| tivadar27 |
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So you'd figure that something you were burning either a feat or a racial feat to access would be a better option as a weapon than some of the standard ones... Turns out that that's not true for the Elven Curve Blade. For some reason, this got changed from 1d10 damage to 1d8. And that's a *big* jump when you consider the following:
1. It's not deadly anymore, so comparing it to the rapier, you lose use of one hand, get +1 damage (1d6 to 1d8) and lose deadly. That doesn't sound like a very good trade to me.
2. Even worse, Rogue's Finesse Striker only works with one-handed weapons, so it's strictly worse for Rogues.
3. It actually doesn't do more damage than the best martial one-handed weapons, such as the longsword or warhammer (both of which have other relevant properties.
4. It... operates weirdly with rogue abilities/proficiencies. I've described this elsewhere, so not going to go into more details here.
Personally, I'm not against this not getting Dexterity to Damage, as encouraging 2-statted rogue builds is a good thing, but in order to make it even close to viable, it needs to be doing 1d10 damage, and probably *also* be deadly. Taking up an extra hand in PF2e is a *big* deal.
| ErichAD |
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Most of the uncommon weapons are lackluster. Certainly not worth a feat. Elven Curve Blade is the highest damage die on a finesse weapon, but I can't see any way of leveraging that. If it was agile, had the two handed trait, backswing, or sweeping I'd think it was interesting. Right now its just the highest damaging finesse weapon with few if any defensive options available while wielding it.
Someone has to have found a use for it, but I can't think of one.
| PossibleCabbage |
Maybe on an Elf Alchemist who wants a melee option when bombs aren't a good idea, who starts with a high dex because they want to multiclass fighter at level 2? Doing this lets you use dex to hit with all your attacks and you have a reasonably damaging weapon even without huge strength.
But you won't have proficiency past expert and your dex will be your 2nd highest stat (most likely) so you won't crit as much so the rapier is less impressive by comparison.
| Tholomyes |
I losing deadly is less of a worry, since it's not just +1 damage, it's +1 damage per weapon die, where deadly only scales up to 3d8 with a legendary weapon. If we approximate the deadly dice as half the number of regular dice, it doesn't become better than the rapier until you've got an 80% crit chance, and for the reasonable range of crit chances, it averages around a 15% increase in damage, which is not that much less than the strength user's damage bump from 1 hand to two hand, when you account for strength to damage. I think they've tuned the dial a little too far on finesse weapons as a whole, but I don't think it's always an inferior option, just not always the right one, with the two handed limitations.
| Tholomyes |
Looks to me like they decided to balance racial weapons around the idea that the familiarity feats downgrading the category of the weapons they provide access to.
So an elven curve blade is built as a good simple weapon, rather than a not-great martial weapon.
This is perhaps fair, and maybe in the full book we'll see more exotic ancestral weapons, but I think it's going to be generally the wrong way of going about things, as, while the ancestral weapon feats seem to be most appealing to classes that don't get full martial access, there's something that bugs me about the fact that a Fighter or w/e doesn't get much benefit out of taking such a feat, but characters like a sorcerer or cleric do, despite the fact that they are only occasionally martially oriented, and they feel like they have better options for getting weapon proficiency. If they skewed to more exotic ancestral weaponry, then you'd have the case where the martially oriented characters, who are the most to gain, are more incentivized to take the feat.