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Debuff is a useful ability to bring to the table. I hesitate to say that it is a full character role though. PFS brings additional challenges to a debuff character.
General challenges:
1. Flexibility. Others have said this well. If all you can do is trip, you're useless against flying foes. If all you can do is grapple, you'll be useless against incorporeal foes or things that you don't want to grapple (like a succubus or a remorhaz).
2. The weak link problem. If your party splits all of its abilities up into different people: one guy is the damage guy, one guy is the tank guy, one guy is the debuff guy, one guy is the buff guy, and everyone is super-focused, what happens when the damage guy gets taken out in round 1? Can the tank guy take over dealing damage or is it going to be a TPK because everyone is a one-trick pony and no-one else has that trick?
To use another example: if you run into a really challenging fight and it's down to your character to defeat the last villain, is there any possibility that you can do it, or is it going to be a TPK because, even at full health, you can't defeat a mook by yourself. (The only TPK I was ever in as a player was one of these: in age of worms, our support cleric thought that offense was entirely optional. The rest of the party was taken down, and all he had to do was beat one mook in order for the party to prevail. He couldn't do it. TPK. If he'd invested in a masterwork weapon, some offensive scrolls, or anything, we survive and are victorious; he didn't so we weren't).
PFS Specific Challenges
1. Your debuffs don't help. A lot of debuff type characters rely on particular types of other characters for success. As others posted, if you're bringing a tripper in a party of archers, you won't be helping like you would in a party of conventional two-handed sword wielding barbarians. In PFS, a highly focused character may be inappropriate for some parties you end up in. Be prepared to bring a different character.
2. Everyone is support. Sometimes you sit down at a party and everyone is playing their special snowflake debuff or control or non-combat specialist. That's like the old commercial where you have vegetables and sides, but "where's the beef?" Sometimes those crazy parties work, but often they are TPK/failure bait.
You'll notice that almost all of these problems can be solved by this:
Don't be a one-trick pony. Debuffing is a nice ability, but it shouldn't be all you bring to the table any more than a barbarian should bring his greatsword and nothing else.
The good news is that just "normal, pregen level damage dealing" is a decent second trick and most D&D characters don't have to do much work in order to have normal damage dealing capacity right out of the box. If you're a rogue, sneak attack and a feat or two to let you actually hit from a flank are a decent backup plan. If your build is so tightly focused on anything that you can't afford to spend a feat for weapon finesse and bring a 16 Dex to the table, you're probably building a one-trick pony every bit as unbalanced as the barbarian with a 20 strength, a greatsword, and no ranged weapon. If you're a bard, it's not that hard to put enough stat points into strength or dex to be able to attack or enough skill points into use magic device that you can use a wand or scroll if you need to.
I have two debuff characters. One is a magus. He can hit people with frostbite and intimidate and entangle them. If they really need debuffing, he can usually hit them with ray of enfeeblement too. But debuffing isn't his only option. He can enlarge his allies, he's got a small but useful variety of skills, he's got some out of combat spells, and he can also just chop things heads off with his sword too. Debuff isn't his role, but it's something he's quite good at. The other is a wizard with arcane lineage magic missile, spell specialization magic missile, and toppling spell. He's good at tripping enemies with magic missile. In a few levels, he'll be good at dazing them with magic missile too. But he'll also have haste, slow, stone call, web, etc on hand. Just because debuff was the first goal of his feats and build doesn't mean that's all he can do.
Debuff is fine, but don't be a one-trick pony.
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And if you sit down at a table with a healer and two buffers?
The uc rogue has no reason not to have a reasonable damage output figured into its build.
This is why I have 16 PCs. :) Well, that and I keep coming up with ideas for new ones.
But I will ask everyone else what they're playing if I'm going to play something "odd", like a pure controller or debuffer. Heck, even if I'm thinking of playing a front line damage dealer, I'll ask what everyone else is playing, to keep the front line from getting too crowded if we all want to be up there.
16 PCs? Slacker!
Yeah, I haven't really been playing PFS for the last 7 or 8 months, so I didn't create any new ones.
The truly amazing part is that of my 16 PCs, only 3 of them use classes that aren't in the Core Rulebook (an oracle, a ninja, and a rogue with the Halfling Opportunist prestige class). I have tons of non-Core material on most of them, but their character classes are almost all Core.
One of these days, I'll have to look at the Advanced Class Guide and start learning about all those newfangled classes that people have been playing for over a year. Forget that newer psychic stuff.
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To use another example: if you run into a really challenging fight and it's down to your character to defeat the last villain, is there any possibility that you can do it, or is it going to be a TPK because, even at full health, you can't defeat a mook by yourself.
Your advice of not being a one trick pony, and my advice of having a backup plan for when you can't do your specialty in combat both cover this.
Using my conjuration/controller sorcerer above as an example, I've actually been in a situation like this once in PFS. I think my sorcerer was level 5 at the time, and we were in a fight where we had to protect some civilians. The bad guys hit us with a group fear affect, almost everyone failed their saves, leaving me and one other person to handle the entire encounter ourselves, while everyone else ran away.
Given my lack of weaponry or other damage potential, I couldn't really help kill the bad guys, and the one other remaining guy was outmatched without me. So I went with my backup plan of summoning, intentionally going for 1d3 lower level creatures instead of just 1 more powerful summons, and literally had them go act as meat shields to stall the bad guys until the rest of the group got over the fear and returned. It was enough. We stalled the bad guys, and starting around 4 rounds later, other team members started returning.
In the case of my debuff bard, I've got healing I'd be using if other team members were down. Or I could stall the bad guys with Silent Image, if it was a similar fear situation to what the sorcerer faced.
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I'll go ahead and say it; I don't particularly care to see a debuffer at my table.
It's not especially because of the debuffing. It's the way the players handle their characters. Most debuffers fall into one of two categories:
1. The caster who has tons of options. So they are always hemming and hawing trying to decide on the best ones. These players slow the whole game down. As a GM I start clocking them but as a player I can't do anything but say "come on!" if the GM isn't pushing them.
2. The maneuver specialist who takes an enemy pretty well out of the combat. So there's nothing for the others to do. While I don't mind seeing this once it gets boring both as a player and a GM when every encounter is ended with a grapple.
I'm not saying all debuffers are like this. I played a couple of games with one guy who had an absolutely hilarious sorcerer. Kept on imposing all kinds of condition effects on the enemies but did it quickly and in well-narrated fashion. It's just that he's an exception among all the debuffers I have seen.
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I'll go ahead and say it; I don't particularly care to see a debuffer at my table.
It's not especially because of the debuffing. It's the way the players handle their characters. Most debuffers fall into one of two categories:
1. The caster who has tons of options. So they are always hemming and hawing trying to decide on the best ones. These players slow the whole game down. As a GM I start clocking them but as a player I can't do anything but say "come on!" if the GM isn't pushing them.
2. The maneuver specialist who takes an enemy pretty well out of the combat. So there's nothing for the others to do. While I don't mind seeing this once it gets boring both as a player and a GM when every encounter is ended with a grapple.
I'm not saying all debuffers are like this. I played a couple of games with one guy who had an absolutely hilarious sorcerer. Kept on imposing all kinds of condition effects on the enemies but did it quickly and in well-narrated fashion. It's just that he's an exception among all the debuffers I have seen.
Those problems are not unique to debuffers, though. I see a lot of blaster casters hem and haw, and it's just as boring to see every encounter go down to the pouncing eidelon or dual-wielding gunslinger.
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I've got to admit that dropping a fear spell is usually more of a "Oh gods, we gonna die" pick than a great tactical choice for my bonacle. Same thing with her blindness spells: the combat is over and now it's time for the gm headscratch-athon wherein they get to shelve hours of combat prep and figure what the hell those guys are supposed to do now.
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I have to disagree with Kevin. I've don't have any characters built in a way they can shut down a whole fight with pure damage in a round, though I have certainly seen the sort of min/max builds that will drop a lot of higher hit pool enemies every 1 to 2 rounds.
That said, I have plenty of characters that have saved the party a lot of resources or from TPKs by preventing the enemies from doing things until those sorts of characters could act.
I've won initiative and avoided surprise against surprise round archers, nauseating them all so they couldn't act and pincushion us, I've slowed and strength drained the big bad so he couldn't pound the low AC melee damage dealers into the ground, I've dragged the fly creatures out of the sky with entangles to save fly potions and letting melee fight their preferred way, etc.
Most of his complaints are as someone above said, complaints that can be levied against anyone based on the player. Especially the leaving nothing for other people to do, because the guy that just 1-shots the encounter leaves me a lot more frustrated and bored than anything a debuffer does.
Most of my characters, and a lot of debuffer characters, are designed to do something fun and useful in combat, while leaving stuff for other people to do as well (Like get big damage numbers if that's your thing.)
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If all you can do is trip, you're useless against flying foes. If all you can do is grapple, you'll be useless against incorporeal foes or things that you don't want to grapple (like a succubus...
*cough* ehhhh... umm...
Who, exactly, does _not_ want to grapple a succubus??
I mean, *looks around* ... yeah. I'll jump on that. Don't mind provoking even...
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I disarmed (at range 30) some npc's fancy weapon then someone (pc) ran off with it. His buddies laid into me over two rounds to +1 con left. Afterward my barbarian friend leans over, "buddy are you on their list or something?"
Nope I just took away their favorite toy and they are expressing a fair amount of irritation.
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Grappling succubi is just part of the barbarian tradition, just like mind control. Even this guy say so.
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I was not a big fan of debuffers for a long time. I thought they were boring. Then I got to play Serpent's Rise at Paizocon...
The lead Aspis agent, Rataji, is an incredibly well-built debuff/enchantment wizard. My kudos to whoever designed that pregen. And the Grand Lodge shall never be the same again....
On another note, beware the #1 downside to being a debuffer; your GMs will eventually run after you howling demonic warcries and brandishing the binder containing the scenario which they spent a week prepping and which you have now managed to break so thoroughly there is no longer a playbook.
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On another note, beware the #1 downside to being a debuffer; your GMs will eventually run after you howling demonic warcries and brandishing the binder containing the scenario which they spent a week prepping and which you have now managed to break so thoroughly there is no longer a playbook.
Joe, a devout Cleric of Desna takes it as a point of pride, that when a fellow pathfinder gets grappled, their next action is to delay until after Joe.
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On another note, beware the #1 downside to being a debuffer; your GMs will eventually run after you howling demonic warcries and brandishing the binder containing the scenario which they spent a week prepping and which you have now managed to break so thoroughly there is no longer a playbook.Joe, a devout Cleric of Desna takes it as a point of pride, that when a fellow pathfinder gets grappled, their next action is to delay until after Joe.
Ummm, why delay? Liberating Command is an immediate action spell...
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Ummm, why delay? Liberating Command is an immediate action spell..On another note, beware the #1 downside to being a debuffer; your GMs will eventually run after you howling demonic warcries and brandishing the binder containing the scenario which they spent a week prepping and which you have now managed to break so thoroughly there is no longer a playbook.Joe, a devout Cleric of Desna takes it as a point of pride, that when a fellow pathfinder gets grappled, their next action is to delay until after Joe.
Desna has the liberation domain. The 8th level ability is basically a short-duration, 30' range mass freedom of movement. Automatic success. But it takes a standard action to activate. Not sure what it has to do with the original quote, though.