What's wrong with the fighter


Pathfinder First Edition General Discussion

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Isonaroc wrote:
Snowblind wrote:

I think MadScientistWorking doesn't literally mean targeting an invisible creature. Anything that lets the wizard affect the invisible creature will do. Something like Glitterdust or See invisibility would work, and Glitterdust is a staple spell while See Invisibility is a prime scroll candidate.

Of course, this is level 2, so those aren't exactly options yet.

Not that this really matters. It is invisibility, not improved invisibility. The fighters and the wizard have roughly zero chance of finding the invisible creature before they open up on the party, and afterwards they are visible again so it doesn't matter if the fighters can attack with 50% concealment (mind you, total concealment does jack vs Color Spray).

Plus, so long as the wizard has line of sight ** spoiler omitted ** she can do all sorts of nasty things like put them to sleep or hypnotize them. Or, if you have a cleric he can channel positively to offset the damage. Or either could summon a bloody human skeleton to cause trouble.

You assume the GM is kind enough to put a marker on the map denoting the invisible opponents position.

Without knowledge of the opponents position, a caster can only guess where to target the AoE. A smart opponent will move, either to an advantageous position or one in which opponents will not expect.

Most of the spells mentioned have a small enough AoE (e.g. Color Spray) that guessing will do little more than waste a spell slot the majority of the time. Sleep may be useful, but is a full round cast time. Any opponent may have access to Spellcraft, letting him know in advance what is coming. The same applies to summoning spells.

A bloody skeleton has no special ability to detect an invisible opponent, and lacks the intelligence for any creative solutions (which any character may employ, caster or martial).


Isonaroc wrote:
Spoiler:
(say, after dude breaks invisibility from the second floor where the fighters have no hope of getting to him before he gets another turn

I place the blame firmly on the shoulders of any martial that fails to carry a bow.

Even my wife's natural attack barbarian carried a bow at first level and had a +1 adaptive bow by sixth level.

Silver Crusade

Snowlilly wrote:
Isonaroc wrote:
Snowblind wrote:

I think MadScientistWorking doesn't literally mean targeting an invisible creature. Anything that lets the wizard affect the invisible creature will do. Something like Glitterdust or See invisibility would work, and Glitterdust is a staple spell while See Invisibility is a prime scroll candidate.

Of course, this is level 2, so those aren't exactly options yet.

Not that this really matters. It is invisibility, not improved invisibility. The fighters and the wizard have roughly zero chance of finding the invisible creature before they open up on the party, and afterwards they are visible again so it doesn't matter if the fighters can attack with 50% concealment (mind you, total concealment does jack vs Color Spray).

Plus, so long as the wizard has line of sight ** spoiler omitted ** she can do all sorts of nasty things like put them to sleep or hypnotize them. Or, if you have a cleric he can channel positively to offset the damage. Or either could summon a bloody human skeleton to cause trouble.

You assume the GM is kind enough to put a marker on the map denoting the invisible opponents position.

Without knowledge of the opponents position, a caster can only guess where to target the AoE. A smart opponent will move, either to an advantageous position or one in which opponents will not expect.

Most of the spells mentioned have a small enough AoE (e.g. Color Spray) that guessing will do little more than waste a spell slot the majority of the time. Sleep may be useful, but is a full round cast time any the opponent may have access to Spellcraft, letting him know in advance what is coming. The same applies to summoning spells.

A bloody skeleton has no special ability to detect an invisible opponent, and lacks the intelligence for any creative solutions (which any character may employ, caster or martial).

You're missing my point. Bloody skeleton would be immune to the AoE in question and the spellcaster can drop it right next to the guy as soon as their location is apparent. Yeah, the round casting time for hypnotism and sleep sucks, but it gives them another option. The major point being, with the way the encounter is set up, the party can get nailed with there only response to be either take time to go out of their way to climb a flight of stairs or to take ranged pot shots at a target with partial cover, and that's not even bringing invisibility into it. At least with the spellcasters there's options. Am I saying it's impossible? By no means, my point is that an all fighter party is hamstrung even as early as the first significant encounters of an AP.


Isonaroc wrote:
You're missing my point. Bloody skeleton would be immune to the AoE in question and the spellcaster can drop it right next to the guy as soon as their location is apparent. Yeah, the round casting time for hypnotism and sleep sucks, but it gives them another option. The major point being, with the way the encounter is set up, the party can get nailed with there only response to be either take time to go out of their way to climb a flight of stairs or to take ranged pot shots at a target with partial cover, and that's not even bringing invisibility into it. At least with the spellcasters there's options. Am I saying it's impossible? By no means, my point is that an all fighter party is hamstrung even as early as the first significant encounters of an AP.

I would hardly call an opponent behind partial cover as hamstrung.

It's just another day as an archer. You don't even care about lacking precise shot since he's not in melee. Even a dedicated archer is going to take cover penalties until much higher level.


Spread out fixes do constitute a logistical problem though, which is a real one for a lot of people. This is why guides are valuable, but only if you know they're there.

I'm not sure that the fighter couldn't use a straight up power bump; something like 4+INT skills/level and Weapon Training at level 1 instead of a bonus feat.


Pathfinder Lost Omens, Rulebook Subscriber

Would there be money in a "Complete Fighters" book, which would compile all of the archetypes, combat feats, training options, etc.. into one volume (possibly as a softcover for cost)?


I think skills are nice for roleplaying reasons, less for gamey reasons. Having a character who is good at a few things (and explaining why) can help round out a character in a way that their combat suite does not. This is why background skills are great, but some times you want to drop points in something that's not a background skill for RP related reasons.

What I feel, "lack of skills" accomplishes more than anything is make it harder to replicate certain backstories with mechanics.


PossibleCabbage wrote:

I think skills are nice for roleplaying reasons, less for gamey reasons. Having a character who is good at a few things (and explaining why) can help round out a character in a way that their combat suite does not. This is why background skills are great, but some times you want to drop points in something that's not a background skill for RP related reasons.

What I feel, "lack of skills" accomplishes more than anything is make it harder to replicate certain backstories with mechanics.

The Strider themed fighter I posted on this thread last night had 8 skill points / level.


Snowlilly wrote:
PossibleCabbage wrote:

I think skills are nice for roleplaying reasons, less for gamey reasons. Having a character who is good at a few things (and explaining why) can help round out a character in a way that their combat suite does not. This is why background skills are great, but some times you want to drop points in something that's not a background skill for RP related reasons.

What I feel, "lack of skills" accomplishes more than anything is make it harder to replicate certain backstories with mechanics.

The Strider themed fighter I posted on this thread last night had 8 skill points / level.

BTW, I'm working on the comparison builds. But why did you go TWF? I feel I've really only seen him fight with that big "great sword" using two hands.


I skimmed through the fighter guide and don't think I learned anything new and my opinion is still the same on fighter.


I was a little curious about that myself, since Aragorn's style tends to be using his longsword with one or two hands as the situation merits or using his bow. The only time I recall him using two-weapon fighting at all was when he also used a torch to help fend off the Ringwraiths, and that wasn't really using the torch as a weapon so much aside from throwing it at one.

Although personally I always felt Aragorn would be best-represented by a ranger/paladin multiclass with high all around mental stats, because the dude's got a crazy high will save, good fighting and tracking skills, a lot of charisma, and some of his acts as the returned king of gondor seem to be more divine grace and laying on hands than woodland know-how.


Also saying your guide is easy to find is a bit of a misnomer. Yeah, it's easy to find if you happen to frequent Paizo message boards and either search for fighter guides or just hang around the advice forum. But be real, how many people do you think actually do that? I'm going to be generous and say 10% of all PF players actually look at the boards or have the presence of mind to search optimization guides which means most people are stuck needing all the rulebooks (fairly unlikely) or pillaging all of d20srd equivs (and lets not pretend that it's easy to find all the bandaids there if you don't know what you're looking for)


Pathfinder Lost Omens, Rulebook Subscriber
Chess Pwn wrote:


People are expressing issues that you need to spend your class features "feats" to buy basic character features. This isn't solved in your guide.
People are expressing issues that you only have 1 AWT, if you burned a feat, until lv9, thus having the available "fixes" not available enough. This isn't solved by your guide.

I was thinking about this part. I know Marshmallow was avoiding the archetypes, but isn't the Weapon Master archetype a partial solution to "no real weapon training until Lvl 9"? You're losing bravery and armor training for a set of specific bonuses for your weapon and the ability to spend your bonus feats on Weapon Training. I think almost all of the AWT options are better than the Feat you were trading in, so this does "help", no?

Also, Marshmallow, would you be willing to edit your guide to link to Internet resources for your options? Being able to click on a reference to the option you are discussing would help your guide become a solid "one stop shop".


Why would the Barroom Brawler feat get FAQratted? It's the "you can do the Brawler's thing, just not as often" as a feat so it should work like the Brawler class feature does.

If that got FAQrattaed then even fewer people would play Brawlers (and it's not exactly a popular class from what I've seen).


Barroom Brawler won't get errata'd, but I can imagine Warrior Spirit + Training getting changed, since it's very reminiscent of Paragon Surge. Though it's in a player companion and just banned in PFS so probably not.


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Barroom brawler is supposed to be used once per day. It's very design limited it from getting two different feats from it in one day.
Now suddenly the fighter getting 5 uses of it a day for 5 different feats was probably not something expected, nor intended, nor wanted based off of the paragon surge FAQ.

I just don't see this combo holding up if Paizo made a ruling on it. Something somewhere would be changed to stop Schrodinger's fighter. Because they have stopped almost every other way to pull off a Schrodinger's anything.


You have to figure though that when they thought of the Advanced Weapon Training that lets you use things that were limited per day more often that they would have thought "What are some things that this would be really useful with" and since Barroom Brawler had been in existence for 14 months when the WMH was printed, they would have considered it.

The whole issue with Paragon Surge was that classes using it were demonstrably more powerful than anybody else. I don't think that's an issue we're going to see affecting fighters any time soon.


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PossibleCabbage wrote:

You have to figure though that when they thought of the Advanced Weapon Training that lets you use things that were limited per day more often that they would have thought "What are some things that this would be really useful with" and since Barroom Brawler had been in existence for 14 months when the WMH was printed, they would have considered it.

The whole issue with Paragon Surge was that classes using it were demonstrably more powerful than anybody else. I don't think that's an issue we're going to see affecting fighters any time soon.

Haha, if they never released any broken content or had options that by the rules didn't work for the feat/class it was meant then I'd figure they thought through things.

They probably went, "It would be cool to let the fighter use stunning fist or the other monk feats more times, not completely like a monk, but more than normal characters. Writes option to increase uses of feats. Player companion options seemingly are very interested in what's cool or thematic over is this balanced or have any broken edge cases."


Chess Pwn wrote:
PossibleCabbage wrote:

You have to figure though that when they thought of the Advanced Weapon Training that lets you use things that were limited per day more often that they would have thought "What are some things that this would be really useful with" and since Barroom Brawler had been in existence for 14 months when the WMH was printed, they would have considered it.

The whole issue with Paragon Surge was that classes using it were demonstrably more powerful than anybody else. I don't think that's an issue we're going to see affecting fighters any time soon.

Haha, if they never released any broken content or had options that by the rules didn't work for the feat/class it was meant then I'd figure they thought through things.

They probably went, "It would be cool to let the fighter use stunning fist or the other monk feats more times, not completely like a monk, but more than normal characters. Writes option to increase uses of feats. Player companion options seemingly are very interested in what's cool or thematic over is this balanced or have any broken edge cases."

Not to mention the reasoning doesn't apply, since the official Paizo line is that all the classes are already balanced and Martial/Caster Disparity is a myth produced by a conspiracy with a shadowy agenda.

That said, history has shown quite clearly that Paizo's vetting of its own rules is shaky at best. Considering they've released things that were broken on delivery or interacted badly/contradictorily with stuff from the same book, I can certainly buy that they didn't realize that it would interact oddly with one feat from a book that came out more than a year ago.


The reason I don't use stamina is because the best combat feats don't even have options for it so it's a lot more effort for basically no benefit. Also, most people play fighter for the simplicity in my experience, so fixes should also be simple for players to implement.

Quote:
Not to mention the reasoning doesn't apply, since the official Paizo line is that all the classes are already balanced and Martial/Caster Disparity is a myth produced by a conspiracy with a shadowy agenda.

No. That is the view of a single individual who is not even on the design team. There is a reason why Unchained added in multiple things that aid fighters more than other classes, and that every single modification to magic was a nerf.


For one thing it feels like a rather daunting amount of work to achieve the effective fighter, when you could just make basically any class effective much more easily.

I wouldn't say it was fixed, I'd say players can fix it with investment and GM co-operation.


I do think the Fighter would benefit from a proper "Unchained" treatment. Right now it's in a similar place to the pre-unchained Monk: you can make a solid working one, but you'll need a mishmash of fixes published in different books, at least some of which contradict each other.

Basically, take all the fixes out there and publish them all in a single place with some streamlining (like fixing all the archetypes that have "Weapon Training, except not called Weapon Training so you don't get access to AWT").

And seriously, 4+int skills/level off a somewhat expanded list.


And a good will save.


I'm not sure if you can call it a fix per-se but I think this prestige class might have legs in upping the fighter classes stock.

I know its not strictly a fighter after that point but it gives you a bunch of standard action powers to mitigate lack of full attack and add a different sort of combat utility, continues weapon training progression, improves the vital strike feat chain (it works with the initial cleave for cleave at least, i dont know how it would interact with later cleave attacks) Seems solid.


I like the adventuring and secondary skill system for giving the fighter a few skill points for flavor

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