are WAY easier to alter via buffs and debuffs than saves are. This will just make Magus better than the full casters are at landing effects like this. And throwing out debuffs to saves based on proficiency? Absolutely ludicrous.

With how fast wealth scales up in the system, getting a higher level item doesn't throw things out of whack that long. It can be really cool if it happens as a narrative reward, or just as a surprise treasure hidden in a secret stash or something. Players think its awesome because its something they literally couldn't get yet.

But in a couple of levels it's generally back in line anyway.

The point for GMs? Don't be afraid to go over the suggested level when giving out treasure if it'll be a cool moment. Don't do it all the time because it ceases to be special in that case, but its not something worth stressing a ton over.

Especially with scrolls, because as mentioned above the DCs and such are still those of the person using the scroll. A good spell at a key moment from a scroll can swing a fight, but it's not like they'll be taking on stuff 6 levels above them because they have it.

Are you comparing archetypes, or dedications? Because Exemplar Dedication is better than Champion Dedication with some of the stuff it can give.

Archetypes as a whole its a different picture, especially if you have Free Archetype. Champion archetype in a FA game is incredible.

But in a core/PFS game where you're more feat limited, Exemplar is giving you a ton for a single feat.

Mathematically, risky surgery just generally isn't worth it.

Upgrading a success to a crit success just increases healing by 2d8. But you deal 1d8 of damage first. You can think of it as a net 1d8 additional healing. But there always the chance that you roll worse on the heal rolls than the damage roll, and that just feels much worse than if you had do nothing.

And if you have a significant chance of a critical medicine roll without risky surgery, you probably should just be going after the next tier of medicine checks, where the flat bonus to healing will outstrip critical success.

Yeah, this. Taking Risky Surgery with the plan to use it with Assurance doesn't really make much sense because it's just not very good, even setting aside that it makes no thematic sense whatsoever. The average gain is around 4.5 HP, and you have a ~10% chance of doing less healing by doing this. That is really poor value from a skill feat.

If you're using Risky Surgery, you should probably use that +2 to go for a higher DC and get significantly more healing.

I wonder how many monsters have multiple weaknesses. And if their defenses and HP total take the official definition of damage instance into account.

A lot of demons, for one. And yes they do tend to have higher HP than monsters without weakness. In the creature building guidelines its suggested that if you add weaknesses you should also add more HP.

But I don't think most of them are designed with the expectation that "weakness fire 10" can proc 3 times every hit. You need a LOT more HP for that and then it'd feel lousy to anyone who isn't able to do the damage type in question because it becomes a "bullet sponge" type enemy.

Tridus wrote:

People read that in a way favourable to them, as players are wont to do. All this change does is telling people to stop doing that.

I get the point you're making here.

I'm just used to seeing significant disagreement when players are taking advantage of a wording, but there was close to universal agreement on this in threads like this one.

And people making the point about Wolf Drag and Furious Drag.

As well as pointing out that Crashing Slam is having to compete with Disruptive Stance and Tactical Reflexes.

So when comparing it to similar abilities and the opportunity cost of taking it, Crashing Slam didn't seem like a too good to be true reading (saw a lot of jokes about how Paizo only printed one level 10 Fighter feat, Tactical Reflexes).

Oh I totally get why people read it that way and it's not out of ill intent. :) Sorry if it came across wrong.

Players just tend to read things in a positive way. It's totally normal. But the difference in wording between the two illustrates the point:
- One says you critically succeed at a Trip attempt
- The other says you knock the target prone

While those are effectively the same outcome since Trip knocks someone prone, one of them is doing the Trip and everything that comes along with it (including the Attack trait). The other one is simply "target goes prone as a rider on this attack."

Balance wise? eh. Slam Down is good and Crashing Slam removes a failure chance from it. I feel like it's still worth taking if you're building in that direction anyway, even if some other feats can be considered better.

I can see why the Time mystery was included in the Dark Archive Remastered since it was in the original Dark Archive book. But this mystery in particular had already been remastered in the Lost Omens: Divine Mysteries book. And it's confusing to me why they had to change the mystery: You now have 2 remastered books that have 2 different Time mysteries for the Oracle.

When creating a Time Oracle can you choose which one to use?

And for Pathfinder Society Play: Can you play a Time Oracle if you have only one of the two books, do you need both, does your mystery change depending on which book you own?

In a home game I'd allow it since they're both remaster books and letting the player pick really won't hurt anything. In PFS, generally speaking the newest release is considered errata/current and will be the one you use. Barring a PFS ruling, that's how I'd probably see it there.

I'd definitely post this in the errata thread and/or the Pathfinder Society specific forum because it's definitely weird.

As to why it was changed here from there? No idea. Maybe they ran out of page count in Divine Mysteries to print Trance of Celerity and thus just used a preexisting one. But it is in this book.

Nothing else was changed though, same spells and no changes to those spells, though Time Beacon could still use clarification because I still believe they mean "failing to counteract" instead of "failing the counteract check".

I'd suggest posting this in the errata thread because yeah, failing a counteract check is a different thing than failing to counteract and the distinction matters.

I'm reminded of a post here when mythic was new. Someone's group ran some test fights to try it out. In one of them, they landed Decree of Execution on Treerazor, giving Weakness All 20.

So anyone with a +3 weapon with 3 damage runes on it (a reasonable expectation at level 20) was getting +80 damage every strike. It was easily more than doubling the total damage output, and they melted Treerazor.

That required a specific mythic ability to land to pull off. Now you just need an enemy with a weakness or a way to create a weakness, and the ability to stack sources of damage to exploit it. It's going to be more common.

I like weaknesses and resistances and I think they make combat more interesting. But I don't think being able to proc the same fire resistance 4 times every strike is good for the game because it has such a warping effect on total damage output.

The flipside, of course, is it makes spells like Blazing Armory better, and I do like buff spells feeling good.

It's also possible that the setup cost to do this will be so much work that most players just won't bother, in which case it won't actually make that much of a difference in overall play. Sometimes we stress about this stuff and then it just isn't a problem in practice, you know? :)

This is why Assurance is good with Medicine. It's a case where Assurance can meet a lot of the checks, and some of those checks are cases where guaranteed success is worth less potential healing.

You may not use it on every check, but you're never going to kill someone via a poorly timed nat 1 Battle Medicine.

The big problem I have with this is that it acts as a substantial buff in power if you have enough system mastery to take advantage of it. For someone running around with a fairly standard astral flaming weapon, not much really changes. But once you know to stack multiple different sources of damage and then get a weakness up so that applies multiple times? You've got a significant damage multiplier.

That can make fights faster, but it's only going to make fights faster with characters/groups that are set up specifically to exploit it. In a game without that (either with new players are players that just don't dig into the rules like this), combat hasn't really spread up significantly. Some of the scenarios I'm seeing posted by more optimization minded folks are DRAMATICALLY stronger.

Generally speaking, boosting the power of system mastery like this makes it harder to plan combats and makes the encounter building rules less reliable. Do I need to buff combats for a group using this? Or have enemies also start taking advantage of it? Or do I just accept that one group will melt enemies quickly and another won't?

I don't really have good answers to that at this point.

Unquestionably, the good news is that we actually have an answer that we can all work from now in terms of understanding how things are intended to work. And if I want to house rule that, I can. That's better than the situation we had where there wasn't really a common understanding of how this actually worked, with large table variance and the closest thing to a consensus we had was "do what Foundry does even if it's not actually correct just because people understand it."

I'm just not confident that this direction is the right one. I haven't had a lot of time this weekend to really understand what it means so I'm still kind of processing it.

I don't like weaknesses set as high as they are. Makes the fights way too easy against the toughest monsters. As the others have stated, flaming rune will activate the weakness just fine doing more base damage as well.

Weaknesses are fun when they're somewhat limited in how often you can proc them. Like if an enemy is weak to X and you can proc that once per attack? That's cool.

The idea that you could proc that multiple times per attack is going to just melt enemies. We saw that when a poster here ran some Mythic fights to try the system out, someone landed Decree of Execution to give Weakness All 20 to Treerazor, and proceeded to melt him in no time flat.

You get a +3 Holy Thundering Shocking weapon and that's 80 extra damage every hit.

I don't think that kind of outcome is the direction things should be going, especially in more standard play.

So what does Spirit Song imply?

Success The creature takes half damage and can't use reactions until the beginning of its turn.
Failure The creature takes full damage, can't use reactions until the beginning of its turn, and is stunned 1.

I think it implies that even by Player Core 2 they didn't know what Stun is supposed to do.

It implies that whoever wrote that didn't know what Stunned 1 means, yeah. Because even before the errata it would have still blocked reactions in this case.

That's par for the course for PC2. It was a messy book with a lot of errors.

The problem with this is it becomes so specific that it's going to very rarely get used. We really don't need an Elf specific archtype, especially with how many ancestries get so little support as it is.

Devote some of that page space and effort into giving some more attention to the ones that don't get it, instead of even more niche stuff for the already supported ones.

I'd dispute the notion that Crashing Slam was nerfed, rather than clarified. Nothing in the original version said that the usual rules of Trip didn't apply, and that would include incrementing MAP after you do it. All it did was give you an automatic critical success outcome.

People read that in a way favourable to them, as players are wont to do. All this change does is telling people to stop doing that.

We did some research last week in the campaign I'm in, and know that next week we're fighting enemies that can do a couple of things:
- A pretty nasty poison breath weapon that covers a huge area and is a Fortitude save (not Reflex according to our research)
- Mental effect spells like Suggestion
- One creature has an emotion effect that causes people to want to stand still while it inflicts stacking Stupefied.
- These are named enemies that I won't name to avoid spoilers, but they're HIGHLY likely to be above our level.

Note that since this was done in downtime research, its possible some of it is wrong, but I feel fairly confident in the above.

So I'm trying to come up with ways to boost our chances against those. Party is level 16 and has a 2h Fighter, Amulet/Mirror/Shield Thaumaturge (with scroll esoterica), Cosmos Oracle with arcane Sorcerer archetype (me!), and Bomber Alchemist. We are currently in a city so can shop/craft and have a few days of downtime available.

Here's what I have so far:
- Antidote will give a +4 item bonus against poison for 6 hours, which should include a poison breath weapon.
- Sanguine Mutagen will also give a +4 item bonus against poison (and some other stuff), and also turns a success into a critical success. At this level, the 1d6 bleed is not a huge concern.
- Breath weapon is magical due to the Primal Trait, so Shadow Siphon can work.
- Greater Bravo's Brew gives a +3 item bonus on Will and +4 against Fear.
- Serene Mutagen gives +4 item to Will against mental effects and turns successes into crit successes. The -1 on attack rolls hurts given that these are "boss" encounters, though.
- Mind of Menace will give a reaction to potentially cause Frightened and give a bonus on the mental saves.
- Bottled Catharsis can work on Emotion effects but we'll need the major one for it to be likely to work at this level as the greater's 6th rank +19 counteract is unlikely to help. (Alchemist is also a Medic and has Holistic Care, so can treat Stupefied, though probably has better things to do mid combat.)
- Zealous Conviction gives a status bonuses to will saves and the Oracle already knows it.

Any other suggestions that might help? Thanks! :)

Sure looks that way. If there's no incantations, there's no need to say anything, which is what causes you to lose your air.

Nice little bonus when it comes up.

Tridus wrote:

This is a case where a simpler rule that doesn't worry about rounds at all works better than a more complex rule that does.

I agree! And if you read my posts carefully, you will see that I have the agreed the entire time. The problem is that my players don't, even after reading this thread.

Yeah that wasn't aimed at you, it was aimed at Unicore. I agree with you, after all. :)

Paizo could solve this problem in five minutes with a FAQ entry, giving me something official to point my players to. And so I asked if anyone was aware of that having occurred. Instead of an answer, I got a bunch of folks insisting that -- despite the existence of this thread -- there is no problem (with the added bonus of several being pretty condescending).

I do not understand how this sort of reception is supposed to help the game, or Paizo, but we should be trying to do better than "if it isn't a problem for me, then it isn't a problem."

Yep. Unfortunately that didn't happen. There is no official ruling.

So the option that's left is a ruling/house rule and just tell your players this is how it will be because RAW is silly in this case. It isn't the first time that's been the case and it won't be the last.

I've had to do that with a player now and then where at some point my answer simply becomes "I know you don't agree but I'm not running it RAW and as the GM I get to make that call." They can run it differently if they run a campaign.

shroudb wrote:

(paragon wasn't usable since Rare tag and only 1 teacher for it made it unaccesible)

F in the chat, another character struck by the [random lore character]’s double slice phenomenon. Hurts to see, but when you got a DM like that you gotta either cut your losses and leave or stick to a class where most of it’s good s*$@ happens to be common (fighter or cleric are good options).

Literally a core assumption of the game is that uncommon and rare stuff isn't automatically available and needs GM approval. And it's a good thing, since it's pretty easy for a GM to turn off if they don't care, while it's much harder to go in the other direction.

Some people have just forgotten that and long for the days of "an AP book printed a Runelord specific spell that hasn't existed for thousands of years, but I'm allowed to just know it somehow as a level 5 wizard on level up because RAW says so."

Yeah, but do you know of any off the top? I'm having a lot of trouble figuring out how to even form a query to search for this, now that I'm trying. Simply searching for monsters that inflict stunned, I can see that a Banshee can do this at level 17 with Vengeful Spite if you crit fail—but that doesn't feel terribly out of line to me in the grand scheme. I'll keep looking, I guess.

It's pretty rare if you're not making up custom creatures. So this not something that will happen frequently. But in a game where PCs are doing it, it's absolutely fair game for the GM to do the same thing.

That's how I tend to resolve a lot of edge case "players are arguing this should work" type of things. I say "if that works, it works for the NPCs too". Players often decide that it's not actually so great when that happens.

But in general all this errata really does is resets back to "Stunned 1 means losing 1 action", which is what it does anyway. There's now no longer a timing edge case where Stunned 1 can be transformed into "Stunned 1 round", which is far stronger (and rarer) condition. Which is fine, really, since if it happens organically you're still taking an action away from a creature that likely planned its turn based on having it.

It's just not worth playing edge case timing trickery to try to set up.

This also happens to be the way a lot of people were running it anyway based on previous dev feedback about the edge case, so it's a relatively easy errata to make.

I did think of a way to explain the delaying situation and why the RAW is that you can delay past the end of an encounter round.

Beyond the fact it would not be possible to delay an entire round if your turn doesn’t start at the beginning of a encounter round, how would you even resolve a player who delays past the last other creature in the round?

They have to take their turn at 0? Even if they are waiting for something to happen before resolving their turn? Then their initiative is 0. How can other players even delay then to go after them if the plan was for them to do something after their other allies have gone?

Also, it would have been much simpler and more clear to just say “you can delay until the end of the encounter round and then either your turn is skipped or you have moved to the bottom of the turn order.” The whole bit about delaying an entire round would never need saying.

The players could even think of the raw as working like this:

“If you delay until the end of an encounter round, you skip your turn for that round and start with the highest initiative in the next round.” As that is functionally what happens when you delay past the n start of a new encounter round.

The problem with this is that "you can delay as long as you want" is intuitive. You leave initiative. When you want to act, you enter initiative at that point. That's the rule. Done. If you for some reason delay for more than an entire round of turns, you didn't do anything and that's that.

But it works properly in all cases. If you're first in the order, or middle of the order, or last in the order. It's simple, consistent, and easy to run.

The idea that you can delay as long as you want unless there's a round end in there at which point you can't isn't that. It's more complicated to run and creates silly cases like if you're last in the order you're just not allowed to delay.

This is a case where a simpler rule that doesn't worry about rounds at all works better than a more complex rule that does.

Tridus wrote:

Like, I feel bad for OP here who has no chance of getting an official answer and thus the best we can do amounts to "RAW is X and we run it like Y because Z reasons." Because when we can't even get answers to the most basic things that should be really easy, what hope is there for anything else?

Well, we just got the errata for the psychic's entropic wheel amp that didn't work, so maybe there's hope after all.

Great news!

siegfriedliner wrote:

Whats intersting is this reminds me a lot of the alchemist discourse from the orginal handbook but i am not hearing the oh but actually psychics are great crowd i suppose that is because what they offer is directly and easily comparable to other classes pre-core alchemist was so different and complicated that it defied obvious comparison.

I’ve seen attempts on Reddit, but they don’t seem to have gotten much traction; one particularly die-hard defender of caster balance even ended up admitting that the Psychic could’ve used more improvements. I agree with your assessment that the Psychic is fairly easy to compare to other casters pre- and post-remaster, whereas the Alchemist is very much their own beast whose changes are more complex to assess.

Alchemist is also very much its own thing with how it works, while Psychic is a caster with a gimmick. We have a lot of casters with a gimmick and you can compare them pretty directly like you said. That really doesn't work in Psychic's favour.

As we saw with legacy Oracle, people can have fun with a class even if its not that powerful if the mechanics let them do things that they enjoy. Alchemist is kind of like that. It's still a messy, weird class, but it can be a lot of fun.

My son is playing a Bomber in Spore War and having a blast with it.

This may be just my own perception, but it felt to me like there was this initial wave of cope when the remaster changes first leaked: although nobody was saying “this is great for the Psychic actually,” there were a few people trying to downplay the impact of the remaster, bring more attention to the buffs, or rationalize justifications for the nerfs to imaginary weapon and the MC archetype. Since then, I think that’s died down and people have become more willing to admit that the remaster is underwhelming, but it’s happened before when content got released to the public that was particularly poorly-designed or balanced.

Opinions tend to shift over time as people get more used to the changes. Especially as this was a weird one where a relatively small number of people actually had the changes and everyone else was working off whatever they posted, so it was kind of an incomplete picture.

But yeah, it was a pretty underwhelming set of changes and I don't think it helped the perception of Psychic as a class any. It feels like a premaster caster living in a remaster world.

Man the hivemind is just completely out of touch on this one.

Hurling insults around is always the mark of someone who is on sound reasoning.

Petrified, KOed, Fleeing, Confused, and even kinda Paralyzed, ect, all essentially mean your turn is over.

Stunned was not some crazy outlier, it was one of the "seriously dangerous" Conditions, and was appropriately rare.

Those things all actually do that, all the time. That's literally what they do.

Stunned 1 in the overwhelming majority of cases will remove 1 action. It will not take away an entire turn, outside of a timing based edge case.

I can't tell if you actually don't understand this or if you're just being deliberately obtuse.

Are folks going to start whining about loosing the rest of their turn actions if they get KOed to a reactive strike? Get Petrified?

Not nearly as much as folks are whining about an obviously wonky edge case being corrected, to borrow your phrasing. I do love it when people make up a case of whining to hurl as an accusation while they are actively guilty of whining.

Tridus wrote:

This is the spring batch, I think? It's labelled "spring 2026". Would be great if they can get it out soon though.

Maya Coleman in the errata thread wrote:

It's that time again, everyone! The team has asked you to now make a FALL 2026 errata thread! They let me know the following as well for those who have questions about the recently updated PDFs!

1. These are errata to go with book reprints.
2. There will be some Player Core 2 errata coming up as the spring errata.

So thank you all for helping us out again and contributing! I'm locking this thread, but please keep things coming in the Fall one you make!

Sure sounds like player core 2 errata is coming in this batch but wasnt ready right now

huh. Well its possible that last "spring" is a typo there, but it would make sense if they mean that it'll be coming in the spring (since its still winter after all).

That would be good news! :)

Tridus wrote:

Except that enemies can do this too. Turn this back around on players and go "oh your turn ends before you get to do anything because I just made you stunned 1 as a reaction" is unfun nonsense.

This was always pretty clearly an edge case interaction that wasn't intended and never should have been run RAW because the outcome was absurd. It absolutely needed to be fixed, and they fixed it the correct way by changing the interaction so that it works more consistently with the power level Stunned is supposed to be.

The fact that some ridiculous edge case interactions don't work now is just how it goes, but GMs never should have let them work in the first place.

Need to run out soon, so I'll check this later, but I'm curious how many enemies can do this without the GM intentionally blowing a large amount of actions to ready abilities—something that would be player-favored in a lot of combats.

For example, I am significantly less scared of a kurobozu that does something like move up and ready stunning flurry than a kurobozu that just attacks a lot. It's obnoxious, yes, but the kurobozu just wants to move and attack a ton. The tactic also makes it harder for the kurobozu to use steal breath.

I do think that if this was a concern, a more direct fix that would've kept functionality would've been to just replace "you can't act" with "you can't take reactions" and leave the old mechanism for losing actions at start of turn intact. That solves almost every problem we've brought up so far, though it might cause some new ones I haven't thought of yet. (E.G., It would allow stunned enemies to talk, which they currently can't.)

Reactive Strike or any other reaction with a Stunned rider is the easiest way. That doesn't require any action economy: it just messes with players turns.

But it can also be done in the same way players can do it, which would only make sense when fighting groups of enemies rather than a single large one. But if the GM has more creatures in play than the players do, they have the action economy to try it.

It's also just a bad interaction. Stunned 1 removes 1 action. It should not remove potentially 4 actions just because of timing. That never made sense.

Tridus wrote:

Unfortunately no Oracle repertoire fix as PC2 doesn't seem to have been touched at all. Pretty frustrating on this one since it's been causing significant real world confusion for a long time.

If it helps, Maya Coleman noted in another thread that they're still working on the PC2 errata and plan to release it as part of the Spring batch.

This is the spring batch, I think? It's labelled "spring 2026". Would be great if they can get it out soon though.

I am complaining, yeah, because the cases in which this could be a problem almost universally cost you 2A+1R and required an enemy save. The two exceptions I know of are Power Word Stun (which is still 2A+1R, but always works and has longer range, so it's broken and should've been hit on its own) and crit reaction attacks from firearm users with critical specialization (which require the attack to crit and a save against class DC, require you to not use fake out if you're a gunslinger, and probably are more likely to occur on builds for the bad gunslinger subclasses than the good ones anyways).

It's among the most edge case interactions in the rules outside of readied power word stun. Outside of PWS, it mostly nerfs things that don't need additional nerfs.

It's not like stun is some plentifully available status effect. The ways to stun enemies on their own turns are already limited, high risk, and expensive (readied stunning fist), or heavily gated by rng and feats (crit spec firearm crit on target of opportunity). The only exception was readied power word stun, which is only online at high levels to begin with.

I think what bothers me most is that I feel like none of the implications here are good. To me, it says the devs must think one of the following:
-that readied stunning fist or firearm strikes going off as a reaction and critting with crit spec are too strong, which is just false
-that PWS is too strong and that they should just nerf stunned to account for it instead of nerfing power word stun itself, which is a bad balance approach, and that it's further a good idea to create a bespoke exception to gaining and losing actions just for stunned in the course of doing so, which I also consider a bad design approach
-that they didn't realize that stunned already kept you from taking actions if you were stunned on your turn and thought how the interaction worked was unclear, which means they didn't understand the rules as they currently exist

No matter what, I don't like it.

Except that enemies can do this too. Turn this back around on players and go "oh your turn ends before you get to do anything because I just made you stunned 1 as a reaction" is unfun nonsense.

This was always pretty clearly an edge case interaction that wasn't intended and never should have been run RAW because the outcome was absurd. It absolutely needed to be fixed, and they fixed it the correct way by changing the interaction so that it works more consistently with the power level Stunned is supposed to be.

The fact that some ridiculous edge case interactions don't work now is just how it goes, but GMs never should have let them work in the first place.

Ravingdork wrote:

NorrKnekten wrote:

Mark Seifter was correct all along and the holy trait is applied to the strike itself

I've seen comments elsewhere that the example given was a poor one that didn't serve to clarify any of the bigger issues with instances of damage.

Nevertheless, I'm thrilled that it's finally getting addressed.

"The example given" was multiple examples across multiple threads and platforms all stating the same thing. Multiple resistances and weaknesses can trigger on a single strike. But its correct that in some of his older posts he did say he was unsure about damage of the same type but from different sources on the same strike. hmm... I ponder how much this is actually going to affect foundry though. Probably not by alot.

A quick read is that it looks similar to what Foundry is already doing. Will have to get more indepth later because those rules have a lot of edge cases, but it doesn't look like Foundry is all that off the mark.

Gunslingers can actually have a fix for alchemical ammo they make! They have a feat for activating ammo when they create it with quick alchemy.

Considering how limited use that is, that's a great improvement.

Some pretty good stuff in here, including a bunch of clarifications that aren't errata. I love to see that!

Some of this will need some digging into to really digest. Like Fireworks Technician changes and Instance of Damage.

Stunned is in here too which is nice.

I did see that Witches were clarified so that you do need your familiar to refocus. Which is what the rules already said unless you just exclude that whole bit about "you refocus by communing with your familiar" to somehow mean you can do that without your familiar. I'm glad to put that "it's flavour text so doesn't count!" nonsense to rest.

Unfortunately no Oracle repertoire fix as PC2 doesn't seem to have been touched at all. Pretty frustrating on this one since it's been causing significant real world confusion for a long time.

Ooh, the oracle thing *is* weird. Is there any example of a spontaneous caster whose default spell progression is smaller than their default spell *slot* progression?

Not that I know of. Not even Oracle until the first errata changed half the numbers in the text to match the table and not the other half.

That's whats so stupid about this. The necessary change is literally the other half of a change they already did, to change "two" to "three" and "three" to "four". This is the easiest errata in the world since they literally already did it once and just didn't do it in both places it needed changing. And yet they can't even manage to get that done after over a year and counting. (They also still haven't fixed the iconic Oracle AFAIK which just doesn't follow any version of the text.)

Like, I feel bad for OP here who has no chance of getting an official answer and thus the best we can do amounts to "RAW is X and we run it like Y because Z reasons." Because when we can't even get answers to the most basic things that should be really easy, what hope is there for anything else?

The Oracle spell repertoire issue is not one that there is a general consensus on, and even the various VTTS have waffled back and forth about their interpretations.

I strongly suspect that it has come up in official event AMAs and that the developers are choosing not to provide direct answers because none of them want to contradict whatever the final errata case will be with it. Why that is taking so long is purely a mater of speculation at this point. Providing unofficial answers to rules questions seems to be something the whole company has tightened ranks around.

Except they aren't providing official answers either. This is literally the most basic function of a spontaneous caster with numerous examples in the game. It should not take 14 months to fix this.

It's not "they're not providing unofficial answers." It's "they're not providing answers." People need to stop reaching to try and defend this and call it what it is.

It's the same thing with this initiative question. If someone actually wanted to answer this, it would require a conversation to determine intent and a mechanism to release that as an answer, like the FAQ they used to have.

Paizo has just backslid horrifiically on this aspect of product quality.

I am the GM. And while the rules seem quite clear to me, my players brought this up, and I wanted to do my due diligence before just shutting them down. A search returned this thread, as well as multiple Reddit threads -- meaning this has come up before -- but no official answer. I guess I just genuinely expected this to be a quick check in the FAQ to clear it up, but I guess this question isn't asked frequently enough to warrant inclusion (which seems odd, given that issuing a ruling on a message board is effectively free, and Paizo has deliberately designed an extremely codified system in PF2...but I digress).

Unfortunately it's not about "this not being asked frequently enough". Paizo does not answer rules questions about PF2 outside of errata. Full stop. They haven't in years, ever since people like Mark Siefer left. We can't get anything answered these days.

Hell, we can't even get errata right now for absurdly basic questions like "how many spells are in an Oracle repertoire?" where the rulebook literally contradicts itself in the same block of text.

It's extremely frustrating.

Let me just look up 'instance of damage'...

Zing! ;) (I tried to put an emoji in here and it broke the forum)

But yes, that's an absolutely terrible pick for an example since it raises more questions than it answers. I'd assume its meant to prevent double dipping if a spell does damage multiple times to one target.

As-is, there's basically no mechanical reason to play a gunslinger over a good archer build and the fault lies almost entirely with reload as a mechanic.

That is patently false.

If Starfinder 2e content is allowed by your GM, Ysoki Prehensile Tail feat solves part of it by effectively giving you another "hand". You're still paying the actions but you don't have to regrip or swap weapons to do it.

Otherwise there's limited ways to do this. Even Alchemist itself doesn't have a "interact/quick alchemy an elixir and drink it in one action" ability AFAIK that doesn't involve a Familiar (bombs do and that is what makes Quick Bomber so good).

Tridus wrote:

It's significantly worse, though. The only class it's "a bit worse" than is Summoner. It's a lot worse than anyone else.

Have you never seen a Monk, Ranger or Champion targeting save DCs with focus spells or spells from dedications before? Magus is on par with all of their casting options (or at least can be if it raises Intelligence).

I said they're the worst casting class in the first comment and this is a continuation of that thought. A Ranger deciding to use an archetype spell is not a caster class.

But no, I pretty rarely see that. Those classes usually have something better to do with their actions until pretty late in the game when they could theoretically cast something like Synesthesia, but if the group has a caster they can probably do that instead and then those folks will pound the debuffed enemy into the ground.

If your Monk is casting attack spells, something has gone sideways.

Tridus wrote:

... If you want to sling spells at enemies directly, Magus is the worst caster class in the game at it. Even it's KAS is geared to spellstrike and not spellcasting. [

A class being able to do something but a bit worse than other classes does not make it pointless for it to do that thing. If it did, literally about 5 classes would be played and all of the rest would get cast aside.

It's significantly worse, though. The only class it's "a bit worse" than is Summoner. It's a lot worse than anyone else.

It isn't uncommon to encounter enemies that will take similar or more damage on average from a regular Strike + a Fortitude/Reflex targeting cantrip than they will from Spellstriking with Gouging Claw + Recharge, even considering the lower spellcasting proficiency of the Magus compared to full casters. All it takes is for that enemy to have a low save that is 3-5 lower than their AC +10.

Except that to do this you now need to have multiple cantrips devoted to hitting saves, in addition to the ones you need for Spellstrike, including if you want anything for weakness/resist/immunity cases, and you need more than one damage type otherwise immunity hits you real hard.

You'll have a lower DC than a full caster due to the KAS, probably not maxing INT because it's a pretty MAD class (especially if you want a good dedication, but even without that INT just doesn't do much for your best attack and you need other things), and a bunch of levels of delayed proficiency.

Ironic considering you're talking about specializing too much and lacking versatility, but cramming your spell list this full of different kinds of attack spells leaves no room for anything else like utility things.

And yeah, Dedications are a thing and help the class a lot. It doesn't help that people often want to take something else because a lot of Magus feats just aren't that good.

People gravitate to spellstrike because it's both good and fun. When you're not doing that, the class really doesn't have a ton else on offer. So naturally people want to get the strong, fun thing more often rather than building around turns where you can't do that and the class doesn't have a lot on offer.