I apologize in advance for the ridiculously long post, but I had several inter-related questions so I kinda wanted to keep them together as opposed to breaking them into several more-reasonably sized posts.
We have several GMs in our group, so we have about 3 campaigns going on different nights - currently I’m the only 2E GM, and my campaign’s pretty low level so far. My friend runs a 15th-level PF1 campaign, but he’s interested in converting. So as an experiment I offered to come up with a series of encounters for his current campaign (a temple of Orcus, so kind of demon-y) for him to run as a one-shot, with everyone temporarily converting their characters. (I would play as well, but keep silent during any decision-making.)
So going by the encounter-building tables, it looks like a 17th level creature would make for a good boss fight against our 15th level party - I chose a marilith. I then used the Pathbuilder 2E app to convert a couple of our characters, just to see how things might line up (the party’s light-armored archer-fighter and my own draconic-bloodlined sorcerer.)
At first, numbers for our characters looked incredible - ACs in the 30s, saves in the low 20’s, mid to high 20’s for skills that you wanted to excel at. But then I compared the numbers with a couple of the encounters. The marilith (granted, boss fight so should be tough) has an AC of 40 - archer/fighter shouldn’t have a problem with that, but my sorcerer’s spell attack bonus of 26 needs a 14+ to hit, and its appr. +30 saves vs. my 36 DC seems kinda mismatched - although I totally get this is offsetting 2E’s lack of spell resistance. And I’m hoping a lot of spells with “take x on a successful save helps out as well. But its attack bonus of 35 seems to suggest LOTS of successful hits, as well as its own save DCs of near 40 means its damaging spells are extremely likely to succeed.
Does this all balance out in high-level play & I’m needlessly concerned? Is the idea that you do get hit a lot more, but you now have more HPs to cover it, and with 4 or more party members spreading out the damage taken and with numerically more actions it all evens out? Or am I totally messing up the character conversion and numbers for 15th level characters are generally higher? Or am I reading the encounter building table wrong and 17 is just too high?
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Higher level foes are indeed utterly vicious vs. a PC group in PF2, but that's by design. They've made it so that boss fights actually are more challenging at the same XP budget than fights involving larger numbers of lower level creatures, and that's good for the game as a whole.
You'll need to use smart tactics and debuff effects to properly take them out, though action economy remains a potent advantage as well, and they're far from unbeatable. Spellcasters are also much better vs. lower level foes than higher level ones, with higher level ones giving martial characters a bit more chance to shine, so that may be why your Sorcerer is looking a tad anemic vs. a boss.
That said, you may well also have missed something in the math. In particular, 'low 20s' on Saves sounds really low for that level. I'd expect Saves to be around +25 on average (+15 Level +4 Expert Proficiency +4 Ability +2 Armor) with high Saves higher and no more than one Save lower (and very possibly none lower at all). If you haven't hit that, you're likely to have a real problem in all the ways you'd expect PCs with low Saves to have them. Likewise, AC should be around 34+ for the most part (+5 combined Armor and Dex +15 Level +2 Trained Proficiency +2 Magic Armor), and should exceed that for martial characters, and so on and so forth. Your Save DC is right where it should be, though.
Are the above numbers sans magic items, maybe? That would explain the numbers other than Save DC being a tad low, since no item enhances that one.
Thank you very much. I could very well have missed things - I was just going by the wealth-by-level table, which indicated 1 14th level item, which I had used for +2 Resilient armor. I really didn't see much else to boost saves. I'll have to re-check things! Thanks again.
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Thank you very much. I could very well have missed things - I was just going by the wealth-by-level table, which indicated 1 14th level item, which I had used for +2 Resilient armor. I really didn't see much else to boost saves. I'll have to re-check things! Thanks again.
No, that's the one I'm thinking of, though it should be Greater Resilient (and thus +2 to Saves) if it's 14th level.
And you're quite welcome, I'm always pleased to be of assistance. :)
Higher level fights are incredibly challenging in PF2.
In my opinion, for my group's level of optimization with PF1, a APL + 2 fight in PF2 is probably about the same as a APL +4 or 5 in PF1. My group regularly fought +2 level things as a base challenge, because on level enemies were terribly weak in PF1.
Now on level enemies are a decent challenge. Fighting things above your level in PF2 feels like you have a significant chance of being knocked unconscious or potentially having 1 character die if you're really unlucky*.
*Enemies whose specific tactics are to focus on 1 PC and make sure they're dead.
Even though the math grossly stays in similar place to low levels, I don't think high level is good intro.
Just too much discrepancy in build efficacy, which you haven't built up organic understanding of over the levels,
and more powerful abilities premised on expectation of powerful effective combos, which again is undermined without system experience.
Doing a 1 off is a good idea to intro 2E though, and no reason you can't still integrate it into your 1e campaign arc,
maybe just have the players take over low level NPC roles, staging some event (combat and non-combat) appropriate to level,
then fade to black and 1e PCs take over with aftermath of 2E PC-NPC setpiece determining direction of things.
You can design 2E NPC builds to be well functional, with players choosing specific NPCs as protagonists,
possibly facing off against other faction of NPCs which they could have chosen to play.
I think part of the problem is the creature you picked. A Maralith is a level 17 monster, but it's supposed to be a hard fight.
A level 15 monster, Mukradi gargantuan beast, has an AC of 37, meaning you would hit on an 11 or better. It's high save is Fort at +32, meaning it succeeds on a 4 and crit succeeds on a 14. But it's Ref is +23 and Will is +26, meaning it succeeds on a 13 and 10 respectively, so failure rate of 60% and 45%.
On the Marilith, even the +28 on Will saves is a success on a 8 and up, meaning you have a 35% of a failure. Not bad on a hard fight. Really, it's AC and saves are right about where other level 17 monsters are. Also the Marilith has some pretty serious weaknesses. Cold iron and good are waekness 15! Also, if it doesn't hurt you, it takes 3d8+10 damage to it's pride.
Maybe you might be better off casting Disappearance (always flat footed) or Monstrosity Form (+28 to hit hits on a 12 or better) as opposed to Polar Ray, or Horrid Wilting. But even a success on a save isn't so bad. Horrid Wilting does 10d10, on a success that averages to 28 damage. Another good spell is Uncontrollable Dance. Even on a success the target is 1) always flat footed, 2) can't use reactions, 3) strides at half speed 4) loses an action each round dancing. For 3 rounds. It has to roll an 18 or better to avoid a pretty nasty debuff. Hell, coupled with it's weakness, you can just stay away for 3 rounds and it will take 3d6+10 just chasing you (you get 3 strides to move, it only has 2 to chase and then hit).
TL;DR it's supposed to be hard, BUT good tactics can alleviate that.
As mentioned, the sensibilities are much different in PF2.
Against a minion you expect them to save, fail, or critically fail. A thug will mostly be save or fail and a boss will likely critically save, save, or fail. Most of the worst PF1 effects only occur on critical fails and those are rarer now. On the flip side, even when a target saves there's usually some effect.
So if you want best effect against a boss, you throw out a spell that has a decent effect even if they save, i.e. Slow. You using your turn to deny them of even one action is a good trade in PF2. Hideous Laughter, which needs to be sustained to deny them Reactions, is valuable because many of those Reactions involve a very painful Strike (or up to 6x in the case of a Marilith!) There are lots of conditions which the party should try to pile on to the target, yet which they likely don't know to build toward since they're jumping in at high level.
Pure damage alone is kinda hard vs. a boss, and maneuvers aren't the game-changers they used to be (though they contribute well).
Also, note the strength of a high-level Magic Missile vs. bosses (but very much not vs. minions!). Automatic damage vs. an enemy that's hard to land a Strike or failed save on is pretty nice.
You may wish to run the scenario as an alternate universe in case everything blows up in their face.
One of our campaigns is the Age of Ashes AP that I run (they just made it to 3rd level). This was actually just so that one of the other GMs in the group could see what running 2E would be like (he's feeling very bogged down by running a 15th level 1E campaign & is kinda wanting to end it for that reason). We had thought about making this a kinda alternate universe/possible dream sequence just in case it went bad.
But I do agree with what many have stated - our group has only played a handful of times in my 2E campaign & will quite probably fall back on their high-level 1E tactics, which would be frustrating at best. And with my own limited 2E GMing experience perhaps designing high-level encounters might be a bit of a reach for me. It might be best for him to just try running a low-level PFS scenario or something.
Thank you everyone for your advice!