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Looks like a lot of people couldn't do like the OP asked, and focus on positive experiences in the thread.
"Don't you straw man me!""No, it's you who straw manned me first!"
There's definitely been some derailing, but the signal to noise ratio is a lot better than I feared it would be. I've seen lots of interesting posts, and also feel like I'm getting some gradual insight into those posters who said they never felt awesome (which is sad).
Hoping we continue to get some interesting reports!
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Looks like a lot of people couldn't do like the OP asked, and focus on positive experiences in the thread.
"Don't you straw man me!""No, it's you who straw manned me first!"
There's definitely been some derailing, but the signal to noise ratio is a lot better than I feared it would be. I've seen lots of interesting posts, and also feel like I'm getting some gradual insight into those posters who said they never felt awesome (which is sad).
Hoping we continue to get some interesting reports!
In the spirit of that, I would like to explain "feeling awesome" meant for me, at least in the context of what it was like in PF1. And I know, perhaps I shouldn't be comparing, but it's very hard not to do.
For me, "feeling awesome" in PF1 meant completely turning the tide/feel of combat with my character's actions. Perhaps that meant that my melee character charged in was able to kill a strong foe in 1 round. Perhaps as a caster it meant I had just the right spell prepared for the fight, like energy resist for an unexpected fight against a dragon (something along that lines). Perhaps I grapple locked down the main enemy spell caster and turned what was supposed to be a challenging fight against a powerful spell caster, into mop up work against his henchmen.
Now, I know PF2 was supposed to reduce how overpowering the characters were...but they went so far that now I never feel awesome.
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I personally think that the negative comments should go to the sister thread. I think that is what it’s there for. At first I was happy to see this thread, hoping to see some light in the toxic darkness that most of this playtest forum is. But no, people want drag this thread through the muck as well. Sigh.
I really do wonder sometimes why my group has overall had such a better run of things. I mean we did play plenty of 1E so we have a good grasp of the differences. Maybe we just went into it with a positive attitude. Who knows.
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...You misunderstand my point.
People have played PF1 to death. They're bored with it, dislike the unnecessary complexity, and find it extremely unbalanced.
What people? Sounds like you're projecting. PF1 is plenty popular at my table. If it wasn't, we'd play something else. You seem to be taking your opinion and projecting it onto everyone.
So, Paizo decides that, with PF2, they try to do new things, cut down on complexity, and rebalance everything so nothing is broken.And yet strangely, it's still quite complicated, just for different reasons. There's still things that are clearly vastly superior to other things, there's still absolute right and wrong build choices, and a well made party is still far stronger than a poorly made one.
Aside from my character feeling far weaker than before when I'm not casting Heal, not a whole lot on that front has actually changed.
And everyone is now saying they don't like it, it's too much like 4E, or some other such nonsense, even though before, they disliked PF1 over the course of its runtime for the same reasons that Paizo is trying to fix.Yes, it's not shocking to learn that lots of people playing PF1 do so because they like it, and that taking away the stuff they like about it will be received poorly.
Again, you are either projecting, or making the false assumption that the people complaining now were the same ones complaining before. Which by and large, they weren't. The people happy with PF1 weren't on here complaining about it. They were busy having fun playing it.
They're now in here having negative things to say about the playtest because for them it's a simply inferior system to the one they already have.
Either we run it rebalanced, or we run it broken as before. There's a middle ground, but 5E already copywrote it, so Paizo can't do that. And people would complain about that too. Paizo just can't win (everyone...
As much as I liked reading your post, there's no point. This thread will be locked and anything that quotes Darksol the Painbringer may be deleted as well. The mods will say "Thanks for the feedback, we don't need another argument going over the same thing so this thread is locked".
Now whether or not Darksol deliberately made a post that will lock the thread, I don't know. But it's going to happen so there's little point in trying to engage in the conversation at hand unfortunately.
I used first of wind to both extinguish a burning ally and hurl a fire elemental into a pool of water. It only worked because it critfailed the save. But fam was it cool
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Looks like a lot of people couldn't do like the OP asked, and focus on positive experiences in the thread.
"Don't you straw man me!""No, it's you who straw manned me first!"
There's definitely been some derailing, but the signal to noise ratio is a lot better than I feared it would be. I've seen lots of interesting posts, and also feel like I'm getting some gradual insight into those posters who said they never felt awesome (which is sad).
Hoping we continue to get some interesting reports!
In the spirit of that, I would like to explain "feeling awesome" meant for me, at least in the context of what it was like in PF1. And I know, perhaps I shouldn't be comparing, but it's very hard not to do.
For me, "feeling awesome" in PF1 meant completely turning the tide/feel of combat with my character's actions. Perhaps that meant that my melee character charged in was able to kill a strong foe in 1 round. Perhaps as a caster it meant I had just the right spell prepared for the fight, like energy resist for an unexpected fight against a dragon (something along that lines). Perhaps I grapple locked down the main enemy spell caster and turned what was supposed to be a challenging fight against a powerful spell caster, into mop up work against his henchmen.
Now, I know PF2 was supposed to reduce how overpowering the characters were...but they went so far that now I never feel awesome.
I'll be honest, I'm not sure I want "my action was so good that it practically invalidated my party's contribution" to be a common thing.
It might still happen sometimes (hello goblin Draconic Sorcerer being the prime factor in taking out 3/4 enemies by round 2 in the final fight of Mirrored Moon, or my party's aforementioned heal-paladin getting off a ~300 HP value Heal), but I don't want to see that happening constantly. It might be possible that I'm overrepresenting your statement, but that's the impression I'm getting from it.
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I just had a new awesome thing happen :)
Level three Redeemer and her Cleric traveling buddy, we'd been in a fight for about three rounds. Our impulsive Gnome monk finally got it in his head that fighting two fire elemental at once was rapidly killing him faster than the two heal capable members could keep him up. He ended up running out of combat at 1 HP and came up with the idea to run out of the cave we were fighting in, into the blizzard outside and started filling a bucket with snow.
Meanwhile the two holy peoples were basically facing the two fire elemental alone while the rest of the party went and got snow and ice to throw at them.
One fire elemental decided it was going to throw a ton of attacks at the Cleric and my Redeemer, At the time I had an AC of 23 due to getting a shield up so it threw three attacks at me, crit failed two of them, then threw two attacks the the Cleric, hit one, I reacted, forced it to fail due to it trying to keep up the attack, resulting in a miss, then getting the Cleric just enough resistance to actually ignore the resulting damage when the last attack hit. So with one reaction, while on critical HP from face tanking a crit earlier for my party I got the HOLD THE LINE, and felt like a total boss for being able to do my job.
We then ended that encounter by throwing water at the fire elemental till they died. Both of them were Level 5 to our level three, so we were at APL + 3 there.
I felt even more awesome later on when I decided to try out some good ole diplomacy on a Young Black dragon, the DM laughed, I invoked the will of the dice gods, and rolled a 20 to convince a dragon of all things to sell us a big gem we needed to get some WIll'o'Wisps to firebomb some evil person who wanted to burn down a vilage. We got it for 200 gold, due to some shenanigans our other gnome had about 149 gold plus some from our last adventure, so every had the mental image of a six foot tall Paladin making a deal with a dragon, then shaking every loose coin out of our greedy as heck Gnome then throwing the backpack of gold into a crack in the wall she was talking through to pay off the dragon.
We then bough a Type 2 bag of holding for a chest of gold we found later on, from the same dragon, which we did after literally backhanding (the cleric and myself again) a ghost with positive damage.
When in the playtest did your character pull off a victory or accomplish a feat and think: "This is awesome! My character is a total badass!"?
Wizard / Ranger vs Dragon. The dragon got punished round after round after round. It wouldn't surprise me if the build were broken in some way, but Hero Lab Online said it was valid.
How many of these moments did you have? And did you feel that the PF2 ruleset did anything to enable them, or would you have been able to do it just as well (or better) in PF1?
The PF2 rules effectively enabled an armor-wearing Wizard to an extent not possible in PF1. A number of Wizard spells and abilities catered to a Wizard with a two-handed sword.
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Chance, that's a fantastic mental image. I'm just picturing a Joe McPlatemail looking guy with a two hander...
"So, what do you do?"
"I'm a wizard."
"Erm. Are you sure?"
"Yes. Let me demonstrate."
~stomps dragon with magic sword~ :P
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I'll be honest, I'm not sure I want "my action was so good that it practically invalidated my party's contribution" to be a common thing.
It might still happen sometimes (hello goblin Draconic Sorcerer being the prime factor in taking out 3/4 enemies by round 2 in the final fight of Mirrored Moon, or my party's aforementioned heal-paladin getting off a ~300 HP value Heal), but I don't want to see that happening constantly. It might be possible that I'm overrepresenting your statement, but that's the impression I'm getting...
Perhaps not...
I want that. That exact feeling is "awesome" for me. I also want to make sure every player has that opportunity.
Anything short of "single-handedly" winning the combat doesn't feel awesome to me. And the question was "When did I feel awesome?" Yeah, it's a high bar.
If the question was "When did I feel like I adequately contributed to the party's overall success?" then the answer would be "Almost always, so long as the dice cooperated".
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I don't think you can design a system where all of the following are true, though:
a) Encounters are designed to challenge players
b) Players frequently single-handedly win combats
c) No player feels left behind or like they didn't contribute.
Even hitting two out of three is going to be hard. I also run Exalted - which I think we can universally agree is about as far from a well-designed system as you can get and still be fun - and B is certainly true. C is true because I work my little GM butt off for it. A is not remotely true.
I think PF1e tends towards a similar outcome, but with table variance - in some groups A will be true and B will not. And C is harder to hit in PF1e than it is in Exalted, too.
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The Cone of Cold did 33% of the dragon's HP and dang near 70% of the giant's, and the Paladin rolled 40 damage on their Lay on Hands against the dragon. Even though the Paladin was the only one to pass their save vs the breath weapon and the dragon managed to Crit them next turn, their Shield Block reaction and high AC both mitigated the damage and caused 2/3 Dragon Frenzy attacks to miss. From a GM perspective the fight was an absolute curbstomp.
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I don't think you can design a system where all of the following are true, though:
a) Encounters are designed to challenge players
b) Players frequently single-handedly win combats
c) No player feels left behind or like they didn't contribute.
Even hitting two out of three is going to be hard. I also run Exalted - which I think we can universally agree is about as far from a well-designed system as you can get and still be fun - and B is certainly true. C is true because I work my little GM butt off for it. A is not remotely true.
I think PF1e tends towards a similar outcome, but with table variance - in some groups A will be true and B will not. And C is harder to hit in PF1e than it is in Exalted, too.
The honest truth for me is, I don't care about A.
I didn't know it until the PF2 play test came out, but I don't care about being challenged as a player. PF1 could have B happen pretty easily. PF1 could have C happen, so long as the GM worked to make sure it did. A basically didn't happen after low levels, with some exceptions.
Turns out, that's exactly what I want.
I was all for simple more streamlined rules. But the overall balance of the game has changed, in a fundamental way that I have found I don't like.
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Yeah, I feel like PF2e actually does a great job of supporting that playstyle by just letting you run lower level encounters - suddenly you will be critting left and right and steamrolling monsters.
Now if what you want is for level-appropriate challenges to be a walk in the park, then basically what you are saying is that you want the game system to lie to you about what a challenging encounter is.
That happened a lot in PF1e, and I'm happy to see it being fixed in 2e. That way I can run challenging games and you can run less challenging games, and we both have the tools to know how to build the game that we want to run or play.
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Perhaps it would be best for the PF2 corebook to specifically state (multiple times in multiple places) that "at level" combats are designed to be difficult, and if you want your players to feel like heroes, put them up against level-2 challenges. Many of the complaints I see here about combat (which really should be in the other thread) are about how ineffective characters seem against an "at level" threat.
It might be good for people coming from PF1e. I think for someone new to the system, the idea that "a level 8 monster is roughly equal to a level 8 character and if they fight one on one it will be a coin toss which wins" is reasonably intuitive.
But certainly coming from PF 1e - I just threw a CR 18 encounter at my 12th level party and they are chewing through it - it's a shocking paradigm shift.
The bestiary and encounter table makes this concept pretty clear, IMO. But I guess most players don't read those, and I'm not sure how many GMs do either at this point.
In my converted AP, Red Cap's went from being a threat the entire party worried over to something the monk functionally one punched after the sorcerer fireballed a group of them. Dude could crit on a 13.
For another awesome monk moment, he ran up a wall, jumped off of it and grappled a flying harpy. Next turn he killed it with a flurry, kicked off its body back to the wall, and bounced back to the ground.
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Like many others in the thread, I GM so my awesome moments come from my players.
In DD1, my players were still getting their legs under them and were sort of grappling with their own characters and how they worked. There was a moment at the end where our paladin ended up tackling Drakus onto a pile of caltrops while the monk told everyone, "I told you it wasn't a stupid purchase!"
DD2 is where my group had a blast. Our druid had a wonderful hot streak of rolling and built his character to be the "wilderness guide" sort of character. He navigated them to Pale Mountain effortlessly, avoided the quicksand, and even noted the manticore markings wherein the ranger of the group used Quiet Allies to sneak the group past it (a tense few rounds to be sure).
Our barbarian loved hurling himself into the mess of with his charge and then cleaving them all apart. He finished things off with a crit, which was a first time for our group to see critical specialization effects. He was thrilled.
But our hands down best badass moment was when the Night Heralds' mercenaries burst in, with their antipaladin leading the charge with her +1 magic axe. Our barbarian player muttered that he'd love to have that instead of his "crappy expert one." The rogue player suddenly remembered something, delayed until the barbarian's turn, and quickly disarmed her, leaving her with her negative energy touch and the barbarian grabbed up her axe.
This is a first time for all of my players ever playing Pathfinder (and half of them have never played a roleplaying game before), so they're a little biased as it's their one point of reference. However, they've been eager to get in more games and the "awesome moments" do seem to come up just as frequently as they did in PF1 for me.
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Drakus was handing it to my 3 man party, and was about to knock out (and potentially kill) the barbarian when the Paladin crit with a Retributive scythe Strike. I had the players each roll one of the d10s and it wound up dealing like 30 damage, killing Drakus before he could finish the barbarian.
Pretty sweet moment.
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My wife mentioned today her character. She came to the playtest late and her only character was a Silver Dragon Sorcerer. When she flew up and clawed the Red Dragon in Mirrored Moon in the face for a whole pile of damage, she felt pretty awesome. :D It did not like the cold damage whatsoever.
It then missed her a couple of times and she did it again. She certainly enjoyed being able to get close to stuff and having the AC to not immediately get blasted into the ground, giving her a chance to use those claws.
I don't think it's mechanically even terribly powerful for her to do that, but thematically she loved it. And it worked well enough to give her that awesome feeling. (She was also tossing around a decent variety of spells, including the heightened Enlarge that was making my Goblin Fighter huge size, which I certainly liked. :D )
Yeah, I feel like PF2e actually does a great job of supporting that playstyle by just letting you run lower level encounters - suddenly you will be critting left and right and steamrolling monsters.
Now if what you want is for level-appropriate challenges to be a walk in the park, then basically what you are saying is that you want the game system to lie to you about what a challenging encounter is.
That happened a lot in PF1e, and I'm happy to see it being fixed in 2e. That way I can run challenging games and you can run less challenging games, and we both have the tools to know how to build the game that we want to run or play.
While I'm personally happier with the PF2 style more-challenging content, I can see someone who prefered the 1E easier content to be annoyed that offical content in 2E is likely to be not-for-them without giving the characters extra levels than what is recommended, and as many/most groups just run as written, that makes finding a group that runs the game they want much more difficult. Perhaps having the advancement track at the start of each adventure module be split into a 'gritty' and a 'heroic' track where the heroic track ends up 2 levels higher, would solve this?
GM here, these are player moments.
** Spoilers **
Lost Star, the dwarf brought Drakus below half in the initial charge. On the negative side, we felt 1st level PF2 was a bit of a rocket tag - this got better later on. This was also true in PF1.
In Pale Mountains Shadow, avoiding all the elementals was super easy, but my players felt rewarded.
The cleric vs undead adventure was a little too easy to really allow any awesome, but the simple device of having an all-darkvision party and scouting out the windows ruled pretty hard.
Mirrored Moon had a very slow start, but the PCs finally got a lucky roll and realized the fairy presence. They transformed their party into amini-carnival and charged the fairies. In the giant + dragon fight, they spent a day observing the nest and struck as the dragon was out foraging. They then proceeded to Charm the giant (I rollev very low on its save), and when the dragon promptly returned (it had its suspicions), it was soundly beaten. Fire Giants are VERY good at fighting red dragons.
Red Flags had some awesome GM moments because of the high pace we maintained. It felt very James Bond, in a good way. 2 heroes entered the kraken cave, with 2 remaining to be made invisible to cross the mirror room. So the 2 in the kraken cave had to evade the kraken and get the treasure, which they did courtesy of rogue skills, celestial armor, and Hallucination spells.
This is as far as our playtest got.
While I'm personally happier with the PF2 style more-challenging content, I can see someone who prefered the 1E easier content to be annoyed that offical content in 2E is likely to be not-for-them without giving the characters extra levels than what is recommended, and as many/most groups just run as written, that makes finding a group that runs the game they want much more difficult. Perhaps having the advancement track at the start of each adventure module be split into a 'gritty' and a 'heroic' track where the heroic track ends up 2 levels higher, would solve this?
That's fair. Although instead of a split track in every AP, maybe just a general note along the lines of "for an easier experience, add a couple levels to the advancement track"?
While I'm personally happier with the PF2 style more-challenging content, I can see someone who prefered the 1E easier content to be annoyed that offical content in 2E is likely to be not-for-them without giving the characters extra levels than what is recommended, and as many/most groups just run as written, that makes finding a group that runs the game they want much more difficult. Perhaps having the advancement track at the start of each adventure module be split into a 'gritty' and a 'heroic' track where the heroic track ends up 2 levels higher, would solve this?That's fair. Although instead of a split track in every AP, maybe just a general note along the lines of "for an easier experience, add a couple levels to the advancement track"?
I say split track with the first module in mind, so that in a standard 1-5 module, it would go 1-7 instead so no levels are entirely skipped. For all further instalments in that AP a simple +2 note would work.
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Chance, that's a fantastic mental image. ... "I'm a wizard." ... ~stomps dragon with magic sword~
From memory... Hand of the Apprentice was effective with a magic Two-Handed sword. 4d12+4 @ 9th level, +3 weapon.
The Weapon Storm spell was also quite effective. 5d12 AOE Cone, IIRC
It could also be a bit disorienting to the opponents. "Aha! I've closed so you can't use those Heightened Fireballs on me!"
"You're right. I'm wearing plate and cast shield, so I'm not a bad tank too, so long as the Cleric will help out my hit points."