Martial characters can do a lot of that stuff with feats. Man its like you've not even read the stuff you are complaining about.
Then why would they gain anything by targeting those saves with -2 or -3 to the save DC over just attacking that weakness with their usual full proficiency? I'm not the one saying the spells give martial characters the ability to attack different saves and I wasn't the one who said that martial characters can't apply solid debuffs when they do attack those saves. I'm just asking how offensive spells fit into things of martial classes can already fill those same offensive niches with other abilities.
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I think in a class based game, its fair that class defines your main powerful set of capabilities. If you aren't a spellcaster you, by definition, cast spells worse than people who are. There's a lot of utility spells its neat to pick up for innate magic and such.
With dedications, you pay about 15% (including both proficiency and ability modifier) of your to-hit/dc if you must use offensive magic-- its big but its not so big that it simply shouldn't be done. Its especially usable if the enemies are lower level, or have their saves debuffed.
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Martial characters can do a lot of that stuff with feats. Man its like you've not even read the stuff you are complaining about.Then why would they gain anything by targeting those saves with -2 or -3 to the save DC over just attacking that weakness with their usual full proficiency? I'm not the one saying the spells give martial characters the ability to attack different saves and I wasn't the one who said that martial characters can't apply solid debuffs when they do attack those saves. I'm just asking how offensive spells fit into things of martial classes can already fill those same offensive niches with other abilities.
athletics maneuvers are attacks though so you'd get more than a -2 on either the maneuver or the ensuing attack.
athletics maneuvers are attacks though so you'd get more than a -2 on either the maneuver or the ensuing attack.
Spells are almost all 2 actions, so the martial class is left with more follow-up options based on their attempt's result. Plus martial classes get action economy enhancers that can often net them fewer immediate attack penalties for two actions taken together at the cost of being locked into a specific set of actions that round.
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Magic aoe damage on a martial MCD caster seems fine given the opportunity cost (don't bother with single target damage, you're already good at that). Weapon attacks on a caster mcd martial also seems fine barring your squishiness (which is a tougher pill to swallow but can still be built around). All in all it seems like you can multiclass into your opposite role and contribute to it without ever overshadowing those who chose to start as that opposing role. I think it's working as intended. As far as squishy casters go, just realize your a second wave fighter and maybe consider those martial multiclass feats that give health based on the number of multiclass feats. I like that I have reasons to play a martial as well as reasons to play a caster. I like that I can mix and match into the other style without invalidating anyone else at the table. I like a game that has this much mechanical depth without breaking the balance within the party. The barbarian with moment of clarity and sorcerer dedication is just as powerful and versatile as the sorcerer who went champion. Neither will be as good as the other at their respective main roles but they will be able to comfortably step outside their box if they choose to. I wouldn't trade that for 3.5, pf1, or 5e multiclassing. Such would be a desolate wasteland of traps with the odd scattered oasis of a munchkin build. Good riddance. Give me mechanical viability driven first and foremost by your characters story over angel summoners and DMX bandits anyday.
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A caster has a lot of ways to mitigate their squishiness. If you are trying to tank, you can get a whole lot of nastiness out of shattering gem, false life, mirror image, shield, etc. False Life lasts hours so you can have that up to begin with and if you keep it in a top -1 slot, that is a lot of temp HP, like probably enough to make up the difference of only having a D6 base. A lot of the Archetypes also have a hit point booster that can get you the rest of the way and is probably worth it if you are envisioning yourself into a Tanky role.
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A caster has a lot of ways to mitigate their squishiness. If you are trying to tank, you can get a whole lot of nastiness out of shattering gem, false life, mirror image, shield, etc. False Life lasts hours so you can have that up to begin with and if you keep it in a top -1 slot, that is a lot of temp HP, like probably enough to make up the difference of only having a D6 base. A lot of the Archetypes also have a hit point booster that can get you the rest of the way and is probably worth it if you are envisioning yourself into a Tanky role.
That's true, I never even considered shoring up the difference with spells. If it was a snake it would've bit me
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Both sides of the coin are probably spending 4-8 feats to get a respectable portion of the other sides schtick. As a martial I'm not getting 14 spell slots with master proficiency without spending 5 feats. As a caster (topping out at AT LEAST 28 spell slots) I'm not getting expert martial weapon proficiency (barring war clerics/battle oracles), combat tricks, and a health boost without spending 3-5 feats. Seems pretty equitable to me. Pour half of your feats if you wanna do half of what the other guy does. You'll never be better than him.......but that was never the goal. You can pour more than half the feats if you really want the flavor of the multy class on top of your base class......and it will definitely make you more versatile, just not party member invalidatingly versatile.
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Both sides of the coin are probably spending 4-8 feats to get a respectable portion of the other sides schtick. As a martial I'm not getting 14 spell slots with master proficiency without spending 5 feats. As a caster (topping out at AT LEAST 28 spell slots) I'm not getting expert martial weapon proficiency (barring war clerics/battle oracles), combat tricks, and a health boost without spending 3-5 feats. Seems pretty equitable to me. Pour half of your feats if you wanna do half of what the other guy does. You'll never be better than him.......but that was never the goal. You can pour more than half the feats if you really want the flavor of the multy class on top of your base class......and it will definitely make you more versatile, just not party member invalidatingly versatile.
Martial characters get more feats than casters get and usually something else on top of that. Yes, spells are a great class feature, but focus spells are hit or miss, and a lack of feats leaves casters feeling kind of samey compared to their weapon using brethren.
So 5 feats for a Fighters =/= 5 feats for a Wizard.
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Both sides of the coin are probably spending 4-8 feats to get a respectable portion of the other sides schtick. As a martial I'm not getting 14 spell slots with master proficiency without spending 5 feats. As a caster (topping out at AT LEAST 28 spell slots) I'm not getting expert martial weapon proficiency (barring war clerics/battle oracles), combat tricks, and a health boost without spending 3-5 feats. Seems pretty equitable to me. Pour half of your feats if you wanna do half of what the other guy does. You'll never be better than him.......but that was never the goal. You can pour more than half the feats if you really want the flavor of the multy class on top of your base class......and it will definitely make you more versatile, just not party member invalidatingly versatile.Martial characters get more feats than casters get and usually something else on top of that. Yes, spells are a great class feature, but focus spells are hit or miss, and a lack of feats leaves casters feeling kind of samey compared to their weapon using brethren.
So 5 feats for a Fighters =/= 5 feats for a Wizard.
Casters get 1 less feat, kind of. Many of them do get a feat at level 1, it is just pre-determined by a different class choice. Fighters are a little better off with an extra flexible feat, but it is not like fighters get a class feat every level.
Casters get 1 less feat, kind of. Many of them do get a feat at level 1, it is just pre-determined by a different class choice. Fighters are a little better off with an extra flexible feat, but it is not like fighters get a class feat every level.
That's my bad. I actually thought that feats were unbalanced between the classes but I must have been thinking of either something from the playtest or another D20 system.
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Except that not everyone wants a tanky role, and just wants to be able to use their weapon well without dying in one hit. Also most buffs only last a few minutes with minimal effect. Even false life is a questionable choice as once its spent its gone. Which means healing won't get you back a reasonable HP.
And those archetypes that give "HP per feat" are only: Fighter, Champion, Barbarian, and Monk. By spending a feat on it. Casters start with one less feat, and must spend a feat to even have the HP to go in melee.
The premise of the thread of "martials don't have enough proficiency from random spells" doesn't fit with how casters are treated were they have to spend all their feats and spells to fall behind slower. Explain why should a martial have an easier time getting spells while still being a good martial?
Bards, Druids, Oracles and Clerics have enough HP and armor right off the bat to take a hit or two in combat. So you are really only talking about wizards, witches and sorcerers. They are classes not built to wade into melee, but I have a necromancer wizard with no martial dedications (only a sorcerer dedication), who is level 5 and does perfectly fine staying up in the thick of combat because it is a pain to attack him, likely to trigger some nasty reactions and is often done with a DC 5 or even DC 11 miss chance, and between vampiric touch and false life, can get HP back very quickly, while debuffing effectively enough for the party to really lay into enemies.
Basically, there are very few character concepts that people have said "This just doesn't work" on the boards, that I have seen fail so badly in actual play. Often times, it only takes one or two different choices to make the idea work out well/
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You could pretty easily scale multiclass and ancestry casting spell attacks/DCs to legendary and it wouldn't cause any issues (in my opinion). The balancing factor of these spells is still that they are extremely limited both in terms of number of slots, and level of spell. All it would do is open up options, and most of the time those options still wouldn't be great - lower stat is one issue, but also lessened effect. Your Fireball as a martial is still doing 4d6 less than the caster's, and you can only do it once a day.
We should be incentivizing those differences, not relegating every MC caster to just evergreen utility spells.
If there is only 1 fight a day, it doesn't matter much wether you can cast fireball once or three times.
Besides, Focus spells level is not limited for MC caster, so you'd end up with Martial being just as powerful with them than a caster for whom it is supposed to be a main feature.
If you give free proficiency scaling to innate spells and caster MC, how do you buff martial MC and ancestry weapon proficiency so the casters get something too?
Aside from 1 fight a day not being an assumption of the system, I’d also make martial MCs get master weapons. The only class I forsee having an issue off this is the alchemist (which I’d have to bump to master natively so they don’t feel taxed into taking an MC).
Master weapons is not as big as people think it is mathematically. You still aren’t very good at actually doing much damage with weapons unless you have a damage booster on top of martial prof (part of the reason playtest magus/summoner suck so much when not using resource is the lack of damage booster), never mind the generally squishier chassis non martial classes have. It would simply open up an option to be a bit better at hitting things with weapons, mathematically it won’t break the game at all, and I’ll even say that it’s probably still going to be a bad option (because casters fundamentally have many better things to do than hit people with a stick/bow most of the time).
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A caster has a lot of ways to mitigate their squishiness. If you are trying to tank, you can get a whole lot of nastiness out of shattering gem, false life, mirror image, shield, etc. False Life lasts hours so you can have that up to begin with and if you keep it in a top -1 slot, that is a lot of temp HP, like probably enough to make up the difference of only having a D6 base. A lot of the Archetypes also have a hit point booster that can get you the rest of the way and is probably worth it if you are envisioning yourself into a Tanky role.
Except those spells are also limited resources especially if you want to make them relevant to the level of the fight you are in. Basically the caster conundrum is their limited resources are responsible for too many things. False life may last hours but it also takes away your top slot, your most effective way of contributing to maybe be as survivable as another class gets passively when you still can't even begin to compete equally in melee combat in other ways.
Lack of hp - Spells
Lack of armour - spells
Worst saves - spells
Utility - spells
Offence - spells
Allied support - spells
All of these compete with limited slots and number of actions over a standard combat especially as prebuffing isn't an option most of the time.
If spells are supposed to fill all this roles for a caster then they need ways of spending actions before combat in buffing and likely a greater number of resources. Casters need to use spells (and actions) for too many things to get kind of up to the same level of things other classes get passively/automatically.
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You could pretty easily scale multiclass and ancestry casting spell attacks/DCs to legendary and it wouldn't cause any issues (in my opinion). The balancing factor of these spells is still that they are extremely limited both in terms of number of slots, and level of spell. All it would do is open up options, and most of the time those options still wouldn't be great - lower stat is one issue, but also lessened effect. Your Fireball as a martial is still doing 4d6 less than the caster's, and you can only do it once a day.
We should be incentivizing those differences, not relegating every MC caster to just evergreen utility spells.
If dedications gave legendary proficiency for spell casting, no one would ever play a caster. Casters already suffer from limited spells, significantly fewer successful attacks, essentially worthless weapon skills, and the worst defense (AC, saves, and hp) in the game.
Imagine if you could play a fighter swinging away with your halberd an infinite amount of times per day and then whipping out a 90% effective fireball if you felt like it.
I would be up for innate spells having legendary proficiency though.
Your single 80% effective (at best) fireball... well not even because your stat lags behind 1-2, so it's more like 70% effective fireball (being generous here, if you take any level below 20 it's actually worse than that even) that you get once per day, vs the wizard who gets it 4 times per day.
I'm not seeing the problem here.
For reference, if we assume Fireball as the standard, then
Level 8: Your fireball 6d6 vs theirs 8d6 (75% as effective, once per day instead of 4 times a day)
Level 12: Your fireball 8d6 vs theirs 12d6 (66% as effective, once per day, and you'll have a lower stat at this level so it's even lower than that).
Level 14: Your fireball 10d6 vs theirs 14d6 (71.4% as effective, still lower stat)
Level 16: Your fireball 12d6 vs theirs 16d6 (75% as effective, same stat)
Level 18: Your fireball 14d6 vs theirs 18d6 (77% as effective, but now you're behind 1 stat due to apex items).
Level 20: Your fireball 16d6 vs theirs 20d6 (80% as effective but you're behind 2 on stat).
This is also assuming you're both casting Fireballs instead of the caster with higher slots casting a better damage spell.
Besides, you can already cast any non offensive spell as well as a wizard, this just opens you up to cast some offensive spells as well, which would still be bad options if you so desired, they'd just be less bad.
The caster's power isn't tied up in their proficiency at all, it's tied up in the number of slots they get and the progression on those slots.
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If dedications gave legendary proficiency for spell casting, no one would ever play a caster.
Food for thought, a fighter MCing wizard has the same spellcasting proficiency as a Wizard for 45% of the total levels in the game (2-6, 12-14, 18. Make it a cool half if the fighter gets an ancestry cantrip or something at 1).
And of course, for any non-offensive, non-counteract based spell your proficiency will rarely matter.
If the only thing that makes wizards and druids and bards and clerics and oracles and witches and sorcerers relevant is that they get to be slightly more reliable with a specific subset of spells for only about half the game, then it sounds like they're already pretty screwed up.
This is just hyperbolic. The world wouldn't end if a martial who threw a bunch of resources into blasting had slightly better accuracy. It just would make it so a handful of character concepts are a bit more successful.
