Unicore's page

Unicore wrote:

Catfolk dance is one type of saves. there are other feats and abilities that debuff other saves, but those are almost overwhelmingly status saves(and unfairly! How is goblin song a status penalty instead of a circumstance penalty?).

And yet, it is still a circumstance penalty to saves.

Unicore wrote:

Black Cat curse is once a day, 30ft range and a reaction and a level 13 ability.

And yet, it is still a misfortune ability made specifically for saves.

Unicore wrote:

Hero points are much more frequent, no action cost, no range issues and available from level 1.

Surestrike is once an encounter and a spell slot or and item.

Let's roll back the tape for one hot second before the goalposts start moving too far away once more:

Unicore wrote:

Just imagine how different the game would work already if allies could aid a caster to apply a -1 to -4 to enemy saves. No imagine being able to combine that with spending a hero point to make them roll twice.

This is you exclaiming how broken the game would be if the party could apply a penalty to saves with misfortune on top. This is not you talking about frequency limitations or types of saves, simply the mere existence of such effects. We are now at a point where I am demonstrating to you that what you're claiming is unthinkable not only is possible, but has been possible for years, yet is so uncontroversial that you clearly were not aware of those effects' existence. Characters can already give the BBEG a -5 to their save against slow, just as they can make enemies routinely even more vulnerable to spells like thunderstrike, while even being able to combine the two using the same ancestry. This is also not the only instance of being able to make an enemy reroll a save with misfortune; merfolk can do it too with Ill Tide.

So, once more, we find ourselves in a situation where you are stating developer intent that is not...

I want to keep the tone respectful here and to make that easier for me I am going to stick to one thing per post to keep from wall of texting.

I agreed that catfolk dance was good, especially because it was a circumstance penalty to saves. I went on for 2 sentences after what you quoted to explain why the limits of being only one type of save and maxing out at -2 matter when comparing it to what aiding a attack roll can be.

If you would rather talk about something other than catfolk dance, I am happy to discuss one idea at a time.

Also, if you are curious, the math comparisons I am talking about are still searchable somewhere on these forums in the Magus playtest forum here is one example thread where someone posed this exact question.

There are a lot more examples of similar threads where people proposed this same kind of idea and the community ran a ton of numbers to figure out the impact. Getting the spell strike down to one roll was probably 3/4ths of the community's primary request at the time, and the developers definitely saw all that discussion.

Yeah, the Shining Symbol will probably have to be nerfed hard with the new damage rules. I don’t think we can have items granting 5 and then 10 weakness to a damage type to every enemy in a 20ft emanation and have that last for 10 minutes.

There is way too much going on there to pile on to how easy it is to stack on effects that do discrete instances of spirit damage.

Also, the same practical effect could be accomplished by printing spell attack roll spells that debuffed enemies instead of damaging them.

Catfolk dance is one type of saves. there are other feats and abilities that debuff other saves, but those are almost overwhelmingly status saves(and unfairly! How is goblin song a status penalty instead of a circumstance penalty?).

It is a good ability, but the thing about using AC for every save defense is that it also over rides good saves and bonuses to save vs magic. Being able to aid a magus' spell strike involves no thought of what save might be targeted or force the magus to pick a certain kind of spell to cast. It also caps out at -2.

Black Cat curse is once a day, 30ft range and a reaction and a level 13 ability.

Hero points are much more frequent, no action cost, no range issues and available from level 1.

Surestrike is once an encounter and a spell slot or and item.

I have seen the Catfolk Dance used and it was pretty good. I have never seen anyone take Black Cat curse, because it is high level, but also, the one time there was a character that could, they were discouraged by the once a day. I have a feeling that that limits its use significantly more than you would see if people had the same opportunity freely from level 1.

You are preaching to the choir about the value of being able to target multiple enemies. I love casters for their ability to handle many situations.

But there is a reason why the developers had to limit spell striking to just spell attack roll spells after the playtest in response to the overwhelming feedback that people wanted spell strike to only be one roll not two. We did the math on that in that playtest and even with just reflex spells and pure damage spells/ no debuffs, the DPR difference with very minimal preparation (off guard and truestrike) was massive and way out of line with what other classes could do.

The area weakness on swarms exists because if the GM were to run the 100s to 1000s of critters as individual creatures, they would all instantly die from an area of effect spell (well, I guess that depends on whether nat 20s are good enough to be a success, so it might be all but 5%), but that doesn't quite feel right as certainly the number of bodies between the source of the effect and some of the creatures in the swarm would result in a fair number living. It is a concession of convenience in making swarms work like swarms, rather than something about any of the creatures in the swarm.

As a GM, I think you probably have to approach it narratively and subjectively. If the whole area isn't still in some kind of damaging effect, I might be inclined to only use the initial instance. It seems likely the swarm creatures that are still on fire are probably dead, and the living creatures would move around them, rather than every creature still being on fire. But if it is described as an area that could still be the source of the damage, I would treat it as an area effect.

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

If the Magus had any kind of mechanic that gave an automatic critical fail on a save spell for a critical hit on a spell strike, it would grossly shift the Magus into the ultimate caster in the game. There are way too many spells where being able to manipulate the odds into 20-25+% chance of crit would just obliterate the odds compared to regular casters. Beyond all the other ways that targeting AC can be manipulated, the fact regular casters never get to use hero points landing their most important spells but Magi would be able to (and use sure strike) would just be too much, out of the gate.

Just imagine how different the game would work already if allies could aid a caster to apply a -1 to -4 to enemy saves. No imagine being able to combine that with spending a hero point to make them roll twice.

As far as Incap spells. It isn't usually against solo creatures that they would end fights, it is against multiple equal level enemies, enemies that they might have a 30-40% chance of criting on. That is just way beyond the game's math expectations. Dominate for example never has to give another save if you ask the creature to protect you and keep its allies away from you (you aren't telling them to kill their allies). But some, like banishment, would be problematic even against much more powerful enemies.

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

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

What I am left wondering, since Holy and the spirit damage come from the same holy rune, is what if the monster had weakness to both holy and spirit?

This too me is why context matters and a strict code reading of the process is less important than a narratively compelling one. At my table, I’d probably treat a rune as a single instance, so only apply one. But a cold iron sword with a holy rune as separate for the holy and the cold iron.

For swarms, area seems like such a separate and inherent weakness do to the way it affects large groups that that is why I’d treat it as one categorical instance that would apply separately to the damage types of the effect doing the damage.

shroudb wrote:

No, you have not 'solved' the error by declaring it to not exist / inventing your own rules to bridge the gap. Your claim also contradicts the errata we just got.

_____________

Holy Cascade does split damage, and is [holy].
The example foe is weak to holy, bldg, and area damage.

In order for the "only the highest" rule to exist, you have to put things like [holy] traits and [spirit] types at the same level.
If the whole attack or spell simply "is holy" on a layer above the damage instance type chunks, you cannot evaluate which is higher.

Doesn’t the example make it clear we are not trying to compare holy to specific types of damage? It would only compare to other categorical traits for the whole attack.

There are some confusing cases in PF2, but holy and area aren’t really that. Personally weakness to holy and area would both go off at my table because they are very different things. I would probably only apply one of the trait based weaknesses though generally, but all of the damage types that actually occurred and are spelled out by the attack/damage source.

Yes, sorry, holy is the category, and doesn’t negate or override cold iron.

Area though is not a damage type or a trait (which is why splash raises more questions for me). The whole instance is either area damage or it isn’t. It doesn’t seem undefined to me in nearly the same way as there is both a splash trait and specific splash damage which also affects the primary target and is reads much more like a separate instance of damage than an area of effect attack that does 2 different kinds of damage.

The model for how to do save spells with spell striking in a way where critical hits matter is the playtest magus. It was a lot of fun. It would be awesome to see that comeback in place of expansive spell strike or beside it (since a lot of folks take expansive specifically for AoE casting) as a low level feat, but I think it might be too much text for one feat.

It is hard to imagine them giving up on the combined 1 attack roll for spell attack spells, since people liked that so much, but lack of fun spells to use with spell strike is a problem of the class right now.

area damage feels pretty conclusively not like a damage type (as in a descriptor of specific chunks of damage) but like an overall category of damage, because nothing does 5 area damage.

It is really "fire" that is the complicating factor in the whole equation because there is 5 fire damage, and there is damage that could be bludgeoning or some other damage type that could have the fire trait and be grouped together as fire damage. Force now also fits into this situation although very minimally and only really with spells from the dark archive.

THe FAQ example does give us a very specific example that holy and cold iron are definitely categorical and not individual damage types that can be applied discreetly. Area damage is never applied discreetly. It is splash damage, not area damage that feels like it could confusingly straddle doing both a discreet instance of splash damage and overall damage that has the splash trait.

It is really unfortunate that the example given in the errata had to give generic "spell effect" for the cold damage instead of actual spells that did that, because I think the context of the actual spells might really help me at least see how they are different things, I am not really even sure what spells could be combo'd like that. Spells like claws of the otter and Mantle of the Frozen Heart can both give you attacks that add cold damage, but they would be mutually exclusive because they are different kinds of claws attacks.

Overall, I don't think the problem is going to manifest itself too often in actual play. The action cost to benefit for doing things like forcing weaknesses on multiple creatures, as happens in most combats, is pretty taxing. Against powerful solo creatures, it has the potential to be more useful, but there will still be a lot of missing or spending actions doing things that don't help in any immediate sense. Players will likely decide fire is the way to go as a default, but there are a lot of resistances to fire and the given weaknesses are going to have to be higher than the resistances by a significant margin or the actions spent doing all this to benefit are going to be pretty low.

Overall, I think it will be worth paying attention to how much this changes anything, and I do think it will make feats like the level 12 wizard feat "Forcible Energy" a lot better, but that is because those feats can be flexible about the damage type, rather than what I think a lot of tables will try to do, where players try to turn everything into a problem fire can fix and then will be in a fair bit of trouble when fire does nothing because of an immunity, or the resistance is high enough to counter the additional damage from weaknesses and having to split the effects that do damage out, will make them very weak if they manage to do any damage at all.

Like a rank 7 elemental betrayal gives a weakness of 5. If a level 14 creature has resistance to fire, the lowest that is going to be is a 9, with an average probably closer to 12 or 15. A party built to just exploit fire weakness, with flaming and brilliant runes on every weapon, is a party that is probably in a whole world of hurt as soon as the fire resistant enemies come into play.

I think there is probably more opportunity for spirit damage to be a problem than anything else, but I personally would not mind if this change made the developers go back and look at whether the shiny newness of remastered spirit damage got a little out of hand in how it was given out, especially in the War of the Immortals book and the divine mysteries book, and some of that was dialed back a little in future errata.

Overall, I am glad things are clearer and am looking forward to seeing how it all plays out at people's tables.

I think it is important to step back and remember that this is the rules discussion forum. So people looking at these threads come here to discuss the rules, often with different perspectives on how to interpret the rules. There is no hint anywhere that this is the place to come and ask rules questions to the developers and expect to get answers. The only place things like that ever exist are in AMAs that tend to happen at conventions, in person or online.

Continuing to discuss how people understand the rules and why is the expectation people bring to this conversation.

With that in mind, I personally don’t understand what someone who believes that you cannot delay past the end of a combat round does when a character has delayed initiative until the end of the round. Do they believe the character goes back to their original place in the turn order? Or do they now go last, as they waited until the very end of the round? And if that is the case, can anyone delay later past them? Because that would imply someone waiting past the end of the round. It feels like this creates a logic paradox that doesn’t happen if you read round (in the context of delay) as subjective to your character: the time between when your turn starts and the start of your next turn.

YuriP wrote:

- Doesn't work well with fighters because you use weapons of 2 different groups.

Just to say, there are several weapons in the Brawling group (which the Fist attack is in) that actually would work well with Overwhelming Combination - the pantograph gauntlet, the fangwire and the tri-bladed katar are pretty good weapons in their own right, and the various Free-Hand weapons are pretty good in a lot of cases if you build around having free hands.

YuriP wrote:

Also notice the Overwhelming Combination gives a double cost problem once that it cannot benefit from Doubling Rings nor Blazons of Shared Power unless if you are playing a ABP/ARP game.

Spirit Warrior has a feat to deal with this at level 6 called "Cutting Heaven, Crushing Earth", so runes are actually less of a concern for this than they are for regular dual-wielding honestly.

https://2e.aonprd.com/Feats.aspx?ID=7024

On the contrary, picking a d4 weapon to use so you can have the same weapon group as your d6 die fist attack is not going to be any kind of the same problem as a fighter grabbing the old flurry of blows to use with d8 agile strikes.

Spirit warrior’s version of flurry is not anywhere near a monk using g Flury of blows, at that was the problem with the old MC flurry, you could build characters better than a monk. I don’t see the existence of the spirit warrior replacing old MC flurry builds.

Resistances and weaknesses to traits instead of damage types has been a thorn in the side of PF2 from the beginning and have added a lot of needless complexity. If it is something that can be/is applied at the end to the entire attack, (like holy and non lethal) then it really just needs to be just one instance that is the entire attack itself.

If it is something like a material (which would include things like force) then it should apply only once, and to the base attack that gains the material trait.

An item that gives resistance to nonlethal damage seems like a bad idea to me. It is not an item I would include in my games and one I would hope gets changed in a future errata.

What has resistance to nonlethal and not immunity?

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is not like the initiative question. An overwhelming consensus of players run delaying and initiative the same way. No additional ruling is necessary for delay to work consistently.

I agree with you that the number of spells in the Oracle repertoire is not as clear and that nothing short of errata is going to create consistency in how many spells does an Oracle know.

But that needs to be official errata to really fix the problem. There is not one developer that can make a post on social media or a message board that will fix the problem. No one developer has that power in Paizo. I don’t know what is delaying that process, but it needs to work its way through that process to get resolved. Players can choose to be sympathetic to the development team or not, that is about individual expectations and feelings and experiences and voicing frustration is fine and even helpful. Honest feedback back is good.

My personal opinion is that random developers giving unofficial feedback on line that might conflict with how the official errata eventually is released will consistently be worse for pathfinder 2e than them getting their official errata process working again.

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

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

Level 15 isn't bad for a monk because dedicated casters don't get a stat boost that level, so their DCs go up two, but the monk can go up +1, so the difference stays a 2 which drops to 0 at 17. At level 19-20, when the choice of Apex item comes into play, that is the only time the DC really slips to -3.

Yeah, doing the whole thing as a Cleric or a Druid would be better saves wise, but my party had a cleric and a redeemer champion, and the character was definitely not a wise decision maker, so I had a lot of fun with the synergy of Dragon stance feats, intimidation, and being a dragon blooded sorcerer.

As far as spell attacks, there are none good enough to not just target AC with a Dragon Tail swipe if that is the defense you want to go after.

Tridus wrote:

benwilsher18 wrote:

Tridus wrote:

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

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

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

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

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

Ki blast is awesome, my monk in SotG has not gone sideways from casting a spell

One of my favorite PF2 characters I have ever played is a Gnome Monk who took the sorcerer MC archetype in a Free Archetype game, but dressed and pretended to be a struggling wizard. +4 STR, +3 CHA to start, I was never really down more than 2 points on my DC than a full dedicated caster, and even then I often caught up with in a couple levels, with the trade off of 10 hp per level, great saves, and the ability to absolutely wallop anyone that got close to me. The Monk's amazing chassis for saves and AC let you slow walk your secondary stat increases and still be as good as any caster at most things. I spent almost all of my money on scrolls and was able to do so much casting the party often forgot I was a monk and not a wizard, even though my INT was terrible.

There are really a lot of ways to Gish very effectively in PF2.

Bugley man, is this the GM? Is it players who think they just can’t use delaying actions if they roll badly for initiative?

If it is the GM, then the issue is bigger than delay because casting spells late in the initiative order is going to have issue if rounds are measured in combat rounds and not the time between players turns.

But if the players (whether GM or not) understand that, then they do understand how delaying works too, there is just some reason they think it works differently?

You don’t generally see “official FAQ” for things like how to make an attack roll or how to determine AC, because those things are clearly stated in the rules. Players who ask questions about them on forums have other players answer those questions and developers don’t chime in because the rules on it are clear.

You do see newer players occasionally ask these questions in live stream or live AMA type events and sometimes developers will explain it there, but that is not any more official FAQ than the response you get from players here. Typically, FAQ happens when a large section of players are interpreting rules differently from each other and there is nothing close to a consensus.

This thread is very old and has had the occasional player reask the question, but the consensus on the issue has never come close to shifting.

The irony of "Just give Gunslinger firearms without reload" is that the class is so tied to reloading weapons that repeating weapons and temporally displaced starfinder guns are better on other classes. Feats designed to work with bows have much better synergy with such weapons.

Yeah, Fighter is right there ready to do nasty things with repeating weapons

That is probably the cleanest way to run it, and how I would write it if I was a developer for Paizo, as I do think the Psychic has always really struggled with longer encounters.

For my table I will probably keep the bring down an enemy requirement to keep things interesting for my specific party. Also, the big sprawling encounters tend to involve a lot of lower level enemies so it is probably not as big of a challenge as it would be at the table of a GM who tends only to use fewer, higher level enemies.

There are magi who have fun options beyond just spell striking every round.

I agree that the shooting star magus isn’t that magus, but other options do give you more things to do that are worth doing. Sometimes the first round cantrip from range and arcane cascade , for example, can give you a weakness triggering damage type that you might not be able to set up with a spell strike and keep you from moving and then ending your turn where you’ll get wailed on in retaliation for showing yourself as a glass cannon.

I personally think expansive spells strike is a waste of a feat, but even if you don’t take it, it is still not a bad idea to keep your INT high enough to be decent casting spells regularly on their own. There are just too many encounters where the range, versatility, and ability to target multiple enemies/low saves is extremely useful.

After looking over the newly remastered Psychic, I am disappointed to see that the unique essence of the original class (from immediately after the Dark Archive was first published and before the game was remastered at all) has been left stripped from the class, and that is the ability to use more focus points per encounter in the day, for every encounter, than any other class.

This uniqueness of the class was stripped out before the Dark Archive ever got remastered itself, by giving every class with focus points the ability to regain all of their focus points with enough time to refocus between encounters, whereas previously every other caster could only recover 1 focus point after an encounter (until later feats got involved, and it was never up to all 3).

Being able to recover 2 in the time it takes other classes to regain 1 is not nothing, but it is not something that comes up often enough to really set the psychic apart from other casters any more, especially since they get so few spell slot spells in a day.

So here is the fix I will be implementing in the games I GM:

Whenever a Psychic gains the stupefied condition from the end of the Unleash Psyche ability, they regain one focus point if they have brought any significant enemy (worth 10 xp or more) to 0 hit points while their psyche was unleashed.

I am sure many players will not find this change to be enough to boost the psychic to the level of some of the more powerful casters in PF2, but it does give them one unique way to potentially use more focus points than any other caster in an encounter, and it addresses another long standing issues psychic players have faced in my campaigns: It gives them a little more staying power in the longer, multi-round encounters that can spring up when you have encounters collapse into each other.

I bet a lot of tables are thinking up ways they are going to modify the remastered Psychic in their games, and I'd love to hear them as well. I am trying to change as little as possible, and I don't mind the change to Imaginary Weapon, but the Psychic class really needs something to give it some specialness again with the remastered edition and I will be trying this out to see if it feels special for my psychic player.

My experience playing the magus was that trying to spell strike too often was an easy mistake to make. I was the twisting tree magus and when facing multiple enemies, especially ones with any kind of weakness, sometimes spell strike was just over killing one enemy and wasting an action or even worse a spell slot to do so. Waiting until the party set me up to spell strike the difficult enemies was always very powerful and awesome feeling though.

I get that some people really get into the repetition of turns, but that always makes classes much more boring to me. The magus plays pretty well for "here are a handful of options you can pick and choose a couple of each encounter."

Oh yeah! Playing with a Commander really, really helps the Magus a lot too. We didn't have one until very late in the campaign but it really shined with the Magus.

I think trying to insert any but the most basic, self-interested, harm reducing reactions for minions is going to be make for balance problems that probably lead to the blanket ban in the first place. That is why I think it would be important to get the intention in there as opposed to try to arbitrate the potential reactions that might qualify.

Minions are creatures that don’t want to die. All creatures have very basic ways to save themselves from certain life threatening situations that only work as reactions: namely arrest a fall and grab an edge. Minions should count as having one reaction (like any creature) when it is necessary to take a basic reaction to prevent harm to themselves. This is instinctual and does not require them to be commanded.

Text like that is almost implied in the first paragraph of the minion trait, but the fact that”action” is a game term that sometimes includes reactions and some times doesn’t means the second paragraph stating that they have 0 reactions will supersede the “minions take basic actions to defend themselves,” especially as that text is primarily about what they do when not commanded…even though basic defensive reactions would have to happen without command to make any sense.

Which is to say, I think there is still a case to say RAW, minions already can take basic reactions to prevent harm to themselves, because reactions are actions and the second paragraph is about what minions can do when commanded, which I interpret to be the time spent carrying out their commands, not necessarily the whole round in which they have carried out their master’s command. But I also think some clarity about that would greatly help avoid “my animal companion mountain lion got pushed off the side of a cliff without being able to try to stop itself” which is needlessly punitive to players (NPCs riding horses or having a close animal companion are never under the same limitations) and makes no sense.

I wonder if they are waiting until close to valentine’s for some kind of thematic reasons?

It would need to specify that it can use basic reactions to prevent immediate damage to itself. That should prevent any attempts for aiding another or readied actions

I wonder how many martial players would give up potency runes to have their weapons be able to target one of AC, Fort or Reflex?

If the idea of the shadow signet had been around from the original playtest, I wonder if we could have had AC just stay around the same values as saves and had ways for martials to target ref or fort with weapons and no one would need potency runes at all, for weapons or armor.

Mathmuse is much, much better at the math than I, but I think that the math on Fatal weapons will work out where being a full striking rune behind on your pistols isn’t that big of a damage component/ can kinda be made up for with much cheaper property runes. Like there will be bad levels when the next level potency rune becomes available, with quick draw and 4 to 6 you can probably stay competitive damage wise doing a round or two of shooting a bunch of guns, then holding on to your best one and reloading it later in the combat, at least at most levels. With APB, depending on what the GM does with property runes, the fire and drop approach almost certainly comes out ahead of a reloading gunslinger.

I do understand how a player could confuse themselves looking at the rules definition of a round, which is talking about bout a round of combat, and the only place where talking about rounds as something that goes from the start of your turn until your next turn is in the duration of effects rules section. However, it is just not possible to delay an entire round unless you can understand that round to be the time between when your turn starts (which happens at your original place in the initiative) and the next time your turn would have started if you had not delayed.

So as far as looking for an “official explanation” the place you could probably get a developer to say the above is in a AMA that happens at various conventions.

Gunslingers have options already for making 3 attacks a round though, right? So the issue is that the slinger’s reload class feature doesn’t interact with those options? I don’t think the class needs every class feature to work with every possible weapon they might use. The class already has a number of feats that require a loaded weapon which capacity weapons make easier to use reliably. That is probably enough support for it.

It seems like the minion trait just needs something in the sentence about having 0 reactions to specify that they have 0 reactions except default reactions to prevent damage, such as from arresting a fall or grabbing an edge.

It doesn’t come up in play because only players tend to have to use minion rules, but if players could just push any creature that wasn’t the boss enemy into a pit without those creatures getting a reaction to not fall, it would be blatantly unrealistic and unfair. The same should be applied to animal companions and other minions.

It almost feels implied by the statement they will take actions on their own to avoid harm, but the “0 reactions” text does look so authoritative that many GMs would assume no exceptions.

Why would arrest fall be different than grabbing an edge? It feels like maybe general advice about what kind of reactions to allow and when would make more sense than trying to sort out all the specific exceptions.

WWHsmackdown wrote:

Funny you say that, I don't think the Magus should spellstrike every round..... I don't think anybody should do the same thing every round. I genuinely think combat design, class design, and player desire should be more engaging than *looks down from phone* "I do the same thing as last turn"

The Fighter does the same thing over and over... yet everyone adores the class...

My main issue since "the departure from 3.5" is how combat encounters became looooooooooooooong, as in enemies got double HP while the players could no longer attack multiple times, let alone not longer dishing big amounts of damage.

If all classes are limited with their damage-dealing abilities, it's gonna turn every fight into a chore...

So this is a criticism of PF1 right? And not PF2? Because high level PF1 encounters could have one round last an hour. Even with 15 enemies on the battlefield I’ve never had a PF2 round take 30 minutes without some kind of break happening in the middle. Average is definitely around the 10 to 15 minute mark, tops.

Yes you can delay into the next round. If you couldn’t then a bunch of weird stuff happens that punishes the whole team and makes no sense from a realism perspective. “The start of the round” only really exists at the beginning of an encounter and possibly as a narrative beat for the GM. Otherwise everything in the game measured in rounds is from your turn. That is why the rules don’t need to be any more explicit than they are. A round cannot go by and not include all the potential initiative markets above yours in the next overall encounter round.

I would not trade the ORC license for errata every 3 months.

For errata, having a brief window of planned support after each release covering major issues only would go a long way. Even just a window of one week for readers to find issues and one week to fix the top ten worst issues found in the previous week. This could all be overridden with a more careful sweep later, but would let things like the confusion over oracle spells get resolved.

I guess I sort of think it is ok to let this be a fan provided service that happens here on the forums. Players ask their rules questions, discuss them, see if there are consensus reached that cause those discussions to go away, and then developers can look and see if those are implementable in the products and line up with underlying game principles or if they need further tweaking. The rules are free to everyone so, in the vast majority of cases, this is not labor Paizo had to do themselves, nor will official rulings inherently make everyone’s games inherently better.

I couldn't care less about errata causing layout issues for hypothetical reprints, I paid for functional rules, and the company I paid for said rules promised two errata updates per year and have now failed at that. Yes, this was expected as Paizo has never been good at sticking to promises to be better at errata, but that doesn't mean anybody needs to be happy about it.

Being frustrated by broken promises and the way things feel on a personal level is totally legitimate feedback to give Paizo. They tell us this all the time and it is not the customer’s job to be patient or understanding of the complex issues that drive business decisions away from their preferred outcomes.

From my perspective though, Paizo isn’t selling “functional RPG rules,” because they are actually giving that part away for free. I totally understand feeling like the game is the thing you are buying when you buy a Pathfinder 2nd edition Rulebook, from a player-side perspective, but by nature of the ORC license, the mechanics are free to anyone to use, develop further, and even to repackage and resell. That puts errata into a difficult space to budget around, because it is quite literally an unlimited money sink attached to the actual product that Paizo sells to keep the lights on. The company therefore has to be pretty careful not to over budget resources to a product that customers see as an essential part of the pathfinder experience, but is almost entirely just marketing and customer service.

I think it is important to recognize that the company is giving away 50-75% (maybe even more) of the labor that creates the product that they actually sell and that it is important not to over pressure the developers who doing 100% of that product-less labor to do even more labor that can’t make money. Arcane Mark was a fairly brilliant approach for Mark to take to (potentially) monetize some of this free labor, but I have no idea if it was enough to make the labor worth doing, AND Mark didn’t have the authority to make actual game rulings on his own that Paizo was under an obligation to officiate into their rules. Not even Jason Bulmahn is in a position on his live streams to do more than say “this is how I utilize these rules.”

Imagine if Mark’s comment about the 6th Pillar Archetype was just a quick, off the cuff comment and not a commitment to make any changes when he said it. What if Fists never got a hardcover edition and no one in the company ever went back and changed the feat? Had he said nothing, players might argue about the power of the feat back and forth, and speculated about why no other such proficiency granting feat ever got published afterwards, but from the company’s perspective, there is no obligation being created to customers that Paizo is on the hook to pay for. By saying “yes this is a mistake we will will fix,” Mark was obligating Paizo to spend money on something it might never have a way to recuperate, and that is something companies have to be real careful about, or else you get customer expectations sky high and the economy of publishing and internationally shipping books (your actual product) might flip on its head in the middle of a print cycle that might nearly sink your entire company. Now you have a situation where your player base is lionizing a developer who is so passionate about the game they are stretching themselves thin to provide advice that is being read as company endorsed rules text, but to actually make it so, other employees have to divert their labor budgets from somewhere else, or leave a promised fix unresolved.

So yes, I do think a sustainable, well implemented errata process is far more complicated than players are going to inherently see, and being transparent about those complexities is difficult because they have to involve business decisions that are not necessarily going to be popular with the player base, like telling enthusiastic developers not to overcommit company resources. I think Paizo has been trying to do better and better with these things, but sometimes it looks like taking two steps backwards, when the initial step forward was actually just sideways to an actual, realizable vision for what the errata process can functionally be.

That example doesn't make the point you seem to think it does. Imagine if Mark hadn't said something. Now we have a build enabling, game changing option sitting in a book for a couple of years with no indication from anyone that it's not intentional.

That's going to put enormous pressure on GMs to allow it because of all the builds it enables that literally no other option in the game does. People make characters with it, use it, get used to it, and then suddenly out of nowhere one day it's gone.

People would be furious at having the rug pulled out from under them like that. And they'd have a point. This is not how game communication works in 2026. Expectations are not what they were in 2010. Letting people think a known issue is fine for a couple of years only to spring a character breaking change on them later is a great way to piss people off, and it doesn't have to happen since they already know there's a problem.

Mark posting about that saved everyone a lot of grief. It was unquestionably a good thing. The problem here wasn't with that at all: it was with that it took so long to get it actually fixed.

Alternative perspective: Mark said nothing. Players who have access to the option make characters, play them for years. Eventually errat comes out with the change and explanation why. Tables decide either to just play on with the old rules because they have been working at the table, or not, because it feels broken. It’s level 12 or 14 feats, so it doesn’t even effect PFS characters (or at least, very, very few, and no one spends 3 years sitting around in limbo because one developer suggested on social media that a change was coming that may or may not have ever been fully made.

Like I get appreciating Mark’s comment. The feat felt too good to be true to me too. But did his comment really end up improving the relationship between Paizo and its player base? Or did it make some people feel like they could never play a character they wanted to play, when they probably could have in the time it took for the change to be made, one that still really enables most of the same characters, with just minor tweaks?

The Oracle problem creating another problem does make developers hesitant to rush out errata though. That is how you get the villagers getting out the pitch forks and torches. Imagine if some random developer popped in to give a specific answer to the repertoire issue, not just admitting a problem (which in this case doesn’t need to be pointed out because it is either causing tables problems or it isn’t) only for 2 years later the book to get republished with a different number than what was posted on social media.what if the “obvious answer” actually meant having to change the language in not just the Oracle’s repertoire, but in every spontaneous caster’s repertoire text and it ended up obliterating the layout of books already in print or getting printed? Well now that initial answer can’t be practical official errata anymore, so maybe a less desirable answer becomes better for the company, but now customers are going to be even more upset because the first answer was the one they wanted to hear. The right answer wasn’t knowable to any developer until every aspect of its implementation is considered through the company because the game rules are not paizo’s product. Books and PDFs are that have many other considerations than rules clarity.

The reason we didn’t get an errata on the expected time line isn’t because no one wanted to do it, it’s because the money wasn’t there to pay employees to do it the right way. That could be because other projects took up more of the labor budget than expected, the cost of publishing this last year has been incredibly difficult to forecast and budget for, or a sustainable errata process has yet to be fully materialized in house. This isn’t a new problem and the fact that the 2 game developers that people point to as going above and beyond to make the errata process feel good to the fan base have left the company seems like a good indicator to me that direct developer engagement with fans who want immediate rules rulings for their games is not a viable long term strategy.

For social media errata to work, there has to be a person who can just answer questions authoritatively without concern of later being over ruled and I don’t think PF2 has that. Identifying a problem is not the same thing as having an internal consensus about how to fix it, and the fix to some issues probably involve waiting for other aspects of the production company than players might expect (light layout editors) before the issue can be considered resolved in a manner ready to publish, even unofficially to social media.

For example, I remember when the second book of the Fists of the Ruby Phoenix came out, people started immediately asking about a feat that granted master proficiency in either unarmed attacks or spells, and Mark Seifter immediately jumped in to tell us that feat was going to be an immediate candidate for errata because it clearly violated the games design philosophy around martial arts/caster proficiency gating, but it would be a year )at least, maybe 2 or 3) before there was ever anything officially said about it. So if you didn’t carefully word a search of these forums that brought up that one specific post, there was no clue anywhere that this feat, that had many player salivating for how it basically let any character become a hybrid fish with 2 class feats, was out of line and going to be completely changed at some point in the future.

This was a feat that essentially broke the math of the game, and was clearly not right to anyone who was familiar with PF2 balance, but also, it only broke the game in a very localized area that was pretty easily handled by GMs because it was an uncommon, higher level option. It was also in a book that was probably difficult to justify paying basically the entire development team to spend even a hour trying to fix because no future sales were going to be impacted by any change or lack of change. Eventually the AP got reprinted and the feat was changed, but it was only because a developer spent unpaid labor to come tell us that the feat was broken that anyone knew that there was something in the works.

It is not really reasonable to expect developers to do unpaid work to interact with customers beyond the formal events that are scheduled into the year (like conventions). You can’t just hire one developer for that purpose either, because players want answers and someone who is spending their work time responding to customer questions is not someone who is spending their time working with the rest of the development team balancing and evaluating potential changes and errata.

It super sucks that the plan to do two errata passes a year couldn’t stick for even a full year, but it is probably one of the hardest business decisions to try to make in advance how much time (and thus money) can be given over to the errata process in advance each year, and it has to be one of the first budgets to cut when product deadlines are approaching. To get errata that has been looked over and approved by some of the most expensive eyes in the company before getting released, the process is not going to be social media-levels of fast or responsive.

I do think it is better not to get half baked changes that potentially conflict with other rules or changes or realities about what is going to be published in future books, than to have and under qualified person making gut instinct rulings that will later have to be retracted if they don’t fit into books or production schedules. Especially if you have to scour multiple corners of the internet to potentially find those changes.

Shocking grasp and polar ray are fine spells if you know about them and can find them. They are legacy options that don’t even show up on Archives of Nethys anymore, rerouting you to saving throw spells if you search for them. They are not good spells for saying “the magus has plenty of Spell striking support in the remaster.” Blood Feast is an uncommon spell from an early AP with themes and descriptions that will make many GMs hesitant to toss out to players too easily.

I don’t really get the point of saying the remastered Magus is still fine without additional spell striking spell slot options, and then point to pre-remastered spells that will be difficult for players to find and access. I do think the new book will have some options but I am curious to see how they are balanced. Maybe they will just be exactly the old spells, at least mechanically, that would get a laugh from me.

The critical damage for Britney bolt increases by 2d6, just like the success result. So at rank 2 that is 4d6 regular damage and 6d6 critical damage. A few ranks up and the critical result is a paltry 2d6 higher than a success. It is useful for creatures immune to criticals because crit immunity only applies to the doubling of damage, not to the other results of a critical success, but against most enemies, the magus loses quite a lot of damage per round when their spells don’t double damage on a critical success.

For regular casters, briny bolt is not a bad rank -3 or 4 spell option because past rank 3 you just don’t get much heightening it any more. But Magi don’t have those spell slots.

Other effects are fun, and making an enemy waste an action is a good one, but Britney bolt will fall way behind even the new Imaginary Weapon for damage at medium to higher ranks. And most Magi players want some kind of maximum damage option that can go in a spell slot, which isn’t really in the game right now at allx

Sometimes AC is the bad defense. Bad enough that the expected damage can work out to match or beat a saving throw spells even with half damage on a save factoring in. Also debuffing AC is a common party wide tactic, as is giving out group bonuses to attack rolls, in ways saving throw spells can’t. Plus hero points can’t help a caster land a saving throw spell nor can sure strike.

That is a whole lot of accuracy boosting math to have to compensate for if the default average spell attack roll spell was not a little behind from the beginning.

Unicore wrote:

The problem with impossible magic presenting a bunch of good ones is that it will have made taking ones like shocking grasp, acid arrow and polar ray out of game mechanically in the first place. They got rid of spell attack roll spells to help guide newer players away from them as the only spells to have memorized.

Right, in the Player Core books, a.k.a, the first books a new player is going to look at, and the books which contain the majority of the game's casting classes. Putting lots of attack roll spells there makes less sense than, say, putting them in a supplemental book with a class whose central conceit revolves around using attack roll spells.

It is my hope this works out well because we do need those kind of spells for existing magus spell striking to work. I just hope getting a new shocking grasp-like spell doesn’t have every new caster player wanting to cast this spell, a spell attack roll focus spell and cantrips exclusively, and then getting mad their accuracy with spell attack roll spells aren’t as good as martials, when the design of casters is “target the weak save,” so the ability to make AC just always the weak save would just make all damage dealing saving throw spells a waste of time.