pachydermic's page

This adventure can be easily incorporated into various virtual tabletops, run off of digital devices, or printed out and played at a table.

Does that mean that this will be released in the same way that those bounties were for Foundry VTT?

I forgot to add what I liked about the class.

I like it a lot thematically and I like that it's a class that doesn't use focus points or any other resource other than the bullets in their guns. And I like how many of the feats are there to modify your strikes.

All of those together gives it a pretty neat toolbox feeling while still retaining that martial class feel of not having to manage a bunch of per day/per encounter resources. You can shooter's aim as much as your heart desires.

I decided to create a 9th level sniper to help imagine how some of the features of the gunslinger would work out. My goal for this character was to focus on crit fishing to try and stack up huge amounts of damage, but at the end of the day I'm not sure the build is really satisfying as it ended up seeming pretty clumsy even though I think that this kind of character should be possible to execute on.

The main problem is the action economy. This problem comes from the inherent problems of guns in general, but also from how the various feats the gunslinger gets don't quite synergize in a way that really makes me excited. There are also issues of complexity and overall damage output which might be even more of a problem.

Unfortunately, I made the character on paper so I'll have to post the details in text form. I'm also playing with the free archetype variant. It's possible I made some mistakes here, but I'm more interested in the big picture anyways.

Level 9

Str - 10
Dex - 18
Con - 18
Int - 12
Wis - 12
Cha - 16

Ancestry: Razortooth goblin
Ancestry feats: Very Sneaky, Twitchy, Goblin Scuttle

Skill feats: Intimidating glare (background), Assurance athletics, Cat fall, Powerful leap, Swift sneak

General feats: Fleet, Incredible initiative

Class feats: Firearm ace, Risky reload, Running reload, Shattering shot, Shooter's aim

Archetype feats: Rogue dedication, Sneak attacker, Nimble dodge, Dread striker

Skills:
Master in Intimidate (background) and Stealth
Trained in Acrobatics, Athletics, Crafting, Deception, Performance, Survival, Thievery, Warfare lore

Gear:
+1 Striking Shock Arquebus
+1 Resilient Leather armor
Demon mask
Boots of bounding speed
A bunch of lesser bombs for hitting weaknesses with shattering shot

How I imagine playing this character is avoiding notice to roll a really good stealth check to kick off combat - when I go before an enemy they're flat-footed due to the rogue dedication - which might let me steady and then make a vital shot or move and make a shooter's aim shot. On later rounds I'd running reload or risky reload and hopefully hide or intimidate to get even more sneak attacks in at hopefully a rate of 1/round.

This scenario brings up the issue of complexity while calculating damage. There are 5? boolean variables to consider: regular hit/critical hit, firearm ace, flat-footed target, one shot one kill and vital shot. That's like 32 combinations? Not only that, but the fatal trait makes things even more complicated. Do I also double the bleed from vital shot on a critical hit?

Anyways, I roughly calculated the max damage to be 8d12 + 12 p/b + 6d6 precision + 2d6 shock + 4d6 bleed which averages to 92 damage or 118 with 1 round of bleed. That's a lot of damage! But it requires a ton of setup and can only be done once per combat and requires everything to go perfectly because of the huge burden these special feats take on the action economy. I quickly calculated how much a giant instinct barbarian does on a crit (with a fatal d12 weapon) and it's around 73 with a single action and basically no setup whatsoever (other than closing the distance which they are pretty great at doing). I'm sure rogues or crossbow rangers could beat this character in a pure damage race as well... These classes also can just do these huge amounts of damage with no real feat investment - this is just the baseline scenario.

Even in the most ideal situation I won't be dishing out the kind of damage that I need to put out to really compete. And it's incredibly complicated. And stuff like shooter's aim doesn't synergize with vital shot at all which is pretty frustrating - if shooter's aim was just a better "steady" action that gave you a +2 circumstance on your next shot that'd at least be an improvement. Unlike many other classes, hasting this character really doesn't help much because that won't let you reload or use any of the special attacks like risky reload or shooter's aim with the extra action.

I think that either the damage needs to be increased, vital shot is just added onto the first shot like one shot one kill is, many of these action-saving feats need to be class features instead, the action-saving feats should be even more efficient, and/or changes need to be made to things like vital shot and shooter's aim to work better together.

For anyone who made it this far, thanks for reading. I doubt this character is in any way optimal, but it's the type of character I'd like to be able to play.

I haven't gotten to playtest yet, and I might not get a chance at all before the test ends, so maybe it's different in real life. Buuut I kind of doubt it.

Unicore wrote:

I think we could use an items and equipment focused book [...]

Speculations about a "Secrets of Equipment" book has been floated a couple of times in this thread, but am I misremembering, or didn't Eric Mona specifically say that they wouldn't be doing those types of "ultimate books" past Secrets of Magic?

What I got from that statement was that they want their new 2e books to be more all-encompassing and general purpose than just a list of items and a few rules to go along with it. I could imagine a book that introduces guns and other technological items, has a couple of classes and archetypes, and delves into the lore of that tech and the regions where it comes from.

Though now that I say it, that sounds an awful lot like secrets of magic. I guess I have a hard time imagining what the alternative is. All we can really conclude from his statement is that whatever book it is won't be called "Secrets of X".

Anyways I'm excited to see what the new classes will be! I hope someone posts some more teasers because it's fun to think about what they might be.

pachydermic wrote:

This is an interesting point to bring up.

I don't think every strategy needs to be equally good at every point in the game. That's not what you're directly arguing for - I think the point you're trying to make is that compared to the endgame power level the early-game power level is too low - but I don't see why that's necessarily a problem either. Unless everything has the same power-level then isn't this sort of issue that you'd expect to pop up?

That is what I'm arguing for, actually. Is it an achievable goal? No. But I think the game should strive to be as close to this as possible, and in a lot of points it looks like it doesn't even try. This one is an example, there any many others (caster-main gishes, offensive spellcasting, shield blocking as a Druid, a lot of feats that start out good but scale terribly, etc).

Well it's wrong to say that they aren't trying. Working in the TTRPG industry is a labor of love and I'm sure they are working hard pretty much all the time... I do question whether some of the writers fully understand the rules sometimes, but that's a different issue that only applies to specific feats for the most part.

The game can't do everything perfectly well and there are inherently lots of trade-offs which means even an ideal solution might have to leave some concepts behind to better accommodate other ones.

Of course you're right that Paizo should still strive for these goals. While balancing issues like these are probably not their top concern, I do think they care and are trying (and listening) though.

But to my main point.

There doesn't have to be any drastic changes to the game like adding half dex to damage or some other strange permanent solution to what could be a temporary problem. I don't think the issue you're talking about is as reliant on the core math of the game as you're making it out to be.

PF2 has a built-in tool for addressing these kinds of concerns - feats. Can't you imagine them adding a strong feat that helps buff these builds? Even if it kind of outshines previous feats?

For fighter there's double strike for two-handed agile weapon users, but there's not an obviously useful level 2 feat for either dual-weapon or archer characters. There's assisting shot, but it's not a build-changing feat. Plenty of room for something to help out archers. 1 class feat is absolutely potentially consequential enough to address your concerns.

They could even address it with a class-specific archetype if they have to go that far. I have definitely wanted more weapon-specific fighting style feats (the one I'd really like to see is a knife-fighting archetype for rogues and fighters), and these could potentially be more powerful because they have a steep cost for access and lock you out of other dedications.

So I think that the most realistic and feasible solution is actually extremely simple and something that Paizo is guaranteed to do - print more feats! Or if it's truly necessary you can errata in bonus feats like they did with the alchemist and add a dex requirement to benefit from them.

I don't know what these magical feats would be... but then again I am not a game designer.

This is an interesting point to bring up.

I don't think every strategy needs to be equally good at every point in the game. That's not what you're directly arguing for - I think the point you're trying to make is that compared to the endgame power level the early-game power level is too low - but I don't see why that's necessarily a problem either. Unless everything has the same power-level then isn't this sort of issue that you'd expect to pop up?

In my experience front line character truly take a brutal beating in 2e, and even with the extra HP from ancestry a single crit has the potential to melt a 16 con heavy armor and shield wielding dwarf. So maybe early on str-based characters *should* be able to do a bit of extra damage to make up for all the damage they'll be taking... especially early on when it can be pretty shocking how deadly the enemies can be.

Swashbucklers, rogues, investigators, and flurry rangers all seem like they have good in or out of combat ways to use their dex, but dex-based fighters and monks are missing out a bit as far as I can tell.

I think the real way to fix these problems is just with new feats. Because all of these classes get feats at 1st and 2nd level there's plenty of room to open up some more options for dex-based characters and the benefit of these fixes is that they can be on a per-class basis. Or even a 1st level ancestry feat could do the same thing.

The most obvious kinds of options would be allow you to add dex instead of str to athletics checks to make certain kinds of maneuvers if the weapon you're using has the appropriate trait. Or extra benefits for using acrobatics like the swashbuckler has the option to get. Stuff like that.

I miss Pathfinder Fridays so much

I really do as well. Pathfinder Fridays allowed for pretty direct communication in that more official setting which allowed them to talk about more issues directly which I obviously really appreciated.

I think this whole working from home thing will be going on at least one and a half more months (best case scenario) and maybe even through the end of the year (not even the worst case scenario), so I hope that they find a way to bring that back sooner rather than later.

Umm, the OP wasn't asking for a dev response to their post... They were asking about links to previous dev comments about alchemists. No one here seems to actually be commenting on that.

In response, to my knowledge, there's been no discussion about the current state of alchemist. The last I can remember was before the first errata came out when, I believe, they acknowledged that there were some problems with alchemists either when or before they released the errata. I don't have a link to that particular video, does someone else?

I just rewatched that part of the errata stream. They acknowledged there was a problem with the mutagenist since its features actually didn't do anything, but they didn't allude to any other issues with the class - at least not in that part of the video.

They DID reiterate that they are definitely listening. Of course that's good, but I just wish I knew whether or not more changes are planned for the class. I get why they don't communicate things before they're done (just look at what happened to those No Man's Sky guys), but I am anxious for some clarity on this issue in particular.

Yeah I'd be pretty surprised if they responded to this post.

It's too bad that they haven't had any discussions about it so far though. I think it'd be really interesting.

Are you aware of any direct comments they made about the class (specifically the alchemist) during the original 2e playtest or where to find those?

I appreciate your reply, but what I'm really looking for is any comments from the designers or Paizo in general about the class like they did when they discussed the playtest classes on Twitch.

Personally, I've seen enough discussion between players like us and I'd like to hear what Paizo's views on the class are and I'd *really* like to know if they are planning any further errata to the class or if there's no changes like that planned for the foreseeable future.

Recently there's been a lot of discussion about the alchemist on Reddit. I don't want to revisit or argue about the strength of the class here (as a quick search shows that's been done a lot already), but rather I want to ask if there have been any comments on the forums/twitter/twitch streams by the designers on the state of the alchemist. I would love to see some of their thoughts discussed in the same way that they had a stream about the playtest classes.

I'm interested because as I'm sure everyone knows the alchemist is a pretty divisive class and while it has many defenders it seems there are also many people that are unsatisfied with it. But it's hard to get a good sense of what people really think through online discussions since small numbers of people can so easily sway the conversation. Maybe Paizo has data? In any case, I think hearing what the designers' points of view on the topic are would be really interesting.

So does anyone have any links where this kind of discussion takes place? Or would any designers be willing to discuss it here? If not, I'd just like to point out that myself and I think many other people would be interested in hearing or reading some thoughts about the reaction to the class, what its power level is right now and whether that's hitting the right mark or whether the class is achieving the goals of satisfying that core fantasy of the kind of "sciencey" based character right now (or is that even the core fantasy of the class?). I'm sure there will be a lot of exciting stuff in the APG that can't be shared yet, but many of the concerns are about more fundamental aspects of the class and that's what I'd like to hear more about. Even just hearing whether there's been a decision on whether or not more errata changes to the class and class feats are coming would be really useful information.

Well not gonna lie, I mostly skimmed what you wrote. I think it's interesting how passionate you are about the game. Something must have resonated with you emotionally to compel you to write that much. I guess you just had really high hopes considering that you ended up feeling disappointed.

Most of your issues will be solved as they add more feats, obviously. Compare what kinds of characters you can build from the CRB of 2e to *just* the CRB of 1e and there's a world of difference. Like yeah, technically multiclassing is something that the dedications aren't a complete replacement for, but other than that the number of options are massively expanded and generally more interesting or consequential. Also the choices don't pigeon-hole you as much as 1e feats did (weapon specialization feats, for example).

Many people are eagerly awaiting the APG. I know I am. To me, the CRB seems like a reasonable success (though not perfect by any means) out of the gate particularly because of the fundamental changes to rules, action economy and the added *number* of customization options in the form of more types of feats. These aren't the things people are complaining about in my experience. People are more concerned with the builds feeling underpowered/underwhelming and the options generally being a bit lacking. I mean the CRB is already huge, they did have to draw a line somewhere. I think it's a bit much to expect them to have crammed even more character options in there as the book is truly comically large already.

So yeah, I think the theory-crafting isn't as fun as it could be right now. But that's something that should work itself out as they release more quality content - it all depends on the future stuff they release being actually good. But I think the CRB succeeds where it's really important for it to succeed. It laid a good foundation for interesting content to be added onto. Much more successfully than the 1e CRB in my opinion.

tl;dr I agree the CRB doesn't have the best or most enjoyable character options. I think it *did* succeed where it really needed to because future splat-books can always add more fun character options, but can't really fix the rules if they're fundamentally flawed.

Wielding a large weapon if you're small/medium can usually be done, but it gives the user clumsy 1 and no extra damage. Small/medium creatures can't normally use large armor.

Source: page 295 of the CRB (can't find that rule on AoN).

Enlarge explicitly grants extra damage, no?