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Silver Crusade

dmerceless said wrote:
Actually I do have one. In one of my level 8 games, we had a duelist Fighter with Wizard Dedication and Basic Wizard Spellcasting. He picked some spells that helped him in fights like Shield, Blur and Haste, and it worked really well actually.

Thanks, that actually looks like a fun build and I'll check it out. What was the first level he/she got to cast spells. It looks to be fourth, if so they have the same restriction that i was explaining before(2nd and 3rd level being used to build the concept.) but a much higher upside of 3rd level spells.

That makes it much more worth it I'll play around with it.

Edge93 said wrote:

My chapters 1/4/7 party has had a few. From the get-go we've had a Sorcerer with Fighter multiclass and a Druid with Cleric multiclass. One was going for a pseudo Draconic Disciple and the other was for story reasons. Both worked out pretty well.

The Sorc/Fighter mainly only used Fighter MC to get martial weapons and a bit better armor as well as a Fighter feat or two, but it made him a solid melee threat on top of his powerful spells, especially after the change to somatic casting allowed him to 2-hand his sword. He didn't pick up much Fighter stuff because Sorcerers are pretty tight on feats but what he had made him a good gish and worked out well with the new action economy, especially when he was hasted and buffed.

The Druid/Cleric used it to pick p some nice buffs to supplement his blast and polymorph spell choices, as well as a little healing sometimes.

In part 4 our Alchemist picked up Wizard multiclass. At first it was mainly for buffs like True Strike, Mirror Image, and Haste, but when we hit higher levels and he could pick up to level 6 spells he got even better stuff like long-duration See Invisibility and the combo of True Strike with Enervation or Disintegrate, which gave him a heavy debuff or risky damage option to supplement his more reliable bombs, making him more versatile all around.

Going from Part 4 to Part 7 our Ranger invested in some Druid multiclass mainly for a couple AoE blasts like Chain Lightning and Cone of Cold to supplement the single-target focus that they were mostly built towards until then, as well as a couple of other goodies like Jump, Gust of Wind, and Earthbind. This also worked out quite well, AoEs are actually a pretty good opener for a lot of hard fights (Especially when multiple players have them), and with the errata spell buffs you still have pretty good damage even being a couple spell levels behind. The lower DC hurts a bit but wasn't too bad when targeting weak saves and typically fighting lower level opponents. For tougher foes you used spells that were touch instead of DC or otherwise didn't rely on saves too much.

All in all I've seen a lot of good use of multiclassing in Doomsday Dawn, there were some other examples outside of our main party but I don't recall them offhand.

Thanks for replying. I'll check some of these out. I really like the Alchemist/Wizard Archetype with True Strike.

Now I have a plethora of examples! Thanks again.

Silver Crusade

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Helmic said wrote:
Rogue Dedication specifically seems not very good since by the time you can get it Sneak Attacker is right on the cusp of being made meaningless by magic weapons. That it doesn't scale is perplexing. I think gating archetype feats that late also unnecessarily delays the time it takes for a character concept to come online.

Thanks for your reply and I Completely agree! and this is my main problem with the system, you have to spend multiple useful class feat slots to make your "Archetype" come to fruition and by the time you get there it's obsolete and static.

Helmic said wrote:
However, overall you can now chose exactly what class features or feats you want from your rogue without having to sacrifice so much to get the entire suite of class features as a bundle, level by level. This hurts concepts that can't make his use of every last thing a class might give you at first level, and it also was extremely limiting when designing new classes to have to keep signature and powerful abilities out of reach of those one to three level dips.

I understand your argument, especially the about the first 3 levels, however, in my experience, in the previous d20 systems i was able to hone my character concepts exactly as I envisioned them and never felt held back by the system. In fact, I felt that it was too un-restricting. All that was needed was a little bit of thought into requirements and progression trees.

Helmic said wrote:

And since character concepts often relied on some synergy of abilities, in PF1 multi-classed builds could take ages to come online. If you were wanting to play something of a Fighter but needed access to level 3 spells to pull off a particular combo, you were looking at potentially 7+ levels where your character can't do much of anything exciting because all their classes are behind the curve.

PF2, there's no multiple dead levels where your character just isn't functioning. If you want to use a very powerful feature or feat from another class, you don't have to invest lots of levels getting features you won't use, you just continue picking your main class's feats and operating as normal until you get access to that stronger ability.

I am Okay with waiting to pull off combos that i invest in as long as I can stay useful in the meantime. In my example above, I would still consider my 2nd and 3rd levels as dead levels because I would have forgone choosing some useful class features to get my concept on line.

You may not have one (And that is okay), but do you have an play-test experience that you can share with the current multi-class system that worked? I continually hear that people love the new system as a concept, which i understand and share the belief that unhealthy min-maxing and optimization hurts the game experience, but do not provide any anecdotal substance that I've been able to see in these forums.

Like I said.. I may be missing something completely obvious. :)

Silver Crusade

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That was a very good analysis, especially the 3 action system (this a game changer), although I only have one point of which I thoroughly disagree and that is with the feat based multi-class system. I'm really trying to see why so many people like it.

Maybe i am completely missing something.

The following is just the most extreme example out of a few others that we encountered.

From another thread:{Why I dislike where 2E's Multi-classing is going }

xzzion said wrote:


The trope I am experimenting with is a Ranger/Rogue, an "archetype" that I have played for decades over several editions and a class combination that I am very familiar with and that I use to test new systems..

Mainly the idea is a Bow Ranger with Sneak Attack capabilities, with the ability to sneak, and give the group utility by disabling traps. All of the while I willingly trade off attack bonus, some resilience, and waiting longer for ranger spells.

So I take:
1st: Hunted Shot
2nd: Rogue Dedication (class), Skill Feat, Skill Feat
3rd: General Feat
4th: Sneak Attacker (class)

With the current rules update I have to wait until 4th level to get the ability I am building for and when I am finally able to get Sneak attacker I spend two class feats to get a nerfed version (1d4 instead of 1d6) and it doesn't even advance as I gain levels. But hey, I get 3 more trained skills that I arguably don't really need, but guess it's a nice addition. When all is said and done the Rogue Dedication is not really worth it and really ends up being 2 class feats = half of the time my enemies are flat-footed in the surprise round (which I don't get to take advantage of for 2 levels) and 3 skills which could be better spent elsewhere.

In my opinion, they should keep the system where you get to choose what class you want to level up in as you advance with the addtion of whatever you select at 1st level is your PRIMARY class. The primary class will allow you to receive full benefits of that class and any non-primary class that is selected afterward should be a step down in effectiveness (i.e. 1d4 instead of a 1d6 sneak attack that scales normally) and lose access to some of the other benefits. Perhaps you can cap the number of classes that you can be as well. 3 sounds right.

If you pair this with a thoroughly thought out class requirement system you can prevent the unhealthy min-maxing and "optimization" that we all experienced in previous d20 editions and still obtain freedom of customization options that this system offers.

I still remain hopeful and my group will continue to use a majority of these play-test rules as we play through Return of the Runelords.

See you all on the flip. :)

Silver Crusade

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I have to agree with the OP here and I will illustrate what I am speaking about below.

The trope I am experimenting with is a Ranger/Rogue, an "archetype" that I have played for decades over several editions and a class combination that I am very familiar with and that I use to test new systems..

Mainly the idea is a Bow Ranger with Sneak Attack capabilities, with the ability to sneak, and give the group utility by disabling traps. All of the while I willingly trade off attack bonus, some resilience, and waiting longer for ranger spells.

So I take:
1st: Hunted Shot
2nd: Rogue Dedication (class), Skill Feat, Skill Feat
3rd: General Feat
4th: Sneak Attacker (class)

With the current rules update I have to wait until 4th level to get the ability I am building for and when I am finally able to get Sneak attacker I spend two class feats to get a nerfed version (1d4 instead of 1d6) and it doesn't even advance as I gain levels. But hey, I get 3 more trained skills that I arguably don't really need, but guess it's a nice addition. When all is said and done the Rogue Dedication is not really worth it and really ends up being 2 class feats = half of the time my enemies are flat-footed in the surprise round (which I don't get to take advantage of for 2 levels) and 3 skills which could be better spent elsewhere.

That said, I love a lot of what the playtest has to offer, especially the action economy (this is a game changer) and I am trying other multi-class combinations and most of the others fair only slightly better than the example above.

I am hopeful that Paizo is just trying to get test data for the core classes and will, in time, completely overhaul the multi-classing in its current form while mitigating the 3.5/PF 1st edition multi-class build abuse and allowing for reasonable customization.

Happy Playtesting!

Silver Crusade

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Our group is using the base AoO playtest rule with two exceptions:
1. It's global (everyone is able to do it)
2. If you are not trained (i.e. Fighter, Paladin 5, etc.) you get a -4 modifier just like any other skill to match core math of the system.

Everything else is the same and we have had great results.
Making AoOs global restricts movement in combat and adds a very cool movement and positioning dynamic for martial classes that cannot be underestimated.

I liked this addition to D&D3e and the cool feats that PF1 added.

Happy Playtesting!