gesalt's page

gesalt wrote:

Gortle wrote:

You don't understand that Imaginary Weapon and Exemplar cleary stepped outside the normal range of damage expectations that they had established?

For me it was as a distinct change where they went off the rails.

It's funny because fire ray's damage is almost identical in damage.

I used past tense. If you thought Fire Rays damage was the same then you don't understand.

I am considering the past tense. 2d8 scaling vs 2d6 and 1d6 patch on the ground.

If you mean something else though then yeah I'm not getting it.

You don't understand that Imaginary Weapon and Exemplar cleary stepped outside the normal range of damage expectations that they had established?

For me it was as a distinct change where they went off the rails.

It's funny because fire ray's damage is almost identical in damage. When you factor in the secondary damage or a provoked reaction attack it's actually slightly better until you get to maximum de/buffing.

Psychic had better archetype slots and IW had a better damage type though. It could also be entered with int which was more convenient for stats.

Thinking on it now....Magus would have made for a cool archetype you could have added to any spell casting class. But would have been too difficult to balance due to the variety of class features different spell casters have with a need to balance.

Eldritch Archer is right there you know. As usual for pf2e, it's better on a martial than a caster.

You could also just add the magus archetype to anyone, but I assume you mean a full version and not just a 1/fight ability.

... I don't think anyone is underestimating versatility here. If anything the opposite, time and time again we see "versatile" become just a polite way to call something bad.

For all that I keep seeing the whole "versatility is power" thing get repeated, I've mostly found it to be very shallow. What you want isn't some mediocre spread of abilities, it's to be really good at one thing and have a toolbox of always accessible abilities to supplement it when the main thing doesn't work out so you aren't totally useless.

Unfortunately I've always found pf2e druid to be kinda mediocre. Wild shape is too weak and action inefficient to be taken seriously, prep casting is weak in this edition, the primal list is missing a lot of good spells and can't even poach back some of the good ones like divine usually can, etc, etc.

You'll only really use cleric at range so you can take advantage of high starting int with something like halfling to get +4 dex, +3 int, +2 wis, +1 con or elf +4 dex, +3 int, +2 wis, +0 con.

In melee you're almost always going to be doing ancient elf (champion) with +4 str, +2 con, +2 cha, +1 wis so you can take advantage of plate, fire ray and champ reaction with force fang at 2 for the 3rd focus point.

Not just fighter and rogue. You'd need to drag down just about every martial class that isn't investigator or inventor. Fighter and rogue might be the best, but swashbuckler remains among the worst.

There's also withering grasp which does d12s and a tiny bit of persistent damage.

Note that fire ray, winter bolt and withering grasp are all available through green faith so it's easy to pick up any two you want.

The gunner rogue being described here has to be one of the most pathetically weak characters I've seen in awhile.

Considering the new damage combination rules was it really that much of a jump to add the silver-fire of moonbeam to any other effect that adds an independent instance of fire damage? Spellstrike with a flaming weapon perhaps?

Maybe a level 9+ monk with metal strikes using the rain of embers stance with flaming handwraps? Or the blazing streak feat if you want to keep it all common.

Or how about blazing armory providing a flaming weapon that also deals fire weapon damage combined with silver salve, plate in metal, transmuting ingot, etc if you want a very silly example.

KlampK wrote:

S'pose that i have resistance to fire 5 and I take a strike that does 2 fire and 2 silver-fire damage. do i resist all of that or just 2?

What is doing " silver fire" damage and how is that separate from the "fire" damage on it? Stuff doesn't do "silver damage" typically: silver is a trait on the attack.

Moonbeam is the silver-fire damage you are looking for.

It is pretty funny how many people are getting bent out of shape over what is essentially a minor champion reaction nerf, and a minor martial buff.

Ryangwy wrote:

...the need to actually get to the enemy (and not death spiral afterwards, costing your party actions in subsequent turns) make sending a pick user, say, less appealing

This. Ranged has generally smaller damage dice sizes because it has generally significant defensive advantages. Bumping up dice size and making reload easier...yeah that would be absolutely horrible to give to NPC opponents. Who wants to play a fantasy game where the enemy constantly shoots-and-moves well out of range of melee attacks and 30' spells.

It'd be a good excuse to give spells actual range again outside of artillery spells like fireball. Not like melee have a hard time closing the gap either since you can already run around with 50+ speed. What's the shooter going to do when they run out of meat shields and the party runs 150 feet towards them?

TBH it feels like you just want all Gunslingers to always get a free action each round to reload. Which would just make them OP.

You seem to be under the impression that gunslingers are on par with archers right now. This would be incorrect. Gunslingers have an extremely rigid action rotation just to be inferior to a well built archer.

A free reload each turn wouldn't change this, but it'd improve their quality of life a little bit. It'd basically replace the otherwise mandatory risky reload by guaranteeing you a second attack each round without risky reload's fail effect.

That's if you want both, if only one is enough there is more deity choices thankfully.

Otherwise all Magi would be either hippies or weebs lol

You do typically want two focus spells. Not only do you need a 3rd focus spell to cap your focus points, but fire isn't as reliable a damage type as physical was with IW. Your choices then are force fang, winter bolt or withering grasp.

I would take withering grasp because winter bolt doesn't double its base damage on a crit and enemies can just detonate the xd12 saveless blast on someone, and that one does double on a crit.

Elric200 wrote:

What do you have to archetype in to get winter bolt and fire ray?

Cleric of Yamatsumi archetype. Cleric Dedication, Basic Dogma (Domain initiate [cold]), Advanced Dogma (Domain Initiate[fire]).

Green faith also works by taking advanced dogma (expanded domain initiate) at 8. That's also the route you'd take if you wanted withering grasp (decay domain).

You understand that none of those things require removing focus spellstriking right?

If they print focus spells worth using, why would you use them on archetype focus spells?

If cascade and abilities tied to it are worth using, the need to spellstrike every round goes away.

You only have so many actions available to you. If you need to add extra limits to some options to make some others worth using, maybe they weren't good in the first place.

ScooterScoots wrote:

My point is that the things the fighter has to do to make themselves work are easier and less prone to disruption.

Yes but that's kinda the point of the class: low complexity, no rotations needed, just a box o' tricks. If that's what you want for playstyle, I would not try and shoehorn a Magus into it, I would just play a fighter.

PF2E is not - as far as I can tell - about rewarding complex builds and class mechanics with bigger damage. The reward you get for playing a gish is that you get to play a gish, not that some easter egg gish build will let you be as good as the specialist at their specialty.

Now there's no wrong way to play here; if someone wants to be the fighter (role) with their Magus (class), have at it! But to me, the observation that the spellstriking Magus doesn't do fighter as well as fighter, doesn't convince me spellstrike needs an upgrade.

Nobody's really asking for a spellstrike upgrade. We're arguing for an action economy improvement (to maybe hit those numbers more often) and against the spellstrike nerf that so many people seem to want to implement by removing focus spellstrikes.

I do appreciate how quickly we went from "focus spellstriking is broken" to "you're being unfair to the magus, surely it can do better than this."

"At this level" is a potential issue though, IMO. Magus is a strongly front-loaded class. Changing the entire spellstrike mechanic to be easier because Magus damage falls off compared to Fighter at level 12+ just makes it that much more of a beast at L1-5, maybe even L1-10. If a class starts out relatively strong and gets relatively weaker at higher levels, and you see this as an issue, doesn't it make sense to argue for a mid-level feat or mid-level mechanical upgrade? Rather than making a change that increases dpr for Ls 1-20?

It's not like fighter can't outdo magus this early either. Fire ray magus isn't going to outdo a double slicer with mutagen and weapon siphons (side note, you absolutely should be running these things on a magus too). That early on, you just don't have the de/buff numbers to really make that single strike sing like you can later and ranked spells don't have the utility effects to make them really impactful either.

Exactly what the title sounds like. The item description for holy water describes it as a simple weapon. Can you stock some in a thrower's bandolier?

I already assume that, as a consumables, it's not coming back after being expended.

I guess this can also be the, "Can I apply runes, talismans, poisons, etc to holy water" question as well.

Treerazor's not all that tough though? He has a giant easily exploited weakness, he's not fast enough to threaten anything that wants to kite him with more than 1 action per round, his spell list sucks, he only has the most basic reactive strike and doesn't even disrupt on a success, only one reaction at all. Most you need to worry about is his 2 action sicken 3.

As for haste being better on fighter than magus, that goes for any martial and magus really. Magus might scale very well with math de/buffs to amp up it's crit rate, but they scale very poorly with quicken, except for melee movement and their level 20 feat to recharge for free. Now, if spellstrike were a single action metamagic-like thing you could use that turned your next strike into a spellstrike, it'd be much better, as you could use the quicken to make the strike, and then have an action open for other things. Unfortunately, not scaling as well with such a common buff (potion patch + quickness potion if not the haste spell), is just something else for the class to deal with.

Conclusion: Spellstriking with cantrip won't require recharge

This accomplishes...what? The demo above uses a focus spell and still falls behind. Cantrip spellstrike itself doesn't do enough damage to compete without force fang's free damage to follow up. That's also why any other recharge mechanisms wouldn't matter anyway.

I can't think of a more surefire way to render the entire class worthless than forced downtime turns.

The Raven Black wrote:

Also nerf the MC Dedication's Spellstrike to be unable to crit succeed on the attack roll.

Wait what kinda stray is this. Are you on the design team that did the psychic remaster or something?

Well after you make the magus worthless with forced downtime you then need to make sure fighter doesn't become better magus.

Generally, though there is outliers like Champion and, formerly, Psychic.

As gesalt said, Champion kind of gives a lot of things a lot of classes might want. It's not really a niche.

A niche is something like Blessed One that focuses on a single ability (lay on hands), or Medic (being really good at battle medicine).
Those work with any class, they aren't "fixes" for your class' design being flawed.

It's more that the best archetypes tend to hit multiple niches, instead of being limited to one.

Champ fixes MADness, AC, sustain and reaction problems in one tidy package instead of needing two or three more focused archetypes like sentinel and blessed one. Take something like thaumaturge. D8, MAD, medium armor, mediocre reaction choices. Champ resolves all of this while leaving you free to pick whichever implements you want. An upgrade in every way over the base chassis.

Gunslinger provides a ranged reaction, some damage and maybe fixes perception on ranged builds. Take something like bow monk. Inner upheaval x3 is cool, but let's add 2x 2d4+2 (scaling to 3d4+3 or 4d4 with ooze) persistent + splash damage with munitions crafter, gauntlet bow fake out to aid allies and boost perception to master at 12. Bonus points if you keep archetyping and do the 9-10 rogue-sneak attack to keep stacking damage. In this way you make up for not having your modifier to damage and missing out on stuff like energy mutagen. Better than anything monk can manage on its own.

The magus is no different from a thaumaturge or monk. It's base chassis is deficient in several areas and it archetypes to fix them. Would it be great if it didn't need to? Sure, but that's never going to be the case. You'd need to give them a spammable attack focus spell so they don't need to archetype for damage, give them plate so they don't archetype for AC, give them a good ranged reaction so they don't archetype for that, and so on and so forth. Even then, unless every level has a great class feat to take, they're still going to archetype eventually just to add even more on top.

Gang, OP's asking for help w/ precision damage immunity, not for a cheat code for the AP's Weaknesses, a.k.a. spoilers.

It's not really a spoiler when the AP's whole premise is walking into treerazer's spooky demon forest. And since you can't beat immunity, you may as well exploit every other opening the AP advertises.

Yes but the question here is "why are people always recommending this?"

Same reason it's so easy to recommend champ archetype on a melee character. It is, in many cases, a direct upgrade and better than whatever your class chassis or feats would give you. Same reason a lot of archetypes are recommended, they provide the class something it lacks that improves it over the things the class offers natively.

Champ with its armor, focus spell(s) and good reaction. Gunslinger to shore up ranged damage with free ammo and a good ranged reaction. Basically anything on casters because so many of their class feats are terrible. Any of the archetypes that boost saves or perception. There's not a class in this game (aside from maybe kineticist) that isn't better off with an archetype or two.

Just so happens that magus hits every checkbox. Archetyping provides better armor, better focus spells, save boost, good reactions, etc, etc, etc.

Lol, Not Astral and Holy?

Thinking about it, yeah. Astral and holy. Just make sure you bring plenty of fire mutagens to stock in your shifting spider collar. At your level, you should be able to afford plenty of the moderate ones, but if you're strapped for cash a giant stack of lesser mutagens will serve just as well to set the forest monsters on fire.

Oh right. If you have an alchemist (or archetype) in the party, see if they can get the cold iron blanch recipe. If not, maybe pack a few cold iron ingots.

I am playing a Rogue currently. I am sure I will be encountering creatures with immunity to precision damage, what should I do? I am a Thief Racket.

First, cry deeply. After that, just make sure you're doing basic melee damage boosting. I think you mentioned you were doing spore war right? Make sure your weapon runes are flaming and holy and you'll mostly be fine.

(Also STR gets you shockingly little return on investment with higher level forms because you only get anything if you can get your attack bonus higher than the form's bonus, and its actually impossible to do that at a lot of levels. Giving Druid a +2 bonus that it almost never actually qualifies for is one of the stranger design choices here.)

From what I remember, str investment only gets you level 4 with animal form and levels 10 and 12 with plant form.

I'm going to propose Arcane Cascade increasing cantrip damage again, since that would give spellstriking with cantrips past the first round a big boost - if we increase it to be on-par with Fire Ray that makes the intended spellstrike gameplan of 'slotted spell - cantrip - cantrip if battle lasts that long' more attractive than triple focus spells

The end result of this is archetyping for a free action focus spell to enable immediate arcane cascade and begin spellstriking. Witch's cackle is the best one to access assuming you'll be allowed to cast it for no effect. Otherwise, you'll archetype cleric for oathkeeper's insignia off the duty domain.

Ends up as a straight buff as you get both focus spell damage and still get to recharge twice with force fang.

The collar holds one mutagen. Energy mutagen picks damage type on creation. I wish you luck on getting that to line up and not waste more actions than one.

That's right. And in any environment where you can expect to fight the same or similar enemies you swap for the rest of the day. Ditto having any advance knowledge. Mutagens are cheap enough that you can carry multiples of every type without issue, though more realistically you'll be carrying mostly cold and fire since elec and acid weaknesses are extremely rare. A quick Nethys search says there are 11 with acid weakness, 48 with electric, 94 cold and 214 fire. You can see why there might not be much of an issue hitting elemental weaknesses with just a flaming weapon and a cold or electric mutagen.

Given how many times it has been shown that the Magus's DPR is nowhere near the top, I'm not sure this statement can be made out of honest ignorance by someone following this conversation. If you have findings to support this claim, I'd be interested in seeing them.

Oh, it's feasable enough for magus to hit top DPR. They scale so well with math de/buffs after all. A magus firing off focus spellstrikes with all the math behind them is a menace that has the highest average damage output in the game the last I did the math. That's the caveat though, you need to have a party that's capable of providing those math adjustments. Inspire/bless, dirge/fear, off guard and aid. To make the magus shine you need to be able to apply these readily and often. On its own and without party support, it's still good, but nowhere what it can look like with so much of a math swing to setup crits. Fortunately, it's easy to get low resource or resourceless math adjustments and then pay in more for synesthesia, heroism, true strike/target, etc, etc to get very high crit rates. This is regardless of enemy level or even extreme vs high AC.

Damage is a solved issue for the magus. The only thing they need to work on is action economy and there are several solutions you can build or buy into for that if it isn't being solved by an ally.

Given that magus, fearless has access to a lot of tool the fighter doesn't have (namely magic and casting items) to enhance their abilities, or exploit weaknesses, and can overtake them occasionally by spending ressources on spellstrike I think it's fine for it to be slightly below outside of it's big novas.

But it does need more options outside of just spellstrike cantrips

And so we're back to arguing that they should be a sub-par martial with awful action economy that's weaker than a featless, itemless fighter outside of 4 spells a day. It's not like magus has good feats. You take what? 2 or 3 magus feats level 1-20? You spend the rest of the time in archetypes.

Access to casting items is a joke because everyone under the sun takes trick magic item anyway. Or, you know, have the caster in the party activate it. Assuming you don't grab a casting archetype for fun, of course.

Weakness exploitation is a joke. It doesn't come up often enough to matter, is usually triggered just as easily by runes or energy mutagen when it does and just got nerfed by the second errata change. That, and all the methods of inflicting manually still exist. Notice how little that came up before? It's because it generally wasn't worth the effort.

A lot of people keep saying that the Magus doesn't do enough damage when spellstriking with a cantrip. Can someone please help me with something. Let's take a 4th level Fighter and a 4th level Magus and give them both a bastard sword with a potency and striking rune. Across 3 rounds have the fighter use vicious swing on round 1 and 3 and the Magus spellstrike on 1 and 3 with gouging claw. And each can swing twice on round 2. How does the math on that actually look. Avg AC for 4th.

Assuming no buffs or debuffs and you mean swing + vicious swing vs gouging claw + force fang? Adjusted for accuracy, see below.

Round 1
Fighter: 18.2
Magus: 16.3 (average includes 2x persistent)

Round 2
Fighter: 16.2
Magus: 12.3

Round 3
Fighter: 18.2
Magus: 16.1

If you cut out force fang and the strike before the vicious swing:

Round 1
Fighter: 14
Magus: 14.3

Round 2
Fighter: 16.2
Magus: 12.3

Round 3
Fighter: 14
Magus: 14.1

An easy example to see why vicious swing is inferior to just attacking twice unless the enemy has resistance. Also easy to see why cantrip magus spellstriking every round is only barely able to stay close to featless Fighter.

pauljathome wrote:

Gang up with a reach weapon is very, very, very good.

So good that it's worth giving up sneak attack? There's only, like, two common weapons that rogues are proficient with and that qualify for sneak attack.

Fortunately the good uncommon ones like the bladed scarf have trivial access conditions that anyone in the party can fulfill for you if you don't fulfill them yourself.

Also dancer's spear is both common and a great weapon for rogues

ottdmk wrote:

Dr. Frank Funkelstein wrote:

I play a Starlit Span Magus in SoT, and it was quite mediocre before i got Imaginary Weapon online.

See, I find the difference in perspectives quite astonishing sometimes.

I did my own analysis of a bunch of ranged strike builds a while back, and the Starlit Span Magus beat them all, easily, with just Gouging Claw. So I find myself wondering, what's the point of comparison? A Giant Instinct Barbarian with a d12 two-handed weapon?

I can believe that starlit span magus is among the highest DPR ranged builds in a white room but having played one I refuse to believe that’s the case the second the enemy does anything to disrupt your spellstrike action rotation.

You also don’t get any of the bullshit other ranged characters get, like stealth shenanigans.

No, I've used starlit span live and it delivered in spades. Big hits with IW, aid every turn with fake out, 16 base int letting me use AoE damage and disables, blah, blah, blah. Getting disrupted usually wasn't much of a problem either. Enemy getting into melee with you usually costs enemies more than it does you, slow just has you spend a round on an archetype or magus spell or bola shot (if you aren't already hasted to ignore it). Turns out illusory object is never bad and archetype silence 4 is also pretty good to punish whichever caster just slowed you. Even getting swallowed isn't the end of the world since you can activate a potency crystal on the gauntlet part of your gauntlet bow and try to punch your way out with a spell that can trigger rupture.

Give it a try sometime. It can really carry its weight both in and out of combat without much trouble. I am going to miss archetype illusory object though. I don't think divine has anything so useful it can slot in the lower slots.

My read is that this is just another shove chassis you can pair with a berms kineticist for extra payoff on your shoves and props to use/slam enemies into.

It was fun to think about while it lasted.

ScooterScoots wrote:

For the one billionth time number of attack spells is not a substantial issue for magus’s power.

You could print 300 new attack spells and unless one of them is stronger than blood feast or polar ray, it doesn’t make magus much better. Even a substantial improvement over top of the line spellstrike spells wouldn’t solve the lack of slots. Magus is fine damage wise when it’s spellstriking with polar ray, the issue is that it only gets to do that 4 times a day, *if* it devotes all it’s slots to it.

Those are not remastered spells! The remastered Magus needs remastered spell attack spells worth casting from spell slots.

If spells like polar ray and shocking grasp were in the remaster, the issue would be significantly less pressing. 4 times a day is a decent number of times for the magus to be able to be the undisputed master of single target, massive strike damage that can be crit fished into absurd numbers. The spells are just not in the remaster to support that.

I agree that it is probably only going to take 3 spell attack roll spells and a couple more cantrips to make the magus work great again.

It's impressive how you both manage to miss the point that you could have an infinite number of spell attacks to choose from and you'd only ever pick 2 (the best and the one to use when the best doesn't work) and then follow it up with "it's OK for this class to only function 4 times per day."

gesalt wrote:

So yes, the white room scenario of "starts next to an opponent in melee." Very uncommon, I've never seen it happen myself.

It's a LOT easier with a Commander: They can give them an extra reaction to use to move to a foe so they start next to them and still has all their normal reactions. it's quite easy to move it out of the white room.

I'm sorry, I really should have put a /s or something to indicate the scathing sarcasm. I'm well aware that this isn't remotely hard to achieve, one way or another.

Mathematically, a d12 fighter attacking 4 times with quicken, certain x3 has an average damage output of ~100 at level 15+ against an on level opponent. That's assuming your team is so phenomenally incompetent that there are no buffs or debuffs, including off guard. The moment you add any, your average damage reaches 100+ at earlier levels, and scales higher, obviously.

So yes, the white room scenario of "starts next to an opponent in melee." Very uncommon, I've never seen it happen myself.

As far as I remember from pre-master calculations, a cantrip only magus needs to spellstrike every round just to keep up with regular martials. Remaster focus spellstriking helped alleviate this for melee magi and without it they'll go back to being fundamentally inferior to good martials outside of the 4 spells they get per day.

Ranged can still work since they can just turret gouging claw and force fang every round. But, with damage reliant on bleed and force fang not getting doubled on crits, their ceiling is much lower and anything bleed immune tanks their output below other ranged characters.

I honestly don't see the issue. You were already counting all the effects so you know which dice to add to your damage roll, how much harder can it be to count the number of relevant effects and add a flat value that many times? Especially if the party is the one applying the weakness, you can math all that out way ahead of time.

While this is certainly what a Magus could hypothetically get if they max their Intelligence at every turn, the Magus is a class that will, in all but two cases, depend on four attributes before even factoring Int. Getting that +3 in Int would mean sacrificing the defenses of a 8 HP/level class that, under all but one set of circumstances, has to get into melee range to do their thing. Although Magus players will sacrifice some of those stats for the +2 needed to dip into a multiclass archetype, leaving the gap at -2 to begin with, I've rarely seen players aim for a +5 to Int unless they were a Starlit Span.

Yeah, it was always risky to try on a melee magus, but that's what making meaningful build decisions is all about. They at least could go cha for psychic and later champion dedication. I imagine most melee magi will go straight cha now for champion archetype for their fire ray access and reaction.

Still doable on starlit span though. Halfling gets you all the stats you need to start with +4 dex, +3 int and +2 wis for smooth level progression. Can even use the helpful halfling feats to boost archetype fake outs to +4.

What's funny is that magus doesn't really have a problem with their spell DC even now. Compared to a full caster the gap looks like this:
01-04: -1 (+3 vs +4 int)
05-06: -0 (int evens out)
07-08: -2 (proficiency)
09: -0 (catch up in proficiency)
10-14: -1 (int)
15-16: -2 (casters gain prof, magus +5 int)
17-18: -1 (recover proficiency, lose apex)
19: -3 (legendary)
20: -4 (int)

Until the very end when it goes bad, your DC is fine for throwing AoEs at groups of mooks or getting the success effect on a useful debuff. Even having three levels where they're equal to full casters feels like an insult to full casters.

Anecdotally, I absolutely have done this. Chain lightning, AoE slow and confusion, shadow siphon counteracts, etc, etc. It works just fine.

That is another side to this, yes. A build designed around doing multiple instances of the same damage type are going to do fantastically well against a creature weak to that damage type. But they are also going to do fantastically badly against a creature resistant to that damage type.

There are two more things to consider in the balance analysis.

One: there is a lot of build cost and often action cost involved in setting up these builds that do multiple instances of the same damage type.

Two: how often does the party actually face a creature that has that particular weakness in real gameplay? Not just in theoretical or hypothetical encounters designed to show just how bad the math is and how horrible of an idea this and how Paizo really screwed this up.

One: The thing is that it takes almost no build cost. Spirit's build cost is measured entirely in gp for shining symbols and setting your runes to astral and holy. Fire's build cost is running witch or ash oracle plus setting two of your three damage runes to fire and brilliant. It's not like you weren't already running energy mutagens and such on melee martials, though those are now fire too instead of some other damage type.

Two: always. That's the power of inflicting weakness instead of just waiting for it to come up. Witch applies fire trait weakness at level 1. Ash oracle applies universal fire weakness at 6+. Wizard can apply any energy weakness at 12+. Spirit weakness is on an item you can buy multiples of at 9+. This isn't a "what if" that only applies once in awhile. This is a purpose built damage engine that acts as a core party strategy. And when it runs into immunity, you just do the usual de/buff and swing because it doesn't actually stop you from taking all the usual good options anyway.

I don't know what this even means in practice. If we're at the point of "fire damage is not a fire effect by traits", that's... something?

Like that doesn't make logical sense. How is literally setting something on fire not a "fire effect"?

The same thing that requires barbarian's dragon rage to explicitly state that it adds the damage trait that matches the damage type. That's just how it goes.

Elemental Betrayal in the remaster specifically removed fire damage as a weakness it can grant. It only works with things that have the fire trait.

Energy mutagens, weapon siphons, and brilliant runes are examples of fire damage without the trait that post remaster don’t work with EB. They still work with the higher level and often save required options available to the 12th level wizard feat, ashes oracle focus spell, and genie sorcerer focus spell.

Well that's unfortunate. Hm. Not sure EBs worth it if it's limited to only the base fire rune. Draconic barrage doesn't have the fire trait either. Dragon barbarian rage gains the trait. Presumably a weapon siphon would still work since the base bomb the damage comes from has the trait but that's debatable.

What other sources do we have? Seal fate is pitiful. That one oracle spell which can be poached at level 12 and scales really nice. A few other spells with pitiful weakness amounts or that require failed saves. Oracle stocks in the rise it seems.

Blazing Armory now grants double weakness procs now, for the whole team, at higher levels.

This is a pretty neat tech, but too slot intensive I think.

On the other hand, wizard finally has a real niche. At level 12 they have forcible energy to apply weakness to any energy type.

Much like NPCs with counterspell or subtle spell vs parties that love silence, GMs will add kip up the more often you frustrate them with trip spam.

Elemental betrayal and shining symbol are almost identical in weakness until the level 17 upgrade. At 9 when shining symbols become available, EB provides weakness 4 vs symbol's weakness 5 and they even out at 13.

It's my honest opinion that, given how much earlier EB is available, you can build completely around fire damage and symbol can be skipped until 17 when the weakness hits 10. At that point you just run both to trigger weakness 10 and weakness 6 multiple times per attack. Just need to find some time to test it.

I wouldn't ever say casters were masters of hitting weaknesses, or at least they're not so much better at it than martials that I'd make a distinction between the two.

They don't really do physical damage and weaknesses to electric, acid, etc are rare enough that martials can hit the most common weaknesses often enough with mutagens and runes anyway. They're also not really hitting weakness to weapon material outside of needle darts, an attack roll cantrip, while the most common material weakness, silver, is trivial thanks to silver salve.

Does feel a little bad I guess that they fall even further behind with exploiting this new damage source, but casters were never great at sustained damage through the day anyway.