I agree with just about everything you said. Metal armor can be worked around, I believe, by using darkwood but I wouldn't be against getting rid of that anathema. They can use metal weapons so why not armor. I wonder if savage slice would work with wild claws.
I agree with just about everything you said. Metal armor can be worked around, I believe, by using darkwood but I wouldn't be against getting rid of that anathema. They can use metal weapons so why not armor. I wonder if savage slice would work with wild claws.Wild Claws specifies that it's an unarmed attack, so I don't think they work together as written.
Then none of the work together animal companion abilities would work with wild shape or form spells or wild claws. On page 285.
"Your cat throws your enemies off balance when you create an opening. Until you next turn all your weapon strikes against a creature your cat threatens make the target flat-footed until the end of your next turn as an enhancement."
To name one anyway. Others use the same term.
Animal form on 205 call its attacks "unarmed melee attacks" and on page 178 unarmed attacks are counted as simple weapons.
Edit:On page 272 wild claws also count as an unarmed attack.
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I do not understand why druid's were punished with such low skill numbers. Starting at 3 versus the cleric's 5 seems to make no sense whatsoever. This is especially true of Wild Order druids who need a high str, dex, con and wis to fight in melee, have enough wild shapes and eventually AC when the wild shapes form stop leveling up and they use their own stats.
I understand that many skill were combined but consider a druid should have:
Nature
Survival
Athletics
Acrobatics (flying is a thing they do with wild shape)
Stealth (sneaking around in Pest Form)
Intimidate (for wild order druids, though this means investing in Charisma which means lower Int and even less skills)
and this assumes they just stick with skill that make sense for the druid. I suggest that they should not only be not lowered to 3 but boosted to 5.
Also wild shape seems to only work between 5 - 15 levels. Before Pest form will just get you killed (i guess this was a response to the bird/fox/bat builds) and forms only scale up to level 15, furthermore the wild order level 20 feat is horrible, actually makes you worse since you go up to level 7 instead of level 8, and doesn't do anything wild shape already does since you don't need to prep the forms like you do with your slots.
I feel like adjudicating most of the order anathemas is mostly going to be a matter of asking druid players to think about what they are doing when it's something borderline and come up with a justification of why it's actually fine in this case.
I think it's supposed to be more of a "roleplaying opportunity" like most of the Barbarian anathema, not an actual limitation like the Paladin one.
But, like, the storm druid anathema basically exists to get the druid to think about what they are doing, and possible unintended consequences, before they act... druids are supposed to be *wise* after all.
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As of now druids are far too weak to be viable.
I believe druids as casters is fine. I'd like leaf druids to have more than goodberry like some druid feats to aid in healing and the like but overall they are viable. Wild druids are my main issue.
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Leaf is a good support platform with room for selecting Feats from other Orders or even multi+classing.
So the conclusion is, that the leaf feats are mostly useless.
I agree with that, but it doesn't sound like you should count 3 of 4 orders as "basically fine".
(Assuming you're talking about Wild being the one not fine order).
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I'd hate for leaf to be a multi-class order. I love the concept of the leaf order and I want to see some nice abilities. Something like improved goodberry, spending spell points to use sunlight to regenerate, a toxic touch attack, barkskin or some sort of thorn armor. Still it'd be fun to have a leaf druid with woodland stride and widen spell center entangle on themselves and watch everyone struggle.
As leaf is right now it's "fine" because it uses the druid's casting abilities and those are basically fine. It is probably ranked 3rd of the 4 orders though.
As leaf is right now it's "fine" because it uses the druid's casting abilities and those are basically fine. It is probably ranked 3rd of the 4 orders though.
Yeah, that's my point. You could also play a wild druid, ignore all wildshape feats and play a "fine" caster. That doesn't mean the either order works particularly well.
I would even say among those two, wild is vastly superior to plant in design and execution. For me, plant is the worst order by far.
Yeah, that's my point. You could also play a wild druid, ignore all wildshape feats and play a "fine" caster. That doesn't mean the either order works particularly well.
I would even say among those two, wild is vastly superior to plant in design and execution. For me, plant is the worst order by far.
Sigh, you're probably right. I just want to like the leaf druid and you're right, there really isn't much there.
I really don't think "fine" is good enough when it comes to druid Spellcasting. So much of the druid's power seems to be derived from the assumption that the average druid will take multiple order feats. If it's assumed, then it needs to be baseline. Take a look at a storm druid who focuses only on spellcasting to other casters of the same level. It is not a good look, imo. Comparable to a bard, but nowhere near a cleric.
You are right in that different classes have different schticks. It probably is unfair to compare different classes to each other. Just irks me that druid has the same number of spell slots as the cleric without a big chunky pool of auto-heightened spells as baseline.
A thought just struck me. Was one of the design goals of PF2 was to increase variety of characters, also greater variation within classes. Yet for druid, Jason brought in order concept, that is a very good change I like. But have failed in variation within the orders. For Wild Order, most will take the same set of feats in the same sequence, due to dependencies for most of the Wild feats. Similar for Storm and Leaf. As is, those Order feats can as well be just hard coded in the progression.
For the Wild orders, I rather like to see flavours of shape shifters, such as animal, elemental, outsider (druids from another world), oozes, plants. Each flavour having a range of feats related to the flavour to choose from starting from the lowest feat choice to the highest. If a druid really wants to have mix of types to shift into, they can choose so, by at the expense of gaining additional benefits if sticking to one flavour type.
Hmmmm.....
If space is an issue, then perhaps, have 2/3 flavours for Wild order included, as to provide GMs and product developers an idea how the flavours can be implemented for other varieties. Can start off with ground based animals (starting off small animal, and moving up in size (also smaller for the sneaking about stuff), 2nd variation could be flying animals types (including dragons higher up, after all they just big flying reptiles with nasty breath), and 3rd elementals (besides size different types of elementals can be increased).
Future could be aquatic animals, tree base, oozes, etc.
I don't know, human Leaf order, pump Wis to 18, take the racial ambition trait to pick up the Reach metamagic at level one, and select addtional cantrip as an ability from your Leshy familiar. You're pretty much an optimal cantrip slinger at first level and it continues to scale without any additional investment.
Take Call of the Wild at 2, some mix of Widen, Steady, Thousand Faces, Woodland stride, or 3 archetype feats at 4, 6, and 8.
Pick up Primal Summons and Healing Transformation (it works with Thousand Faces!) at 10 and 14.
18th either Verdant Metamorphosis or pick up something you missed earlier. Both level 20 choices you qualify for are good.
That looks like a solid character to me.
I guess the big advantage to Leaf is that a familiar and Goodberry never really stop being useful even if you don't keep investing in them directly. The other three orders really require specific investments if they want to keep their base abilities fully relevant.
The problem is any druid order can do that same thing. Other than leaf getting to move in magical plant terrain and leshy with 3 abilities and goodberry which is worse that channel energy because who tracks rations. Also channeled heal can be improved with a feat and has its own pool and goodberry doesn't.
Yeah, the specific things I listed should be fixed, but honestly 3 of the 4 Orders are basically fine as long as they avoid a few garbage Feats. And the 4th Order really just wants a couple of specific things tweaked and it's good to go.
Animal is probably the most powerful due to action economy, Storm is a very solid nuker, and Leaf is a good support platform with room for selecting Feats from other Orders or even multi+classing.
Storm is a bit of a one trick pony but it is a pretty dang solid trick. Animal looks to be in a good place I really like how you can grow your pet as you level seems solid.
Wild I think could be fine but right now it seems to suffer from a lot of the issues the release version of shifters did that got reworked/errated pretty fast. Shifting that has highly limited durations and other weirdness all tied into a seeming unwillingness to let shapeshifters shape shift.
Animal companions can't get magic attacks at higher levels, which is still important against some enemies.
Wall of thorns seemed pretty bad.
I think the magic attack thing while it should be something to point out probably gets fixed soon enough. Either via some specific spells or in theory something like magic weapon may work on them. Since unarmed attacks are considered simple weapons by the same logic magic weapon spell should work for unarmed attacks to both make them able to strike magic as well as giving them an extra dice of damage.
Actually strike that druids basically already have the correct version of magic weapon to buff their pets attacks to be magic.
MAGIC FANG SPELL 1
Casting Somatic Casting, Verbal Casting
Range touch; Targets one willing ally
Duration 1 minute
Choose one of the target’s unarmed attacks that deals 1 die of
damage. You cause that unarmed attack to shine with primal energy.
The unarmed attack counts a +1 magic weapon, gaining a +1 item
bonus to attack rolls and dealing another die of damage on a hit.
So at the start of combat if you find you need magic to hit the target buff up your willing pet and then let him go attack.
So probably more of a matter of they tried to do a copy paste of magic weapon and forgot about the effects on full grown animals so either just need to give it a heightened effect so it can apply to adult animals or just edit the existing spell with something like if a non magical attack does more than one dice just add +1 to hit and make the attack magic.
Given this is clearly what the spell was designed to accomplish I doubt it would be that big of a deal for them to do for the full release.
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Weirdness with the Storm druids. The feats seem pretty much spelled out for you up through level 8, and then... nothing till 18. Sure, you could go back and pick up whichever of widen / reach you didn't grab at second (unless you're human and already got both). But really it seems the best thing there is to dip into the multiclass feats.
Solution: they should add a feat around level 10 to get the first ed Natural Spell back in. Give an option for other druids to dabble a bit in wild shape without blocking out their spellcasting.
Since that's not an option right now though, I'll probably add some cleric in to pick up an interesting domain.
Weirdness with the Storm druids. The feats seem pretty much spelled out for you up through level 8, and then... nothing till 18. Sure, you could go back and pick up whichever of widen / reach you didn't grab at second (unless you're human and already got both). But really it seems the best thing there is to dip into the multiclass feats.
Solution: they should add a feat around level 10 to get the first ed Natural Spell back in. Give an option for other druids to dabble a bit in wild shape without blocking out their spellcasting.
Since that's not an option right now though, I'll probably add some cleric in to pick up an interesting domain.
I think that actually may be a good thing that they are more free to make some choices in other stuff or dabble in archetypes/multiclass stuff.
If you look at the animal ones they pretty much seem locked in to focusing every animal boosting feat they can get access to at any level they get access to it and if you don't then your companion is going to be hurting.
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The problem is any druid order can do that same thing. Other than leaf getting to move in magical plant terrain and leshy with 3 abilities and goodberry which is worse that channel energy because who tracks rations. Also channeled heal can be improved with a feat and has its own pool and goodberry doesn't.Other Druid Orders absolutely can do the same thing, but the opportunity cost for Leaf is lower because their base abilities don't really brook further investment. I legit feel bad for Animal Companions whose owners aren't fully investing in Animal Feats.
I admit that channel energy is much better than Goodberry, but honestly I don't particularly mind that maybe Clerics are better healers in most situations. Goodberry is a pretty different healing mechanic regardless, and is not without its own benefits.
I'm not worried about the 'rations' aspect to Goodberry, I see that as mostly an RP item. It is genuinely not that difficult to come up with berries in most biomes through much of the year, never mind your actual rations or the possibility of harvesting them off your Leshy.
I only bring up channel energy because leaf druids get goodberry and leshy and clerics get channel energy and domain. One would hope...all other things being equal...that goodberry could compare to channel energy but goodberry has no use in combat and heals less than channel energy and has nothing to improve it later on. I think druids should be able to heal as well as clerics and i think the leaf order is a good place for those mechanics.
It'd be neat to have an open druid order like the universal wizard school but I don't want that to be the leaf order. I want cool plant powers.
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Animal form on 205 call its attacks "unarmed melee attacks" and on page 178 unarmed attacks are counted as simple weapons.
Edit:On page 272 wild claws also count as an unarmed attack.
Then at page 183 for weapon traits we read:
Unarmed: An unarmed attack uses your body rather than a manufactured weapon. An unarmed attack isn’t a weapon, though it’s categorized with weapons for weapon tables and weapon groups, and it might have weapon traits.
Note also that all heigh-level form spells use "natural attacks", not "unarmed". The problem is that the term "natural attack" is not defined anywhere.
However, if you read carefully, while claws are said to be unarmed attacks, their traits are written (agile, finesse), not (agile, finesse, unarmed)
This terrible mess definitely need a clarification from the developers. IMO, the difference between fist (or "another part of your body") and claw or specially scaled tail is too big to be both the same "unarmed" category.
Primal Summons and Storm Retribution don't add spell points. Those are typos, right?
RPG Superstar 2008 Top 32, 2011 Top 16
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All order feats that give spell points should do so to druids of any order - not doing this is another way character diversity is discouraged. I don't have an issue if druids of an order get a perk from feats associated with their order, but it shouldn't be spell points as well as using the power better.
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RPG Superstar 2008 Top 32, 2011 Top 16
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Wild Shape feat
1) so you can wild shape from 1st level, but only into a pest/Tiny animal? That’s pretty weak and lame. Great to scout with, but there should be a combat form out of the gate, even if a minor one, like a small sized dog or cat, like a coyote or bobcat etc. Animal form later grants a battle form starting at Medium, so there’s room to have a Small battle form.
2) Non wild order druids should be able to wild shape more than twice a day. Either gaining more shapes for additional feats beyond 4, or having a feat of extra wild shape granting 2 more points a day, etc.
3) Also, why does wild shape have a separate pool from spell points? Either commit to having all special spells be powered by spell points generically, or have all use separate pools that make sense. Don’t do one with exceptions.
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RPG Superstar 2008 Top 32, 2011 Top 16
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Call of the wild - so if you take this at 2nd level, using it for a 1st level summon costs 2 spell points, since if it's your highest level spell it costs 2 instead of 1? There should be an exception that the 2 points and have it only kicks in for 2nd level and higher spells.