Xenocrat's page

Uncontrollable Dance and Overwhelming Presence.

One non-numeric change to the Succubus is that it’s now uncommon and therefore not eligible to be summoned.

There's also the basic option to just put three antimatter missiles in your forward arc and three in your turret on a fast, manueverable ship. Broadside gets you 6x55=330 average damage if they all hit. (This set up is why a good ship should have 1-2 point defenses in their turret, and many mid to high tier paizo ships do).

A flyby with a strong computer to maximize success (and stunt piloting is one of the easiest character optimization challenges) lets you target them in an arc that doesn't have a non-turret point defense, and a backup gunner can also dump some plasma mines (whether homing or not) in hexes fore and aft to add some extra damage if they move away (and if they don't, if homing).

I don't love this one because of the many failure points that make it struggle - you can get outmanuevered to cut your expected damage by half, a double point defense turret tanks your expected damage by up to one third, and you can even be outrun to tank it all to zero. Point blank engagements are necessary. A mix of particul beams and antimatter missiles gives you more flexibility but does lower your Big Hit potential. And if a cruiser+ with a capital weapon antimatter missile comes at you with the potential one hit kill, you'll wish your turret had a point weapon for the easy shoot down chance.

Anyway, tier 20 medium ship building is fun post-SOM. There's plenty of offense vs. defense tradeoffs to be made and tactics to exploit them. But you're still a bit of an eggshell with a (light) sledgehammer even with max shields, so probably the safest and most reliable but most boring build is to go heavy defense and armor and speed, not worry about manueverability, and just maintain max distance to ping big lumbering enemies from long distance with linked turret particle cannons boosted by a computer. You'll consistently hit, they'll have lots of weapons that suffer range penalties or are useless if you stay 15-40 hexes away. Face your aft (you can put another pair or single particle cannon there) towards them, maintain distance, and dump lots of free shields from other arcs into the aft for when they do hit. Your science officers can burn their free resolve points (and maybe an aft facing ECM, albeit with big range penalties) to hurt their accuracy.

My final forward arc favorite for close-ish range hunting is the rail quality guns that SOM introduced (but not the "railgun" in CRB). They get extra damage for extra accuracy, and at high tier with computers, attack outpacing AC/TL, and bonuses from TIMs, you can often expect to hit at +10 over AC, when these outdamage persistent particle beams. Put a linked pair in the forward arc or turret, and optimize everything around that weapon. Only downside is 10 range vs 20 on particle beam, and slightly lower damage if you don't hit AC +5.

The tiny ships at tier 16 are just a thought experiment, they're never actually useful because of the weapon limitations. They can live a long time because of immunity to capital weapons, crazy high AC/TL from unlimited budgets for defenses, damage reduction from deflection shields and adamantine hulls. I don't have a real answer to you about when a tiny or small ship stops being practical at a given tier. I'd abandon them as soon as I can just for seating and hull point reasons. Tiny are never useable at any tier for the former reasons.

Medium ships are always viable. The full sized tier 20 magic torpedo unit has a +20 bonus that rolls twice to hit, because quantum quality. Check out the published high tier AC/TL for tier 16+ cruisers through super dreadnoughts, they aren't actually very high because of size penalities and armor costing so much past minimal levels. So with two rolls to hit the automated torpedos usually hit. Six of those (because broad arc) are firing at anything in your front or rear arc, then you only need a couple of gunners (or one gunner plus one VI, or Broadside or Fire at Will actions) to fire at no penalty your front/rear arc linked guns and turret. That's 6x17 potential damage from the magic torpedo units, 4x35 from persistent particle beams, average is 242 if everything hits. You'll put your computer bonuses in your two big guns, so they are very likely to hit, the 6 torpedos are likely to hit. If you're forced to fire into port or starboard you Broadside, which cuts three torpedos out of what you can use, but does raise your accuracy on the other three quite a bit.

Three to five rounds, any big 20 tier ship with big HP and high shields is likely dead. You're more manueverable and faster, you can usually stay out of their big gun arcs. If you can't, it will admittedly suck. That's why the CRB tells you not to fight even CR ships very often, they're deadly!

There are zero rules about officer limitations once you go past medium frame anyway, it's all random nonsense where the number of officer actions has no bearing on anything. A destroyer can have 6-20 crew, and have been published with 6-12 officer roles. No reason they could have 20 actions if some crazy Paizo employee slipped it in. Hull points (which is where medium ships really suffer, consider ablative armor in small doses at higher tier) and capital weapons (which are just BP and mount efficient versions of heavy weapons that come with significant overhead costs from frame limitations) are what matters, not crew actions, on the high tier ships.

If you're using Starship Operations Manual it's much easier to find useful BP to cram into a small frame. I've made tier 16 fighters (extremely hard to hurt with deflective shields and adamantine hulls, extremely undergunned because only light weapons), and you can do a worthwhile tier 20 medium ships easy. Load up on automatic quality magic missile weapons (they have a different name, they're quantum with long range and broad arc) launchers on the flanks, big linked weapons in the turret and fore/aft (put a mine layer in the aft), and you can lay out huge hurts.

Don't forget your VIs for extra actions in the tiny ships.

Errenor's point is what I was getting at, the slashing/cold iron/personal antithesis combo doesn't seem to actually work out based on the most common "instance of damage" reading and how antithesis is defined in the class features.

What is more in doubt is stuff like a weakness to fire where you have flaming runes on your weapon and add on a personal antithesis. Is the flaming rune part of the same instance of damage? I think considerable electrons have been spilled on the matter.

Is there a link to this reddit post?

I can't find the Reddit post right now, but there's this Paizo forum post where he thinks Milos can do 20 points of weakness to a Glabrezu in that encounter with his cold iron weapon. A Glabrezu only has 10 points of weakness to cold iron, so the other 10 would have to come from 10 points of Pesonal Antithesis, which would be somewhat reasonable for a level 16 Thaumaturge facing a level 13 Glabrezu and level 7 Succubus and expecting to stomp them in that story.

When they make an option that allows me to be a ghost, I can't buy 'they didn't think about how incorporeal moves' seriously.

You should always take "Paizo didn't think about how X works" seriously, no matter what it is or how much they've written on or adjacent to X in the past.

Xenocrat wrote:

Don't adjust any of the spells because of the Remaster. Ignition and Sure Strike if you must, but nothing else.

You do realize that in all probability after the final physical stock of the original Pathfinder 2e Players Core Rulebook is sold they probably will not reprint it and only print the Remaster version. That said they might still sell the PDF copy of it for a period of time but eventually they will stop selling that because it splits their player base even more than it already is with them maintaining the First edition of Pathfinder.

None of this is relevant to anything you asked or are proposing to do.

Note that you can choose Mortal Weakness if they have a weakness, but you can choose to instead go with Personal Antithesis.

Why might you do this? Well, according to Mark Seifter, author of the class, on a Reddit post this is to add more damage on top if you already have access to a relevant weakness, like using a cold iron weapon against demons or fey - it hardly seems fair that you and the barbarian both get the weakness damage, and the barb also gets rage, just because you came prepared. So you can add Personal Antithesis on top if you don't need Mortal Weakness.

Whether this actually works depends on your GM and how "instances of damage" actually works on a strike and how various sorts of weaknesses interact with materials, damage types, elemental weaknesses, and the Personal Antithesis "weakness to your strike" all put together on one weapon strike. Good luck!

Don't adjust any of the spells because of the Remaster. Ignition and Sure Strike if you must, but nothing else.

Fighter with Unexpected Sharpshooter.

There IS no exploit without a listed weakness to holy. Unholy on the skeleton lets it hurt, say, angels more by triggering their weakness, but only suffers against specific abilities that add on against unholy.

Get a psychic with Message amp to blow three focus points in one round handing out extra strikes.

They have not said that they meant to write something other than what they wrote and that works fine as written.

The wand being save rather than spell attack is why it can’t interact with the weakness granting abilities.

Some people argue the world is flat, but there’s no actual issue here.

One nice thing about the remaster is it gave us spell versatility that we otherwise never would have seen. E.g., lots of same damage type and spell rank, but now save with potential crit fail rider instead of attack.

Stifling Stillness steals an action and does no save fatigue to those in the area who aren’t ALREADY holding their breath - it doesn’t make them choose to hold their breathe to avoid that and the poison damage.

They probably didn’t intend that, but it’s what the spell does. It’s 4 stars without errata.

You can’t cast in any battleform. Pest Form is a battle form, albeit one with no attacks.

Maybe

The psychic also has a couple of “always aid attacks (or anything)” options. One in Silent Whisper cantrip at level 6, the other in Int subconscious mind during psyche.

It’s the Dragon Form spell, not Dragon Soul.

Dragon Form also doesn’t grant the breath weapon rider effects a couple of dragons have. You adopt some generic characteristics, you don’t become the creature.

Filtering in Nethys shows that a lot of them are from APs, and therefore presumptively incompetent. Examples from real books include things like Daemon/Demon/Devil Form that were put on both the divine and arcane lists as a sop to angry wizard players still chimping out over not being able to summon these.

Similarly, Occult/Primal share the Summon Fey and Fey Form spells. There's also sort of traditionally witch themed "living stuff, but in a creepy way" that they gave to both lists, like Moth's Supper, Shadow Spy, and Bursting Bloom.

That’s what Final Sacrifice is for.

After level 7 take the rank 4 Deep Breath cantrip via MC dedication once it has 8 hours duration. Bury yourselves in the earth of the floor of your cabin.

Probably because of Mindblank (with new name) at rank 8 doing the same thing at that longer duration. Mindblank also gets that +4?status to mental saves, but maybe they thought more was needed to differentiate the two.

Nondetection in PF1 was hours/level while MB was 24 hours, so a simple conversion would lead you to 8 hours and until preparations.

Yeah, those have the same problems of requiring actions to pull out again if your weapon isn't an implement and your second implement is ever actually used in combat.

Which is probably fine. Use mirror, wand, or chalice as a single action - get effect. Pull out tome, regalia, or lantern - restore effect, albeit one that has to wait for something else to happen to matter.

Oh yeah. I withdraw my point.

I'll never forget the time Vildeis turned away from the rampaging demon horde to slay her followers who called them names.

I'd say they don't interact and the scroll robes don't benefit from scroll thaumaturgy.

Scroll robes require you to inscribe using the same method as normal crafting, so you can't put a free thamauturge scroll on there to begin with.

The free thamaturge scrolls are formed from elements of your esoterica, that's why they benefit from the same "look, ma, both in one hand!" ability to hold an esoterica (or scroll formed from same) in the same hand a an implement. It's no help with regular scrolls not formed from esoterica.

Hmmm. Is there any action associated with the lantern besides Intensify? And does the book's free action RK trigger if you swap to your book at the beginning of your turn?

No, lantern doesn't have any actions other than intensify (which doesn't do much and generally isn't worth the action).

No: "While holding your tome, at the start of your turn each round, attempt a check to Recall Knowledge..." You need to already have the tome in hand when your turn starts to get the RK check. (Technically it doesn't actually say it's a free action, so it's either missing the text saying it is, or it's missing the text making the RK knowledge an option rather than mandatory. Lacking errata, people aware of the issue seem to treat it as a free action.)

W Feels like Lantern for passive stuff is ok. Does the lantern still work hanging on your belt? Seems like it should, but I'd prefer to avoid the annoying "passive benefits don't let you swap implements" malarkey.

First sentence of initiate benefit: "While you hold your lantern..."

First sentence of adept benefit: "In addition to the initiate benefits, when you hold your lantern..."

What algorithm would you recommend for a hypothetical matter/spirit tradition? What trait combinations would you look to in order to determine if a potential spell from Player Core, such as Jump, is on the list or not?

I wouldn't, the very basis of this thread is nonsensical.

I understand that you find this system of comparing the presense or absense of a trait to a simple conditional complicated and confusing. I think very few other people do.

Apparently all undead except Vampires now specifically list an immunity to bleed damage.

But now let's look at the Elementalist spell list. It is static. It does need a listing of what spells are and are not on the list. It was first created in Secrets of Magic and then updated in Rage of Elements. But when Howl of the Wild and War of Immortals come out, if either of those books include any new spells, none of those spells will be added to the Elementalist spell list automatically.

This isn't true. Check out Rage of Elements page 59 under Elemental Philosophy. Every elementalist gets the (small, generic, fixed) universal list of spells, and every spell that shares elemental traits of their philosophy (either air/water/earth/fire or earth/fire/metal/wood/water without also sharing a trait they don't have in their elemental philosophy).

So future single elemental trait spells will go on Elementalist lists, and dual (or more) elemental trait spells may, depending on the mix and whether the Elementalist took the feats to add missing traits to their philosophy. (The "no elemental traits missing from your philosophy" rule, incidentally, is why things like Cataclysm and Summon Elemental Hearald had to be put on the universal list - each is overinclusive in elemental traits.)

Player Core 1 and 2 spells also interact with this rule. Howling Blizard has the air trait, so it's on the spell list of Inner Sea Elementalism followers, but not Elemental Cycle philosophy casters. The opposite is true of Impaling Spike and a lot of wood trait spells in PC1.

Any witch can do in combat healing with the Life Boost hex taken via Basic Lesson feat at 2nd level (lesson of life).

Primal and Arcane witches do control best, everyone but Arcane does healing and condition removal with spell slots.

Solid Fog and Wall of Force are still there.

There will be ORC books that contain monsters. There are not announced plans to do a Monster Core 2.

The four Remastered core books are the bare minimum to support a viable product line if the OGL blows up again. Once they're all out there (PC2 is all that's left) they can move on to their regular releases.

Perpdepog wrote:

You could also call them your Mark or your Target, though target is kind of broad and Mark may be used for the operative.

How about calling them your Focus?

Maybe your level, rank, or feat.

If I Detect Magic and detect the strongest spell on a creature, but there are actually two effects of equally high ranks, will you let me pick one of those at random?

If a creature has multiple spell effects on it and you're not specifying which one you're trying to dispel then how do you handle it? One at random?

Grapple wouldn’t work because damage is required.

I trust those allowing strength to be withheld from damage are also not adding it to the attack roll.

Which of the following do you allow not to be applied, and why or why not if not all?

Precision damage
Attribute damage
Weapon specialization
Deadly/fatal
Other critical hit bonus damage
Runes
A flat number of damage points (separate from or in addition to specialization)

Plate in Treasure only coats an outer layer. It’ll trigger weaknesses (sickness if hit/bitten) but clearly wouldn’t change the structural strength of a shield.

The benefit to casting from a spellheart is that Daze would trigger the weapon or armor bonus - they want the benefit of that and the amp.

I agree that you can’t amp if cast from a spellheart. Spellheart rules allow you to sub your spell attack and DC numbers, but it’s still the item casting it (with a divine trait!), not you.

As a side note, the Barbarian could also ask to not use all his Strength modifier on damage. After all, what prevents you from doing 1 point of damage only?

And if I can choose not to apply sneak attack, why not weapon specialization bonus damage? There would need to be some rule for pulling punches and the limits of it, and there's not.

Abasalom Station is for the humans! Down with Melacruz!

(Checks forum name.)

Oh, never mind, carry on.

The trigger counts ("you hit a creature with a melee attack roll") but the text refers to a Strike, which would bar elemental blast.

The clear intent of making elemental blast not a strike seems to be to avoid it interacting or benefiting from martial feats at all for what I consider good reasons, so as a GM I personally would stick with the Strike reference and not allow it. In PFS they'd have to not allow it.

It's the most absurd and overpowered ability in the entire game.

It’s not like any occult casters would love the Brass Bastion. Toss out a Slow, then plink with Telekinetic Projectile or Needle Darts for often no damage?

Sustain Phantom Orchestra for consistent small chip damage?

What are divine casters doing? Healing the melee guys I guess.