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Had a friend looking at animal companions. They wanted to grab a pet hyena, but its stats are really bad. It’s not even just because of verisimilitude- hyenas have the strongest jaw pressure of any mammal (thanks, Google!), but they’ve got a d4 bite with no starting strength bonus. I’d need to check, but I think that’s the weakest mammal bite attack.
Animal companions in Pathfinder get scaling beyond the base form anyway, and the word “dire” solves a lot of scale problems. It’d be nice to have choices even out a little more.
Yeah, some of them are too powerful in relation to others. Think they should all have something that makes them an attractive choice, at least.
Yeah, I imagine the action economy will make a pretty big difference! But I’d definitely like to see a little more balance, even if it’s not as accurate on “who would win in a fight?”
I love hyenas and want a great hyena companion. I want a deer to be good, I even want the falcon that rides on your shoulder to be a good option. End the tyranny of the big cats!
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The thing to remember with animal companions is that they basically start out as baby version of themselves before growing into something else.
I think the way to go about animal companions is to have template bases, much like they did with the Unchained Summoner's Eidolon.
So you would have a quadraped base, a serepentine base, a biped base, etc. And then based on what animal you choose it grafts certain things onto the base creature type.
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I want the animal companions to still be animals, not some hodge-podge construct.
Bears that grapple, tigers that sneak and pounce, deer that sprint, angry wolverines, sneaky and clever river rats. I don’t want them realistic, but I do want them to fit the theme.
There should be more options that are equally viable. That doesn’t mean they are all the same. I can see dogs, small cats, horses and ponies all being accepted but a character needing to work to get a dinosaur into the normal stable for the night.
Hippogriffs should not be stabled with horses. The creatures consider them a nice meal.
I would prefer that there were a variety of creatures, and the more deadly require that the character put more resources into animal handling/training in order to get them. Anyone can train a war dog, training a bear is more difficult.
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While we're talking animals... bears need some love. Having seen what a roughly 100-pound juvenile black bear can do (never mind adults, grizzlies, polar bears...), the bears in PF are ludicrously weak...
The thing to remember with animal companions is that they basically start out as baby version of themselves before growing into something else.
I think the way to go about animal companions is to have template bases, much like they did with the Unchained Summoner's Eidolon.
So you would have a quadraped base, a serepentine base, a biped base, etc. And then based on what animal you choose it grafts certain things onto the base creature type.
This would be good though I think for ease of play the default players handbook should have some common animal companions, wolf, tiger, bear etc. And then a future book should have a robust animal companion creation feature that allows the player and GM to design any animal. Ideally the rules would be comparable so you could create the same wolf, bear, tiger using the custom animal companion creation rules. Id say same thing for familiars as well.
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A bit more evolution (no Summoner Pun intended) would be good, however. Say, "level 4, the animal companion gains X, Y, and Z" then "level 7, it gains A, B, C", then "level 10, it gains your choice of G or H"
Something like that would be nice....let them grow with the player a bit more.
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The thing to remember with animal companions is that they basically start out as baby version of themselves before growing into something else.
I've always found this weird, and it's really a symptom of animals in general being over-statted. The idea that a wolf is CR 1 while a thug armed with a sword is CR 1/3 is just silly when you think about it, and because animals are overstatted like this we end up getting babies for animal companions for the first several levels of our career.
I'd much rather animals have sensible CR's so we can have thematic animal companions from 1st level. We have dire animals to fill the niche of challenges for higher-level PC's, so there's really no need to have CR 3 lions.
While we're talking animals... bears need some love. Having seen what a roughly 100-pound juvenile black bear can do (never mind adults, grizzlies, polar bears...), the bears in PF are ludicrously weak...
This is an unfortunate necessity due to a design decision choice made in the damage calculations of 3rd edition D&D that Pathfinder inherited. Put succinctly, strength is over-weighted in these calculations. In reality, strength has a fairly modest effect on the power of your attacks, and the type and quality of your weapons has a much bigger impact. As an example, imagine the strongest bodybuilder on earth was given an ordinary dagger while I (a stereotypical weakling nerd) was given a halberd. Under Pathfinder math the dagger would hit harder (1d4+4 avg 6.5 vs 1d10-1 avg 4.5) but in reality the two attacks would be incomparable. The dagger simply isn't made to deliver the kind of forceful blows a halberd is (it's a weapon designed for precise killing blows, not raw impact power).
Now, this was a conscious design made by game designers, and its purpose is to increase the focus on the heroic qualities (in this case, strength) of the player characters. As such, the damage calculations are designed to allow those mighty heroes to flex their muscle and really overshadow the plebs. However, this leads to a problem when you start talking about animals. Large animals have strength that is far, far greater than any real human could ever achieve. When you use those same damage formulas on such animals, you get outrageous results. For instance, a gorilla with a realistic strength score could punch a hole through a solid stone wall with ease (which is obviously an unrealistic result). So as a consequence of strength being overvalued to better emphasize it as a heroic quality in humans, animals needed to have unrealistically low strength scores to keep them from doing absolutely ludicrous things.
To be honest, I think it's an acceptable tradeoff in the service of a good fantasy experience. It's probably not worth changing at this point, but that does mean animals are stuck with curiously low strength scores.
This is an unfortunate necessity due to a design decision choice made in the damage calculations of 3rd edition D&D that Pathfinder inherited.
But it doesn't follow that PF2 needs to inherit the same issues.
Just saying, when a modestly sized grizzly can grab over half a ton of drowned bison out of a hole in lake ice and drag it to shore without being all that unduly put out...
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Had a friend looking at animal companions. They wanted to grab a pet hyena, but its stats are really bad. It’s not even just because of verisimilitude- hyenas have the strongest jaw pressure of any mammal (thanks, Google!), but they’ve got a d4 bite with no starting strength bonus. I’d need to check, but I think that’s the weakest mammal bite attack.
Animal companions in Pathfinder get scaling beyond the base form anyway, and the word “dire” solves a lot of scale problems. It’d be nice to have choices even out a little more.
Hopefully this is something they can really make scale well. Especially since monsters are getting levels now, and not being built like PCs, it should be simpler to have a scaling companion that doesn't break the action economy or the rest of the game but is still cool. Even better if the mythic level of skills and stuff apply to animal companions. So at level 1, your wolf is a faithful hound, but at level 20, he has ascended to greatness alongside you, and is now Huan, Hound of Valinor, who took down Sauron in the form of the greatest werewolf that ever lived.
This is an unfortunate necessity due to a design decision choice made in the damage calculations of 3rd edition D&D that Pathfinder inherited.But it doesn't follow that PF2 needs to inherit the same issues.
Just saying, when a modestly sized grizzly can grab over half a ton of drowned bison out of a hole in lake ice and drag it to shore without being all that unduly put out...
I saw footage of a polar bear pulling a beluga out of the water. Their strength is unreal.
PF2 could take care of this in a lot of ways. Give the bears an appropriately high Strength (which also means that big animals like elephants, dinosaurs, and dragons need really titanic Strength scores), and/or add more noncombat power to high Strength values. For larger animals, their feats of strength should be more potent, so a bear can simply lift or pull more than most (low-level, at least) heroes.
Natural attacks and unarmed strikes are consolidated into one nice and consistent package, so whether you're using a fist, or a claw, or a crane flutter, or whatever, you only have to learn it once (also they work similarly to other weapons in most ways, so maybe you only have to learn it 0 times if you know the weapons? That just sounds weird though).
I imagine one major benefit of this + the resonance system is that now a +1 Amulet of Mighty Fists (or whatever the PF2 equivalent is) really can be exactly equal in price and effect to a +1 LongswordMrgrgr, razzle frazzle natural attack/unarmed extra attacks per round forcing extra costs for monks. But no more!
Necroing my own thread for the update. From the sound of it, natural attacks are going to work like regular weapons now, doing a lot to level the playing field!