Deadly Shurikens of Doom?

[Moonheart]

What happen if you build a Master of Many Styles using Ascetic, Dragon and Marid Style fused together, and happen to throw one shuriken while activating Elemental fist?

Is it truly doing (at level 20):
2D8 base damage (Ascetic Strike)
+ double strength modifier (Dragon Ferocity)
+ 5d6 elemental damage (Elemental Fist + Dragon Ferocity)
+ wisdom modifier (Marid Style)

At +5ft of range (Marid Style) and while entangling the target (Marid Spirit)?

Sound so nice on paper that I feel I could have missed something...

[Ascalaphus]

Most of those feats provide a bonus when you make an unarmed strike. That's not the same as increasing your "unarmed strike damage", which is what your shuriken get.

And frankly, even if they did, it would not be all that impressive even for a level 10 character...

[Moonheart]

Ascetic Style's description states that you apply "you can apply the effects of feats that have Improved Unarmed Strike as a prerequisite, as well as effects that augment an unarmed strike, as if attacks with the weapon were unarmed attacks"

There is no restiction shown about those effect only being applied if they are unarmed damage increases, or am I wrong?

And yes, it's not impressive overall. The "shuriken of doom" part was a joke. :)

My point is more to know if it can work, because if it works, you can apply this on better monk weapons like rope darts (no ammunition and 25ft range), kamisugama (2-handed, double sided) and a lot of other goodies.

I feel like to make a "Master of Many Weapons" if this combo works.

[Ascalaphus]

Yeah, ascetic style would probably make that possible.

(Looking once again at the reason ascetic style didn't make it into PFS...)

[Imbicatus]

If you want to be really scary, multiclass master of many styles with ninja, use flurry of stars, and combine ascetic style and jabbing style.

[Ryan Freire]

Ascalaphus wrote:

(Looking once again at the reason ascetic style didn't make it into PFS...)

Because PFS does little to curb power classes like cleric and wizard but an awful lot of keeping low tier martials down?

[Moonheart]

Imbicatus wrote:

If you want to be really scary, multiclass master of many styles with ninja, use flurry of stars, and combine ascetic style and jabbing style.

Not currently my goal to be a shuriken, I'm just trying to understand the extent and mechanism of the Ascetic Style the right way, see if I got it right.

But a Master of Many Weapons sound a nice idea, I should perhaps open a relevant thread and see if people have some nice ideas about it.

[Ascalaphus]

Ryan Freire wrote:

Ascalaphus wrote:

(Looking once again at the reason ascetic style didn't make it into PFS...)

Because PFS does little to curb power classes like cleric and wizard but an awful lot of keeping low tier martials down?

"We can't solve some other problem in a different area, so we're just going to let this get out of hand as well." That sort of argument doesn't really convince me.

Ascetic Style would have really upset balance among monks, after Unchained tried hard to make unarmed attacks more competitive with monk weapons.

[Moonheart]

I don't understand. You just claimed that the damage brought by ascetic style was unimpressive, and now that it has an upset balance. What is exactly the kind of mix you have in mind that would make Ascetic Style unbalanced?

To me the Ascetic Style could be rephrased to "Trade four levels of monk unarmed damage to add to your unarmed damage the qualities of a weapon you're proefficient to"

4 levels of monk unarmed damage is at most 2 points of damage per roll in average (2d10 become 2D8 for a level 20 monk), so it's a good trade, but the gain of weapon qualities on unarmed attacks do not seem overpowered for a combat style to me.

Some styles do a lot more and are not be seen as overpowered.

[Tarik Blackhands]

There's probably some wombo combos out there that push Ascetic Style over the top, but honestly I'd say the thing got banned because it's so ambiguously written there'd be 3 good arguments every session about what exactly constitutes a feat that "augments" an unarmed strike. I don't blame the devs for not wanting to deal with that nonsense (although I do blame them for the sloppy writing in the first place).

[Ascalaphus]

Moonheart wrote:

I don't understand. You just claimed that the damage brought by ascetic style was unimpressive, and now that it has an upset balance. What is exactly the kind of mix you have in mind that would make Ascetic Style unbalanced?

It's not this particular example that's really impressive. But opening up abilities that were meant for unarmed strikes only to other weapons is.

For example, any thing that triggers off a crit with unarmed strikes. Normally unarmed strikes only threaten on a 20. A Keen Urumi threatens on a 15-20 however, and is also easier to squeak past DR.

Or the Flying Kick style strike - currently it strictly requires a kick. Ascetic Form would allow that to be done with a temple sword (again, cheaper to enhance than unarmed strikes, better crit range and so forth).

The monk's unarmed strike damage dice are the least important part of the feat chain, it's allowing stuff only intended to work on unarmed strikes to also work on manufactured weapons that's the problem.

[Moonheart]

Ascalaphus wrote:

It's not this particular example that's really impressive. But opening up abilities that were meant for unarmed strikes only to other weapons is.

For example, any thing that triggers off a crit with unarmed strikes. Normally unarmed strikes only threaten on a 20. A Keen Urumi threatens on a 15-20 however, and is also easier to squeak past DR.

That's still a totaly unimpressive bonus for the cost of a style and the extra feat requierement you need with it.

Is there truly any broken combo you can do with Ascetic Style?

[Ryan Freire]

Moonheart wrote:

Ascalaphus wrote:

It's not this particular example that's really impressive. But opening up abilities that were meant for unarmed strikes only to other weapons is.

For example, any thing that triggers off a crit with unarmed strikes. Normally unarmed strikes only threaten on a 20. A Keen Urumi threatens on a 15-20 however, and is also easier to squeak past DR.

That's still a totaly unimpressive bonus for the cost of a style and the extra feat requierement you need with it.

Is there truly any broken combo you can do with Ascetic Style?

The big issue is that base monk is so generally unimpressive compared to many other classes that things which bring them up to interesting are viewed as such a huge step up that they're overpowered. It depends on your basis of comparison entirely.

Class with option vs without
Class type vs other classes in that type (martial v martial etc)
or Class vs all other classes.

In the first its going to be OP

In the second its probably going to make it competitive with other options available

In the third it doesn't even shake the tree of the classes viewed as top of the heap powerful.

In general, i feel like the second or third options are the better fulcrums to find balance on, but there are a lot of people who want to compare balance as class with option vs without. I personally dislike that because it means weak classes are always going to remain weak classes, since anything that changes that is going to overshadow vanilla class by quite a lot.