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Canny Acumen is a relatively cheap way for a trained character to hit Expert, but going from Expert > Master without class features doesn't come online until very late at level 17 (a full 10 levels after it comes online innately for other classes) and there's no way to progress from Master > Legendary without class features.
This means that if you don't have one of a couple specific classes in your party, it's actually impossible to ever detect a hazard like a Banshee's Symphony.
That's kind of an extreme example, but it highlights to me something that feels almost antithetical to PF2's design. The game has opened up skills so that anyone can specialize in any skill they want and done away with a lot of forced niche protection. Even the skill based classes mostly just get more skills rather than being flat out better at them.
Except for Perception. Perception is still weirdly hardcoded into classes, which means only a handful of them can fully leverage the ability and no matter how hard you try, building a dungeon delving, trap spotting wizard or sorcerer is ultimately going to run into the difficulty of having some hazards you simply can't detect. You just aren't allowed to do that.
I understand that one of the design goals here was to get rid of the feeling that everyone needs to invest in Perception and I get that certain classes might be innately better at it too, that makes sense. But the solution of turning it into a walled garden I think is ultimately really unsatisfying and just walls off things from certain classes in a way almost nothing else in PF2 really does.
Which is why I think it should be easier to improve perception (at the very least, canny acumen's master benefit comes online way too late).
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Alternatively, don't lean so heavily on requiring a particular rank in perception. Only Expert, but good Wisdom? Your cleric can tell you where not to step.
I think the current spread of proficiency plans vs key stats does okay balancing rogueish vs wise classes so neither overshadows the other too heavily. But mandatory classes to be able to succeed at some tasks doesn't fit well with 2E.
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Easier how?
In PF1, Perception was the ultimate "must have" skill, seldom ignored and nearly always boosted via magic. It had that much importance. Paizo hardcoding Perception was one of the choices I immediately appreciated since if everybody's going to invest everything into it, why pretend it's optional? And Perception's as important as ever IMO, which is why I think it's part of a class's total power budget, more costly than skills are. That makes it hard to grant general access to higher levels of proficiency.
Canny Acumen remains the singular, non-class-feat, "must have" trick to get around class barriers, yet one has to choose, effectively putting Perception on par w/ saving throws. And CA is generally useless for the saves too, at least for the many levels before hitting 17th. I don't see how your argument for Perception is any better than an equal argument for access to improved proficiency with saves.
So again, how might one make it easier to access higher Perception, yet in a way that leaves it optional (likely due to cost!)?
Right now, there is a way to reach Master at 12th, via the Ranger MCD, mirroring how it's possible to hit Master in saves via other MCDs.
Making a new "Perceptive" Archetype might work, though even Scout doesn't get access to higher Perception, so I doubt there's a niche for this, much like there wouldn't be for one based around specific saves.
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I can sympathize if only because I want to play a monk whose perception is the stuff of legend. Unfortunately, proficiencies in the monk kit were stacked and I'm guessing perception was the sacrificial lamb for the rest. Even still, I think legendary should be a class innate thing over a buyable thing but I would be down for canny accumens master proficiency to be lvl 13 or 14 instead of 17.
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I'm putting my vote behind this.
Alternatively, don't lean so heavily on requiring a particular rank in perception. Only Expert, but good Wisdom? Your cleric can tell you where not to step.
It should be a well thought out design decision to put the PCs up against a hazard that requires master or legendary proficiency to detect. The encounter should be balanced around the assumption that the players do not detect the hazard.
There are a few ancestry specific options that you upgrade your profieincy a tier for traps, as well.
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To be honest, I kind of want a way to tank perception too. One of my favorite PF1 characters was an 8 wis Paladin with no ranks in perception who was nearsighted, absentminded, a terrible judge of character, and whose gut feelings were always wrong.
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To be honest, I kind of want a way to tank perception too. One of my favorite PF1 characters was an 8 wis Paladin with no ranks in perception who was nearsighted, absentminded, a terrible judge of character, and whose gut feelings were always wrong.
Clearly a house rule, but I imagine most GMs would be ok with you deliberately taking a -10 (or whatever) to your perception checks
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It would cause you some problems for initiative though.
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I don't see how your argument for Perception is any better than an equal argument for access to improved proficiency with saves.
Two big differences. First, saves are a defensive/reactive option. Obviously everyone wants better saves and sometimes your save spread can conflict with your vision for the character (imo, more classes should be set up like the monk's Path to Perfection in terms of how their saves advance), but they don't really enable gameplay in the same way proactive checks do.
In that context, Perception functions more like a skill check than a save and I think the same logic as to why we did away with class-limited skill options explains why it can feel frustrating here.
Second, saves don't have any gates on them. There's no spell that denies you the ability to make a saving throw if your Will isn't legendary. Perception does, which makes the impact of limited proficiency hit that much harder.
I think the current spread of proficiency plans vs key stats does okay balancing rogueish vs wise classes so neither overshadows the other too heavily.
This makes sense. The quirk of clerics being so good a perception always felt like an odd thing to me and trying to address that here makes sense.
But proficiency gates are problematic and this dichotomy leaves non-wise, non-perceptive classes out in the cold too, where it feels like they really just don't have the ability to really participate in that part of the game.
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Maybe what they should do is allow Legendary perception as a multiclass option that is an archetype feat. So that is you really want it you can multiclass into Ranger/Rogue and get it.
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proficiency gates are problematic and this dichotomy leaves non-wise, non-perceptive classes out in the cold too, where it feels like they really just don't have the ability to really participate in that part of the game.
Participate might be the wrong word to use there. If you fail to spot a trap, odds are everyone is going to be participating because you triggered an encounter. (At least for complex hazards.) Where as spotting the trap will usually only let the spotter and disabler participate.
The real problem, IMO, isn't that some classes are bad at perception. It's that Search is so much more important than using other exploration tactics. Spellcasters having bad perception wouldn't matter so much if the tactics they are good at (Detect Magic and Investigating) were useful. But I've yet to see an AP where they explicitly do anything. I'd rather they fix that paradigm.
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I feel like abomination vaults made the first step towards incorporating investigate as an exploration activity, but even there it is a little underdeveloped and I think a lot of GMs don’t know what to do with it.
Like I see investigate happen a lot as a secondary activity once a room has been entered and searched, but is it supposed to be a useful activity for general dungeon crawling? I think GMs need a lot of help figuring out how to make that happen and the trick to it (like everything about recalling knowledge) is that it is subjective, party dependent what is useful, and changing so often that it would eat up tons of page space to incorporate it thoughtfully into every dungeon.
Maybe eventually we get a dungeon delving book that has a heavy GM focus on providing support for creative, interesting, and relevant detail sharing that can help expand this?
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Arguably, Searching as an exploration activity only makes sense for people in the front, maybe second row of the marching order. Because the area you search isn't that big, and by the time you search an area the person in front of you may have already stepped into the hazard.
But if you start enforcing that then other activities like Defend and Avoid Notice are even more borked.
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The search activity is not especially spelled out how it works. If GMs treat it like a repeating seek action, then even characters in the back row are able to cover out past the front line. It also says you can go more slowly to cover the area more thoroughly, but what does that mean in play? In APs some rooms will say something like "characters that spend 10 minutes, or an hour, searching the room might discover..." but how many GM's ask the players to decide exactly how long to search a room with out any hints about how long it would take to do so thoroughly? Also, that seems like it would never apply to hazards or other situations with a gated perception check.
Hazards gated behind a legendary perception check are not supposed to be spotted in advance. The assumption has to be that they go off, unless the party has a character who is of a class that specializes in perception AND even then, it is probable that the hazard goes off any way. Really those kinds of Hazards are only really by-passable by a trap focused specialist.
I think the game would be worse for it if any character could be a trap focused specialist for the cost of a general feat. Rogues have to sink class feats and skill feats into it as is to be remotely good at it. Hazards generally go off in PF2 and cause harm to a party. Assuming anyone should be able to make it otherwise without class-based character investment makes hazards a bit of a waste of time to include in the game.
I can sympathize if only because I want to play a monk whose perception is the stuff of legend. Unfortunately, proficiencies in the monk kit were stacked and I'm guessing perception was the sacrificial lamb for the rest. Even still, I think legendary should be a class innate thing over a buyable thing but I would be down for canny accumens master proficiency to be lvl 13 or 14 instead of 17.Monk only has average saves for a martial.
True, but it does have more flexibility in assigning those saves, which is nice since it is easier to patch your bad save through the ancestry. More importantly, WWH didn't just refer to saves: they get hay legendary unarmored as well.
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I can sympathize if only because I want to play a monk whose perception is the stuff of legend. Unfortunately, proficiencies in the monk kit were stacked and I'm guessing perception was the sacrificial lamb for the rest. Even still, I think legendary should be a class innate thing over a buyable thing but I would be down for canny accumens master proficiency to be lvl 13 or 14 instead of 17.Monk only has average saves for a martial.
Only half of the martials gets to Legendary in any one of their saves. So, I strongly disagree.
The monk's flexibility in apportioning saves means that if you're inclined to multiclass (Rogue's a good one) you can easily hit L/M/M in your saves.
I'd love to have a Sensate archetype.
I don't want a numerical bonus to Perception, but just having it fully oriented towards things like Blind Fight, Greater Darkvision, and so forth would be great.