Vodalian's page

Oh I already have a stable boring good career as a data engineer, complaining about game design is just a shared passion for me and my SO. We love playing all sorts of games, we love complaining about them just as much.

Sorry, it's mostly because I'm in an argumentative mood. I still love pf2e, and now that the computer game adaptation Dawnsbury Days is coming out and enabling me to fix all the math to my liking via modding, I feel empowered to speak out.

Pathfinder 2e math is strange sometimes. You can see this in so many places.

- Weapons with reload do nearly the same damage as weapons without reload despite the action cost effectively being DOUBLE.
- Attack spells deal nearly the same damage as save spells despite no damage on failure.
- Poisons deal nearly the same damage as other at-level damage buffs despite having 2 points of failure (attack and save).
- Spells like disintegrate deal less damage than upcasted second level damage spells (sudden bolt) due to 2 points of failure (attack and save).
- Spells with automatic success (maze, wall of stone, heroism, magic missile) are wildly more powerful than other equivalent level spells due to no points of failure.
- Feats and spells with powerful effects only on critical fail are way overvalued in the balance math. Knight's Retaliation shoves an undead enemy back only on critically failed attack of theirs for a LEVEL 8 feat.
- Finishers are just one more addition to the list.

The size of an effect should be adjusted based on the probability of that effect occuring. An effect occuring with a 5% chance should be 20 times more powerful than one occuring at 100% chance. Instead Paizo often has a different type of math: bonuses and damage are always roughly based on level and do not account for the probability of the effect occuring.

EDIT: Removed a needlessly inflammatory statement

The truth is most caster issues are because optimal caster play is restricted to only a handful of spells, since most spells are trash. I had necromancer wizard ally that only wanted to cast necromancy themed spells, he ended up doing less damage, being a slightly better buffer and less of a debuffer than my bard archetype dual flickmace fighter in almost all fights. He mostly cast animate dead (pretty bad) and grim tendrils (awful) and rouse skeletons (terrible), sometimes he cast haste and enlarge. I casted bless and mirror image and debuffed foes with prone (and clumsy and enfeebled with crushing rune) with double slice crits and fear from intimidate. With the +1 status bonus to coerce from bullhorn cantrip and +1 (+2 later) circumstance bonus from intimidating prowess my coerce check was better (and intimidate on par) with that of a charisma caster. His character had almost universally worse proficiencies, worse hp, worse AC, was worse at charisma based skill checks, athletics skill checks and was on par or slightly stronger with wisdom-based checks. He was better stealth and acrobatics, but that didn't really play much of a role in the campaign. Oh and he was better at recall knowledge of course and the GM was generous with information, so I guess he had that going for him.

Here's my viewpoint on martials vs. casters.

Try to make an all-martial party. Throw it at a published AP. You'll probably die horribly at some point.

Now try to make an all-caster party. Throw it at a published AP. You'll probably die horribly at some point (though it's less likely since you actually have vaguely competent healing).

Now make a balanced party. Much less likely to have problems.

You do need them both. Without AoE or solid healing, martials are exceptionally sad. Without consistent single target damage, casters are sad.

I think 4 fighters with casting archetypes and reach weapons will roll over any published AP with relative ease. In-combat healing can be handled via healer's gloves, treat wounds or spells from archetypes, and AoE is not necessary if have solid tactics and lure swarms into bottle necks. Buffs from archetype casting lag many levels behind buffs from casters, but during levels 1-10, +1 is generally the biggest status bonus buff you're going to get, and those are available from lvl 4 onwards even on archetype casters.

At level 11, casters get access to lvl 6 spells and +2 status bonus buffs, which archetype casters won't access until lvl 16, so I can see a case being made for casters for high level parties. Also damage spells get a huge bump too, with chain lightning doing more single target damage than most single target spells before that level, but for AoE. Not to mention wall of stone and synesthesia, which are game breakingly powerful. But for levels 1-10, there aren't many obstacles a mixed party can handle that a full martial party with casting archetypes and a diverse set of skills can't.

Summoner archetype would actually be overpowered, even if the only thing the eidolon could do was open doors and walk around with no other abilities. This kind of 100 % risk free resource free scouting (except summoner hp which can be quickly recovered with medicine) trivializes almost all traps, hazards and ambushes in the game.

The GM may homebrew that encounters increase in difficulty if the players scout them, but all this does is create a toxic arms race between players and the GM which encourages the PCs to be even more cautious and cowardly.

Someone wise on these forums once said this (I don't remember who it was): No campaigns (except maybe the very worst ones) have ended due to the player's missing an out-of-combat ability. No AP will include a legendary skill check that none of the group's members has to progress the story, the GM will always find an alternative path for the players to take.

In contrast: lack of combat ability will ALWAYS pose an existential threat to the party and failing at it will lead to death not occasionally, but most times. Thus in-combat abilities in traditional DnD type TTRPGS will always carry infinitely more weight than out-of-combat abilities.

TLDR: When damage and hp are insufficient: the adventurers' journeys immediately end. When Out-of-combat abilities are insufficient: a reasonable GM will find a way to progress the story anyway.

It's far from a dump stat for casters. The way people commonly build their characters, yes, but that's just because people don't know how to build.

What casters gain from strength:
1. athletics maneuvers at 0-map for one of the best 3rd actions in the game.
2. Heavy armor and bulwark for the price of a few feats, which is not a big price since most caster feats suck.

But you might say: but casters are squishy and not well suited towards grappling and tripping at melee. And you would be right.

That's why you have whip wielding plate armored skeleton sorcerers and bards with lunge from free fighter archetype tripping people from 20 ft away with an athletics bonus that blows their spell DC out of the water, without sacrificing the ability to cast a spell on their turn, and freeing the martials to use their 0-map attacks (over 50% of their dpr) on actually damaging the enemy.

And what is the opportunity cost? If you don't take strength, you need to take dexterity. How often do your casters go sneaking around or pick pocketing people? Stealth is bad in almost every ttrpg, since splitting your party is bad and a recipe to getting your character killed alone in the middle of the enemy lair, and sneaking with your whole group is one of the mathematically most impossible things to achieve, since it requires your entire party to succeed at avoiding detection, so 4 consecutive rolls, for EACH enemy. For a room with 4 monsters that's 16 rolls you need to succeed in for one round of avoiding detection. And if you fail at ANY of the rolls, you are effectively all busted and start the combat in a bad position.

Update: And you might argue that having high dex to hide for personal survivability is advantage enough, to which I say, you actually want all of your party members getting targeted. Especially in a game like pf2e where true tanks don't exist, you want to distribute damage as evenly between party members as possible, to avoid your frontline being focus fired down. And having casters with plate armor and mirror image (from a 12 g scroll) is a big boon to achieving this.

Every post in this thread makes me want to talk about "Legend of the five rings rpg". There your attribute scores are water (adaptability), fire (aggression, passion), wind (mental and physical alacrity), earth (steadfastness) and void (ability to empty your mind). Notice none of these are strictly physical or mental, and all are supremely flavorful. You can use fire to both incite a crowd with a passionate speech as well as engage in a furious reckless charge in combat. And the game's mechanics support this by giving different ability scores different mechanical advantages, fire gives makes you more likely to succeed but at a cost to your mental stability, water gives you the ability to combine actions, earth prevents incoming hits from becoming criticals etc. this makes it so you are never deciding between raising in-combat and out-of-combat attributes, and never sacrificing combat effectiveness for rp potential.

Alignment exists to enable a system of justice where government-sanctioned lvl 1 clerics with divine lance walk on the street randomly blasting people every 6 seconds to weed out anyone with the inherent inescapable propensity to do evil.

There are two reasons the eidolon breaks the game in a way that familiars and animal companions don't, and it has more to do with how most GMs run their game instead of strict mechanical rules.

When scouting with animal companions and familiars, DMs can plausibly avoid spoiling encounters for the party, as in the familiar rat can't interact with the magical doodad / can't open a specific door etc. Same with most summons.

With eidolons, this no longer works. They have the agency, intellect and manipulation ability of a party member, so whatever dangers the room had, the party can plausibly trigger and interact with 100% safely through the eidolon.

This becomes more lopsided when the cost of losing the eidolon (having to heal the summoner from 0% to 100%) is smaller than even a lvl 1 spell slot for the first 5 levels of the game.

It's a classic problem. Every TTRPG breaks down if the party is safely able to scout ahead. It's the optimal way to play, it makes the game run slower and less interactive, it reduces the stakes and makes everyone except the scout twiddle their thumbs. In pf2e this problem manifests itself in the form of the eidolon dedication.

To be honest, there is no easy way to solve this RAW. The solution is always an out-of-game buy-in from the players not play optimally in order for everyone to have more fun. On the GM side it requires the players to trust that they don't get instakilled just for exploring/entering rooms/interacting with the world. Otherwise you can't really blame players for the 2022 flavor of bringing along 50 goats / goblins under the suggestion spell on a leash into every dungeon, which was the optimal way to play tomb of horrors for example.

Lollerabe wrote:

Heh, figures. Out of curiosity - where would you rank melee Magus compared to other melee martials ?

This wasn't addressed to me hah, and I have a whole tier list I stole amd mostly agree with, but I rank them like this

S - Champion
A - Fighter (Magus Ranged)
B - Ranger, Barbarian, Monk
C - Melee Magus, Swashbuckler
D/F - Melee Investigator

Mine (for optimized builds):

S+ - Melee fighter (use champion archetype if you want to play a stronger champion)

S - ranged fighter (Debilitating shot is broken)
[UPDATE] snare ranger might be broken, need to look into it.

A - ranged magus and gunslinger (These guys go up a rank if your party can buff/debuff for reliable crits). Rogue (good offence, good defence)

B - Champion (Only this low because champion archetype is OP and replicates the best features of the base class)

B minus - Tangled forest stance monk (with tower shield can lock down enemies and tank well)

C - ranger (Lots of work for worse-than-fighter offence and defence. Goes up to S once you get shared prey at 14)

C minus - barbarian (50% fighter, 50% unconscious), other monks (low damage, MAD, enemies can just ignore you).

D - Melee magus (MAD, Weak defences, bad action economy, sub-fighter-level offence), swashbuckler (Weak chassis, bad action economy, best feat 'one for all' can be poached using human ancestry multitalented at lvl 9, right when aid becomes strong)

E - Investigator (just sad), alchemist

? - Inventor (haven't looked into it)

...

Magus is okay, but let's compare it to another class everyone loves/hates. I also made a graph. Here: https://imgur.com/FWmCzqg

Now let's see.

- Green is double flick mace fighter using 2 actions for double slice and one reaction for opportunity attack each turn. Reliably put out almost as as much damage as the magus reroll alpha strike, often inflict prone condition due to frequent crits, only uses 2 actions + reaction. Better defenses than magus.

- Blue is Eldritch archer fighter using gouging claw eldritch shot. (I think fire ray would be even more damage but it would require more work in the app to calculate). Easily beats normal gouging claw magus for equal amount of actions except for first turn, where magus has 1 extra action for true strike. Better defenses than magus.

- Orange is Starlit Span Magus Gouging Claw Spellstrike, same as SuperBidi used.

As we can see, even in the most optimal of conditions, the low defense, opportinity attack eating magus doesn't really match up to the god of fighting. I'm not saying optimal magus is weak, what I'm really saying is that fighter should be nerfed.

I am working on treasure for a campaign, and I want to include the occasional wand. To be honest, I get overwhelmed by the spell lists at times, however. Is there a list or guide somewhere that someone has already compiled of ideal wand spells?

I saw the spells guide over at the Guide to Guides page, and my current thought is to focus on the spells marked as "decent, but situational" (my phrasing). Any thoughts?

A melee martial with the 'trick magic item' feat and a wand of mirror image can more than double its effective hp against bosses for a single fight in a day. Pretty good for 160 gold.

Vodalian wrote:

The wizard, the way I see it, has a really bad class feats. And overall pf2e rewards diversification over focus. There are very few feats that give additive bonuses to any skills, spells or attacks.

This means that the strongest character build are often the ones that poach useful skills from archetypes for different situations. This I think is one of the best features of pf2e, allowing great customization without hurting your class' primary role.

A lot of people are saying wizards 'should stay in their lane' and pick more wizard feats which sounds sort of gatekeepy as well as bad advice in general.

So let me give a different example.

Let's say you have a fighter that multiclasses into Bard, Cleric, and Wizard for low level spells. After all those multiclasses, at level 12 they only have a single level 1-3 slot from each of those, and have consumed all their class feats.

Despite the fact that they have a bit more versatility compared to a standard fighter, they've sacrificed all the power they can get from higher level class feats to pick up more low level spells. As such, this fighter is not very good as a fighter compared to a fighter that just took all fighter class feats.

That's the same thing with this wizard.

Edit: A more accurate example, now that I consider it, is a fighter that picked up Beastmaster, Medic, and Bard Dedications and no fighter class feats. They're all good dedications with good bonuses (full animal companion, Doctor's Visitation, Inspire Courage), but you're not taking advantage of anything the fighter does.

This is an interesting example, because a fighter needs nothing but double slice and combat reflexes (for extra attack of opportunity) to be the strongest dpr (or equal to giant barbarian in some instances) character in the game. If you want I can show the math for this. You can spend all of your other class feats on utility/spells/whatever. You already have heavy armor proficiency for max AC without DEX, so you can increase two mental attributes without worry. You don't even need twin parry, since the shield cantrip gives the same benefit with an additional shield block reaction (you might still want to take shield parry for twin riposte).

So you are already fulfilling the fighter's primary role (deal melee damage and frontline) to optimal efficiency while spending nothing but one level 2 class feat and one level 10 class feat.

PF2 rewards not hyper specializing while also having a literal ton of niche protection. It is not gatekeeping to say that trying to make a tank wizard is trying to punch a boulder uphill. The game actively makes it hard to do, while minimizing the reward for doing so.

Also, there is a difference between building around something and getting some alternate options, and "tries to do 5 different builds simultaneously". Not even fighter can make 5 different builds simultaneously be coherent. PF2 rewards the former, and punishes the latter.

I don't see being tanky as a 'role' or a build that someone tries to do, but something all party members need to optimize. Just today our party entered a small room to be immediately ambushed by a

The wizard went down in a couple of attacks (2 crits if I remember correctly) and the party barely escaped with their lives. If he had been tankier and had been able to use battle medic the fight might have gone compeletely differently.

The wizard, the way I see it, has a really bad class feats. And overall pf2e rewards diversification over focus. There are very few feats that give additive bonuses to any skills, spells or attacks.

This means that the strongest character build are often the ones that poach useful skills from archetypes for different situations. This I think is one of the best features of pf2e, allowing great customization without hurting your class' primary role.

A lot of people are saying wizards 'should stay in their lane' and pick more wizard feats which sounds sort of gatekeepy as well as bad advice in general.

I agree with you on auras and AoE effects, being close to melee is definitely a detriment there, and the caster would be better off staying at a distance. But even here, being tanky doesn't actually make things worse for you. I think the biggest opportunity cost for taking sentinel and bastion feats would probably be taking a witch dedication to give you more lower level spell slots and a familiar. This I believe is a reasonable trade-off.

For your second example about the oracle, I think it is not necessarily bad. If the oracle can tank a boss crit without going down (which I believe this build is supposed to accomplish with the chain armour specialization), eating an AoO or strike instead of the low-hp barbarian who is trying to reposition or magus who wants to spell-strike can be a great thing to do, especially if you have battle medic to heal yourself or them back up.

In your example you are saying you could barely keep your champion and monk alive through the encounter. If the AoO against your oracle would have been targeted against the low hp champion instead and he would have gone down, wouldn't the situation have been even worse?

I agree that against fortitude saving throws, casters are notably worse, and against persistent damage, having another sack of hp helps less since getting rid of persistent damage eats up actions and persistent damage of one type can only apply once per character anyway, so against these types of enemies I would follow your advice.

I guess my point is that

1. making your wizard tanky is not making you worse at playing safe and doesn't force you to be close, and the feat opportunity cost is not unbearable.

2. Distributing damage between party members (when auras/AoE are not destroying you, so not all fights) is an element of team play that is often ignored, and can really help your party survive in situations where your frontline would otherwise collapse, for example eating a strike from a +2 brute type enemy (or multiple ones using mirror image). Of course, if you can't take the hit without going down, you are probably hurting more than helping.

I agree this is possibly objectively the best build for wizard. People seem to think that investing in tankiness in a wizard is a waste, since you would be better off hiding, invisible, or out of reach of the enemy.

This is a very common mistake, the same one people make when they say ranged characters have the "advantage" over melee characters in being out of harms way. What they don't realize is that being out of range actually makes the enemy focus fire your frontline, and thus REDUCES the tankiness of your party. HP is a resource, and not using it is reducing survivability except on a selfish individual level. Distributing damage across the party is good because for the same reason focus fire is good. I will admit that ranged characters do have an easier time avoiding AoE, which is an actual survivability increase (as long as you go in to contribute your HP to tank once the AoE threat is gone).

People are also questioning charisma, and I agree that this build might be even better as a sorcerer or bard, but the challenge was not to create the ultimate caster, it was to create the ultimate wizard. I think charisma is too good to pass on even on wizard. All the best skill actions (coercion, bon mot, intimidate, one for all, request, make an impression) are governed by intimidate and diplomacy. There is actually a striking lack of good skill actions (for combat especially) using most other skills, athletics and medicine being the notable exceptions.

The intelligence skill actions are much weaker, and recall knowledge is the only one that is usually usable in combat. The problem is recall knowledge is gm-dependent and bad, I would never take it without session 0 concessions from the GM to reveal almost the entire monster stat block and all special abilities on success. Otherwise, I would always use one of my 9-12 actions in a regular combat for intimidate, aid, battle medicine or trip/shove instead, the opportunity cost is too great. Nobody would take the RAW recall knowledge success effect over healing 50% of your hp, setting your enemy prone, giving an ally +3/+4 to attack or causing fear 1-2 (or at higher levels making the enemy run away or outright killing it).

People are saying that this build is sacrificing optimization for versatility. I would say this is blatantly false. The only thing this build is sacrificing is one highest level spell slots from not wielding a two-handed staff, which is a worthwhile sacrifice for the extra tankiness and battle medic healing you can contribute to your party. Apart from that you are as optimized a spell caster as any wizard can be.

I'm just surprised the wizard was using the crossbow instead of the alchemist, and that the wizard didn't seem to have any slotted spells in the +2/+3 level encounters.

He used grim tendrils in the +2 fight for 5 damage and 1 persistent bleed. The haunt inflicted stupefy 2 on him so that probably influenced his decision to not use slotted spells against the wood golem (or maybe he just thought produce flame to trigger weakness was his best bet), I'm not sure.

The alchemist was new to the system and probably needed more help from GM to gear up (me and him got 75 gold to start with and buy whatever we want since we joined at level 3). Now that I think about it firing the crossbow at -5 MAP after throwing a bomb would have probably been even worse than wizard firing it after casting a save spell.

... and had a great time! We were playing abomination vaults and I joined on level 3. I have maxed intimidate and all the coercion feats as well as bard dedication.

We are a party of 4 but barbarian couldn't attend so we were 3: human fighter, (human looking) wizard medic (gave a hint he's not human but didn't want it to be revealed yet), goblin alchemist. Also there was a ghoul level 3 npc helping us. Goblin alchemist and I were new to the system.

The good: The encounters were varied and monsters interesting (1 haunt, one fight against +2 enemy and one fight against +3 enemy). I felt my character was effective and I could do a lot of stuff: double slice, intimidate, coerce, bull horn cantrip to boost intimidate and shield cantrip to defend myself. Risky surgery with assurance from wizard seemed really effective, healed me to full after going to half hp from haunt. In combat he couldn't really hit anything with produce flame though, he got one nice call from the grave off.

The bad: The alchemist and wizard were struggling.

All in all I had a good time but I don't know if my allies did.