I too was intrigued by head smash until I realized that the DD class DC is very bad, and combined with incap, it was never going to be more useful than rushing stride and generating adrenaline off of a no map strike.
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The problem with Daredevil is, you're assuming the Daredevil is actually using their maneuvers. The daredevil in my game did not use Maneuvers a single time. All they did throughout all combats was throw improvised weapons with Breakaway Attack and Caroming Charge. They didn't touch any of the risk mechanics at all. And not only that, their character succeeded, and was doing the most damage of the party. Did they have fun playing this way? Or was it disappointing? I don’t see caroming charge dealing the most damage out of the party that frequently in encounters of less than 3 enemies. Was your party large with lots of extra enemies in it? I do think it’s a feat that will do better in those circumstances. It’s math is just not broken enough in standard encounters for me to worry that much about it and it seems like trying to get everyone is going to leave you getting wailed on pretty frequently by the enemies you just lightly bruised. It feels like an exploit that will occasionally be very effective and loads of fun, and often lack luster, but also leaving you very vulnerable. That fits pretty squarely within my vision of daredevil abilities. Letting all abilities that do stunt damage double on a crit doesn’t really work because stunt damage is extra damage from moving an enemy into a wall. The critical result on the ability might have been what let the ability move the enemy enough to do stunt damage in the first place. Specific abilities could call out doubling it for crits but it shouldn’t double on a generic shove or especially not on something like getting pushed from having got hit with a weapon with a crit specialization that shoves or repositions (which currently requires going out of class to get, but is the easiest way to combine strike damage and stunt damage).
Also, I am not sure Kip up alone is worth racing for over getting athletics to master, so it might be more like level 10, or 8 levels of not having it before it solves that one response.Taking Acrobat Dedication gets you scaling Acrobatics. I imagine it'd be quite popular way to get both athletics and acrobatics increases as soon as they are available for a single 2nd level feat [especially in free archetype games]. Acrobat as an archetype is pretty terrible for daredevil beyond getting scaling acrobatics. The rest of the feats do not synergize with your play style at all, not being press abilities and doing things you have class feats to do better already. It seems like it would be a pretty bad FA as you’d be stuck taking multiple feats you will basically never use to get out of it, to get a skill feat two levels early. If it is that important to the player to Kip up, they should just probably prioritize acrobatics first, especially if they are never using any maneuvers and just wanting to throw rocks and caroming charge.
Will most daredevils eventually have Kip up? Probably. They will go for it faster the first time their character gets knocked prone and can’t caroming charge when they would have like to. Letting that be a win for the player serverql times is great GMing. Having enemies sometimes grab instead or after realizing prone isn’t good enough is also great GMing. Also, I am not sure Kip up alone is worth racing for over getting athletics to master, so it might be more like level 10, or 8 levels of not having it before it solves that one response. I originally wanted stunt damage boosted in some fashion but have walked back on that in higher level play testing. Caroming charge is the one place where what happens with stunt damage is going to matter the most. It is hard to advocate what the activity should be like without knowing how that will change. Not having to roll a whole bunch for it is kind of nice from a game play perspective, if like almost every other maneuver ability, the damage doesn’t double on a crit. If the damage will double on a crit, then I think that gets tricky for establishing whether it will crit in other instances that trigger it. There is a danger of making stunt damage only matter with caroming charge if it is the only way to get double stunt damage.
The fighter is fun. I have mostly been unable to play the magus because I was so much bigger a fan of the playtest version than the one that got published. I do like crit fishing classes, including the sniper gunslinger. The daredevil having a mitigated MAP penalty and the eventually ability to crit on a 19 is very interesting to me. It is a shame the best case uses for it are to be on a boat or go out of class to get feats that attack multiple enemies.
I agree that the playtest daredevil leaves the “mitigate the critical fail results of your activities” as an opt in thing right now. I have mixed feelings about that and started this thread to talk about that. I could be convinced either way to leave it that way or build it into the class more. The class is incredibly fragile without taking some of the defensive feats. It could be that leaving all the defensive abilities as feats was a deliberate play test experiment. Which feats will people take? Do the people who take no defensive feats also complain about how squishy the class is? Do the people who choose the denesive feats have the same issues? Which defensive feats are play testers actually picking? Etc. there is another thread in the daredevil playtest category where we all have been talking about the overall defensive side of things. Personally, I think the lack of stacking of scrambling retreat and galvanized mobility is a mistake. I’m be of the main reasons I think that is because intentionally provoking some nasty reactive strikes is something a class this mobile is going to do fairly often and only a +2 to AC to deal with that is just contributing to making this class a party wide liability. I could very easily see scrambling retreat built in to the class as a defensive feature because as a feat, it isn’t that great and it pushes players that are looking for more defense out of the class to do the thing better. But I am on the fence about that one. With the later feats around it, it becomes incredibly good at limiting the damage a daredevil will take and so many of the critical failure and failure results of the class’ feats do provoke reactions or give away free strikes that it is almost must take. Right now, one of the most useful uses I have found for scrambling retreat is to be very intentional about who I rushing stride at, and where they fall in the turn order. If I rushing stride at the enemy going next and I don’t kill them, they are still likely to attack me and then I scrambling retreat against that attack and make myself harder for the targets I am off guard against to exploit that without wasting actions. Maybe two or more depending on my speed. The ability to make myself a juicier target to predictable enemies has made scrambling retreat feel much better in play than it did at early levels. Wall sweep is plainly a terrible feat…except where it specifically synergizes with feats like opportunistic maneuver stunt. So is it a better candidate to cut out out the class entirely? Or to make sure that by the time you might pick it, it is doing something very practical for the builds that might choose it? I think the class is going to need more activity feats for both maneuvers and strikes, I’d like to see more of them feature critical failure results that move the daredevil, spread across levels, because I think this kind of synergy is really cool to strive for in a class like this. I think a reaction related to getting grabbed could be very thematic and synergistic to this class. I think one for falling prone that isn’t dependent on acrobatics and going the kip up route would be welcome and synergistic as well.
Scrambling retreat is a mitigator for being left off guard to certain enemies. If your speed is good enough, the first time you are attacked you can get far enough away for enemies to have to waste actions to take advantage of it and you can get to places that set up your allies reactive strikes or AoE abilities.
I kind of want to move a conversation that indirectly applies to a lot of the thoughts and experiences people are having about the Daredevil class here, because it is very relevant to “what kind of builds does this class enable,” and that question is “what is the fundamental mechanical appeal of this class for you? Some folks are quite interested in its gameplay style of letting the daredevil compress a whole lot of combat maneuver actions into one turn as possible, and letting the risk that ensambles that reward to be critical failure results that punish you pretty badly when your third or fourth roll goes badly, likely under a reduced, but heavy full map. I see that as something the playtest class does enable, but I appreciate the way its reactions (like scrambling retreat and wall sweep) help mitigate the risk of those critical failures. Additionally, I have had more fun with the feats that also allow the class to be very nasty with its critical hit results on strikes, and increase the likelihood of getting those results, even with strikes made under MAP. I would very much not enjoy the class at all if it didn’t include any support for making powerful strikes, and don’t think it needs to be pushed deeper into a gameplay loop of just trying to perform as many possible combat maneuvers as possible each turn until you critically fail and set yourself up to be focus fired out of encounters. I appreciate that the class can enable both styles of play and characters built to do both maneuvers and strikes when the tactical situation calls for it, and that your selection of feats can enable you to have certain kinds of maneuvers and strikes you will be better at than others. I think some more thought will need to go into the synergizing feats internally to help make sure daredevil characters don’t become clowns that just get KO’d right away, and bringing down the entire party, but I see the framework in this playtest for a class that can be very flexible, do some impossibly lucky things, but have some tricks up their sleeves to help prevent complete catastrophe when the inevitable bad roll comes their way. I think one of the keys to making this work will be helping players see the links between feats that synergize together well without requiring those feats to necessarily chain together (some will by nature of improving what lower level feats do, but please don’t force everything to chain so there are are only one or two total build choices possible out of the class).
I would argue that wall sweep is a particularly difficult reaction to use unless you are setting yourself up to use it, possibly by triggering it yourself, to begin with. Its synergy with opportunistic maneuver stunt is not a random accident. The critical failure result of this ability is one of the more devastating results on any of these feats. End up prone in a square of your enemy’s choosing, quite possibly with no actions left on your turn, is really bad. But with Kip up and Wall Sweep, you can use start using Opportunistic Maneuver stunt from a place of much better security, because critical failure probably means “move yourself 20 ft” instead. That is very clever game design that this class can strive towards. The limits on requiring props and such are what creates the tactical decision points that are really cool. I think the discussion about whether the DD class is about compression of maneuvers or swingy use of all 4 tiers of success has probably run its course for this thread and is distracting from the purpose of this thread. It is probably worth talking about in a dinnerent thread about the intention of the class, but is distracting to the conversation about how and whether the reactions the class has access to should be better integrated into the abilities the class has. Personally, I thing Galvanized Mobility needs to be fixed to not be redundant to scrambling retreat, and then many of the feats that directly provoke reaction strikes will have the same kind of cool synergy that wall sweep and opportunistic maneuver have. I also think more feats should feature letting the enemy reposition the daredevil on a critical failure as that really makes an otherwise underwhelming feat (wall sweep) be really cool for this class.
I was more responding to the idea that the ability as is leaves the GM helpless in encounters where lots of creatures are just getting run over by a daredevil with the ability. It seems pretty reasonable for a group of monsters to respond after it happens once by trying to trip or grab the enemy that is doing lots of damage to their group. It is not really any different of a situation than if a caster hit 4 party members with a chain lightning spell. “We need to stop that from happening again” is a very natural response with in world logic to back it up. “Make the fast enemy that runs through us like a recking ball have problems spending his action moving through us so quickly” will provide a defense against it.
Daring Stunt only requires you to move up to an enemy to gain Adrenaline. There is no requirement to attempt to grapple, reposition, shove, or trip. You are given the option to, but you are not required to, to get the adrenaline. Then on the remaining actions, as I had said. If you start your turn prone, you can’t use daring stunt to move and have 2 actions to use caroming charge. You can’t stride from prone
Caroming charge is two actions and requires adrenaline. If a dare devil starts a turn prone, they can’t caroming charge (unless maybe rebounding fall stunt can be done from prone. Grabbed is another condition that can make it exceedingly difficult to do a 2 action activity that requires adrenaline and is not risky.
It is a pre remastered spell. I feel like maybe some of the language around hiding and undetected have changed?
The very first thing cursebound 1 says is “Spells have an easier time wounding you.” if the intention was for the effects of the curse to be sometimes good and some times bad, I think you choose different language here. Also, the whole remaster approach to curses was to move the good effects off of curses to other parts of the oracle kit.
Opportunistic Maneuver Stunt is a prime example of a feat that can use one of the classes reactions to massively mitigate the critical failure result.Why do we need to make the risk-taking class immune to their own risk? Again, there is an inherent judgment call behind this, which is specifically to lean away from what has been established as a defining element of this class, in fact this very playtest. Say what you like, but this very much does not come across as trying to engage with the class's design. Maybe my point is being missed here. The way the class works exactly as written for the feats Opportunistic Maneuver Stunt and Wall Sweep is doing what I am talking about with this thread. If the Daredevil is prepared and knows their feats, they can already mitigate serious critical failure results on some of their feats (like this one). I think that is cool, but it would make more sense to not hide that feature down in the reeds, but make it clearer and more intentional throughout the class feats that you can do this.
Let's calm down with the judgements on each other's experiences and perceptions of the play test class. I am glad you found a playstyle that you enjoyed. I don't advocate spamming only rushing stride and risky over extension. I generally dislike any class that does the same thing over and over again. Having tactical choices to make is great and something this class offers in abundance. I do think those are two strong options and are good "what else am I going to do?" options to have as a baseline. Sometimes you are going to miss with your rushing stride, but if you have Accompanying Strike, then that is going to make for a pretty good one, two, and then maybe you throw in something with your third action that is a maneuver and movement to get a little distance for protection or you can even just move away if the being off guard to a lot of enemies is going to be a problem. They might choose to move and then attack you, but that can atleast waste some enemy actions. Overall, I do think that the class has a lot more to do than try to strike as often as possible, but it also has a lot of built in support for taking your shots with strikes and far exceeding the damage you can get out of stunt damage. I love the mobility of the class and how many of the feats try to utilize that. I am personally not very satisfied with the high level maneuver feats. They look very bad to me and not worth taking over other options that can build up into making you a pretty decent striker. Edit: And in defense of the idea of this entire thread, Opportunistic Maneuver Stunt is a prime example of a feat that can use one of the classes reactions to massively mitigate the critical failure result.
It is clear we have different approaches to this class. Topple dominos was DOA to me on taking 3 actions. Maybe if I was in a party with a commander and a bunch of ranged characters I’d see value in being able to trip 3 enemies and move with my turn, but not getting any attacks in or usage out of audacious combat makes it a pretty bad feat in my eyes. I guess maybe if you archetypes a bunch to get more out of shove then there might be value in 3 full attack bonus shoves but I am not going to build that to playtest with. Combat Grab is a level 2 fighter feat is superior in many ways to knee to the nethers, which is coming in at way too late of a level to be worth taking. Sickened 1 is a cool add on,but not 10 levels later awesome, and 2 dice rolls is worse than one (you can hero point or otherwise fortune 1 attack that grabs as well. Lastly, being limited to an unarmed strike in a class with no support for it is rough. Level 12 feats are bad for the DD all around but 8 and 10 have multiple feats that are better. I am not down on opportunistic maneuver stunt, but rushing stride is better than daring stunt to set it up. If you grab or trip the enemy, then moving them into a flanks position made your daring stunt maneuver redundant, compared to getting a 0 map strike in and then setting up your ally to get a 0 map strike in. Critting on either the daring stunt or the opportunistic maneuver is unlikely to have done much of anything for you with your set up, while critting on the rushing stride could have been massive damage (and you have feats to make that even uglier. My one knock on opportunistic maneuver is you really need an ally who does good single attack damage, but either doesn’t have reactive strike, or has it and follow up feats to be able to use it and another reaction in their turn. Many fighters will check that box, while some barbs/other big hit martials will hit the other, so it can be really good, but it takes coordination to make it better than free wheeling strike which can be another way to exploit the classes synergy with nasty critical strikes. That one probably requires vehicles or the ability to run up on walls to really be all that useful all that often though. My experience with high level play generally is that one combat maneuver per turn is usually plenty for any one character, while being able to strike effectively is pretty much essential for any martial. At the later point that you crit on a natural 19, agile press strikes with fatal and deadly weapons get really strong with the DD and ignoring a feat like hit or miss, your only press strikes that doesn’t require complicated circumstances to set up, will hurt your ability to be an effective martial character with a class that essentially lacks a damage boosting mechanic beyond their striking feats.
Because the spell only makes you undetected for the short period of time the spell is active, while you are casting it. As soon as the casting effect ends, you are immediately observed again or hidden, based upon the result of your check.
Is the rest of the Paizo website not showing up for anyone else? Only the forums seem to be be working right now. When does the playtest end? And are folks able to access and find the surveys right now?
Look at the level 10 feats and up. Even when they include maneuvers, the maneuvers are very subservient to the strikes attached to them. Some even prevent you from using the maneuver to do stunt damage. Meanwhile you have feats like hit or miss, risky over extension, and daring critical that really make strikes vastly superior action usage than maneuvers.
It is definitely the case that base class casters struggle to keep up with base class martials in melee. I think the reason form spells don’t fully compensate isn’t really about AC or attacks, it is about how far casters tend to be behind on all defenses, especially fortitude and Reflex. Even when they have the benefit of canny acumen at high levels, the added levels of shifting success values that most martials have are pretty game changing. Even with a lot of temp HP, the risks of getting grabbed, swallowed tripped and poisoned really add up to make casters melee fragile without doing a lot of mitigating spell casting before transforming. For another example, casters trying to get heavy armor and then counting on bulwark to boost a Reflex save that is probably poor because casting stat and strength eat up a lot of boosts, fall pretty far behind at higher levels. That can lead to getting trapped up close due to immobilizing effects, being left prone, etc.
Yeah, I think one of the tricks of PF2 is that, even with wave casters, this is not purely a 50/50 split. Either strikes or offensive spell casting is going to end up slighly prioritized and that split will guide your class choice. I have played the spell heavier cloistered cleric with a bow, who could hit pretty hard with it fairly often, but I was mostly controling the battlefield, debuffing and casting offensive spells. I also played a monk with a casting archetype in a FA game who dressed up like a wizard and said he was being taught how to be a sorcerer, and did so much casting that my party would forget I was a monk until we got into combat and I dragones kicked like a dragon. With STR and CHA as my two highest stats, I was a glass cannon for sure, but I had a champion and healer cleric in the party so someone had to pack the juice, and those turns where I threw out a two action top rank -1 spell off a scroll and then flurried enemies who had rushed the caster I was doing very impressive damage. So I think martials like monk and Champion make really good casters that can still be quite beefy, and shouldn’t be discounted from the list. They too will end up at master and master offensive proficiencies with much, much better defenses than any caster first Gish will, even when they lag in the defensive attributes for a whole.
Without increasing the critical effects of the daredevil’s maneuvers, at high level, there will just be very little reason to ever do more than one maneuvering activity a turn, so the whole “do a lot of these” is not going to materialize in play. Eventually, I could see a DD who wants to strike with their first action and then maybe do a press agile maneuver to grab or trip, but there are exceedingly few high level maneuver abilities (most of which are as much about a strike as doing anything with a maneuver), and thus doing low level maneuvers with your press actions is going to be competing against making strikes that crit automatically if they hit or Hit or Miss or the like.
Why have a dexterity option if it is going to require subbing in a different skill or attribute to se the primary skill of the class? If alternatives to tumble through and standing up from prone using athletics are already available in class, it feels like there really is no purpose to choosing dexterity. a STR based Daredevil will still need some dex, but can do every maneuver with athletics and the class can just cut the stuff that is about trying to sloppily give athletics maneuvers with athletics. Then all the STR to damage stuff is fine and even the AC is fine. If they just don’t offer dex, then the class works very well as a STR based class
Why have a dexterity option if it is going to require subbing in a different skill or attribute to se the primary skill of the class? If alternatives to tumble through and standing up from prone using athletics are already available in class, it feels like there really is no purpose to choosing dexterity.
I see what you are saying and agree that both success and even failure on a press maneuver should be decent. My issue is that maneuver crits tend to be pretty underwhelming, with the exception of grab. That can make rolling natural 20s on things like shove, where you are doing it because you need to move the enemy 5 feet and more than that is often meaningless, or trip, where an extra d6 becomes meaningless and should at least scale with athletics proficiency, becomes underwhelming, while critting with a strike always feels good. I think if you are giving maneuvers meaningful and significant critical failure results, the critical success should at least feel good and be better than having rolled a success, which is not really the case with many of the press maneuver feats. I think the secret sauce to reactions that mitigate those crit failures is that there should still be chance involved or incredible planning. Hence why my suggestion was that you trigger a reactive strike which could still go very badly for you.
I don’t know if I explained myself well enough in my initial post so I will try to flesh out an example. Let’s say there is either one baked in reaction to the class, or a a reaction each subclass gets. Either way, for this example let’s say the gifted reaction is something like scrambling retreat, but it stacks with Galvinized Mobility and it has one additional rider that if you use it against a creature making a reaction based attack, and they miss, they are so off balance they fall prone. Then a feat like forceful kickoff stunt might work mostly the same, but with the following tiers of success:
Now, do you need maxed out acrobatics to still use this feat? Like crit success is really good, but even the success and failure results might get you where you need to be and even the crit failure result might work out to let you snatch a win from the jaws of of defeat. It is still risk taking, but in a way that could end up rewarding you on potentially any result.
I know Paizo generally already knows what alternative ideas they might use to shore up play test class pain points and frustrations, and so I am hoping this is more of a “we’ve already thought of this and are on it situation than something new, but in thinking about the issue of maximizing two attributes to be good at the fun and thematic press maneuvers, it dawned on me that there already is some synergy with the class’ reaction feats and mitigating the critical failure results, but it is kind of something that is difficult to spot or build around. Right now, the class’ 2 reactions are AC bonus and move away, and redirect forced movement. If galvanized mobility stacked better with scrambling retreat, than critical failure results on press action maneuvers with critical failure results that provoke a reactive strike would not be so dangerous, and could even be built upon to do something like “an enemy that misses you with a reaction strike is off guard to all enemies until the end of their next turn.” This would make it not such a big deal to be risky with one press action a turn, and turning certain disaster into something cool and unexpected feels like it would be a slam dunk to the class theme. Wall sweep would be another cool one if many of the maneuver feats have critical failure results that let the target move you, as you could mitigate those into something good by taking control of the move. I think one more reaction for when you fall prone could be cool too and then falling prone could be another common critical failure result. If the maneuvers were fairly consistent about whether athletics feats had one critical failure result and acrobatics had the other, then having a slightly worse athletics or acrobatics wouldn’t be that terrible when you knew you had a way to mitigate it once a turn. If you went this route, it would be ok to dial up how bad those critical failure results to be really bad when you don’t have a mitigating reaction, and then you could increase the critical success results to be even better, and maybe have room to give more of them interesting and not terrible failure effects, as is common on press feats generally. I think this would really be a unique and interesting approach that would make the daredevil feel very different to other classes and play more satisfying into the risk and reward theme.
At least for the small, personal vehicles, like bikes, scooters, skateboards, etc, I could see a game wide “use dex for piloting these vehicles” rules as opposed to just a class substitution. I also don’t want to see sub classes personally. Subclasses that really split a class into parts end up requiring tons more feats to support builds that can’t use each others skills and features. The dexterity based stuff in the playtest though is pretty underwhelming across the board. Most of it needs a serious second pass for the stuff present to work, and the class needs a lot more of that improved kind of stuff to be satisfying in my opinion. That sounds like a heavy load to accomplish by publication time when STR-based Daredevil stuff needs much less polishing to be in a good place. Besides, knowing that Dex is a secondary stat could open up improving a lot of the acrobatics feats in the class even more if it is understood that critting on these things is going to be slightly more difficult for the class, maybe by just seriously dialing down the negative consequences for failure or critical failure. Personally, if the class is STR only, I think letting a lot more ok stuff happen on a failure and much better crit success results, but still having crit failure result in stuff like being left off guard to an enemy or allowing an enemy to move the DD (and enabling more uses of the reaction for being forced to move) would be a pretty cool way of still making acrobatics maneuvers worth doing, even without a great acrobatics skill.
I guess the third option which I ignored because I don’t like it to have the DEX and STR builds designed around actually tanking the other attribute in order to be able to have a floating attribute like CHA or INT (for piloting). This would require attribute swapping or skill swapping for maneuvers or feats, and more extreme versions of my number 2 adjustments above. The reason I dislike this option so much is because attribute swapping was way overdone in 3.5 and PF1 and leads to making well balanced characters a bad idea. Like it makes a lot of sense to me that dare devils should be fast and strong. Probably not as strong as a raging barbarian, but they won’t be from just having a +4 STR.
This is my guess about most likely options: 1. Don’t offer Dex-based as an Ket attribute option. Rewrite acrobatics-based feats to assume a -1 or -2 attribute bonus. They are already not great and could use rebalancing. Increase AC/defenses within the chassis. Assume Dex is still very much a highly necessary secondary stat, but focus abilities on strikes that will benefit from STR to damage and maneuver feats that mostly build off athletics. (This is my preferred, hence why it is first, not that I think it is most likely) 2. Offer 2 class paths, one for each attribute. STR is mostly as above. Dex needs a static damage booster, a plus one bonus to athletics checks (or some subset of athletic checks). Both will need something unique and interesting because right now the difference in builds is so close that the choice is mostly an illusion or a trap. Probably remove +STR to stunt damage and increase the damage dice to compensate, and add more high level feats to allow stunt damage off acrobatics maneuvers. The reason I don’t love 2 is because static damage bonuses to finesse weapons is a played out mechanic at this point that just makes the dex DD feel more like a class that should be an archetype of another class that already dice the acrobatics around and strike game play better.
I agree with Yuri. I think it is possible to add enough support to make Dex-based Daredevil viable, and it is a class that can’t completely tank Dex, which inherently makes it pretty MAD as “Dex or STR” is the primary martial build separator, but my big concern about building up a Dex-based DD is that it is going to require more stuff that make it look more and more like a swashbuckler. Thematically, acrobatics feels very Daredevil-like, but mechanically there is very little to do with the skill actions of acrobatics that are not core to the swashbuckler class.
I played with breakaway attack. I took it as my risky flexible feat. It is a nice ranged option on a melee character. It is a nice opener when you really don’t need to move and do a maneuver with daring stunt. It also has flourish so it is once a turn. Its building feats split between supporting melee and ranged. It isn’t bad but your targets all end up having to be pretty close together. By mid levels though, you get so much better strikes to do in melee it is definitely more of a back up option in the playtest. You can get some interesting feats that work with range, like the one that does extra damage to enfeebled and clumsy enemies and the feat that lets you crit on a 19, but it is pretty sparse.
I toyed around with making a Daredevil MC Fighter who picked up assisting shot and an air repeater or shurikens , who could throw debris first, then assisting shot various enemies to help out allies but it felt like it would get stuck in a very repetitive game loop and not be very effective.
Right now I think a Dex-based daredevil is a trap option, and I feel trying to patch the class to make it work is going to take a lot of class budget to be worth it IMO, more so when the class needs buffs desperately even at its best. The class revolves entirely around Athletics maneuvers and Stunt damage, both with are tied to Strength. Since the class doesn't have an auto-scaling skill, if you want to focus on Acrobatics you'll be lagging behind on Athletics which means half of the class (and the stronger half of the class for that matter) is going to underperform. I posted about this recently in the stunt damage thread, but actually, past low levels, stunt damage is also currently a bit of a trap option because getting it requires doing low level feat maneuvers that don’t do anything else (you will almost never move an enemy far enough to make moving an enemy and doing damage with one action a regular occurrence, so you might as well just be striking for damage). However, even the class’ strike actions will pretty much require a fair bit of STR to do much damage with either the agile weapons you want to use with press feats or the archetypes 2 handed builds, so the outcome is the same. Even from just a fun perspective, there just isn’t enough to do with acrobatics with this class for it to be as rewarding as building a STR Daredevil. That has been my experience anyway.
It is kind of coming up in other threads, but feels worth its own conversation, is a Dex-based Daredevil viable? And if so, how do you play one? My first attempt at building a daredevil was to go Dex and assume I was going to be doing a lot of pummeling strike…and then I realized I don’t really get to do anything cool for building that way, and that my STR was going to have to be decent or else I can’t use daring stunt or most of the maneuvering g feats, and my damage was going to be terrible because this class is not built to use finesse weapons or benefit from them. I think removing the Dex based option actually makes more sense than trying to build it up. At best, a Dex based DD is going to play like a rogue or swashbuckler, and still need so much STR you don’t enable having a CHA or INT option really. This is an athletics manuever class with agile strikes support. It might on the surface look dexterous, but it’s unique and fun stuff are really STR option
I think it was one of those “let’s give this class a way of doing a bunch of acrobatics maneuvers with athletics, and athletics with acrobatics” feats that is significantly overvaluing that skill swapping ability, especially as the class will have both of those skills trained and will be very unlikely to try to tank the attribute for either. At very high level the difference between the skills might be significant, but there are a lot of other ways to move from point a to point b. Not the least of which is to just reposition.
Did anyone choose HIGH-FLYING TUMBLE STUNT? I am pretty confounded by what it is trying to do. I guess it’s tumblr through for a DD with no investment whatsoever in acrobatics? But it’s a press ability, so you have to attack someone first and suffer MAP that you don’t with tumble through, and crit failure leaves you prone, and if you were hoping for off guard, you could have just daring stunt and tripped with your first move. This is especially relevant because you are very unlikely to even have a press strike you can make with a third action to take advantage of the off guard you gain from crit success, which only lasts unti the end of the turn, unlike the off guard from daring reversal. I just don’t understand what maneuver this feat is meant to accomplish, much less how it would ever be worth using.
After my level 8 play test, my opinion about stunt damage has changed a little. Now I don't even think just increasing the damage is going to do much for it, and the idea of the daredevil doing damage to enemies by shoving them into props becomes a bigger and bigger trap option as you get higher level. The class itself kind of realizes this and stops feeding you ways to trigger stunt damage with your actions and instead gives you feats that move you into making strikes (and getting more out of your strikes). Seriously, there is topple the dominos at level 12, which is just flatly worse than Caroming Charge for hitting as many enemies as possible with stunt damage, but before that level 4 is the last level that has shove or reposition feats that would let you do stunt damage. I think there is a good reason for this though, in that taking actions specifically to do stunt damage instead of strike (with the one possible exception of Caroming Charge) is the much worse way of doing damage. In theory, your stunt damage would come on top of pushing enemies as well and that you would have a purpose for pushing enemies beyond just getting damage from it, but most of the push/reposition options move 5ft on a success, so you are probably not moving anyone and doing stunt damage at the same time, at least not most of the time. Since pushing someone into a prop doesn't cause them to fall down or debuff them in any way, pushing and repositioning for stunt damage is really just a strike by another name...a strike that cannot crit, can't benefit from runes, or any special weapon traits. It would surprise me to hear that any play test Daredevils past level 4 did much stunt damage in encounters beyond Caroming Charge, and maybe some Daring Reversal attempts. Increasing stunt damage won't really change the fact that higher level daredevils have much better things to do with their actions than try to shove an enemy nowhere. Even with the autohit ability of Caroming Charge, it is hard to imagine that players are going to feel great doing that levels 11+ when the caster in the party can unleash a chain lighting in the handful of encounters per day where that feat is still going to shine. SO is there value in increasing Stunt Damage? I kind of think not, unless the class changes significantly to focus on it, and at that point, I think just adding more feats like Daring Reversal, that build a strike into a shoving/repositioning maneuver, are better than just upping the damage.
I did a level 8 playtest that I will hopefully write about later in regards to stunt damage and props in particular (probably in the stunt damage thread), but I too think Opening Gambit is kind of an interesting sleeper feat for the Daredevil. Because it is risky, it is the only way to start an encounter with adrenaline and enable reactions that require it in the first round, so even if you do go last, you are not caught without your reaction abilities. Obviously if you pass on those, you don't care, so it doesn't feel essential to the class, but it is a good option if you go that route. It is interesting to me too that a feat that did nothing at all but give you a strike with with the press trait becomes better than pressing pummel in most situations for this class. Exacting strike does more than that for a 2nd strike but is still worth using as a third action even though it does nothing else (this was my white room analysis on fighter feats as well).
I made a post about a play experience where I saw a non-gunslinger use a gun very effectively. You responded to tell me that that would only be the case at low level, but my player ran that character from 8 to 13 when the campaign ended, and it stayed very effective with massive critical hits that would one shot lower level enemies and significantly change the game against bosses when they happened. My point was to say, hey, I’ve seen guns used effectively by nonslingers, because I have (also an investigator).
I mean, Magus wouldn't cause that due to Spellstrike being two subordinate actions which are treated as separate effects unless otherwise stated. Resistance applies separately to the strike and the spell.Paizo mentioned in the Spring Errata 2026 blog that Spellstrike got updated to combine the damage for weakness purposes. Strangely, I don't see any Secrets of Magic 2026 errata in the FAQ itself. Why would they upload the Player Core 1 and 2 errata but not Secrets of Magic? Secrets of Magic isn’t getting touched again. Impossible magic will release this year and include the remastered Magus, Summoners and 2 new classes.
Thankfull Pathfinder is much better about not having tiers of classes that approach the god caster/useless martial of past editions.
Maybe I am missing something, but doesn’t Paizo bury WotC as far as new content per year? Even operating on a much smaller budget. Those developers have to look at every book too as new rules content comes out in APs and LO books. Paizo developers don’t sit around and talk about existing rules content all the time, or have meetings every week to talk about errata. They have assignments they have to keep up with and they only get together a couple times a year to talk errata. When they don’t include an errata on something, the blog post notes would be “x developer took a pass at this issue but it created additional problems we are trying to resolve.” Then the community would be all over trying to prescriptively tell them how to fix it, probably leading to heated debates, only the community is already doing that anyway, but the difference would be that the posters would be shouting even louder, focused on getting developers time and attention rather than just discussing rules, and the environment gets a lot uglier and more time intensive for the developers. If they ignore the posters, then the posters feel even more betrayed and internal company discussions blow up into players arguing about whether individual developers have the right idea or not. It would turn the whole process into ugly reality TV. A lot of folks would love that, but it sounds like a miserable work environment
Without an off guard target, the rogue’s 2nd shot with a bow is -7 compared to the hiding sniper rogue. That is a pretty huge cliff to fall off of as far as additional damage, especially as your second shot loses sneak attack damage. So the bow rogue could instead alternate between shooting and hiding to get 1.5 shots per turn and never move, but once the rogue could sneak through open terrain, they were waiting a lot of enemy actions by not hiding far away, but shooting from near by and moving all around the battle field without needing a tank to sit on them to protect them, which has proven to be the case with every melee rogue I have ever seen.
I did a large hex map homebrew of adventurers hired by a city to explore and survey a river that went most of the way to a large trade partner city. I had a lot of nomadic groups the party encountered along the way, but it was a lot of work to keep tabs on where they were but also how they interacted with each other and had conflicting goals. It would be pretty cool for that to be a mechanic played with in an AP or in a LO book in a region with a lot of nomadic groups. So something like a down time organization type subsystem that has like 4 major groups of nomadic people in a region that the party builds relationships with and tries to do diplomacy that keeps the peace enough for trade to prosper.
I think the mistake was forgetting bombs are a thrown weapon, not a ranged weapon. I suspect that one will get fixed. At the same time, bombs feel like the attack least needing to use Devise on. My investigators would use DAS to set up a dueling pistol shot and then if I rolled only kinda bad, I’d throw a bomb instead.
I have seen a rogue with running reload make a very effective sniper. Shoot, hide, reload and sneak. They were a touch less good at getting cries, but the sneak attack damage helped make the regular hits painful and when they did crit it was spectacular, just not as frequent. Only one attack per turn but the sneaking away at the end made it a very frequent multiple action sink for my npcs and even if one did spot the rogue and point him out, there was usually someone off guard to shoot. I think Sayre really hit it out of the park with PF2 gun design. Their cries are heavy enough to one shot a lot of lower level enemies and significantly change an encounter against a boss, without being easy enough to make happen that they just make everything else terrible. If you think of regular hits not as actually hitting a target in a significant body part but near misses and light grazes, the fantasy and the mechanics work pretty well.
Fun fact, Paizo has had rules developers interact more frequently with players in the past. In fact the whole situation of everyone interpreting instance of damage differently than was RAW to begin with was a developer jumping in to provide clarity. People took that informal errata as errata for years, and it was clearly not what the development team over all thought the ruling should be, but, clearly, trying to formalize the FAQ to explain what it should be in all cases turned out to be difficult and take a very long time, only for the community to essentially decide to reject the RAW so vehemently, that we are just now getting a consistent RAW on this ruling. Now I love Mark Seifter and his interactions with the community, but clearly, one developer just jumping in to answer questions and present “this is how I run this” as company policy has created rather far reaching problems for the company. Much smaller companies might have one person who is the rules person (like Seifter is now for RFC), and what they say is company policy. That person is also probably doing a lot of unpaid labor to sell the brand because the brand is their baby. That is not a healthy labor practice though, and rules people don’t need to be spending their time and energy on customer service, which is what interacting with the community is. And when development hours run short, and the company can’t afford to pay for it, errata, the thing generating income, is pretty naturally going to be the thing that gets pushed back.
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