Roaring Applause is far too GM dependent to be a contender for best spell in the game. Around some tables it will just be unusable as the GM will enforce both the need for hands and the need for understanding.
If one of my players decides to use it, I'll have to spend some time speaking with them to determine what should be a proper reading of the spell.And my critics about the Cleric is not about the Divine list per se, but about their subpar spellcasting abilities outside their Font.
Hands, sure, maybe, but there's no "need" for understanding. It hasn't got the Linguistic trait. It says they must be able to "see, hear, or otherwise understand you" - good luck finding a situation where you're casting a spell on something that can't comprehend your existence. Most things can see or hear.
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Hands, sure, maybe, but there's no "need" for understanding. It hasn't got the Linguistic trait. It says they must be able to "see, hear, or otherwise understand you" - good luck finding a situation where you're casting a spell on something that can't comprehend your existence. Most things can see or hear.Roaring Applause is far too GM dependent to be a contender for best spell in the game. Around some tables it will just be unusable as the GM will enforce both the need for hands and the need for understanding.
If one of my players decides to use it, I'll have to spend some time speaking with them to determine what should be a proper reading of the spell.And my critics about the Cleric is not about the Divine list per se, but about their subpar spellcasting abilities outside their Font.
"see, hear or otherwise understand you" is very weirdly phrased as seeing or hearing don't imply understanding. And how can you understand someone without even seeing or hearing them?
This sentence is very unclear and I can see GMs considering that the strange sentence is there to imply that there must be some form of understanding (even if there's no Linguistic trait, so not a word comprehension but an action comprehension).Anyway, it's mostly the need for hands that makes most creatures immune to it. Unless you play an urban campaign, you won't find many targets to Roaring Applause.
Why are Dexterity Fighers bad in PF2e? Just unable to take account of the correct feats etc? Could they not be great archers?
And there's also the question of average VS optimized. As Fighters can be either Strength or Dexterity based, and Dexterity based Fighters are quite bad, do you consider the class strong because of its best builds or average because it has both good and bad builds?Like Temperans said, if you want a melee Dexterity-based character, you need the damage bonuses from Sneak Attack and such.
And for archers, Ranger is just so much better that there's not much point to go Fighter (mostly because you don't care of having Heavy Armor proficiency and specialization and tons of extra feat because there's not much you can take on a ranged Fighter).Overall, it's not abysmal, but compared to Strength-based Fighters, there's no competition.
I think Fighters with a basic composite bow work pretty well. The deadly trait is nice with the extra accuracy. They are definitely worse with crossbows and guns than the ranger or gunslinger though. I still like rangers better as archers, personally, because they are better at switch hitting and have extra range from Hunt Prey. But I don't think there is anything wrong with fighters, and point blank shot makes them arguably the best pure longbow users.
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The deadly trait is nice with the extra accuracy.
The issue is that the Fighter archer doesn't have extra accuracy. Double shot and Triple Shot, the main support for archery the Fighter has, puts you at normal accuracy for a martial. Overall, it's not crazy when the Ranger, on top of having an Edge, has the action gain from Hunted Shot (even if the need for Hunt Prey doesn't make it a 1-action gain all round), extra skills, better saves...
And to top it, the Archer Dedication gives you access to all the Fighter feats if you want your Ranger to get all the good things the Fighter has.| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
I do think you underrate the druid. I think they are very potent.No he is underating the Primal spell list.
It is very good.
Primal is probably the best at targetting elemental weakness and battlefield control. They are great at combat healing and decent at buffing at debuffing.
Druid is the sturdiest caster and ovearall has the best focus spells (not cantrips) of all of them.
I think he is underating both.
Roaring Applause is far too GM dependent to be a contender for best spell in the game. Around some tables it will just be unusable as the GM will enforce both the need for hands and the need for understanding.
If one of my players decides to use it, I'll have to spend some time speaking with them to determine what should be a proper reading of the spell.And my critics about the Cleric is not about the Divine list per se, but about their subpar spellcasting abilities outside their Font.
You don't need hands or palms to attempt an applause (you need them to successfully do it) and the spell does not say that creatures without hands are immune to it.
The spell says that the creature needs to see, hear, OR otherwise understand you (A blind and deaf creature with motionsense or mind reading skills could be able to understand you despite not being able to see or hear you). Or, not and. A mindless (that is already immune to it doe to the mental trait), blind (or that can't see you for a spell effect or due to stealth) and deaf creature would be immune to it, nothing else.
I think that the GM explaining how silly an Ankhrav affected by this looks like is part of the charm and purpose of the spell.
The deadly trait is nice with the extra accuracy.The issue is that the Fighter archer doesn't have extra accuracy. Double shot and Triple Shot, the main support for archery the Fighter has, puts you at normal accuracy for a martial. Overall, it's not crazy when the Ranger, on top of having an Edge, has the action gain from Hunted Shot (even if the need for Hunt Prey doesn't make it a 1-action gain all round), extra skills, better saves...
And to top it, the Archer Dedication gives you access to all the Fighter feats if you want your Ranger to get all the good things the Fighter has.
Double and Triple Shot are traps, never pick them. If you want to play an Archer Fighter, get Ranger dedication at 2 for Gravity Weapon and Hunted Shot. Incredible Aim and Debilitating Shot work really well in tandem with those 2 too.
Basically better play a ranger with a "+2 to attacks" Edge.
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PFS is a different game - I primarily base my expectations around approximately 4 encounters per day (which seem to be the suggested number as per adventure building guidelines). Divine has gotten some good spells since the CRB - especially in SoM, and choice of deity can add some more good spells to the cleric list. The primary strength of the cleric, however, is the fact that it makes everyone far less likely to lose combat - even at higher levels. There’s less of a decision of “how much do I want to use” - the primary cause of TPKs aside from level 1-3 jank, ime, is players greeding too hard for resource saving. PFS, though, Life Oracle is probably better - your resources aren’t getting stretched enough to make full use of those bonus slots + your main slots.The thing I've seen is that healing becomes less desirable after the first levels. Characters are able to take more punishment before going down and secondary healing starts to shine more than focused healing like the Cleric and Life Oracle provide.
And the Cleric spellcasting (outside font) is really lackluster. 3 prepared slots, no strong focus spells. So, very often, I see Clerics doing nothing (as in delaying) or healing the smallest bit of damage just to feel useful. Becoming actual dead weights and greatly improving the chances for the things to go south.I far prefer characters like Sorcerers, Oracles or Druids with strong healing capabilities but also non healing abilities.
Cleric focus spells are a bit of a mixed bag, but they do have some good ones. Without mentioning the Abomination domain, here’s some good PFS legal ones - Lament, Eject Soul, Asterism, Stasis, Draconic Barrage (Admittedly only gets good later), Enduring Might, Hyperfocus (admittedly requires a few ranged characters), Ephemeral Hazards.
And yes, the Divine list has gotten better with SoM - I now rate Primal as the worst list (and ignore the existence of elementalist entirely). Divine has strong control spells and buffs, primal… lacks those.
1 - Heal, Magic Weapon, Air Bubble, Lock
2 - Dispel, Calm Emotions
3 - Roaring Applause, Fear
4 - Freedom of Movement, Vampiric Maiden can be ok but it’s specific, upcast calm emotions here
5 - Summon Celestial, Command, Breath of Life
6 - Heroism, Summon Celestial, Roaring Applause
7 - Nothing really good at this level
8 - Divine Aura
9 - Banishment, Summon Fiend, Overwhelming Presence
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It's interesting how radically different different players' PF2 experiences are.
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I do think you underrate the druid. I think they are very potent.No he is underating the Primal spell list.
It is very good.Primal is probably the best at targetting elemental weakness and battlefield control. They are great at combat healing and decent at buffing at debuffing.
Druid is the sturdiest caster and ovearall has the best focus spells (not cantrips) of all of them.
I think he is underating both.
Druid is sturdy, sure, but primal is the worst list. “Decent” buffing and debuffing - it has like 2-3 notable buff/debuff spells and they mostly inflict frighten. It has very little by the way of either of these.
It’s worse than arcane on the battlefield control front - practically all of its control spells are shared with arcane. But arcane has extras.
Hitting elemental weakness with slotted spells is a scam past low levels anyway - your martials do it better and more consistently than you. I don’t particularly care to use a 5th level slot and deal 10d6+10 damage instead of 10d6. I don’t particularly care to use a 5th level slot to do 10d6 damage in the first place - because, as I stated before, blasting is something that only generates value by turn 2-3 at the earliest. I’d prefer to cast Wall of Stone or Wall of Ice.
Primal does have some neat tricks - hazardous terrain (Coral Eruption/Wildfire/etc.) and forced movement against huge or gargantuan creatures can represent a lot of damage… however you don’t get any decent forced movement spells until SL6 with Tangling Creepers - at which point you’re spending a 4th and a 6th on this combo.
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It's interesting how radically different different players' PF2 experiences are.
It depends a lot on the DM, the AP, and other factors as to how classes are valued. In the Extinction Curse AP the druid was really, really good because the areas they were fighting in were very large and open. Plenty of room for the mobility advantage provided by a druid wildshaping.
A druid provides a variety of damage, healing, and other effects.
When I play a druid, I try to get a sustained damage spell going, blast, and use a weapon to deal damage. The aggregate damage, especially against mooks, adds up substantially even with a lot of hit points. Eroding 20 plus points a round to each target, while also hitting them with a blast spell, and a weapon adds up to substantial damage. You can often do this at range.
At 16th level with effortless concentration and haste, you can have a druid with a Punishing Sands active with a fiery body which is not a combat form moving around the battlefield in the air hammering with punishing sands, using a 2 action blast spell, moving, and using a weapon or alternating with produce flames for 1 action when not using a blast spell.
A druid in general doesn't necessarily compete with a support caster spot against say a bard or wizard. A druid is the best damage dealing caster due their aggregate ability to do damage from a variety of sources.
A bard or support caster would do more providing support to a well built druid damage dealer because a druid will create a maelstrom of damage against enemies that will far exceed what a martial character can do.
If you view the druid as a group support caster, then yeah, wizard, bard, occult sorcerer or something with key support control spells are better. If you view the druid as the best casting damage dealer filling a hybrid damage dealer role, you will find the druid will exceed a martial's damage by a good measure in the vast majority of fights across nearly all levels.
That's why I like the druid compared to Exocist.
The individual damage sources look small compared to a martial hit. But when you see they attack multiple sources at once at range with no need to take moves to set them up, while keeping the druid relatively protected from harm or being easily attackable you see the value of a druid as a primary damage dealer in a group.
I imagine that is why we see things differently. Whereas Exocist sees only one damage spell a round from a primal druid, I see a druid with a weapon or wild shape with a sustained damage spell active ripping apart a battlefield with a combination of weapon attacks, excellent focus spells like tempest surge, cantrips, and/or a blast spell mixed in here and there. When you add up the totality of the damage coming from the druid, it gets pretty insane.
For me the Bard is the number one support caster followed by some kind of occult caster or a wizard due to variation.
And the druid is the number one damage caster and one of the best damage dealers in the game easily competing with martials for DPR.
S tier support-Bard, Wizard, Occult Caster of some kind
S tier Damage-Druid, Fighter,
I would even classify a druid as perhaps the number one damage dealer in the game in the most fights because of the ability of a well built druid to mix in substantial martial damage for a minimal resource investment when magic isn't working great.
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Same AP except one of my players was a blaster wizard - likely using, or at least trying to use - the same spells the Druid would be using. It would be pointless to count up the damage numbers on spells like Chain Lightning or Eclipse Burst because the problem was the relevancy of the damage dealt rather than the number. As is standard with damage, no point of damage actually matters against the last one, so dealing 50 damage to 5 dudes is pointless until you start hitting dudes 2-5, and even then it’s only got a point when you actually deal the necessary quantity of damage to kill them. Before that, the spell essentially was a waste of a turn - and that was largely the problem my group had with blasting. You cast a spell and it doesn’t actually reduce the threat of the enemies until you spend enough turns to actually kill off one or two, which is usually on the second or third round. Especially when you get to higher levels and everything has metric tons of HP.
Most of the value of blasting is concentrated in the back half of the combat, when the outcome is already decided and you’re just cleaning up the few weak mooks that remain.
The day the wizard switched from casting Chain Lightning and Eclipse Burst to casting Slow 6 and Paralyze 7 was the day that the party no longer felt much threat in combat - well, when he remembered to cast those spells at least. He still tried to do damage with slotted spells occasionally and it would always come back to that problem - using blasting spells did nothing until later.
Now, granted, I never started combat more than 120 feet away. It would be pointless to see my players start 600 feet away and roll out volleys of longbow shots at smaller penalties while the enemies have to get closer. If they could infinitely kite the enemies (such as what happened to some monsters in book 3) by running and gunning, I’d just call the encounter at the end of round 1 - there’s no reason to continue the fight, and no reason to expend resources blasting.
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that was largely the problem my group had with blasting.
This is where you are getting into trouble: Undervaluing blasting well done, Failing to recognise that the Primal list does other things apart from blasting. Primal characters have control spells - walls and difficult terrain, primal characters have buffs - just not boring +1 to hits.
My default spell suggestions on the Primal list:
For direct damage Electric Arc, Scatter Scree, Scorching Ray, Fireball Chain Lightning Horrid Wilting The primal tradition is chock full of these options. They are simple fun and a useful default, though often you have better options.
For buffing Longstrider, Protector Tree, Shattering Gem, Haste, Stoneskin , Clone Companion, Envenom Companion, Organsight, Elemental Gift
For debuffs Slow, Obscuring Mist, Ignite Fireworks, Dispel Magic
For healing Heal, Restoration, Neutralize Poison
For control plenty of shove/prone/walls Gust of Wind, Lose the Path , Aqueous Orb, Wall of Water, Wall of Stone, Pillars of Sand, Burning Blossoms
For utility the basics are covered Darkvision, Light, Dragon Form, Air Walk
For melee you have all the Polymorph Battle forms starting with Animal Form and going all the way up the list to Nature Incarnate for Godzilla form.
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Same AP except one of my players was a blaster wizard - likely using, or at least trying to use - the same spells the Druid would be using. It would be pointless to count up the damage numbers on spells like Chain Lightning or Eclipse Burst because the problem was the relevancy of the damage dealt rather than the number. As is standard with damage, no point of damage actually matters against the last one, so dealing 50 damage to 5 dudes is pointless until you start hitting dudes 2-5, and even then it’s only got a point when you actually deal the necessary quantity of damage to kill them. Before that, the spell essentially was a waste of a turn - and that was largely the problem my group had with blasting. You cast a spell and it doesn’t actually reduce the threat of the enemies until you spend enough turns to actually kill off one or two, which is usually on the second or third round. Especially when you get to higher levels and everything has metric tons of HP.
Most of the value of blasting is concentrated in the back half of the combat, when the outcome is already decided and you’re just cleaning up the few weak mooks that remain.
The day the wizard switched from casting Chain Lightning and Eclipse Burst to casting Slow 6 and Paralyze 7 was the day that the party no longer felt much threat in combat - well, when he remembered to cast those spells at least. He still tried to do damage with slotted spells occasionally and it would always come back to that problem - using blasting spells did nothing until later.
Now, granted, I never started combat more than 120 feet away. It would be pointless to see my players start 600 feet away and roll out volleys of longbow shots at smaller penalties while the enemies have to get closer. If they could infinitely kite the enemies (such as what happened to some monsters in book 3) by running and gunning, I’d just call the encounter at the end of round 1 - there’s no reason to continue the fight, and no reason to expend resources blasting.
And we did start hundreds of feet away with an archer. We absolutely wiped stuff out before it even reached us. If you want to in PF2, you can kite and wipe stuff out while taking minimal damage.
But a single blasting spell wasn't really where the druid shined. It was in aggregate damage mixed with a blasting spell.
Slow spell is very nice. I used it against a bunch of mooks and it was a big game changer with my shadow sorcerer.
The druid is the class you play if you want to do maximum damage in a variety of different ways. I would say they're better at replacing a martial than replacing a support/control caster. A well built druid will out damage a martial in most fights.
They are probably one of the highest damage dealing classes in the game and most versatile. For all those claiming casters don't do damage, I recommend the druid with a focus on Str, Dex, Con, and Wisdom for stat increases. A storm druid who dual paths into wild shape to get dragon form is a varied damage dealer that will let you really be a damage hammer. Build up Athletics and build them to trip and play with a heavy focus on martial and spell damage.
I guess that is where my view differs is I don't view the druid as great because they are a control/support caster. I view them as a top tier damage dealer and more of a martial/caster damage dealing hybrid with with utility. Once I played the druid in that fashion, they were absolutely brutal with damage tracking numbers on par with any martial in the group.
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It's interesting how radically different different players' PF2 experiences are.
Ya :'D It's main reason I didn't fully agree with two of my players even though they were being pretty convincing.
Like one of things I noted was that in campaign where you face lot of mooks rather than lot of mini bosses/bosses, fighter will feel less efficient in comparison as all martials can decimate mooks
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Same AP except one of my players was a blaster wizard - likely using, or at least trying to use - the same spells the Druid would be using. It would be pointless to count up the damage numbers on spells like Chain Lightning or Eclipse Burst because the problem was the relevancy of the damage dealt rather than the number. As is standard with damage, no point of damage actually matters against the last one, so dealing 50 damage to 5 dudes is pointless until you start hitting dudes 2-5, and even then it’s only got a point when you actually deal the necessary quantity of damage to kill them. Before that, the spell essentially was a waste of a turn - and that was largely the problem my group had with blasting. You cast a spell and it doesn’t actually reduce the threat of the enemies until you spend enough turns to actually kill off one or two, which is usually on the second or third round. Especially when you get to higher levels and everything has metric tons of HP.
Most of the value of blasting is concentrated in the back half of the combat, when the outcome is already decided and you’re just cleaning up the few weak mooks that remain.
The day the wizard switched from casting Chain Lightning and Eclipse Burst to casting Slow 6 and Paralyze 7 was the day that the party no longer felt much threat in combat - well, when he remembered to cast those spells at least. He still tried to do damage with slotted spells occasionally and it would always come back to that problem - using blasting spells did nothing until later.
Now, granted, I never started combat more than 120 feet away. It would be pointless to see my players start 600 feet away and roll out volleys of longbow shots at smaller penalties while the enemies have to get closer. If they could infinitely kite the enemies (such as what happened to some monsters in book 3) by running and gunning, I’d just call the encounter at the end of round 1 - there’s no reason to continue the fight, and no reason to expend resources blasting.
In my opinion, there's an issue with this return of experience. There's no need to switch from dealing damage to Incapacitation spells as both are different spells with different uses.
Incapacitation spells have a lot of drawbacks: You need to use one of your highest spell slots (if not the highest), they are mostly mental spells targetting Will, they have limited range and limited areas.Blasting spells don't have these issues and can more easily be used in various different situations.
Also, when you state that you need multiple blasting spells to score a kill, you complete elude both critical failures to the save (very common when you blast mooks with a Reflex spell as it's the weakest save of high level creatures) and the martials in your group (that will jump on the enemies having critically failed to finish them off). So blasting scores kills right at round 1 outside extreme situations.
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...Same AP except one of my players was a blaster wizard - likely using, or at least trying to use - the same spells the Druid would be using. It would be pointless to count up the damage numbers on spells like Chain Lightning or Eclipse Burst because the problem was the relevancy of the damage dealt rather than the number. As is standard with damage, no point of damage actually matters against the last one, so dealing 50 damage to 5 dudes is pointless until you start hitting dudes 2-5, and even then it’s only got a point when you actually deal the necessary quantity of damage to kill them. Before that, the spell essentially was a waste of a turn - and that was largely the problem my group had with blasting. You cast a spell and it doesn’t actually reduce the threat of the enemies until you spend enough turns to actually kill off one or two, which is usually on the second or third round. Especially when you get to higher levels and everything has metric tons of HP.
Most of the value of blasting is concentrated in the back half of the combat, when the outcome is already decided and you’re just cleaning up the few weak mooks that remain.
The day the wizard switched from casting Chain Lightning and Eclipse Burst to casting Slow 6 and Paralyze 7 was the day that the party no longer felt much threat in combat - well, when he remembered to cast those spells at least. He still tried to do damage with slotted spells occasionally and it would always come back to that problem - using blasting spells did nothing until later.
Now, granted, I never started combat more than 120 feet away. It would be pointless to see my players start 600 feet away and roll out volleys of longbow shots at smaller penalties while the enemies have to get closer. If they could infinitely kite the enemies (such as what happened to some monsters in book 3) by running and gunning, I’d just call the encounter at the end of round 1 - there’s no reason to continue the fight, and no reason to expend resources
Even with crit failed saves, enemies at higher levels have such a ridiculous amount of HP that you’d need a crit failed save followed by 2 hits or a crit to kill a mook. It’s utterly silly how much HP enemies have at that point. For instance, at level 13, your blasting spell does 13d6 usually (gonna discount Chain Lightning because of restrictions and because I hate the RNG on it) - or about 45.5 damage. A crit fail would do 91 damage - if they even crit fail, it’s honestly not that common even on -2s - a fighter hits for, at best, 3d12+2d6+9 (35.5) damage. The level 9 monster has 155 hp on average. This only gets worse as you level from there, from needing a crit to a crit and a hit and eventually 2 crits (or more) from the fighter to finish the thing. Those are pretty low probability odds.
Or alternately, if they crit failed against Fear - a level 3 spell that I don’t even need to upcast - they’d be out of the fight for 2 rounds (one fleeing, one returning) and would have no threat in the encounter during that time. If they crit failed against Slow 6, they’d be basically out of the encounter (slowed 2 makes it trivially easy to avoid their attacks).
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that was largely the problem my group had with blasting.This is where you are getting into trouble: Undervaluing blasting well done, Failing to recognise that the Primal list does other things apart from blasting. Primal characters have control spells - walls and difficult terrain, primal characters have buffs - just not boring +1 to hits.
My default spell suggestions on the Primal list:
For direct damage Electric Arc, Scatter Scree, Scorching Ray, Fireball Chain Lightning Horrid Wilting The primal tradition is chock full of these options. They are simple fun and a useful default, though often you have better options.For buffing Longstrider, Protector Tree, Shattering Gem, Haste, Stoneskin , Clone Companion, Envenom Companion, Organsight, Elemental Gift
For debuffs Slow, Obscuring Mist, Ignite Fireworks, Dispel Magic
For healing Heal, Restoration, Neutralize Poison
For control plenty of shove/prone/walls Gust of Wind, Lose the Path , Aqueous Orb, Wall of Water, Wall of Stone, Pillars of Sand, Burning Blossoms
For utility the basics are covered Darkvision, Light, Dragon Form, Air Walk
For melee you have all the Polymorph Battle forms starting with Animal Form and going all the way up the list to Nature Incarnate for Godzilla form.
For reference, here’s what I rate as the good spells on the primal list
> lvl 1 - mud pit, summon animal, summon plant/fungus depending on ruling, heal, lose the path
> lv 2 - summon fey, summon animal, summon plant/fungus, worm's repast, dispel magic, glitterdust
> lv 3 - fear, summon animal, pillar of water, fireball (decent at lv 5-7), slow
> lv 4 - vital bacon, coral eruption (large monster cheese) summon fey, control water (highly dependent on rulings)
> level 5 - there's wall of stone, and wall of ice if wall of stone is banned
> level 6 - summon animal, tangling creepers (to combo with coral)
> level 7 - summon animal, mask of terror, control sand
> level 8 - mask of terror, deluge
> level 9 - meteor swarm (for good single target damage), upheaval
Primal buffs
- Haste 3 is terrible and I’ll flat out say that. Takes too long to recoup value. Haste 7 is good.
- Longstrider I put on a wand
- I’m yet to be convinced by Protector Tree. It doesn’t have object immunities and allies have to stay adjacent to it. It says 10hp/level, but that’s more like 5HP/level seeing as the tree can easily be crit, or just hit on a high MAP attack. Precastable Healing is good and all but the restrictions on this one are a bit too tough.
- Stoneskin is pretty bad for the level of slot it requires. If I knew an encounter was coming ahead of time and that I wouldn’t have many encounters that day, I might cast it for action efficiency. The level 6 version might be ok when you have level 8 or 9 spells.
- Companion spells require your companion to actually hit. I’ll keep my free 50ft stride thanks.
- Organsight has too many points of failure for me. You’re obviously going to max medicine so that’s a non issue, but it takes two turns to pay off, requires you pass recall knowledge checks (so at max you get three uses before you can’t pass the check anymore - and woe be you if you fail one due to rarity or whatever), and then requires you deal piercing or slashing with a strike or spell after. Also it’s self only and single target. No thanks.
- Elemental Gift is fly but better. It’s reasonable. I usually use items rather than spells for flight, though.
And battleforms are also pretty terrible out of a slot. Wild Shape can be ok (well… highly dependent on rulings) because it’s a focus spell, but I’m not spending a max slot for those benefits.
Also most of the spells you listed are arcane as well (except the healing ones), which also has much better buffs (invisibility/disappearance) and debuffs.
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...Same AP except one of my players was a blaster wizard - likely using, or at least trying to use - the same spells the Druid would be using. It would be pointless to count up the damage numbers on spells like Chain Lightning or Eclipse Burst because the problem was the relevancy of the damage dealt rather than the number. As is standard with damage, no point of damage actually matters against the last one, so dealing 50 damage to 5 dudes is pointless until you start hitting dudes 2-5, and even then it’s only got a point when you actually deal the necessary quantity of damage to kill them. Before that, the spell essentially was a waste of a turn - and that was largely the problem my group had with blasting. You cast a spell and it doesn’t actually reduce the threat of the enemies until you spend enough turns to actually kill off one or two, which is usually on the second or third round. Especially when you get to higher levels and everything has metric tons of HP.
Most of the value of blasting is concentrated in the back half of the combat, when the outcome is already decided and you’re just cleaning up the few weak mooks that remain.
The day the wizard switched from casting Chain Lightning and Eclipse Burst to casting Slow 6 and Paralyze 7 was the day that the party no longer felt much threat in combat - well, when he remembered to cast those spells at least. He still tried to do damage with slotted spells occasionally and it would always come back to that problem - using blasting spells did nothing until later.
Now, granted, I never started combat more than 120 feet away. It would be pointless to see my players start 600 feet away and roll out volleys of longbow shots at smaller penalties while the enemies have to get closer. If they could infinitely kite the enemies (such as what happened to some monsters in book 3) by running and gunning, I’d just call the encounter at the end of round 1 - there’s no reason to continue the fight, and no reason to expend resources
You’d be using wild shape for combat pretty often then? IME needing to use slots that high level for blasting tends to run you flat, especially in APs with like 10enc/day. Was another problem my wizard player ran into - launching off two chain lightnings because the first one didn’t have great effect, even with a few Fs, is a lot of resource to spend on one encounter when there’s 9 other ones to go.
I’ll concede that blasting may be more useful if you have 4 or less encounters in a day and can afford to be spending high level spells at that rate.
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I'll say I have a very similar experience to Exocist as far as blasting vs control goes. Past level 5-ish which is the high point for blasting, it, and trying to do damage as a caster in general, became things to do for recreational purposes (seeing big numbo) than actually trying to win. Monster HP scales too much and control spells get too powerful.
The difference between not having a dedicated control caster in the party and having one was muddy tap water to 300 year old fine wine. While a Primal damage-focused caster would have done an okay amount of damage to a bunch of enemies, an Arcane or Occult controller would have the encounter pretty much solved and reduced to cleanup by the end of round 2.
...Same AP except one of my players was a blaster wizard - likely using, or at least trying to use - the same spells the Druid would be using. It would be pointless to count up the damage numbers on spells like Chain Lightning or Eclipse Burst because the problem was the relevancy of the damage dealt rather than the number. As is standard with damage, no point of damage actually matters against the last one, so dealing 50 damage to 5 dudes is pointless until you start hitting dudes 2-5, and even then it’s only got a point when you actually deal the necessary quantity of damage to kill them. Before that, the spell essentially was a waste of a turn - and that was largely the problem my group had with blasting. You cast a spell and it doesn’t actually reduce the threat of the enemies until you spend enough turns to actually kill off one or two, which is usually on the second or third round. Especially when you get to higher levels and everything has metric tons of HP.
Most of the value of blasting is concentrated in the back half of the combat, when the outcome is already decided and you’re just cleaning up the few weak mooks that remain.
The day the wizard switched from casting Chain Lightning and Eclipse Burst to casting Slow 6 and Paralyze 7 was the day that the party no longer felt much threat in combat - well, when he remembered to cast those spells at least. He still tried to do damage with slotted spells occasionally and it would always come back to that problem - using blasting spells did nothing until later.
Now, granted, I never started combat more than 120 feet away. It would be pointless to see my players start 600 feet away and roll out volleys of longbow shots at smaller penalties while the enemies have to get closer. If they could infinitely kite the enemies (such as what happened to some monsters in book 3) by running and gunning, I’d just call the encounter at the end of round 1 - there’s no reason to continue the fight,
It depends on the fight.
As I see the druid is constantly doing damage to multiple targets almost every round with a combination of abilities. They have high quality focus spells. High quality sustained and direct damage spells. They have access to a weapon or can easily obtain access to bows via ancestry feats. Their builds are highly effective for dealing damage. They have access to electric arc the best damage cantrip if two or more targets are available and it is save based.
I didn't go in expecting the druid to be a top tier damage dealer. I was recording damage to see how a ranger precision archer, a giant instinct barbarian, and a wit swashbuckler did in comparative damage. The occult witch wasn't even on the charts. But battle after battle the druid was coming out on top. It wasn't any single source though obviously AoE spells was a big spike in battles where they were used. It was really just the combination of abilities with tempest surge often employed against single targets with a bow shot or electric arc against multiple targets with a bow shot. It was a maxed out bow with energy runes.
At higher level it was dragon form martial combat combined with a breath weapon every 1 to 4 rounds which can also critically fail for damage.
It all adds up to a surprising amount of damage when tabulated at the end of a battle. The druid changed the entire way I think about building a damage caster and the value I put on a weapon for a caster.
- Haste 3 is terrible
Not really. Its just that it is a buff that you should precast. Otherwise its only worthwhile if the combat is going to be long.
Likewise StoneSkin.
Protector Tree. Is a level 1 spell, and its likely permanent. For its level its not bad.
Companion spells require your companion to actually hit. I’ll keep my free 50ft stride thanks
For sure the mount is the best bang for buck gain with the companion. But Clone Companion is another melee chunk to stand in front of you. Some parties like that. Companions attack are a few points of to hit down on martials. But that is still not bad. Even if you value their attack at only 50% of a Strike that is not nothing.
Organsight has too many points of failure for me. You’re obviously going to max medicine so that’s a non issue, but it takes two turns to pay off, requires you pass recall knowledge checks (so at max you get three uses before you can’t pass the check anymore
That is not true. The Recall Knowledge here is a Special check and you roll the same one again. But I agree the limitation on one enemy hurts. I've probably overrated this.
And battleforms are also pretty terrible out of a slot.
a battle form out of a slot is a utility only or it is in your top slot. Its not a bad thing to have one of.
Also most of the spells you listed are arcane as well (except the healing ones), which also has much better buffs (invisibility/disappearance) and debuffs.
Well I didn't list the various healing spells arcane doesn't have as people are aware of these.
Yes there is a lot of overlap between lists. I mean every list has a moderate number of summons and several battle forms now. But really that is the point. You can play a cleric in the style of a wizard. You can play a primal control caster. You can play a primal caster and never cast a direct damage spell. They work. Yes the arcane list is larger, but the difference with the other lists is not that much, because they all have so many options now.
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Even with crit failed saves, enemies at higher levels have such a ridiculous amount of HP that you’d need a crit failed save followed by 2 hits or a crit to kill a mook. It’s utterly silly how much HP enemies have at that point. For instance, at level 13, your blasting spell does 13d6 usually (gonna discount Chain Lightning because of restrictions and because I hate the RNG on it) - or about 45.5 damage. A crit fail would do 91 damage - if they even crit fail, it’s honestly not that common even on -2s - a fighter hits for, at best, 3d12+2d6+9 (35.5) damage. The level 9 monster has 155 hp on average. This only gets worse as you level from there, from needing a crit to a crit and a hit and eventually 2 crits (or more) from the fighter to finish the thing. Those are pretty low probability odds.
Or alternately, if they crit failed against Fear - a level 3 spell that I don’t even need to upcast - they’d be out of the fight for 2 rounds (one fleeing, one returning) and would have no threat in the encounter during that time. If they crit failed against Slow 6, they’d be basically out of the encounter (slowed 2 makes it trivially easy to avoid their attacks).
Your damage calculation is a bit low, as most spells do more than 2d6 per level at level 13 and you have damage bonuses like Dangerous Sorcery to account for. On the other hand, you don't always use your highest level spell.
You also don't take into account the fact that Fear and Slow have a 30ft range. So you will hardly affect all enemies unless you also go for a metamagic action. This extra action can be used for a damaging one action cantrip and there are many. So, the monster that crit fail is actually one slash away from death at the end of your round.You say that the crit failing monster is not there for 2 rounds, that's true. But all the other monsters are just Frightened 1/2 or Slowed 1. Sure, it's crippling, but at the same time it doesn't put you closer to the end of the fight. At the end of the day, you still need to damage the enemies to actually kill them. And if you don't do it fast, at some point they recover from your spell so you need to cast more spells to maintain your debuff.
Overall, I find that it's perfectly balanced. If damaging spells were killing enemies on a crit fail, there would be no point to use any debuff spell as Dead is the best condition to give.
I also think it goes back to the tier you put the Cleric at. If you use debuff a lot, combats become longer. Sustained healing becomes more important as you need to maintain the party alive against tons of low damage. In my opinion, it's a strategy that is working fine, but there are other strategies that make blasting shine. Having 2 blasters for example, as now most enemies will be one slash away from death if you mop the battlefield with fire.
Cleric healing is really good. The cleric lacks mobility and doesn't operate at great range, though you can buy them reach spell. Their feat builds aren't that interesting as well.
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Bringing it back to the topic of the OP, I think Fighters being arguably the strongest melee is fine. They're a FANTASTIC newbie class now, unlike in PF1, being extremely straightforward and rewarding. I liked being able to tell my new player who is entirely new to TTRPGs that the simple class is also quite strong and hard to mess up, so they didn't fear dragging the team down.
They're not far enough ahead that it breaks the game, or stops people who want to play a character with a different theme from doing so, but they're strong enough that people who just *have* to be the best at hitting things can play one. In exchange they get pretty limited goodies beyond hitting things.
If people in your own games are feeling overshadowed by the fighter, that's more of a table issue. As the OP states, it's more of a feels vs reals thing for many levels, so mechanical adjustments are necessarily going to be appropriate, but if it makes your table feel better you could have a gentleman's agreement not to play fighters. If that's not enough, and the feels are strong enough, I might consider tweaks like Fighters needing to get an AC+11 to crit, or something like that.
Yet it repeatedly shows up in APs - AoA, ExC, Edgewatch, Ruby Phoenix B1 (B2 is 1 enc/day, B3 haven't read through yet).Primal is for those who want blasting + healing.
10 encounters a day ? That seems pretty far from encounters' guidelines.
Please quote the exact line where that is shown, without it being an extrapolation made for the sake of "realism".
Please quote the exact line where that is shown, without it being an extrapolation made for the sake of "realism".Yet it repeatedly shows up in APs - AoA, ExC, Edgewatch, Ruby Phoenix B1 (B2 is 1 enc/day, B3 haven't read through yet).Primal is for those who want blasting + healing.
10 encounters a day ? That seems pretty far from encounters' guidelines.
What do you mean? If you're in a dungeon, you can easily do 10 encounters a day. Unless you look at a dungeon room as not an encounter and a dungeon level as an entire encounter.
There are times when it's appropriate to pull back, but other times it really doesn't fit. I'm in a module right now where once you enter, you're pretty much committed to finishing or you're going to lose the objective.
Then again there are times when you face one encounter a day and that means the whole party can just unload and be fine.
There is no real number of encounters per day in modules or adventures. It's what the overall design of the objective is and how much time you have to get it done.
Could be one encounter, could be 4, could be 10. The objective must be accomplished within the timeframe given.
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I've seen such crazy adventuring days in at least one AP. 14 encounters in a raw. You can't play any resource limited character through that and have any kind of fun.
Going up to 7 fights is hard for resource-contrived classes, but at least it's doable. Over that, it's mostfly painful for no valid reason (especially at low level).
I put this kind of design in the same basket than having 7 consecutive fights with Precision-immune enemies, or 7 fights against fliers. Not fun at all for half of the party.
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The Slithering flashbacks...
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The difference between not having a dedicated control caster in the party and having one was muddy tap water to 300 year old fine wine.
Completely agree with this, but as Deriven Firelion said earlier, a Druid is not supposed to be substituting a control oriented Arcane or Occult caster, they are meant to complement each other.
If you think in pairs, Occult + Primal and Arcane + Divine are the best pairings as they have the least overlap. Instead of looking at things in a vacuum, look at it in regards of how would you build an actual group. Druid for me is a clear winner there as it complements the best non-damage list (and Bard most especifically, arguably the best caster in the system) the best. I also prefer the approach of having the casters more focused on their role instead of the merge between control and damage that would occur with an Arcane + Divine pairing, but that's a me thing.
A control caster is a must in any optimized party and a damage oriented caster is not, but not because one is good and the other is bad, but because the role a damage oriented caster does can also be covered by any other damage dealing class and the role of a Bard or a control and debuff Wizard or Sorcerer can't.
Hitting elemental weakness with slotted spells is a scam past low levels anyway - your martials do it better and more consistently than you.
Should have explained myself better. Triggering weaknesses while dodging resistances and immunities is the real benefit. A martial can't decide most of the time to just swap its weapon with how runes work. I agree that a magus specifically is better at doing this, but they can't cast battlefield control spells and other type of math swinging spells as usual and as consistent as a full caster can.
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I agree. The thing with damage is that all classes can do it and a lot of players focus only on that. The result being that it may feel less useful than other types of contribution... until you end up in a party with so low damage that you can't kill the enemies anymore.
PF2 is balanced around every type of contribution being important but too much of a type of contribution bears diminishing return. So you need to properly balance your party to contribute in as much domains as possible without going too much in a single domain.
That's actually my main criticism against Cleric. The class is all about healing, but I think it's more optimized to have 2 secondary healers in a party than one single primary healer.
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Please quote the exact line where that is shown, without it being an extrapolation made for the sake of "realism".Yet it repeatedly shows up in APs - AoA, ExC, Edgewatch, Ruby Phoenix B1 (B2 is 1 enc/day, B3 haven't read through yet).Primal is for those who want blasting + healing.
10 encounters a day ? That seems pretty far from encounters' guidelines.
10 encounters a day doesn't strike me as the norm for APs. Usually you get a dungeon with no real time table for how long you need to take. So while you often CAN do 10 encounters in a day, I'd rarely say you have to or that it is even advisae.
However,
Later on, there's 4 encounters chained together followed by a point you could potentially rest... If you are ok with leaving some folks imprisoned by slavers for the night. If you decide to immediately free them (not an unreasonable call for heroes to make, especially before they can be moved) then you're chaining another 4 or 5 encounters.
Extinction Curse book 1 chains a lot of encounters for the opening as well. Book 2 opens with a pretty big chain as well. Neither has an explicit timetable, but there's definitely some narrative pressure to finish both runs before your group can comfortably sleep.
I'll stress again this isn't the norm, though. Heck, book 2 is mostly 1 a day encounters, and it is explicitly said to be intended there.
I think trying to guage encounters per day is a bit silly because there shouldn't be a "normal" number. Keeping things varied keeps it interesting and keeps players guessing.
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What I've always liked about damage spells is that you don't have to go over to where the enemy is.
If you're evaluating damaging spells by comparing them to melee weapons, well of course the weapons are gonna win the race. But compared to archery? I think it's a much closer call. And archery is kinda hedged into piercing weapons, and precious metal ammo is not-funny expensive.
If I see one enemy nearly dead over on the left side of the room and another one on the right, I can electric arc both of them. If I had to walk to the left first, I'd be out of position after the attack.
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Please quote the exact line where that is shown, without it being an extrapolation made for the sake of "realism".Yet it repeatedly shows up in APs - AoA, ExC, Edgewatch, Ruby Phoenix B1 (B2 is 1 enc/day, B3 haven't read through yet).Primal is for those who want blasting + healing.
10 encounters a day ? That seems pretty far from encounters' guidelines.
Of course, you can just allow your players to rest and break the narrative flow if you want, but my experience has been that the players aren’t sure that they can rest either. And if they can rest once without penalty, even under “pressure” are they ever sure what to believe. I can list out what is happening is ExC - resting in that AP is made really hard because there is always “pressure” going on, so letting the players rest is more a case of the GM breaking the given narrative to allow the players to get their resources back. Is it more fun? Probably, but also I can’t imagine that they would have written it in such a way unless they intended you to do it all in one shot (otherwise they would have put designated safe zones like in ExC B1C4).
10 encounters is not much unless they are all insane encounters. It's usually a mix of weak and strong. In weak encounters, you really don't have to blow out resources. I'm used to PF1 and I play PF2 in one aspect similar to PF1: I conserve resources until they are needed. I don't see the point in blowing off spells if the martials can easily clear the encounter.
I still tend to see martials as the hyped up grunts of the adventuring party. They're always ready to go in and swing or fire their weapons. While casters are the calm field generals of the adventuring group watching the battle unfold ready to apply the necessary pressure should the grunts have problems.
Otherwise, they spend their time chatting and studying their surroundings enjoying the travel waiting for the grunts to clear the path.
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Yeah APs sure do have a habit of putting 10+ encounters together, with a narrative that suggests that you really shouldn't pause. I mean, taking a 10-30m break in between every other encounter to heal up is already a serious strain on immersion, taking a night break even more.
Every time they've been challenged on it though the Paizo reaction has been along the lines of "yeah but we expect GMs to make it their own, adapt it to the pacing that works for their group etc etc".
But Exocist has a point; if sometimes you mysteriously can take a break as PCs, and sometimes you can't, while the narrative always seems equally urgent - what are you to do?
Personally I prefer a bit more tuned packages. Sometimes you get a few heavy encounters but that's all for the day. Sometimes it's really about a rolling battle room by room, trying not to give anyone any time to rally a response to the party crashing the place. If you're raiding a gang HQ in Edgewatch, it doesn't make sense to take two days doing it. I'd rather the encounters individually were made a level or so easier, but you have to dip a bit in the consumable bin to keep up your steam.
Although I'd aim for enabling enough 10m breaks, which allows to relieve Wounded conditions and regaining Focus, even if full free healing isn't on the menu.
Yeah APs sure do have a habit of putting 10+ encounters together, with a narrative that suggests that you really shouldn't pause. I mean, taking a 10-30m break in between every other encounter to heal up is already a serious strain on immersion, taking a night break even more.
Every time they've been challenged on it though the Paizo reaction has been along the lines of "yeah but we expect GMs to make it their own, adapt it to the pacing that works for their group etc etc".
But Exocist has a point; if sometimes you mysteriously can take a break as PCs, and sometimes you can't, while the narrative always seems equally urgent - what are you to do?
Personally I prefer a bit more tuned packages. Sometimes you get a few heavy encounters but that's all for the day. Sometimes it's really about a rolling battle room by room, trying not to give anyone any time to rally a response to the party crashing the place. If you're raiding a gang HQ in Edgewatch, it doesn't make sense to take two days doing it. I'd rather the encounters individually were made a level or so easier, but you have to dip a bit in the consumable bin to keep up your steam.
Although I'd aim for enabling enough 10m breaks, which allows to relieve Wounded conditions and regaining Focus, even if full free healing isn't on the menu.
Yep. I'm running Edgewatch right now too. It is definitely not friendly to breaks. You pretty much have to go in, hit heavy and hard, expect no real breaks, and you can't let the criminals escape. You have to have that mindset going in and make sure they PCs get used to conserving resources.
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I don't think that even with conserving resources it's really doable in many cases. If you need to do half a dozen encounters without breaks that let enemies regroup/combine/escape/kill the hostages, then those need to be much easier encounters.
Although in the case of Edgewatch it wouldn't break immersion if the city supplied the PCs with a substantial amount of consumables needed to power through such raids. Which is kinda what we're doing in our campaign.
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10 encounters is not much unless they are all insane encounters. It's usually a mix of weak and strong. In weak encounters, you really don't have to blow out resources. I'm used to PF1 and I play PF2 in one aspect similar to PF1: I conserve resources until they are needed. I don't see the point in blowing off spells if the martials can easily clear the encounter.
I still tend to see martials as the hyped up grunts of the adventuring party. They're always ready to go in and swing or fire their weapons. While casters are the calm field generals of the adventuring group watching the battle unfold ready to apply the necessary pressure should the grunts have problems.
Otherwise, they spend their time chatting and studying their surroundings enjoying the travel waiting for the grunts to clear the path.
Conserving resources is not that much of a solution. First, it doesn't change the fact that you will Electric Arc during 70% of your rounds, which is not the reason why I play a caster. Even martials have more variety as their Strikes are rarely vanilla.
And conserving resources for the "big fights" mean that you have foreknowledge of said big fights. When you see a single creature, you don't know if it's one of these crazy level+3 moment or just a level+1 speed bump. And if you keep your resources and discover it's a +3 boss, you'll have to spend twice more resources in the subsequent rounds as you are now fighting uphill. Unloading the big spells at round 1 is the best way to spend low resources during tough fights.I've once finished a dungeon with half my spell list because I didn't know there was no really tough fight in said dungeon. Thanks resource conservation.
Now, I personally buy truckloads of scrolls so I can last forever. That way, I play a caster for the whole dungeon. And if the GM forbids such style of play (by limiting gold too much or item accessibility) I just switch to a martial. I don't find any pleasure in playing a character who's just not a good fit for the campaign.
As a consequence, I rarely play casters in APs.
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When you see a single creature, you don't know if it's one of these crazy level+3 moment or just a level+1 speed bump. And if you keep your resources and discover it's a +3 boss, you'll have to spend twice more resources in the subsequent rounds as you are now fighting uphill. Unloading the big spells at round 1 is the best way to spend low resources during tough fights.
This is not entirely true. If you (the caster) don't go first, you have a very good chance of gauging enemy level just off the results of martial strikes or saves vs enemy abilities.
When you see a single creature, you don't know if it's one of these crazy level+3 moment or just a level+1 speed bump. And if you keep your resources and discover it's a +3 boss, you'll have to spend twice more resources in the subsequent rounds as you are now fighting uphill. Unloading the big spells at round 1 is the best way to spend low resources during tough fights.This is not entirely true. If you (the caster) don't go first, you have a very good chance of gauging enemy level just off the results of martial strikes or saves vs enemy abilities.
I disagree. Unless your GM is open about his dice rolls or the monster's AC and such, you won't have enough information after half a round. Luck will have more to do with the monster's efficiency than its level.
As a side note, the most deadly fights I've seen were nearly always starting the same way: A very tough monster rolling really low during the first round so noone uses resources just to ramp up the dice when PCs start to go low on life.
When you see a single creature, you don't know if it's one of these crazy level+3 moment or just a level+1 speed bump. And if you keep your resources and discover it's a +3 boss, you'll have to spend twice more resources in the subsequent rounds as you are now fighting uphill. Unloading the big spells at round 1 is the best way to spend low resources during tough fights.This is not entirely true. If you (the caster) don't go first, you have a very good chance of gauging enemy level just off the results of martial strikes or saves vs enemy abilities.I disagree. Unless your GM is open about his dice rolls or the monster's AC and such, you won't have enough information after half a round. Luck will have more to do with the monster's efficiency than its level.
As a side note, the most deadly fights I've seen were nearly always starting the same way: A very tough monster rolling really low during the first round so noone uses resources just to ramp up the dice when PCs start to go low on life.
If one of your martials doesn't hit on a 14 on its first strike you can easily guess that the combat is going to be hard.