queuebay's page

The notion that divine is bad for blasting dates back from before the remaster, and is since outdated: the low-rank options may still not be great, but you get plenty of choice at higher levels, and some genuinely top-tier options that are unlikely to hit resistances or immunities.

What are your go-to divine blasts at higher ranks?

You've mentioned Spirit Blast, which is indeed good single target damage at rank 6 (and only rank 6 IMO, since it is superseded by Execute immediately at rank 7). But this spell alone isn't enough to be a good blaster, right? You need to be able to target more saves, which I feel is more much important than evading resistances/immunities, especially since high-Fort monsters become more prevalent at higher levels. What blasting spells do you use to cover other saves or AoE? (Also, I feel that single target spells barely count as blasting in the first place, otherwise you could say that the best blaster is a Magus or a Barbarian . When it comes to caster damage, AoE is where they shine.)

I know Divine Wrath gets a lot of praise, and it's definitely a good spell, but in my experience it's not a great blast. In practice, in the situations where I wanted to cast a big AoE spell with no friendly fire (i.e. vs lots of mainly lower level enemies), I would much rather do double damage on a crit fail rather than inflict Slowed 1 and Sickened 2. Not being able to inflict double damage greatly tamps down on the amount of damage you're putting out with Divine Wrath. Also spells that do d10 per rank just feel worse than spells that do 2d6 per rank, not just because it's less damage but also that you're much more likely to get screwed by variance (I rolled a 5 on a 4d10 last week. Rank 4 Fireball would never.) And again, it targets Fortitude, and I consider being able to target multiple defenses to be the most important part of blasting. The primal list has enough spells to get around resistance to fire or electricity or whatever, but I can't find a good way to get around Fortitude saves for a Divine blaster. (N.B. I am talking about blasting only. Buffs and debuffs are appreciated but need not apply.)

Okay, what about something crazy with Shadow Sheathe? If you put a loaded Dagger Pistol into a Shadow Sheathe (possible because the melee mode has Thrown), and you draw, switch modes, fire, then draw a new copy of the Dagger Pistol from the Shadow Sheathe, is the copy loaded?

If yes, then it works with Crescent Cross in a similar way: make the knife half of the Crescent Cross your Gleaming Blade, take Hurl at the Horizon so it gains the thrown trait, which means it qualifies to be put inside a Shadow Sheathe. Then you can draw it for free, switch to ranged mode for one action, then use Crescent Cross Training.

For this to work, you have to keep your spark in the Gleaming Blade I guess, otherwise your Crescent Cross loses the thrown trait. But this way you can get infinite uses of Crescent Cross Training as a three action activity. Maybe usable at level 10 with Exemplar dedication and two ikons. Or give up Transcendence as a Exemplar, which seems bad.

this "made no mistakes and is still screwed" cases get kinda just dumb

I agree with what you said earlier about it being immersion breaking if the GM suddenly dumbs down monster behavior mid-fight, but I personally think it is just as immersion breaking for every encounter to be 'fair' for the players, to the extent that neither bad luck nor powerful bosses should be allowed to take a player down before they get to react. For me, this shatters the verisimilitude of the game world.

Taking the Abomination Vaults example, of course level 12 Belcorra should be able to do whatever she wants to a level 8 party in a fight. That's the whole point of Belcorra. The narrative of the AP establishes her as an extremely powerful sorcerer. Her not intending to kill the whole party is character exposition, and in fact it makes the final fight easier because Belcorra is playing with her food and showing her cards to the party. The sensible course of action for a well prepared party would be to immediately flee when she appears.

I would encourage the GM to encourage the players to run, and run a Victory Points system for 'escaping Belcorra' if a one-sided losing encounter is not to the players' taste. Possibly the GM core should also teach this: allow an escape scene if the fight looks lost or too difficult - the party bolts, carrying unconscious member(s) with them (each unconscious body could increase the difficulty of escaping). Transition to some defined subsystem for escape or something like that.

I feel like the notion that a player character should never go from 100 to 0 is completely absurd in a TTRPG.

Imagine a fresh, green, level 1 party going to their first dungeon, and they are told there is some extremely dangerous ogre boss down there. Now, imagine that the wizard of the party is a carefree sort of fellow, who is haphazardly and noisily opening doors left and right, without any regard to whether there might be any enemies behind the door. Inevitably, the wizard is going to open a door and find an ogre waiting for them. In this scenario, going from full to Dying 2 is the least I would expect. I would argue that the wizard should be turned into a fine pink mist outright, but low level PF2e has already been tuned so that this is not going to happen. This is the TTRPG equivalent of running into an obvious landmine.

I would make a similar argument for being ambushed. If a party does not put up adequate precautions in a dangerous area (watches, the Alarm spell, Cozy Cabin, camouflage, a ditch maybe), I would consider it a failure of game design if the hp math was tuned such that none of the party could go down in the first round of an ambush.

If PF2e was like Pokemon and encounters are things that just happen to you as you walk around, then sure, we should make sure agency is preserved by keeping TTK high. But this is not a video game, and players should be punished for bad out-of-combat decision making in-combat. Arguably, finding yourself in a fair fight against a boss as a low level party means the party has already made a mistake, so I am fine with someone getting gibbed on round 1.

So what are the ~30-40 (arcane) spells that a sorcerer can take that would be functionally as good as prepared spellcasting? It seems like this is the key point of contention and it would helpful for people who think this to actually enumerate what they think these spells are to see if there's actually a consensus. I'm sure everyone can agree on the top 10-15, but I wonder about the rest. If there's no consensus here then maybe there's room for the wizard after all.