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I don't think they can release a half-caster class. I think the math is too tighlty bound/multiclassing is too hodge podge to allow half casters to exist.
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Warpriest is obvious example for full-slot approach. (it needs Errata IMHO, but basically close to that)
Otherwise you basically have Focus caster, with Champion as example.
APG is supposed to include Ranger magic, possibly sub-path or class-specific Archetype?
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Personally I don't want half casters. If you want to limit the power of spells give them specific lists or less slots. A full caster magus properly balanced would be my dream.
Wizard Class Archetype, perhaps? I could see an Arcane variant of Warpriest.
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Half Caster in this edition would be like the War Priest, master spellcasting with spell slots and expert weapon proficiency or the Champion that get Master weapon proficiency and focus spells.
Buffing is a likely the path for half casters- your casting stat is not quite as important since you are not competing against saves. Bards seem a likely comparison (although they seem to fall into the buffing action economy problem).
The other approach is the magus method. I assume they are going to apply an attack spell onto your melee weapon, and then use the melee weapon's bonuses to apply the spell. This would allow them to avoid the problem of using a 'meh' casting stat on spell attack rolls.
It seems like an something that plans to be smoothed as the edition goes on.
With just the CRB you can go Fighter and MC an Arcane Caster; using the Gnome Ancestry for the Animal Accomplice to get a Familiar w/o needing a class feat:
Caster Dedication (Class Feat)
Basic Spellcasting (Class Feat)
Expert Spellcasting (Class Feat)
Arcane Bredth (Class Feat)
Ring of Wizardry (Magic Item)
Spell Battery* (From Familiar)
1: 1 + 1 + 1 + 1
2: 1 + 1 + 2
3: 1 + 1
4: 1 + 1
5: 1
6: 1
With this you get a sizable amount of spells. This is only with the Arcane Tradition currently though, so that is something to take into consideration.
*I’m not sure if you can grab Spell Battery multiple times, so for the example i’m assuming only once.
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Half-casters are going to exist because their thematics demand that they do, not their mechanics. But there's a fair bit of range between a fighter and a wizard in which you could fit something else.
Like "2 spells/level, master weapons, expert medium armor, MME saves, expert spellcasting" could be a thing.
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Multiclassing *feels* like a half caster. In my games with +1 class feat every odd level, a ranger/druid feels very close to a PF1 ranger.
So if the problem is that there aren't enough class feats to enable a satisfying half caster build without house rules, maybe there could be some way to grant more flexibility.
Say, a "half-caster" archetype that allows you to buy multiclass feats with general feats with some additional restrictions.
Or maybe add items that bolt on some spellcasting progression at significant cost. Maybe a pricy amulet that grants the "basic spellcasting" feat if you qualify for it?
Ancestry feats might also be added to further reduce the multiclassing feat burden.
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A fighter can have really awesome fighting and some quality casting by giving up a huge number of their feats.
A wizard can have really awesome spellcasting, and some okay fighting by giving up a noticeable portion of their feats.
What we need is someone who can have useful spellcasting and useful fighting which gets to keep their feats. Since spending 5 feats on the wizard archetype leaves you fewer feats to spend on any other archetype, and you might have wanted to be one of those for story/theme reasons.
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This thread in a nutshell
https://imgur.com/a/sTmABWG
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I don't see the need for half-casters. Not beyond what we already hit, anyway.
You can't just cap them at 6th level like in PF1 because high level spell slots are much more important now due to the way heightening works.
You can't just give them full spellcasting and reduce their spell slots because that's basically already covered by caster multiclassing.
Switching around proficiencies like the warpriest does is the most sensible approach. And I agree with Quandary that the warpriest could still use some work. But the concept seems fine.
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A fighter can have really awesome fighting and some quality casting by giving up a huge number of their feats.
A wizard can have really awesome spellcasting, and some okay fighting by giving up a noticeable portion of their feats.
What we need is someone who can have useful spellcasting and useful fighting which gets to keep their feats. Since spending 5 feats on the wizard archetype leaves you fewer feats to spend on any other archetype, and you might have wanted to be one of those for story/theme reasons.
Actually, with Martial Flexibility, it puts Fighters in a better spot than others; and gives more of a buffer than other classes might feel. It’s also possible to grab Animal Accomplace from Gnomes with a General Feat and an Ancestry Feat.
With that said, I’m personally rather pleased with what the mechanics currently allow.
You brought up the Thematic demand of half-casters. Could you elaborate more on this idea? What would make them differ thematically from either extreme of Bards or Champions?
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I'm not sure I get the notion that you need to spend all your class feats to get a good amount of casting from multiclass.
2: Dedication
4: Basic
8: Breadth
12: Expert
18: MasterThrow in (Tradition) Breadth in there somewhere probably, it makes for a nice number of extra spells later. But even with Breadth that's 5 class feats out of 11. That's not all your class feats. It's not even half.
I've gone ahead and thrown it in Breadth at 8th level. And to help make up for it I'm going to have us compare the fighter:
Level 1) 1/1 class feats are fighter feats (100%)
Level 2) 1/2 class feats are fighter feats (50%)
Level 4) 1/3 class feats are fighter feats (33%)
Level 6) 2/4 class feats are fighter feats (50%)
Level 8) 2/5 class feats are fighter feats (40%)
Level 10) 3/6 class feats are fighter feats (50%)
Level 12) 3/7 class feats are fighter feats (43%)
Level 14) 4/8 class feats are fighter feats (50%)
Level 16) 5/9 class feats are fighter feats (56%)
Level 18) 5/10 class feats are fighter feats (50%)
Level 20) 6/11 class feats are fighter feats (55%)
So yes. You are right. Strictly speaking they are not 50% of a fighter's feats. But claiming that is actually misleading because you're only looking at 1/20th of the game.
100% class feats are fighter feats: 1 level
55-56% class feats are fighter feats: 3 levels
50% class feats are fighter feats: 10 levels
43% class feats are fighter feats: 2 levels
40% class feats are fighter feats: 2 levels
33% class feats are fighter feats: 2 levels
If you look at the median we are definitely talking about 50% of class feats being fighter feats. If we talk about the mode we are definitely talking about 50% of class feats being fighter feats. If we talk about the average but we look at it in an honest way rather than cherry picking exactly 1 level out of 20 and instead look at it across all 20 levels, we are firmly talking about losing 50% of your class feats (49.9925% is what I calculated it to be. But I suck at maths so feel free to prove me wrong).
I'm going to assume you want to discuss this in an honest way, so I'm assuming you are now willing to accept that a non-caster multiclassing into a spellcaster class is going to lose at least 50% of their class feats (because if a game doesn't get to level 20 and instead stops at a lower level then you lose more than 50% of your feats depending at which level the game stops at).
Is that a correct assumption I'm making? Or do you see it from a different perspective?
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While martials can get a decent amount of spellcasting if they spend all their class feats multiclassing, it's a buzzkill since you don't get any of your normal class feats. I think the current gish options don't have the right balance of spellcasting to martial that people are craving. Martials are too biased towards the martial side, while spellcasters are far in the other direction. I think there's a happy medium to be found, with less spellcasting than a pure caster, and less martial progression than a Fighter or a Champion.
To that end, if Paizo releases a half-caster class, what should their casting progression look like? Off the top of my head, I've been thinking of options like:
1. Same as Multiclass caster progression
3. Limited spell slot progression, but heavy use of Focus Points
4. Lots of spell slots, but they're low-level
5. Just use magic-themed at-will abilities a la the Warlock from 3.5.
half casters imo should be martials with a hefty focus on focus spells/cantrips.
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Technically, the fighter gets 13 class feats, thanks to combat flexibility. And I'm pretty sure you can pull off any one combat style with 8 class feats.
That makes the fighter by far THE prime martial class to multiclass into caster.
I would say no spell slots, but that does not mean no spells.
For instance, you might have a feat that lets you cast burning hands 1/day (with kind of scaling). But it would only be a limited selection of spells that make sense. Or if not burning hands, then some equivalent, like..
"fire sweep" : 1/day make an attack against every creature within reach and deal fire damage.
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Personally I'm against half-casters and feel like they overall hurt the balance of the system in PF1E. In Second Edition I feel they should be represented either as full casters with limited spellcaster proficiency ala Warpriest, or themed as an Archetype ala Fighter + Wizard Dedication.
I would MUCH rather they add Magus as an option and make it similar to a Warpriest but for Wizard. Restricting some class features but giving them better weapon and armor proficiency.
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I'm thinking at-will type abilities and focus points - possibly with ways to regain more focus points that other classes.
I don't see how half casters hurt 1e balance, as the 3/4 BAB 6 Level caster was the best chassis for a 1e class and Paizo's strong point in design.
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What I hope for halfcasters? Simply: leave them out in the rain
All classes are either full caster, focus caster or non caster and I think that is a good setup
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You must have hated PF1e. 6th level casters we’re one of the best parts of that game.
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It's worth noting that all of the archetypes that grant spellcasting in LOWG (red mantis, runescarred, and lion blade) only have basic and expert spellcasting, i.e. only go up to 6th level spells, which imo sets a pretty strong precedent for half-casters to exist later on in the games life as classes.
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You brought up the Thematic demand of half-casters.
What I mean is that there's a lot of demand for things like Inquisitors, Maguses, Occultists, etc. and there's a fair bit of ground between "all the spells" and "no spells" in which we could fit something else. By having the class have limited spellcasting, but all of its feats we create more space to explore the thematic spaces of those classes, something we can't do with "a fighter with 5/10 class feats spoken for."
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You brought up the Thematic demand of half-casters.What I mean is that there's a lot of demand for things like Inquisitors, Maguses, Occultists, etc. and there's a fair bit of ground between "all the spells" and "no spells" in which we could fit something else. By having the class have limited spellcasting, but all of its feats we create more space to explore the thematic spaces of those classes, something we can't do with "a fighter with 5/10 class feats spoken for."
I wasn’t intending that to sound insulting, so my apologies on that; I was honestly curious to hear from your viewpoint. I’m not interested in pegging all casters as full or focus with no middle ground. I was just having issue imagining how to place them. You’ve expressed an interest behind the lore and thematics before so I thought it best to ask than assume.
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Well, like one of the neatest things the Magus did was the archetypes that were like "soulbound to an intelligent weapon" or "can create a weapon out of their mind". If we create an actual Magus class we can create space for things like "Black Blade support via a feat chain" (a la the Champion's radiant weapon) which would be really hard to do with most or your feats already spoken for to fulfill the basic concept.
I don't think they can release a half-caster class. I think the math is too tighlty bound/multiclassing is too hodge podge to allow half casters to exist.
I agree. I don't think half-casters will be a thing, in the way people imagine from PF1.
I think you'll have casters that have a decidedly more martial (or other) focus to their character which will be represent in the form of class feats. Based on the bard being "full progression" I don't expect we will see "half casters".
I think things like the Magus will be an archtype for wizards/fighters or something to that effect, or accomplished via new class feats and taking certain class dedications (like fighter/wizard, and taking a new class feat to grant Spellstrike).
I think a M/M;M/E;E/M proficiency scale is all you really NEED to get the 3/4BAB+6lvl slot limitation that Magi/Warpriest/Inquisitor had. So if they just gave us a base class with X tradition spell list, M/M proficiency in weapons and spells, and only E in medium armor, that'd give enough baked in functionality to get the half-caster feel. Plus, there's the Magic Knight archetype that's in... I forget if it's the LOWG or the APG, but we haven't seen what THAT does yet, it could do exactly what people want, or at least get close enough to let us know how a base class could/would work if implemented.
Magic Knight does not do what you want.
I will look up the details tonight if nobody beats me to it.
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If you are talking about Magic Warrior, it only adds some more focus spellcasting, and requires focus spellcasting to take. It doesn't have anything to do with spellcasting slots.
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I'm not sure I get the notion that you need to spend all your class feats to get a good amount of casting from multiclass.
2: Dedication
4: Basic
8: Breadth
12: Expert
18: MasterThrow in (Tradition) Breadth in there somewhere probably, it makes for a nice number of extra spells later. But even with Breadth that's 5 class feats out of 11. That's not all your class feats. It's not even half.
I've gone ahead and thrown it in Breadth at 8th level. And to help make up for it I'm going to have us compare the fighter:
Level 1) 1/1 class feats are fighter feats (100%)
Level 2) 1/2 class feats are fighter feats (50%)
Level 4) 1/3 class feats are fighter feats (33%)
Level 6) 2/4 class feats are fighter feats (50%)
Level 8) 2/5 class feats are fighter feats (40%)
Level 10) 3/6 class feats are fighter feats (50%)
Level 12) 3/7 class feats are fighter feats (43%)
Level 14) 4/8 class feats are fighter feats (50%)
Level 16) 5/9 class feats are fighter feats (56%)
Level 18) 5/10 class feats are fighter feats (50%)
Level 20) 6/11 class feats are fighter feats (55%)So yes. You are right. Strictly speaking they are not 50% of a fighter's feats. But claiming that is actually misleading because you're only looking at 1/20th of the game.
100% class feats are fighter feats: 1 level
55-56% class feats are fighter feats: 3 levels
50% class feats are fighter feats: 10 levels
43% class feats are fighter feats: 2 levels
40% class feats are fighter feats: 2 levels
33% class feats are fighter feats: 2 levelsIf you look at the median we are definitely talking about 50% of class feats being fighter feats. If we talk about the mode we are definitely talking about 50% of class feats being fighter feats. If we talk about the average but we look at it in an honest way rather than cherry picking exactly 1 level out of 20 and instead look at it across all 20 levels, we are firmly talking about losing 50% of your class feats (49.9925% is what I calculated it to be. But I suck at...
I am really confused at what you are trying to prove here. It seems like a bit of a rant based off of nothing
Edge seemed to be challenging the ideal that you have to give up “all” of your class feats - because the OP said that it was a buzzkill not getting *any* class feats
The response was basically - that is wrong you only give up X out of Y : not even half. You may want to quibble about a few percent here and there but you have gone of on a maths splurge and not actually really read what you are replying to
And no one is being dishonest . I can’t believe there hasn’t been a general post about this on community behaviours. I know a paizo rep has had to come on and specifically say “always assume people are posting in good faith”.
So once again :
- OP says you won’t get any class feats to multiclass into caster
- Response proves this factually completely incorrect
- End
Now whether that is too many is a separate point.
What was unhelpful was some unintentional hyperbole from the OP
It'd be a little bit of a different dynamic, but I think that one way to do a character that has spellcasting as less of a fraction of its power budget would be to keep the same spellcasting progression in terms of when new spell levels are learned but to limit the number of spells/day, perhaps to as few as one spell per day per spell level, or perhaps two at lower spell levels. There's already between-class variation in the number of spells per level per day that different classes get; this is just taking that to the next step. This would produce a meaningfully different dynamic for partial casters than PF1 had, and may not be appropriate for all partial caster concepts, but it doesn't require introducing any new basic architectures for how classes are structured.
Well, like one of the neatest things the Magus did was the archetypes that were like "soulbound to an intelligent weapon" or "can create a weapon out of their mind". If we create an actual Magus class we can create space for things like "Black Blade support via a feat chain" (a la the Champion's radiant weapon) which would be really hard to do with most or your feats already spoken for to fulfill the basic concept.
I agree and would love a Black Blade; either as a Magus path or chain of feats like you suggest. So, if i’m correct, it sounds like you’re suggesting at the very least, support for where half-casters left their mark in 1e. I would say that’s the best reason to fight for their return since flavor tends to be just as important to some when it comes to making characters.
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2E needs half casters less than 1e did because high level magic is more sensible.
I don't know that we'll ever get "true" half casters, but I could absolutely see class feat based spellcasting, like an in-class take on the multiclass basic/expert/master spellcasting. Expanded a bit to be more solid but still optional and likely gated behind a subclass.
Most of those 1e classes will appear at some point though, one way or another : they're too important to the identity of the game not to. Just probably not the way they used to.
I like the ability to create a Gish without necessarily needing to take a special Gish class - for classes that are conceptually martial spellcasters, I'd like for them to have a stronger identity than just "here's a ranger and druid MC but now you've got your feats back."
Magi (maguses?) having an intelligent weapon that eats up most of their feats to work around is the sort of thing I'd like to see, and it makes it more compelling as a proper class that can contribute something itneresting to other classes that would like to take it as an archetype. As a Fighter, would I want to bother taking a Magus dedication? Would that be balanced? Would the Magus then dipping into Wizard create an imbalance?
It's not helped that a lot of the martial dedications are kinda lame if you're coming from a casting class. It seems to work out much better from the other direction since you only really sacrifice the potential to use directly offensive magic, but you can't really do terribly well with martial attacks if you're only working with Expert proficiency in weapons or armor. So it can be tricky to make something more caster-y.
Part of it is that the Fighter in particular gets a really good chassis but their feats are almost exclusively actions. You can only really use one action at a time, so the more actions you get the more you experience diminishing returns as you run out of useful combos. Right now there's a lot of pressure for even most Fighters to be multiclassing and grabbing abilities that are more dramatically different than the sometimes too-heavily-themed actions for their chosen fighting style. You only really need so many enemy repositioning feats before even just access to a cantrip becomes more practical.
So it at least seems like the baseline is already that a good chunk of "pure" Fighters are going to end up as gishes anyways just for lack of a better option.
I really dislike the idea of half casters in this system. A warpriest like archetype is exactly what needs to be done.
I really dislike the idea of half casters in this system. A warpriest like archetype is exactly what needs to be done.
Could a magus be a similar chassis with it's own unique feats and something to replace divine font? And obviously Arcane magic...
I really dislike the idea of half casters in this system. A warpriest like archetype is exactly what needs to be done.Could a magus be a similar chassis with it's own unique feats and something to replace divine font? And obviously Arcane magic...
Yeah, that is a really good idea, you could expand the warpriest into a full class and make it more complete as an arcane caster, but I still feel it should remain a 'full caster'
Honestly, I don't think we should have full and half casters anymore. Casters or noncaster is all this system really needs.
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I think one thing people are sleeping on is that since there are only 4 spell lists (and possibilities for 1-2 more, but Paizo doesn't feel interested) there's no reason there cannot be a huge number of caster classes.
Since we no longer have to do stuff like "Level adept 0, arcanist 0, bard 0, cleric 0, druid 0, hunter 0, inquisitor 0, magus 0, medium 0, mesmerist 0, occultist 0, oracle 0, psychic 0, shaman 0, skald 0, sorcerer 0, spiritualist 0, summoner 0, summoner (unchained) 0, warpriest 0, witch 0, wizard 0" for Detect Magic, we can just say "you cast spells off the {Arcane,Divine,Primal,Occult} list" and let things like # of slots, how fast you get new spells, and how fast your proficiency advances (as well as unique class features) dictate how good you are at it.
Like you could have 19 different classes all casting off the arcane list, and this wouldn't require any editing of the list itself. Probably there don't need to be that many, but the question about "should there be an arcanist or a psychic" should be about whether the class has themes and mechanics that sufficiently differentiate itself from other options and not about which spells. There's no reason you can't say "casts off the [whatever] list" and have the spells top out at sixth level spells with different slot progression. We did exactly this with the Warpriest, the Hunter, and the spellcasting Vigilante archetypes in PF1.
how I think half casters will go, they'll release some generic arcane, occult, primal and divine focus spell lists and the classes will be able to pick spells from their list every number of levels. they might be cantrips (and thus not use focus points) or bigger ones and use focus points.
prepared casters would be able to grab a bunch of them but only prepare and be able to use a certain number in a day. these casters would work in a way that they have a lower amount of crazy options to do, but don't need to sleep to regain spells and have more liberty in having non-spell related class features.
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I hope they exist in a form outside of MCD alone.
Personally, I think that taking a martial class chassis and adding MCD to a spellcasting class works great for creating a ~50/50 gish. It also appears that it works reasonably well to create the '6 level caster' types as well as something approximating the '4 level caster' like the D&D3.5 paladin and ranger.
The barebones basic fighter/wizard would be fighter class, wizard dedication, basic wizard spellcasting. This would probably be fine for a fighter with buff spells (And I would note that this is two feats, not *all of them* and not even 50% of them). This would give them 3rd level spells and trained proficiency. The '4 level caster'.
Adding the Expert wizard spellcasting would add up to 6th level spells and increase the proficiency to expert. The '6 level caster'. Definitely able to use buff or utility spells. May use attack spells against lower level opponents or as a backup option.
Adding the Master wizard spellcasting adds spells up to 8th level and increases the proficiency to expert. This seems actually really powerful considering that they still have the ability to swing a sword with the same proficiency as any other fighter. May not have all the fancy moves that the full fighter has, but will still have several of the more important ones.
Serious question here: how many feats does it take for a fighter to feel competent and effective in their martial fighting ability? How many are left for cool abilities to use in specific niche circumstances - that could instead be traded out for multiclass feats?
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Fighter focusing on free-hand techniques combined with wizard multiclass looks really powerful.
Snagging Strike followed by Chill Touch.
Daze, then Combat Grab.
Dual-Handed Assault when you want to add more physical damage.
And I haven't even gotten to 6th level feats yet or moved past cantrips.
...I'm not sure I get the notion that you need to spend all your class feats to get a good amount of casting from multiclass.
2: Dedication
4: Basic
8: Breadth
12: Expert
18: MasterThrow in (Tradition) Breadth in there somewhere probably, it makes for a nice number of extra spells later. But even with Breadth that's 5 class feats out of 11. That's not all your class feats. It's not even half.
I've gone ahead and thrown it in Breadth at 8th level. And to help make up for it I'm going to have us compare the fighter:
Level 1) 1/1 class feats are fighter feats (100%)
Level 2) 1/2 class feats are fighter feats (50%)
Level 4) 1/3 class feats are fighter feats (33%)
Level 6) 2/4 class feats are fighter feats (50%)
Level 8) 2/5 class feats are fighter feats (40%)
Level 10) 3/6 class feats are fighter feats (50%)
Level 12) 3/7 class feats are fighter feats (43%)
Level 14) 4/8 class feats are fighter feats (50%)
Level 16) 5/9 class feats are fighter feats (56%)
Level 18) 5/10 class feats are fighter feats (50%)
Level 20) 6/11 class feats are fighter feats (55%)So yes. You are right. Strictly speaking they are not 50% of a fighter's feats. But claiming that is actually misleading because you're only looking at 1/20th of the game.
100% class feats are fighter feats: 1 level
55-56% class feats are fighter feats: 3 levels
50% class feats are fighter feats: 10 levels
43% class feats are fighter feats: 2 levels
40% class feats are fighter feats: 2 levels
33% class feats are fighter feats: 2 levelsIf you look at the median we are definitely talking about 50% of class feats being fighter feats. If we talk about the mode we are definitely talking about 50% of class feats being fighter feats. If we talk about the average but we look at it in an honest way rather than cherry picking exactly 1 level out of 20 and instead look at it across all 20 levels, we are firmly talking about losing 50% of your class feats (49.9925% is what I
1) Making a claim and then backing it up with evidence is not ranting.
2) I did assume good faith. Hence why I went through why I disagreed with the "not even half" claim and then asked Edge if they had a different perspective.Accusing people of ranting doesnt really seem to be in the spirit of assuming good faith. So I'm assuming you didnt mean to make that accusation and meant something else :)
Yup. I definitely overlooked that.