Calybos1 |
Our dedicated party healer's strategy is to hang back and use Electric Arc on lower-level foes until someone's badly hurt. Then she moves forward to bring her main abilities to bear, putting the frontliners back in action with the appropriate single- or multi-action heal effect (and often getting blasted herself in the process).
But she can't keep pace with the damage the frontliners are taking, even though she's taken every Cleric feat, spell, and feature she can find that seems to support healing (including Battle Medicine and all the related Medic archetype stuff). And it's not just the frontliners; AOEs are destroying this level 7 party on a regular basis too. Any suggestions?
Castilliano |
4 people marked this as a favorite. |
Because it's only a Cantrip and "healer" isn't a sufficient role?
There do exist parties without healers; ones which wait until out-of-combat.
Or your martials think they can stand toe-to-toe when they can't?
Being a "10 hit point" class w/ decent Con isn't enough.
IMO only Champions, defensive-build Monks, & shield Fighters (or at least Full Plate w/ a Parry or Stance) can afford to stand still. Others should likely move around more.
Suggestions:
Reach Spell so she doesn't have to move up or be so close. She's likely quite squishy if Cloistered. It also helps avoid clumping. (Which might be a good reason the Bard hides!)
Don't use single-action Heal. That's bad math.
Maybe instead of asking about each PC individually, just share the party's builds and typical tactics (or tactics in one specific case which highlights their "best" efforts, yet turned against them even with normal rolling.)
Why? Because PF2 is all about teamwork and team synergy.
In a white room, it sounds like the Cleric isn't failing on her own (assuming a good build underlies this). Acquiring Electric Arc is enough to show she cares (though it does make her vulnerable at 30' range!).
thenobledrake |
7 people marked this as a favorite. |
If a suped-up healer can't keep up with the damage the party is taking (i.e. your 7th-level cleric is tossing a healing font heal spell using 2 actions for 4d10+32, and that's not enough to keep a character in the fight), the cause likely doesn't rest on just what the players are or aren't doing - the GM is probably cranking up the difficulty of encounters too, whether by too frequently using the higher difficulty XP budgets, filling their budgets with higher-level creatures more often than suggested by the game calling anything the party's level or higher a "boss", picking actions for NPCs like it's their goal to TPK as often as possible and they are just trying their best, or some mix of those things.
Lightning Raven |
2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Because this isn't an MMORPG. Even though Heal in combat is much better in this edition, doesn't mean that being proactive and preventing damage isn't still the wisest course of action.
Electric Arc is nice, the best cantrip actually, but doing the same thing over and over is not only denying yourself from actually playing PF2e, but you're probably not helping enough by doing that.
Given the sparse description, this seems to be a Cleric. Which means that the class has lots of ways to help out without maintaining this binary playstyle.
The character should be using buffs and debuffs whenever it can, they're pivotal to make your front-line hit more and harder (higher crit chance). Demoralize or Bon Mot may also be of great help, since they can enable other characters. For example, if you use Bless and your ally is in your aura, then you demoralize for a normal success, you're creating a +2 difference in their hit chance (Alternatively, you can think like making the enemy two levels lower, if you're just counting AC). So if your fighter or barbarian would only crit on a 19+, now they can crit on a 17+.
Healer is a great role to have in this edition, but parties can survive without a dedicated one only through utility items, Battle Medicine and the occasional Elixir/Health Potion.
Alchemic_Genius |
Electric Arc is a very sexy and appealing cantrip, all the more tempting by it's spammability, but its shouldn't be your maim thing
The divine list has a lot of powerful support spells, and they should be used. Whether she's buffing allies withass resist energy or dropping a mass fear to weaken multiple foes; using these support spells will get a lot further than prepping heal in every slot and cantrip spamming.
What is her diety/domain?
Steelbro300 |
Also, don't discount the fact that your GM might just only be putting Severe encounters against you (or is running an early adventure path).
Severe encounters should only be for bosses. Low and Moderates should be the average encounter. And less single enemy fights, cause those are usually less fun.
Kyrone |
Cantrips are nice from lvl 1-4 but after that they fall off really fast. To give a comparison.
A lvl 4 cantrip have the same strength as a lvl 2 spell.
A lvl 7 cantrip have the same strength as a lvl 3 spell.
A lvl 9 cantrip have the same strength as a lvl 4 spell.
And that is only on damage, because spells from spell slots usually have secondary effects.
After like character lvl 7, cantrips are mainly back up option after you used all the spell slots or "the battle is basically won, I might as well conserve the slots".
FlySkyHigh |
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f they wanted to play a DPS role maybe they shouldn't have rolled them up as a healer...
I don't think you read OP correctly. Their main concern is that they aren't keeping up with DAMAGE TAKEN by the frontliners, as a healer, not keeping up with damage DEALT.
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Jesus, a lot of people didn't seem to actually read the original post here, they just honed in on "OP said electric arc isn't working, clearly that means x"
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In regards to OP, in most d20 systems healing is not meant to be a definitive "I am guaranteed to keep you alive" method of play. If you're fighting weak opponents it's very possible to outscale their damage with healing, but as soon as you start to reach even a moderate challenge you're going to get outpaced very quickly. Either because there are more enemies attacking than there are available heals, or because an enemy's single attack will do as much or more than what you're capable of healing for.
Emergency healing is fantastic and can really help people get out of tight spots. Expecting to be always able to out-heal any enemy you come across is never going to work. I recommend looking into other ways to contribute to a battle, especially buffing or debuffing.
Unicore |
Our dedicated party healer's strategy is to hang back and use Electric Arc on lower-level foes until someone's badly hurt. Then she moves forward to bring her main abilities to bear, putting the frontliners back in action with the appropriate single- or multi-action heal effect (and often getting blasted herself in the process).
But she can't keep pace with the damage the frontliners are taking, even though she's taken every Cleric feat, spell, and feature she can find that seems to support healing (including Battle Medicine and all the related Medic archetype stuff). And it's not just the frontliners; AOEs are destroying this level 7 party on a regular basis too. Any suggestions?
In the party I play in we have a cleric, a champion, a rogue and a wizard.
The Champion is the only front liner, and regularly takes more damage in a round than I would be able to heal with even a 2 action heal spell.
This is really the crux of the problem your cleric is having. Cantrips take 2 actions and healing requires 2 actions to really undo the actions of a difficult or high level enemy. Not even haste can help you, especially because 1 action healing often requires movement.
Instead of using cantrips for attacking, my cleric uses a bow (Ketephys deity) and does a lot of spell casting to mitigate damage, while the champion carries a shield and can self heal. Our party synergy is strong enough that the GM regularly doubles up encounters on us because the Rogue, cleric, and wizard are siting back in cover, in greater magical darkness, with the ability to negate the penalties ourselves, while the champion hangs out just outside the darkness with my animal companion by his side to grant flanking and benefit from their reaction abilities.
Preventing incoming damage is a very big part of running an effective party. Our party is most vulnerable to area of effect attacks, but those are also the kinds of attacks that are often preventable with energy resistances and making sure you have good reflex saving throws. Our rogue also has snare crafting and we are really, really good at stealth, and so we often want to trigger multiple encounters at once, drawing enemies into a trap/ AOE killing field. Even still we occasionally get in over our heads and have to make sure that we have a back up plan/way to run away if we end up triggering 3 or 4 encounters at once.
Queaux |
1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Our dedicated party healer's strategy is to hang back and use Electric Arc on lower-level foes until someone's badly hurt. Then she moves forward to bring her main abilities to bear, putting the frontliners back in action with the appropriate single- or multi-action heal effect (and often getting blasted herself in the process).
But she can't keep pace with the damage the frontliners are taking, even though she's taken every Cleric feat, spell, and feature she can find that seems to support healing (including Battle Medicine and all the related Medic archetype stuff). And it's not just the frontliners; AOEs are destroying this level 7 party on a regular basis too. Any suggestions?
In a tough fight, healing shouldn't keep up until a significant portion of the enemy has been dealt with. For lower level creatures, this means killing enough of them. For higher level creatures, this means sticking multiple buffs and debuffs. Spending spell slots to proactively deal with incoming damage in the first few turns off a tough fight should be expected. After you have removed enough of the enemy's output, healing comes in handy to finish the fight.
Squiggit |
4 people marked this as a favorite. |
One healer isn't designed to be able to just completely negate incoming damage. Healing is supplemental, for keeping people alive and dealing with spikes of incoming damage.
And I know you've said you wanted to keep these separate, but a large part of your problem is the compounding nature of a huge chunk of your group not really wanting to be flexible with their tactics or work together, which means a lot more damage is coming in than otherwise would be, which makes the Healer feel even less effective.
Thunder999 |
3 people marked this as a favorite. |
In 2e the enemy will generally hit harder than you, more often than you, outdamage your healing and succeed at their saves, you can't actually just stand and fight, you should be making one or two attacks then moving away, perhaps even make one attack, then use your last two action to ready an action to move away (so that you can provide flanking if there's not some other source of flat footed active).
Healing is a fine use of the cleric's actions, there's not many spells that'll do more than a heal after all.
Salamileg |
2 people marked this as a favorite. |
In addition to what others have said, you've mentioned in one of your other threads that you have a party of six, with the bard also occasionally healing. In my experienced, having a dedicated healer and an off-healer is useful even in a party of four. For a party of six, someone else is going to have to either dish out some healing or damage prevention.
Calybos1 |
In the party I play in we have a cleric, a champion, a rogue and a wizard. The Champion is the only front liner, and regularly takes more damage in a round than I would be able to heal with even a 2 action heal spell.
I am very confused. This part of your post, I understood. As you noted, that sounds exactly like the situation our own cleric is facing.
Instead of using cantrips for attacking, my cleric uses a bow (Ketephys deity) and does a lot of spell casting to mitigate damage, while the champion carries a shield and can self heal.
But how is this an answer? It sounds like you just said "So we let the champion solo everything while we hide." I hadn't noticed that champions are indestructible; we have one in another game, and he's neither bulletproof nor an endless reservoir of HP.
does a lot of spellcasting to mitigate damage
??? I understand all those words individually, but not in that order. What on earth are you talking about? Nobody has Stoneskin.
Preventing incoming damage is a very big part of running an effective party.
Umm... huh? Say what now? For example?
Calybos1 |
In 2e the enemy will generally hit harder than you, more often than you, outdamage your healing and succeed at their saves, you can't actually just stand and fight, you should be making one or two attacks then moving away, perhaps even make one attack, then use your last two action to ready an action to move away (so that you can provide flanking if there's not some other source of flat footed active).
Healing is a fine use of the cleric's actions, there's not many spells that'll do more than a heal after all.
?confused? But most attacks miss, so the only way to make up for that is to deliver as many attacks as possible and pray for crits. Since the monsters have higher defenses and higher attack (and damage) bonuses, they get crits more often and we die faster than they do. It's not working.
Our group is very puzzled and very frustrated. Current group discussion is about forming a new party with all warriors + all healers, and not bothering with any other classes or roles.
Unicore |
Unicore wrote:In the party I play in we have a cleric, a champion, a rogue and a wizard. The Champion is the only front liner, and regularly takes more damage in a round than I would be able to heal with even a 2 action heal spell.I am very confused. This part of your post, I understood. As you noted, that sounds exactly like the situation our own cleric is facing.
Unicore wrote:Instead of using cantrips for attacking, my cleric uses a bow (Ketephys deity) and does a lot of spell casting to mitigate damage, while the champion carries a shield and can self heal.But how is this an answer? It sounds like you just said "So we let the champion solo everything while we hide." I hadn't noticed that champions are indestructible; we have one in another game, and he's neither bulletproof nor an endless reservoir of HP.
Unicore wrote:does a lot of spellcasting to mitigate damage??? I understand all those words individually, but not in that order. What on earth are you talking about?
Unicore wrote:Preventing incoming damage is a very big part of running an effective party.Umm... huh? Say what now? For example?
You can’t cast a 2 action heal spell (which allows for really effective healing) and a cantrip in the same turn. If the cleric is casting heal and electric arc, the healing is going to be pretty in effective.
Mitigating damage as a caster can mean a lot of different things. My cleric does it with darkness, which works cause the party specked into it. It can be done with movement powers, debuffing enemy actions, a lot of different ways.
Not having to heal every round is made possible if your martials aren’t taking a lot of damage. If enemies have to spend actions not damaging the party, the cleric won’t get overwhelmed with healing responsibilities.
The whole party can play a role in this, focusing fire on enemies before they have the chance to hurt an ally, rotating who is taking damage some times when some one needs a break, etc. does that help?
Arachnofiend |
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Well a six person party is inherently gonna be harder for a single healer to keep topped up especially with AOEs being tossed around. She's really gotta be doing other things to make the party take less damage. I still think the skirmisher and the wizard are the biggest issues for your party's survival though, and think it's a bit odd that you've made a thread to blame the two support characters first...
breithauptclan |
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Thunder999 wrote:In 2e the enemy will generally hit harder than you, more often than you, outdamage your healing and succeed at their saves, you can't actually just stand and fight, you should be making one or two attacks then moving away, perhaps even make one attack, then use your last two action to ready an action to move away (so that you can provide flanking if there's not some other source of flat footed active).
Healing is a fine use of the cleric's actions, there's not many spells that'll do more than a heal after all.
?confused? But most attacks miss, so the only way to make up for that is to deliver as many attacks as possible and pray for crits. Since the monsters have higher defenses and higher attack (and damage) bonuses, they get crits more often and we die faster than they do. It's not working.
Our group is very puzzled and very frustrated. Current group discussion is about forming a new party with all warriors + all healers, and not bothering with any other classes or roles.
What this sounds like is that your GM has a published adventure built for 4 players. Then since you have a party of 6 instead, the difficulty of the battles needs to be increased as well. So the GM raises the level of the enemies or gives them other buffs to make them stronger.
That is probably where the mistake is being made. Instead of making the enemies stronger individually, there need to be more of them. If the enemies are more than +1 or maybe +2 above your character levels, then you run into the problem you are describing - players can't land hits with any degree of reliability; enemy lands everything easily and crits often.
Unicore |
Calybos1 wrote:Thunder999 wrote:In 2e the enemy will generally hit harder than you, more often than you, outdamage your healing and succeed at their saves, you can't actually just stand and fight, you should be making one or two attacks then moving away, perhaps even make one attack, then use your last two action to ready an action to move away (so that you can provide flanking if there's not some other source of flat footed active).
Healing is a fine use of the cleric's actions, there's not many spells that'll do more than a heal after all.
?confused? But most attacks miss, so the only way to make up for that is to deliver as many attacks as possible and pray for crits. Since the monsters have higher defenses and higher attack (and damage) bonuses, they get crits more often and we die faster than they do. It's not working.
Our group is very puzzled and very frustrated. Current group discussion is about forming a new party with all warriors + all healers, and not bothering with any other classes or roles.
What this sounds like is that your GM has a published adventure built for 4 players. Then since you have a party of 6 instead, the difficulty of the battles needs to be increased as well. So the GM raises the level of the enemies or gives them other buffs to make them stronger.
That is probably where the mistake is being made. Instead of making the enemies stronger individually, there need to be more of them. If the enemies are more than +1 or maybe +2 above your character levels, then you run into the problem you are describing - players can't land hits with any degree of reliability; enemy lands everything easily and crits often.
This makes a lot of sense.
Ruzza |
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Damage prevention is a very different beast in PF2 than just getting the best AC you can and Raising your Shield. Denying opponents the opportunity to attack prevents your group from taking damage and freeing up your "dedicated healer" to contribute to the fight. This means anything as simple as the classic "Stride, Strike, Stride away" turn to having your frontline character Tripping and Grabbing dangerous opponents rather than trying to get in the most damage they can. It means casting spells to blind and dazzle opponents. It's debuffing opponents while buffing yourself.
If the frontline characters stand in melee and spend their actions Striking three times, they're going to get punished (and likely not have a very interesting time? That sounds like a dull turn, to me). That goes for champions as much as the next, as they don't have that much more AC than others, but rather the tools to mitigate damage more effectively.
So to answer the question, "Why isn't this healing working?" It's because the characters aren't taking steps to prevent the damage in the first place. Healing is there to fix the damage that does come in, not nullify all damage that one could take. It's a Band-Aid, not a Medigun.
Mathmuse |
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Thunder999 wrote:In 2e the enemy will generally hit harder than you, more often than you, outdamage your healing and succeed at their saves, you can't actually just stand and fight, you should be making one or two attacks then moving away, perhaps even make one attack, then use your last two action to ready an action to move away (so that you can provide flanking if there's not some other source of flat footed active).
Healing is a fine use of the cleric's actions, there's not many spells that'll do more than a heal after all.
?confused? But most attacks miss, so the only way to make up for that is to deliver as many attacks as possible and pray for crits. Since the monsters have higher defenses and higher attack (and damage) bonuses, they get crits more often and we die faster than they do. It's not working.
Our group is very puzzled and very frustrated. Current group discussion is about forming a new party with all warriors + all healers, and not bothering with any other classes or roles.
Yes, the big, dumb monsters of the same level as your party have higher defenses and higher attack bonuses and higher damage. And they get more critical hits than your martial characters because of those higher attack bonues. Going toe-to-toe with those monsters is a formula for losing.
The reason that these monsters have better numbers is because they are dumb. They can do nothing except hit, so the game developers made them good at hitting. The smart monsters will have the same numbers as the party.
To win, the party has to use tactics or teamwork (the dumb monsters lack good teamwork abilities, too).
For example, are the frontline characters using shields? If they had the +2 circumstance bonus from Raising a Shield, the monsters would hit less often and deal damage more slowly. The frontline characters would deal less damage, since they would have to use one-handed weapons instead of two-handed weapons, so both sides would slow down their damage dealing. The key is that with slower damage dealing, the cleric might be able to heal fast enough.
Is the party sneaking up on the monsters to catch them flat-footed? My players love this. They created high-Stealth characters because the beginning of the Ironfang Invasion adventure path required a lot of hiding, but once they were on the offense rather than defense, they mastered using their Stealth to ambush their enemies. They do have two rogues in the party, so ambushing is especially good for them.
Do the spellcasters lay down battlefield control? A wizard casting Grease can delay half the enemies for a turn, which is one turn during which the party is beating on the enemies on their side of the grease but are not being beaten by the enemies on the far side of the grease. Clerics and bards are better at debuffs, such as Fear, than at battlefield control, and the PF2 debuffs have a useful effect even on a successful save. A save against Blindness leaves the target blind for one round, so it has to succeed at a DC 11 flat check in order to hit a frontline party member. That is less damage.
Strong martials can perform battlefield control with Trip and Shove, for the low, low price of training in Athletics. Such an action is usually not worth the time, but tactical players learn to recognize when tripping an opponent gives a useful advantage.
Salamileg |
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Salamileg wrote:For a party of six, someone else is going to have to either dish out some healing or damage prevention.That would be... armor class. Unless you're aware of something else?
Good-aligned champion reactions, simply moving away so the enemy gets fewer attacks on you, and the shield block reaction are all common ways to reduce incoming damage.
Lightning Raven |
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Calybos1 wrote:Good-aligned champion reactions, simply moving away so the enemy gets fewer attacks on you, and the shield block reaction are all common ways to reduce incoming damage.Salamileg wrote:For a party of six, someone else is going to have to either dish out some healing or damage prevention.That would be... armor class. Unless you're aware of something else?
Battle field control, vision denial through "terrain" effects, sneaking, combat maneuvers (if you successfully trip the BOSS, that's a critical hit saved for your party, and possible extra damage).
Also, in this edition, you actually have something that you didn't before: Outmaneuvering your opponent. Due to the limited amount of reactions that give extra attacks or those that outright stop movement, your party can coordinate their movement to significantly hamper the enemy.
For example: After the GM threw an extreme encounter at us, after two severe (we took a 10min rest before the extreme), we successfully took down 9 enemies, but everyone at our party was down, except my Monk with 50HP against a Bruiser (level 10 fighter with Barbarian damage and a flurry of blows, NPC's are bullshit like that) and two dwarf smugglers (also Roguish-type enemies). The two dwarves were full HP but were Level-2 and the bruiser was level-1, my Monk was 11th level. You know what got us through this tough situation? I leveraged my Monk's speed and Assurance(Athletics) to reduce their action economy to make it more manageable and attacked one of the Dwarfs first (the -2 to AC they had coupled with my Ki Strike straight up blew up the poor dude). I outmaneuvered them using Winding Flow (Step then stride with one action for 55ft move speed). I managed to bring the three down only being targeted 5 or 6 times (Stunning Fist greatly helped against the Bruiser), instead of the 27+ times if I had stayed put (3 actions per enemy, over the course of 3 rounds,the Bruiser could attack up to 4 times and it's -10 penalty was reasonable enough). My speed advantage allowed my breathing room and engagement initiative.
Calybos1 |
We have a dedicated tripper. We know the value of tripping; it costs the enemy an action while he gets back up, so he makes one less attack. In another game we have two PCs with shields, so we've seen the value of shields (i.e., not much). We've tried sneaking, but that's never worked in any edition because only one PC is ever trained in it. For what it's worth, the fighter has Attack of Opportunity and he makes the most of it.
We've tried spells like Grease (can't be used on held weapons any more), Resist Energy (too weak now), Blindness (no duration), Haste (too limited), Fear (save DCs are too low/monster bonuses too high), etc., etc. Nothing works.
I'm sorry, but there's something I'm not getting here. Everyone's shouting 'tactics' but that doesn't make the problem go away until I see something that actually works.
Ruzza |
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If everyone is using the same tactics that you're using and getting opposite results, you have to question why that is. There could be a few reasons.
1) Good tactics, bad application - I see this come up a lot, but I don't think it's the case for your group. Casting Fear just as an enemy is about to take their turn. Putting Grease down in an area where an opponent can Step to avoid it. Tripping a high Relfex or already slow Speed opponent.
2) Bad luck - This seems to be what a lot of horror stories without enough detail get attributed to. "Must have rolled low while the GM had a hot night - or several hot nights." This feels like such a cop out since even bad luck can be mitigated with smart play. And I think you would have brought it up.
3) Rules mistakes - This comes up less often, but with your pattern of posts this seems to be what I'm leaning towards. I'm assuming that you're not alone in your group in feeling that conditions didn't apply towards things like saving throws and DCs (which is a common tripping point for players, so I wouldn't feel bad about that one). It seems to point to maybe the GM being inexperienced with the system or everyone sort of learning at the same time or, trickiest of all, approaching the game with rules from another game on their mind.
Judging by some of the comments you've made with the only real concrete examples we've been given:
...It really looks like your GM is making a lot of mistakes. Pretty big ones, too. Or purposely buffing DCs, enemies, and really taking away any advantages that your group would have in a fight. If you have any more information, concrete details, about how your encounters go, it would be a lot easier to help out.
Lightning Raven |
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We have a dedicated tripper. We know the value of tripping; it costs the enemy an action while he gets back up, so he makes one less attack. In another game we have two PCs with shields, so we've seen the value of shields (i.e., not much). We've tried sneaking, but that's never worked in any edition because only one PC is ever trained in it. For what it's worth, the fighter has Attack of Opportunity and he makes the most of it.
We've tried spells like Grease (can't be used on held weapons any more), Resist Energy (too weak now), Blindness (no duration), Haste (too limited), Fear (save DCs are too low/monster bonuses too high), etc., etc. Nothing works.
I'm sorry, but there's something I'm not getting here. Everyone's shouting 'tactics' but that doesn't make the problem go away until I see something that actually works.
I'm inclined to believe Ruzza's third point is right. There are some errors occurring about the rules that may be making things harder for you guys. This happens sometimes at my tables as well. For example in the fight against the Vrock (The bird demon), he had a Double Attack Opportunity with no penalty in these attacks, pretty OP stuff, right? Except that he can only use it while airborne and in this edition, in order for a creature to remain airborne (even with flight) it needs either to move (Fly Action) or to stand still and spend the Fly Action to Hover (which is also a move action). That fight would've been a lot easier with the Fly rules applied correctly because my Monk had Stand Still AND the monster's action economy would've been impaired.
My suggestion? Talk with your GM and go read in depth about the rules as well. It is not, at least in my opinion, rules lawyering if you're just bringing up the correct interpretation of rules your GM is no using right or is assuming that works a certain way based on experience in previous system (one of the basic offenders is stealth and Recall Knowledge. For example, players don't even roll them in PF2e, the GM does, experience with other systems will say that the players roll).
Claxon |
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Our dedicated party healer's strategy is to hang back and use Electric Arc on lower-level foes until someone's badly hurt. Then she moves forward to bring her main abilities to bear, putting the frontliners back in action with the appropriate single- or multi-action heal effect (and often getting blasted herself in the process).
But she can't keep pace with the damage the frontliners are taking, even though she's taken every Cleric feat, spell, and feature she can find that seems to support healing (including Battle Medicine and all the related Medic archetype stuff). And it's not just the frontliners; AOEs are destroying this level 7 party on a regular basis too. Any suggestions?
Going to agree with what others have posted and say "Dedicated Healer" isn't an actual role. It barely was in PF1 (you had to have super specific builds to make it work and those didn't even involve cleric) so it should be no surprise that it doesn't work now either.
Damage mitigation (healing) is by necessity less efficient than damage dealing or else the party (and enemy if they had a cleric) would never be in danger. Worse, if you had a cleric on both sides then it would simply be a battle of which cleric runs out of spells first.
The cleric needs to do things besides casting electric arc and waiting to heal someone.
Ubertron_X |
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Calybos1 wrote:Our dedicated party healer's strategy is to hang back and use Electric Arc on lower-level foes until someone's badly hurt. Then she moves forward to bring her main abilities to bear, putting the frontliners back in action with the appropriate single- or multi-action heal effect (and often getting blasted herself in the process).
But she can't keep pace with the damage the frontliners are taking, even though she's taken every Cleric feat, spell, and feature she can find that seems to support healing (including Battle Medicine and all the related Medic archetype stuff). And it's not just the frontliners; AOEs are destroying this level 7 party on a regular basis too. Any suggestions?
Going to agree with what others have posted and say "Dedicated Healer" isn't an actual role. It barely was in PF1 (you had to have super specific builds to make it work and those didn't even involve cleric) so it should be no surprise that it doesn't work now either.
Damage mitigation (healing) is by necessity less efficient than damage dealing or else the party (and enemy if they had a cleric) would never be in danger. Worse, if you had a cleric on both sides then it would simply be a battle of which cleric runs out of spells first.
The cleric needs to do things besides casting electric arc and waiting to heal someone.
In order to better be able to challenge the players there has been a paradigm shift in between editions from defense to offense. In PF2 you can not be as untouchable as you could be in PF1, neither AC nor saves, which means that every single character will be hurt much much more even when the whole party is actively playing to minimize damage. As such healing as one form to mitigate damage has somewhat been diminished (as in you often can't keep up with the incomming damage) and it is strongly recommended to actively participate in your own offense instead of just reacting to any incoming damage. Even my WP of Sarenrae as our dedicated party healer is nowadays casting Fireball, Fear or Heroism first and looking at possible Heals only much, much later.
Claxon |
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I would argue that even if PF1 dedicating yourself in PF1 was a fools errand.
Like you could do, you could shoot for an untouchable AC or saves. But you usually couldn't do it for AC and all 4 saves. And if you did manage to do so, the investment usually meant your offensive capabilities were next to non-existent. And lacking much in the way of game mechanics to force an enemy to go after you, often meant you got ignored.
So it was effectively like the party was one player less in size.
That aside, healing in PF1 didn't really work outside of the Heal Spell which could out heal the amount of damage enemies would deal, but was still limited by number of spell slots.
And it was still better to do something to the enemy proactively to stop their ability to hurt your friends or at least reduce their effectiveness in doing so.
That is still true in PF2.
The only real exception in PF1 was tiefling paladin/oracles with life link and using lay on hands to self heal for crazy amounts of health and linking up with party members to heal them, using fey foundling and basically every trick possible to maximize self healing.
Edit: I also want to add in general PF2 requires all the players to be much more flexible in behavior and tactics and to play tactically as a team.
Playing PF2 the way you played PF1 will result in failure.
You are no longer individual superheroes who happen to be traveling together each capable of (mostly) beating up the enemy all on your own. You will need to work together, strategically to succeed. Spending three actions attacking is a bad idea. It's good for at least one martial type to pick up assurance athletics and use it to trip routinely. Use Bon Mot and Intimidation (timed in conjunction with casters) to land important spells because these effects are short duration and can't be re-imposed in the same combat.
PF2 requires flexibility and NOT trying to do the same thing every combat or even every turn. You must react to the changing battlefield circumstances.
If this paradigm change isn't what your party wants, I suggest going back to PF1.
Benchak the Nightstalker Contributor, RPG Superstar 2010 Top 8 |
We have a dedicated tripper. We know the value of tripping; it costs the enemy an action while he gets back up, so he makes one less attack. In another game we have two PCs with shields, so we've seen the value of shields (i.e., not much). We've tried sneaking, but that's never worked in any edition because only one PC is ever trained in it. For what it's worth, the fighter has Attack of Opportunity and he makes the most of it.
We've tried spells like Grease (can't be used on held weapons any more), Resist Energy (too weak now), Blindness (no duration), Haste (too limited), Fear (save DCs are too low/monster bonuses too high), etc., etc. Nothing works.
I'm sorry, but there's something I'm not getting here. Everyone's shouting 'tactics' but that doesn't make the problem go away until I see something that actually works.
Is the GM using appropriate level monsters for your group?
I'm running Agents of Edgewatch for a group of 6. Most of the time, I increase the difficulty of the encounters by adding extra monsters, rather than buffing the existing ones.
I find most monsters have a decent chance of failing at least one type of save, and most spells have an effect even on a success, which makes debuffing pretty effective in my experience.
Lightning Raven |
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Calybos1 wrote:We have a dedicated tripper. We know the value of tripping; it costs the enemy an action while he gets back up, so he makes one less attack. In another game we have two PCs with shields, so we've seen the value of shields (i.e., not much). We've tried sneaking, but that's never worked in any edition because only one PC is ever trained in it. For what it's worth, the fighter has Attack of Opportunity and he makes the most of it.
We've tried spells like Grease (can't be used on held weapons any more), Resist Energy (too weak now), Blindness (no duration), Haste (too limited), Fear (save DCs are too low/monster bonuses too high), etc., etc. Nothing works.
I'm sorry, but there's something I'm not getting here. Everyone's shouting 'tactics' but that doesn't make the problem go away until I see something that actually works.
Is the GM using appropriate level monsters for your group?
I'm running Agents of Edgewatch for a group of 6. Most of the time, I increase the difficulty of the encounters by adding extra monsters, rather than buffing the existing ones.
I find most monsters have a decent chance of failing at least one type of save, and most spells have an effect even on a success, which makes debuffing pretty effective in my experience.
Age of Ashes is quite hard overall and there are some encounters that are sprang upon the party that can become far worse if the GM decides to use them as reinforcements because you're fighting in the very next room, making so that several encounters blend into each other. At least that's how it happened for my group. My GM also, to my chagrin, played the monsters "to the best of their ability" which meant like a Wargame unit, on top of using a house rule of "villain points" in every battle, so the difficulty may be a bit skewed for our group.
I still think that there is a good chances that Calybos' GM is doing something wrong at some point.
Queaux |
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I think the advice for the cleric here is a bit buried, so I'll take another shot at explaining it.
I think the first spell a cleric casts in most fights should be a slotted spell that either contributes towards killing or disabling enemies. That could be a buff spell to make another character kill better or it could be a debuff on a boss that can't just be killed. A cleric needs to proactively help the fight end before their reactive healing role comes into play in order to make the most of their abilities.
In general, the best strategy in PF2 is to come out the gate and nova as hard as possible in the early rounds of a combat then used the advantage generated by that nova to have a turn to turn advantage in the fight. If it's a single boss, then you have to employ a different strategy of taxing the effective amount of actions and numbers of that boss until you have a turn to turn advantage. Once you achieve a turn to turn advantage, healing is to keep your party from dropping in order to maximize the number of actions you are taking. Unless you suspect a party member will drop in the following round, it's usually a bad idea to heal.
This goes for all of the players in the game. First, create an advantage by focusing on a weak link in the enemy. Next, exploit the weakness you just created.
I've run in a 6 player party, and proper teamwork in that context had us regularly taking on extreme encounters through the first 8 levels of the game. I'm also running an AoA game for 3 players, and they have been able to take on some of the encounters designed for 4. I will say the game is actually very engaging for the group of mostly experienced wargamers I run with, though, so your mileage may vary as far as what can be taken on.
Ascalaphus |
I found the divine spell list picking up speed dramatically when I got to level 3 and especially 4 spells. At level 3 you should start getting offensive spells that also help your allies be more offensive, like Agonizing Despair or Blindness. At level 4 you get Divine Wrath which is really good against groups, especially in Age of Ashes because so many enemies are evil and weak to good damage.
Blindness is a bit of a tricky one because yeah, Incapacitation. But that only applies when going uphill. If you're using it to quickly focus fire a lieutenant or mook then it's not an issue.
And notice that I didn't say focus fire the boss. Mooks hit pretty hard in this edition but they're also a bit glass cannons. Especially if you can debuff them just a bit with Intimidate and your party flanks them, they can crumple quickly. In my experience it's much better to take out the mooks first than to try to take out the boss first. (Quite different from PF1.)
And that's why I like Divine Wrath so much. The Sickening effect is quite strong and if one or two mooks fail badly against it, then become easy prey to take down. And you don't even have to cast it as your highest level spell for that.
AlastarOG |
If everyone is using the same tactics that you're using and getting opposite results, you have to question why that is. There could be a few reasons.
1) Good tactics, bad application - I see this come up a lot, but I don't think it's the case for your group. Casting Fear just as an enemy is about to take their turn. Putting Grease down in an area where an opponent can Step to avoid it. Tripping a high Relfex or already slow Speed opponent.
2) Bad luck - This seems to be what a lot of horror stories without enough detail get attributed to. "Must have rolled low while the GM had a hot night - or several hot nights." This feels like such a cop out since even bad luck can be mitigated with smart play. And I think you would have brought it up.
3) Rules mistakes - This comes up less often, but with your pattern of posts this seems to be what I'm leaning towards. I'm assuming that you're not alone in your group in feeling that conditions didn't apply towards things like saving throws and DCs (which is a common tripping point for players, so I wouldn't feel bad about that one). It seems to point to maybe the GM being inexperienced with the system or everyone sort of learning at the same time or, trickiest of all, approaching the game with rules from another game on their mind.
Judging by some of the comments you've made with the only real concrete examples we've been given:
...It really looks like your GM is making a lot of mistakes. Pretty big ones, too. Or purposely buffing DCs, enemies, and really taking away any advantages that your group would have in a fight. If you have any more information, concrete details, about how your encounters go, it would be a lot easier to help out.
Good catch oh this being the DM from those other posts.
So yeah, the DM is definitely the problem here!
Playing all fighters and healers would not solve this at all. I've DM'ed age of ashes, we are now halfway through chapter 5. There are 6 players in the party, they have NEVER played any pathfinder or DnD before. They have regularly overcome encounters with XP budgets of 200-240.
If there's solo monsters I give them 4 actions and x1.5 the hp, or the elite trait. (4 actions is super strong as it allows the monsters a lot of flexibility with their 2 action action)
We had ONE party death, and it was the animal companion (they promptly raised her) . I did not pull punches, I help them do their level up and that's it. One time the Rogue decided to open the doors and fight 3 encouters at once for no reason, one of those monsters was a Grikkitog A.K.A the TPK machine. The total xp package for that fight was around 280.
Party comp is:
Paladin of Sarenrae
Animal Barbarian
Thief Rogue
Bomber Alchemist
Animal/Wild druid (mostly casts spells though)
Maestro Bard.
The druid rarely prepares heal above level 4-5.
Either you guys are shittier than a bunch of noobs at this, or your DM is f&&*ing you over.
I'm leaning towards option 2.
Squiggit |
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Don't think it's necessarily the gm f-ing them over, but it does sound like they're either underleveled or doing something wrong with the math or both, judging by the way the OP has talked about spells critically failing more than they succeed and attacks almost always missing even against normal enemies.
Combine some minor math errors, being underleveled and some suboptimal gameplay (what with the martial who only trips, the cleric who only casts electric arc, the bard who only spends one action per round, etc.) and it's easy to see how all this could sort of snowball into a really rough experience.
Zaister |
Zaister wrote:I can't help but wonder, how does the cleric cast electric arc, which is only on the arcane and primal spell lists?Ancestry feats.
Ah, thank you, that's possible, of course.
AlastarOG |
EdwinM wrote:Ah, thank you, that's possible, of course.Zaister wrote:I can't help but wonder, how does the cleric cast electric arc, which is only on the arcane and primal spell lists?Ancestry feats.
Specifically adaptive cantrip from human ancestry, considered a top tier choice for clerics.
Zaister |
Zaister wrote:Specifically adaptive cantrip from human ancestry, considered a top tier choice for clerics.EdwinM wrote:Ah, thank you, that's possible, of course.Zaister wrote:I can't help but wonder, how does the cleric cast electric arc, which is only on the arcane and primal spell lists?Ancestry feats.
Ah, I wouldn't know about who considered what like that, I dn't follow optimizer boards.
Fumarole |
I still think that there is a good chances that Calybos' GM is doing something wrong at some point.
Based on Calybos' comments in the Cult of Cinders thread this is absolutely the case, as Ruzza mentioned previously. One example is the GM telling the party a hazard wasn't a trap and couldn't be disabled by the rogue, even though the hazard has the trap trait and explicitly lays out how to disable it using thievery.
Ruzza |
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Huh, my party really values dedicated healing-- they use it to keep people up after big hits that would drop them in short order otherwise. Its interesting how even succesful parties can have different tactical metagames.
It's something I love about PF2 and also something that I think causes some misunderstandings on these forums. Groups function wildly different from one to the next, meaning that people leave those tables with strong opinions that aren't necessarily wrong, but perhaps feel stronger with another group.
I run three different tables right now and the emphasis they place of maneuvers, Recall Knowledge, even champion positioning, are all so different from each other, yet they all are very successful. Weirdly, none of my groups have a "dedicated healer," though two have someone with the Medic archetype.
Arachnofiend |
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Ah, I wouldn't know about who considered what like that, I dn't follow optimizer boards.
Well it's pretty intuitive if you think about it; the divine list lacks a strong, reliable damage cantrip so finding a way to get your Cleric a strong, reliable damage cantrip is going to be pretty good.