Skills you will raise to Legendary


Advice


Hi everyone!

I was building my PFS2 Rogue and thought about taking Trapfinder. It gives you the ability to disarm Master level traps without being a Master in Thievery. And I thought: What are the odds there won't be anyone raising Thievery in my party? And then, I realized I could generalize the question: What skills do you plan to raise on your characters? I think it could be a nice idea to see what skills are common and what skills are rare.
So, what skills do you plan to raise on your characters? Separate them into 2 lists: The ones you'll raise to Master before level 11 and the ones you'll raise to Legendary (because most of the time, we play before level 11).

I start:

My Alchemist:
- Crafting
- Nature
After level 10:
- Survival

My Rogue:
- Deception
- Intimidate
- Occultism
- Diplomacy
After level 10:
- Performance
- Arcana


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K1 wrote:
Acrobatics with all characters as main skill.

I assume tumble is the reason for this? is it really that good?

Sovereign Court

Kip Up and Catfall seem nice, but I can't escape the feeling that Acrobatics seems to be doing a lot of stuff that could have been a Reflex save instead.

For me prime skills to push would be:

Athletics
- Used for most "can you physically get there" kind of checks: climbing, jumping, swimming.
- Used for combat maneuvers
- In combination with Assurance, you can circumvent MAP to use a third action to cow-tip mooks.
- Used as a defense against some attacks.

Crafting
If I care about crafting on a character, I'll probably want to be really good at it. For example, repairing higher-level shields.

Intimidation
It's mostly used opposed, and the Demoralize debuff is very good, so if I'm going this route I'm going it for real.

Medicine
The amount of healing is strongly tied to your degree of proficiency.

Deception, Stealth and Thievery
Most of the uses are opposed, and have a really high price for failure.

---

It's all going to depend on the character of course, but these are broadly speaking the ones where I think high proficiency can be critical.

Sovereign Court

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I can't remember the last time balance checks were really a thing.


How much crafting outside of organized play do people really do?


I was not expecting this discussion to go in this direction. It looks like we have very different views on skill, which is good, it means the game's balanced and that different skills are appealing to different philosophies.

Personally, I tend to avoid skills that can be trivialized by magic, as I hate to see the Wizard swimming better than my Fighter. So Acrobatics, Athletics (unless I go for maneuvers) and Medicine. It looks like Stealth is no more trivialized by Invisibility, which is a cool thing.
On the other hand, I love skills that give me information, allowing me to understand the story and push things forward. So Arcana, Occultism, Society, Religion, Nature and Diplomacy are top choices for me.
For Thievery, I'm kind of puzzled, as traps are rarely blocking the party. What is important is to find them, but you can often trigger them through summoning or disable them with Dispel Magic and such type of spells.

Dark Archive

Taking Arcana to Legendary is a pretty solid idea thanks to the Unified Theory feat.

Craft and Medicine seem great for their respective uses and scaling. Society has surprisingly large range of feats and uses!


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Styrix wrote:
How much crafting outside of organized play do people really do?

In some campaigns, a ton... but in others, almost none except basic repairs.

Sovereign Court

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SuperBidi wrote:
For Thievery, I'm kind of puzzled, as traps are rarely blocking the party. What is important is to find them, but you can often trigger them through summoning or disable them with Dispel Magic and such type of spells.

That depends a lot on how mean the writer of the adventure is really. I've seen some traps in PF2 that just did a LOT of damage, but you could also run into traps that destroy part of the treasure or alert enemies.

Also, given that casters aren't really swimming in spells and counteract checks aren't all that easy, I wouldn't rely too much on them.

The case for Thievery is basically: it's more cost-efficient than magic, and perhaps also less risky.


I honestly don't think I have ever seen anyone roll a check to balance or crawl in any edition, or seen 10 less feet of fall damage matter that much.

I have seen a lot of tumbling though, especially by melee dex characters.

I think there are two categories for "essential skills" (a proviso here, I am referring to campaigns that are played as a roleplaying game as opposed to tabletop MMO action rpg simulators - in the latter case, ignore any skill that doesn't frequently apply in combat, and any skill applications that are things that kind of GM handwaves).

Category one is skills that are really good for multiple members of the party to have (skills that help your character where they can't just rely on someone else to have it)
These are;

Acrobatics (only for fast martials like rogues and monks who want to tumble through to keep from getting cornered and to set up flanking)

Athletics (it benefits most martial characters to be able to climb, swim, kick down doors, break open cages, grapple, trip, disarm, etc, and many of these uses come up frequently)

Stealth (it is often necessary for the whole party to sneak, and you can often end up sneaking without the rogue present to guide you)

Category two is the skills where you usually want to have one party member who is really, really good at this thing, but if you have one you don't need to worry about having a second that much.

Arcana/Nature/Occultism/Religion (these are you go to for identifying creatures, spells, magical effects, etc, but will almost always just be a case of the person with the highest proficiency rolling once for the party and then disseminating the information. Especially relevant if your GM requires a check to identify a spell being cast so you can counterspell it or what curse or debuff is on someone so you can dispel it, which your GM absolutely should)

Deception/Diplomacy/Intimidation ( much like how it is good to have a single expert for things like arcana or nature, it is good to have a single face for dealing with social situations, especially when shopping, negotiating rewards, dealing with nobility, or trying to avoid combat. Intimidation actually applies a pretty nice debuff that can help set up your party to have a round of crits on a focused target, so is useful in combat as an alternative to your third strike (though you should use it before your one or two strikes to give that penalty to AC to help you crit more)

Medicine (a lot of GMs require medicine checks to identify if someone is diseased or poisoned, and to determine which party member is low on hp, in which case this becomes essential for the party healer to have to help them triage who to use their heals on first in combat)

Survival (it is really good to have one character good at survival to track the fleeing bad guy or little Timmy's kidnapper or to avoid getting lost, but you usually only need one character who can do this)

Thievery (this is the best example of this category, as it is literally the main reason that I have never seen a party that didn't have a rogue, and why digital adaptations of ttrpgs almost always end up with every party composition having exactly one rogue - you generally need exactly one shady character who can pick locks, disarm traps and steal things, no more, no less.)

The skills that are optional but nice are crafting and performance.

The skills you can safely ignore are of course lore & society, as they usually just amount to you knowing a thing that is nice to know but doesn't tangibly help you, so they are mostly just there for flavour (the one particularly useful thing you can do with society is decipher writing, which is one of those things that is vitally important once or twice when in a weird magically trapped riddle room or reading the evil liches diary, but those can be covered with a low level spell)


Not that I disagree with you, Tender, but you don't answer my question. I know what skills are good in what situations. But I don't know who takes what skill on what character. For example, I was not expecting I could ever see a Champion with Legendary Acrobatics, as my building philosophy is miles ahead K1's one. So, his answer is very interesting to me.
Also, some skills will be more frequent than others despite being very similar at first glance. I expect Occultism to be a very rare skill, for example. Intelligence is a dump stat in PF2, Wizards and Alchemist tend to favor other skills before Occultism, and the only character who has Occultism as main skill is not Intelligence based and will end up quite bad at it. On the other hand, Religion should be a very common skill. Nearly everyone increases Wisdom for Saves and Perception, Clerics being Wisdom based and a very common class, plus many Champions and even some Druids who will increase it makes Religion the kind of skill you'll nearly always find around a table and at high level of proficiency.

As I'm playing PFS, I want my skill set to complement the ones of the random players at my table. As you have pointed out, many skills require only one specialist around the table. Hence my question. But it may not be a very interesting one.


SuperBidi wrote:

Not that I disagree with you, Tender, but you don't answer my question. I know what skills are good in what situations. But I don't know who takes what skill on what character. For example, I was not expecting I could ever see a Champion with Legendary Acrobatics, as my building philosophy is miles ahead K1's one. So, his answer is very interesting to me.

Also, some skills will be more frequent than others despite being very similar at first glance. I expect Occultism to be a very rare skill, for example. Intelligence is a dump stat in PF2, Wizards and Alchemist tend to favor other skills before Occultism, and the only character who has Occultism as main skill is not Intelligence based and will end up quite bad at it. On the other hand, Religion should be a very common skill. Nearly everyone increases Wisdom for Saves and Perception, Clerics being Wisdom based and a very common class, plus many Champions and even some Druids who will increase it makes Religion the kind of skill you'll nearly always find around a table and at high level of proficiency.

As I'm playing PFS, I want my skill set to complement the ones of the random players at my table. As you have pointed out, many skills require only one specialist around the table. Hence my question. But it may not be a very interesting one.

Aah, I thought you were asking what skills I would prefer to raise, which my answer was - always the ones I listed in category 1 (but narrowed down further by my class/role)(because I can't rely on a party expert to do those for me), and only the ones in cat 2 if my character is planned to be "the expert" in that.

I listed what was good in what situation to explain my reasoning behind my choices, and to explain which ones would change depending on what character I would be designing.

I can't just say "I'll pick Occultism to legendary" because I don't know what character I would build, and Occultism won't apply to every character make.

I'm sorry if ,"it depends" isn't a super satisfying answer, but the best I can give is the rough rules I follow when choosing which skills to master, which require the reasoning to show how often I apply specific ones, especially given that I make a looot of characters.


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The acro feats are not for thr check itself but to avoid being caught out of guard from

- balance checks.
- Being prone.
- stand up ( no action needed either, so action economy ).

Excellent feats for a warrior.

Reducing falling damage is also good at low lvls, bur at high lvls could not be worth it. Eventually you could replace it.

Also as a champion of Shelyn, i feel comfortable with being agile even without dex ( due to enhanced performance and agile stuff ).

Also Crawl ing fast and balancing stuff is combat training too, so even if under acrobatics checks is worth for any warrior.


I've noticed pretty much all my PCs go to legendary in Acrobatics if for no other reason than to get Catfall. It seems very popular. It seems an almost must-have pick.


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Catfall is one of those amusing instances where players are clearly interested in it because of how useful it is assuming the scenario it applies in will come up... but it seems like no one's taking the time to consider that in very many campaigns, it's unlikely to ever come into use.


thenobledrake wrote:
Catfall is one of those amusing instances where players are clearly interested in it because of how useful it is assuming the scenario it applies in will come up... but it seems like no one's taking the time to consider that in very many campaigns, it's unlikely to ever come into use.

I disagree. Once you reach legendary, it's almost guaranteed to come up, because any time you need to escape, you can just fall out of the balcony like in the new Aladdin movie.


Catfall maybe very situational, but the higher the level the PCs progress, the more likely it is that an NPC can Sparta kick them off a cliff or an elemental will whirlwind them into a spiked pit. It's just one of those skills that altho it comes up infrequently can be the difference between taking no damage or being severely smashed up or deaded !


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Cat Fall is an important safeguard for people with cloud jump, otherwise you can jump high enough to really injure yourself.

More on-topic, my bard will be taking occultism all the way, to power up bardic lore more than anything. Also diplomacy and maybe deception. I really want to play characters that trick out medicine and arcana because there are some pretty nifty tricks in there, but they don't fit that character. Specifically I rather like Godless Healing and Eye of the Arclords, feats that were conceptually cool in 1e but not useful, but now seen more useful to me. Lastly, I really like the options for maxing out athletics regarding jumping and titan wrestler. A gnome who can jump up to a giant's nose then spin-kick them to the ground is just the right kind of silly for me.

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