Thoughts on Demons - Spoilers for non-DMs ahead!


Rules Discussion


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- So Demons have very few resistances now, and many vulnerabilities. Not sure how they survive the various nasty environments in the Abyss now LOL. I'm wondering how a Demon like a Vrock will hold up with Cold Iron being pretty easy to obtain and it suffers +10 Dmg on every single hit. Their 'special vulnerability' added to that and I wonder if Demons will melt down fast?

- They mention Possession but I see no Demons having such ability, I guess it was just flavor text or future-proofing? Because I like the idea, would've been nice to have it written-in.

- No more Gating and it all happens via Ritual Pacts which take 1 day IIRC. I guess Gating was *really* hard to balance.

Overall I like the fun design aspects of the demons and I like that they still have spells. Just leery that with no damage mitigation and those big vulnerabilities, will they be the fearful encounter they should be (at-level)? This is all theorycraft, any thoughts?


I assume cold iron would be Uncommon in the abyss, even if it is Common in Golarion. Similarly, Good damage probably won't come up a whole lot if you are dwelling in the abyss, what with it literally being made of the concept of evil and all.

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The theory goes that demons have a LOT More hit points than they should at their level, so if you don't take advantage of their weaknesses they are harder to kill. For example, the balor has 480 Hit Points while the pit fiend has only 335, despite both of them being level 20 fiends.

As for the environments on the Abyss... they're pretty much immune to those environments, as are any outsiders who dwell in deadly areas on the outer planes. (As detailed under the definition of "Fiend" on page 346 of the Bestiary, "Fiends can survive the basic environmental effects of planes in the Outer Sphere.")


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Special materials are very costly and require higher grades in order to apply higher level runes on them. It will nearly double the cost of a item to have it made from cold iron and will prevent it from being upgraded past a certain point.

As of now I very much doubt anyone will be crafting with these special materials unless they know they will be focused on a very specific theme. Average groups will not have them.


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mcintma wrote:
- So Demons have very few resistances now, and many vulnerabilities. Not sure how they survive the various nasty environments in the Abyss now LOL.

Demons have the “Fiend” trait, and fiends can survive basic environmental effects in the outer planes (see p346).

I think demons are in a pretty good place. Resistances are implicit nerfs to most spell damage, so minimizing these throughout the Bestiary is part of what keeps spell damage at a reasonable level.

And the weakness to cold iron weapons scales by demon to be about 3-5% of their total HP; enough to make them effective, but not enough to trivialize those encounters.

EDIT: Ninja’d by the T-Rex himself!


I can understand the weakness to cold-iron and good, but some of the others are odd; like marilith being vulnerable to sonic, glabrezu to fire, etc.


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Colonel Kurtz wrote:
I can understand the weakness to cold-iron and good, but some of the others are odd; like marilith being vulnerable to sonic, glabrezu to fire, etc.

You're looking at the playtest bestiary, the final PF2 bestiary got rid of demonic elemental weaknesses.


James Jacobs wrote:

The theory goes that demons have a LOT More hit points than they should at their level, so if you don't take advantage of their weaknesses they are harder to kill. For example, the balor has 480 Hit Points while the pit fiend has only 335, despite both of them being level 20 fiends.

As for the environments on the Abyss... they're pretty much immune to those environments, as are any outsiders who dwell in deadly areas on the outer planes. (As detailed under the definition of "Fiend" on page 346 of the Bestiary, "Fiends can survive the basic environmental effects of planes in the Outer Sphere.")

Aha, super helpful thanks James. It's always a treat to get a peek behind the game design curtain.

Very stoked to use demons now. Looking fwd to expansion of the 'Possession' idea in future supplements.

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