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A week ago I made a post to talk about my players experience playing the new classes and my experience DMing them.
This weekend we tried doing the same but jumping to level 10. Just a reminder that this were pure combat games, you will not find nothing here about out of combat utility and such. First, here you have some info:
- Most things from the first try stayed the same for this one like lowering unstable check, allowing Specialty Crafting with Overdrive or the exact rules we used.
- All players got a +2 striking weapon with a property rune of their choice (all of them picked one of the level 8 damage runes, the sniper gunslinger showed interest in Grievous but as there are no rules for the firearm group he went with Flaming instead), a +1 Resilient armor, any magic item that gives +1 item bonus to a skill they use in combat, and in the case of the Sniper, some low level fire bombs (He told me he wanted just fire bombs for some reason). I also offered them to pick any cheap magic item they thought would help them but all of them told me they were fine as they were.
- We just had time to do 2 combats, the first on against one single boss slighly under severe difficulty(I messed up a little bit with the monster choice, will explain later( and a severe encounter against a bunch of level 8 creatures (4 marsh giants and 4 stone giants). As their party is very umbalanced, this encounters are supposed to be more difficult than normal, take that in mind.
- The layouts I used were a closed square with lots of 10ftx10ft columns for the boss fight and an empty map for the mob fight.
- I made a slighly mistake with the solo boss. I used a Clockwork Assassin as I could look into 3 things at once, how do these classes fare against high AC, how do they work with phisical resistance and how they work when concealment is in play. Sadly I forgot one crucial thing. This creature had a crippling weakness to electricity. All 3 inventors had megavolt (not much of an issue as the creature has insane reflexes, ended up rolling nat 1 on one and failing one save) and the armor inventor had the level 10 feat that does electricity damage when hit. To compensate I went all in in trying to down as many of them as posible instead of playing a low intelligence creature like a low intelligence creature. In the end it was decent enough I think.
- Pistolero's Challenge doesn't specify which DC should be used. We went with will for this test.
Before talking about their impressions I will describe how the fights went:
- The first one was weird. They figured out instantly that the creature had weakness to electric damage. Armor inventor stayed in front and they played around corners to make themselves difficult to hit except for the armored dude in the middle of the room. First the creature tried to down the armor Inventor ASAP as it was also the only one with electric damage on their strikes, the creature managed to get the armor inventor to 1 HP after he used Orc Ferocity but soon the creature HP was so low that that strategy stopped being an option. The creature then switched targets to the nearest target, managing to down the pistolero. Sadly it was to late to do anything more as they exploited that the creature had to effectively run from the 1 hp inventor.
- The second fight was extremely simple. Is giant in range? If true, smack, If not throw rock. I wanted to see how they did in a difficult fight against low AC creatures, and it ended up being kind of weird. gunslingers crit sometimes and took a good chunk of health but they were severely outperformed by Inventor's Megavolt spam. One of the inventors ended up using 3 succesful megavolts in the fight, one free, one against flat DC11 and the last against flat DC17. Pistolero ended up fighting half of the fight from the ground because she got there with hit the dirt + return fire and just didn't want to get up. They ended up winning the fight with no KOs.
Now for the impressions:
- Armor Inventor liked more the class, said he had more things to do compared with level 3 (pretty obvious but true and valuable feedback nonetheless). He realized that the first fight was not how things are supposed to work but he told me he felt the class was decent.
- Weapon Inventor also liked the class at level 10. He tried megaton strike in the first combat and it ended up being useful against a monster with phisical resistance. Again nothing special, it feels like the most vanilla of the 3.
- Pet inventor felt the pet became just bad at level 10. I agree, the pet didn't manage to hit once the boss, even when flanking, and most of the class features of the construct inventor that give damage work through the pet. I agree with him that this needs work the most out of all 3 Inventors. A class feature shouldn't feel worse than the animal companion chain feat and construct requiring feats to proggress to end up being worse than Ranger's feels very bad.
- Sniper gunslinger felt he did nothing in both fights. He dropped the arquebus (a wise choice IMO) and took a musket. He had deflecting shot and he liked it. He did pitiful damage in both fights and he hit most of his shots. He didn't use vital shot once because even if he had the opportunity to use it in the second combat, he felt he couldn't afford to do it if he wanted to contribute to the fight.
- Pistolero gunslinger liked a little bit more the class at level 10, but still doesn't enjoy it overall. She seemed to love the Hit the Dirt + Return Fire Combo and also used redirecting shot twice. She had lots of opportunities to use Pistolero's level 9 reaction but she felt that hit the dirt was just better in every situation she was put in (Giants never critically failed a melee hit against her so I understand).
And to end it all, my personal opinions:
INVENTOR
Out of the two, I think Inventor is by a long margin the one that needs the least work. Even so, I still think that it needs some help to compete with the existing martials. Trying out level 3 and 10 ended up being a good idea as in this levels the inventor is lagging 1 behind in accuracy compared to other nonfighter martials and that -1 ended up mattering a lot in these games. I believe a +1 to hit on Overdrive critical success would be awesome (can be a enhancement to the current item bonus so it doesn't mess with weapon traits and spell buffs).
Moreover, overdrive damage scales poorly with levels. +2/4 damage at level 1 is great. +2/5 at 10 is meh. +3/6 at 20 is completely ignorable. Inventors have no action economy enhancers so its damage boost should scale a little bit more.
In adittion, all of us agreed that loosing your actions when risking for an unstable action feels terrible. Also, and this is a personal opinion, I don't think a explosion unstablity should work the same as a megavolt unstability in case of them ending up doing some damage back to the user.
Megavolt damage. Wow.
Also, I don't like at all that you can't switch your weapon innovation to a composite bow. The fact that an armor innovation Inventor can do more damage than a weapon innovation Inventor bothers me. Making then start with a level 0 weapon for free and then allowing them to switch to another one they got or bought would be far better.
And to end with Inventor, we have yet another case of Apex Item-itis. For a class as reliant on unstable actions as the current Inventor is, having to sacrifice another +1 to hit to keep your Class DC decent is bad. Having to take this choice is bad.
GUNSLINGER
And then we have gunslinger. This class is a mess.
First we are going to talk about firearms. They are bad. Period. Reload is a huge setback and when you compare them to other ranged weapons outside of slings and crossbows (which are terrible options right now that no one should use for comparison reasons) they just can't compete. And not only they can't compete, they aren't fun to use. Reload is not fun.
Which takes me to my second complaint. Why reload is not fun? At least it should be fun when playing the gunslinger as they don't have the option to just chose another ranged weapon (well, they could, but then what's the point of playing gunslinger?) Why a gunslinger can't use an action economy enhancer like Risky Reload with a special attack like Shooter's Aim. And specially, why has the gunslinger even have to pick feats like Risky reload or Running reload when they just level the playing field a little bit with other ranged weapons?
Also, guns with other classes are just unusable. Guns should be decent, comparable to other ranged weapons most of the time and above average in the hands of a gunslinger in the same way a bow gets better in the hands of a ranger than in the hands of a rogue.
Current ranged weapons aren't even that great (they do less damage on a hit than melee, which is fair, but also they have to deal a lot more with cover, lesser cover specially so they hit less often than melee weapons). They aren't bad but they also are not incredible. All good ranged builds are good either because of a damage boosting/action economy enhancer class feature like ranger or because they have good support capabilities like fighter. Gunslinger has no damage boosting class features (You could say Firearm Ace but in the long run its damage is too low), has to deal with reload, and its support capabilities are somewhat comparable (still worse IMO) with what an archer fighter offers but doing less damge in the process. They have to expend all their low level feats to just be in a similar spot a level 1 character of other class would be if it decides to use a ranged weapon.
Some feat choices for a gunslinger are not choices. You just cannot forgo running reload, and specially you cannot forgo firearm ace at level 1. You either pick them, or your class sucks. That's not good design.
Now something good, Gunslinger reactions are awesome. The fact that they are better because they only work when you have a loaded weapon is gold. Special mention to return fire. It is the most cinematic feat I've seen in play ever.
Pistolero's Retort is cool, but should be a lower level feat, not a class feature. Specially not a level 9 feature. I haven't seen a Drifter in play but I feel the same about their level 9 class feature.
Sniper features being locked mostly behind stealth is awful IMO. I like being able to build a stealthy sniper, but stealth being mandatory to play a gunslinger with a rifle goes nowhere.
Give gunslingers some ways to interact with cover. If posible something that is not cover fire, that feat is awful. Something like negate cover penalty if with a step you would have a cleaner shot and shoot.
Way of the pistolero should be splitted in two, a proper 2 weapon Way and a 1 handed Way. They need diferent things to work, merging them makes no sense.
Also Way of the shotgun. Pretty please.
Give some action economy enhancers at level 1. Make each initial deed give a diferent way to improve reloads instead of what they give right now. The initial Deeds we have right now are pretty meh.
FIREARMS
Here is just some talk in specific about firearms, nothing related to classes.
All martial firearms need some serious help. I find simple ones to be almost okay.
Something to take into account when balancing reload weapons is that they benefit less from things that apply on hit like weapon specialization or property runes like flaming. That ends up making their damage harder to improve as you level up. Hope Paizo is aware of this.
Arquebus needs a lots of things to be an actual weapon. First, more damage, then bipods and finally sniper not depending on flat-footed to work (more damage would be good too, something like half dex wouldn't be bad). In the forums I posted some days ago about merging sniper and unsteady and give the extra damage when not receiving a penalty from the trait. I still abide by that. Also allow to negate the penalty by dropping prone, would be pretty cool.
Now I mentioned the bipod, I came up with this: Bipod, takes 1 action to set up, is attached to the arquebus, negates unsteady. You can retract the bipod with another action. Moving with the bipod extended imposes a huge speed penalty.
IMO Most firearms should be able to be shot from the ground with no penalty to the attack roll.
When buffing scatter weapons, I think it would be wiser to improve scatter rather than giving the blunderbuss a higher damage dice. Instead of 1d10 + current scatter I think it would be more interesting 1d8 + double damage scatter. Average damage on the main target would be the same but damage on secondary targets would be higher. Besides, the weapon would be "worse" at long range with the second iteration, which makes more sense.
And that's it. I'm sorry if the second half is disorganized but it is pretty late where I live and this took a long time to write.
Nice writeup.
The option you give for negating prone penalties have been raised elsewhere - it does feel very trope-conversant.
Being able to negate your own cover penalty with a step also feels cinematic.
It also seems like a constant refrain that reload/running reload needs some attention. Definitely good feedback to give in surveys seeing as there isn’t a great deal of comment from designee Michael Sayre on the threads.
To be honest I’ve been underwhelmed by Michael and Mark generally - a lot of conversation seems to go round and round on both classes on the same few concepts - Reload and general firearms for the Gunslinger; and Armor Innovations (or lack of options for), Unstable and Overdrive for tge Inventor - said circular conversations could be quelled with a little direction either way, or comment from the designers. Mark has commented that Unstable is *not* going ahead as written, and should not be used as written, but beyond that I haven’t seen a lot of input.
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Nice writeup.
The option you give for negating prone penalties have been raised elsewhere - it does feel very trope-conversant.
Being able to negate your own cover penalty with a step also feels cinematic.
It also seems like a constant refrain that reload/running reload needs some attention. Definitely good feedback to give in surveys seeing as there isn’t a great deal of comment from designee Michael Sayre on the threads.
To be honest I’ve been underwhelmed by Michael and Mark generally - a lot of conversation seems to go round and round on both classes on the same few concepts - Reload and general firearms for the Gunslinger; and Armor Innovations (or lack of options for), Unstable and Overdrive for tge Inventor - said circular conversations could be quelled with a little direction either way, or comment from the designers. Mark has commented that Unstable is *not* going ahead as written, and should not be used as written, but beyond that I haven’t seen a lot of input.
I wouldn't be so hard on them, I'm sure they have received an insanely big amount of feedback. Sorting all of that out takes a lot of time and effort.
I would count us lucky that Pathfinder team takes our feedback into consideration at all. Luckily both Inventor and Gunslinger final versions will feel better than current versions (wouldn't be hard though).
Designer
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I wouldn't be so hard on them, I'm sure they have received an insanely big amount of feedback. Sorting all of that out takes a lot of time and effort.I would count us lucky that Pathfinder team takes our feedback into consideration at all. Luckily both Inventor and Gunslinger final versions will feel better than current versions (wouldn't be hard though).
We also don't really want to get too heavy-handed with clarifications that haven't actually been decided yet. Very consistently, the things that forum discussions center on and the conclusions that people arrive at just don't match what the wider audience is actually thinking or asking for, so if we promise a fix that a minority of people are requesting (which is anything that's been discussed on these forums until it's been contextualized within the much more comprehensive survey data) and then the broader consensus doesn't fall that way, we end up in the unwelcome situation of having to walk back whatever we said during the playtest that no longer jives with the direction determined by the broader community.
The point of this playtest is to collect data, not to actively reshape the classes while that data is still being collected (since that can lead to an inferior final product that doesn't actually serve the wider community), which is why we target our feedback to things like "Good news! This is already lined up for the final product" or "Yes, that is a typo."
It's also why we included this text in the welcome thread for both classes:
"[...][The magus/summoner playtest] was filled with gems of incredible feedback but buried in a few repetitive discussion topics. So I'd like to ask that we try to focus, like the inventor class itself, on new playtest experiences, analyses, reactions, and ideas, rather than get too distracted in lengthy debates with other playtesters or re-iterating a point we've already made in other threads. It can be very tempting to do so, but I guarantee you that I read and thoroughly digest playtest results and new analyses (if I can find them amidst the other posts) while I skip repeat posts, so if your intended audience is the designers, repeating your message is not helping your case. It might particularly seem challenging when a new playtester makes a point again that you've already seen before, perhaps in a new thread, to come back into that thread to reiterate your own opinion, and perhaps instead of doing so (in either support or disagreement), we can post a reply thanking the playtester and linking to the prior discussion in case they want to see some support or counterpoints there."
I wouldn't be so hard on them, I'm sure they have received an insanely big amount of feedback. Sorting all of that out takes a lot of time and effort.I would count us lucky that Pathfinder team takes our feedback into consideration at all. Luckily both Inventor and Gunslinger final versions will feel better than current versions (wouldn't be hard though).
We also don't really want to get too heavy-handed with clarifications that haven't actually been decided yet. Very consistently, the things that forum discussions center on and the conclusions that people arrive at just don't match what the wider audience is actually thinking or asking for, so promising a fix that a minority of people are requesting (which is anything that's been discussed on these forums until it's been contextualized within the much more comprehensive survey data) and then the broader consensus doesn't fall that way, we end up in the unwelcome situation of having to walk back whatever we said during the playtest that no longer jives with the direction determined by the broader community.
The point of this playtest is to collect data, not to actively reshape the classes while that data is still being collected (since that can lead to an inferior final product that doesn't actually serve the wider community), which is why we target our feedback to things like "Good news! This is already lined up for the final product" or "Yes, that is a typo."
It's also why we included this text in the welcome thread for both classes:
"[...][The magus/summoner playtest] was filled with gems of incredible feedback but buried in a few repetitive discussion topics. So I'd like to ask that we try to focus, like the inventor class itself, on new playtest experiences, analyses, reactions, and ideas, rather than get too distracted in lengthy debates with other playtesters or re-iterating a point we've already made in other threads. It can be very tempting to do so, but I guarantee you that I read and thoroughly digest...
Didn't read that about the previous playtest. Anyway keep up with the good work.
If it is not very inconvenient to ask, how is survey participation going, is it on the line of Secrets of Magic and APG?
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Designer
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Didn't read that about the previous playtest. Anyway keep up with the good work.
If it is not very inconvenient to ask, how is survey participation going, is it on the line of Secrets of Magic and APG?
We've had a very healthy number of respondents so far, comparable to the APG but not quite as many as Secrets of Magic (to be expected given that guns and steampunk are a bit more niche than magic and magi).
As to the contents, tone, or general direction of the data coming in, that's something we'll talk about more in the playtest wrap-up blog. It's not something we want to discuss while the playtest is still ongoing, since it can bias the data.
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Once again, thanks for your hard work!
When I write a report and submit it for review, I get all anxious waiting for the feedback, then seeing all my coworker's comments and questions and suggested changes makes me want to go back to bed.
I can't really imagine working on something and then having an entire forum of people picking through every detail and being told I'm not making edits fast enough before everyone has even had a chance to read through it.