Hi everyone,
1- My warpriest wants to use the Sacred Form spell in combination with his Spined Shield since this battle form has hands, but I'm not sure if it is allowed. I know that according to the rules, a battle form can benefit from the circumstance bonust to AC that the shield provides. What confuses me is the "gear is absorbed" part in the battle form explanation inside the polymorph trait:
If you take on a battle form with a polymorph spell, the special statistics can be adjusted only by circumstance bonuses, status bonuses, and penalties. Unless otherwise noted, the battle form prevents you from casting spells, speaking, and using most manipulate actions that require hands. (If there's doubt about whether you can use an action, the GM decides.) Your gear is absorbed into you; the constant abilities of your gear still function, but you can't activate any items. If a polymorph effect causes you to increase in size, you must have space to expand into or the effect is disrupted.
¿Is the intent of this rule that the shield gets absorbed into the battle form, and that usually the circumstance bonus comes into play when there is Cover, or can you keep it in your hand? If you get to keep the shield, can you activate the "Fire Spine" ability since it is not merged?
I'm inclined to keep it simple and allow the character to use the shield as usual, but I'm not sure if I'm missing something here. Thoughts?
2- The fighter has taken the 10th-level feat Debilitating. On paper it seems quite powerful for a fighter to inflic slowed 1 on hit with no save allowed. What are your experiences with this feat? have you houseruled it somehow?
Thanks a lot!!
Checking Debilitating Shot, there doesn't seem to be any ambiguous text there.
Aiming for a weak point, you impede your foe with a precise shot. Make a ranged weapon Strike. If it hits and deals damage, the target is slowed 1 until the end of its next turn.
It is a 2A flourish action though, so there is some cost to it. Another wrinkle is that slow/stun does not stack, so it'll disincentivize other PCs from using Slow effects.
Honestly seems like an appropriate power for a Fighter. When vs a single boss, spending +1A to slow 1 is very, very good. But any time the party is outnumbered, it's not a good use of the Fighter's action.
It's also important to remember that on paper, a Fighter is *supposed* to have better actions than it's peers. Fighter lacks the chassis power of things like Rogue's Sneak Attack & Debilitating Strike.
Fighter only has their accuracy, and their meta-Strike actions. Reactive Strike included. The point being that, their actions are supposed to be a bit better than the rest.
For an example of the opposite, you have classes like Alchemist with some rather terrible feats, or perhaps I should vaguely gesture at caster feats, lol.
The power get per class feat spend really does vary a ton by class, which kiiiinda is imo a BIG dev mistake in pf2 due to the archetyping system.
It's even worse when Paizo throws those powerful "fixer feats" at Lvl 1 & 2. Front-loading classes with such powerful feats really kinda breaks feat balance due to archetype poaching.
Like, it was a baaad idea to put Oracle cursebound actions as L1 feats, free to poach.
I had a game where another player took Debilitating Shot, it can indeed be very strong but he did run into a couple of situations where he hit but dealt no damage (he was using a composite shortbow) due to Resistance, which meant it didn't do anything.
That said it's still amazing vs solo bosses, against an encounter with multiples enemies it's alright but not crazy.
Debilitating shot is good against "boss" type enemies. Single enemies that are higher level than the party, where robbing them of a single action might be incredibly powerful, because it might deny them the use of a "super awesome 3 action ability". And it can be used every round, as long as the fighter hits. Which incentivizes the party to debuff the boss as much as possible to allow the fighter more accurate shots, to keep them slow. It's amazing in the right circumstances. But if you're fighting multiple opponents it's probably not worth doing.
The best thing is, it really encourages the group to strategize and plan around its use. So, while it's a strong ability it's exactly the kind of ability I'd like to see more of. Something that encourages tactical group play.