19 AC is just platemail and not even remotely unreasonable for a first-level combat-focused character, you can get better than that without stat-dumping just by taking heavy armor proficiency and having 12 Dex.
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I agree that it doesn't seem like a great deal.
While a lot of 1-st level monsters has difficulty hitting AC 19, remember to increase their chances through charging and flanking.
Based on what you've said, the character doesn't seem like one that is going to break the system. If his wisdom is low, his offensive spellcasting is going to be weak. With a low cha he is not going to channel that much.
While the cleric might make a decent tank, his AC is going to be lower than a comparable fighter. And his melee offense is going to be significantly lower.
Our point is simply that AC 19 isn't extraordinary at lvl 1. A sword and board fighter is likely to have it, and is going to increase several point over the next two levels.
Thus, while it might seem problematic in the specific encounters, it is well within what can be expected.
Abadar suggest useful ideas to challenge him. Otherwise, I'd say, let the tank have his fun. Martials tend to shine in lower levels, and that isn't a bad thing. As stated earlier it doesn't seem like a character that is going to dominate the game in the longer run.
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Ok. I have a 1st ldievel cleric who has a 19 AC who has sacrificed his Wis and Cha for great defense. He is played by a guy who greatly prefers 4e and continuously points out the disparity between classes in combat ability. It feels like he is deliberately trying to "break" the system.
So I am running Shattered Star, but throwing 1st level monsters against him (and even the more reasonably designed characters) seems a waste of time.
How can I balance the game more in the GM's favor without resorting to dirty tricks (every encounter with stirges and shadows, for example)?
I have a first level thief with an armour class only one less than that - equal to it in certain circumstances! It's hardly a game-breaker cleric.
Regarding the bold text - can you tell us why you feel the need to? Are the players not enjoying Shattered Star? Are they complaining of a lack of challenge? Not every encounter needs to be (or should be) a desperate fight to the death. There are six books for them to overcome.
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Spider Swarm.
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Like so, so many threads, is there any way you can post the player's build? If the community knows the exact stats, equipment, spells, etc., they can provide much more specific feedback and advice.
AC 19 is just not that high, even at level 1. And a cleric dumping WIS and CHA to get it? What does that even mean?
I suspect your question is a symptom of a deeper problem. Post the build, detail the encounter, and we can help.
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Why would you even bother challenging him? Reward him by allowing him his nigh-invulnerability. In a few levels it won't matter because he'll be a gimped cleric who can't fill the role the class is designed for because he won't have the Wisdom to cast any spells higher than 3rd (assuming he puts his stat raise into Wis at 4th level) and won't be a threat to undead because they'll be making their saves against the lousy Will save for his Channel Energy ability. He's effectively gimped his character to be a low-level one-trick pony, and the trick isn't even all that impressive.
It would appear that what you have on your hands is something referred to as a battle cleric. He will likely focus on self buffing spells and play as if he were a full melee character. If he is having fun go with it. He should be strong for the first book, good for the second book, and after that will be average. Melee characters are particularly strong at low levels, and it seams that he is trading late game strength for early game strength.
Honestly, there is nothing he is doing at the moment that a fighter could not do better.
With that low Con score, the hits you do score, are going to hurt a lot more.
Seems like, goblins that run and shoot arrows; would cause great trouble for this character. He can't catch them, and you will get the hits. It's not that hard to roll a 15.
Have creatures use terrain, nets, and ganging up -- don't have three mooks roll individually at him, have them flank and aid another and attack from higher ground.
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It's not that I don't know how to challenge him. I can hit him with all incoporeal monsters, swarms, spells, etc. I'm just wondering what I should throw against him in a typical fight. Are we looking at monsters with +6 or +8 BAB for a reasonable challenge to hit.
And to answer the question above, the players are enjoying it, but I am not enjoying the AP due to not being able to challenge the players appropriately. I feel like the encounters are jokes.
If you think that the AP is too weak for your party, then you could just put the advanced template onto the monsters in one encounter. Since you have a party of only four players, I think that you will just TPK them if you do this, but you know your party better than I.
In my opinion, most encounters at 1st level should be relatively easy. It's always irritating to lose a character early on, and combat is very swingy at low level. Even with only a 20% chance to hit for a d4 damage, given the number of attacks a first level character has against them he still has about a 2% chance of being brought straight down by a crit before he gets to 2nd level.
I think the real danger here is that you have a guy who has a preference for one game system, seems a little irritated that you are making him play in another system he thinks is broken, and has generated a character that will "prove" it for him after a few more levels.
Sounds to me like an elaborate set-up by a disgruntled player.
Plus, an inability to be of service to the other PCs as they might expect for a cleric, is going to be an irritant to the other players, eventually.
The AC is the least of your worries.
AC 19 is just standard. and that build is terrible. Geeze. Any character with chainmail, 14 dex and dodge has 19 AC. What would you be doing if he was just a standard greatsword fighter with the same AC and a higher attack bonus while power attacking for 2D6+9?
Also spiritual weapon is a second level spell, so you got that going on too.
I notice a lack of a healing kit so heal is a useless skill for him too.
It's not a terrible build, so long as he multiclasses into fighter or paladin pretty soon, and has that as his favoured class. And trades out those feats for something better. And casts Aid and Bear's Endurance on himself a lot.
But yeah, your player is being a dick. One crit and he's down. And if he's the only cleric in the party, he may well be staying down.
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Also spiritual weapon is a second level spell, so you got that going on too.
I notice a lack of a healing kit so heal is a useless skill for him too.
I was assuming that the spell was a typo and he meant Magic Weapon since the cleric is apparently trying for melee flavoring to the detriment of all his clerical abilities.
19 AC is not bad at level 1. This PC's inability to contribute in the cleric role is bad and will hurt the party, becoming more evident and dangerous as they gain levels.
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Yeah, I had a situation like this once when I was in the party. My DM nerfed him, killed him, and said if he did that again he might as well just walk out the door. We all looked at him and said the same thing, brandishing our Rapier, Bow and Greataxe repectivly. He got the hint.
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What AP is it?
Even though the APs are designed for a minimum of system mastery I have a hard time believing ANY of them have such pitiful monsters that AC 19 is hard to hit and that Cleric would be considered anything but a joke after level 2.
He's only barely not a joke now because his build is so sad it's not even funny. It's like he wanted to play a Paladin but didn't know the Paladin existed.
This is almost as bad as the 13 Wis Druid we had in our Serpent's Skull game and it didn't take him long to realize why that sucked.
I'm also trying to figure out how your 1st level Cleric has 3 Feats. Ah wait, is he a Crusader?
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Why would you even bother challenging him? Reward him by allowing him his nigh-invulnerability. In a few levels it won't matter because he'll be a gimped cleric who can't fill the role the class is designed for because he won't have the Wisdom to cast any spells higher than 3rd (assuming he puts his stat raise into Wis at 4th level) and won't be a threat to undead because they'll be making their saves against the lousy Will save for his Channel Energy ability. He's effectively gimped his character to be a low-level one-trick pony, and the trick isn't even all that impressive.
Agree 110%.
He's built a very focused character that can shine for a few levels (and is still quite vulnerable to that 20% of hits - criticals are nasty), and afterwards will be limping around with a slightly better or just average AC - a value that doesn't quite scale as much as attack - and none of the class goodies that can make a difference.Enjoy the game despite his grievances.
I'm running Shattered Star currently, I'm up to book 5 now, and let me just warn you book 1 is just a casual warmup.
A number of the dungeons are long, so to make up for the longer adventuring day, the designer has to use lots of lower level encounters. And lets face it, unless the monster is a level 3 warrior fully optimized or 3rd level adept with burning hands he isn't going to challenge anything within normal guidelines with a CR of only 1. CR 2-3 for a first level party are the fights meant to be a challenge.
This AP has claimed the party witch 3 times, the rogue once, a paladin (who died horribly in 1 round of triple crits +7 more hits), dropped to negatives the monk, the summoner, and dismissed the eidolon countless times. I'm running for 6 players without adjusting the encounters very often (I'm telling them I'm adding the advanced template on some things, or adding monsters, but I actually haven't been doing so as often as I say I am). Those 6 players are also 20 point buy rather than the AP normal 15, and the players are very experienced at optimizing (the witch is a brand new player, and makes new player mistakes hence his death rate). I might be running the encounters a bit too optimally, but I doubt it because the big set piece fights last all of 3 rounds against my party (its like rocket tag currently).
What I guess I'm saying is the APs tend to get off to a slow start, but generally starting book 3+ can turn into a meat grinder. This cleric thing will sort itself out one way or another, its pretty obvious that he is going to multi class into some strange hybrid build, one that is going to be below par compared to just taking the right class to begin with.
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Just play smart.
Sunder his weapon or even better Command him to drop it with a cleric ennemy. Maybe he will then shout "Damn, I wish I was able to do something else than swing my stick with a lousy BAB".
Surround him with Kobolds that put him down with 1 backstab. Maybe he will then shout "Damn I wish I was only a 2nd line support fighter".
Make his buddy barbarian drop and have him shout: "Damn I wish that cleric was only a 2nd line support fighter intended to buff and patch his comrades so I WOULDN'T BE DEAD AND ANGRY NOW!"
how does he have weapon focus at 1st level without the +1 bab requirement?
Interesting -- in 4E you generally want to get your attack/casting stat as high as you can, so for a Pathfinder cleric that would mean pumping up wisdom, not dumping it. What is really interesting here is that he could have given himself better wisdom and charisma with the same AC -- and that AC is really not out of bounds for any 1st level character who is proficient with medium armor and shields.
The main problem with this character is that he won't be able to keep up what he is doing for very long without multiclassing. His BAB lags behind that of a fighter, and he will have a hard time boosting his wisdom to the point where he does not start losing out on whole spell levels -- although even then the situation is not hopeless. At 7th level he is high enough level to cast 4th level spells but will lack the wisdom to do so unless he has picked up a headband of wisdom +2 by then. The only question is whether he will see boosting his wisdom as a priority -- but given that he set it to 12 to begin with, I have my doubts about that.
My real question is how this character's AC is even a problem. What is the rest of the party like? If all of them are limited to light armor or less, he may be straining to fill two roles (healer and tank) not covered by the rest of the party. If this character really has the best AC in the party, I can think of at least two strategies for the monsters to use to get around it (since he will look like the hardest one to hit to even the dimmest monsters):
1) Go around him to get at the squishies, if any of them are dishing out more damage than he is or are not far enough behind him.
2) Otherwise, surround the cleric to get +2 to attach him from flanking positions, and use any other available tricks to get other bonuses (such as another +2 from charging). It is actually not that hard to rack up enough bonuses to give the monsters a decent chance to hit him.
Favourite trick against High AC PCs:
Surround him. Have 7 of the 8 use Aid Another to grant a +2 each to the attack roll to the 1 that will actually make an attack. That one makes an attack at normal attack roll +16 (+14 from Aid Another, +2 from flanking). Those lowly goblins are now hitting AC 19 95% of the time. If that's not quite good enough for you, split them into 2 groups and do the same thing: hitting on a 9+ is pretty good.
If he's so tough for monsters to hit, then why would they keep trying? Have them give up and focus on the squishier targets...
how does he have weapon focus at 1st level without the +1 bab requirement?
I was wondering the same thing, but looks like he has the Crusader archetype (only one domain, fewer spells, free weapon focus, w/out prereq).
More power to him. If he's trying to prove that a cleric can be a strong melee in 3.5/PF - good! If he's trying to prove they're purely better than fighters? Good luck!
Let him have the fun. If he's being irritating about it during the game - address that with him, not the build.
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I think he's also trying to show the "gloriousness" of 4E's healing surges by nerfing his cleric's healing capacity.
He'll have a fun time doing that while he's dying, I suppose.
I really don't care one way or another what system to use, but the group voted and Pathfinder beat out 4E (and we've played both). I just want all of the players to be positive about it or stay home.
If he's disruptive in play, you may need to remind him of this - that the vote went against him this time and he should be gracious about that... or stay home.
Threads like this always give me a headache and make me want to *facepalm* This isn't a game of the GM vs the Players, this is a role-playing game. As others have said quite a few times the cleric isn't built min/max by any means and he'll feel that in a couple of levels as he is unable to cast as many spells per day. He doesn't hit hard and even trying to get a higher AC he isn't a threat as an offensive player. Why make it a you vs. him? Play the game, run the AP, and have fun. Things will work themselves out in a couple of levels, you'll see.
Note that with a heavy shield equipped and a weapon in hand he can't cast any spells with somatic components. He'll have to sheathe or drop his warhammer (or drop the shield) in order to cast those kinds of spells (e.g. Magic Weapon, assuming that's a typo and not the 2nd level spell Spiritual Weapon [which also has somatic components]).
In the long run this character is ruined. If by breaking the system he means having a character that will not live past 3rd level, then he has succeeded.
I am more concerned about comments about him pouting over pathfinder and wanting to play 4E. You can live with a poor characters, but poor players is another thing.
If other members of the group are also interested in 4E, you might want to alternate between the two with the agreement that he plays PF with as much zeal as 4E.
Compromise sometimes works better than a big stick (less blood and screaming).
Well, here is my strawman: I played 4e because of the hype and found it to cater to the tastes of Wow gamers and children, the two not being mutually exclusive. Now, it seemed to me that was not the type of game for me and having foolishly traded in about 7-800 dollars worth of 3.5 materials(original market value) to purchase 4e core and be THOROUGHLY disappointed, we(my co-GM and I) we traded in 4e core for pf core and have been THOROUGHLY satisfied. Some people like linear predictable progression with childishly oversimplified rules. 4e caters to them.So does Candy Land.