Hmm...that looks very useful, at least for those that can activate it.
Heck, at high levels, it's cheap enough to buy a backup or two.
I have mixed feelings about this. Must-have items make me wary and I can honestly say, it may cause me to tweak some PC ideas.
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It is useful. But it is a sharp investment at lower levels. 160gp is a lot of dosh for a long while (I wouldn't grab it till 8th or 9th at best for many characters). And since it is such a low level counteracting is super easy if something needs to or even if it has innate abilities to do so.
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That's extremely handy to know of if you're in a party that's complaining about you holding them back.
and it's really nice that you can pass that item around on a daily basis to make sure that the party isn't slowed down by someone when you're doing long treks through the wilderness, then hand it back to the superfast one when you expect a fight against whatever you're tracking.
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That's extremely handy to know of if you're in a party that's complaining about you holding them back.
and it's really nice that you can pass that item around on a daily basis to make sure that the party isn't slowed down by someone when you're doing long treks through the wilderness, then hand it back to the superfast one when you expect a fight against whatever you're tracking.
Now the alchemist can keep up when carrying his basic gear! :P
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I actually went mining for useful long duration spell wand combos like this, but then I fell asleep.
I'm glad someone was hard at work.
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this type of thing is why I never supported alchemy-is-totally-different-from-spells concept: it introduces discrepancy where there is none needed. and also makes it more difficult to look up effects. I suppose there is benefit in not committing to specific spell list: alchemy is potentially able to create any effect irrespective of 'essence' (vs defined pseudo-spell-list), but there is trade-offs. expecting to take that route, yet still enjoy exact spell equivalency is fantasism, the lack of limitation by list/essence does appropriately follow jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none paradigm. nonetheless, people apparently vastly preferred this approach, so can enjoy the results of that.
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It is useful. But it is a sharp investment at lower levels. 160gp is a lot of dosh for a long while (I wouldn't grab it till 8th or 9th at best for many characters). And since it is such a low level counteracting is super easy if something needs to or even if it has innate abilities to do so.
If an enemy caster is wasting actions and resources on countering longstrider I would say that boosts the value of the magic item quite a bit. No?
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I actually went mining for useful long duration spell wand combos like this, but then I fell asleep.
I'm glad someone was hard at work.
As far as I can tell it is pretty much:
Longstrider (2nd)
Endure Elements (5th)
See Invisibility (5th)
Spell Immunity (4th - more limited due to the counteract check)
Status (4th)
False Life (2nd)
Undetectable Alignment (2nd)
Water Breathing (4th)
Mind Blank (8th - expensive but very useful, a big bonus to mental saves)Everyone may as well also pick up a wand of restoration eventually as you can only benefit from it once a day anyway.
Thank you! :D
I also found the following spells with non-variable 8 hour or longer duration:
alarm
ant haul
bind soul
bind undead
charm (4th)
contingency
continual flame
dimensional lock
dominate
dream message
dreaming potential
endure elements*
energy aegis
false life*
false vision
floating disk
gentle repose
glyph of warding
hallucination (6th)
hallucinatory terrain
illusory object (5th)
illusory scene (6th)
item facade (2nd)
light (ineligible for a wand)
lock
longstrider (2nd)*
mage armor
magic aura
magic mouth
magnificent mansion
mind blank*
misdirection
modify memory
nightmare
nondetection
pass without trace (2nd)
phantom steed
private sanctum
resplendent mansion
rope trick
sanctified ground
secret page
see invisibility (5th)*
shadow walk
shrink item
sigil
spell immunity
status*
telepathic bond
tongues (7th)
tree shape
undetectable alignment*
vital beacon
wanderer's guide
water breathing (3rd)*
wind walk
* Included again for completeness' sake.
Now the alchemist can keep up when carrying his basic gear! :PThat's extremely handy to know of if you're in a party that's complaining about you holding them back.
and it's really nice that you can pass that item around on a daily basis to make sure that the party isn't slowed down by someone when you're doing long treks through the wilderness, then hand it back to the superfast one when you expect a fight against whatever you're tracking.
I thought they said the extra weight was a typo? I could of swore I read that somewhere.
I thought they said the extra weight was a typo? I could of swore I read that somewhere.Now the alchemist can keep up when carrying his basic gear! :PThat's extremely handy to know of if you're in a party that's complaining about you holding them back.
and it's really nice that you can pass that item around on a daily basis to make sure that the party isn't slowed down by someone when you're doing long treks through the wilderness, then hand it back to the superfast one when you expect a fight against whatever you're tracking.
The Adventurer's Pack is the only thing spoiled as an actual error: taking that into account, they are still overweight just going by the premade alchemist... They need 3 or 4 more things dropped in weight [alchemy tools, books, not needing healer's tools, ect] to make it a workable weight. We'll see.
They need an alchemist stone. Something that could work as a multi-tool that they can create for a cost. I think that would be uber cool.
#trademark
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They need an alchemist stone. Something that could work as a multi-tool that they can create for a cost. I think that would be uber cool.
#trademark
That JUST reminded me the abomination they made of the Traveler's Any-Tool... 200gp! 6th level! I tried to always have one of these in PF! when I STARTED... Now I might get one at 7th as my highest level item... What? :P
Is this really the cost for having the "most basic tools" at hand?
Was that a thing? I have never heard of this before.
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Was that a thing? I have never heard of this before.
PF1 Traveler's Any-Tool 250 gp, 2 pounds. Ultimate Equipment pg. 323
"This implement at first seems to be nothing but a 12-inch iron bar lined with small plates and spikes. It can be folded, twisted, hinged, and bent, to form almost any known tool. Hammers, shovels, even a block and tackle (without rope) are possible. It can duplicate any tool the wielder can clearly visualize that contains only limited moving parts, such as a pair of scissors, but not a handloom. It cannot be used to replace missing or broken parts of machines or vehicles unless a mundane tool would have done the job just as well."It was something to put in a backpack and if you needed a shovel, pick, scissors, pliers, ect... you had it...
Now 200gp, 1 bulk, item 6 and "You imagine a specific simple tool, and the any-tool transforms into it. (Usually, you can choose from a tool listed in Chapter 6). This transforms the wooden portion into any haft and the metal caps into spades, hammer heads, or the like, allowing for most basic tools but nothing more complex."
So the price jumped from 25gp with the new standard to 200... It's cheaper/easier to get a bag of holding I [75gp, 1 bulk, levl 4] and buy every tool and put it in the bag and use the same number of actions to pull out the tools instead of transforming... The items makes no sense.
PS: started a new thread on this to move sidetrack over there.
I want one.
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Certainly permanent items are a lot more valuable, but consumables can’t be super cheap because they can be used again and again. Permanent items like wands have limits to how many times they can be used in a day but one off items don’t now that resonance is gone.
Sure, for effects that last 8 hours your going to want a wand but for quick durations the potions would be too powerful to be super cheap.
Take Haste for example. 360 GP for a wand of haste or 95 GP for a potion. If you made it 1/15th or 1/30th they would be 12-24 GP each. You could pop them into every important fight rather then just once per day.
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Agree that potions are terrible bang per buck compared to wands, which is only partially offset by the extra usage options.
I'm wondering if this is deliberate by design, because most parties (in my experience) scorned potions as treasure, either selling them immediately, or carrying them around forever without using any. In most fights you usually had better options each round than retrieving and drinking a potion. Wands were almost always superior, to the point where they've been severely nerfed to compensate.
A possible solution is to hand out potions and other consumables as treasure to encourage players to use them, while making wands much rarer, so players either buy or craft them?
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Potions are priced by game balance on specific spells rather than spell levels, but didn’t take into account the cross price for a generic level of scroll or wand which don’t engage in similar spell specific price discrimination.
From a developer viewpoint it’s the scrolls and wands that are wrong for those specific spells.
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Yeah, the assumption clearly was that anyone can drink a potion, where as you had to be trained and competent to use a scroll or a wand doesn't hold as much weight for the adventuring party as it does for average folks about town. A scroll or wand of invisibility would be useless to most people, while a single potion of invisibility to could be used once for an NPC's big life-altering score.
But building the prices around that world dynamic is problematic for heroes that see and spend wealth that common folks will never even dream of.
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I agree the cost of consumables seems way off.
A major thunderstone costs 2,500gp to do 4d4 + 4 splash damage (with a chance to deafen). For that price you can get three horns of blasting (700gp each), each of which can do 3d6 damage every round and 8d6 damage once per day, also with a chance to deafen, and still have 400gp to spare.
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Consumable costs were way off in the playtest and they're way off now. Paizo must have had some internal logic that guided them to the final values, but that logic certainly doesn't work for me.
Trinkets were where I first noticed this, if I recall correctly. The Owlbear Claw was 3gp and applied a weapon critical effect once. There was a zero percent chance someone would use that instead of selling it at level 1.
The scaling of healing potion cost was the next place where it was obvious something was wrong. Which is even more ridiculous now that having a focus power that heals gives you all-day free healing.
In my games I plan to give out plenty of potions as treasure, and mostly require crafting for wands. Doesn't help people who like to run a magic-mart though.
In my games I plan to give out plenty of potions as treasure, and mostly require crafting for wands. Doesn't help people who like to run a magic-mart though.
Planning the same approach in my games, as magic shops wreck the economy and the new crafting rules mean they're no longer needed. Offloading unwanted magic items may see a return to 1980's style D&D with bartering. :)
it actually demolishes the economic scale of the common folk as well:
rent is now around 1/4th of the full price of a building, a simple bowl of soup costs around 1/4th of the cost of "lifetime eat as much as you want" and etc.
again, the underling issue is that it shows that "a one time commodity should cost around 1/4th-5th of a permanent commodity of equal value"
While I generally agree with your point, I think you missed one the key element of my analysis: There is a difference in consumables that anyone can use and permanent items that require specialization to use. Even a cheap can of soup should be more expensive and less satisfying than what a professional chef can whip out with knowledge of the market to purchase ingredients and use their superior tools. Which is why I think potions should cost more than scrolls, and the wand thing is not quite a permanent item for granting 1x use a day of spells for people that aren't casters, but I agree that the prices still feel off for consumables
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IIRC the current price formula is the way it is to prevent players from affording items well above their level. If consumables were so cheap, you might see people buying Potions/Scrolls of Fly and other powerful spells from really low level. I guess there's a danger these items could mess things up?
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I think the internal issue with pricing is trying to keep game changing utility spell effects out of the hands of lower level characters who would go to the magic mart and buy stuff way ahead of level if the consumables were in the 1/15th price range. I get the design impetus, but I'd almost rather have hard rules about the level of items available in town then try to control that through costs alone.
it actually demolishes the economic scale of the common folk as well:
rent is now around 1/4th of the full price of a building, a simple bowl of soup costs around 1/4th of the cost of "lifetime eat as much as you want" and etc.
again, the underling issue is that it shows that "a one time commodity should cost around 1/4th-5th of a permanent commodity of equal value"
While I generally agree with your point, I think you missed one the key element of my analysis: There is a difference in consumables that anyone can use and permanent items that require specialization to use. Even a cheap can of soup should be more expensive and less satisfying than what a professional chef can whip out with knowledge of the market to purchase ingredients and use their superior tools. Which is why I think potions should cost more than scrolls, and the wand thing is not quite a permanent item for granting 1x use a day of spells for people that aren't casters, but I agree that the prices still feel off for consumables
that's false though.
you may have used the wand, but there's no difference in pricing due to the "wand limitation".
ALL permanent items, even those with absolutely zero limitations, costs exactly 4-5x the amount of a consumable one.
"Specialisation" actually doesn't do jack for pricing.
Again, market is simply going to crash in Golarion within weeks, if not days, if the prices for commodities/services/consumables are simply 5x the price of the equal "level" of permanent things.
I haven't done that thorough of an analysis for permanent items, but I was mostly responding to the comment about about how potions do seem to have a varying cost that accounts for the utility of the spell, while scrolls do not.
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IIRC the current price formula is the way it is to prevent players from affording items well above their level. If consumables were so cheap, you might see people buying Potions/Scrolls of Fly and other powerful spells from really low level. I guess there's a danger these items could mess things up?we already have "level" of stuff though to keep things like this in check.
Again, a simple fix is having each and every consumable in the game cost that much PER BATCH. (also much easier and elegant to Errata it this way)
If a "scroll of fly" wouldn't break the game, 4 of them won't either.
And it makes much more sense economy-wise to be priced at most around there (around 1/20th).
Interesting. That seems like a fairly decent way to go about fixing the price. It's also scalable depending on how you want to adjust things.
As for using straight item level as a gate, I think it works fairly well in Starfinder. Just a general rule that you can easily find items of your level + 1 or 2, with higher levels requiring GM say so. Experience, notoriety, contacts, and luck can kind of blend together to allow this hand-wave. Being unable to *USE* items in your hands based on level is where item level would be a big problem.
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IIRC the current price formula is the way it is to prevent players from affording items well above their level. If consumables were so cheap, you might see people buying Potions/Scrolls of Fly and other powerful spells from really low level. I guess there's a danger these items could mess things up?we already have "level" of stuff though to keep things like this in check.
Again, a simple fix is having each and every consumable in the game cost that much PER BATCH. (also much easier and elegant to Errata it this way)
If a "scroll of fly" wouldn't break the game, 4 of them won't either.
And it makes much more sense economy-wise to be priced at most around there (around 1/20th).
Interesting. That seems like a fairly decent way to go about fixing the price. It's also scalable depending on how you want to adjust things.
As for using straight item level as a gate, I think it works fairly well in Starfinder. Just a general rule that you can easily find items of your level + 1 or 2, with higher levels requiring GM say so. Experience, notoriety, contacts, and luck can kind of blend together to allow this hand-wave. Being unable to *USE* items in your hands based on level is where item level would be a big problem.
I agree, although I wouldn't mind a future equipment book that really dug into how to help make the magical item economy a narrative element of your campaign rather than a hassle. It would be cool for there to be some urban exploration/mystery adventures where you are essentially trying to figure out how some low-life thugs (level 1) got a hold of an invisibility potion to pull of a score and find out that a local seller is selling discounted individual potions instead of potion batches without checking the credentials of the buyers. It would probably have to be set in a larger city like Absalom where there might legitimately be a society that puts pressure on magic dealers not to sell consumables to maniacs and cultists who will use the items in ways that bring public attention against magic item users.
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I think the intent is for people to mostly not use on-level consumables, but instead use those from a ways down the chart in level.
Whether that's a good plan is a slightly different matter, but I think it's the clear intent, and it works. A 10th level permanent item is around 1000 GP. An 8th level consumable more like 100 GP and more within the price range people are discussing.
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So a party will typically get a fair number of equal-level consumables as rewards but will have to look a few levels behind if they want to go shopping for more. Seems pretty alright.
So a party will typically get a fair number of equal-level consumables as rewards but will have to look a few levels behind if they want to go shopping for more. Seems pretty alright.apart from the fact that with prices as written it's always in favor of the party to sell the consumables, no second thoughts, and buy permanent items with the money.
since the cost:value is biased towards permanent items to an extreme degree.
Unless of course the GM or adventure writer is aware of the immediate situation the party is in and the consumable could help the solve a problem or acquire an item otherwise unobtainable.
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We pretty much had this same discussion regarding grenades in Starfinder. I think the consensus was that they're best off as loot as no one will buy or craft them.
We pretty much had this same discussion regarding grenades in Starfinder. I think the consensus was that they're best off as loot as no one will buy or craft them.
Only Grenade that looks useful is the one Soldiers can make as that's at least 'reusable' and you can splice some effects to it later I think.
But is this just wands being king again or are staffs also up there too? Playtest looked to try to improve staffs but I haven't really checked that section too much.
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Longstrider is a status bonus, which stacks with Boots of Bounding which are an item bonus. The monk speed bonus is also a status bonus, so still the fastest rocket elf-monk that I can see off the top of my head is still 85 foot movement speed with permanent 4 actions a turn at 20th level (38.6 mph Zoom!). But this can bump the speed of non-monks decently.
And as for alchemists and consumables... Yeah, the consumable pricing is just absurd. The only reason to ever use any higher level alchemical items is if you have an alchemist in the party making them for free. Non-infused alchemical items are just a waste of money.
And from what I've seen, consumables are worse than even in the playtest. The terrible pricing was commented on at the time, so it wasn't just an oversight but a conscious decision to make the pricing so bad. My guess is that's a consequence of taking out resonance (an idea that should never have gotten as far as the playtest. Yeah, I'm still bitter about Resonance. It will forever give me pause that Paizo thought it was worth trying). It really looks like the main thing they were looking at for consumables was how to prevent 'abuse' but giving less thought to what would make something that you actually want to use.
The price scaling of healing potions is particularly bad. And it doesn't need to be, considering free healing is easily available with focus based healing and Treat Wounds. But it does encourage guzzling lots of cheap potions instead of a single higher level version. The price her HP healed on average scales like so:
Minor: 0.89 gp/hp
Lesser: 0.85 gp/hp
Moderate: 2.13 gp/hp
Greater: 8.51 gp/hp
Major: 75.76 gp/hp
That's absurd. Particularly the Major. The playtest had bad scaling, but it was much better than this. The playtest ratios were: 0.67, 0.62, 0.93, 1.74, 4.85, 17.01 respectively (there was one more potion and the levels varied a bit from the final).
The one thing that starts to make healing potions and other consumable prices start to make some sense is looking at them from the point of view of percentage of total expected lifetime party wealth at the level of the item. Here's the numbers for that:
Minor: 2.29%
Lesser: 1.23%
Moderate: 0.97%
Greater: 0.75%
Major: 1.98%
So the major is still overpriced even using this metric. I'm hoping it will get fixed in the errata. Dropping it's price to 1500 gp would make it fit into the progression much better by being 0.59%, and continuing the trend of parties being able to afford more potions of an appropriate level as they go up in level. Makes the GP/HP ratio less obscene too (but still pretty bad at 22.73 gp/hp). It still feels dramatically overpriced, but there would at least be some justification for it. I haven't run the numbers adjusted for how much HP characters would have at those levels. So if the higher level potions don't give as much of a percentage of the total HP as the cheaper ones at the level of the potion, then it'd go back to being bad scaling.
I think shroudb's batch pricing is also a good idea. Especially combined with the repricing of the Major, it might actually be kind of worth using.
Only Grenade that looks useful is the one Soldiers can make as that's at least 'reusable' and you can splice some effects to it later I think.
But is this just wands being king again or are staffs also up there too? Playtest looked to try to improve staffs but I haven't really checked that section too much.
From my read, staves don't look too great. They still require 1 charge per spell level, and each day gain a number of charges equal to your highest spell level, and you can only prepare one staff. So effectively it's a wand if you use the highest level spell. Although there is a bit more, prepared casters can spend a spell slot to get that many charges extra (only doable once a day, so you can get double by expending a top level spell), while spontaneous casters can cast any spell for 1 charge plus using a spell slot of that level. It looks a bit better for spontaneous casters, in that they can supplement their spell repertoire with the staff. There's also an added benefit each staff gives, for the school staves it's generally a +2 on rolls to identify magic of that school.