- Forces role of healbot onto PC at the expense of other options. Channelling is very rarely traded out in archetypes making the problem worse. Wide abundance of healing in other forms makes it largely unnecessary..... classic example = the ubiquitous wand of CLW
For some alternate definiton of "healbot" where "healbot" == "has any kind of healing ability"?
Channel without any feat support doesn't enforce healbot at all. Quite the opposite. Without feat support it's barely usable in combat at all. You'll be doing something else and using channel in downtime to help recover.
That's not a healbot. That's not even close to a healbot. A healbot is a character that isn't effective doing anything except healing, and a PF1 Cleric is not even close to one of those.
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For some alternate definiton of "healbot" where "healbot" == "has any kind of healing ability"?Channel without any feat support doesn't enforce healbot at all. Quite the opposite. Without feat support it's barely usable in combat at all. You'll be doing something else and using channel in downtime to help recover.
That's not a healbot. That's not even close to a healbot. A healbot is a character that isn't effective doing anything except healing, and a PF1 Cleric is not even close to one of those.
But as I said, even if you accept that its going to be used purely out of combat, the problem still remains:
1) Alongside domains it is the clerics only class feature and it is geared towards healing.... an ability easily duplicated by other means, thus making it redundant and thus a waste of a class feature.
2) The class design gives you very little option to trade this out via archetypes. You are in effect pushed into the healing role right from the start. Neg channelling is so horrendous its basically a class ability write off for any evil clerics!
This is the crucial point.... a huge amount of your class design space is geared towards an ability that either requires a huge additional investment on the PC behalf to make it even maybe semi-useful in combat or something that is easily replaced in out of combat scenarios.
If it was an ability that was frequently able to be traded out in archetypes then the issue wouldn't have been an issue..... the problem is that it very rarely was!
The burden of party healing was always assumed to be that of the clerics.... irrespective of what type of cleric they wanted to play and which deity they worshipped. Something that when you think about it is pretty nonsensical.
This was something that during the entire of PF1 Paizo just couldn't (or probably didnt want) seem to see.
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Channel has been a net gain from 3.5. Before, Clerics were still demanded to heal, but had to use their spell slots for it.
What Paizo did was giving Clerics a way to say ‘no, my spell slots are for spells, and only in emergency case I’ll convert them’.
They should do something like that again.
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Channel has been a net gain from 3.5. Before, Clerics were still demanded to heal, but had to use their spell slots for it.
What Paizo did was giving Clerics a way to say ‘no, my spell slots are for spells, and only in emergency case I’ll convert them’.
They should do something like that again.
True.... but also not really relevant
3.5 gave clerics more meaningful ways to tailor the class than PF does
Also doesn't change the fact that PF Neg.Channelling is effectively a non-option and so a waste of class ability and irrespective of which deity and type of cleric you wish to RP, healing responsibility is forced upon you as a cleric. You still carry at the bare minimum, the shadow of healbot!!
When you look at a great many of the deities, this makes zero sense.
At the end of the day....Paizo could have very easily created archetypes that traded channelling for other more thematically appropriate options.... but they didn't. So many of the archetypes were just plain terrible.
I'm not saying that channelling shouldn't have existed.... if you want to be a 'channel cleric' then fine.... but to have it forced upon you is just wrong, and IMO contributed significantly to the 'boring and bland' tag that PF1 cleric was frequently stuck with.
And interestingly....nothing that I have seen from PF2 shows this changing.... amazingly I see the PF2 as being even more dull than PF1 cleric! At least with some system mastery, you could do something with PF1 cleric.... with PF2 Paizo seem to be on a very stubborn crusade to prove the worth of channelling!
Irony: you can build a non-sneak-attack rogue.
Its called a thief.
Ooh, I can do this too!
Sadly, you have chosen a poor comparative, so I'm afraid not!
PF1 rogue sneak attack requires zero additional investment on behalf of the PC and scales fine as well in terms of it granting additional damage. In addition it has synergy with other rogue options so is fine in that respect too. And also there is no distinction in its quantitative effectiveness in terms of the rogue's alignment.... the same undeniably cannot be said of channelling for clerics. The rogue has a great many class abilities, so the necessity of trading out any individual one of them to introduce archetype variety becomes less important - there are numerous options. This becomes even more relevant when remembering that sneak attack is very effective.... so why would you trade it out?!? PF1 cleric has very few class abilities, so the necessity of trading out to create interesting archetypes becomes far more significant.
Simple stuff.
As I explained and examined previously, PF1 channel energy has numerous inherent flaws. None of which are similar to that of sneak attack.
I am one of many people who who thought channel energy largely ineffective/waste of design space in PF1..... a search of the forums will show you that.
Rogues being shackled to Sneak Attack
In Late PF1, this was a non-issue, because if you did not want sneak attack, there were hosts of other classes that could fill the rest of the rogues' niche.
In the playtest, this actually IS a problem, as the rogue is the only skill class. In the playtest, you cannot dodge having Sneak Attack if you want to play a skilled character.
[Yes, i do see that this was originally a strawman argument, but it does carry the point above.]
Rogues being shackled to Sneak AttackIn Late PF1, this was a non-issue, because if you did not want sneak attack, there were hosts of other classes that could fill the rest of the rogues' niche.
In the playtest, this actually IS a problem, as the rogue is the only skill class. In the playtest, you cannot dodge having Sneak Attack if you want to play a skilled character.
[Yes, i do see that this was originally a strawman argument, but it does carry the point above.]
Eh.
1) I'm relatively sure we will get a Rogue specific archetype that trades out sneak attack. As you said, it was a late edition, and it is absurd to think we won't get class specific archetypes at some point.
2) You can still build a pretty skilled character without being sneak attack focused. Yes, rogues are the best at it, but getting more trained skills is easy and there's several ways to get additional skills to expert or above. You can also functionally get extra skill feats a few ways. And of course you can multiclass rogue. Doing so doesn't get you sneak attack unless you want it.
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I mean, to be fair I feel like a couple of other classes could also fill the Cleric's niche of divine caster without Channel Energy, though not as many to be sure.
You mean a divine sorcerer? Sure, it exists.
It is also completely and utterly useless. I've seen actual mushrooms with more utility at the play table than a divine sorcerer.
1) I'm relatively sure we will get a Rogue specific archetype that trades out sneak attack. As you said, it was a late edition, and it is absurd to think we won't get class specific archetypes at some point.
This would require a new set of archetype rules. Current archetypes only swap out feats, not class features. I would actually like archetypes like that, but I'm far from sure it will happen.
Ithink it’s more likely we’ll get new base classes, but with the Rogue tag so that they can take Rogue feats.
How in hell is that ever going to help at all?
Let's be serious, those domain powers need to be improved.
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All spells need to be improved. But Cleric Spells more than most, and Domain Powers too.
Oddly enough it's the specialist wizard powers that are in the best place at the moment... But Specialist still sucks because of how much better off Generalist is.
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All spells need to be improved. But Cleric Spells more than most, and Domain Powers too.
Oddly enough it's the specialist wizard powers that are in the best place at the moment... But Specialist still sucks because of how much better off Generalist is.
Absolutely that Divine spell list is a shadow of the PF1 Clerics list.
The main problem is that the divine spell list was almost always buffs, but they had to severely reduce how effective buffing was from PF1 to PF2 because otherwise it would break the math behind the game.