General impressions of playtest so far. All of this is done in Doomsday Dawn.

[Kringress]

First is player participation, We started with 15 people at the beginning, we are down to 5 people right now. We lost most people to not liking playtest rules or losing interest.

Attacks, if I were to create a party right now I would have 3 barbarians/fighters and a cleric. Only once was anything written for a dedicated rogue. Spell casters other than clerics need not even apply. Spell casting other than healing needs a total rethink/write. After second level there is no need to have a rogue (better off having a cleric taking thief skills). As far as anyone can tell there is no niche for anything that is anything other than Barbarians, Fighters, Paladins, Clerics. You do not need anything else. This is a FUNDAMENTAL problem, and a bad design flaw.

The only time we had more than one spell caster was for the third chapter and we had 2 clerics who turned the fights into snooze fests with so many channels it was not funny.

Overall I would rate up to Mirrored Moon as the first chapter was interesting, and the others as have a cleric with a bunch of fighter types to absorb and deal damage. It has become how magical is your weapon vs how many hit points do the monsters have.

[DM_Blake]

That's a frightening synopsis, but it's similar to what we've found at our table.

Nobody wants to play any caster except cleric and nobody wants a rogue or ranger either.

Monk is on the fence so far but we only had one at level 4 so we don't have much data. Nobody is in a hurry to play it again though.

That leaves fighter, barbarian, paladin, and the requisite god cleric. Our current group has three of those and a sorcerer who is quickly becoming disillusioned.

Length of battles, yo-yo nature of being knocked out by bosses then standing up and getting knocked right back down again, and the general difficulty of doing anything that isn't healing or swinging a weapon for the first time, has flat-lined most of my group's interest.

[Mary Yamato]

My husband plays sorcerers, but he plays them as if they were martials: he uses a one-action magical ability (all through Sombrefell he was using one that does not work on undead--we could not figure out why at first!) and then attacks with Magical Striker. It does not feel much like a caster.

My impression is that functionally all classes are the same: you should wear armor, carry and use a melee weapon, and have a backup missile weapon if you can afford it. Use your spells, if you have spells, to buff yourself or your allies, or for healing. Get a magic weapon and magic armor before anything else. In last weekend's game I frankly had trouble keeping the characters straight. We had two clerics, a paladin, and a primal sorcerer, but except for Channel it might almost have been four fighters. (Admittedly we were saving spells for the big boss, who we didn't reach by the session's end. But this is driven partly by having so few spells, I for one am afraid to use them.)

[pauljathome]

Mary Yamato wrote:

My impression is that functionally all classes are the same: you should wear armor, carry and use a melee weapon, and have a backup missile weapon if you can afford it.

Unfortunately, I think you're largely right. Hopefully the de nerfing of spells will change this but right now hitting people with weapons is the way to go. Spellcasters get magic for utility and AoE damage, martials get tricks to be more effective at hitting things.

But EVERYBODY should be in armor, have good Dex, and be using good magic weapons. Absolutely NO exceptions.

And all spellcasters should be paladins

[Azmodael]

The +10-to-crit really destroyed any chance to build a character with sub-optimal AC and not be a liability to the team.

[Edge93]

My group has played a fair number of casters, at least one from each spell list, and they all really enjoyed them. Most of them didn't use a backup weapon either. I don't know if it's something about my style of GMing or the way my players play or what but we just haven't been seeing the complaints people seem to have towards PF2 casters. We are currently in Heroes of Undarin and it's been the first time we've worried a caster might not have enough spells to get through a day (Our Wizard is low, our Druid multiclassing Ranger has mostly been using Hunt Target and arrows because he keeps forgetting about his spells because he usually plays a Ranger so he's got plenty left). And the spells certainly haven't felt ineffective to her. We've gotten a lot of mileage out of her blasts and debuffs and her spells have absolutely saved our hide once or twice though I will concede those were lucky shots (Oneshotting a Lich with Disintigrate due to a critical hit followed by a crit failed save and then a Demilich failing its save against Slow forcing it to let our Paladin out of a Maze or else stop casting other spells and also preventing him from dodging AoOs and casting in the same turn). But again even disregarding those lucky bits our casters have all felt very effective.

Electric Arc is a favored cantrip for its ability to hit multiple targets, do some damage even on a failure, and have it's success chance keyed off of casting stat instead of Dex. Thematically I like lower Mage AC making them more squishy, we haven't found them too frail at all though but we try to work as a party to keep pressure off of the casters anyway.

[DM_Blake]

Now that blasting got more damage, they might not be quite such a terrible option.

Let's get in the Way-Back machine, way back to the 1970s when AD&D first came out. We had a Fireball spell that did 1d6 per level of the caster. That's not too far off from what it still does to day in Pathfinder 1e, right? But back then, the biggest, baddest, deadliest monster in the entire Monster Manual was the ancient red dragon which topped out at 88 HP.

That's it. 88 HP. IIRC, nothing had more than that.

So, if your 12th level wizard dropped a 12d6 fireball (bad example on a red dragon but just run with it for a moment), you could do 72 damage but probably do around 40-45.

In other words, a 12th level caster could cast a single Fireball that does 1/2 the HP of the biggest monster in the game.

By comparison, today's ancient red dragon has 385 HP, more than 4x the total HP. Well, 12th level characters, today, don't fight ancient dragons, so compare to a 12th level Adult Green Dragon in the playtest which has 180 HP, still more than double.

OK, but fireball does more damage, right?

No, not even close.

Even after the update, it's only 8d6. Sure, you can heighten it, but that AD&D wizard only used a THIRD level slot to cast his 12d6 Fireball. So if a PF2E wizard uses just a 3rd level slot, he gets 8d6. Exactly 2/3 the damage output against a dragon that has more than 2x the HP.

If the wizard heightens it to a 5th level slot he can do the SAME damage as the AD&D wizard and if he heightens it to a 6th level slot he can do 14d6. He increased his damage output by 17% while the dragon has more than 100% more HP, and our poor PF2E wizard had to burn his highest level of spell to do it while the AD&D wizard only needed a puny 3rd level slot and still has all of his 6th level slots available for actual 6th level spells like Death Spell or Disintegrate. Our PF2E wizard has those spells too, but if he wants to cast his best Fireballs, he must prepare Fireball instead of those spells, while the AD&D wizard could get both.

And kill monsters with a lot fewer HP.

So people will say "Today's game is different".

Fine.

But in the 70's, wizards blasted monster HP with fireball, and today wizards blast monster HP with fireball. Different game or not, THAT mechanic is pretty much the same, only today it's a much weaker AND more limiting option.

[Matthew Downie]

A caster using a third-level slot to inflict damage equal to half the HP of the strongest monster in the game to multiple creatures sounds like pretty terrible game balance...

[pauljathome]

Edge93 wrote:

Thematically I like lower Mage AC making them more squishy, we haven't found them too frail at all though but we try to work as a party to keep pressure off of the casters anyway.

It sounds like the GM isn't focus firing very well or just isn't bothering to attack casters very much.

Note, I'm not calling BadWrongFun, just trying to point out why you may be seeing things differently from other people. There are very few tools in PF2 "to keep pressure off the casters".

[DM_Blake]

Matthew Downie wrote:

A caster using a third-level slot to inflict damage equal to half the HP of the strongest monster in the game to multiple creatures sounds like pretty terrible game balance...

Didn't seem to bother us in the 70s.

That same caster could have used a higher slot and killed the dragon outright.

Or the fighter could have beaten it down in a round or two with his magic sword.

Combats were shorter. PCs also had fewer HP and could be beaten down faster too. That 12th level wizard probably had about 30 HP. Tops. A bit more if he rolled well (or "rolled" when the GM wasn't watching...), but could have had less, too (needed a 15 CON to even get +1 HP per level). No Toughness feat either.

The benefit was that we could play a 5 hour session and easily finish a dungeon with 8 or 10 encounters in that time. Including time spent exploring rooms and solving puzzles and dealing with traps, roleplaying with chatty enemies or non-hostile encounters, etc.

I can't remember ever getting a 10 encounter session in modern evolutions of the game, say, in the current century.

So, maybe that 1st edition was balanced for quick and fun progress through adventures rather than for harder, longer challenges that slowed down the adventure's progress by ramping up the encounter challenge.

In any case, I just brought that up to demonstrate how, over time, blasting spells have lost a ton of relative power. In AD&D, blasting was a good way to win a fight. In PF1E, blasting is considered very sub-optimal compared to battlefield control, SOS, or even buffing.

Across several editions, blasting went from king-of-the-world to plague-ridden-unwanted-village-idiot.

In PF2E, blasting lost some more of its power, even AFTER the update, but so did everything else. Now it just feels like spellcasting is sub-optimal (except healing).

[Edge93]

pauljathome wrote:

Edge93 wrote:

Thematically I like lower Mage AC making them more squishy, we haven't found them too frail at all though but we try to work as a party to keep pressure off of the casters anyway.

It sounds like the GM isn't focus firing very well or just isn't bothering to attack casters very much.

Note, I'm not calling BadWrongFun, just trying to point out why you may be seeing things differently from other people. There are very few tools in PF2 "to keep pressure off the casters".

Yeah, I suppose that is a by-product of my GMing style. I try to make strong challenges for the party but I -usually- stray away from brutal tactics like running in to gun down the casters or trying to down one PC at a time. I usually tend to let the frontliners work as a frontline as long as they aren't just sloppily leaving big openings for enemies to move by, even if the enemies could technically just run by and hit the casters. I do sometimes have enemies focus primarily on a single character but it's usually when a given character marks themselves out as an especially large threat by getting in a really good round or targeting a weak point or something, rather than just prioritizing the players that I know are easier to take down. (Funny note, our Wizard in HoU is a Dwarf with 18 Con, Toughness, and that one Dwarf feat. Her HP is about on par with the Paladin and Fighter. XD

And I also tend to have monsters respond to being hit by turning in anger upon whoever hit them (Unless they were focused enough on something else that the hit wasn't enough to pull them off), depending on how badly they were hit sometimes, so as to let players draw enemies off of other players if needed (Like not to the degree of being able to just juggle a monster's aggro around, I do put limits to it) and also to make things a little more personal with my players, they like to sometimes form micro-rivalries in battle, often doing the same thing in turning their attention to enemies that specifically target them. That's actually how that Lich got oneshotted, he tried to Dominate the Wizard and it ticked her off so she spent 3 Hero Points to get the extra action to use Disintigrate on the Lich in addition to something else she was trying to do on that turn. XD

[DM_Blake]

Edge93 wrote:

I try to make strong challenges for the party but I -usually- stray away from brutal tactics like running in to gun down the casters or trying to down one PC at a time.

Me, I often give back as well as I get.

I'm a professional chess player and coach, I love strategy games of all kind, and I feel confident that I can match most RPG players tactic for tactic on the battlemat. In fact, I may be able to overmatch many of them.

So I let the players dictate the tactics.

If my players routinely run in and wipe out enemy healers before mopping up the enemy martials, then I'll have my enemies do that to them (based, of course, on the intellectual awareness of those enemies). If my players routinely focus fire on the most threatening and/or easiest glass cannon amongst the enemies, then I'll have my enemies do that. If my players routinely optimize for certain tactics (e.g. using darkness and blindfight to get an advantage on their enemies) then I'll use similarly optimized enemies built for similar tactics against them.

Not every time. Variety is the spice of life.

But if my players are not doing those kinds of things, they I don't do that to them. Often. But I may do it occasionally, especially if the enemies are a focused group of bad guys with a reputation for being brutally efficient and tactically sharp, in which case, even my less tactical players usually rise to those occasions and enjoy the challenge.

[Tridus]

Matthew Downie wrote:

A caster using a third-level slot to inflict damage equal to half the HP of the strongest monster in the game to multiple creatures sounds like pretty terrible game balance...

People who complain about rocket tag today have no idea. That was by design back then. And as DM_Blake said, it had its upside: stuff went a lot faster. Either you kill the dragon or the dragon kills you, but we're not taking 2 hours to resolve it.

Combat didn't drag on forever the way it can now. That opens up a lot more time for narrative stuff in a session, or more combats. I cringe everytime someone says playtest combat needs to be longer, because it already goes on for quite a while. If they make it even longer and expect me to spam cantrips until the bullet sponge falls over, my eyes will glaze over and I'll long for the days of rocket tag.

[Kringress]

Just ran Heroes. We had a Barbarian, Paladin, Monk, and Evocation Wizard.

3 Combats ran about 1 hour plus each, so we only got through the first wave.

Damage on average for the all melee characters (including the wizard with a +3 Staff) averaged 30 points for a regular hit, and 60 for Holy Smite.

Wizard used 7 fireballs, 4 x 6th, 2 x 5th, 1 x 4th level fireballs, 37.5% Saves on all spells. Did less than average damage (rolled 3.2 average). Only once was able to hit more than 2 targets.

Most damage was done when wizard was hit by demon and Elemental Tempest did 12 D8 fire damage, doing almost 60 points of damage. Used 1 5th level Magic Missile 9 d4 + 9 doing 45 points of damage. Used 2 Cantrips for no damage. (roll to hit did nothing).

Party AC 34 Paladin, 33 Wizard, 30 Monk and Barbarian. (Wizard took Fighter and AoO feats). Barbarian took 95 HPS damage in 1 round, Monk kept getting hit 1-2 times a round, Paladin and Wizard took the least hits No one got below 0 hps but it was the first combat. Paladin used 3 lay on hands and 1 use of Wand of heal, 1 use of Heal potion.

Basically Wizard was out of high level spells by the end of the first wave, and healing would not have been a great option going onward.

The GM ran the monsters correctly so we could not concentrate on 1 target, No 3rd attacks landed and only on 20s were there any critical hits. My guess is that we would have died on the second or third wave as the Wizard would have been reduced to damage from swinging the staff and all the healing magic would have been used.

[Gortle]

DM_Blake wrote:

Now that blasting got more damage, they might not be quite such a terrible option.

Yep the damage that direct spells do is way behind the increase in hit points over the years.

But thats been true for all systems not just this playtest edition.

Personally I don't mind that so much as it was done for the purpose of play balance, but maybe it was power creep to sell editions to players.

Anyway I do think that spells should do even more damage than they made in the recent changes. Except for cantrips as they should be in general below weapon strikes for damage.

But its the non damage spells that really suck. Point in case I was just looking at Enlarge for its conditional bonus to damage - then I realized Sluggish was a penalty to attacks,reflex saves and AC. Its actually a net negative unless you really really need to be large for some other purpose. I should be thinking of it as a debuff. Definitely not worth an action to cast. 80% plus of the non direct damage spells are an utter waste of space.

[Gortle]

Kringress wrote:

Just ran Heroes. We had a Barbarian, Paladin, Monk, and Evocation Wizard.

We ran it 2 weeks back now.

Had a Fighter, Paladin, Rogue (archer) Wizard (evoker) and Cleric (multiclass Bard, buffer with no weapon attacks)

The first 2 waves were quite easy because
1) our GM had let us buy a few potions of flying,
2) the Cleric got down a Sanctified Ground
3) the Paladin had Aura of Faith which meant doing Good damage was easy

Spells were fairly pointless as they were doing less damage than the Fighter. Saving throw DCs weren't too hard due to the armour bonus. It was really only Critical Fails that hurt. The GM was not happy when I Critically succeded as the first victim of a Chain Lightning.

The Paladin had Channel Life so there was stacks of healing

Because we had flying the enemy casters that we did encounter were very quickly in melee.

But we just ran out of time it was more than 10 hours of play over multiple sessions so we just called it off in the end. We still had 2/3rds of our healing left at this point, but the casters were getting low on spells.

We had a brief look at the third wave. The party concensus was clear after fighting the first 6 waves.
Encounter 7 would have been a problem because disarming the only weapons of the fighters whould have been it for the party. But other wise it would have been tough due to the insane AC and attacks of the demons. We also were running out of fly spells so they could have abused their longer reach.
Encounter 8 would have been a pointless doddle even for a weakened party.
Encounter 9 would have definitely been a total party kill as we would have had no resources left at that point and the final monster had a ridiculous AC.

In summary, the level difference was just too great for the party to win that final fight, maybe even if we had had full resources. +1 per level is crushing in this game. The monsters 2 levels below the party where a total cake walk, we could get through an encounter with them almost unscathed.

Saving throws are not well balanced between the PCs and the Monsters.

[Kringress]

Yeah that is my impression of damage from the wizard point of view. Doing about the same damage as the Paladin (overall) with less resources.

I agree with DM_Blake about AD&D and 2nd ed D&D, fights got done in 1-2 rounds because no one had the hps to do anything else and you hope the cleric had a few spells left by that time. Healing potions were used constantly after the first adventure otherwise you might not have any heals.

[shroudb]

That Adnd spell comparison is flat out wrong.

For starters, a 12 level wizard required quite a lot more xp than everyone else, making him similar to something like a level 15+ rogue as an example.

Next, wizards in Adnd were made of paper. Nowhere near the survivability they have now.

Due to how con works now, as well as maximised hp/level we have now, it would be like a current wizard was at most a d2.

Lastly, casting times and concentration of old Adnd made it a risky business to even launch a spell since it gave a whole range of initiatives that if you were hit in between them you simply lost the spell.

In short, yes, wizards did heaps more in Adnd, but also died if something looked funny at them and their spells were ridiculously easy to interrupt as well.

3rd edition, pf, and now pf2 continue on a path that continually drops the explosive power and substitutes it with survivability and sustain.

As for evokes in current pf2, our group's blaster sorc (level 6 now in our homebrew pf2 adventure) is doing just fine:

8d6+3 vs 2 targets and then flaming sphere +cantrip each round means he's pretty much king of damage if left alone. And he can do so around 5 battles per day while still keeping his 1st level slots for a bit more burst (sphere+burning hands usually).