Zero support for combat maneuvers?


Skills, Feats, Equipment & Spells


Combat maneuvers are a lot better base line in PF2 than they were in PF1 - you can use any of them as long as you're trained in Athletics without further character resource expenditure. In PF1 you had to lock yourself into a specific combat maneuver you wanted to be good at, while in PF2 you can disarm humanoid targets and grapple rhinos.

This is all great and a very positive change, but... there doesn't seem to be any way to increase your effectiveness beyond this baseline level of good? My biggest issue is that as far as I can tell there is no way to remove the "no greater than one size larger" restriction on maneuvers, a restriction that wasn't there for every maneuver in PF1. This means that despite getting your level to Athletics and having more fair numbers to shoot for combat maneuvers still scale horribly into later levels as bigger enemies become more and more common. A skill feat that, for example, lets you use maneuvers on enemies two size categories larger at Master and removes the restriction entirely at Legendary would go a long way to making maneuvers more consistently effective and would actually be a Cool Thing you can do with higher level skill feats, which is currently rather rare. "At Legendary Athletics you can suplex a Great Wyrm" is the kind of thing I would actually be excited about as a high level martial player.


You've probably already guessed the answer based on your comment. These are likely all candidates for future Master/Legendary skill feats.

Remember this is a tiny sample of the game, not the final product. We'll probably see more support for characters to specialize into certain types of maneuvers at a later point. Right now they're just testing the core mechanics of the game, not publishing a product intended for full play.


Even if that is the case it's worth mentioning that this is important to me, but... I'm not convinced that it is the case. The Legendary skill feats we've seen in the playtest are almost insultingly weak. Given Paizo's repeated statement that the playtest represents them at their most ambitious and there's several things they will dial back on if there's too much blowback I doubt Paizo has any intention of turning the dial up on Legendary skill power. I'm not going to believe that there's any Great Wyrm suplexing in PF2's future until I see it.

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