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Casters get lots of props lately as debuffers. Cast an L3 spell, don't even get a crit fail save, and your foe is auto debuffed at Condition 1.
Fighters get master proficiency with weapons at L5 giving them crit specials. In addition to doing double damage on a crit hit, they also automatically:
Bows - +d10 damage and pin foe to wall taking 1+ actions away.
Brawling - Fort save or Slow 1 until end of their next turn.
Club - knock foe 10' away in any direction.
Dart/knife - 1d6 + item bonus in bleed damage.
Flail/hammer - knock the target prone.
Pick - +2 dmg per die (not to mention ~quadruple damage fatal).
Polearm/shield - knock foe 5' away in any direction.
Sling - Fort save or Stunned 1.
Swords - make their foe flat-footed.
Only 2 of those debuffs grant a save. That's a lot of auto-debuff for free on top of double+ damage.
By Level 5, you could also have:
Snagging Strike, L1 feat: If you hit, target is automatically flat-footed until start of your next turn.
Aggressive block, L2 feat: On shield block, knocked back 5' or auto flat-footed.
Combat Grab, L2 feat: On hit, auto grabbed.
Intidimating Strike, L2 feat: 2 action, if hit, Frightened 1 or 2 on crit.
Knockdown, L4 feat: 2 action, hit, then trip attempt at full attack bonus.
Already out of the gate, the fighter has virtually every caster debuff at her disposal without sacrificing constant damage or running out of debuffs.
I especially like critting foes with a maul and intimidating strike. Nothing like 2x 1d12+4 damage, auto-knocking down my foe, and making them frightened 2. Would love to get some debuff help in there. /s
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I don’t think the people saying casters were good at debuffs meant martials had no debuffs.
I don’t think the people saying casters were good at debuffs meant martials had no debuffs.
No, they weren't. They said the role of casters was debuff, not damage. This shows fighters debuffing for free on top of damage. It's an interesting juxtaposition.
Overall, I like the game as it is. As a GM, I'm doing my part to accommodate all the players' styles including giving the casters opportunity to be impactful where others wouldn't have been.
I like the fighting system, in particular the 3 action system, but there are definitely some cases now where you can see a caster wondering how to stay relevant when the party's martials can do anything. PF1 being the reverse does not mean flipping that is a good thing.
Again, I like the system. I'm a fan. I also like poking the hornet's nest from time to time.
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where you can see a caster wondering how to stay relevant when the party's martials can do anything.
They can't. Or rather, any given martial can't. Unless your fighters is carrying around one weapon of every weapon group, and paying the costs to keep them all viably enchanted. Also, critting is not a reliable strategy, even for a fighter. Yes, it is great when you do it. But you can't do it at will. Nor are they likely to have all of the feats you listed, since they use incompatible fighting styles.
A caster can actually have access to all of these debuffs at once, albeit only so many times per day. And they can choose when to deploy them instead of just hoping for crits. Their equivalent to a critical hit, a spell crit failure? That can do more than just debuff. That can take an enemy out of the fight entirely, or even turn it against its allies. The former is something martials can only do by dropping enemies to 0 HP or finding the occasional cliff to Shove them off. The latter isn't something they can really do at all.
Martials have a limited number of things they do really, really well at will. Casters have finite resources and can't necessarily optimize to do that one thing as well, but when you compare the number of options any given caster has compared to any given martial, the caster trumps in versatility every time.
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I also like poking the hornet's nest from time to time.Please just stop.
You're one of the vocal forum posters who try to put down anyone who openly questions the new martial/caster dynamic of PF2. I have questions about it. That is after all why I came to a forum, to discuss it. If you don't think these threads have anything for you, because you know the truth already, good for you. Why are you posting?
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I think it's a question of marginal gain.
If you're building a new party, the first thing you probably do is put a martial in it, because martials are awesome in this edition. So what's the second character you put in? You could add another martial and it wouldn't be bad, but your party would be stronger if you added something different. A cleric maybe, who has good Medicine for post-combat healing, and Heal for spike healing in combat. Who next? Another martial? Could do, but overall the party is stronger if you add a rogue who can remove some of the very nasty traps you can run into (and isn't a slouch in combat either!). So now what? Add another fighter? Or add someone who can easily access various elemental damage types, and does well at knowledge checks to know what approach works best with each monster?
I think adding more of the same class doesn't add as much power to the party, as covering all the bases does.
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Casters have more reliable ways to eat enemy actions and reactions with debuffs. Critical Specializations are unreliable compared to spell debuffs. If you need to eat up enemy actions in a given round you cannot count on the critical specialisation to occur but you can count on a spell to happen. They will eat at most 1 action, and some won't have the effect immediately if the enemy is willing to cope with prone/moved around/stuck in place for a bit. Compare to Slow, which will remove an action on a success, 1 action/round on a fail, and 2 actions/round on a crit fail. Slow is better.
Action denial is a big deal for debuffers. Making an enemy hit less often or easier to hit is less impactful than narrowing their options. An enemy with only 2 actions often has to decide between a cool and effective power and moving to a more effective position. It also makes hit and run tactics more effective, which can make surviving their routine more possible for the party and functionally impossible for the enemy. Even just denying reactions with Hideous Laughter is pretty strong. Casters excel in action denial, while fighters can occasionally step up to the plate and do it. Kinda the opposite of how fighters excel in single-target damage and casters can occasionally step up and do some. One is better than the other but both can try.
They also inflict more severe conditions at times. Fear, for instance, is a stronger debuff than Intimidating Strike, though it doesn't do damage it triggers on successes (while IS misses on fails) and has stronger numerical penalty on the other results (and a fleeing side effect on crits).
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First criticals are not exactly a reliable thing and lot of spells have critical success effects as well.
Better to compare active debuff actions of different maneuvers and spells.
Yes a martial can do virtually all the types of debuffs in the game if specced for them. That's because of 2e debuff system sharing a lot of overlap.
Flat footed being the most common by a wide margin.
Demoralize being limited but one of the few things that stack with FF armor reduction as well as things like disarms to hit reduction.
After that? It becomes more niche.
And the big difference? No martial can apply these debuffs to a large group in the way a caster can.
You want to mess up some martials? Send swarms. Large numbers. Unless they have the 3 action whirling strike (easily avoided) they are going to die without some AOE help.
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Debuffs from spells level 1 to 3 which the martials cannot replicate that early, since you contend they get "right out of the gate, virtually every caster debuff at their disposal":
* Fleeing from Fear spell
* Goblin pox
* Grease (-2 circumstance penalty to all checks using an object)
* Shove 30 feet with gust of wind
* Sickened from a number of spells
* Enfeebled, ray of enfeeblement
* Unconscious, sleep
* Deafness
* Blindness
* Treat others as concealed, darkness
* Remove positive magic effects, dispel magic
* Ghoul fever, ghoulish cravings
* Dazzled, invisibility negated (though Revealing Stab is a thing), glitterdust
* Lose a full round of actions, Slowed 1 for more than a round, can't use reactions, hideous laughter
* Silenced, can't use verbal spells (only used offensively as 4th level spell though)
* Stupefied, touch of idiocy
* Can't cast divine spells for one round, crisis of faith
* Fascinated, hypnotic pattern
* Paralyzed
Many of these happen on crit hit/crit save fail, but the martial usually has no debuff except on crit so I thought that was fair.
To reiterate, these are only spell level 1 to 3 debuffs which the level 5 martial has no way of replicating. They have other debuffs the martials can replicate too, which typically affect an AoE like web, or very reliably apply the debuff like slow. They also have a whole host of buff spells, none of which the martial can replicate at all.
No caster has access to all of these, but a caster can very easily get access to five or more in a day if they want to. By comparison the martial likely only has access to one or two of your debuffs listed in the OP because most martials don't carry around an armory, they have one main weapon.
Of course, with higher level spells we get even better debuffs that the martial can't replicate, while they're using high level feats to replicate these debuffs the caster had since level 3.
Martial debuffs are good, but there is not nearly the same amount of debuffs they can apply, and your statement about covering nearly all caster debuffs is extreme hyperbole.
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On the other hand, to land the debuff, the caster spent two actions and if the creature made the save, most of the effect is minimal (for example, fear, frightened 1; grease, no effect; blindness blind until start of next turn).
The case could be made that if you replaced the caster with a dragon barbarian, the creature would be dead that much faster.
Comparatively, if you spend 2 actions to attack and miss, you get no effect.
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Well as they are currently it's not like the Wizard is actually doing anything in combat. He either buffs so allies can brute force better or debuffs so allies can brute force better. What's left is mook clearing which feels like you are a sidekick and whatever limited out of combat spells are left, which have either meh duration and/or require concentration.
An extra martial straight up doubles all damage which means enemies are less likely to target the Cleric/Bard and Rogue less often.
Also getting Wizards just for the RP sounds like the wizards arent even playing the same game.
By that logic isn't better to just replace every character with a fighter? I mean they got the highest average damage, and everything the cleric really is good at doing is healing, and who needs healing when you can simply get pots and medicine can do the job just fine. Also why a rogue, you can instead play a dex fighter with a bow for better to hit, and just share the skills around who needs a skill monkey.
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Pretty sure if you took a party with 1 martial, 1 rogue, 1 cleric, 1 wizard and replaced the wizard with another martial, party 2 would be superior.
In the context of the thread, a party without a debuffer capable of denying enemy actions will have a harder time handling significantly deadly enemies. Action denial is pretty core to surviving the strongest of foes because you quickly run out of the ability to take their full routine. A martial debuffer is much worse at this sort of play than a magical debuffer, their abilities are harder to trigger and work in fewer situations. Maybe wizard isn't the best pick for that role, I'll leave that discussion to the numerous threads about whether wizards got shafted too hard on this edition. But I really doubt replacing a debuffer with another martial will be strictly better. Even a martial debuffer, because their abilities are more limited.
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Ah, so I see your two fighters don't need haste or fly. And don't need to know where invisible enemies are with glitter dust, or go invisible themselves. And so on.
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Ah, so I see your two fighters don't need haste or fly. And don't need to know where invisible enemies are with glitter dust, or go invisible themselves. And so on.
Please, my Schrodinger's Fighter took both has and doesn't have Sudden Leap and Blindfight at 8th level, so neither of those are a threat.
Pretty sure if you took a party with 1 martial, 1 rogue, 1 cleric, 1 wizard and replaced the wizard with another martial, party 2 would be superior.
I think you may be right, our party consists of a barbarian, a wild order druid/fighter MC, a ruffian rogue and a Bard and it works.
I think you may be right, our party consists of a barbarian, a wild order druid/fighter MC, a ruffian rogue and a Bard and it works.Pretty sure if you took a party with 1 martial, 1 rogue, 1 cleric, 1 wizard and replaced the wizard with another martial, party 2 would be superior.
It should work. That was something that PF2 did very well, making it so that any party compositions can work (thank you Medicine skill and easier multiclass acces). What he's saying is... Superior. And that could be argued, if anyone could say what sort of metrics they're looking at when it comes to superior.
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It seems that many people also forget that every debuff the fighter gets, the wizard or any other caster can as well. Spells are just easier to use and more efficient for them. Have we also forgotten that just like every other class, spell casters are not only limited to their class’ chassis: there are skill debuffs as well. Also, if we’re going to list every debuff that a martial can do, then I only think it’s fair to list out every damage type, utility, and buff that casters can do as well.
I think you may be right, our party consists of a barbarian, a wild order druid/fighter MC, a ruffian rogue and a Bard and it works.Pretty sure if you took a party with 1 martial, 1 rogue, 1 cleric, 1 wizard and replaced the wizard with another martial, party 2 would be superior.
If that’s true then your party has not played with a range of enemy types, hazards, and otherwise. We have a sorcerer in our group, and if he was not around, we would not have been able to get through Book 2 of Age of Ashes without either kissing a lot of time or the death of multiple characters, mine included. There were traps, hazards, diseases, as well as multiple creatures that only he could handle, and there were creatures that negated nearly all my character’s damage and that none of our strength focused characters could handle, while the sorcerer just changed into a dinosaur and shoved it into a hazard that killed it.
It seems that many people also forget that every debuff the fighter gets, the wizard or any other caster can as well. Spells are just easier to use and more efficient for them. Have we also forgotten that just like every other class, spell casters are not only limited to their class’ chassis: there are skill debuffs as well. Also, if we’re going to list every debuff that a martial can do, then I only think it’s fair to list out every damage type, utility, and buff that casters can do as well.
If that’s true then your party has not played with a range of enemy types, hazards, and otherwise. We have a sorcerer in our group, and if he was not around, we would not have been able to get through Book 2 of Age of Ashes without either kissing a lot of time or the death of multiple characters, mine included. There were traps, hazards, diseases, as well as multiple creatures that only he could handle, and there were creatures that negated nearly all my character’s damage and that none of our strength focused characters could handle, while the sorcerer just changed into a dinosaur and shoved it into a hazard that killed it.I think you may be right, our party consists of a barbarian, a wild order druid/fighter MC, a ruffian rogue and a Bard and it works.Pretty sure if you took a party with 1 martial, 1 rogue, 1 cleric, 1 wizard and replaced the wizard with another martial, party 2 would be superior.
That's pretty cool, I'd say the Bard is just as capable as the Sorcerer no?
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That's pretty cool, I'd say the Bard is just as capable as the Sorcerer no?It seems that many people also forget that every debuff the fighter gets, the wizard or any other caster can as well. Spells are just easier to use and more efficient for them. Have we also forgotten that just like every other class, spell casters are not only limited to their class’ chassis: there are skill debuffs as well. Also, if we’re going to list every debuff that a martial can do, then I only think it’s fair to list out every damage type, utility, and buff that casters can do as well.
If that’s true then your party has not played with a range of enemy types, hazards, and otherwise. We have a sorcerer in our group, and if he was not around, we would not have been able to get through Book 2 of Age of Ashes without either losing a lot of time or the death of multiple characters, mine included. There were traps, hazards, diseases, as well as multiple creatures that only he could handle, and there were creatures that negated nearly all my character’s damage and that none of our strength focused characters could handle, while the sorcerer just changed into a dinosaur and shoved it into a hazard that killed it.I think you may be right, our party consists of a barbarian, a wild order druid/fighter MC, a ruffian rogue and a Bard and it works.Pretty sure if you took a party with 1 martial, 1 rogue, 1 cleric, 1 wizard and replaced the wizard with another martial, party 2 would be superior.
Yes, the bard is just as capable as the sorcerer. I may have misunderstood your post as agreeing that having two martials in the party is undeniably better than having a martial and a caster.
Maybe not a good example...the fighter is awesome in shoving.We don't have a sorc or wiz in the group and just do fine.
Pf2 really allows a lot of different group compositions.
Fighter is good at shoving when (s)he doesn’t have to roll a 19 to get a success. Of course, it would not have been as dramatic if she focused on getting every advantage for maxing our athletics, but that would have required the player focusing on a different aspect of the game than the player wanted to. On the other hand, our sorcerer just uses a scroll to change and shove our opponent where it needed to be in order to do adequate damage.
That one spell that was not even prepared or known turned the entire encounter around.
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Fighter is good at shoving when (s)he doesn’t have to roll a 19 to get a success. Of course, it would not have been as dramatic if she focused on getting every advantage for maxing our athletics, but that would have required the player focusing on a different aspect of the game than the player wanted to. On the other hand, our sorcerer just uses a scroll to change and shove our opponent where it needed to be in order to do adequate damage.
This is the issue with all these threads. The martial can always build to be good at a particular thing, but they cannot be best at all the things at once. One thread it's a giant instinct barbarian with Whirlwind strike, the next its a free hand debuff fighter with a range of weapon crit effects. But neither character will do the other's roll well at all (AoE VS debuff). And many come online around level 13-14, when casters have already been filling the role for 10 levels. Casters allow the versatility of someone who can do it all, but with large restrictions based on preparedness and daily slot limits.
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Fighter is good at shoving when (s)he doesn’t have to roll a 19 to get a success. Of course, it would not have been as dramatic if she focused on getting every advantage for maxing our athletics, but that would have required the player focusing on a different aspect of the game than the player wanted to. On the other hand, our sorcerer just uses a scroll to change and shove our opponent where it needed to be in order to do adequate damage.This is the issue with all these threads. The martial can always build to be good at a particular thing, but they cannot be best at all the things at once. One thread it's a giant instinct barbarian with Whirlwind strike, the next its a free hand debuff fighter with a range of weapon crit effects. But neither character will do the other's roll well at all (AoE VS debuff). And many come online around level 13-14, when casters have already been filling the role for 10 levels. Casters allow the versatility of someone who can do it all, but with large restrictions based on preparedness and daily slot limits.
Who was it that called it Schrödinger's Fighter? I really like that title for all of these threads filled with hypotheticals.
Schrödinger's Wizard is a pretty ancient RPG term for a wizard that somehow has every exactly the right spell prepared, always. At least I think that's the origin?
Heck, reliable debuffing as a martial isn't incredibly hard (crit spec debuffs are anything but reliable). Demoralize is available to all and can be very effective, especially with casters on the team. Trip is just amazing, though it does suffer from MAP.
Martials do have access to debuffs (though the OP is looking for them in the completely wrong place IMO), though they are not nearly as reliably powerful as a caster's. The debuff success on a martial is often equivalent to a debuff failure on a spell. When you get into the successes and crit successes of debuff spells you're often looking at fight-altering stuff. Crit failing a fear turns a boss into a chump.
Depends on the martial. It's really not hard for a dmg focused fighter to get some control/debuff Feats. AoE is something else.
True to an extent, but it will only ever be a minor secondary thing in this context, certainly not enough to declare martials are debuffer on par with casters in breadth like the OP suggests. You have to commit a lot of resources to be able to apply a wide variety of debuffs on a martial, which was my point about threads where the premise is that martials can do anything casters can do. They can do a lot of the things casters can do, and can be competitive in the traditionally caster areas like AoE if you specialize, but no single character can do all of it.
Fighters also only get critical specialization on one weapon group until 13th, and even then you won't be using them very often because your proficiency in all the other groups lags behind your main group for basically your whole career.
Barbarians and rangers can actually get the specialization on all weapon groups equally, but at even less likely to crit due to poor accuracy. That said, a flurry ranger can actually be pretty nasty since they get so many attack rolls and can fish for 20s. I've seen our Archer pin the same enemy down with two or three Arrows, which makes it incredibly hard for them to get mobile again.
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Yeah, dragon barbarian is the special exception that can do a lot of things martials normally can't like energy damage, AoE, and flying, all while having damage only very slightly behind giant instinct (which is the highest single hits in the game). IMO it's too good for this reason, it should pay more of a price for being able to step on caster's toes so much while still putting out such good single target damage. But that's for a different thread.
Shifting rune is limited because it requires a rune slot (less damage), requires actions to change, and can't cover any weapon, only those with the same number of hands. It's another thing where the martial always has both shifting rune and an elemental damage rune, depending on which is more useful for them to have this discussion. Of course champion can change it daily so they actually can do that with a little advance notice of the day's enemies.
I don't consider axe sweeps an AoE, it's just a small +1 bonus on hit if you make two attacks against different targets adjacent to each other. If that's an AoE than any martial attacking two different characters is an AoE, no axe needed. Typically an Area of Effect ability has an Area it affects.
Again, these are things you have to go out of your way to acquire (choosing axe means not getting other weapon traits, for example), and when you do you can in a very limited way kind of perform the role of debuffer or area damage. Your main thing will still be beating one character to death quickly. Your debuffs will not be as reliable, as versatile, or as potent (on a fail save). Your (non dragon barbarian) AoE will not hit as many enemies, and will do nothing if you miss. Etc.
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Not going to wade into the back and forth here, but I will give my 2 cp:
It's really freaking cool that a party of 4 martials can work 2e. Sure you're giving up some stuff, but you're also not relegated to bashing stuff with sticks and maybe some skills. It's doable in 1e, but is a lot harder and requires more GM flexibility.
In my actual game experience, a party of 4 casters isn't viable in 2e. You'll be deeply frustrated, except with exceptional concessions from the GM. I don't want 1e where a party of 4 casters completely overruns every encounter, but I like the idea that multiple play styles are viable.
I'm squarely in the camp that martials are really awesome, but in an attempt to balance casters Paizo lost something.
Someone posted on the threads that it's almost impossible to make a useless martial. Great! But you really have to optimize casters to even keep pace at all.
2e is still a great game. I'm not at a place where I have any suggestions on how to make casters more fun without overshadowing martials, but at some point I will homebrew something.
There's an element on the forums who take disagreement a step further and try to silence or shout down anyone who criticizes or questions the game in any way. This kind of gatekeeping is not helpful.
Totally state your opinions - disagree, debate, discuss. But the negativity is killing the community.
Yea if sweep is AOE, then stuff like agile weapons would basically be have to be called AOE too.
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My party has been a monk, a bard, a divine sorcerer, and a warpriest cleric of gorum. They have not had issues so far with survivability, and in fact have not had anyone drop in combat yet. I've been homebrewing the adventure, the biggest fight thus far was against some cacodaemons shortly followed by a sod hound (just before level 2).
The monk unquestionably does the most nova damage (he went ki strike), but the rest of the party has been contributing well. Soothe on the Bard and heals from the sorcerer have been working well to keep people standing in combat, and they all do fine with their weapons and cantrips (sorc took an ancestry feat for produce flame).
Our game has only got to about halfway through level 2. I'll see how they progress as the levels increase.
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As for the last part of your post, I agree that there is a lot of negativity, though I wouldn't say it's all from people trying to shut down criticisms of the game. There's just a lot of negativity in any discussion, which I think is nearly inevitable in an internet forum where people can read negative tone into the posts they don't agree with and things can escalate from there. I am as guilty of this as any, unfortunately.
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I do agree on dragon barbarian.
That said, my saying was mostly because the fact I can hardly remember the last time i fought with one of my party a group with more than 6 enemies.
That's why I also mentioned swipe + sweep + axe critical specialization ( by lvl 6 a critical hit would be like 6d12+str+spec on 2 targets )
I come from 5e and I am currently playing AoA. Almost lvl 3 and the larger ( note larger, not harder ) was composed by 4 low lvl creeps and 1 medium one. But same goes for the 2 5e campaigns I partecipated.
Maybe I will see ( mine is just a consideration, so please no AoA related spoilers ) sometimes a group of 7+ enemies.
At last, since we are discussing about aoe effects, what would be the number of enemies hit to justify an aoe?
We can find a theoretical max number of enemies using encounter guidelines.
Encounters should not go above 160 XP total, and enemy level should not go below PL-4. That's 10 XP each, or 16 total enemies. So that's the theoretical max you should ever see in an encounter by those guidelines.
Realistically you will likely have encounters that are 4-6 max. Usually a larger encounter can be one stronger enemy, one at level, and two or three weaker, though this can obviously change a lot.
I think it does not take many enemies to justify an AoE, 3 definitely does it and maybe even 2 (would need to look at numbers). Spell damage of 2d6 per level, save for half, is not very far behind a martial's first attack, so if you hit two enemies it should be more valuable than 2 vanilla Strikes with MAP (the second Strike loses about 50% damage), though of course there are many feats where you are not making two vanilla attacks. However the average damage gains for these feats are not always as high as you might expect, most stay at average damage of 2 attacks at full bonus or lower. So 2 enemies hit by AoE is decent but not great, but more than 2 is definitely worth it, would be my "napkin calculations" assessment.
Swipe is much worse than AoE. It has the cleave problem where enemies don't consistently stand next to each other. It might come up occasionally, but more often the enemies will split up or flank or do anything other than stand in a row. Not even because the GM is trying to deny Swipe, just because it is very easy to not be adjacent to each other.
Could be good in a 10' wide hallway or other tight quarters. Not so good against highly mobile foes.