I don't see why not. You don't need to be a spellcaster at all to take this. It's got no prerequisites, no tradition limitations, and even gives you Cast a Spell for spells cast from this feat.
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No it doesn't. The rules makers just assume people can see the pattern without needing every possible permutation spelled out explicitly, especially for combinations that don't make much sense to do in actual play (like a +0 Greater Striking Weapon).
Lost Omens Travel Guide has a page about the Church of Abadar's role in markets, including regulating coinage, notorizing contracts, regulating interest rates, and a line mentioning how merchants don't need to carry piles of gold around since they can use the banks services. So, almost certainly. They aren't the only ones that could, of course, but they are a global banking system along with a church so they definitely do. The exact mechanics of how that works are up to the GM to determine based on what your campaign needs, but its fair to say the PCs can deposit money in one city and gain access to it in another. For loans themselves... well if they have collateral or are well known in the area then maybe, but adventurers don't tend to to have established assets to act as collateral in an area so the PCs may need to turn to more unscrupulous types for that. As the narrative warrants, basically. :)
Most of my group played PF1 before PF2 and so some of these have easier answers there. "Cannot use your magic to create" for example is actually easier in PF1 terminology because creation magic was classified. Most of it was Conjuration (Creation), and those typically created something that was either permanent or very long lasting. So although we don't have the category anymore, we know what a "creation" spell looks like and that's our guidance. Effectively we would use that to block something that creates something permanent. So create food/water are out. Wall of Stone is out (but Wall of Force is fine). Anything that causes something new to exist for an extended period of time is out. There's still some grey areas, like Cozy Cabin isn't permanent but it is pretty long lasting so I wouldn't allow that one. Summoning would be fine, however, as that doesn't create: it calls a creature to fight for you and then sends it back. (This has some interesting implications of its own.) The lack of spell schools in PF2 creates more table variation on this, but looking back to PF1 gives my table a common base to work from in terms of being on the same page about what a creation spell looks like.
The actual problem might not even be the class balancing, but the encounter design our GM prefers. Our GM does not like meaningless combat. Which means fights need to be dangerous to a certain extend. Also book keeping lots of enemies is not really fun for the GM. It drags the length of combat. So in practice this often means we have 3 to 4 combats per adventuring day. Almost every combat is atleast a severe difficulty encounter with a few enemies of party level or fewer enemies above party level. Enemies of party level -1 we see rarely. Party level -2 enemies I have never seen in any serious encounter. This. If every combat is a boss encounter, then what makes the fight with the actual boss stand out? You can throw lots of challenge at the party without every encounter feeling samey, and some of those other options are going to favor other builds, including casters. Adding more enemies, hazards, terrain challenges, and such all help with this. Its also okay to just have an easy combat now and then so the PCs feel like the badasses that they actually are.
I saw this set of rules today and thought they were interseting. Simplified Kingdom Rules. These cut out things like kingdom stats entirely, using character stats instead. Each player generally gets one action. Most other things are dramatically simplified, so turns can be done significantly faster and there is less to track. Not my rules, but I thought it had some good ideas.
Here's some suggestions for what you can do, given your situation: Pick up stuff that helps tilt success rates in your favor. Sure Strike is the obvious one if you're using spell attacks. It's 1/fight now, effectively, but on a key spell that still matters (and it bypasses concealmeat/conver). Intimidation or Diplomacy (for Bon Mot) let you debuff enemies, and that really matters. Get your martial players to help out with this if they can, too, as they often have ways to get debuffs up that help you. Archetype into Sorcerer if possible for Imperial's focus spell. The bonus to attack and penalties to save matter and it scales well. Spam the crap out of it. Intersteller Void on Oracle is also pretty good as Fatigued is a straight debuff to all defenses (that even gets applied on a critical success), but if you're not an Oracle it is significantly more investment to get and requires sustaining (also comes with some damage though). Actually I'd consider Oracle as a class to play. Some of the abilities really help blasters:
The Divine List is a bit campaign dependent in that there's some adventurers where it isn't great*, but it's way better than it used to be and Oracle has multiple ways to get access to non-Divine spells to pad it out. If you can get into the mid level range the class really comes online and can deliver good results. But Tempest and Flames have access to spells that are broadly effective even at relatively low level. * I found it a challenge in Kingmaker because Divine has a lot of good sanctified/holy stuff and Kingmaker doesn't really do much with that. When we switched to Spore War, suddenly I had stuff like Moonlight Ray at full power and it hits like an absolute truck. Landing 100 damage on a hit sure felt good at level 14, and that was against a significant single enemy encounter. If your GM is open to house rules, ask if they'll house rule in runes applying to spell attacks. Spell attacks feel absolutely awful in the mid levels because they lag WAY behind weapon attacks (-4 a martial at level 13 and a shocking -6 vs Fighter/Gunslinger) and allowing potency runes to apply helps a ton in terms of evening that out. At level 19 it actually lets you pull ahead of the non-Legendary martials, but you mostly need it in the mid levels because at high level there's just relatively few spell attacks anyway. GM thoughts: The core problem is the GM is making every encounter of the kind that blasters just don't excel at in PF2. It's just a known quirk of the system, and if they never throw you a bone, you're going to have a harder time than a support/debuff caster.
Combat doesn't have to feature super powerful enemies to be significant or impactful. Add in minions. Toss in terrain hazards or traps. Use enemies with weaknesses the caster can exploit. There's lots of ways to do this besides "everything is PL+1 or bigger." Making every combat just "few, strong enemies" favors the martials and the support/debuff casters as they're just more effective in that situation. Against a PL+3 creature, no blast spell really competes with Synesthesia and a couple of martials that can take advantage of it. It's just a known issue with how the game works for blasters, and if your GM is actively going to make it as hard as possible on you, then there's only so much you can do. Campaign level also matters. Casters feel really lousy at low level and ramp up. If you get into high level play, then the really good spells start coming online and proficiency eventually catches up. If we only ran 1-10 stuff I would get sick of playing casters real fast.
Yeah, you could let each PC be mayor of a given settlement and make the building decisions there (and narratively be in charge of it), while still part of the same kingdom.
The Foundry modules are made by Foundry, not Paizo. So you'd have to ask them. But if you already have the original foundry modules, you are best off running that and making any adaptations as needed. It likely won't require a lot of changes.
Are there any haunts that are perception-gated? That feels real weird just, conceptually. Yep. One in Chapter 3 (so typically PC level 3) of Abomination Vaults requires Expert Perception. It can be deactivated with Intimidation or Religion. A pretty wide swath of classes don't have Expert Perception at this point. Haunts, in contrast, are practically the opposite. Haunts come from spirits or some other presence who is upset and making that upset manifest for some reason. They want to announce themselves. Making it hard to spot a haunt feels like it's going against the spirit, her-der, of the hazard, IMO. Yeah. It just means they don't have any chance to find it before it activates, which is how it announces itself. Whereas the Fighter who knows literally nothing about Haunts can notice that the thing is haunted before that, somehow. I'm really not a fan.
Maybe those "named" NPC companions would all of a sudden, be WAY more valuable to help avoid vacancy penalties. Wait, you're not going to try to actually run the full kingdom system for all of them, are you? Because that sounds like an absolute nightmare. Kingdom turns are slow for one kingdom, it'd take forever with four of them.
The obvious answer is "don't do it". If you want everyone on the same team, put them on the same team. If you put people onto separate teams with their own interests to look out for, at some point someone is going to do that. Like, I don't get what the reason for making this change is unless you want to give them the ability to pursue diverging policies and plans, which might come into conflict at some point. So you want to do that but you also don't want them to actually do that in any major way? I guess if you throw enough external problems at them that require them to band together to cope with, they'll never actually diverge enough for it to become an issue... but that's effectively just a more complex version of having one kingdom anyway.
Then those questions should be summarized in a thread and linked here, so the devs have a clear set of questions to answer. "Go look up the posts where people are confused" is in no way helpful to errata writers, especially when we know they're clearly overworked and errata isn't a priority. It needs to be made as easy as possible, and this isn't it.
It is about as classical a fantasy trope as there can be that you bring a rogue to a dungeon to find traps and secret treasures. Without proficiency gating it takes a while for a rogue’s perception to be better than a wisdom caster. And if no one wants to play a Rogue you... just don't find traps, I guess? I mean, that's what we did in PF1 if no one wanted to play a class with Trap Finding: we're either using some other trick like summons to try to set traps off ahead of us, or we're just brute forcing all of them because the game wants to impose a class that people don't want to play and people said no. It put the GM in a very awkward position with some of the nastier traps because if a character gets killed by something that they were simply not allowed to find until after they were dead, it leaves a bad taste in everyone's mouth. It wasn't good game design then to try to force certain classes into every party, and its not good game design now. Especially since PF2 is a lot more flexible in terms of who can be built to do what. This is some vestigal stuff that feels archaic. Clerics don’t need to be the trap finders. Why not? If someone wants to build to be good at that, why shouldn't they be allowed to do that? This is like saying Rogues shouldn't be allowed to take Battle Medicine because they don't need to be the healers. The thing about dealing with haunts is that most of them can be dealt with while they are going off. If you catch them before they start you often don’t learn very much about what they are or why they are there. If finding them doesn't actually matter, then there's no reason to gatekeep who can do it, is there?
I'm looking for someone from Paizo who can answer my questions about systems. For example: is it possible to exceed the 10d6 fireball maximum with the Arcanist's Potent Magic exploit? I'm pretty sure that's a PF1 question so you're in the wrong forum... but also, don't get your hopes up. Paizo doesn't tend to answer that kind of question these days.
I'd sneak in and make a new errata document exactly 180 degrees off the community consensus on every issue. I'm enough of a GM that being the monkey's paw just has too strong an appeal."Oracle gets no spells now. Goodbye" Oracle gets a different number of spells at every rank that were determined by rolling a d8-3. There will be no further explanation.
I think this proficiency gating is a thing they were really high on in the beginning of PF2, and unfortunately didn't get rid of in the remaster. I don't see it used as abundantly as in the beginning but it's still there now and then. There's cases where it does make sense. You see it mostly with skill feats being gated behind proficiency, but saying "performing emergency surgery to remove demon fungus tendrils from someone's brain requires Master Medicine", I'm pretty okay with that. It's well beyond what basic training could reasonably teach you to do, and it's a skill that anyone could choose to progress if they wanted to. Perception is a bad one because most classes can do little to nothing about it. Like as soon as a trap requires Master Perception, you've blocked every caster in the game except Bard from finding it... even if they're the ones with the skills to actually deal with it. So a Cleric can't find Haunts even if they're one of the best people on Golarian at dealing with them by being Legendary in the respective skills and thus should logically know what they're looking for... while some random thief who doesn't know what a Haunt is can spot them no problem? Ditto with a Wizard who invests a lot at Thievery and is super good with traps except they aren't allowed to find them while an Investigator who doesn't know anything about traps somehow can? It just doesn't make sense narratively. It doesn't feel great mechanically either because the options for what to do about it are few and expensive (like Master Spotter in an archetype so multiple feats, or using your Canny Acumen on that and it not coming online until extremely late and thus also not having it for a bad save). Like, the classes with legendary Perception already have an advantage at this: the bonus from legendary Perception. This isn't something that needs to be further gated. I don't enforce that in my games and if someone was looking for a haunt specifically I'd let them use an appropriate skill (like Religion or Occultism) instead because in that context it makes sense.
Hazards as part of another encounter are a different story, obviously. But hazards just in an otherwise empty hallway or room, or along your travel route, just are not the stuff unless they're really really really scary. Yeah, agreed. Simple hazards that are part of another encounter really mix things up and are downright scary. A bunch of simple arrow launchers is a big deal when you're already fighting and have to watch where you step, but it's basically irrelevant on its own. This isn't just a hazard problem, though it's usually a hazard problem. Some APs will have you do checks and if you fail you get an encounter or something goes wrong, but it can only happen once per day so it's no real threat. You deal with that, then it can't happen again so you just heal up and move on. But it happens by far the most often with hazards. Complex hazards either need to be dangerous enough to actually be a threat outright, integrated into another situation, or something that the PCs have an active motivation to engage with. Otherwise they can just deal with it at their leisure and that isn't terribly interesting.
My biggest annoyance is minimum proficiency levels. Sometimes a character who is literally maxing out the skill won’t reach the required proficiency level for an above level trap, which is utterly degenerate design. I don’t think there’s *any* real argument in support of that bullshit. Yeah, this. "No one in the party is allowed to even notice that hazards exist so you're just going to bumble into all of them" isn't even remotely fun. No one in the party have perception on a fast proficiency track is a choice about as sensible as having no healer or no tank, at least for traditional dungeon crawling adventures go. The dwarves didn’t need Bilbo Baggins for his back stabbing ability or single target damage potential. Players already chafe at the notion that they need to have specific roles and find ways around it, and PF2 tends to enable that to one degree or another. Especially when the thing to find it isn't at all related to the thing related to deal with it and isn't something you can readily train. Like, to say "you need a healer" doesn't mean "you need a Cleric", and there are a ton of ways to do this. But there are very few ways to actually train Perception and they're pretty costly, so you're largely just stuck on that one. Haunts come to mind on this: AV has a haunt for a level 3 party that requires Expert perception to find, so pretty much every non-Bard spellcaster is already locked out. You can disarm it with Trained Intimidate or Religion though, which those same people that can't find it have a decent chance of having. It creates this ridiculous situation where a huge swath of classes in the game can deal with this but only after they blindly stumble into it... even if they're actually BETTER at Perception than someone else. Like a Cleric can't find this but due to their high WIS probably has a better Perception modifier than someone that can. "You're the best person in the party at noticing things but you're not allowed to notice any trap in the game from level 3 on" is unintuitive and feels ridiculous. Especially if it happens to a whole party... and no one is picking a class to play for the entire game on the basis of "well this one has enough perception proficiency that I at least have a chance to see hazards." Hell: new players have absolutely zero chance to even know about that.
Hmm. Does this mean that innate spells and focus spells don't help you identify spells when you see them cast? They can't be prepared and aren't part of one's repertoire. For focus spells it feels like it should work because if it doesn't then two Clerics of the same faith with the same focus spell don't know that the other one is casting it without having Recognize Spell and making a fairly difficult check. That just doesn't sound right. They don't use the word "repertoire" for focus spells, but you have a set that you know and can cast on demand, exactly like a repertoire. Feels to me like that case should work and I don't think it's harming the game to give that one to the players (though it comes up pretty rarely). Innate spells... eh? I don't know. I'd be inclined to give it to the player in that case just because then every case functions in a similar manner and it's pretty straightforward at the table to understand. It feels consistent and I value consistency.
Anybody else think this thread has long since run its course?
The part about the playtest being earlier in the cycle than usual is something we were told. It was known the wait between playtest and release of these would be longer than in the past, but there was a combination of other stuff going on that meant it made sense to do the playtest at that time. That stuff might be happening at Gencon is a guess, but past history is that they pretty much always have something coming out at Gencon so it'd make sense. It's highly unlikely to be earlier than that, at least. We don't know why those announcements haven't happened yet and I doubt Maya will tell us when to expect them because that's just not how these things tend to be done and xe probably can't tell us.
This is effectively the Aid action from normal PF2, with the same caveats and issues that come with Aid. One of which is that DC 20 is hard at level 1 and trivial later. The remaster changed Aid to DC 15, which is not hard at level 1 and gets trivial earlier. Except Aid takes up PC actions (which are valuable) and Focused Attention can be spammed with excess Kingdom actions that you don't really need. Course, the other consideration is that RAW a lot of Kingdom DCs are really hard for the Kingdom due to lack of skill boosts, so you really need that bonus. If the DC should scale or not probably depends on your opinion of Aid scaling. We just didn't award Fame for it because that would be very silly once you're far enough in that getting a 30 isn't that hard, on the grounds that you didn't really do anything and aiding an action that hasn't happened yet doesn't make sense to make you famous. Also remember that Cooperative Focus makes this even better with a +3 and changing degrees of success at higher level. It's a crutch a kingdom leans on with skills you're only trained in (which I consider a problem in itself). Making this DC scale weakens that feat and thus weakens that crutch, so doing it in isolation risks making those skill checks feel worse than they already do.
Is it me or do the DCs for Discovery and Influence feel very high, even on the lower end? My party are level 12, which I believe they're supposed to be, and they're having a difficult time making checks ,even aiding each other. Yes, some of them are very high. It kind of imposes a bit of an order that the PCs don't have a good way to know about: - The Council of Mwanyisa can give up to a +4 on checks to all checks on Zubari, which makes a massive difference as his DCs are sky high. Of course, the PCs can try to influence Zubari before the Council will talk to them and that may go poorly. If they don't figure out to do this in the right order it'll be a slog.
You can also play up the personalities of the various NPCs and give PCs bonuses for leaning into them. Like I had a whole thing where Themba portrayed himself as a gracious and kind host, offering up his guests rare spirits and great hospitality. They got him a gift and that played to his ego, which gave them a bonus on a check. I injected a bunch of opportunities to do stuff like that and my players ran with them. Like when Worknesh invites the PCs to view the demonstration and several other dignitaries are there, I played up Themba and Worknesh being rivals by having Themba make a veiled insult. The PC that liked Worknesh responded in kind against Themba with her own insult. That got her a bunch of brownie points with Worknesh... and also made Themba angry enough to try to poison her (it didn't impact the PC that Themba did like, though Themba remarked that his choice of allies needed evaluation). This is a chapter where playing things up as the GM some more than the book suggests can open up some points for your players to try and do something different, and you can give the players bonuses for those ideas to help with the DCs somewhat. Plus it's fun for the PCs to go off script. :)
It does, in that it says explicitly you take the damage and doesn't mention anything else. The lack of anything else happening means you don't take anything else. It doesn't make much sense if you think about it (how are you taking the damage but they're still getting grabbed/poisoned/etc?), but it's perfectly clear. This came up in the playtest feedback pretty extensively and the fact that it wasn't changed suggests its intentional.
Having some enemies with precision weakness would probably help, because then there's some cases where it's actually better.
Nice that Maya went to check for us, but if not for Maya asking we wouldn't have known at all. Maya and James are the superheroes of Paizo communication.
The fact that this is a game and to some degree it is the GM's job to play into the Player's plans. The GM also gets to have fun. Players aren't the only people at the table. It doesn't feel like a living, breathing world when reasonably intelligent creatures just blindly walk up to an obvious trap over and over again. That feels like a video game. The GM shouldn't just thwart everything players want to do because they can, but players need to accept that if you telegraph what you're going to do super obviously, an enemy with the smarts to understand that might not fall for it.
Wait really? Where was it clarified? I haven't seen anything about it when I searched. In an email reply that got posted to Reddit. I'm not surprised you couldn't find it.
If you need to hide what you are planning to do from the GM in order to make use of your abilities, you are playing with a level of adversary player-GM relationship that is almost certainly outside the range accounted for by Paizo designers. If this works for you, more power to you, but it doesn't seem to be the assumed default. Except when it's so obvious that the enemies can tell. If you see someone holding a 2h gun in the party back line, you can guess they're probably going to shoot it. That's not adversarial: that's playing the enemies to have a basic sense of awareness. Brace isn't quite that obvious, but taking the ready actions means you're not doing something else and it does give a hint that you're preparing something. Intelligent enemies aren't dumb and they can likely clue in that "approaching the guy who appears to be waiting for someone to approach him" isn't a good idea.
I'm pretty sure that's the point: without that bond, a Commander isn't particularly better at skirmish combat than anyone else. Commanding a small squad like the PCs is different than commanding a large formation, and they probably don't want the class to just be automatically way better at it than everyone else. So they get a bond they can take to get that bonus, while other folks take some other bond to get something as well. It feels like its a "this is a game and we don't want Commanders to just outshine everyone else in squad combat" decision.
Not sure why you were told to avoid the magus or oracle. Both are strong options. If you don't have an archer, a starlit span magus is an amazing archer. Likely either the perception of difficulty (which was true of premaster Oracle but is much less so now), or that the GM just doesn't know the classes well enough to be able to help a new player out (which is a totally valid decision at a table of new folks).
Yeah, melee Magus is difficult to play well with the action economy and the risks of being in melee. Starlit Span Magus, OTOH, is straight up one of the easiest things in the game to play. Take a bunch of different damage types for your cantrips, pick up a good focus spell via Archetype, and Spellstrike pretty much every turn you don't have to move. Profit.
This was clarified some time ago and it is correct as written. We as a community aren't sure why that change was made, but we do know that it's deliberate.
Astral is great, no doubt. Flaming is also pretty great. In a campaign where it's relevant (like Spore War), Holy will do a lot of work because you're going to hit a bunch of weaknesses. But I really enjoy the utility runes for the fun in play. Had a Thaumaturge using a Whip to trip (the ranged Rogue REALLY loved me) and Shifting was great on that for avoiding a resistance or needing to do lethal damage without penalty. It also goes with the theme of the class in a sense to go from "I'm tripping this guy at reach" to "I now have an Earthbreaker so I can smash through something." My son used Extending in Extinction Curse and it was absolutely hilarious when he'd crit stuff that was flying around theoretically well out of sword range. 2 actions hurts in the optimization department for sure, but the whole table would grin every time he crit something with this comically long range sword. That's something I really like about high level play: once you get multiple property runes, you can mix in a good damage rune and a fun utility rune. The opportunity cost is a lot higher at lower level when you only get one.
Yeah I'm extremely disappointed that they think fixing a spellcasting class so its repertoire doesn't contradict itself isn't "urgent", when it's been a problem for over a year. This isn't some edge case: it's a key part of literally the core function of the class. It's also a very simple fix. Especially when you look at Korakai's PFS pregen and the spells there don't really fit with the rules either and it means even Paizo doesn't seem to know how this is supposed to work. I get why corner cases and more obscure things don't get errata because there is only so much time in the day, but something like this never should have been released that way in the first place and there's no excuse for it not being fixed for well over a year.
Oracle repertoire size is inconsistent with its own text. Part of it uses the numbers two and three, like the number of spell slots used to. It also says you gain a new repertoire spell every time you gain a new spell slot, which is inconsistent with the numbers given.
I don't know what you're expecting. You've already laid out the available information. It's pretty clear that a negative value is a nonsensical outcome and the rules tell you not to follow that. The logical thing to do is use the same minimum (1) that is stated in other places where this kind of thing can happen.
Part of this is mathematical, but part of it is also player psychology: Taking advantage of a weakness feels good. Not taking advantage of a weakness due to lacking the thing to do it is a nuisance but doesn't feel that bad since you're still doing damage (and if its happening a lot, you go get the thing and feel good). Hitting a resistance can feel lousy if it's big enough because it can shut down a large percentage of your damage, depending on the build or what resist you're hitting. You can feel like you're doing very little. Bypassing a resistance feels good. Even if these work out math wise so that one isn't actually better than the other, one of them feels better to the average player than the other. Immunities, of course, can feel real bad since you you can be effectively shut down. It's pretty rare for a resistance to be high enough to actually fully shut someone down. My impression is that bludgeoning tends to avoid more resistances/immunities, while slashing tends to benefit more from weaknesses. Did some searches on AoN. Resistant creatures by type: Bludgeoning: 471Piercing: 538 Slashing: 499 Physical: 378 There's a lot of overlap in them because anything that resists physical or resists all (like every incorporeal creature) will count in all 3. Swarms also do that by often listing all 3 damage types, sometimes being more resistant to one than the other (like the feral skull swarm is Bludgeoning 5, Piercing 10, Slashing 10). For weaknesses:
Piercing seems to be left in the cold, I get the impression they get deadly/fatal more frequently (pick, bow, rapier, wolf style), and of course apart from guns/inventors, piercing absolutely rules long-range weaponry. And there's underwater combat, and maybe an occasional rakshasa. Based on what I've seen, a slashing/bludgeoning combo is your best bet, since slashing can take advantage of the most weaknesses and almost nothing is actually immune to bludgeoning. There's also no overlap in terms of immunities for those two, unlike Piercing/Slashing.
To me, the problem with this is that the fire-only Kineticist who doesn't pick that 1st-level feat is a build the game readily offers to the player. It's also not a terribly niche build: you just pick a single gate, and pick some other 1st-level feat, so unlike the hypothetical caster who prepares nothing but fashionista, the single-element fire Kin is very much a build that can easily happen in the wild and not just in online discussion, especially when a player has a specific pyromancer theme in mind and believes that's something the game will let them do. This is a good point because "single element Kineticist" is literally an iconic character. Yoon is a PFS pregen and thus something actively available to first time players or players playing out of band in PFS. PF2's left hand gives this build to players to play while the right hand makes it a bad idea that players shouldn't play. This sets up a situation where players need enough system mastery to know that the pregens are giving bad advice otherwise they can walk into a trap and get hard countered by doing nothing other than something Paizo themselves did. Double weapon immunity (piercing/slashing) has similar issues to me where the game doesn't tell you "if your primary attack is piercing or slashing, you should have a backup bludgeoning weapon because nothing is immune to bludgeoning and another weapon type." You can do the right thing by having a backup weapon with a different damage type and still get hard countered just due to not having the system mastery to know it should be bludgeoning. (In fact, I can only find 3 creatures in the entire game that are actually immune to bludgeoning damage, which is less than the number immune to both piercing and slashing.)
I know Shades of Blood is undead heavy (especially vampires) This is kind of the only downside on Bards. A lot of undead have immunities that are a problem for the Occult spell list. It won't matter if you're buffing and you can pick spells that are reliable enough to deal with it, but you will have to think about those selections. If your goal is to use your spells to attack directly, Sorcerer is probably the better pick. But in general Bard is a very strong class in a large party with how many people they can buff with their songs. The +1 from Courageous Anthem increases both chance to hit and chance to crit, so it's a lot more powerful than it sounds. In terms of something else... if that Investigator is ranged then another melee like Fighter/Barbarian would bring some big frontline offense to the table. If not, having 4 melee can run into issues of tripping over each other in narrow spaces, so it'd depend on how big the maps are in Shades of Blood. You could use a reach weapon to help get around this, and Fighter with a reach weapon is really good due to reactive strike anyway. Trip stuff (either via Athletics or Slam Down) and they're gonna have a bad time.
That's Act Together, rather than Tandem actions. But yes, Act Together's wording is complicated. I think it was done that way to avoid any possible exploits, but it does make it hard to parse out how it works.
Good to know, thanks!
Yeah, Shelyn is not focused on technical perfection. Rather it's the action of creation itself that matters. Someone creating art with their heart invested in it is making her happy even if it's technically not very good.
I can't remember what company it was, but I remember one that used to not only do errata, but had them formatted such that when printed out, you could cut up the sheet and glue the new text over the old in the book. Not sure how that would work with PDF, but it's a cool idea... Yeah it is a cool idea. It's tricky for cases that require more text than the book layout allows, though, like the IWR/instance of damage stuff. But for a lot of rules updates it would be doable. For the PDF you'd just have to update the PDF and reissue it. (Though I don't know how many people are getting their rules from PDFs these days with AoN right there.) Back in 3.5 WotC released a "rules compendium", which was a book of rules and rulings. That led to one of the wildest rules discussions I've ever seen where people argued WotC's "Rules Compendium" book couldn't actually impact RAW because in the order of book priority, it was lower than the PHB. Thus, an official, newer book specifically about clarifying rules wasn't RAW if it didn't line up with an older book. That was the day I realized how absurd purist RAW arguments can get.
For anyone who can easily test this via Foundry: I'd love to hear what happens if double-trait (no type) weakness is popped, like that holy water vs fiend troop/swarm example. Or adding Holy to a bomb, idk if holy water is a functional item or not. Holy water is functional (tested on Treerazer). Vescavor Swarm pops two weaknesses: Holy and Splash. You'd have to ask the Foundry devs if that's an intentional outcome or a bug on this particular combination. I feel like its probably an error because this happens even on a miss where you're only doing splash damage, rather than doing the bomb damage and also the splash damage. There's some edge cases with bombs, like the Bomber's ability to add special material properties to their versatile vials not applying to the splash portion in Foundry and I'm not sure if that's intentional or not either. Sometimes this stuff is just technical where it's a problem to implement it rather than taking a stance on how it should work.
This one also seems to be popping multiple times in my test game, which is weird because I don't think it was doing this in earlier verisons. Example case is Seelah (PFS Champion) vs a Shemhazin Demon (weakness Cold Iron 15, Holy 15): 1. Longsword triggers Holy Weakness (because Champion and I think everyone agrees this is correct).
This appears to have changed in the most recent version because I don't think case 2 was doing that before.
This would also apply to resists though, and that creates silly situations like if you're resistant to every damage type on a strike, it counts as only one instance so you only apply one resist... but Resist All applies to all of them (because the rules flat out say so). That means "Resist All" works differently than "Resistant to Every Single Type of Damage Being Done". You could literally have every single resist in the game and it would behave differently than having "Resist All", despite those being logically equivalent. The obvious upside of a position with multiple instances of damage is that the problem goes away: Resist All and Resist to Multiple Things work in exactly the same way. That's both much more consistent to run and also easier to implement on a technical level since you don't have to build in an exception code path for Resist All. Another reason that Foundry gets considered with such weight in these talks is that it is a deterministic system, it (is not supposed to) play favorites, and should be applying one set of rules evenly. This is why I'm perking up at hearing inconsistent results where the Arboreal did/not get a double pop. Since they fixed that in an update, it's pretty clear it was a bug. My first guess is that they coded the Holy rune against the textual instruction, and only the bonus spirit damage is Holy instead of the entire strike. Based on how they fixed the Arboreal axe thing, this doesn't appear to be true. They have a list of types that can only trigger weakness once. Axe wasn't on it so it was double popping, then that was fixed so it stopped doing that. Holy doesn't double pop in my testing and I don't see any instance where the same weakness can trigger more than once outside of a bug. If it has two weaknesses you can trigger both of them, but not a single weakness twice on the same strike. It's too convenient of a "bug" that'll prevent the systemic result of their own logic from triggering. This sounds like an accusation. That Holy rune is supposed to make the entire weapon attack Holy. If Holy only pops once total even when the entire attack is Holy, that implies a more specifically coded exception might have been implemented. My testing and the patch notes don't really back this up: they implemented logic so that trait weaknesses only trigger once per attack rather than being able to trigger four times if you have 3 damage property runes. Aside from doing that not being very strongly supported in the rules, it doesn't make much sense and would lead to absurd outcomes if Foundry did that by default.
It's a deterministic ruleset: you put X input in, and you get Y output out. That works every time within a given version. You might not like what the outcome is, but that doesn't mean its nondeterministic. It's clearly not "cheating" where its doing different things for some creatures than others. PC, NPC, whatever. If it has the same set of resists/weaknesses it gets the same outcomes. Considering the wording on resistance-granting gear Paizo's published well after launch, I can promise yall that at least some of Paizo folk do NOT subscribe to the "Types-create-instances" notion. To them, one hit is one instance. You are not supposed to be getting "every weakness once per hit," every time I re-read those rules, it instructs to use the highest single weakness per hit. Citation Needed. If this is how Paizo views it, you'd think when the Foundry team asked for clarification they would have just given that answer. It's not like we're talking about a random person here: they're blessed as the "official" implementation and recognized as such. If they can't get a straight answer about how the rules work, then what does that say? And what does "Weakness All" do in this case? If it's just functioning like a single weakness they really shouldn't have used "All" because that means it works differently than Resist All without being defined anywhere in the rules... and given how confusing this already was, they had to know doing that would cause even more confusion. Course, if Paizo subscribes to a specific ruling on this, it sure would be great if they would tell us what it is. It's only been what? 6 years since this first started causing confusion? The fact that it's still not clarified is absurd. At this point the theory that Paizo thinks it should work a certain way and simply wont' tell us because reasons isn't any more likely than the theory that Paizo doesn't agree internally on how it should work and won't clarify it because they're not on the same page themselves.
I think the key difference here is that casters are made to work with hard counters, unlike martials. Outside of the admittedly many egregious hard-counters to all magic like golems, will-o'-wisps, and the leydroth, most enemies with immunities can be approached in alternative ways with a diverse enough array of spells: if a Sorcerer's fireball doesn't work against a devil, for instance, that can be fine, because they could just cast lightning bolt instead, or one of several more spells in their repertoire. By contrast, enemies that are completely immune to Strike-based damage tend to leave martial classes with very little recourse. Martials can and should have backup weapons at the ready, but if your main weapon deals slashing damage, your backup weapon deals piercing damage, and you're up against a verdurous ooze, your Swashbuckler will be reduced to slapping the ooze with unbuffed unarmed attacks, and taking acid damage each time for the privilege. It's an interesting dichotomy, isn't it? Casters are expected to face immunities constantly and build around that, and will still face a pile of stuff that hard counters their entire method of combat. That's why I took exception to the idea that it'd be some kind of huge problem if an enemy existed that was resistant or immune to rage damage. Heaven forbid that a Barbarian has to deal with a single enemy that is resistant to it's special thing. It's not a fun thing when it happens, which is why it should be used sparingly: so it has an impact when it happens without just shutting a character down too often. With that said, I also agree that it sucks to get hard-countered, and even though casters have the means to deal with it, that still doesn't make it much fun. It's also in my opinion the single biggest obstacle to any kind of thematic caster with a specific theme, because it's very easy for that theme to get completely shut down. Any kind of mentalist class is obviously going to suffer against the game's large number of mindless enemies, and builds centered around a particular element or ailment, like fire or poison, will have very few options against enemies immune to those. In a gaming environment where increasingly more players want to commit to a particular theme or emulate a character that's similarly good at a specific niche, something that's easily achievable with martial characters but not with casters, it would be to the benefit of a future edition to let players do that without feeling completely out of options against some enemies. If they're going to enable that kind of gameplay, they need to commit to it. They're pretty clear when it comes to caster gameplay that you're expected to have a wide variety of options and specialization will bite you, though some specializations will bite you more often than others (mentalist being a particularly poor pick)... and even then sometimes they still go "nope, you're buffing the Fighter today and hopefully it doesn't get dispelled." They're more wishy-washy on the martial gameplay side of it, because a lot of time you can get away with specializing on one thing and having it work. Like there was almost no enemy in Extinction Curse that my son's 2h Fighter couldn't deal with using the strategy of "hit really hard with sword". He had a great time with that. Even precision immunity has some campaigns where it hardly ever comes up. So you do that for a while and it's working great, and then suddenly you run into a bunch of enemies that go "nope" and it feels really jarring because you don't have anything you can do about it. So the game design needs to pick a lane, IMO: either hard immunities are a thing and every class should have some way to deal with it, or it should be limited to resistances and thus while your thing might not be as effective, you're never hard countered to the point of being shut down.
The most annoying immunity is non-mindless mental because it’s on way too many things at high level and usually doesn’t make any sense. Like is there any reason you shouldn’t be able to demoralize treerazor? My best guess at what’s going on is that the writers didn’t want big bad scary bosses subject to the effects of laughing fit. This is a whole thing in Spore War. Aside from mental immune enemies (like Treerazer, I guess because demoralize is too good or something), some other enemies you fight multiple times have some kind of resistance to mental. That's either in the form of mental damage resist or bonuses to saves against it for reasons. It comes up often enough to be really noticeable if you took something like Debilitating Dichotomy, which I did. Next time we have some downtime I should probably retrain that, now that I think about it. It was a lot better in Kingmaker than it is here. (AFAIK tons of stuff is poison immune, but no one bothers attempting to use poison at this point so it doesn't come up.)
Spellcasters have entered the chat. Aside from the years of Golems being "lolno", we have stuff like the Leydroth which while not immune to magic does get +2 to magic saves, a reaction counterspell that causes mental damage to the caster being countered, and multiple ways to dispel your buffs (with more mental damage if it succeeds). An AP goes "here's 3 of them at the same time, have fun!" so if you're a lone caster in that fight, you're facing 3 separate reactions to counter you. Good luck! And of course, there's our dear friend "mythic resilience on all 3 saves" courtesy of WoI, though Paizo learned not to do that in later books because it's so ridiculous. I find the idea that it'd be a crisis if something was somehow resistant to rage damage to be somewhat exaggerated. The game has been doing that to casters for years and they deal with it. It's definitely lame for a class heavily reliant on a damage type (like precision) when it doesn't work at all because they don't have a good alternative, but if it's a rare occurrence its not the end of the world as long as the creature is statted appropriately or it has another weakness that can be used to deal with it.
How quickly we forget the contents, such as they were, of the last errata. Oh, I haven't. I remind people that we're now at a year and a half where Remaster Oracle's repertoire size is contradictory every chance I get. But that's the thing: this system can be both better than the old one and also not good enough at the same time.
This is one of those things that has existed for a long time and every edition, fewer things have it. Which tells me it isn't very fun. It needs to be really rare given how it acts as a fairly hard counter to a couple of classes. Immunities in general have that problem, though those one is broader than "fire immunity", which only really shuts down a single gate Fire Kineticist (even a Flames Oracle should have some other type of damage to use instead). Like, I don't have a problem with hyperspecialists that are really good running into something that their specialty doesn't work on. That's why you should always build to be able to do more than one thing. Removing that wouldn't really be good for the game. If someone really only takes Fire effects and they run into a Fire Elemental? There's a valuable lesson in that for them about the importance of versatility. But in the case of "my class by design does precision damage and that's baked in no matter what I do about it", blocking that entirely is pretty rough on that class.
It sounds right. I can't recall ever seeing a creature with poison weakness in actual play. Poison is just nonviable most of the time in PF2. Tons of things are immune, basically nothing is weak to it, and it's not so powerful that it makes up for that in any particular way. It's useful to the GM far more often than it is for players.
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