For my birthday I managed to get together a group to playtest the 12th level adventure this week. I wanted to test a few ideas, and saw an opportunity to make a character who mirrored one of my favorite NPCs from one of my last campaigns.
Stiv Stalen, the GDBM:
[Abilities]
STR 18
DEX 20
CON 12
INT 14
WIS 12
CHA 18
[Ancestry Feats]
[General Feats]
[Skill Feats]
[Class Feats]
[Skills]
[Gear]
The character's niche is that he's the best at intimidate, and can do so to instill the flat-footed condition to trigger both more crits because this is a fighter, and to get more sneak attack damage, which I believe doubles on a crit now. Deadly was also up to 2d6 on both weapons, and I could use them both with Returning.
Two things:
1) Blood Demons ruined my night immediately
2) night wasn't going so good because despite all the extra d6's, the starknife's d4s could not keep up with the cleric or paladin rolling a d12. I crit more often, because I built for it (also we had a bard) but even so my crit damage was barely enough to be relevant. This was painful to play out.
I'm of the opinion that dice/HP need to scale back, because another thing we noticed was that turns all took a really long time because of how many dice we were rolling, and then we had to check for weaknesses and resistances and it didn't feel simpler or faster than the old system.
That said, I think all the dice need to scale up, so we have better averages on niche builds like mine to have a chance at having more fun.
I really liked the character, he was just terrible for this particular fight.
Ugh... that 12th level adventure is not a birthday present at all. Your character might feel like being master of Intimidate, yet mosters are made overpowered compared to PCs. Some demons in the encounters have +26 Intimidate, just becase designers gave them that number out of the blue. If GM remembers to use that, no character combo does well in that fight.
I expect some serious changes in the Bestiary, right now monsters progress faster than PCs. As a result, at higher levels players feel weaker, not stronger.
I noticed that for sure, but combining a bard with the feint mechanics really helped tactically.
There just need to be more tactics to employ.