Skill feats are disappointing at 4th level and above

[Colette Brunel]

I find myself terribly disappointed by skill feats at 4th level and above. The 7th-level skill feats seem like abilities appropriate for 4th-level characters, and the 15th-level skill feats seem more along the lines of 8th-level abilities. I think that Paizo should lower the prerequisites of the 7th-level skill feats to be selectable at 4th level, lower the prerequisites of the 15th-level skill feats to offer them at 8th level, and then work hard to produce more spectacular and memorable skill feats available at 12th level, 16th level, and, as narrative-distorting skill capstones, 20th level.

I just do not see why searching an area twice as fast (Expeditious Search), feinting and striking (Cruel Deceiver), preventing an unlikely social gaff (Shameless Request), or skulking along quickly (Quick Sneak) is appropriate only for characters at 7th level, as opposed to 4th level.

Similarly, the 15th-level skill feats seem anticlimactically non-legendary. Legendary Climber and Legendary Swimmer would have been nice many levels ago, Legendary Codebreaker is laughably situational, Legendary Contortionist's super-squeezing powers seem similarly niche (no pun intended), Legendary Impersonator comes far too late especially when magical options are available, Legendary Medic just is not that good compared to lower-level spells, Legendary Negotiator is too easily shut down by enemies who really want to fight, Legendary Performer is redundant with being a demigodly 15th-level character, Legendary Survivalist assumes that food and water and temperature extremes are still relevant to such high-level characters, Legendary Thief imposes too many limitations, Scare to Death lives up to its name only on a critical success, and so on.

The lackadasical strength of higher-level skill feats is in part what contributes to the martial/caster disparity. When a 15th-level skill feat is on the level of "You can break ciphers or squeeze really quickly!", spells look vastly superior.

[necromental]

Keep in mind that spells have been nerfed also. So actually the whole scope of the game (in terms of character's abilities) is lessened compared to PF1.

[Colette Brunel]

necromental wrote:

Keep in mind that spells have been nerfed also. So actually the whole scope of the game (in terms of character's abilities) is lessened compared to PF1.

No skill feat is ever going to stack up against a sending or a shape stone, for example, and those are common spells. Then we have uncommon spells like raise dead and teleport.

7th-level spells include the likes of ethereal jaunt, magnificent mansion, plane shift, and retrocognition. All but the last are uncommon though, so maybe Paizo is expecting GMs to carefully restrict spell access? That seems very "mother may I," of course, and we cannot say for sure how it is supposed to work in Doomsday Dawn or Pathfinder Society.

[GentleGiant]

Well, Resurrect is a Ritual, so you don't have to be a caster to do that. Skills can also "mimic" certain spells.

[Rameth]

I'm not sure I agree with your assessment. Since originally there wasn't even anything resembling skill feats at all I believe they are an interesting and welcomed addition to the game. Before in 1E even doing things that are low level skill feats now were hard linked to class abilities or were pain in the butt feats to get.

Like for instance Expeditious Search its half as long to search a room and at legendary it's reduces the time by 4. That's tremendous right there. So several of the skill feats give you some sort of bonus/ability and can scale as you level which means it doesn't require you to take additional feats later on, which I personally like. Also remember skills feats aren't supposed to mimic spells or make martial characters on par with spell casters. It was just meant to make skills more interesting and fun.

Lastly you have to remember they only added a few to the playtest of the game I believe. I'm sure the final version will have several legendary skill feat, plus more lower level ones, giving you even more options.

[Colette Brunel]

Rameth wrote:

Like for instance Expeditious Search its half as long to search a room and at legendary it's reduces the time by 4.

Could you please explain what makes you think these to be major benefits? As far as I can tell, if you have time to search a room meticulously, you can generally take your time.

[Colette Brunel]

Could this thread please be moved to the skills or feats subforum?

[Rameth]

Colette Brunel wrote:

Rameth wrote:

Like for instance Expeditious Search its half as long to search a room and at legendary it's reduces the time by 4.

Could you please explain what makes you think these to be major benefits? As far as I can tell, if you have time to search a room meticulously, you can generally take your time.

It doesn't only apply to just searching rooms but searching anything. Searching through bags, a unconscious/dead person, a desk, a dragon's horde. Anything that before would be unable to do because of time restraints, or extremely hard you can just do no problem. I mean granted yes that's not going to come up every session but it is a helpful addition to just make your skills better, which is the point of skill feats.

I can understand your reasoning against their level cap but it is a new system and the levels mean something different now. So we should try it out and see how to flows. Maybe level 7 will feel like level 4 now? Who knows lol

[Colette Brunel]

Rameth wrote:

It doesn't only apply to just searching rooms but searching anything. Searching through bags, a unconscious/dead person, a desk, a dragon's horde. Anything that before would be unable to do because of time restraints, or extremely hard you can just do no problem. I mean granted yes that's not going to come up every session but it is a helpful addition to just make your skills better, which is the point of skill feats.

The situations I can think of wherein quick searching would be invaluable are quite narrow, and certainly not the purview of such high-level skill feats.

[Draco18s]

Rameth wrote:

I mean granted yes that's not going to come up every session but it is a helpful addition to just make your skills better, which is the point of skill feats.

I am going to paraphrase/quote something I read a while back:

Quote:

A good feat is one that you use all the time.

A bad feat is one where you say, "Wow, I'm sure glad I had that feat, I got to use it!"

Legendary Search at 1/4 the usual speed is a Bad Feat by this metric. Maybe it opens up some options here and there once in a while, but it's not Good.

[Colette Brunel]

Another possible metric would be, "Is this the kind of feat that would appear in myth and legend from real world?"

I do not remember the epic sagas about the great hero who could search a room in a quarter of the usual time.

[deuxhero]

Saga Edition made it so nearly all base class talents could be taken by level 5 (there's a single talent, Uncanny Dodge 2, that requires level 9. That one looks like someone forgot Improved Initiative was a talent with a required talent instead of a feat in SE, rather than an intentional design choice because it doesn't include the prerequisite's prerequisite in the prerequisites). What SE did was make characters more versatile by letting them grab multiple trees at higher levels. Sure Saga was more grounded (Throw 24 CL1 stormtroopers at a level 20 guy and he could easily lose) but the same general idea applies. PF1 went too far into "you can only do anything useful with this tree if it's maxed" anyways.

[Yossarian]

I'm inclined to agree with you: the overall power level of the skill feats feels a bit underwhelming. The idea of skill feats is awesome, especially combined with the critical success / critical failure mechanic, but each feat should feel 'oh that would be cool for my character'. Most are just a bit meh.

Easy enough to alter however: just spice up the skill feats a bit.

[slightlyprime]

most of them make me go wow I want that. Fast impersonation is great in 6 seconds you become a totally different person. how looney tunes is that, you are being chased round a corner and you are replaced by a beautiful woman with an umbrella and a fan and the guards run past. I think they are super fun and I want to play a rogue just to get more skill feats.

[Tursic]

The list of general and skill feats feel incomplete. Its like here are the first level feats and a few of the higher level ones. The mid level and higher level list do not feel like they are complete.

[pauljathome]

Tursic wrote:

The list of general and skill feats feel incomplete. Its like here are the first level feats and a few of the higher level ones. The mid level and higher level list do not feel like they are complete.

This IS the playtest and not the final product :-). If enough people are underwhelmed by the current options they may well get better.

Some of the legendary powers are fairly cool. And some are seriously meh. Of course, I expect people disagree as to which is which :-(

[slayer_of_gellcor]

I agree. Choosing Skill Feats at the lower levels are interesting enough, but I found that the options were limited - particularly with the requirements to be Experts, Master, or Legendary of the skill in question to be able to select many of them. That really starts to limit the options for higher level skill feats.

Compounding this is that characters get so many Skill feats compared with the other feats. I feel that the rate at which characters get skill feats and the rate at which they get the ability to access the higher level feats don't move at the same rate. There either needs to be a LOT more options, which likely they will eventually make with future books, etc. But in the meantime, the choices are just not there.

In building a 10th level Half-Orc Ranger - one that I played in 3.0; 3.5; 4E; Pathfinder without problem. He elevated to Master in Survival, which fits the character well, then was up to Expert in Stealth and Intimidation. I ended up taking Skill feats that didn't relate to the character but were the least offensive option. Assurance for Survival is pretty phenomenal, and that was the first one I picked up. The other Survival feats are just lackluster. Experienced Tracker is worse than the class ability that my Ranger got a few levels later. Planar Tracker is...fine I guess, but just not who the character is. Legendary Survivalist looks cool...so I'll wait for 15th level for that.

So I picked up Terrain Stalker, which looked okay. Quiet Allies, and the ran out of options. I chose Intimidating Glare and Underwater Marauder because of the options those at least sounded useful and interesting.

[MerlinCross]

pauljathome wrote:

Tursic wrote:

The list of general and skill feats feel incomplete. Its like here are the first level feats and a few of the higher level ones. The mid level and higher level list do not feel like they are complete.

This IS the playtest and not the final product :-). If enough people are underwhelmed by the current options they may well get better.

Some of the legendary powers are fairly cool. And some are seriously meh. Of course, I expect people disagree as to which is which :-(

We'll find out which one is the new Sleight of Hand when the books comes out. AKA, the one you are bad for putting points into becasue why would you ever do that. Or is that .... what's the word? Apprise? Strange word that has no meaning.

[Colette Brunel]

Again, Paizo has already demonstrated a capacity for writing interesting, noncombat-utility-oriented abilities for martial characters in the form of vigilante social talents. Why can these not be reintroduced as skill feats (with reasonable level prerequisites, not being 15th-level to have super-cryptography or super-squeezing skills) and hand these out to martials more frequently, thus making skill feats more powerful and also improving martials' ability to contribute to noncombat situations?

[Colette Brunel]

This is one of my earliest complaints on 2e, and it looks like it has still been consistently holding up. Paizo does not seem to have taken any steps to address this.

[PCScipio]

Skill feats should be either improved substantially, or removed from the game. At the moment, they're just a fiddly complication that adds almost nothing.

[pauljathome]

While I certainly share your concern (I've been complaining about this from day one too) I've not completely given up hope.

There is a chance that Paizo recognizes the problem and plans to fix it in the final release but doesn't consider it worth play testing those changes.

Far more likely, of course, is that they're quite happy with the skill feats and don't see an issue. Paizo does have a long track record (Rogue talents, Skill unlocks, etc) of tweaking skills in ways that I (and many others) find to be thoroughly "Meh".

But right now Skill feats are so close to useless that I don't even bother picking them all when making a high level character for the playtest.

[Colette Brunel]

As I mention here, all throughout this playtest, I have consistently heard groaning from my players about how boring it is to pick skill feats, because they all do such tiny things.

I have had to create GMPCs very often, and picking out skill feats has been even tougher for me, because I know what the content of the upcoming adventure is, and it is depressing to see that the vast majority of skill feats are more or less irrelevant to the playtest adventures. There are exceptions, like Kip Up, which should come as no surprise, because Kip Up actually applies to a common combat situation.