Unicore's page

Unicore wrote:

AlexTheQueen wrote:

Physical abilities could be represented purely by mechanical effects and social/mental abilities do not

I understand how it might feel this way, but measuring and representing physical abilities with a total of 3 attributes really isn’t any more realistic than trying to do the same with mental attributes. It is really no more difficult to represent “how persuasive can my character be?” With mechanics, than it is to represent “how well will my character’s physical health hold up under a constant barrage of life threatening circumstances?”

All of it requires imagination, suspension of disbelief, and a willingness to accept a lot of abstraction.

The question here is not realism, but the representation of what High or Low attribute score means. If you have High ST, you are strong, If you have high Con you are tough, If you have high Dex you are dexterous and so on. This things purely mechanical and could be represented only by system itsefl. Because you do not need to be olympic level athlete in real life, to be olympic level athlete in TTRPG. This is not the case for purely mental stats, having high wis, int and char definitely gives you mechanical benefits, but you can't get full use of this stats without being able to represent them in real life, of course you would need to do that with much lesser degree but still. This is the same thing with gming, GM must have appropriate level of creativity, intelligence and multitasking to be GM. If we expect GM to create consistent plot, remember all twists, play different characters(at the same time) and came up with new interesting encounters(sometimes on fly), we should expect from players some similarities with their character. You can't roleplay genius tactician without at least base understanding of tactic, of course high stats and modifiers will help you with this, you'll get much more information about enemy and the situation, but you should be able to use that information in real life by...

I will give you that Intelligence is a very difficult attribute to create mechanics around beyond very surface level "know more stuff" metrics. I too have been making that argument for a long time, see the numerous 100+ posts about why playing wizards can be very difficult for many players. Measuring, even defining, intelligence in the real world is even more complicated and fraught than most physical attribute metrics, and I agree that PF2 in particular does not do a good job of giving the players of high intelligence characters ways to say "my character makes the smartest choice possible here." There are some INT based mechanics related to tactics and strategy, but they are almost all class defined, not things smart characters can generally choose. At the same time, the INT skill feats actually are pretty decent for "your character can do this extra thing because they are smart" outside of being a brilliant tactician or strategist. Those things might be coming soon though, as the next rule book is going to be about that kind of stuff. SO "Does my character know this" is not hard to arbitrate mechanically, but "how should my character best process this raw information" is currently difficult with many aspects of the game beyond getting told numbers and abilities of creatures.

But charisma and wisdom do have a lot of options for basically just saying "my character does this thing because they are charismatic" (or wise). Perception as a skill really covers a lot of essential elements of what an observant, intuitive person is going to be able to figure out. Players don't really need to be able to describe a complicated search methodology in character to justify, "my character is searching," and for the GM to have very clear cut mechanical means for interpreting that into the game.
Charisma really does the same. Players really don't need to be able to sit there and act out a 15 to 20 minute scene of gathering information, making a request, or deceiving someone for the GM to generally be able to ask for a roll and the player and the GM both having a relatively good sense of what that means.

Skill feats are a pretty new concept in the D20 RPG space. The fact they competed with combat feats in past versions of the game basically meant characters never had any/ only took ones that could be massively exploited for some kind of mechanical dominance. This meant, at the start of the edition, no adventure writers or GMs really had any experience with designing adventures with them in mind. It also meant that game developers had to weigh their balance more carefully, as characters would get enough of them that they weren’t only going to come up once in a blue moon. I think that created a natural tendency to stay low on the power scale, especially as they needed to stay less powerful than class feats. Rebalancing existing skill feats is something that is probably very difficult to do, especially as players tend to love just getting new skill feats in new books. It seems like only extreme outliers will get reviewed, and even then only ones that the game really needed to work, but don’t, AND are preventing a new feat from essentially just superseding it. Anything else is just trivially easy to ignore by saying, don’t pick that one. Between spells, gear and feats generally, there are just tons of game options that fall into this space and there always has been.

At the same time, I think the adventure writers/designers at Paizo are getting better and better at creating noncombat/exploration encounters that use the games existing rules instead of defaulting to old adventure design ideas that are not PF2 game specific. This definitely includes skill feats. With time , I think that this, plus player feed back about how those encounters go, are going to continue to result in better skill feats implementation and design in the future.

4e skill challenges never quite worked out in implementation the way they were imagined to in that system, but they changed the D20 game space and how to integrate game mechanics into the most narrative aspects of the game previously. They introduced the idea of using the rounds/turn structure outside of combat to ensure more equal opportunities for player participation and were a huge move forward, even if they never really presented a well balanced injection of tension into noncombat encounters because they tended to be either much to easy to present a challenge, or ended up being doors that turned off momentum in story if the party didn’t have the right skills to complete them. I think the implementation of skill feats has already been better than that, even if it hasn’t been executed perfectly.

I think one of the biggest challenges moving forward with them is that noncombat encounters just can’t be as regulated mechanically with tight, crunchy rules without massively slowing the game down. Combat rules also run into this problem, but RPGs have decades of experience filing the trickier kind of combat encounters down/off so that the limits of turn based combat encounters don’t pop up that often to draw notice (big fights with lots of creatures of very different levels have always been very complicated and difficult to run, as an example of something that took time to come up with a solution like Troops, which while good, still require mechanical abstraction that can break immersion). Dialing in when and how to abstract things like movement speeds, npc morale/commitment to accomplish their goals, etc. is just a process that is going to take a lot of time, and something many tables will ignore, because they have been running a more abstracted/narrative system for doing these kinds of encounters for a long time, in a way that trying a new, less polished and refined system will not be able to easily or effectively replace. I know I had this reaction at first to things like chase scenes and infiltrations, which used to require massive maps and 8+ hour encounters run at combat pacing, but didn’t actually lose as much as I thought they might to pulling out into a VP system with multiple tiers for success and complication.

Convincing an army to run away is a plot point too big to fit within the coerce action. No adventure path is going to set that up as a thing that could happen. If talking an army down is an intended option in an adventure, the GM should run it as a victory point skill challenge. Skill feats have some trouble interacting with these inherently, but there is guidance about this in the Game Master Core. Relevant skill feats should give bonuses or even automatic success where it really makes sense.

Players with out the feats can still participate in the group activity.

These rules were never intended to work well with single character protagonist narrative making. They are designed to make challenges fun for a group of people working together. Skill feats primarily exist to tell players and GMs what kind of things each PC is more focused on with their skills than simple proficiency boosts which are not very granular.

The activities like coerce and make an impression can be useful for navigating very loose, improvised exploration scenes, but for the really tense encounter mode-like non-combat encounters, the activities can be way too flat to make any sense to use beyond a general guideline of how things generally work in the world.

Fighters have feats and features that let them get more critical hits from more than just their proficiency bonus.

Reactive strike is free and is a no map attack until later feats will give you multiple ones still with no MAP.

Feats like swipe functionally give you another one as well, especially if the party learns how to set you up for it.

Fighter feats create their own combat styles with weapons and lean heavily on different critical effect features from both the weapon itself and the runes you put on it. So the flexibility is already there.

I disagree that the fighter is boring in practice. It is incredibly dependent on its feats to give it character, but it is pretty easy to build a fighter that has many different options for what to do with every turn. Most other martials are much more heavily tied to specific and repetitive routines.

I do think that it is possible to build a boring fighter if you don’t diversify your feats at all, but I think you pretty much have to MC out of fighter to do it.

I understand a little bit of why the fighter might look weapon silo'd on paper, but I think the difficult piece to see until you can put it in practice is interactivity of combat flexibility with having standard martial weapon progression for everything outside your specialization.

Fighter feats are really good for giving a character activities that are powerful in and of themselves. And since it is difficult to get many of them to stack on top of each other, one specific weapon centric feat can suddenly make a fighter about as good with a secondary or even tertiary weapon as other martials might be with their primary weapon.

The "I found this new awesome weapon and I want to make it my focus" is kind of a separate issue, because, in the lance example, even in APs the GM gets advice to consider switching up treasure based upon the characters in the campaign. If a GM is going to seed really shiny, powerful weapons that don't fit the party's build, then they should consider making retraining the weapon specialization feature a bit easier, or at least give the party enough time to make it not feel impossible.

Object Reading is such an amazing spell, I often pick it up with an archetype on non-occult casters. If you are doing really ancient dungeon delving it is not super useful but even in dungeons, writers tend to like having twists where other adventurers/etc are active and this spell is a great way for a player to give a GM an extra opportunity to seed background information and plot details that might otherwise go undiscovered.

Pocket library is another pretty evergreen and amazingly useful rank 1 spell at the point that you are not really using rank 1 spells in combat anymore.

Ventriloquism is great in both rank 1 and rank 2 slots.

Summon fey can get you a sprite or a Nyktera, so a talking, flying creature that can either make light or see in the dark, which can easily be as useful as a familiar that you really don't have to worry about.

An important thing to remember about spell casting in PF2 is that using spells are many ranks below your top slots in combat can often be a detriment to the party as a whole, especially if they are taking up 2 or more actions in combat. So casting bless and expanding it once or twice before opening a door can be a decent use of a rank 1 slot, but casting it once combat has already began might be a bigger waste of actions that even using a cantrip or getting out a better spell on a scroll. That is why, as a prepared caster, I am probably using most of my rank 1 slots as utility spells by the time I am casting rank 5 spell.

At the same time, one rank 1 force barrage can be fairly useful. It is automatic damage, so sometimes might be the best way to finish off a creature you know is up against the ropes but is difficult to damage, or to one action zap an ally who is confused.

Edit: also, I cannot believe I forgot to mention Lock at rank 1 and Knock at rank 2. These are spells I often carry scrolls of as well, but a lock spell in a combat where doors might get opened by enemies trying to bring in reinforcements can force many wasted actions, and a knock can sometimes save them for the party since you get an open opportunity with the casting, and it makes it easier for anyone else if you need to get a door open quickly (like to escape or free a prisoner in combat).

It sounds like the solution to the runesmith just picking offensive damaging runes is going to be to reduce direct damage and add persistent damage. This will allow more different kinds of offensive runes without creating nova blasts, which is good, but it would be really cool if some of the offensive runes were more conditional on the enemy’s actions. This would still keep them from being big nova threats, but incorporate a lot of rune/glyph magic narratives.

Old_Man_Robot wrote:

Wizards haven’t got any new Wizard-specific content in the last 6/7 books, be they rules or LO. (There was an AP with a new school however! )

I haven’t seen Rivals yet, but Wizards have long overdue some actual content.

A lack of actual class feats is just sad to see. It’s hard to think of a book more perfect to drop a handful of new feats for specific things.

With Monks in SoM, Barbarians in RoE, Druids in Dark Archive, Barbarians again in WoI

It's pretty clear imo that the next batch of wizard feats goes in battlecry.

Or the impossible book seems like a place where a lot of new magic class stuff would be located.

Unicore wrote:

It makes sense to want to be careful with that thread, given where it was dipping into occasionally with the weekend ahead. I think a civil conversation/discussion about playtest communication might be a good idea before the next play test rolls around to make sure the larger, excited fan-base that likes to participate knows what to expect as far as when and where communication will come from around play tests.

The team is currently working on writing up a wrap-up in the form of a blog! It'll be posted soon!

That wrap up hasn’t been posted yet has it? I know this is a holiday, so I don’t expect any Paizo folks to answer, but if the wrap up has been posted and I missed it, I’d appreciate being pointed in the right direction!

One thing that is probably too late to do much about, but could still be implemented going forward is that there are way too many common spells of every tradition. New books having common spells was a mistake in my opinion because the just gave it all away to druids and clerics when more uncommon spells would have had every class interact more with the learning spells mechanic.

Another too little to late observation is that the recall knowledge, identify magic, learn a spell, and maybe just every thing about religion and nature should be INT based. Nothing about “ Wisdom measures your character’s common sense, awareness, and intuition.” Makes sense for knowledge skills. It was like they were just worried clerics and Druids would just be too bad at their magic tradition skill, but CHA caster classes were already in this boat and it just makes wisdom the much better attribute to build a caster around. Having those skills be INT based, and then having many more uncommon spells that casters want to learn would have very naturally given wizards a meaningful edge on being the “learn new spells class.” Without those two things, it makes wizard (and witch) spell learning a hassle instead of the benefit it could have been.

One tweak that might still be possible for the wizard schools though would be to let wizards choose one of the two free spells they know when gaining a new rank of spells be added to their school list instead of just their spellbook. I think this would be well received, and allow every PC wizard to feel like they are really at the forefront of their school’s academic research /philosophy.

Unicore wrote:

There are useful spells to cast on days where you have 0 combat encounters. As a player, you can’t know for certain which days those will be, but with spell substitution, you don’t need to know that in advance and you can partially switch through out the day based upon your growing assessment of the days likely challenges. There is really no other caster that can do this.

What a great point. I also agree that it should be a core feature of the Wizard class and not something they have to trade for other options!

Because this

“Unicore” wrote:

I do think the wizard does just approach the game differently than a lot of casters

Should only be allowed to be true if it isn’t the case for all Wizards equally.

I said earlier that I would not mind spell substitution being the wizard’s thing and built into the class. I do think there are players who don’t want to change up their spells that often and prefer being able to blend away school spells for more higher level slots and who like being to flexibly change up what spell shaping feats they have. I think the witch doubling down on the familiar has made the familiar thesis for the wizard into “be a less good witch” and probably could have been retired, but taking bad options out of the game tends to get people more angry than leaving them in and having people eventually stop picking them. Staff nexus feels largely the same to me, except I do see the “I cast only low level spells every day/all the time as well as my top level slots” as something some players seem to enjoy. I feel like scrolls can largely cover this, and casting really low rank spells frequently in important rounds of important encounters to be a party hostile play style, so a thesis that can easily lead to that seems like a not great idea to me.

So if Paizo feels like theses are supposed to be a one of X feature, deciding spell substitution is the best one for all wizards because it gives them the most unique play experience is something I personally think is true, but also unnecessary to force on players that never really want to deal with the complexity of having to have familiarity with their entire spellbook at all times to be effective. I can see how forcing that feature on the class, even if a second thesis option was granted, could be a complexity deal breaker for some players.

I do think PFS scenarios work very well for wizards. You tend to get a lot of knowledge about what is coming up, tons of down time, free scrolls you can use to get new spells, and a lot of opportunity to use spells out of combat.

So one way that wizards can be made better with no change at all to the class is to keep making sure that new creatures have significantly exploitable weaknesses and saving throws. Wizards do need to be able to learn these (preferably at a time early enough in the adventure to change their spells memorized to exploit this information) some how. Really it is the thaumaturge that is really eating the wizard’s potential lunch here because the got all these abilities that would be amazing to combine with the wizard…if they were INT based. Making arcana checks not to recall knowledge but specifically detect weaknesses to energy types in a specific area (without learning anything else about the creature) would be one potential add on that could really help with that. Possibly in the form of a focus spell or cantrips.

I still love the wizard as my favorite class in PF2, but being the full time childcare provider for an infant turned toddler, who doesn't let me sleep, or play in games with even 50% of my old ability to focus has illuminated some aspects of the class for me.

1. It should have traded places with the sorcerer so people don't think of the wizard as the basic "entry" caster, like the cleric or the bard are. This is because especially at the mid to high level, the wizard is class that requires a lot of mental bandwidth, organization and game knowledge to play well. There is a logic to that that I personally like, but what other class puts as much burden on the player to be good at the things that make the class function effectively? Minimally this should remove the wizard from the "basic caster" conversation.

2. INT as a stat is badly developed as a "magical power attribute." Unless a whole new set of skill feats come out that are specifically related to casting spells better, with new actions and activities like demoralize, grappling, tumbling through, but specifically tied to casting a spell as the next action, or something like that, and largely centered around using INT based skills, then giving the wizard more skill stuff is only going to be stepping on the toes of classes like the investigator, the alchemist, the inventor and the mastermind rogue. Most of the things a wizard character would benefit from having a high INT skill are things that require player experience and knowledge, not character ability. The wizard has one feat that lets them do something like this, but half the recall knowledge base skills are not INT based so just focusing it around recalling knowledge doesn't really help the smart wizard look smart.

I think there are feats and spells and other addons that can help with some of this. For one, a feat or feature, or maybe even a focus spell that let a wizard spend one action to switch out a spell from a slot with a spell from their spell book would be very thematic and help with the "perfect preparation" issue, and it could be limited as necessary by specifying number of times per X, or rank of spell.

Also, spell substitution is the only thesis that really gives the wizard a unique way being more than a traditional prepared caster, which given that clerics and druids get massively bigger pools of spells to choose from each day without intense dedication on the part of the wizard's wealth and possibly even class feat choices, they kind of need that. Spell blending is cool and solves the school issue for most players, but it really is just "more of the best slots." I can see how some players probably feel like that is enough for the wizard to feel smarter than other prepared casters (because they can trade out less valuable slots, kind of the same as the staff nexus), but it never really felt all that narratively fulfilling to me, and the issue is that the wizard isn't really better at "cast the most of the same spells over and over again" than other caster classes, so features that encourage that end up working against the design of the class. I am starting to believe that spell substitution could be baked into the wizard class as a level 1 thesis and second thesis could be chosen at a higher level without really breaking the class.

More schools and more dynamic spells (with multiple action cost options) will also help, and those seem like things coming down the pipe on their own.

It makes sense to want to be careful with that thread, given where it was dipping into occasionally with the weekend ahead. I think a civil conversation/discussion about playtest communication might be a good idea before the next play test rolls around to make sure the larger, excited fan-base that likes to participate knows what to expect as far as when and where communication will come from around play tests.

As the playtest winds down and we've had so few people posting feedback or play experience here, I do hope we hear from a developer in a blog f they got a lot more feedback in surveys than we've seen here.

I have had the most fun with playing PFS games by post. I find folks really put thought into their characters and posts and you end up getting to know the other players better since the game takes a week or two instead of just a few hours.

I recall devs making comments on aspects of past class playtests where something was completely unplayable/confusing, but not on minor power balance stuff or things that could maybe work one of two different ways, at least not until the playtest was over. Mark and Mike would occasionally pop in with enthusiastic supportive statements about players experiences, but not usually in a way that weighed in on the design intentions, but neither of them are still with the company nor a part of this specific playtest. we will probably start seeing commentary in a coupe of weeks.

Far more concerning about these playtest forums to me is that we have seen barely any report backs from actual play experience. I know someone who played with a 15th level runesmith and they said the burst damage of the runes on round 2 was encounter ending and made every other character feel pretty useless.

I look forward to hearing about how developers will address that issue, but I don't expect it before the playtest is over.

I also can't put the save in same ground of AC. Most monsters and NPCs does way more vs AC than saves and most saves are most AoE focused and have some resource limit or recharge. Also Saves are more easier to be reinforced with feats and items than AC. IMO it isn´t a big downside to justify too much things.

I can't speak to other players experiences, but at high levels, it is the saving throw stuff that wrecks characters far worse than direct AC targeting damage. Like, yes, critical hits can really hurt, but it is when players don't have the kinds of massive mitigators like greater evasion/juggernaut/resolve, where failure and even sometimes regular success really hurt characters, get them trapped at the bottom of earthquakes, dominated, or other save or lose kind of effects.

Even fighters, who have not great saves on account of their legendary proficiency going to weapon proficiency, still have 2 master saves (with success=critical success) and a very useful mitigator on their third save. Most others have legendary and a master save, both with strong tier changing mitigators. Canny Acumen can help a little, but only very late and, for reflex saves in particular but also for will saves with all the frightened x even on a success, not nearly as good as getting the master boost in class. Casters that try to hang in melee range at late levels greatly feel this already, and the runesmith is going to as well, especially as the weapon usage on the class is actually pretty difficult to do well with the play test class.

Edit: Like it seems like the Gaurdian should have had better weapon proficiency than the Runesmith to begin with. It is just weird for a class that leans so far away from using a weapon having so much chassis space given over to it.

Runesmiths start out with martial looking saves, but end up with 1 master save and 2 expert saves. Worse, they only get the one saving throw tier booster, so they never get any critical failure resistance or failure boosting. They are going to get shredded by AoE attacks and be very vulnerable to mind control without any spell caster defensive spells.

Their AC does go up to Master, but it is slow, and they are so bad at reflex saves that going and getting heavy armor and not boosting dex is going to hurt. So they pretty much have to use a shield, and have to keep a hand free, so that martial weapon proficiency boosting they get is incredibly limited. They would be much better off getting saving throw boosts and quicker armor progression and being limited to expert weapon proficiency than having standard martial weapon progressing and the terrible defenses, at least with the current playtest chassis. If attacking with a weapon is a second tier action choice (as in you will often not use it at all in a round and almost never 2 times, it is a lot of dead weight on the class.

I don’t really think the Runesmith is built on a martial chassis. Its defenses (especially without a shield) are worse than some casters and that is a pretty big problem for a class pushed so hard into melee. At least casters get some defensive spell options that can mitigate risk, but the rune smith’s defensive options are either shield-based or best used on allies.

I think this is relevant to the damage of runes vs weapons because it is an extra risk to playing into the engraving strike runesmith. Are you forgoing a shield? Or using a weapon that barely adds enough damage to be worth it, especially at higher levels.

I feel like the end result is a weird “super glass cannon” white room damage smasher, but it will be almost impossible to play in practice unless the rest of the party builds to protect and position the rune smith (and their damaging runes) for the big damage bursts. That feels like a counterintuitive design goal for a class billed primarily as a support martial.

In this specific instance though, the player was saying “our characters don’t understand game mechanics” and that is the root of the problematic statement.

1. It is incorrect on a general level. If your character is a trained rogue (probably a scoundrel), and trained in deception, your character might not use the language of “off-guard,” but your character knows, in world, what the effects of those game mechanics mean and how it relates to the abilities that they have spent years cultivating. The mechanics of the game just don’t work if characters think sometimes they might be able to move 30ft, open a door, and then attack before the enemy gets to react when their movement is only 25ft.

2. Directly stating that “our characters” don’t know this stuff is doubly bad, because it is prescriptive game playing. It is saying your character shouldn’t know this stuff either, and that is particularly hostile, especially when it is wrong.

I think it is very likely that this player built a charismatic rogue and wanted to particularly lean into their charisma skills in playing their character. That is player expectation and desire, which is totally fair, and a very good thing to bring up early in a session 0, or even an introductory scene of a PFS scenario. And it probably sucks for the player that no one else at the table has characters that benefit from any of the character’s charisma abilities except probably demoralizing effects. This is one of those “charisma-based rogues as support martial have to coordinate well with the strengths and needs of the party to realize their potential” situations that is not uncommon with many character class builds. Clearly, that didn’t happen with this group, so the player was probably headed to some frustration with their character eventually, regardless. But it also is going to lead to table wide frustration if the GM is basing the campaign difficulty on assumptions of player characters functioning together as a team. That is something that justifies stepping out of character and potentially redoing a session 0 expectations conversation, because otherwise the campaign is barreling off track.

My issue is that "our characters don't possess any knowledge of the game's mechanics; of every +1 that they can get. I'm not going to metagame." Is flatly an incorrect statement about RPGs generally and PF2 specifically. Especially for PCs. It is also a table hostile attitude to bring without talking about playing that way in session 0.

This has become a bit of a pet peeve of mine. I don’t know how much live stream stuff has influenced it more, but players assuming that everything has to be narratively described in detail, in game, to exist or be actionable is exhausting. Characters have lived full rich lives doing the things that turn them into characters that can tell if a target is vulnerable to their signature abilities. Neither the GM nor the player should assume ignorance on a character that has managed to survive in a high magical world to gain a character class. We are not playing commoner NPCs.

In other words, a character may not think in game terms, but game terms exist to help players communicate effectively about things in the game world that characters inherently understand.

Had similar thoughts, and did not like the conclusions I came to.

As I see it, there's 3 ways the rune mechanic can go.

1. What we have: bespoke magical mechanics that are carved out from the rest of the system so as to not interact weirdly with it, but also is unlikely to get much support going forward. Also have to use a lot of page space to once again give basic options like "additional fire damage on a strike". Edit: points though to the designers for creativity with doing this by lowering the target's fire resistance. If it made the target vulnerable once their fire resistance was 0, that'd be even cooler.

2. Spells in a can: runes become a class specific way to generate spell casts, sort of like temporary scrolls.
Personally unsatisfying to me, but the benefit would be the designers could let the specific effects of runes be someone else's headache, and concentrate their efforts on making the application, creation, and usage of runes in combat and exploration modes interesting.

3. Runic Alchemy: The runesmith class mechanic becomes the ability to use runes (the magic item) better than any other class. Specifically they'd be able to quickly generate and apply those runes for free on the battlefield as a consumable, and add an activation effect to the passive rune. Probably want a third creation option "Engrave" to differentiate between runes that are meant to be applied permanently as normal (engraved) and those meant to be invoked (etched and traced).
I personally favor this approach right now, as it presents runesmiths as masters of those specific class of magic items, but what is interesting to me might not be the best for the game.

All 3 have pretty obvious problems and potential headaches. I'm not fond of option 1, but I also dislike the options they have presented, so that may be coloring my judgement. Genuinely not sure which way I even want them to take this class.

#1 is what the playtest is testing, and it doesn't currently balance well currently, not to mention it narratively locks the magic of runes into a weird class restricted space. The biggest unfortunate aspect of this to me is that the design of the runes is a very dynamic use of the action economy that could be used to make a lot more interesting spells.

If runes were spells that defaulted to around a 30ft range and took two actions to cast, but runesmiths had a unique class feature to cast them at touch range for 1 less action, and the only one who could cast diacritic runes, the class would still be unique and cool, and there would be a ton of new space created for action-dynamic new spells.

OceanshieldwolPF 2.5 wrote:

Sibelius Eos Owm wrote:

To me, Lamashtu's faith is here to embrace monstrosity, reject beauty, corrupt purity, and to feast upon those who would oppress them (in their minds: everyone), which is a dark, twisted nightmare, but a fascinating one to play with at the more ambiguously evil aspects. Her ideal of family may be the most twisted and monstrous imaginable, but to her followers it's still family--with all the usual toxic justifications that can imply..

This is exceedingly well put. Thanks SEO. I’ve always been drawn to Lamashtu and her story (apart from her real world name, that is just…annoying) but this makes me love her and her followers all the more. Families are hard!

I despise Lamashtu -- which is why my most recent character is an ardent worshipper.

It's as important to explore the visceral negative reactions as the positive ones. Something there is resonating, and if you don't understand why, there is self-knowledge there waiting for you.

I love Lamashtu and the recognition that in a world of high magic and gods, birth working the same way it does in our world could only be the work of a monster or even the god of monsters. Lamashtu captures the absolute brutality and terror of child-birthing very well and I don't think any additional cruelty is necessary for her to be perfect.

Rogues want to be in melee all the time to make the best use of their opportune strike, but don’t carry shields, and don’t have great AC. Like barbarians, their big swings of damage tend to lead to them getting focused on, only they don’t really have the HP and they literally get eaten alive by very many grab monsters (I have seen it!). It is definitely the class I see getting beaten up the most.

Going from 5/10 rounds to 1/10 rounds is a hit.

No one is spell striking 5 times in an encounter with sure strike. It is much more like 1 out of 3 instead of 2 out of 2, as a magus using conflux spells with their third action might actually make an extra spell strike attack a round. (Assuming an average 3 to 4 round encounter)

If the magus is using out of class focus spells and sure strike to spell strike, then we are talking about only spell striking every other round and burning actions on recharging, right? Not even the starlit spam magus is spell striking with sure strike every round. I don’t think the magus damage math is as effected by the change to sure strike as people are making it out to be.

If your character has a hero point as well (a resource you only burn on a miss), spell striking g with sure strike on round 1, then using a hero point if you miss on your second/third rounds while using conflux focus spells is going to be much better damage output than repeatedly sure striking out of class focus spells.

If these wrrata changes are meant to balance the game why are there always so many too good options nerved but very rarely any utterly awful options buffed? Balance is a two way street and while it might be more pressing to fix outliers that are breaking encounter balance, like a certain dedication that will remain for another six months, it should also go the other way and fix spells and feats that are actively hurting characters that use them. Until that happens errata will tend to feel bad as it will "break" characters that people enjoy playing without equally fixing other characters that could use the help.

Badly underpowered spells don't break the game, and don't need to take up time and attention away from new, better material. Boosting bad options is squarely the realm of homebrew stuff. If someone's homebrew fix is so good that it really catches on, then maybe enough of the developement work is done for a change to be made, but trying to go back through and raise up what appear to be underperforming options across the board just leads to a steeple chase of power bloat.

The occasional overpowered options don't actually break the game either, because a TTRPG doesn't have rigorous code that must be followed to the letter or cease functioning, but it does create much bigger problems than underpowered content. Many people end up feeling like they have to take the most powerful options, especially where overpowered options get compared to the underperforming options as either/or.

Whole classes are a little bit bigger an issue, but spells, items, feats that underwhelm are not errata worthy unless they are completely preventing another option from opening up later on.

Yes, the Paizo work would not be 0. Likely, this would take the form of a once a week sign off from some lead with only a slight variation from the now-norm:

Quote:

Dev_X: take #3 off the list. I don't understand where the problem is, so you'll need to explain it to me after the weekend, but post the rest to the scrum board [and to the public list].

This is part of what I mean with some posters having wildly unrealistic expectations. If you think the development team is discussing errata issues weekly you are assigning way too much work to the team as a whole. We get errata twice a year because they collectively get together to discuss these issues at most 2 or 3 times an errata cycle. This is labor that earns 0 dollars for the company.

Posting rules questions to the forum is about getting community discussion and feedback back, not about getting additional secret rules content out of the development team. PFS has its own system for dealing with this as should any other organized group. Everyone else is as free to use whatever rules make the most sense to them. This is very different from a software system where the rules require special outside coding skills to change as needed

Maya, you are doing an amazing job, thank you!

If I were at Paizo, I would be very cautious about trying have any kind of "known issues" list or "to be addressed errata" list.

Firstly, what goes on that list? Every complaint/rules clarification any forum poster ever makes? That is pretty unreasonable of an expectation and a headache to keep up with for a part of the game/community that actually brings in 0 revenue. Especially as there might be no consensus in the community or within Paizo that there is an issue to be addressed. Making developers spend time and energy expressing "we are not going to change this aspect of the game at this time," for every issue ever brought up on the forums or even specifically posted in an errata thread, feels like pretty misdirected energy to me...even as I have had my own pet issues/concerns since the start of the PF2 and many of them have never been addressed or got addressed years later by just not having those aspects of the game carry over into the remastery.

Secondly, as soon as anything is on some "we are looking at this" list, then expectations from players immediately jump all over, including to very unrealistic and often conflicting places: see the kineticist for just one example. This is especially a problem because errata has to fit in the books that it was first printed in, and so some issues might be brought up in developer meetings and no satisfactory changes can be agreed to at the time, so the issue might sit in indefinite hiatus or until a new place to make the change is published that gives them the room to make the change. Errata is not just "these are ways to make the game play better," Errata is changes to published books that improves the quality and useability of that book. For very many "bad" or "unplayable" options, that will more often mean that Paizo is better off publishing something new that better fits player expectations for what that option was supposed to offer, rather than try to substantially change something that has a limited amount of space for change. For that reason, I was actually really surprised to see any Secrets of Magic errata in this recent batch, because that is errata that will not see print in a new edition of the book, since so much of the book is mired in OGL content. The fact they did it was amazing and shows how dedicated they are to making sure that some of the key options from that book stay relevant and playable, even without a known republishing deadline.

But expecting Paizo to basically have to give us the minutes of every meeting they ever have to potentially address errata or even just points of friction in the game is adding way to much to the work load of the developers and is intrusive into their creative space. This is not government policy that demands as much transparency as possible. People who don't like specific little rules of games change those rules all the time and PF2 is a game designed to let its players mod the rules in an amazing broad spectrum of ways. The extra document from War of the Immortals for mythic play, for example, might serve as a good way for future potential variant rules to see the light of day.

Really, I think it would make a lot more sense for folks from the community to create our own lists of potential issues that we see in the game and how we deal with them in documents similar to all of our class guides and such, all kept in one place instead of spread out across hundreds of threads and posts, as then it would be a lot easier for GMs to see what issues they might need to resolve at the table and be supported in having multiple ways to address them--all in one place--rather than get into heated debates because we all believe that our posts to this forum are going to be "the thing" that set off official clarification around our pet issues to our satisfaction.

3rdly,

Unicore wrote:

Does the animist not also have an expert with evasion save? I know they did in the playtest.

I think it is fine. It makes that save a high risk/reward save. And it does nothing to help when the save DC is used. I still see more rogues die than any other character class.

It doesn't really make it a high risk high reward save. You're still going to get hit by random Fort saves, this just makes it "play the game, high reward for nothing".

I don't see anything giving Animist this benefit.

Expert with a boost from success to critical success is a high risk, but high reward value for a saving throw, especially on a gambler-esque of class like a rogue. When they are lucky, nothing can hurt them. But their fort save is also not very good, so having to make fort saves is still a very risky situation for them.

It looks like the Animist boosted save got removed in the process of changing how the different sub classes work from the playtest to the final result. Maybe that means they are walking back on handing out such abilities, but if that is the case, it didn't make this errata.

Does the animist not also have an expert with evasion save? I know they did in the playtest.

I think it is fine. It makes that save a high risk/reward save. And it does nothing to help when the save DC is used. I still see more rogues die than any other character class.

A mistake a lot of frustrated posters are making is assuming that there is one developer at Paizo who knows exactly how all of the rules are supposed to work and work together. The errat happens after the whole development team gets together to address the issues, possibly having to give some developers “homework” of researching every possible interaction a rules change might entail, before coming back and formalizing the errata into a list that can can keep all the page numbers in place and line up correctly in the book.

So answering questions “officially” online in forums pretty much requires waiting until the errata drops anyway to make sure the change actually happens the way the individual developer thinks it is going to happen. If players didn’t jump all over personal “this is how I play it” threads as official statements from the company, then individual developers would be free to say “I do it this way” and not have that lead to conflict both on the forum and at Paizo of different developers who run games do it differently. That is a lot of the great stuff we get from James Jacobs, and used to get from Mark and Mike, and Logan and even Jason, but it seems like rules advice (as opposed to official rules clarification) gets a lot more vitriol than lore advice.

I think "what is the identity of this class and how does it fulfill it" is a fair question for a play test. The potential damage output of this class is very high, but it takes a fair bit of alignment to pull that together. The Runesmith is going to really like the commander and want to go right after them as often as possible.

My issues with it having such a high single target damage ceiling are:

1. The class does a lot of extra stuff compared to other dedicated single target strikers. It is not commander level of support martial, but it is much better than fighter, ranger, magus, swash buckler and barbarian at support and will push champions/inventors/investigators/Thaumaturges/rogues there too. At higher levels the sheer number of runes you can have and use at any time is really high. Even if you have 3 damage runes and that is your primary combat routine, you'll have 6 all day etched runes out of 9-10 options. and that would still leave you with a handful of emergency/fun/utility ones as well.

2. A D8 HP, heavily melee-centric class with saves this bad is going to get annihilated at higher levels. So much chassis is going into martial weapon profs and Legendary class DC. But only having 1 save that grants you the Resilience/evasion-type abilities means even with canny acumen you are going to get shredded by auras/aoes and mental control abilities.

This is especially problematic for the folks that want to play the class heavily into a martial support role and use weapons and shields with traces mostly for ally support. Minimally, being able to trade down that Legendary class DC for better saves would be a good idea for a subclass option, because otherwise, not building to offensively use runes is just so costly with the trade off you are getting for the DC.

So the Runesmith is a sugar-glass cannon oozing with support narrative, but you get heavily pushed into playing as essentially a melee blaster with out of combat support options that will pretty much preclude you from using a weapon if you don't want to die quickly.

3. The feats want you to use a weapon. The art says use a weapon. But then the class features say use a shield and blast with your runes and actually make it pretty difficult to use those weapons anywhere near as effectively as just blasting with runes. It seems like people really want the class to be a hybrid magical martial and not feel like it is just secretly the best all day blaster caster in the game, but only if you are willing to take an intense beat down.

The commander's mobility strategies are amazingly helpful to anyone laying down AoEs. In our playtest, it was bonkers how good completely repositioning the entire party right before all the casters got to go. They really didn't need to do more to help casters (or kineticists) than that.

Personally, I kind of think Kineticist and Runesmith are narratively...not opposed...but necessarily, partially incompatible, especially for the etching stuff. "Hey, I add runes to stuff" and "Hey, I barely use stuff" can afford to be not a great synergistic combination, in my opinion. So I don't mind Kineticist and Runesmith stuff being different. The runesmith stuff just feels so much like a "I modify runes (and can make some temporary ones) like an alchemist modifies alchemical items" class that I think it is a bit of shame that so much of the cool dynamic way they interact with the action economy is going to be locked out for other characters.

Ravingdork wrote:

Tsubutai wrote:

Unicore wrote:

Michael Sayre has definitely left Paizo, I am sure that has interfered in the Errata plans.

I'll be honest, the loss of him and Mark Seifter really doesn't fill me with confidence in the system's direction.

A year ago I warned of dark times ahead. I suspect this is just the beginning of the decline.

I think we need to get your profile avatar a little doom prophet sandwich board.

This was said in a kind-hearted jest voice. I should have (:p)’d it.

Tsubutai wrote:

Unicore wrote:

Michael Sayre has definitely left Paizo, I am sure that has interfered in the Errata plans.

I'll be honest, the loss of him and Mark Seifter really doesn't fill me with confidence in the system's direction.

A year ago I warned of dark times ahead. I suspect this is just the beginning of the decline.

I think we need to get your profile avatar a little doom prophet sandwich board.

My biggest problem with new classes getting unique silos of abilities are:

1. They all stack with each other instead of competing for set resources, like most core classes. Luckily, bonus types remain contained, so it is not the greatest threat to game balance, but the rune smith’s abilities tend not to just offer direct status bonuses, so there are many classes that operate much better with some specific runes in the party.

2. If being a member of X class is the only way for a character to access them, then providing new material for those options is only supporting 1 class, whereas new spells and items are things almost any character can use. My party often uses scrolls and alchemical items for example, but even with 2 kineticists in the party, new material for Earth or Metal kineticists is entirely unusable.

Sometimes, I do think it is worth it anyway for some classes, and a lot of folks think so for the runesmith. I am just starting to feel like things like Ikons and Runes are kind of “already bespoke game space” of items and magic that might just be adding complexity to the game, especially if they could be things that are not so class locked. I think the alchemist is to alchemical items relationship is a very strong feature of PF2, that new classes (even ones I like, like the commander) don’t get at all.

It didn't exactly strike me as a problem with the commander playtest for some reason, but Runes being an entirely new thing, is making me aware of how we are starting to get a whole lot of unique categories that are really going to complicate character building, especially with the Free archetype variant.

Oracle abilities
Commander strategies
Runesmith Runes

on top of focus spells and there becomes a pretty intense metagame of maximizing what resources are available to a character.

It also tends to undermine the modularity of the basic system in my mind.

Oracle abilities have their own set back with the curse, so I didn't find that one problematic, and I maybe just liked the commander strategies enough to not feel off about them, but couldn't "rune magic" essentially just be a new tradition of magic and use spell slots and cantrips to do everything the Runesmith class does, perhaps making the class a wave caster to keep the martial chassis?

It feels like doing otherwise is kind of just repeating the mistake of the kineticist neither casting spells not making strikes.

Maybe it is just me, but I really don’t think “I make tons of thralls that I treat with abandon” needs to be playable as a white mage. The class isn’t going to be a healer/life giver class. There is no alignment anymore anyway so it hardly matters but the game leans very heavily away from sanctified undead, even on an individual basis, much less “I make hordes of undead thralls!…for goodness.”

Between undead sorcerer, the boundary school of magic for wizards, clerics, bones oracles, animists, and various archetypes, I think the “uses general necromantic magic effects for better purposes” is already pretty wide spread in the game. I think this class might end up covering Tar Barphon as “uses undead thralls to accomplish my purposes. But I am not sure it will even cover Geb’s study of the undead as presented in the book of the dead