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Same with Planar Bond and Planar Pain. Planar bond has scaling damage resistance (level +2) while planar pain has +2 status damage.
It is somewhat rare to get scaling offensive bonuses. Non-scaling bonuses are usually fairly powerful already.
For example, Inspire Courage gives a fixed +1 status bonus and is still considered one of the best buffs in the game.
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Second, I am really confused why the offensive powers have no scaling?
Healing grace heals you half your level in flat healing, scales with you. Harmful malice gives you 1d4 negative damage, which while nice early is neglible later. Why doesn't it scale too?
Same with Planar Bond and Planar Pain. Planar bond has scaling damage resistance (level +2) while planar pain has +2 status damage.
Same reason Barbarian Dedication, Sneak Attacker, and Bespell Weapon never scale I imagine, because most offensive feats (though not quite all) don't tend to scale with level.
Part of it is that PF2 is really conservative when valuing offensive feats. Another part is that I don't think offensive powerups and defensive powerups serve mirror functions. For buffs applied PCs offensive boosts tend to make fights shorter, defensive powerups do not tend to make fights longer, they make fights less costly to recover from. Which I suspect is why the game is slower to grant scaling offensive boosts via feats, since fights getting shorter becomes anticlimactic more often than fights having shorter recovery times, and small boosts to speed up fights are more valuable than small boosts to speed up after-fight cleanup IMO. Especially with defensive boosts like resistances or fast-healing which don't impact AC since you're still getting hit and crit in the fight, you're just less hurt or getting better.
If you're looking to make the feat that gives a full-level harm spell and a damage buff scale up to +1d10, you should probably also scale Sneak Attacker, Barbarian Dedication, and Bespell Weapon up considerably as well.
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I really just wish soulforger where better, its so cool but having the payoff you get be a once a day ability prevents it from being a core part of your character, especially given the effect you get is like... half of a third level spell in most cases
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I used it for a she-ra inspired "magical girl" build and i just... rarely got much use out of the bonus, the transformation just became something i did thematically than a tactical choice of any kind, yeah the bonuses are super economic, and yeah some are pretty good, but the one a day restriction is really what rubbed me the wrong way
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Rise, thread!
Y'all. Don't sleep on Planar Pain. It is an incredibly flexible ability. It is DEVESTATING my Abomination Vaults encounters. Being able to target any weakness or resistance on demand is an incredible boon, and only doing it once a day is fine because you often only need it once a day. Assuming you're getting a standard variation of enemies rather than fighting nothing but humanoids, you usually average one fight a day where this makes a huge difference.
The ideal enemy has both a weakness and a resistance for you to double dip the custom damage type. So when you don't use it at level 20 to gain +2 damage. You use it on a pit fiend to gain +32 damage plus shut off its regen.
A magus can only use damage types it prepares. Alchemists are a bit more flexible, but they deal lower damage in the first place to make up for it. The soulforger can target an unexpected weakness better than either while retaining full martial damage.
This entire time I thought you had to pick Planar Pain beforehand, and then it couldn't be changed. That is much better than I was assuming.
Yeah, the wording there is tricky, and a huuuuuge game changer. Even out the gate, you're basically getting +7 to +12 damage per hit once per day, which is a great use of a second level feat. Really awesome with ranged and/or flurry builds.
You can run into issues if you rely on the soulforged weapon all the time rather than use it as a back up, but the Rapid Manifestation feat fixes that and then some.
I've chosen planar pain, planar bond and healing grace on my flurry ranger. I've not used them much yet (retrained beastmaster for soul forger @14th level), but in the last extreme encounter two of the three were very useful. Dismissing and manifesting isn't fun, but the added extras are worth the trouble.
You know when I clicked on this thread I forgot I was the one that started it, hah.
Falco, I don’t think you need to dismiss and resummon to activate the essence power. Although that really should be spelled out better (hence why I started the thread hah)
When you Manifest Soulforged Armament, you can summon any number of your armaments (you must meet the Requirements for each), and when you Dismiss the effect, you can choose to Dismiss some and not others. You can choose to manifest the essence form of any number of your armaments when you take the action. Each armament can manifest its essence form only once per day.
The above part of the rules disagrees with your remark, I would say. When you take the action of manifesting your armament you can choose to manifest the essence form. And to manifest, you need to have your hands free and/or no armor.
Extradimensional Storage: The armament is stored in an extradimensional space when not in use, and you can Manifest it to summon it into your hands or onto your body. A soulforged armament can be Dropped, Disarmed, or otherwise removed from you, but its soulforged abilities don't function for anyone else, and you can Dismiss the manifestation to return the items to the extradimensional space no matter where the items are. If you die or choose to pass ownership of a soulforged armament to a successor, it loses any soulforged abilities; violating the spirit of the soulforged bond by selling the item tends to have disastrous results. There might be special techniques or rituals by which a determined foe can break your bond with a soulforged item, but otherwise, your ability to Dismiss and Manifest it essentially means it can't be stolen.
I think the above implies that Manifesting is actually retrieving it from this extra dimensional storage. So dismiss/manifest needed.
But I agree extra clarity could be useful. Simple line mentioning manifest is only possible from the ED storage.
I think it's fairly clear you can't manifest what's manifested.
Bringing item A into being doesn't make much sense when item A is already existing. Except for its interaction w/ coming & going from storage, it seems to act much like a regular, singular item rather than soulstuff that one repeatedly refashions.