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Which is exactly the opposite of what a champion should be. They should be inflicting terrible judgement on the enemies of god, not being MMO tanks. To bring them to what they actually should be, using the rules we have, you have to leverage human shields etc, because the reactions are so totally anathema to that actual role. Champions stride out and do huge, maiming damage to evil outsiders, etc, they don't 'tank' that is for extreme niche prestige classes like dwarven defenders etc.
I think you would be right if Champions were entirely limited to their reaction ability AND a desire to protect people as somehow in direct opposition to the good Champion's code.
Good Champion reactions protect allies, and the Lawful and Neutral reactions also harm evil-doers. You choose your allies, and by the Tenants of Good, this should include innocents. Are you really claiming that giving allies, including innocents, damage reduction is an anathema to what a Good Champion stands for? Are you suggesting that a Paladin should not immediately strike at someone who someone who attacked an innocent? Or that a Redeemer should not offer an evildoer the chance to change their ways? Or a Liberator should not help an innocent escape from an evil doer?
A Champion does not have to be a tank. My Paladin does not have a shield. He sometimes casts the shield cantrip if it is tactically sound. His party is a party of good. He smacks down those who attack his party when his party is working to make the world a better place. He provides damage reduction for those who fight for the same causes he does.
Now, you certainly can imagine a Champion who doesn't want to do these things, but to say that does protect good and punish evil is not a real Champion is silly.
To the contrary, understanding the difference between the player and the character is vital to understanding the meaning of TriOmegaZero's comment.Sure. But when someone makes the comment that they don't like the way the Champion mechanic makes them play because its reaction based around defending allies when they have a different notion of what a Champion should be doing, one shouldn't respond with 'All champions should hope it doesn't get used.' That assumes a great deal about many potential champions and feeds into the notion that 2e doesn't want people coloring outside their lines.
This hypothetical champion is one an infinite number of hypothetical champions who may or may not want to defend their allies. Saying what is good for one and thinking that it solves the original objection isn't quite right.
Outside of the mechanics of the class, there is nothing you can say that applies to all champions. Even the specifics of anathema are subject to your GMs interpretation of it.
A Champion does not have to be a tank.The mechanics of the class do lean pretty heavily into it though. I'm no numbers guy, but I don't think a Champion will be as good Damage as Fighter or Barbarian without leveraging their reaction mechanic and their support game is no where near the level of Cleric or Sorcerer. Nothing wrong with playing against type, but if the objection is that the mechanics of the class don't incentivize what some consider a classic play style of previous iterations of the class, I think that's a fair criticism.
Well, it is a class based game. If the objection is that Champions should not be insensitive to protect allies, the criticism should be directed at the Tenants of Good, not the mechanics that to some extent support the Tenants. But it makes little sense to me to complain that a class in a class based game can't support any and all visions for a character.
Sure, a Champion will not be as good a general damage dealer as a Fighter or a Barbarian. A Barbarian won't be as good with armor as a Fighter or a Champion. A Champion won't be as good a spell caster as a Cleric. Or as good as a performer as a Bard.
But I would suggest that the Champion is still designed around doing damage to evil creatures, even if they are not doing the most damage in general. There are numerous abilities that specifically do good damage, or damage specifically to evil creatures.
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My personal resistance to 2e is it suffers from the same bad design decision that both DnD4 and and DnD5 took. Under the d20 System and derived games, the attitude was here's the mechanics, make the character you want to play. Under PF2/DnD4/DnD5 the decision was made to be here's the characters we, the designers, want you to play, you're not allowed to customize them; be happy with that. The decision to remove multiclassing (feat classing wasn't multiclassing in DnD4, and it still isn't multiclassing in PF2), class locking most mechanics, and designers start saying nonsense like "niche-protection" fully cemented that opinion.
Sometimes I'm really baffled by people's opinions. I don't see how 3.X's and PF1's multiclassing gives us that much more freedom and liberates us from the designers' choices. If the old multi-classing was that great then why did we need hundreds of prestige classes or respectively hundreds of archetypes to access and replace class features? And how are archetypes that different from the current multiclassing of 4e and PF2? You just swap out class abilities... Also doesn't 5e literally use pretty much the same multiclassing as we were used from PF1 (haven't touched 5e for a couple of years)? So why throw it in with 4e and PF2?
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Champions were invented for PF2. The idea of what they "should be" is a little weird in that context, isn't it?
I mean if they were paladins then they'd "supposed to be" lawful good, but the whole point of the Champion was to be a new direction for that element of the game. If that design goal was achieved it's going to be necessarily different from how things used to be and referencing back to PF1 as a kind of touchstone is going to be a doomed endeavour.
The reason I say that is that, if Champion design is a real dealbreaker for you, I wouldn't bother trying to "get" PF2. It's a new thing, not a representation of an old thing so I can't imagine it changing in a hurry. It sounds to me that the game has gone a direction you don't like, which is just a fact of life.
To me it'd be like trying to play D&D variants as a class-free game or as a slow-progression, low-magic game. It's probably possible, but it's going to be terribly frustrating.
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. You punish evil by proactively striking it down before it acts, not reactively mitigating its effects, innocents are saved when the creatures body is rotting meat, so strike with swift and sure judgement, in righteous fury, the reactions are the opposite of that. If they were an option I could just avoid them, but they aren't, we are stuck with them, and their aren't ways to build out of them. Hint: to me Ragathiel is the perfect holy warrior, Champions are the ultimate zealots, they should destroy the enemies of the faith, utterly, either by blade, conversion or banishment.
I mean... as already pointed out in this thread, there's literally nothing stopping you from playing a Paladin that way? Paladins are quite fine at martial combat even without their reactions. And since those abilities are reactions instead of actions, they don't hinder the Paladin's ability to do martial stuff.
Instead, the Paladin is a competent martial warrior who gets to free-action punish people who are foolish enough to bring harm to his allies.
I get where you are coming from wanting the Paladin to be the spike-damage class that it was in 1e, but the thing is that's not really a mechanically distinct concept. "Barbarian except with holy damage" is not a unique niche to carve a class out of.
Champions were invented for PF2. The idea of what they "should be" is a little weird in that context, isn't it?That names of classes change over time isn't anything exceptional. Fighting Man and Thief are certainly still mainstays in the game, even if we call them Fighter and Rogue now.
Trying to appease the legacy crowd, they kept Paladin as the LG champion, but it also lets people carry that baggage forward. The Champion is the inheritor of the Paladin. Its changed, its different, but it has to pull double duty of being its new thing and representing the thing that used to be in the game that people had certain ideas about.
Saying that just because the name is different you can't follow the through line seems silly.
Okay. Not to me. (To be clear, I don't particularly like the champion, I just don't see what's gained by declaring what it "should be" - it's just not what I'd like).
I think if you view RPGs as a series of shoulds you will continually be disappointed or annoyed ("disgusted" even).
BTW, I didn't say "just because the name is different you can't follow the through line"
I said:
the whole point of the Champion was to be a new direction for that element of the game. If that design goal was achieved it's going to be necessarily different from how things used to be and referencing back to PF1 as a kind of touchstone is going to be a doomed endeavour.
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hundreds of archetypes
When I hear people complaining about playing against class role easier in PF1, I think they are mostly thinking of these archetypes that would trade away class features for others that supported the new role.
Those were in the APG last time around(IIRC), and it sounds like they'll be there this time around too.
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. You punish evil by proactively striking it down before it acts, not reactively mitigating its effects, innocents are saved when the creatures body is rotting meat, so strike with swift and sure judgement, in righteous fury, the reactions are the opposite of that. If they were an option I could just avoid them, but they aren't, we are stuck with them, and their aren't ways to build out of them. Hint: to me Ragathiel is the perfect holy warrior.
This is a very narrow view of Paladins and Champions and doesn't even fit or describe most LG deities in the Pathfinder pantheon. Redemption and forgiveness play a major role in most of the LG faiths, so just going out to strike down anything evil is a rather simplistic and one-dimensional way of playing Champions. Yet nothing in the rules stops you from playing that way, even throwing in some free reaction attacks if you position well in a combat.
You punish evil by proactively striking it down before it acts, not reactively mitigating its effects, innocents are saved when the creatures body is rotting meat, so strike with swift and sure...
How, exactly, does the Champion Reaction prevent a Champion from proactively attacking evil creatures. Reactions happen when it isn't your turn. A Champion can attack up to three times on their turn and still react to evil behavior on the enemy's turn.
Sure, ideally a Champion has destroyed all evil in the universe before it can do any harm. But in that rarest of circumstances that this has not happened in the first few seconds of combat, maybe a good champion shouldn't take a vacation when her turn is over. Maybe she should both attack evil AND try to reduce it's impact.
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TBH I don't think it's unreasonable to be a little disappointed with the comparatively narrow focus of the Champion. It's definitely one of the classes with the clearest direction to its design and it can be annoying if you have another vision of what you want to play in your head that's almost there but the chassis doesn't quite accommodate that.
I sort of felt the same way when I was trying to put together a Ranger and didn't really feel like being an archer or dual wielding melee weapons and realized that kinda left me starved for options.
But despite their comments to the contrary earlier, it does sort of feel like Tremaine is coming into this looking for reasons to not like Champions and PF2. They seem to be going out of their own way to frame things in the worst way possible in order to denigrate them and... I mean it's no wonder you aren't having fun if that's your approach to things.
But despite their comments to the contrary earlier, it does sort of feel like Tremaine is coming into this looking for reasons to not like Champions and PF2. They seem to be going out of their own way to frame things in the worst way possible in order to denigrate them and... I mean it's no wonder you aren't having fun if that's your approach to things.
Agreed. I might be mistaken but I think that they are the same person who said they didn't like the 3-action economy. If you dislike the fundamentals of a system to such a degree than it's easier to look for other options instead of complaining about the one you don't like. If you don't like PF2 then that's fine, there is still PF1 and 3.X around if you prefer those or one could check out the hundreds of other options that are out there.
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when the group I have moves on, it will be pf2 or nothing. I have tried Roll20 etc, they fizzle, and finding games for anything that isn't 5e is hard enough for current systems on there, let alone abandoned ones, having a group last more than a few sessions is also nigh miraculous.
And how will complaining about a system that you don't like solve that? Also, that is highly hyperbolic and not the case if you put in some time to find the right game with the right people. I've run and played in multiple games and campaigns that lasted for about a year and that in a time-zone that's not exactly primetime for RPG communities.
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. By limiting the Good damage to those reactions, and forcing out any other builds. If it was optional it would be something I could avoid. It isn't, it is a lump screaming at me that if I don't see paladins as tank's I am doing it wrong. If reactions didn't take up most of the feats, and most of the ways to do damage, it would be less offensive. But they do. Holy damage? Tied to reactions, smite? Relegated to a taunt mechanic...You punish evil by proactively striking it down before it acts, not reactively mitigating its effects, innocents are saved when the creatures body is rotting meat, so strike with swift and sure...How, exactly, does the Champion Reaction prevent a Champion from proactively attacking evil creatures. Reactions happen when it isn't your turn. A Champion can attack up to three times on their turn and still react to evil behavior on the enemy's turn.
Sure, ideally a Champion has destroyed all evil in the universe before it can do any harm. But in that rarest of circumstances that this has not happened in the first few seconds of combat, maybe a good champion shouldn't take a vacation when her turn is over. Maybe she should both attack evil AND try to reduce it's impact.
Good damage can be had from Vengeful Oath, Smite Evil, Aura of Faith, and Blade of Justice. None of those require use of the Champion Reaction. And using a Reaction does not necessitate being a tank. My Champion is literally not a tank. It is utterly not true that non-tank Champions are impossible, non-viable, or some hard to construct niche build. He just goes in and fights the things he believes need fighting. And when those things continue to do evil things, they get punished even more.
And still, none of the presented arguments support the idea that punishing evil-doers and protecting allies is "so totally anathema" to what Champions should be. Remember that reactions do not replace actions. They are in addition to actions.
If you call your game Pathfinder, you have to expect it. People say 'Its a whole new game' all they like. Its named Pathfinder, and the class can be a Paladin. Expecting people to just give up on all that history is unrealistic. And when they don't and express disappointment, all I can really say is "That's rough, buddy."
Mostly I just wish people would stop being so incredulous that when people hear Paladin(Or Pathfinder), one might think of the standard that was set by the past 10+ years of the game.
New players probably don't have this issue. I imagine that must be nice.
We have very different perspectives on the champion. I think its a really obvious break with the past. In my view, you have to work quite hard to see it as a legacy feature (I think the weird ranger dichotomy of either TWF-or-archer is a much better example of that).
Irrespective, my main point was that its very unlikely to change. If you dont like PF2 because you find the ancestry options overly restrictive or something, I think it makes sense to wait around and see if your issue gets resolved. I think youre going to remain disappointed for a long time if the core concept of the champion bugs you.
Im not dismissing those objections (I dont like the champion much either and for similar reasons to tremaine) but I think one should be pragmatic in these sorts of considerations.
the imposition of mmo style tanking on the class
That is simply untrue. Build a Paladin. Get yourself the weapon of your choice. Don't pick up a shield. Don't maximize Constitution. Pick up Smite Evil and other good-damage dealing abilities. Use your three actions to get into the fight and deal as much damage as you can.
There's your non-tank Paladin.
When you see a bystander attacked, don't protect them. Don't react by attacking the evil creature. Just yell "Proactive attacks only! I'm a real Paladin!". Now your non-tank Paladin isn't doing those non-Paladin things like punishing evil.
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Monk 1 (for AC)/Paladin 2 (for smite+saves), Wizard 1 (for Mage Armor + Shield + Enlarge + other utility), Fighter 4 (for Weapon Spec), Barbarian 1 (for fast movement),
This character in particular sounds like a grab bag of mechanics for the mechanics.
To achieve the same in play result in PF2, considering it's a different system, I'd recommend fighter with wizard MC, picking up multitalented if human for either champion or barbarian to achieve the same flavor.
No, you can't dip into several front loaded classes to achieve an all over the place character that still works somehow. I'm not convinced that's a loss.
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OK, pure and simple I hate those reactions, they could do a billion damage, or instantly make the target Good, and I would still hate them, I do not want them on my character sheet, they do not at all fit my vision of the class, yet I am stuck with them, if I want to play the holy warrior, I don't even have the option of an actual War Priest anymore, the only game in town is champion and it is stuck with those... Things.
Well, I guess you are saying you don't like the new Paladin's because they give you an option you don't want and are not required to use.
Why not just get a shield and save your reactions for Shield Block?
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the imposition of mmo style tanking on the classThat is simply untrue. Build a Paladin. Get yourself the weapon of your choice. Don't pick up a shield. Don't maximize Constitution. Pick up Smite Evil and other good-damage dealing abilities. Use your three actions to get into the fight and deal as much damage as you can.
There's your non-tank Paladin.
When you see a bystander attacked, don't protect them. Don't react by attacking the evil creature. Just yell "Proactive attacks only! I'm a real Paladin!". Now your non-tank Paladin isn't doing those non-Paladin things like punishing evil.
. See the last paragraph utterly invalidates the previous ones, by making it clear the reactions are in fact a tanking mechanic. (a hybrid of mocking blow and blessing of protection in fact, if I was naming the two skills they look most like from wow.)
This is a fundamental break, you seem to see them as powers, I see them as a theme, and I don't like the theme (unless I misinterpreted you).
I just...I don't even know how to discuss this. Options are just options. A Champion at creation is given 2 options for reactions. You can only use one at a time. The idea that Champions have to be tanks because you feel some sort of obligation to ignore other options is silly.
You have adequately demonstrated that exists a Champion build you don't like. What you have not done is demonstrate your claim that other builds are impossible or nonviable. A claim that is especially odd to me considering that my Champion is not a tank, seeks out evil to destroy, and is the top damage dealer in our party.
Not that my build is what you want either, because I MC's into Bard (because Shelyn tells us to master an art). I guess yet another option that you don't have to choose makes it even worse?
Would you be okay with champions getting 'summon balor', mandatory, at say lvl 16? You have to have it, you can not use it, but most feats past that point support buffing it... That is how much the reactions offend me.
I would not, and have not. Protecting innocents and punishing evil acts is solidly in line with the ethics of a Paladin (even if your Paladins would not choose to do so). Summoning evil creatures is in direct opposition to the standard Paladin (though I leave room for circumstances, histories, and lore I do not know that might justify such a thing). Having the casting of an evil spell as a standard option would be a very different thing.
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Sure PF1 had a massive amount of possible combinations, more than PF2 has. But 99% of them would just be objectively terrible.
At my last count, we had 665,280 possible multiclass combinations in PF2, just from the Core Rulebook alone, and almost none of them were objectively terrible.
Monk 1 (for AC)/Paladin 2 (for smite+saves), Wizard 1 (for Mage Armor + Shield + Enlarge + other utility), Fighter 4 (for Weapon Spec), Barbarian 1 (for fast movement),This character in particular sounds like a grab bag of mechanics for the mechanics.
To achieve the same in play result in PF2, considering it's a different system, I'd recommend fighter with wizard MC, picking up multitalented if human for either champion or barbarian to achieve the same flavor.
No, you can't dip into several front loaded classes to achieve an all over the place character that still works somehow. I'm not convinced that's a loss.
Yeah, that looks like a theorycrafted build to me not like something that any character would organically develop into, especially when considering it requires at least 1 or 2 diametrically opposed alignment changes to get there.
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Because someone might come up with an argument that shows me what I am missing, or something so good I can look passed it. On roll20, not had that experience, sadly, have tried multiple games, best was an Eclipse Phase game that lasted 8-10 months.
Sorry, but you seem to hate many of the design choices with a passion, so I doubt that changing your opinion or perspective on this is even possible.
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Sure PF1 had a massive amount of possible combinations, more than PF2 has. But 99% of them would just be objectively terrible.At my last count, we had 665,280 possible multiclass combinations in PF2, just from the Core Rulebook alone, and almost none of them were objectively terrible.
That to me is what matters the most.
I had a friend who I played with regularly in 3.5 for years, and he would come up with some exceptional concepts.
He played a Fighter themed as a samurai (during the APG release so Archetypes has just come out and alchemist too). I did a campaign themed around an ancient alchemical city in a homebrew.
So basically he had a lot of thematic reasons to Multiclass into Alchemist , but he was level 4 when he made this decision and as far as “optimal” goes it was about the worst time to do it. He lost BAB, it didn’t mesh with the high movement play style, etc. but it did make sense from a story side.
I try not to fluff that much but I sometimes had to in this played case, and on the other end of the table I have an optimism machine (just enough to be the best at the table at killing things, but not enough that it was disruptive) that’s putting a lot of contrast to that character (we were all close friends so it didn’t matter much).
Now I look at this new system, not only is what he wanted to do better supported, it’s actually really freaking good!
And it was not just that character he had problems with, and part of it was he was committed to a concept in its purist form, that he would select unoptimal feats. And if going purely on concept, that was extremely easy to do in 3.5 and by extension PF1 (which did add a lot of help, but the problems were inherent to the design).
This edition, I have not seen a bad character so far that was created in earnest, just ones that require different play styles. Even that one rogue/ranger thread a few days ago wasn’t that bad, and that’s probably the least cohesive unit I’ve seen built.
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Playing a lv1 chracter in pf2 is weird. Extremely weird. Because even though you are lv1, you feel like you have your class’s main stuff and shtick, and you can call yourself ‘weak but starting well’.
I can’t recall the last time I felt like that in a system with the superior ‘old school’ multiclassing. Level 1 was half-baked, always.
I’m ok with that being binned.
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You're not going to have a lot of luck understanding it. Most of the people that praise the old 3.5/PF1 "freedom of choice" were intentionally making what most people on this forum write off as "suboptimal characters", characters that were unique and fun to play, but not as cookie cutter uber powerful as they could be. I've come to the conclusion that there's two types of people on these forums, ones that limit the pool of viable builds to hyperoptimized tier 1 characters, and people who can find enjoyment playing any build. And these two types of people basically talk over and around each other. The people in the former group welcome PF2 because they didn't really lose anything from PF1, because I...
It isn't just things being "suboptimal and not hyper optimised" that is disingenuous imo. It was super easy to simply create characters that stopped working or could not be played in a party without an optimised character or knowledgeable player to balance it out. Or the GM just going easier on the group and accommodating for it (way more common than players seem to think).
The issue may not appear during the early levels beyond a small irritation, but it certainly became a noticeable problem during mid to late levels.
A lot of the solutions to this issue cannot even be credited to the level by level multiclass system, but rather the 10 years of content releases.
But without system mastery it is very easy to make a near useless character in PF1e.
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I was quite shocked to see 40+ new posts overnight and then dismayed to see they were almost all a bunch of arguments over the champion plus some daft ones about old 1E build styles
This thread was never supposed to be a space where someone could come in and say “I am not switching / Hope I don’t have to switch because I think element x of 2E sucks”
Indeed I am quite sick of people coming onto the 2E boards saying 2E sucks or 1E was better at X. The claim may be that they are looking to be corrected or pointed to something they haven’t seen but this is highly unlikely to be true in most of the cases. Because if it were true they would not argue back and forth for 40+ posts when people tried to point them in a different direction
Incidentally i am also finding this “am i missing something” line of questioning annoying as well (even if I haven’t managed to completely avoid it myself). This is because at least 9 times out of 10 there person asking that seems to actually be saying “I know in my mind I am not actually missing something and I just want people to confirm my suspicion. If people tell me I am missing something I will argue continuously because I don’t want to be proven to be mistaken in the position I have tried to take”
No I don’t doubt my accusations of bad faith posting will potentially draw the ire of community standards but I am not pleased at how far off track the post I started has been dragged through bickering
So can it go back to people discussing what they have potentially seen as the general reaction to 2E and not their own complaints?
And as mentioned above - perhaps other threads for “help me with builds I don’t think I can currently achieve anymore” and “What changes could be made to a champion to move them from the tanky role”
Incidentally i hope the APG introduces ways (or hope the general archetypes introduce ways) to trade out things other than class feats. These could be champion reactions which would solve the issue of on of the main posters above. And from my side I would like to see ways of replacing bloodline/school focus spells as the weakness of some of those put some players off certain pathways in those classes...
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Incidentally i hope the APG introduces ways (or hope the general archetypes introduce ways) to trade out things other than class feats. These could be champion reactions which would solve the issue of on of the main posters above. And from...
Until we find out if it will, I suggest reskinning another class. Create a Fighter in heavy armor and shield with a holy symbol and plenty of faith in his god and call him a Paladin in training. You could even multiclass to Paladin if you want. This way, your Reaction is just the Fighter's AoO, and you can shout "Sarenrae smite you, coward! Face me instead!"
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How long is this derail going to continue? Until mods are called in?
It's a low data speculation thread; I doubt the thread could get back on the rails without data to discuss. Till then, may as well enjoy people explaining why their favorite or most despised feature is driving real play numbers.
I have just clicked on warhorn and PF2 is about 80% of PF1 and more than starfinder
Not knowing much about warhorn I don’t know how much that shows!
I have just clicked on warhorn and PF2 is about 80% of PF1 and more than starfinder
Not knowing much about warhorn I don’t know how much that shows!
I have never heard of "Warhorn" before and I'd say I'm quite entrenched in this hobby. What kind of platform is it and who is it targetted at?