How much experience do people have with these so far?
I was just browsing the conversion discord and there was discussion of solo villains not working well in tabletop rpgs because either the villain is too strong or action economy gets them
Does this still hold in 2E? I know there are action economy boosting special abilities . But do the numbers still have a chance of flattening the PCs?
For example I remember seeing a lot during the APG playtest about swashbucklers and investigator struggling to get the skill rolls needed for panache and studied strike (or whatever the investigator thing was called now) against higher levelled foes?
So do level +2 or 3 solo monsters become a case of PCs struggling to get anything to work and being crit all the time?
How have things worked in practice ?
So do level +2 or 3 solo monsters become a case of PCs struggling to get anything to work and being crit all the time?
Well, not having too much experience with solo bosses so far, but I can assure you that as long as you have not yet mastered the art of movement war, buffing & debuffing and new action economy they are a tough nut to crack and feel like a constant and unfair uphill struggle.
When we encountered one infamous solo boss in AoA volume 1 my group of experienced boardgamers and I looked at each other after round 1 (when we got to know most to-hit numbers, damage, AC and saves) and even without speaking a single word looks and shaken heads were telling enough.
"LoL, what kind of silly numbers are those? If our GM is only remotely playing this monster with half a brain we will have our behinds handed to us even before being able to finish our very first PF2 adventure..."
More disbelief than fear.
The battles are hard, specially at low levels, but after like level 7, solo bosses of lvl +2 do get way easier though, more resources and magic items make a big difference.
Age of Ashes Spoiler
The Great Barghest was basically cheesed, it had lower Will saves so the Aberrant Sorcerer managed to land a demoralize and Hideous Laughter in the first turn and from there the battle has gone downhill to the enemy with one less action and no reactions, it tried a Confusion spell against the Sorcerer but a hero point made it make the save.
So the martial side of the party basically did hit and run tactics plus some tripping, had a turn that the Barghest had to crawl to attack because getting up from prone plus stride would leave it without actions to attack.
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Solo bosses are serious business in PF2 yeah. If you look at the tables on page 489 you see that you could put down a single level +4 creature as the boss, but that it stands a good chance of causing a TPK.
Generally speaking, even a level +2 monster has a good chance of downing (though not immediately killing) some characters.
Solo boss encounters are iconic, but they're also tricky to write. I think a good rule of thumb is that you should aim to never spend all of the XP for an encounter on one creature. One single creature that contains all of the XP for a hefty encounter is very all or nothing; the players can't focus fire to take out a mook and so weaken the enemy side. They don't get to recover unless the solo boss is dead.
So don't spend all the XP on buying a high-level boss; spend a part on it on non-creature threats that the players can deal with. Like a hazard, or problematic terrain. Something they can do something about to make it less bad, like managing to get to the other side of the battlefield where the hazard doesn't cause such problems.
This chops up the battle into smaller accomplishments, without taking away from the narrative of "all of us against one big dragon". It's still a difficult confrontation but you're not going up against an insane numerical difference.
From my experience, it has been the least fun combats so far.
Most of your stuff doesn't work, the monster crits every round (sometimes more than once), you need to roll really high on your first attack and the second one is basically a wasted action (I play with a Monk).
It's as close to PF1e as PF2e can get. You just try to flank as fast as you can and hope to get lucky. Incapacitation trait just removes a lot of possibilities from the table as well, even though the last battle against a Boss my stunning Fist surprisingly worked (one of the rare instances my GM doesn't roll 15+ on saving throws).
The monster was PL+4 but the encounter had a 10th level NPC with us to compensate... Not that it made that much difference actually just one round with roughly 40 dmg dealt by the NPC. Another odd occurrence? Nobody got down in the end, but we all knew that if one dropped, everyone else would soon after.
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High-level boss encounters in my experience work so much better than in PF1 (One of the only aspects I don't like about that system) They are really hard, but it gets countered by action economy. And you can always hit, is just a matter of stacking benefits (Luck effects, flank, intimidate, etc) and then a dash of luck. But 4 against 1, is really unlikely the party would lose, but it feels that they are always on the ropes. And I want to be very clear here, EVERY single boss fight I've had in PF2 has been amazing (Levels 1-11)
High-level boss encounters in my experience work so much better than in PF1 (One of the only aspects I don't like about that system) They are really hard, but it gets countered by action economy. And you can always hit, is just a matter of stacking benefits (Luck effects, flank, intimidate, etc) and then a dash of luck. But 4 against 1, is really unlikely the party would lose, but it feels that they are always on the ropes. And I want to be very clear here, EVERY single boss fight I've had in PF2 has been amazing (Levels 1-11)
Having been caught in some dire situations due to lack of information on Age of Ashes Book 2, I found that tougher encounters with weaker enemies were much more rewarding in a round by round basis.
Fighting stronger enemies has been always tough for us, because our group isn't very lucky, so having several frustrating rounds and a ton of things that can't be use, or are used for minimal to no benefit, things can get frustrating really fast. I also find it to be TOO unwieldy. Some lucky crits (it's not that lucky when they crit you on a 16 and you're a DEX Monk) and the monster can just take down a player and start a chain reaction.
I'm not saying it was terrible or anything, my argument is that it was the least fun we've had with harder encounters. And my party had only our Wizard standing with 40HP on our last major fight (against several weaker but high damaging enemies and a powerful and stronger spellcaster), it was very tough, but at the same time it was nice to see your stuff actually work.
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If you apply PF1 tactics to PF2 boss fights, you'll lose. One-spell-shot-kills don't work anymore. Standing and full attacking in melee doesn't work anymore. The action advantage of PCs is countered by the fact that all it takes is one lucky crit and you're at single digits hp. Depriving the boss of actions becomes crucial, doubly so if they have some "OH CRAP" 3-action ability. Moving in, dashing out to heal and coming back is something that actually happens while it pretty much never occured in PF1 fights.
If you apply PF1 tactics to PF2 boss fights, you'll lose. One-spell-shot-kills don't work anymore. Standing and full attacking in melee doesn't work anymore. The action advantage of PCs is countered by the fact that all it takes is one lucky crit and you're at single digits hp. Depriving the boss of actions becomes crucial, doubly so if they have some "OH CRAP" 3-action ability. Moving in, dashing out to heal and coming back is something that actually happens while it pretty much never occured in PF1 fights.
We always use several different tactics. I think the only person that uses all of his actions to attack is our Flurry Ranger because the build can afford it quite well. But otherwise, everyone takes advantage of everything we can (Tiger Slash has been my best friend in such fights) and we move around, but that doesn't mean that our GM will not roll 15+ on every attack in a round or that our rolls will fall short a couple points even after flanking and minor debuffs (we don't have that many buffs, yet).
We also had an alchemist and the player just straight up retired the character last session. So, there's that. I think this was one of the biggest arguments I've seen against the class so far. A player just retired the character because it wasn't being as useful as the others. So there's that as well.
Conversely my group of experienced boardgamers recognized that a singular powerful foe would require different tactics and teamwork, that having such differences in encounters stops the game getting stale and without the tougher numbers (that arent really inflated just the natural progression within the system) the single enemy would drop boringly fast.
The things is, we found out too, however a lot too late, as much of the damage was already done at character creation.
If any of us players had read the rules properly and derived the meta before we actually made our characters it would have been a lot easier. However we created our characters according to the pictures of the heroes that we had in mind first and decided to use a "learning by doing" approach, which almost spectacularly backfired.
* no one in the party picked up the intimidate skill = no spammable frightened condition and DC reduction...
* no one in the party is able to conduct combat manoeuvres properly (3 of 4 have the skill, but no hands free and/or wrong weapon selection) = no grapple or trip to impose flat-footed condition
* only one pure melee in a party of four (our tank) = flanking bonus not very probable, especially on opponents that might have reach and AoO
So what do you do when you - by chance - build a party that can not properly lower enemy DC's and you face a boss where the game mechanics expect you to do exactly that (and despite targeting the lowest save my cleric's fear spell was critically resisted by the way)?
I tell you what you do: Roll high or die!
However I do not expect similar problems in future because as the gamers that we are we analyzed what went wrong and probably will be able to amend some of those problems as we level up, however what I just wanted to say is that we were 100% not prepared for boss fights when we created our chars. And once in a fight you can only use, what you are given which easily may not be enough.
Well, intimidate using the demoralize action isn't spammable against a solo enemy, but there are some class feats that provide good ways to make that condition stick around
I already talked about this more extensively in my own thread, by my experience so far with solo bosses has not been good (as a GM; as a player I've not encountered a "real" boss yet). Basically the same complaints as Lightning Raven: fight is too swingy as the boss has a really high chance to crit, and if they crit somoene will probably be insta-downed; and the players feel like their characters are innefective because of how low their success chance is for any given thing. After a while I really started dislking using accuracy as such a determiner for difficulty across levels, as did the players.
We only started having more fun with solo bosses after I started actively modifying the monsters I meant them to fight solo, nerfing their "d20 stats" (+hit, AC, Skills, Saves) and giving the power back in terms of action economy improvers, special abilities, etc.
It helps for players to recognize that fighting a severe boss is like fighting 3 NPCs that are equal to your PCs. The boss will have 3x the offense, 3x the defense, etc. of a competent threat. Or 6x the threat of the weakest of the standard creatures.
So in simple, direct ways this makes a boss worse since it automatically focuses fire on whomever it's attacking (often via spiky crits). Being next to the boss is like being surrounded by several competent enemies. Plus hit point depletion doesn't hinder the boss until the final blow, so yeah, it's a killer.
Thinking about the boss as 3 to 6 enemies highlights how important depriving it of one action is. If everybody next to it moves away (hopefully not too many folk!) that translates to 3-6 actions taken from the enemy. Every single-target penalty your party lands becomes multiplied in effectiveness the same proportion, so any spell that has a penalty on a save Success (most likely result) still matters.
And so forth. It's pretty easy to extrapolate after that.
I'd suggest offensive casters carry a variety of different spells not only for targeting different saves/AC, but for bosses vs. henchman vs. minions. Some martials should build like this too when able.
On the other side of that, and possibly due to my customary bad dice as a GM, my players haven't been too frightened or upset at solo bosses. I think they'll get very complacent considering how many dangerous encounters they've skated away from while thinking it's because their tactics were good (definitely no) or their defenses were well built (not really). We'll see.
Definitely had one player, a light-armored goblin bard, facetank an enemy for three rounds without taking damage. This enemy had a +20 to hit and the bard had 24 AC. And sadly that's not wildly unusual. Of course, the fourth round, right before this wildly frustrated monster got put down, it landed three attacks in a row and knocked the bard to Dying 3. So maybe he learned? But probably not.
Anyways. If you are a hot-dice GM, +3 and sometimes even +2 enemies can really ruin your party's day. Those of us who watch our well-crafted encounters fall apart when the boss critical fails multiple saving throws in one fight might have a different outlook on what it takes to back our players into the corner. I get a lot more luck with a handful of on-level enemies instead.
Almost to chapter 4 of book 2 of Age of Ashes, no character deaths. Only a couple close calls.
I imagine we hear a lot more complaints about encounter balancing because no one comes online to say "damn, my group fought a boss over the weekend and it felt super balanced and fair to us as players." People only tend to discuss it after a bad session with some unlucky rolls or some terrible tactics...
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My experience running solo monsters is that they can be absolutely brutal. I had to "save" my PCs from an encounter by having an NPC jump in to distract the boss for a round, otherwise it would have been a TPK.
Overall I'm actually happy with that - being able to have actual boss battles that are actually scary is nice - but you do have to be careful and aware that such encounters are massively more deadly than they were in 1e.
Save it for something special, and don't overdo it; if your players are constantly encountering level+2 solo monsters as their standard encounter, it's likely to wear on them fast.
One of the most fun ways to handle it, in my experience, is to run a deadly solo creature and have it play very sub-optimal. Have it waste actions swaggering around, have it Demoralize PCs but not follow up on that, have it switch targets frequently and "play with its food". Solo bosses will often last long enough that you can waste actions and not feel like the fight is wasted, and as long as you aren't too obvious about it it's easy to scare your players with how powerful the boss is without killing them by bringing that power to bear to full effect.
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So, I wrote this big long reply with my own experience throwing solo bosses +3 levels higher than the enemy, and I deleted it all because what I have to say is actually pretty simple:
Pre-1) TALK to your players. Explain to them that it's a new game and old expectations don't work. PF1 was won or lost in character creation. PF2 is won or lost in the moment, and tactical choices matter. They NEED this mindset if they are to do well in PF2, and not just for tough solo boss encounters.
1) DO IT! Don't be afraid. These are very tough encounters, but a solo monster that is a Severe encounter IS beatable. Stage it by talking up how frightful the enemy is - the players need to know they are in for a shellacking. That's a mindset that they need to know so they know to pull out all the stops and fight as hard and as smart as they can.
2) Make the environment USEFUL and INTERESTING. I think you set your players up for failure if you throw a boss into a large empty room and sic it on your players. But if the players can use the environment against the boss, it will be far more engaging for them.
3) Leave an Out. Adventurers don't like retreating as a general principle, but if they truly have no way to retreat, then a battle going poorly can mean the worst.
Examples:
A multi-level environment, with stairs to a balcony level for example, can give your tough melee characters the opportunity to hold a choke point and withdraw slowly away while the ranged characters can chip away at the boss from relative safety.
Including plentiful terrain features that can be used for cover is excellent - your PC may rightfully fear being crit by the boss, but if they are behind cover they have less to fear - and if they TAKE cover, well, now they have a very defensible position.
Try to include ways to interact with the environment in ways that will make life tough for the boss. i.e. tip over a candelabra or cut the rope holding a chandelier to cause fire damage to the boss, or perhaps use a torch to set the rug on fire creating an environmental hazard for a few rounds - especially effective if it triggers a weakness the boss has. In PF1 your sole job is to deal damage to the boss. In PF2, causing the boss difficulty or otherwise diverting its actions away from Striking is just as important.
Be lenient about giving out information about the bosses defenses. Describe it as slow and lumbering if it has poor reflex saves. Describe it as lithe and quick, or maybe even sickly, if it has poor fortitude saves. Describe it as being dimwitted if it has poor will saves. Describe a physical vulnerability if its AC is on the low side. It's unlikely that your players will get lots of success with Recall Knowledge, but knowing the right save to target can get the ball rolling on getting a handle on the boss, and IMO the battle is more engaging if the party has someplace to start, as opposed to "you don't really know anything about this creature" while it whackamoles the fighter and you can't think of what to do to slow the thing down.
Ok, I ended up writing a lot anyways. Very glad I deleted all of the other paragraphs :P
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This is the first version of D&D I have GM'd for, where I felt like I could afford to have a powerful monster act cocky, strut around and then live long enough to be surprised that the party was tougher than it initially thought and then dialed up the heat.
I do think that players coming from PF1 get pretty horrified by how frequently their characters are going to be taking critical hits, and hitting the floor against powerful foes. Depending upon the expectations and maturity of your players, you will want to be real careful of feeling out whether they are going to throw their hands up in disgust and walk away from the table, or if the challenge is going to be exciting and fun for them.
This is the first version of D&D I have GM'd for, where I felt like I could afford to have a powerful monster act cocky, strut around and then live long enough to be surprised that the party was tougher than it initially thought and then dialed up the heat.
I do think that players coming from PF1 get pretty horrified by how frequently their characters are going to be taking critical hits, and hitting the floor against powerful foes. Depending upon the expectations and maturity of your players, you will want to be real careful of feeling out whether they are going to throw their hands up in disgust and walk away from the table, or if the challenge is going to be exciting and fun for them.
Dr. PF2e or: How I learned to stop worrying and love the critical hits.
My GM has had an entire fight that the higher level monster (Level +2) was getting a crit every round and one time it was two critical hits in a row.
We somehow managed to stay up so far, we're level 10 and halfway through Age of Ashes Book 3.
We also had several 200+ XP encounters with several foes(they meshed together for some reason or other) and still managed to stay up. That's been a mixture of miracle, positioning and good usage of our abilities.
I should note that I was partly asking as there seems to be some PFS scenarios/quests with L+2 solo enemies
So if I was to run those I can’t just ditch them or change them
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This is the first version of D&D I have GM'd for, where I felt like I could afford to have a powerful monster act cocky, strut around and then live long enough to be surprised that the party was tougher than it initially thought and then dialed up the heat.
THIS.
I can't tell you how many times I had an encounter in P1 where the PCs just steamroll the CR+3 monster in a round and a half.
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I should note that I was partly asking as there seems to be some PFS scenarios/quests with L+2 solo enemies
So if I was to run those I can’t just ditch them or change them
PF2 characters can take quite a beating, go down maybe, and get back up and fight again. Much more than in PF1, you can have a fight that feels hard and yet still make it through.
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This is the first version of D&D I have GM'd for, where I felt like I could afford to have a powerful monster act cocky, strut around and then live long enough to be surprised that the party was tougher than it initially thought and then dialed up the heat.
THIS.
I can't tell you how many times I had an encounter in P1 where the PCs just steamroll the CR+3 monster in a round and a half.
I remember some random encounter our GM sprang at us as an ambush in a town that had 5 weresharks insanely stronger than us (We had to roll really high to hit and their damage was insane, our GM grossly misjudged the difficulty), it was by far the most unbalanced encounter we ever had numerically-wise... Yet we steamrolled it because of our Witch's Slumber Hex, three sharks failed and our characters just took the time to Coup-De-Grace them to oblivion.
Yet, another encounter where our characters had the upper hand, the monsters were fairly weak math-wise and only had a song that caused the Fascinated Condition. It was some kind of demonic harpies you fight on Skull and Shackles, they were by far the weakest encounters we had on that island, yet most of our characters failed on their damn song and in the end only my cleric and one animal companion had actions. I managed to save them by some clever spell usage and because the harpies were missing several attacks (specially on our captain).
PF1e is too unwieldy that way. In Pf2e if you're fighting above your class you need to be ready to take some severe hits.
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I have heard about those harpies. It was on some kind of podcast where they discussed absolutely horrendously balanced fights and that being an extremely hard one
I think it might have been the same podcast that had a couple of "theater" episodes featuring the iconic party against infamous fights in Council of Thieves and Realm of the FellKnight Queen - and getting absolutely crushed, full TPK in about 2-3 round
They didn't do that for that encounter but it definitely came up as a discussion point where certain parties are absolutely screwed against them
But yes PF1 is all over the shop. Especially at mid levels. Add high levels PCs tend to streamroller everything unless they come up against something really unexpected.
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I have heard about those harpies. It was on some kind of podcast where they discussed absolutely horrendously balanced fights and that being an extremely hard one
I think it might have been the same podcast that had a couple of "theater" episodes featuring the iconic party against infamous fights in Council of Thieves and Realm of the FellKnight Queen - and getting absolutely crushed, full TPK in about 2-3 round
They didn't do that for that encounter but it definitely came up as a discussion point where certain parties are absolutely screwed against them
But yes PF1 is all over the shop. Especially at mid levels. Add high levels PCs tend to streamroller everything unless they come up against something really unexpected.
As a guy who’s run a not-insignificant amount of high-level PF1, the only time I’ve honestly felt like I’ve managed to challenge a really high-level party with a level appropriate encounter (APL+4) was for it to be over a hundred feet above ground, in the middle of a horrific storm, with something throwing negative levels all over the place, and the boss having an AC in the low 50s, having absolutely absurd DPR, absurd saves, and evasion, all at once, all going at the same time. Archers taking about a -8 on their attack rolls, martials not wanting to go close in fear of the dangerous full-attack, and the casters worrying more about the negative levels. Had a cavalier, a monk, and an angel all charge at the same time and all miss, leading to a big fat “OH CRAP” as folks were begging for a dimension door to avoid the full-attack.
So…yeah, PF1 combats are stupid like that. At least with PF2 the higher-severity combats all generally have the same feel.
Anyway, dotting for interest.
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iconic party
PF1 iconics were so horribly badly built that playing an AP using them was an actual, real challenge.
Apart from that corner case, people would always optimise somewhere on the scale between "took some no-brainer blue feats from a guide" to "this is my Ladnsknecht/Vitalist/Savage Horticulturist kukri juggle build, 140 DPR at level 10" scale, rendering stock PF AP encounters a walk in the park with some very few notable exceptions.
I would be intrigued to know what the notable exceptions are...
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OG RotRL Xanesha.
Reign of Winter has several. Book 1 is brutal due to environmental rules and some fights can easily TPK, but then again early levels are swingy and balanced.
But later on ... Rasputin Must Die, if you trigger the entire <SPOILER> camp in one go you have the fight for the ages at your hands. Doable, but will test a twinked-out party, and the sheer WTF factor of some opponents there will leave even the best-prepared optimisers scratching their heads.
One of the many reasons it's one of the best Paizo adventures ever, you can softball it easily for casual parties or just balls to walls if your PCs are coming at you with Intimidate abuse builds or Sacred Geometry + Dazing Spell.
Pretty much makes the adventure a better AP finale than book 6 is :)
Hell's Rebels book 4 big fight if the PCs didn't clear the <SPOILER> and the DM knows their tactics.
OG RotRL Xanesha.
Reign of Winter has several. Book 1 is brutal due to environmental rules and some fights can easily TPK, but then again early levels are swingy and balanced.
But later on ... Rasputin Must Die, if you trigger the entire <SPOILER> camp in one go you have the fight for the ages at your hands. Doable, but will test a twinked-out party, and the sheer WTF factor of some opponents there will leave even the best-prepared optimisers scratching their heads.
One of the many reasons it's one of the best Paizo adventures ever, you can softball it easily for casual parties or just balls to walls if your PCs are coming at you with Intimidate abuse builds or Sacred Geometry + Dazing Spell.
Pretty much makes the adventure a better AP finale than book 6 is :)
Hell's Rebels book 4 big fight if the PCs didn't clear the <SPOILER> and the DM knows their tactics.
I still remember how powerful the Tree in front of Baba Yaga's dungeon was. The players have the chance of bypassing the encounter without a fight, but my players didn't have the name of the character that was the answer, so a fight was inevitable. So between dominates and several powerful attacks, the players only won by the skin of their teeth (It could've been easier, but some players were very very casual with their characters).
My only real problems have been along the lines of what Ubertron mentioned. In parties that don't happen to have very good ways to debuff bosses, they can be kind of frustrating because the PCs are going to end up failing lots and lots of checks.
Maybe my group of "experienced boardgamers" fared better due to the types of games we play, which often includes coop games. Pf1 absolutely allowed experience from non-coop gamesbto come through, you could build a character that was such a tour de force in one area they didnt need any one else. That isnt true in pf2 and it is probably my coop focused bias coming through but I was surprised that a group of experienced gamers had issues around having little party synergy, lack of alternative combat methods etc.
The thing is that in many games set-up actions are regarded as lost actions, simply due to the often very low efficency of those set-up actions. In PF2 however those actions not only have a very high efficiency, they are also at least somewhat expected and considered by the meta.
However not following the playtest we more or less managed to create our characters in a vacuum. Only the GM had read the rules in their entirety (most players stopped after character creation) and neither of us had of course any experience how actual encounters worked, especially considering level based skills, saves and attacks and the 3-action system.
In the end that meant that despite triple digit years of gaming experience we accidentially managed to gimp our characters because we went with a "eh, let's just start and work things out later" attitude instead of mastering or at least trying to understand the underlying meta first.
This is a problem I can imagine especially new players and/or GMs running into, e.g. "I want to play a barbarian with a greatsword because Conan is cool, but I seem to miss every time" instead of perhaps considering a more nuanced weapon selection like war flail or guisarme, which allow effective combat manoeuvres even with hands occupied.
I've found that the numbers make single high-level bosses a good fight. However, I find Severe or Extreme fights more fun if they use level+2 bosses with some minions.
Level+3 or level+4 solo monsters can work well, but they will crit a lot, especially early on before the PCs adjust their tactics. A rough first round can demoralize players, which makes the whole combat tougher in terms of engagement.
Isn’t it a good thing if you are playing a game and an aspect of it gets really difficult, and then you are able to learn from the challenge and do better next time?
My overall take away from this is that GMs should be patient with their players, and be sure to talk to them about whether they are having fun and, if not, work extra retraining time into the campaign.
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Isn’t it a good thing if you are playing a game and an aspect of it gets really difficult, and then you are able to learn from the challenge and do better next time?
The thing about this is: if you have a party that's new to the game with a GM that's also new to the game, and they're all just trying it out, people might get frustrated with the game before they even realize what they're doing wrong. This isn't Dark Souls; people come to the game expecting a fun RPG first, they don't come knowing it's supposed to be super challenging and with a steep learning curve. PF2 doesn't market itself as a meat grinder or hardcore RPG, so the initial phase of the learning curve where you're ignorant of what you should even try to learn can easily get people frustrated enough they give up on it. I've seen some reports of this happening in these forums and I don't blame these people... at all.
For as much as I'm a big fan of running more gritty games where you have to be smart every battle or you'll have a bad time, I don't think this should be the base assumption of the game; it seems like backwards logic to me. Why? Because it's way easier for me, as someone who plays RPGs for 10 years and has been following PF2 since the Playtest, to work on making the game more challenging (even easier on PF2 since the encounter building rules actually work), than it is for someone who's just trying the game out as a GM to adjust them down because their group didn't figure out optimal tactics and is being decimated.
Our group has done more solo bosses (PL+3 and PL+4) than most groups. We like them.
I've found the fights to be a lot more static than a typical fight. The early level encounters were easier to make interesting. The boss would use their flying/strafing techniques early until we took shelter or happened to bring it down with gust of wind. From there, we would enter a static melee with AOOs being threatened if the boss moved. The fight in 2 stages worked quite well to be engaging. With my bard stacking bonuses and penalties in the party, we rarely had a problem with the numbers being so disparate.
We haven't fought a boss once we got access to fly, so I'm not sure how the GM is going to respond to that. We did run a one shot with a level 12 party of 6 fighting an Astradaemon as the finale. We had some players new to PF2 in that group, and the fight went super badly. It was a TPK. More than that, the fight came down to surrounding it for flanking and trading blows rather quickly. With it's multiple instant death causing effects, 50% miss chance, and regeneration, it's exactly the kind of boss that is inappropriate as a PL+4 encounter.
Overall, I wouldn't recommend just slamming the party into a room with a solo boss and having them brawl. The teamwork abilities do allow for a prepared group to bring it down, but it just isn't fun. For an encounter like this, you need to make it feel like it has stages in some way. Having some mooks come it in intervals might be a good way to break it up. Some terrain that must be traversed while the boss is pelting you with ranged attacks, as suggested earlier, would also be good.
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Isn’t it a good thing if you are playing a game and an aspect of it gets really difficult, and then you are able to learn from the challenge and do better next time?
For the players in my game, it was less a matter of the fights being too difficult and more the quality of that difficulty that turned them off.
When they were unprepared, fights became missfests, where players constantly failed at basic tasks against the boss, while the players would just rubberband between being downed and being back on their feet. Characters who were nonspecialists in a field (like our sorcerer who took some feats to be better in melee with weapons) felt like they had to completely abandon that part of their character because it was so ineffective.
When they were more prepared and fights did go their way, they'd swarm around a boss and just keep piling on debuffs to try to cripple the enemy, then kick them while they're down until they stop moving.
They didn't find either of those paradigms to be particularly fun for them or evocative of the type of story they wanted to tell.
It's not that they didn't enjoy hard fights, they just found solo bosses to be tedious and swingy.
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Isn’t it a good thing if you are playing a game and an aspect of it gets really difficult, and then you are able to learn from the challenge and do better next time?For the players in my game, it was less a matter of the fights being too difficult and more the quality of that difficulty that turned them off.
When they were unprepared, fights became missfests, where players constantly failed at basic tasks against the boss, while the players would just rubberband between being downed and being back on their feet. Characters who were nonspecialists in a field (like our sorcerer who took some feats to be better in melee with weapons) felt like they had to completely abandon that part of their character because it was so ineffective.
When they were more prepared and fights did go their way, they'd swarm around a boss and just keep piling on debuffs to try to cripple the enemy, then kick them while they're down until they stop moving.
They didn't find either of those paradigms to be particularly fun for them or evocative of the type of story they wanted to tell.
It's not that they didn't enjoy hard fights, they just found solo bosses to be tedious and swingy.
I am confused about what you are saying here. Are you saying that when the party was prepared the sorcerer geared up for melee was effective at hitting the boss +2/3 level monsters, but when they were not prepared they were unable? Or is this a separate complaint not related to boss encounter fights for your players?
Like I have said earlier in this thread, if your players don't have fun with the challenge of level +2 or 3 boss encounters, then it is fine to modify your encounters however you wish.
My players have been enjoying the difficult of solo boss monsters significantly more than they did in PF1. We stopped playing PF1 because of this issue about a year before the PF 2 playtest was announced because high level solo fights were not fun. We haven't got to the high level part, but they are loving the solo monsters feeling dangerous and difficult to hit part.
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I think you can create a lot of the "cool challenging solo bossfight" feeling with a lower-level (say, APL+2) boss, if you make up the rest of the challenge with non-creature problems.
This can help for groups that do want a bossfight, but get turned off when the boss has too-high stats, causing spells to continually fail, attacks to miss etcetera. But because you fill up the challenge with non-creature problems, it still feels like you're facing a solo boss.
For example, environmental problems, like the party starting in a dangerous part of the map like a cliff that crumbles away a couple of squares every round, and the boss is trying to keep them on that part of the map. Once the players manage to get around him, they've solved part of the encounter, much like killing some mooks solves part of a group on group fight. And they might even be able to turn the tables on the boss, keeping him up against the edge until he falls down. Some players (me) would like that even more than striking the deathblow myself.
Or multitasking problems, like a task that has to be accomplished while the boss also has to be entertained. For example, there are civilians tied up while the building just caught fire. As the battle progresses, the fire spreads and smoke effects start happening. If you get to them sooner then rescuing them is easier, but that involves sacrificing a lot of the party's numerical action advantage.
I'm trying to push myself to never set up an encounter in an uninteresting location.
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I am confused about what you are saying here.
Sorry, to clarify I mean the aforementioned melee Sorcerer felt like they had to completely give up on even trying to melee when fighting bosses, because they were already having accuracy issues even against same level enemies and so against harder to hit ones it felt like wasted actions to them.
For some people I guess that's WAI, but for him it felt like he was trying to build something that sounded fun and different and was punished by the game for not min-maxing enough when it came time to fight a difficult enemy because accuracy is such a big part of how Pathfinder 2 gates challenges.
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Some more things to make a satisfying bossfight, without resorting to numeric overload;
- Talk them up beforehand. If the players know the name of the boss before they meet the boss, it's more interesting. So name-drop the boss during the preceding adventure as the PCs interrogate mooks, search drawers for documents etcetera.
- Describe them in more detail. It's not just an orc waiting for you. It's... kinda smaller than the mooks, but looks like it's meaner to compensate for that. It's got a gleam of wicked cunning in its eyes that sets it apart from the dullard mooks. It's got a nasty-looking barbed dagger with some dried blood still on it. Tattoos. Scarification. An eyepatch maybe.
- Speech! Speech! Prepare at least an opening remark for the scene, and maybe a few comments you can drop during the battle. I'm bad at making my NPCs converse during battle, I need to prepare lines or I'll forget entirely.
- Stakes: if the PCs don't win this encounter, something bad will happen, apart from them maybe dying. Like hostages being killed, the portal opens, the ritual fails, the MacGuffin is broken, we lose the election, our friend takes the fall for a crime they were framed for, the real culprit gets away or destroys the evidence, the evil princess eats gold dragon egg omelette to gain more power, the enemy army overwhelms ours unless we kill their general etcetera. There's no "run away, heal up and come back tomorrow".
- Vengeance: have the boss do some things that really aggravate the PCs. Revenge is far more satisfying than just checking a "AP volume completed" box.
That doesn't mean you want your boss to be too low-level of course. After you raised expectations, you don't want them to get squashed and the players to say "was that it?". But by using techniques like this, you don't need high numbers to make it epic. Just "hard" will be enough, you won't need "extreme".
I'm not saying it was terrible or anything, my argument is that it was the least fun we've had with harder encounters. And my party had only our Wizard standing with 40HP on our last major fight (against several weaker but high damaging enemies and a powerful and stronger spellcaster), it was very tough, but at the same time it was nice to see your stuff actually work.
It depends on the group I guess. I have a player who doesn't like that much the challenge, but he doesn't play PF2 (He still finds PF1 too challenging, mostly based on the effects. He hates Nauseated for example)
My current PF2 group loves when the enemy is capable of 2 shooting them, of course, used sparingly with easier encounters.They can still hit everything most of the time (Boss +2-3) in fact I don't really understand these claims that everyone misses with their optimized characters, we have a Barbarian with STR 15, he still hits... Maybe is because of our style of play, we have really quick rounds, I'm a fast GM (Compared to what I've seen online), the monsters don't take more than 1 minute to resolve their actions. So yeah, my players miss sometimes, but they don't care, as they can try again almost immediately.
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I'm not saying it was terrible or anything, my argument is that it was the least fun we've had with harder encounters. And my party had only our Wizard standing with 40HP on our last major fight (against several weaker but high damaging enemies and a powerful and stronger spellcaster), it was very tough, but at the same time it was nice to see your stuff actually work.It depends on the group I guess. I have a player who doesn't like that much the challenge, but he doesn't play PF2 (He still finds PF1 too challenging, mostly based on the effects. He hates Nauseated for example)
My current PF2 group loves when the enemy is capable of 2 shooting them, of course, used sparingly with easier encounters.
They can still hit everything most of the time (Boss +2-3) in fact I don't really understand these claims that everyone misses with their optimized characters, we have a Barbarian with STR 15, he still hits... Maybe is because of our style of play, we have really quick rounds, I'm a fast GM (Compared to what I've seen online), the monsters don't take more than 1 minute to resolve their actions. So yeah, my players miss sometimes, but they don't care, as they can try again almost immediately.
When your GM is rolling 18+ almost every round and even rolling nat 20's on the third attack, that changes your perspective a lot!
Also, our party is very unlucky overall, it seems like every session we pass a torch to the other and it's just a slump for anyone carrying it for the day. Nat 1's come frequently for us that since we play with a house rule of "villain points" (every time we roll a nat 1 in an attack our GM gets a VP, works like hero points) we have several times gave our GM the maximum amount of VPs (three) in a session and once the cap was reached in two rounds.
I'm surprised that our s%%$ty luck hasn't killed us yet. We gotten ourselves in some deep trouble a few times (our maybe our GM got us into it) by facing several encounters at once (often with 1 round between new enemy arrivals). So far, so good though, I think now that we have a Cleric things will be easier (our Alchemist player retired the character because she didn't feel it was being very useful, which is hard to deny when the character ran away from a fight with 4 enemies standing and the remaining players were at half health still prevailed).
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They can still hit everything most of the time (Boss +2-3) in fact I don't really understand these claims that everyone misses with their optimized characters, we have a Barbarian with STR 15, he still hits... Maybe is because of our style of play, we have really quick rounds, I'm a fast GM (Compared to what I've seen online), the monsters don't take more than 1 minute to resolve their actions. So yeah, my players miss sometimes, but they don't care, as they can try again almost immediately.
As it often is with bosses it is hard to try again, when you are on the floor dying x. Apart from that it is of course just math and chances. For example our "maximized" fighter thouroughly thrashed every single mook we met while rolling slightly above average / great but still managed to not connect once (!) during our boss encounter while rolling slightly below average / abysmal for 3 or 4 consecutive rounds.
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As it often is with bosses it is hard to try again, when you are on the floor dying x. Apart from that it is of course just math and chances. For example our "maximized" fighter thouroughly thrashed every single mook we met while rolling slightly above average / great but still managed to not connect once (!) during our boss encounter while rolling slightly below average / abysmal for 3 or 4 consecutive rounds.** spoiler omitted **
Yeah, I guess luck does do its part. Of course, you can't do much if you are dying, but again if its a boss, he is alone vs 4 + NPCs/Pets, and in a round, even if everyone is terrible and has to roll 15+ to hit, he is going to get some damage done, get crippled by some effect or receive some crits by Nat 20s.
Of course, it can be frustrating, and I get it, is not for everyone the type of gameplay in which you need a big dice to win... Personally, even when I'm losing, I never get frustrated with low dices, I just take it and die laughing. (I get frustrated when I cannot do anything about it... mostly Stupid GM fiat, like making every enemy appear next to you with no roll, or crap like that)But in this system, almost every complain I've heard so far, is numerical in nature... So, thinking positively, it seems so easy to fix... like, we don't like it so luck-based, so every enemy has the weak mod. Or Boss is just +1, and mooks are -2
So your gm has great luck, sees this disheartening his players and chooses to implement a house rule that let's him control his luck even more to the detriment of the players? I think you need to have words.
I might have made it sound worse than it is. It is a little frustrating, but our rolls are more responsible for it than Age of Ashe's monsters. The single monster encounter certainly is hard in this system, but I think it would've been better have a Boss Template or something, rather than just a monster that has the math of the game heavily favoring it.
We have a lot of fun the majority of the times, but these encounters just puts a highlight on how unlucky we are. I've enjoyed a lot more the 200XP+ (can't remember how much) encounter we ended up face at the mines in AoA Book 2, the monsters were fairly strong and there were a lot of them, but we still could use our abilities with a fair chance of success and the monsters hit quite often (lucky GM) but we could take some hits and your AC still felt like it mattered.