Tridus's page

They're definitely not destroyed, because you don't say "lost forever" if the items are destroyed, and it's not a cheat code to destroy artifacts.

I agree with Finoan that the rules are deliberately vague on this. PF1's bag of holding says the same thing. It's really just "the stuff is gone unless the GM wants to make a plot about getting it back."

Considering the size of the entrance of a spacious pouch, it's going to be pretty hard to trick anyone into walking into it, I'd think. Let alone anything powerful enough for that to be a necessary tactic. Handy way to dispose of a body, though.

The Raven Black wrote:

shepsquared wrote:

Idk why it would be an issue to remove AI generated images from the guides. The art isn't why anyone ever opens them, and you can pretty obviously replace them with random anime screenshots and get the same effect.

Ain't that even more direct copyright infringement?

Disclaimer: I'm not expert on copyright law.

I am suspecting that with the derivative work being non-profit and the use being both limited in scope and duration (one still image from a long video) and very transformed (the new content has no relevance or competition to the original work), it would have a good argument for fair-use.

It is probably in the same category as using a still screenshot of a movie as a meme template.

I think the fair use argument is pretty weak because the thing in question isn't transformational (the art isn't being transformed into anything), and it's not relevant to the piece at all so provisions related to commentary/criticism don't apply either.

It doesn't matter particularly because no one ever enforces it for something like an image in a guide, but it does present an interesting argument because Paizo doesn't enforce any rule against using someone elses artwork without permission in something linked on this forum.

They also explicitly allow AI in ORC licenced stuff, so they're saying you can do it but you can't link it here?

I feel like some of the numbers might be high, but I like the idea! Invest some class feats into being able to use wands and such more frequently and you can. It'd be quite a good feat chain for someone that wanted to invest in that, including a class that isn't a default caster but might want to be able to have a reusable wand on hand for various reasons.

Cool concept. :)

Interesting. Is the idea that this is something that is just added, or something that has some kind of buy-in (apart from buying the staff, of course)? If the former, I agree it should be Dex. If the latter, your casting stat is fine.

I don't think Dex is too out there - after all, rays used Dex in PF1, and nobody thought it was too weird. (Or did they?)

Anyway, it seems like you would need to review each staff to give it an appropriate attack. Or at least, every staff anyone in your game is considering buying/keeping (which to be fair might be much smaller number).

DEX would make sense if its a ranged strike since that's the standard for those, and you can already swing the staff in melee using STR.

How would you feel about a high-magic homebrew rule that lets people make a ranged weapon strike with a staff that's 1d4 and a fixed energy type with a ~30ft range, maybe in the sling weapon group like foxfire?

Kinda like the idea of doing some old school WoW style wand spam, and making it a bit cooler to have a staff handy.

I like it! My typical caster fantasy doesn't involve carrying a bow or whatever around to make a third action strike, even though it makes sense to do so. This solves that and is a nice little staff boost.

Would it scale off runes like weapon attacks do?

Claxon wrote:

ScooterScoots wrote:

The main problem with medicine is just that ward medic and continual recovery are feats instead of built in. So in order for the party to rely on medicine (which it has to unless someone happens to have right focus spell, or multiple people for some focus spells) some poor SOB has to pay the skill feat tax.

Honestly you get 10 skills feats on a character. Spending 2 of them on medicine isn't that big a deal IMO. It's honestly more than you need to spend skill proficiency increases that is a little harder to stomach.

Some characters don't care much about losing 2 skill feats (though they might care a bit more about having to lose those right at level 2 and 4), but if you don't happen to have a character like that already on the team it really sucks to have to contort around the tax feats.

I always felt like Continual Recovery should be just how Medicine works. Why is that a feat? The game designers don't want people going into fights at low HP and low level scenarios tend to go out of their way to give you time to recover so you don't. Continual Recovery just feels like a straight up feat tax on being allowed to do what the skill already does often enough for it to do its intended function. Like, there's no feat on Athletics that you have to take to be allowed to trip/grab/etc the same target twice.

Ward Medic a bit less so, but that feats makes everything feel so much better. Incredibly so at a large PFS table (6 players). I hate having to sit there going "do I heal the first time players first or the veteran that is effectively carrying the group?" All while hoping we don't get interrupted.

Toss in Battle Medicine and Assurance and Medicine has a ton of "core" skill feats. That's not even all the good ones. It's one of the most stacked skills for good skill feats, but it's also really stacked for ones that just feel necessary for the skill to do what it's supposed to.

(In fact now that I'm thinking about it, I may just house rule Continual Recovery away in my next campaign.)

ISTM that the whole thing is a big old mess, and it needs errata whatever the devs originally intended. Both to confirm what an instance of damage is, and fix the rules that only work with the other definition (of which there appear to be examples in both directions).

I'd rather have some examples instead of errata, because the errata would have to be really long to actually cover every case and they won't do that due to it being impossible to fit into the book's current layout.

But they can much more easily create a FAQ page (or hell, even a blog post using their existing system!) that runs through a couple of complex scenarios and tells us what the expected outcome is and more importantly: show the work of how they got that answer.

Link the blog post on the AoN rules page for IWR and we've got something to work with.

I'm pretty sure it's the Dedication now. Both because the already cited line about the archetype granting access to scrolls/staves/wands didn't used to exist, but also because before that changed, PFS had a ruling that said it was Basic Spellcasting Benefits that granted it.

That ruling was removed when this wording changed. So it seems to me like Paizo clarified it with the intent that it's the Dedication by deliberately not adopting the PFS wording, and PFS dropped their ruling when the base rule changed.

Of course, that doesn't necessarily mean it actually works for everything listed. Staves have added requirements:

You can Cast a Spell from a staff only if you have that spell on your spell list, are able to cast spells of the appropriate rank or higher,

So for example a class with no spellcasting that takes a spellcasting Dedication feat can't actually cast anything of rank 1 or higher from a staff because they have no spell slots. They also can't charge the staff since that's also based on spell slots. It reads like casting a cantrip from it should work since you can do that even in a staff with 0 charges, as long as the cantrips are on the spell list the archetype is giving you.

shepsquared wrote:

Idk why it would be an issue to remove AI generated images from the guides. The art isn't why anyone ever opens them, and you can pretty obviously replace them with random anime screenshots and get the same effect.

Ain't that even more direct copyright infringement?

Yes, but no one really cares about it in that case.

I suspect that even the creators wouldn't care if its in a nonprofit guide and they're being credited.

That playtest was from December of last year, right? Any idea when we're getting the next one?

Nothing has been made public that I'm aware of about a new playtest or classes after this one. We don't tend to know about those very far in advance of them coming out.

The book for the classes in this playtest is supposed to come out in 2026 sometime IIRC. Given Paizo's past release history of always having something new at Gencon, that would be a decent guess.

I may have misunderstood Glass' original post, but I think everyone talking about "4 charges" misunderstood what glass was trying to say.

Glass wrote:

Chargeable wands are "spells in a stick" like PF1 wands were, except that a fully charged wand only has 30 charges. Actually casting a spell from one works like a standard wand, except there is no daily restrictions (there may be a once-per-round restriction). They cost quite a lot up front, but the a significantly less to add charges. Restoring any number of charges takes two hours (you can do four per day if you have nothing better to do).

When Glass wrote this, I think he was saying you could recharge your 30 charges by spending 2 hours of time. And he was saying "if you had nothing to do all day (8 hours)" you could spend your time (discharging and) recharging the wand 4 times.

Oh. Yeah that would make a lot more sense. :)

totesmagotes83 wrote:

It's the same thing with "expeditious search" skill feat. It's lvl 7 for that reason, but they could have just made it lvl 8.

It's not just that skill feat either. Pretty much all of the 'requires Master' skill feats are level 7 feats. Even though you don't get a skill feat slot at level 7.

You get a general feat which can be a skill feat, so that is the earliest level you can take it if it were a skill feat.

So I do think that the feat needs errata. It looks like it is supposed to be a skill feat. You could technically use it during combat, but that doesn't really seem like its intended use case.

Not that it is likely to get errata. It is from Guns & Gears and doesn't look like it made the cut for Remaster. Maybe Demolitionist Archetype will be reprinted in a different book at some point and this will get fixed then.

Demolitionist is in the remaster G&G. This feat wasn't changed. So yeah, probably not getting errata.

Zalabim wrote:

The real tricky part of pf2 is that it can be really hard to anticipate how a build plan will play out in "real" combat.

There's always a push-pull tension between building a PC as flavorful and thematically as possible, versus selecting for mechanical performance.

I love the idea of many of the "bad" archetypes, but the knowledge that they are essentially wasted feats pushes me away from ever selecting them.

This is one of the best uses of Free Archetype. If your core build is capable, you're totally free to take a "bad" archetype for flavour or situational fun and it doesn't really hurt you. You're still going to be capable at the core stuff since your class feats and such are intended to be able to do that.

I enjoy FA a lot more in games where people use it to do flavourful things than when someone does it to chain a bunch of power combo archetypes together.

That phrasing is a bit misleading. DC 15 is a rule of thumb starting point, yes, but the rule is that the DC is set by the GM case by case, and the rules do include things like guidance that attempting the same Aid method repeatedly against a creature should have the DC rise.

It's still true that Aid is a very strong tool, and true that critting tends to become much easier as you go, but it can't be accurately presented like the DC is fixed.

That's best discussed in a different thread because it'll get lengthy. :)

The costs of those still scale quadratically, so even if you make the cost of the lowest-level versions reasonable, you still be better off spamming those than the higher-level versions.

Since you're changing prices, you can change them to not scale quadratically. You can change them to literally anything. Though there's some value in not having to spend a half hour chugging potions before being able to move on.

I am not sure what you're saying here: There is no 4 charge limit, you have 30 charges to play with. I deliberately make it only take 2 hour to recharge so that it would not be too much of an impediment. If you burn through 1500 hp before you can spare 2 hours, this won't work, but you've probably got bigger problems.

4 charges is how many you can restore in a day under this, IIRC. If you burn 4 or more in a single fight, the wand can't keep up that and will run out, so the recharge becomes a lot less useful unless its a campaign like Kingmaker with far more downtime than adventuring time.

In something like Ruby Phoenix for example, you'd basically only have one section where it would ever be rechargable, and the rest of the time it's just a consumable. That was the point I was trying to make.

gesalt wrote:

Teridax wrote:

There's a difference between "good" and "the class's key asset and the reason they're a 2-slot, 6 HP/level caster," though. Poaching tempest surge from the Druid is generally not going to make you a better Druid, nor will poaching cackle make you a better Witch. A +2 status bonus that's guaranteed to bump up a check's degree of success as a reaction three times per encounter makes a major difference in my experience, more so than the aforementioned focus spells.

I can't say I've ever gotten any crazy mileage out of amp guidance. Mostly because of the +1 status bonus to attacks already on everyone and +3 and +4 aids stacking with it and being capable of bumping checks to crits. Yes, I do believe a +15-20% chance to hit/crit on a roll every turn is better than holding my reaction to bump a roll that missed by 1 or 2.

Maybe that's why I don't find it broken. I typically take psychic more for the focus point than the actual amp. Most martials? Extra LoH for an emergency heal or to heal between waves. Monk? Shield to proc psi strikes. Other casters? If not extra casts of their own focus spell, then message, actually. Force the reaction attack even if the enemy doesn't want to move or stand up.

How do you get +3 and +4 aids with a single Dedication feat?

I would love to get it.

Those +3 and +4 aren't coming from a dedication typically (though Swashbuckler Archetype has One For All), they're coming from the Aid reaction. You add +3 if you critically succeed and you're a master in the skill, or +4 if legendary.

As by default the DC is always 15, this becomes trivially easy at high level to the point that the only way to not critically succeed is to roll a nat 1.

And my opinions on that are best for another thread. ;)

Maya Coleman wrote:

For your second question, can you provide an example of this? I'm struggling to relate it to the conversation at hand with generative AI on our forums specifically, but that could just be my autism being rigid about conversational buckets, and I want to make sure I get on the same page as you to give you an accurate answer!

Allow me to rephrase:

If another company creates a product using AI tools or generated AI assets intended for use with the Pathfinder roleplaying game, is Paizo going to send them a cease and desist letter?

I'm thinking of apps like Pathbuilder 2e, a campaign setting book for a non-Golarion setting, or Tableplay Gamers' various online Pathfinder character galleries, all of which might contain AI generated content or had been obliquely created with AI tools.

Pathfinder Infinite does have a rule forbidding GenAI works from being used on that platform. That's part of the agreement for Infinite, which aside from being a storefront is what lets someone use non-ORC resources (like stuff from Golarian). Infinite is also what lets you use some Pathfinder branding, but that's getting well beyond anything I understand. :)

So, a supplement/adventure/etc published on Infinite can use the Golarian setting and some other things Paizo makes available that way, but can't use AI.

This isn't true of ORC, which is a much more open use licence that places very few restrictions on what you can do with the content. AI is allowed there.

Pathbuilder uses ORC/OGL content, which is why it has to rename certain things (like Brevic Outcast background is called "Kingdom Outcast" in Pathbuilder). Pathbuilder could use AI and they'd be fully in the clear per Paizo's "the licence in plain English" details.

... which makes this kind of weird now that I'm reading it, since Paizo is saying that guides can't use AI images, while Paizo also says that anything using ORC can use AI, which would include guides.

If you want to keep using AI for your work that you share personally, that's your prerogative, and we won't tell you what to do, but we will have to remove it from our forums as we don't allow AI on our platform. If you want to share the work you create on our forums, it can't have AI. You can share it other places that allow that, but we won't be able to keep it here.

Setting aside how people feel about AI for a moment, there's a separate fundamental issue here: this is impossible to enforce consistently, for several reasons:

1. It's not really feasible for someone to follow every link posted on the forums and check for AI content because I doubt Paizo has enough staff on this to actually do that job. That's a lot of links, a lot of text, and it's not static (something could "pass" today and then a week later update and now "fail"). Stuff is going to get missed, and people who do get called on it are going to feel like its rather unfair that other stuff isn't getting called out.

2. Actually checking for GenAI content is going to require also reading the whole guide to see if the text is that way. Otherwise the stance is applying only to assets (images and such) but not the actual guide content.

3. How about VTT mods, encounter builder websites, or other tools that get linked here? If they're created with the help of Claude/Github Copilot/etc, are they also banned? Unless someone audits the code or the author says as much, how would that be enforced? Or is this kind of GenAI fine?

4. Applying this stance across the forums creates an impossible standard in the case of a link to social media like Reddit: I can link a discussion on Reddit here in reference to a rule and a different commenter there can add GenAI content, which I have no control over whatsoever. Likewise, this post is a guide to the guides: if the guide links to a guide that has GenAI content, does this guide to the guides have to remove that link? And is the author of this expected to enforce that?

5. Determining if something is GenAI or not isn't cut and dry. Sometimes it's obvious, but other times it's really not. This is going to lead to false negatives, but also false positives, which are extremely frustrating to anyone caught by them.

I'm a big fan of Paizo's "no AI in our products" stance, but this isn't your product and trying to extend enforcement to other people's work feels like an overreach. The guides are a useful community resource that help your customers and are written by your customers. They aren't using your branding and don't reflect on you.

Trying to police all of that is mostly going to frustrate people when it's inevitably unevenly enforced and drive people to either post it elsewhere or not do it at all, neither of which are particularly helpful.

I really think this policy needs a rethink. Unenforceable or inconsistently enforceable rules often cause more problems than they solve.

My referring to Medicine as mandatory is obviously hyperbolic. But the party needs to invest heavily in something to survive in PF2.

They also did in PF1 too: the something was just "burn a lot of money and make sure someone can activate endless wands." If you ran out of wands halfway through the dungeon, you were screwed and effectively forced to retreat to restock.

It also didn't work at low level there either because a healing wand was really expensive early on.

The only thing that actually changed is the game now expects people to get an ability to do it instead of spend gold to do it. But you can house rule the ability part away with a couple of the proposals you've been given.

Which alchemical items? Because the ones have costs that start way too high to be routinely usable while level appropriate, and then scale highly non-linearly with level (and hp restored). Exactly like other PF2 consumables (and not all that differently from PF1 consumables, in terms of relative costs across levels, although they tended to be a bit cheaper overall).

Healing Vapor and Soothing Tonic (which does exactly what Infernal Healing does). As I said: massively cut the price on them and you've regained item healing spam without changing anything else.

Teridax already pointed out quandary as a possible issue, and in response I changed the proposal to limit it to only spells whose base ranks is 4 or less. So there are not going to be chargeable wands of any of those except slow. Now that is definitely a spell that benefits from being spammable, since if you force enough saves eventually the enemy is going to fail one. I am not sure if I consider that to be a problem - I will have to ponder.

4th rank heal does an average of 50 HP of healing, or 18 in AoE mode to a party (which is the way to go if 3+ people are injured). Given high level characters easily clear 200 HP and many clear 300 HP, you're going to be burning through a LOT of charges to recover after a fight of any significant difficulty. The 4 charges a day you can restore won't heal a Fighter or Summoner back up after a single encounter, let alone a Barbarian or Guardian. And if the whole party is injured, you're looking at over 10 charges per fight. So in a time compressed AP scenario with little downtime, the recharge mechanic won't matter and you'll have to just carry a pile of wands.

Like even my 14th level Spore War party would completely drain one of these in 4-5 fights if we used it as our primary recovery method. It'd be faster if they all go like the last couple of fights we had went where we were barely surviving.

And this doesn't eliminate all the downtime rolls unless you're just going to take the average and not roll it. Otherwise you'll have to roll 4d8 a whole pile of times and everyone will get annoyed when they get single digit HP.

I really feel like you're too fixated on trying to do what PF1 did as a solution without recognizing why its not really suitable to PF2 and that there's better ways to go about doing the same thing. (Frankly it was a lousy solution in PF1 too, but it was what we had.)

@Tridus, the new "Recuperate" action your suggesting is basically just the alternate stamina rules that I've suggested before.

You're right. :)

But yeah, problem with cheap spamable wands in PF2 is that since the spells use your DC, offensive use would be viable. And even with a bad DC, as long as people aren't critically succeeding, a spell like Synesthesia being able to used as often as desired will trivialize a lot of enemies/encounters.

I just see it as a big problem to implement a change that gives a lot of uses of a spell for a low-ish cost.

Yes, 100% this. If you can use these wands for offensive purposes, any spell with a good outcome on successful save becomes the go-to item. I'd abuse the ever loving hell out of a Synesthesia chargable wand on every caster I make: pick up a dedication that gives you the Occult list (or a feature like Mysterious Repertoire to get it on your list) and you're golden.

In a campaign like Kingmaker with a lot of short adventuring days and a lot of downtime, the abuse potential of this is sky high since you can pretty much always have it fully charged and you can even get the money to charge it from Earn Income during that downtime.

I recently started a thread here on the idea of porting PF1-style 50-charge wands to PF2. The general consensus, which I have come to agree with, is that it was not one of my better ideas. However, in the course of conversation I hit on something that I though might be better. Before I get into the details, a little preamble about the perceived issue I am attempting to address: Both PF1 and PF2 have their near-mandatory post-combat procedures, which are different but both can be kinda annoying in their own ways.

PF2's version is making a whole bunch of Medicine checks, consuming quite a lot of time both in and out of universe. At my table we have already houseruled them to consume less of both (fewer die rolls, more generous results). But they still require someone (preferably at least two someones) to invest heavily in Medicine to keep the party on their feet. Which would be great if it were one option amongst several, but ATM it does not feel like it is.

It is, though:

TLDR: Mandatory Medicine checks are kinda annoying.

I think you're trying to solve the wrong problem, TBH. The problem you're having is downtime recovery feels annoying. It'd be a lot easier to address that directly.

eg: Create a new downtime activity:
Recuperate [Downtime]
10 Minutes
Target: You or one ally.
Restore HP equal to X% of target's maximum HP. If the target is yourself or it's appropriate as determined by the GM, you can Refocus while doing this activity. You can only benefit from this activity once per 10 minutes.

Set X based on how long you want a badly injured party to take to recover. So if you set it to 33%, then a party where everyone is at 1HP can simply declare "we spend 30 minutes recuperating" and they're all back at full health. No checks rolled, no investment in any skills/feats required. If someone is only slightly injured, they'll have extra time to identify items/search/whatever. If the party gets ambushed after 10 minutes, they at least can't fail to get some health back because there's no failure chance.

So how does making wands rechargeable help? It kinda brings back the PF1 "happy-stick dance" without the elements that made that annoying (ie, the supremacy of low-level wands even at the very highest levels, leading to huge numbers of charges being used).

Alchemical items can currently do that since you can get a pile of them and just use them as you need them. Drop the cost on the downtime recovery ones and you've given people downtime healing wand spam back, effectively.

Chargeable wands are "spells in a stick" like PF1 wands were, except that a fully charged wand only has 30 charges. Actually casting a spell from one works like a standard wand, except there is no daily restrictions (there may be a once-per-round restriction). They cost quite a lot up front, but the a significantly less to add charges. Restoring any number of charges takes two hours (you can do four per day if you have nothing better to do).

My grasp on how to price them is less solid than in the PF1 version of this thread, largely because the relationship between rank and wand cost is not obvious to me. But I am leaning towards having the upfront cost the same as a standard magic wand. The cost to recharge would be linear with spell rank (maybe 4 gp per rank - same as a scroll at Rank 1). Because the HP restored per spell rank is linear (at least for heal and soothe), that conveniently keeps the cost per hp consistent across all versions (ignoring the upfront cost).

To charge the wand, you would probably need Magical Crafting, and would definitely need to match the spells level and provide a casting of the spell (from a slot). To make the thing in the first place, you would need all that plus an appropriate formula (and more time/castings, of course).

So what do you think? Any suggestions on price. Any flaws with my cunning plan that I have missed? Anyone want to weigh in on the costs? Any thoughts on a better name for the standard PF2 spell wand than "magic wand" (to differentiate it from this, and in general)?

EDIT: I meant to say, although I have focused on spells which restore hp, I was intending this option to apply to any wands. Are there any spells which would be particularly broken under than paradigm? I guess it would cut across the extremely restricted spells slots that PF2 caster have, but I am not sure how much of a problem I consider that to be!

If the cost is cheap, people will definitely spam wands of stuff like Synesthesia, Slow, Quandry, Chain Lightning, and such. it's great news for spellcasters in that sense because I can now have 30 Synesthesia castings available on demand and get them back at a fraction of the cost that it'd take to do that any other way.

And it has to be a fraction of the cost, otherwise it doesn't work for its purpose of downtime recovery as it'd be too expensive to actually use.

Hell, one of these of Heal and you've got nigh-endless in-combat healing. Sure it costs a bit, but it's way cheaper than a scroll (because it has to be to work for downtime recovery), and so it makes more sense to use it in combat and do downtime recovery in a more renewable way.

The only way this works as downtime without being combat appliable is if its a downtime only spell in the wand like Soothing Spring, or the wand increases the casting time so it's not viable in combat.

Body text does change what creatures are the spell's targets. The issue is that we have so much precedent with those opening spell sentences being "unrequired" for mechanical adjudication, that we don't think that "foes" phrasing should update the spells mechanical targeting.

Not just unrequired: sometimes they're directly contradictory. Like Waters of Creation.

I don't think people should ignore the "flavour text" either, but its a learned behavior from cases where its necessary to do that because the two don't line up at all. Past editions had an awful track record at this. Over time the community came around to ignoring that in favor of the mechanical text so that there would be a common understanding of how things work.

PF2 is often better about it, but PF2 also has standardized terminology and formats for spells like this that sometimes Paizo just doesn't bother following. If Whispers of the Void was written the same way that Divine Wrath is, it would be clear and we wouldn't be having this conversation.

In general, these forums are *heavily* skewed toward "RaW purism" and really don't like the idea of RaI overruling RaW, because that genuinely is an entirely different discussion without RaW's greater degree of objectivity.

Not really: everyone agreed pretty quickly on what Arcane Cascade's RAI was and ignored RAW for literally years without much fuss.

The issue with RAI is that intent often isn't actually clear and people project their own interpretation onto it. I'm going to pick on Waters of Creation again, but what's the intent there? No one can possibly know the answer to that. The flavour text contradicts the mechanics text that comes immediately after it. We have to ignore one of them due to the contradiction, and the flavour text is going to lose that battle every time. And every time that happens, the belief that flavour text is secondary gets reinforced.

For Whispers of the Void, is the intent that it only hits enemies? In my answer, I said yes, probably. But I'm just making an educated guess and I don't actually know what was intended.

Because if you took the same flavour text and slapped it on Fireball, does Fireball now ignore allies? Or do we know that must be wrong because we have literally decades of understanding of how Fireball works and thus know to ignore that as narrative flourish?

That's the whole problem with flavour text at the end of the day: sometimes it's relevant and sometimes it's just flat out wrong and we have to guess which case is which.

I stil think Resistance All is still "To Good To Be True" when it comes to applying multiple times no matter how you look at it possibly.

Resist All is the one case that is explicitly defined in the rules. It's not "too good to be true": it's flat out the rule that it applies to every type of damage you take.

It feels like the Weakness/Resistance rules do not work evenly in both directions which I think feels wrong from a balance point of view. Why can my Resistance 5 (Expect Force) apply to my Flaming Thundering Short-sword three times but If the monster had Weakness 10 sonic, Weakness 5 Fire and Weakness 5 Slashing, it only takes the 10 sonic weakness? How is this even or fair?

I mean, maybe it should? The whole problem is that this stuff isn't well defined and no one really knows how it should work when you apply multiple resists (except resist all) or multiple weaknesses. (fun fact: we also don't know for sure what weakness all does, either.)

If we had a FAQ list, "instances of damage and how resistences/weaknesses work with it" would be the #1 question since 2020.

I think it should work the same way because consistency is good in rules. It's easier to understand if they do the same thing and follow the same rules. So how I think it should work:
- If something is resistant to fire and slashing, both resists apply.
- If something is weak to both fire and slashing, both weaknesses apply.
- If you have a trait like Holy being applied, apply that resist/weakness only once to the entire attack (because the outcomes become absurd if you apply Holy weakness four times when someone uses a flaming corrosive shock weapon).

That's consistent with how resist all works and keeps the two functioning roughly the same way. Is it RAW? I have no idea, lol. But it works and players can understand what the outcome is going to be, so that's good enough for me.

IIRC, that's pretty close to what Foundry is doing. "Foundry does it" also doesn't mean it's RAW, but it does mean any table using Foundry with IWR on is getting that implementation, so it's something of a defacto community standard and if you "do what Foundry does", you'll at least get a consistent outcome with a lot of other tables.

Since Paizo is allergic to explaining things, that's kind of the best we have.

SgtBalanced wrote:

Rule concern 1) Please define the phrase "instance of damage."

Bwahahaha! Best of luck with that. I've been asking for that for literally years.

I think they painted themselves into a corner on it. There isn't a consistent definition that can possibly be created that will work 'as intended' in all cases.

Yeah it's absurd that they have left this in this state for so long. I think it's a victim of their unwillingness to do anything except issue official errata.

One of the few things PF1 did better than PF2 is that PF1 had a big FAQ that was willing to explain things and give examples without it having to get into a book as errata. That is what this problem needs: concrete examples where Paizo takes a couple of complex scenarios and tells us what the expected outcome is.

I don't know why they refuse to sort stuff like this out, but it's really unhealthy for the game that six years later we still don't actually know how a core mechanic works, let alone that they've abdicated sorting it out to the Foundry team.

As a GM I just use the old version of the abilities, since the feats are from that time and haven't been updated. That means they work as intended. It does make a Trip Summoner pretty good, but I'm totally fine with that.

It's also kind of funny because at least on monsters, the new version of Grab can be stronger than the old ones. Yes, they have to roll... but if it's a high power monster relative to the party, getting to roll Grab with no MAP means their odds of critical success are actually pretty decent. Restrained is WAY worse than Grabbed.

It's a bit of an unintended consequence because players felt like the auto-grab was unfair so they do have to roll now, but that particular ability wasn't actually weakened by it. (Knockdown got less out of it, since a critical success on trip isn't much different than a success.)

A well constructed build will usually be taking several archetypes and have serious trade offs to make in how many and when it can take those dedications. Exemplar doesn’t come off particularly well compared to build specific synergy archetypes (unless it *is* the build specific synergy, like for throwing builds), mostly being something you fit in at the end if you can. Which you often can, but usually late and using your multitalented (which might also mean you have to take adopted ancestry or be half human heritage or whatever instead of something otherwise better). It’s got other competitors for this role as well, such as alchemist dedication giving 4 prebuffable autoscaling mutagens of choice.

In a non-FA game, which is what I already said I was talking about, doing this requires spending the vast majrity of your feats in most APs just to get to 2 archetypes. Even if you're a human, and there's a lot of non-human characters out there.

Now, where exemplar *is* a big power spike is compared to just not taking any archetypes at all, which less skilled build crafters were doing in the first place. So it appears much more powerful than it is because it causes a big jump in power for a large fraction of the playerbase, by dint of being simple and easy to understand. Any idiot can see the value of flat damage, add exemplar onto your monoclass no archetype build and it’ll improve it because there’s no opportunity cost if you weren’t going to use the opportunity anyways.

Aside from the insulting tone, that's literally the point. It's one feat that is way out of line with other feats of its level.

The idea that it's less out of line in a specific situation where you're playing a specific hyper optimized setup doesn't actually make it okay for how typical people actually play the game.

On the one hand psychic is the best caster multiclass dedication feat because it gives a lot in one feat.

On the other hand its not the best caster archytype being weaker than bard and sorcerer as a whole imo (its at least comparable).

Its also not the best multiclass dedication feat, rogue and champions both get a lot for their entry feat enough to be comparable.

Its not the best archtype dedication feat,the two weapon fighting archytype, blessed one, spirit warrior, exemplar all get powerful abilities you can build around that are stronger or at least comparable.

People probably think its too strong for 2 reasons magus synergy (more an issue with magus than psychic imo) and because its nice as a free gift with human and ancient elf free dedication feat which sees it as a common pick.

Given the main issue is a magus issue it think adjustments are needwd there rather than here.

Setting Magus aside, the problem with it is that the Dedication is way out of whack with other Dedication feats. It gives you a LOT for a single feat, including the signature ability of the class.

So it has the Exemplar problem: it's extremely powerful in a normal/PFS game where you simply take the Dedication on a character you were otherwise never going to archetype on. You get a dramatically stronger level 2 feat than you could otherwise get at effectively no cost since you're under no obligation to ever take another Psychic feat. That makes it one of the best feats in the game for a massive swath of classes and builds.

This is less of an issue in a Free Archetype game because you have to take two more feats no matter what and the spiked Dedication will average out some vs what other archetypes can give you with more investment. But that's not the core rules of the game.

The rules are really inconsistent about if an archetype should be able to get the class signature ability and how much the Dedication feat gives you:
1 Ones like Cleric just flat out disallow it, as there's no way for the archetype to get any version of Divine Font.
2 Ones like Summoner that let you get it but give it to you in such a weakened capacity that it's not really worth doing.
3 Ones like Monk that let you get it (flurry of blows) but require additional investment and give you a nerfed version for it.
4 Ones like Oracle (Cursebound abilities) that let you get it with investment and have it work nearly as well as the class itself can do it.
5 Ones like Champion where the Dedication itself is giving you good things (scaling armor proficiency, Sanctification for strikes), and you can get the class signature thing (the reaction) with investment.
6 Ones like Exemplar and Psychic that give you the class signature ability right in the Dedication with no additional investment needed whatsoever. (Alchemist could probably be here too.)

Compare what you're getting as you go down that list from the Dedication level 2 feat to what another level 2 feat in class gives you. 6 is way out of whack with the expected power of a feat, and 5 is pushing it too. Compare to something like Summoner dedication, which is just bad.

That's the real problem with Psychic archetype.

I think one of the issues is how 'steel' the 'common' item, is the item which is of the finest grade and used for the best items.

So if you want to add a powerful rune on an item, you have to be using steel, or if you are using a special material, you have to pay for an even more expensive special material.

Yeah this is an issue. Material only matters if it's not the base material. If it's that, for some reason a random 2s dagger has the material quality to become +3 major striking when a mid-grade special material item can't despite costing massively more.

Instead, I'd have been fine with the concept of finer grade of material for weapons, move some of the cost of the runes implementing grades of weapons, and make it clear that you can take your grandfather's old axe and take it to the blacksmith and they can upgrade it to a higher grade, and add the rune in a short time, just needing the money.

I think the playtest had an idea for something like this but it was pretty clunky. It's been a long time.

I get that they don't just want everyone to have a special material weapon late game because the cost is trivial so why not, but the net outcome made it really hard to use instead.

Maybe the special material effects should have had tiers instead. Like "low grade dawnsilver" can only trigger a max weakness of 5, and the tiers above it increase maximum effect. That's giving you something for the investment but runes work normally in any case so it's not required for the weapon to function as you gain levels.

Two actions is correct: it was in the official errata.

Page 320: The cleanse affliction spell accidentally lists two casting times. Two actions is correct, so delete "Cast 1 minute".

If I feel like the player would like one, I give it to them as treasure or enough material if they want to make it themselves. Material prices are too expensive in my opinion for what they provide, especially with the rules for material that you can put runes on by power level.

Same. I like to add this stuff as part of treasure. Unless you foreshadow "you're gonna need X metal in this campaign", people don't tend to go get it. But if you give them a nifty material item, they're more likely to use it.

(Some APs do make this obvious, like Spore War.)

If you have a local game store, they will have dice. Those are often Chessex and they're typically not super expensive. If you have the option, taking them to the store and letting them pick out a set might be a way to go.

Online there's tons of dice companies. I own sets from Die Hard, Heartbeat, and Kraken. It can be fun to get dice themed to a character, so if someone is playing a character that wears a lot of purple: purple dice. Wizard/Witch player might want dice with rune designs on them, and such. There's tons of variety here.

For background music, there's tools like Syrenscape. There's also tons of stuff on Youtube. If you run PF2 in Foundry, the premium adventure packages come with playlists for different areas included as well.

Otherwise, making it "extra fun" is like Ascalaphus said: you have to know what your players like and give them a chance to do that. Like my son loves running in and hitting things, so a combat heavy game with big personality enemies and minions he can get critical hits on is fun for him. He always talks about the time he killed things with Scare to Death or whacked a Hag out of the air with a crit from his Extending Greatsword.

Meanwhile: I love character drama and personal stakes, so I tend to have the most fun when we're doing tense negotiations, influence, or facing down the awful problems of my own backstory. Some of the most fun I've ever had was in game nights where we literally didn't pick up the dice at all.

That kind of thing comes with experience as a GM.

Mechanically, my advice is to use severe encounters sparingly, and when designing encounters, err on the side of "use more enemies". In theory a fight with a single strong enemy is just as hard as a fight with 4 weak enemies, but the fight with weak enemies will feel more fun to most players because they get to crit more often and their spells will land more reliably.

I think the amount of new content published for Kineticist says something about whether it's a good strategy to write classes that need you to explicitly assign new content to them.

My biggest concern for Runesmith, too. Kineticist doesn't interact well with the rest of the game and thus barely exists in it as far as new content is concerned. See: Mythic as the glaring example.

You could add a new spellcasting tradition and as long as they remember to tag spells with it, it would probably be okay. But a significantly different magic system wouldn't have that and would need far more ongoing support to not fall way behind, and it probably wouldn't get it.

The track record for this isn't great.

exequiel759 wrote:

Unless all magic system used the same spells (which means they wouldn't be able to truly design systems that were that different from each other), I don't see a world where one of those magic systems (likely the one that the core classes like sorcerer or wizard are going to use) is going to be heavily favored over the other in newer books and thus the classes that that used the other magic systems would be heavily in disadvatange.

The very existence of spontaneous and prepared spellcasting right now proves this wrong. Both are completely different systems for using spells that make spellcasters play radically differently from one another, despite using those same spells. Adding more spells benefits both types of casters as well, so it's not like prepared spellcasters as a group receive significantly more content than spontaneous casters or vice versa. Again, this to me is a lot like claiming that adding more martial weapons favors Fighters over other martial classes or the like: although some particular weapons work especially well with certain classes and their own unique mechanics, the addition of more martial weapons is to the benefit of all martial classes, whose different features draw from that same pool when Striking.

Spontaneous and Prepared are barely different. The difference is in how you create the list of spells on your character sheet for the day. After that, everything else is basically the same.

That's nothing like bringing Psionics or Spheres of Magic or such into a game, where they function in completely different ways.

ElementalofCuteness wrote:

Now Oracle have a weird side mechanic which no one seems to really like. Hey you need healing? Well grab stuff like Cosmos Oracle and spam 2+Levelx2 Healing 4 times because -4 to STR checks isn't gonna matter. The Cursebound status/effect feels very under whelming since you get literally no buffs to do it. There is no reason generally to go back cursebond 1-2 since cursebound actions feels weak compared to your focus spells

This, to me, is a prime reason why the remaster made the Oracle's inter-mystery balance worse, not better: prior to the remaster the Oracle had some mysteries that were for sure stronger than others, but at least each mystery had quite a few unique things going for it that others couldn't access, such as the unique mystery benefits and the curse benefits in addition to the revelation spells. With the remaster, however, the Oracle's mysteries lost their unique benefits and their curse benefits, and their revelation spells are a distant second to their much more powerful cursebound feats, all of which can be accessed regardless of subclass. Previously, opting into one mystery meant locking oneself out of those many benefits, whereas now, there are no such benefits to miss out on, so the optimal choice is to just pick the mystery with the weakest curse and exploit those generic cursebound feats to the fullest. This is a balance issue that exists in the PF1e Oracle as well, and that unique mystery benefits would help prevent as they have already done.

Yeah this is what irks me most about the remaster Oracle. Mystery balance was bad before and they... utterly failed to fix it. Now they get to be bad AND generic.

Life really got hit by that. It's a worse healer than Tempest if you care about Waters of Creation, and a worse healer than Cosmos if you don't. It's most iconic ability (Life Link) is actively crippled by its curse.

Ancestors was weird and hard to use before, but it had a unique play style. Now it has an absolutely awful curse and has nothing unique going for it. And of course, Battle has a hilariously awful initial revelation spell and requires a lot of external feat support to do the thing that it used to do out of the box.

Meanwhile you have Cosmos and it's "this curse basically doesn't exist" situation. If you're going to remake a class this drastically, there isn't an excuse to leave the subclass balance in this state.

And of course, the whole mess with the number of spell slots at release and the repertoire size now being unclear just really makes it feel rushed.

Agreed that is the biggest problem. The new Oracle suffers from the same problem as the Pyschic - you can poach the best part. I for one prefer a sorcerer - oracle over a straight oracle.

Well, Oracle has better defenses (HP, Armor, and Will Save) and I think more spell slots at high level. It's got stuff going for it. But yes, I really consider it a problem that the best Cursebound abilities are front loaded and thus easy for the archetype to get. If you had high level ones (which the archetype can't get) that were actually good it'd help somewhat with that, but that largely isn't the case.

It's frustratingly inconsistent wording. Compare this:

You channel the fury of divinity against your foes. You deal 4d10 spirit damage to enemies in the area, depending on their Fortitude save.

To this:

You howl a lament of damned souls. Each living enemy in the area takes 8d10 void damage depending on its Fortitude save.

To this:

You whisper baleful secrets that transcend language and carry magically to the ears of your foes. The words take physical form, weakening the life force of the targets, each of which must attempt a Fortitude save.

The first two clearly say that the effect only hits enemies.

The third one is oddly worded because it doesn't say "enemies", but it also doesn't say something like "creatures in the area must attempt a Fortitude save", which is what you'd expect if it hit everything in the area. (Or not mention it at all and use the default of everything, like Fireball does.)

You effectively have to make a ruling on if you think the description is a statement of intent for what it should do (in which case your player is correct and it hits only enemies), or just narrative and doesn't mean anything based on what the rest of the text says.

In this case there at least isn't a contradiction in the text, which does happen (using another PC2 example):

Water is the source of life, and you draw upon this primordial force to heal your allies' wounds. A gentle ring ripples out from you in a 15-foot emanation, restoring 5d6 Hit Points to creatures in the area.

That says allies in the description, but then says "creatures in the area" right afterward, which includes enemies. Effects that only target allies say "allies in the area". So the first sentence is contradicted by the second sentence. This is one of those cases where people tend to go "flavour text doesn't count", though Paizo has said that isn't really true in the past (and people sometimes use the "flavour text" argument for any text that is inconvenient for the interpretation they want to use).

But for Whispers of the Void, it reads to me like its intended to only target enemies and a different writer used different wording. The text at least doesn't contradict itself, so there's that. But no one can really prove that, so the GM will have to make a ruling.

Unfortunately PC2 was a really messy book for things like this.

Witch of Miracles wrote:

As long as we agree that casting dedications allow you to use items like wands and scrolls, I think every casting dedication has a pretty significant frontloaded benefit. I feel like I remember seeing in another thread a long time ago that PFS locks all that behind the basic spellcasting benefits, though? Unsure.

Not that I know of, and it would be out of character for PFS to do so. While sometimes PFS has to get a bit involved if some option is really unclear and problematic, overall PFS hopes to stay as close to the out of the box game as possible. There's a few things that get banned for power level reasons, but that's especially rare for core book things. Core books kinda are the yardstick that everything else gets measured by. If it's in core, it's almost by definition not overpowered compared to core :P

PFS used to, because before the remaster it wasn't clear in the rules when you got those things and "when you gain a spell slot from basic spellcasting benefits" was an accepted interpretation. PFS used that interpretation.

In the remaster they added this sentence to the spellcasting archetype rules which has led to the common understanding being that the Dedication is what grants it:

The spellcasting ability from a spellcasting archetype also allows you to use Cast a Spell activations of items (such as scrolls, staves, and wands).

At least, I'm pretty sure thats what happened. the PFS resource page is loading so slowly that I can't confirm my memory right now.

Maybe it's just me, but I feel like some of the problems might be to simply remove the following line from Psychic Dedication:

Dark Archive pg 48 wrote:

If you already have a focus pool, increase the number of points in your pool by 1.

If you don't have a focus pool, you gain a point. So that way you can use the Amp you've gained. If you do have a pool, you have a new option, but your resources don't go up. Kind of reminds me of how they do the Basic Alchemy Benefits: if you get them from more than one place, you have more ways to use Vials, but you don't increase the number of vials.

Given that the remaster changed focus pools to be based on how many focus spells you have, I expect that line to go away. It's anachronistic at this point as the whole focus pool system was simplified. (Psychic itself could still start with more focus points if they wanted to, but there's no need for it the archetype at all.)

Squiggit wrote:

Man Class DC really is such a terrible mechanic.

Uh, why? What's wrong with it?

In other d20 games, abilities each include their own save DC formula (though I'm pretty sure I've seen one or two where they forgot to define it!) that are all ultimately pretty similar. Here they define it once, done.
Though of course then you get the occasional ability that still doesn't specify to use it, so that's the same issue. But more concise!

Except they didn't define it once: they defined it all over the place. PF1 has a pile of different formulas for things like this, and for any of them that aren't constantly used, we always have to stop and go look up what it is for that thing. And if they forgot to define it, you're basically on your own figuring out how the thing works.

Class DC's problem is that it was half-baked: a bunch of classes didn't have it initially (though the remaster is fixing that) and some things didn't specify that they used it. But at least in the latter case if you guess that they should be using it, you don't have to guess at the formula.

Psychic is one of these mistakes because Psi Burst (or Psyche feats in general) doesn't say what to use and Psychic also doesn't have training in class DC. That leaves us in this situation of trying to figure out what the rule actually is. Usually class feat DCs use the class DC.

The problem of course is that without training in class DC, the feat very quickly becomes completely useless as outside very low level, everything will critically succeed against Psi Burst. So if you rule it to use spell DC instead, the feat actually functions. Since it's nonfunctional with one ruling and functional with the other, that makes it pretty clear to me what the RAI is. But RAW doesn't say that.

This is one of those cases where RAW is a troll ruling.

(The comparison point is Remaster Oracle which has a similar situation with Cursebound feats like Debilitating Dichotomy, except Oracle does say to use spell DC unless the feat says otherwise.)

You're not going to get an official response, just to set expectations. I've seen people discussing this for a long time and I'm not going to even attempt to make a RAW argument on it.

It's pretty clear to me that one of these feels lousy to the Chirurgeon, because the entire point is that you can use your Crafting Proficiency/Modifier in place of Medicine, meaning you don't need to train Medicine. In particular, it specifically calls out that Crafting counts as prerequisites and thus lets you qualify for Medicine feats.

Does it really make sense for something to do this and then say "you took a Medicine feat but you don't benefit from it"?

Especially if you consider that if you go back far enough in the many revisions of Alchemist in PF2, early on it didn't work this way (and some other options for this still don't, like Natural Medicine). They added language in specifically so that Crafting works for all Medicine purposes.

Given that, I feel like it's pretty player-hostile to tell them that their Medicine feat doesn't work when they are doing a Medicine check. I wouldn't pick the player-hostile ruling unless I had a reason to do so like preventing an exploit/cheese, and I don't see that as being the case here.

So, my advice here is to forget about trying to parse out what the rules intended here and just go with the ruling that lets your player have a good time.

What happens if the PCs lose the Chase?

This is a good case for a fail-forward skill challenge: the PCs can't lose the chase. The checks of the chase determines how badly they get beaten up while running away and how many other problems arise from it. Do well and it's a relatively clean escape. Do poorly and there's problems, but they still get away.

I'm a firm believer in letting players run away if they get in over their heads and it's even remotely reasonable that they could run away. Players don't tend to like doing it and it's humiliating for their characters, so it can add personal stakes to an encounter. It also means they don't get TPK'd and the campaign ends with everyone feeling lousy about it.

I didnt feel stunning blow was worth it, Ill take a look at the other feats you mentioned see if I can swap them out in a rebuild.

I'm GMing a Monk in a SoT game. Stunning Blows doesn't work a ton (due to the Incapictation trait), but it's basically free: you do it when you Flurry of Blows. If you can get something to fail, it's a big deal. But since it doesn't cost you actions and just happens when you do something you'd do anyway, it's pretty handy.

It also lets you get Triangle Shot eventually to do 3 shots for 2 actions and Stunning Blows (with MAP not scaling until after).

I really don't like having multiple, drastically different magic systems. It starts becoming too many things to understand as a GM for me. That's why I banned Psionics in every edition of D&D I ran where they added it. It was a striaghtforward case of "I do not have the spoons to understand a second magic system when the first one is already so complicated."

You might be thinking of this:

Sometimes a character might want to follow up on a check to Recall Knowledge, rolling another check to discover more information. After a success, further uses of Recall Knowledge can yield more information, but you should adjust the difficulty to be higher for each attempt. Once a character has attempted an incredibly hard check or failed a check, further attempts are fruitless—the character has recalled everything they know about the subject.

That's not quite the same thing since it's changing the DC.

The only -2 I can think of for RK is Diverse Lore, as that imposes a -2 on your check with Esoteric Lore.

The most painful way this pops up is if you’re a caster playing Stolen Fate. The artifact cards with DCs all use class DC, not the more common language allowing you the better of class or spell DC on items. It’s probably an oversight or a space saving measure.

Yeah some APs do this where they put in really important and/or thematic items and then do something that prevents those items from working for a whole pile of classes. Stolen Fate is almost certainly an oversight because it's so big, but even when it's not an oversight it's still a bad time for some groups and the GM should intervene.

We're having that problem in Spore War where the AP wants to give us these really interesting items that basically no one can use, sometimes because it'd require a massive amount of retraining to make work and in other cases because the item flat out only works for certain classes (like the one that requires prepared casting when the only caster in the party is an Oracle, so that's plot relevant bit of vendor trash).

This happened to my group in Extinction Curse near the end and I just started changing items so that they'd get used.

I want to go two handed with a hammer to match a mini that I just painted.

Cool. In that case grab your favorite 2h hammer, pick up something like Slam Down (and Sudden Charge or Vicious Swing), get heavy armor, and you're good. Run in and smash things.

Fighter is pretty forgiving as a class. You don't need to worry about min/maxing everything to make an effective Fighter.

Tridus wrote:

And although Magus it's the worst offender, it's not the only class where Psychic Dedication itself is one of the strongest level 2 feats in the entire game. It's not quite as bas as Exemplar and basically any martial, but it's up there. If you compare Imaginary Weapon to Fire Ray for a Magus to get, Imaginary Weapon is stronger and cheaper. It really shouldn't be both of those.

If the ability to Amp was a second feat, it's...

How is Imaginary Weapon cheaper than Fire Ray? It is indeed better, but they both need two feats to learn. Psychic Dedication only grants you a standard psi cantrip, so you still need Psi Development at 6th level to learn Imaginary Weapon. Same as Oracle Dedication needing to take Domain Acumen at 4th level for Fire Ray.

Right, my bad. That's what I get writing stuff too early in the morning.

Nevermind, I forgot what I was talking about. :)

Tridus wrote:

Akashi Zetsugou wrote:

Hello! First time poster here, I had a question in regards to the item Amphisbaena Handwraps, are they intended to work with Talismans or Weapon Property Runes or neither? Any help would be appreciated!

For weapon property runes? Definitely.

Quote:

Amphisbaena handwraps can have weapon runes etched onto them, similar to handwraps of mighty blows.

Treat these as handwraps of mighty blows for rune purposes, which can have property runes.

For Talisman... RAW, no. They're not weapons and the item doesn't say they inherit the handwraps ability to have talisman. I suspect a lot of GMs would allow it, though.

I don't think you can etch property runes onto them because they're a specific magic weapon. You can etch fundamental runes onto them, though.

Amphisbaena Handwraps are not weapons: they're worn gloves (like handwarps). So the rule about specific magic weapons doesn't apply RAW and the handwrap exception does (since these say they use the handwrap exception).

Both of them are magic items and neither are weapons, so one saying "it works like the other" and the other saying "you can do it" should cover it. I don't think that needs an errata.

I would say that you are absolutely not wrong to nerf only it into allow a rerolled save once per affliction, As Paizo themselves errated a similar ability to do just that.

War of immortals 2025 Spring errata wrote:

Page 47: Update the One Moment till Glory transcendence of victor’s wreath to more closely match some similar abilities, to have less of a downside in certain situations, and to be less powerful at ending long-term effects outside combat.

“You rally your allies, carrying them from the brink of disaster to the verge of victory. Each ally in your aura can immediately attempt a new saving throw with a +2 status bonus against one ongoing negative effect or condition currently affecting it that required a save. Use the result of the new save to determine the outcome of the effect, unless the new save would have a worse result than the original save, in which case nothing happens. Each ally can gain this benefit against a given effect only once.”

This is exactly how I would nerf it. The idea that you should just have "unlimited cleanse affliction until it succeeds" is ridiculous. Against slow acting poisons and most diseases its a hard counter. Even someone actually specialized in this with the relevant Medicine feats can't do anything like this, and casters would have to burn a ton of high rank spell slots.

It can activate once per stage of the affliction would also be better.

Hello! First time poster here, I had a question in regards to the item Amphisbaena Handwraps, are they intended to work with Talismans or Weapon Property Runes or neither? Any help would be appreciated!

For weapon property runes? Definitely.

Amphisbaena handwraps can have weapon runes etched onto them, similar to handwraps of mighty blows.

Treat these as handwraps of mighty blows for rune purposes, which can have property runes.

For Talisman... RAW, no. They're not weapons and the item doesn't say they inherit the handwraps ability to have talisman. I suspect a lot of GMs would allow it, though.

It's weirdly worded because there's multiple things going on. Flexible Ritualist says this (emphasis mine):

When you cast a ritual, you can reduce the number of secondary casters by 1. When you do, you must fulfill any requirements for the secondary caster, and you attempt the secondary check normally performed by that secondary caster. You can't replace a secondary caster who is the target of the spell (as in the atone ritual).

So this means two things are happening:

Assured Ritualist says this:

You can cover for a secondary caster's error. If you are the primary caster, after all the secondary checks are rolled, you can choose one check that was a failure or critical failure, and improve the result to one degree of success better than what the secondary caster rolled.

So again, this is referencing two things:

RAW, I think that means it doesn't work because of B.

Personally I'd ignore that and let it work because this is a situation where if you want to use Assured Ritualist, you may not be allowed to use its prerequisite due to that prerequisite invalidating Assured Ritualist. And I think that's silly and probably unintended, because PF2 usually has prerequisites in that new feats build on them to do extra things or change how they work. Making a prerequisite that invalidates the feat that requires it doesn't make sense.

(That said, I house ruled secondary checks out of my games entirely because the math on them is absolutely brutal for PCs and rituals are hard enough as it is. The whole mechanic is really titled against the players.)