I like simplicity.
What about removing it from combat, but keeping it functionally as is?
If it's having an undesired effect on your combat experiences, then simply take it out of combat. Then you're basically back to having combat be really close to your 3.5 experience.
The fix: have the act of channeling energy take longer than 1 standard action, like say 1 minute. Fluff-wise, it takes a period of time concentrating to make the effects of the channeling manifest.
This change makes it not viable as an attack form, but may slightly strengthen the Turn Undead feat as that would become the only reliable way of using channeling energy in combat. In fact, you may want to add a Rebuke Undead feat as a counter-balance for evil clerics.
1) Have Channel Energy be a 1-round action (similar to 1-round casting of spells like summoning and sleep) that provokes AoOs and requires a caster level check if damage is taken.Oops! we've been running this as a full round action.
I like simplicity.
What about removing it from combat, but keeping it functionally as is?
If it's having an undesired effect on your combat experiences, then simply take it out of combat. Then you're basically back to having combat be really close to your 3.5 experience.
The fix: have the act of channeling energy take longer than 1 standard action, like say 1 minute. Fluff-wise, it takes a period of time concentrating to make the effects of the channeling manifest.
This change makes it not viable as an attack form, but may slightly strengthen the Turn Undead feat as that would become the only reliable way of using channeling energy in combat. In fact, you may want to add a Rebuke Undead feat as a counter-balance for evil clerics.
Interesting. That's real close to what I did with Channel Energy in my game. Channeling takes 1 minute, but the cleric has the option to reduce that to standard action by having the healing heal 1/2 the normal amount. And the Turn Undead feat works as a standard action.
Out of curiosity (and because I feel left out because you answered everyone's proposition except for mine, snif), what do you think of divorcing the (same) positive energy = healing AND damaging undead.
I had run into similar "issues", not that it broke the game, but changes in the tides of battle caused by channel as healing were too significant for my personal tastes. I house-ruled that all healing effects (healing living beings for positive channelers and undead for negative channelers) change to touch effects, using d8+level instead of 30 ft burst based on d6.
Ultimately, it became the de-facto spontaneous cure spell...
'findel
Shame on me! How did I miss your suggestion? Maybe I scrolled too fast...
While I think your suggestion would drastically reduce the excessive clerical healing, and it would solve my concern, I was looking for something that didn't actually create two mechanics (one for undead, one for healing). I'd like one simple mechanic for the whole shebang if possible, though I'm beginning to think that anything that limits the over-healing enough to be worthwhile will overly nerf the undead angle.
It's a wicked pisser this is...
I like simplicity.
What about removing it from combat, but keeping it functionally as is?
If it's having an undesired effect on your combat experiences, then simply take it out of combat. Then you're basically back to having combat be really close to your 3.5 experience.
The fix: have the act of channeling energy take longer than 1 standard action, like say 1 minute. Fluff-wise, it takes a period of time concentrating to make the effects of the channeling manifest.
This change makes it not viable as an attack form, but may slightly strengthen the Turn Undead feat as that would become the only reliable way of using channeling energy in combat. In fact, you may want to add a Rebuke Undead feat as a counter-balance for evil clerics.
Yikes!
Lemme tell you about one of my all-time least favorite tactics as a DM, going all the way back to OD&D.
Fear. And all related/similar effects, like turning undead.
I hate them. With a passion.
I like tactical battlemats, but they're only so big. When an undead runs off into the deep dark dungeon, I suddenly have to keep track of it. When 8 undead run off, I have to keep track of them. And if they run in different directions, well, it gets irritating.
I eventually found my way to Everquest 1. In that game, if a monster ran away, it would eventually return - and bring half the dungeon with it. You'd get creamed. Wiped out. TPK. And once I started using that tactic as a DM, bringing half the dungeon to find out what scared Zombie Zed so badly, well, I still hated Fear (etc.) but now nobody dared to use it. Nobody turned undead unless they knew they were somewhere safe, or knew they could destroy them.
When I found Pathfinder, all my dreams came true. Well, at least on this one subject. No more undead running all over the dungeon. And none of my players have even considered (out loud) taking the Turn Undead feat.
Problem solved.
Which means I won't be very likely to run with this idea. I like the fact that clerics can channel energy against undead in combat, and I like the fact that the undead stay put and suck it up rather than running all over the place.
I really like those things. A lot.
Shame on me! How did I miss your suggestion? Maybe I scrolled too fast...
While I think your suggestion would drastically reduce the excessive clerical healing, and it would solve my concern, I was looking for something that didn't actually create two mechanics (one for undead, one for healing). I'd like one simple mechanic for the whole shebang if possible, though I'm beginning to think that anything that limits the over-healing enough to be worthwhile will overly nerf the undead angle.
It's a wicked pisser this is...
What about the inverse then? Make channeling only harm/heal undead? It has no effect on living beings. That brings it closer to the 3.5 model that it was derived from. Honestly, how much healing do adventurers need?
FWIW, although I'm running a low level campaign, I haven't experienced what you're going through as no players have chosen a cleric since we've started PF, but on the surface, I've never liked the idea of channeling since it was introduced in the Alpha playtest.
Out of curiosity (and because I feel left out because you answered everyone's proposition except for mine, snif), what do you think of divorcing the (same) positive energy = healing AND damaging undead.
I had run into similar "issues", not that it broke the game, but changes in the tides of battle caused by channel as healing were too significant for my personal tastes. I house-ruled that all healing effects (healing living beings for positive channelers and undead for negative channelers) change to touch effects, using d8+level instead of 30 ft burst based on d6.
Ultimately, it became the de-facto spontaneous cure spell...
'findel
Shame on me! How did I miss your suggestion? Maybe I scrolled too fast...
While I think your suggestion would drastically reduce the excessive clerical healing, and it would solve my concern, I was looking for something that didn't actually create two mechanics (one for undead, one for healing). I'd like one simple mechanic for the whole shebang if possible, though I'm beginning to think that anything that limits the over-healing enough to be worthwhile will overly nerf the undead angle.
It's a wicked pisser this is...
I get your point.
With my group, the suggestion passed rather smoothly because the effect becomes identical to the cleric's ability to spontaneously cast their highest cure spell. So the mechanic was altered but not new.
Other than that, there always the idea that the channel provides a total pool of dice. So it would still heal/deal 5d6 points of damage, but you'd have to divide it among legit targets rather than apply equally to all.
It would also suppress the must-have use of selective energy - as the feat would no longer be necessary - and solve the pulse-nova undead-smashing syndrome.
The ability would still be useful as ranged healing, but severely nerfed.
'findel
Or have it grant temporary hit points as a quick burst of positive energy, not a fully focused and applied burst?
Say if used as a standard action, it grants a number of temporary HP, perhaps even with the stipulation that the temporary HP from Channel does not stack, just take the best. However, if used as a 2 round action, it is properly focused and heals normally.
there always the idea that the channel provides a total pool of dice. So it would still heal/deal 5d6 points of damage, but you'd have to divide it among legit targets rather than apply equally to all.
It would also suppress the must-have use of selective energy - as the feat would no longer be necessary - and solve the pulse-nova undead-smashing syndrome.
The ability would still be useful as ranged healing, but severely nerfed.
Very interesting idea.
Maybe I'm too hung up on keeping the mechanic the same, but since I am, I'm afraid this idea would weaken the usefulness against undead. A 8th level cleric rolling 4d6 damage to divide amongst a horde of undead seems awfully weak.
I'm probably shooting myself in the foot trying to find one mechanic that works for healing and damage, reducing the healing but not nerfing the damage too mcuh. Maybe it can't be done.
Maybe I should revisit all these ideas without trying to cram them into a single mechanic.
Very interesting idea.Maybe I'm too hung up on keeping the mechanic the same, but since I am, I'm afraid this idea would weaken the usefulness against undead. A 8th level cleric rolling 4d6 damage to divide amongst a horde of undead seems awfully weak.
Indeed.
IMO, it would cripple one of the trademark ability of the cleric (destroying undead) below usefulness. That being said, I thing the cleric is a very capable class even without this feature. As far as destroying undead go, a non-channeling cleric is still very well equipped and probably ties with a paladin.
I'm probably shooting myself in the foot trying to find one mechanic that works for healing and damage, reducing the healing but not nerfing the damage too mcuh. Maybe it can't be done.Maybe I should revisit all these ideas without trying to cram them into a single mechanic.
I'm afraid it will be hard to find a satisfying compromise, but I understand, and to a certain extent approve, of your tenacity to keep the ability streamlined. Temptation to split features into this and that is very high with pathfinder as a toolkit, but ultimately too much options is like not enough.
I do think however, that it will be possible to find a way in which the ability IS split between healing and damaging, but using two mechanics that are both known and intuitive (in relation to the existing mechanics of the class). Personally, I'm satisfied with what I changed for my games (# of dice of channel = level of cure [level] wounds spell), but I'm sure that better solutions for you exist if we bend our mind enough.
Of course, there's always the possibility of dropping the healing part entirely, as previously suggested. If you are open to homebrew feats, replace Selective Channeling (no longer necessary) with some sort of Divine Reach where a cure X wounds spell can be used at 30 ft. reach by spending one use of channel energy, or something around those lines...
'findel
Of course, there's always the possibility of dropping the healing part entirely, as previously suggested...
I've never thought it was entirely a good move to allow a cleric to spontaneously cast cure spells AND channel energy to heal.
Imagine if you will that somewhere in this world exists a Pathfinder group consisting of a bunch of grizzled old veteran D&D players. In this hypothetical group are several players who have been playing since the 70s, including three veteran DMs with about 90 years of collective DMing experience.
Now suppose this group is all of the opinion that a typical group of Pathfinder heroes has access to far more healing than any similar group of heroes in any previous iteration of D&D. So much so that all of these veteran DMs despair of finding suitable combat challenges for Pathfinder groups. To the point that they all throw impossible challenges at the players, challenges that would have surely resulted in a TPK in any of their previous game versions, only to see the players defeat these challenges easily.
So they begin discussion about Channel Energy, a class feature that can be used in Pathfinder, even as early as 3rd level, to restore well over 100 HP during a single combat. So when it really hits the fan, the cleric can pump out an extra 100+ HP of healing, which means the monsters need to pump out at least that much additional damage to keep pace and present a reasonable threat. Unless, of course, the cleric goes down, in which case suddenly we have these overwhelmingly powerful monsters without that fountain of nearly-endless healing to counteract it.
So what suggestions would the wise and creative community here offer to this hypothetical group to reduce the power of Channel Energy?
While that 100 HP of healing sounds impressive, it works both ways. The 9 Kobold Clerics in a CR 3 encounter can do over 2000 damage if they all get get off all their channels. This number is a little absurd to be sure, but it shows it doesn't take much from an evil Cleric to do exactly as much damage as the good Cleric can heal.
Even if you use more mundane monsters. The 15 or so Troglodytes that a level 3 party should face over an entire day can easily do over 800 HP of damage if they can stay up for a few rounds, not hard to do with a +6 natural armour. Even if they only hit 25% of the time, likely with only a +2 to attack, that's still 200 damage. This should leave your party near dead with no spells or channels left. About right for five EL 3 encounters.And think what a day full of That Damned Crabs could do.
I would say, that a Cleric's channel is finally able to compensate for the generally higher damage being tossed around since 3.x. (now that everything gets + to hit and damage from something). If your players are good at making effective characters and/or have good combat tactics and you need to beef up the monsters or their tactics, that's fine. I find the simple advanced template works well for a slight boost, or give that baddies a few more HD for a bigger boost. If the Cleric drops, then yes, you run into the 3.X problem of not enough HP.
An alternative, is to get rid of Channel, altogether, go back to turn undead or keep the damage, but it only effects undead (the latter would make it hard to keep up with evil clerics who damaged the living, unless they dmaged undead, too). Then lower your baddies to hit and damage. This is a hard fix, as you have to rebalance all the numbers to something that works for your game.
Tweaking the amount of healing a Cleric gets seems like it would be an eaqually difficult and specific fix. If the Cleric gets a significant amount of healing, then when the Cleric drops, you lose that healing and monsters are tougher. If the Cleric has an insignificant amount of healing, then why even bother. If you're looking for "just right" healing, it's really hard for me to say what is just right for you, because I find the way it is to be "Just Right" (personally, we still need wands of CLW)
So the PCs healing went up. In some situations, way way up. And the monsters remained the same, more or less. And now PCs laugh at the puny non-threat of an even-CR battle. Even a battle 1 or 2 CR higher than the average party level is a breeze. It's not until you get into the 3+ range that fights even get interesting from the perspective of whether there is any danger to the PCs at all.
Yes. They've changed Pathfinder so that a party can do more than a couple encounters a day. My experience in 3.5, was that if a Cleric cast a lot of spells in combat, buff, debuff, CC, etc, and then tried to heal the party to full afterwards, they would usually be out of spells.
I enjoy games that keep flowing with the action. I remember what it was like to play 1st ed, when you had Cure Light Wounds (1d8, no + from levels), Cure Critical Wounds and nothing else.
If you just want to alter in combat resources for healing, but not damage, you're going to need two different mechanics. Just change the healing effects to require 3 rounds. It's short enough that a short rest of 10-15 rounds allows the party to heal up, but too long to be effective in combat. The party can get their HP back and move on to the next encounter, but they don't have to rest 8 hours to feel like they aren't vulnerable to a TPK.
Here is another idea. How about changing the selective channeling feat reducing the dice of healing/damage, so if you use channel energy after combat without selective channel and you get the full benefit, but if you use it during combat with selective channel maybe you get 1 dice per 3 or 4 lvls instead per 2. This would allow channel against undead to be just as effective as long as you didn't have your own undead on your side. So no change to the channel energy feat, just to the selective channel feat. The only downside would be you could still use the healing ability at full effect against undead
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I'm of the mind that Channel Energy was significantly powerful because it was combined with multiple summons with DR10.
I'd try this house rule for a session or two and see how it changes the dynamic: When using the Selective Channel feat to exclude targets from the healing, it automatically excludes any summoned creatures.
Or you can house-rule that spell resistance blocks channel energy healing. The SR17 of the bralani would take -17 off the channel energy effect, so it would take an above average channel to heal them, and even then only a couple points. And there's no way for the bralani to control this SR against a channel effect.
For creatures without DR10, the healing in a single round isn't really that meaningful. At 8th level, its 4d6 or 14HP average.
Multiple allies with DR10 is very, very, very powerful at level 8 especially against many foes with multiple attacks that on average do 6-16HP/damage a hit. The channel is just icing to make the bralani invulnerable during fights of this composition.
Just realized that 'Cure Minor Wounds', which cured 1 point of damage in 3.5, has become 'Stabilize' in PF, now just causing a dying creature to stabilize. Reshuffling my brain cells.
Yeah I think we've rooted out the real problem, selective channeling. If you want to tone down healing, you should remove it in your game or make it cost 2 uses or a full-round action to do. Then at least there's a tactical decision involved.
I'm not sure if I said this earlier, but I believe the original intent was to give that to all clerics so they don't have to memorize healing spells and still be effective healers. Now the problem is they memorize that WITH all healing spells AND the healing doman, PLUS selective and extra channel. Not everyone, but people who enjoy playing healbots do so, or at least they routinely spontaneously swap spells. That really is an inordinate amount of healing, especially in combat and with Reach Spell :-/.
Unless you're in an adventure/string of encounters that relies on another limited resource, i.e. wizard spells, then you can really just go all dang day.
I had cleric in the Cot game I ran. Channel energy while useful was no where near as good as it appears to be in your game. Now the Cleric in my game didn't have a good Chr at 12 which reduced the number of channels and made selective Channeling useless, I'm not even sure he could take it as the prereq might be 13 Chr. So that could be why the cleric was not as effective.
Still if you go with high Chr stat on Cleric you are lacking else where.
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We haven't had as much trouble with channeling as you have, partly because our DM has ruled that all NPCs stay alive until they are at -CON just like PCs.
If we aren't very careful, one channel can cause half of our enemies to jump back into the fight. :) That's even with Selective Channeling.
Note that most of our party loves to charge off
in random directions and get surrounded, so your milage may vary.
I had cleric in the Cot game I ran. Channel energy while useful was no where near as good as it appears to be in your game. Now the Cleric in my game didn't have a good Chr at 12 which reduced the number of channels and made selective Channeling useless, I'm not even sure he could take it as the prereq might be 13 Chr. So that could be why the cleric was not as effective.
Still if you go with high Chr stat on Cleric you are lacking else where.
That all comes down to build though. The problem clearly isn't battle clerics or summoner clerics or multiclass cleric-rogues being OMGOP in the healing arts, its that optimized healers blow everyone out of the water and trivialize a lot of encounters.
A good healing cleric needs Cha as much if not more than Wisdom because an extra channel per day is about equivalent as 1/2 a proper heal PER party member PER day. Wis 16 and Cha 16 is pretty easy to come by.
I am in Blake's group and I think there were a few things that made it in our favor. Realistically all of us are long time players and DMs. We are playing with very optimized characters. We have been trained well on battlefield tactics, by fire. Blake's wizard/trans muter is a powerful battlefield controller. My rogue is a flanker who is also a dwarf so he had a big bonus against giants to AC plus mistweave armor and swiftstep boots that allow a concealment and 20' ft teleport. Not to mention a bluff and improved feint. (I think 4 hits including a Crit were negated by the mist.) I could flank and do average of 30 points damage. hasted with a possible 3 hits with all the buffs wasn't to hard.
The wizard is doing multiple damage with summons and spells, not to mention a fire ball that killed a few giants. The barbarian having no problem hitting into the 30 AC'. The cleric had a bevy of things happening. Holy smites, with a spiritual weapon and zombie giants. While we plugged up the halls.
We were mowing through the giants.
I think there could have been some things the giants could have done different, bull rushes, throwing rocks, picking us up to squish. But with attacks of opportunity and dishing out some damage I don't know if those things would have had a impact.
I have had some of the same problems making what I think is going to be a challenging encounter, only to feel that the party hardly worked up a sweat. I know our DM is shaking his head demoralized when his giant chief goes down in three rounds. I know it isn't supposed to be DM/Players but when you put hours into your dungeon thinking it is going to be cool, only to have it be a cake walk, it is discouraging.
We also have a house rule that all save DC's are increased by 2. Trying to make spells more effective. I think that some of the high saves also had a part to play in the battle. When a giant has to make a 24 DC will save or become blinded by a holy smite, Not much chance of making that. I think it was a good thing when we were low level but might be a bit too much at high level now that we have attribute scores at mid 20's.
I am not sure every problem we have can be attributed to the Channel energy. Our Cleric was optimized also to be able to heal major damage with the healing domain, and a none combat stance. I think our ability to dish out major damage, control the battlemap, support each other, cover the bases with high DC's all make our group hard to handle.
I have seen a major trend towards power-gaming/ optimization in the group. We tend to plan our characters with ability's and feats in mind, from 1st lvl. Multi classing has proven to be a liability/less powerful so no one really does that. If there is something that might be flavorful or a interesting choice it isn't picked if it might detract from having a higher armor class or better ability. I am not saying it is a bad thing but it is certainly had a impact on the style of our game, and the ability to run/DM a challenging campaign.
I think these are all reasons for us steam rolling over the giants, and not any one problem.
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Suggestions anyone?
In Kingmaker one problem is many of the encounters are spread out so that there is often only one per day. When the party has to only fight one encounter a day, you generally want to make the encounters slightly tougher or they will breeze through them regardless of channeling.
One completely self-serving suggestion for channel energy: give the clerics more opportunity to use it by adding to the possible effects the clerics can achieve with it - the more they use it for things other than healing, the less they will be able to use it for healing. Just coincidentally I've got a book on the market at the moment that allows for this very thing. :)