Vaktaeru's page

I don't really see a way to play Magus without investing in getting more spell slots. If they had 2 spell slots of each of their highest levels and 1 of every other level, it would probably be fine. Generally speaking you'll be in three to five combats each adventuring day. There's not much point in being a full caster though if you only get to cast a full spell once per combat on average - especially when that spell is liable to be weaker than the actual spellcaster's equivalent.

The class as it stands now is basically pigeonholed into one of two options - invest heavily in a spellcasting archetype/extra slot items/hope capture spell works out, or relegate to mostly casting cantrips and then using them as riders for strikes. In either case, I would mostly rather play an eldritch archer so I can actually have some martial abilities beyond proficiency. As a matter of fact, I might prefer eldritch archer so I can also hit my master spellcasting a level sooner and keep my good perception modifiers and base skills.

I would really like to see this class shine, but in its current state it looks one step short of a paycheck. Better/more feats, the ability to inherently pull a martial package off another class, focus spells that can actually spellstrike, better skill/perception proficiencies, better spellcasting proficiencies, spontaneous casting, or just straight up more spells. Any one or two of these things would make me say magus looks solid, but right now it seems to be an almost-finished class that needs to rely on heavily archetyping to realize its potential.

That looks like a lot more than 5 ancestries: Aasimar, tiefling, duskwalker, kobold, orc, catfolk, ratfolk, tengu, dhampir, changeling? That's at least 10!

Is the github still being updated? The last commit is over a month old now. Obviously people get busy and things happen, but this can be continued elsewhere if OP no longer has the bandwidth to keep up with the flood of attention (and derailing) this thread has received.

Bestiary Page 295, the Simurgh is listed as CR 18 instead of Creature 18. This is inconsistent with level listings for other bestiary creatures.

As others have pointed out, attribute damage has been replaced with conditions, etc.

As far as the "instant die lol" effect that negative levels were, they've been most closely replaced with the "doomed" condition, which reducing the dying value you die at by 1 with each stack. If you ever reduce your "max" dying value to 0 through doomed, you die instantly (usually doomed 4).

However, unlike negative levels, doomed isn't a death spiral because you take no mechanical penalties from it until it actually kills you.

By Ragathiel, this certainly blew up while I wasn't looking! To throw my own two cents back into the conversation, I would like to point something out to people who are saying "just get a shield made of special materials". While I initially agreed with you, and would love for that to be how shields work...

It isn't. At all.

Most of the specific magic shields in the book don't actually follow the hardness and hit points rules for their given material (usually steel). As an example, here we have the stats for a steel shield , and here we have the stats for a dragonslayer's shield, and finally here we have a spined shield. All three are steel shields, and all three have different hardness and HP. Meaning there's no entirely clear indication of how to price these shields if you change their material, or exactly what their hardness and HP will be if you do so. And before someone misquotes the book, no the dragonslayer shield doesn't use the dragonhide hardness either.

My working theory (read: desperate hope) at the moment is that someone at Paizo was tasked with creating a bunch of cool magic shield effects, and did so, but they copy-pasted the same magic shield over and over again for stat blocks and just changed the descriptions to give them different magical effects but forgot to change the actual shield statistics - either because the shield rules weren't set in stone at the time, or because they didn't personally have a great understanding of how shields worked at the time, or because of a simple oversight/misprint/typo error. There are simply too many shields which are clearly meant to do something involving shield blocking (i.e. arrow catching and dragonslayer's shields) that just...don't do that very well.

Also, generally speaking, if you're using a shield and spending a ton of money on it, it's because you're a character who's very invested in using their shield. If that's the case, you probably have the shield block reaction. Why would the design of an item actually punish you for spending more money on that item or investing feats in it? The numbers (if not necessarily the rules) are counterintuitive as-is, hence fundamental runes being my solution.

I love the shield rules, I love the way that shields have been approached, and I think actually getting to use a shield instead of just setting and forgetting it as a passive stat is a grand step forward. However, the magic shields that have been made available seem to go against the design philosophy of other magic items in the book. Most characters who intend to use a shield will, at some point, want to use it to shield block. In this instance, only the sturdy shield appears to be a viable option at higher levels, because every other "specific magic shield" will be destroyed in a single attack at high levels. I'm not sure if this is a deliberate design choice to keep shield blockers from having cool effects attached to their shields, but it seems to go against the way that weapons and armor were designed, to the degree that I actually created my own shield runes to provide my players with actual options at high levels and let them have cool things.

Does anyone have a solid explanation as to why shields were designed in this way? Surely the characters who specialize the most heavily in shields can't be intended to never use anything other than sturdy shields past level 8. In a perfect world I would love to see my shield rules included as an errata, but I realize they're little more than homebrew at this point.

To clarify, I didn't make this thread to discuss the merits or balance of the homebrewed shield rules I presented, but to discuss the existing state of magic shields and whether they're actually healthy for the game.