| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
A weapon draw archetype for my Iado fantasies, to incentivize weapon switch and draw slashing.
Same here, I want a weapon draw archetype so badly
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
Neutral Champions. All of them.
Being unable to play a Champion of Gorum in PFS is rattling TBH.
So many times, I go to make a character, realize what I want them to be is an LN Champion, and just scrap the whole concept. I need Neutral Champions terribly!
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
I've also run into the problem of wishing I could make LN or CN or specific flavors of N champion. I hope we get them (I also hope their mechanics and themes are more playable than the evil champions while we're there).
... I want more gear customization archetypes. Mindblade is cool, but I want more. An archetype for someone who crafts their own unique weapon. Some kind of gloomblade-esque thing. An archetype for wielding an intelligent weapon that grows alongside you.
Treasure Vault has alchemical flamethrowers in it and that blurb has me imagining like, unique pseudo-weapons designed to be wielded by non-weapon wielding classes. Imagining some special weapons that alchemists are uniquely qualified to wield that allows a player to build a more offensively minded character and have unique effects and compete in a very narrow way in that regard.
Alchemist with a Mr. Freeze style ice cannon or an acid thrower strapped to their back, fueled by their own alchemical reagents, allowing you to funnel your utility into a limited offensive capacity and lean into a more murdery design space...
IDK if what we're getting is anything close to that but I want that now too.
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
That might be a fun angle, actually - framing this talk as "what characters do you wish you could make, but currently can't?"
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
It's a great idea, but I'd encourage you to make a new thread for better visibility and topic cohesion.
With, bearing in mind a previous conversation between us, a gigantic statement discouraging replies along the lines of "you can play a magus already just MC wizard on a fighter".
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
More magic sourcebooks.
Sourcebooks for martials.
A dedicated "tech book". To be specific, (and this sort of reflects what I want to see more in design as a whole) I would want to see guidelines on how to make your own tech according to a "tech level table" or something, rather than just writing down a bunch of "generic" future/Numeria stuff and saying "this is the only stuff you can have."
That is, I would much prefer solid guidelines and examples, in order to provide both players and GMs resources.
Ps: Fwiw, I know the og tech book had that weird color system that roughly corresponded to "spell level" but that didn't really help at all, considering a lack of help on spell design and magic in general (but I digress).
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I'll do whatever it takes to get a full map of Arcadia; the one in Guns & Gears has been all I've thought about since.
Fallen Razatlan is, seemingly, comprised of Innazpa, Nalmeras, Razatlan, and Xopatl - but of those, we only know the last at all! Segada is one of Degasi's cities, tantalizingly hinting not only at the wider nation, but also three other allied Mahwek nations and a twelve-nation boundball contest! We don't know a thing about the Primal League or Salt Stretch beyond their names, and most Arcadian microregions are scarcely better off! The sooner we have enough meat to run campaigns there, the better.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I like to be able to build a Swashbuckler that uses a whip to trip and grab. One that is not themed as a gymnast nor is reliant on high strength. As that destroys the image. Perhaps Dex option, but really a whip option for athletic maneuvers for a cheeky martial. Clearly that ability would have to be tied to the class, lest it would ripple through the rest of the game.
Yes you can do a bit of it at the moment, it just not quite right flavour wise.
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
What I think I'd like, more than anything, is a Magus-like bounded-casting class for the divine casters, especially if like the Oracle it doesn't demand allegiance to the deity supplying your powers, kind of like how in terms of 1e rules Salim Ghadafar is TECHNICALLY an Inquisitor of Pharasma, but he is still a defiant Rahadoumi atheist and makes his contempt for her and the powers she gives him clear when circumstances force him to use them, as opposed to his own mortal cunning and his skill with a rapier.
Whether that class called Inquisitor, or Avenger, or Poor Fellow-Soldier of Iomedae and of the Temple of the Seventh Church, makes no difference to me. At the moment, the only other major option is the Pathfinder Infinite supplement, Clerics+ with their take on the Warpriest, and while that looks GREAT in my opinion, it's still a branch of the Cleric class, which is the divine class that REQUIRES you and your empowering deity to get along, and not all GMs will allow third-party materials, even ones that implicitly carry Paizo's blessing as part of Infinite.
| 4 people marked this as a favorite. |
Shaman class
Was not into inquisitor but the idea of a divine striker class is pretty cool
Darklands book
Tech Guide. Not just Numeria but I'd take it as a LO book. Tech Guide hopefully covering different types and levels of tech. Maybe not Golarion and would touch on levels of tech on other planets like the Akiton write up did in the AP.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I am more into the idea of a more broad offense-focused divine class, not sure what it would be called, but with Inquisitor as a subclass (sorry keftiu). I think there is design space for both an Avenger-type class and an Inquisitor class, but if I had to choose I’d rather have the former. There are a lot of gods where a cleric or champion doesn’t feel like the best choice for a divinely empowered worshiper of them. The way to play a holy warrior of Gorum right now is with either a monk or a battle oracle, but it doesn’t feel the best. I really want something along the lines of a 5e paladin’s divine smite.
I really want something along the lines of a 5e paladin’s divine smite.
Well... monk does have things like Ki Strike and Ki Blast? For a monk that's a divine caster, Ki Strike is at least getting close to a smite.
Whether or not that's satisfying rather depends on what you actually want out of it, though.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I am more into the idea of a more broad offense-focused divine class, not sure what it would be called, but with Inquisitor as a subclass (sorry keftiu). I think there is design space for both an Avenger-type class and an Inquisitor class, but if I had to choose I’d rather have the former. There are a lot of gods where a cleric or champion doesn’t feel like the best choice for a divinely empowered worshiper of them. The way to play a holy warrior of Gorum right now is with either a monk or a battle oracle, but it doesn’t feel the best. I really want something along the lines of a 5e paladin’s divine smite.
If it delivers on the fantasy satisfyingly, there's nothing to be sorry for! Having the mechanical skeleton is the most important part.
| 7 people marked this as a favorite. |
Sort of tangential but one thing I thought was really cool about the 4e Avenger was that it both did not wear heavy armor but was also predisposed to using very big weapons. Fullblade (greatsword+ basically, sort of the equivalent to PF1's butchering axe) was a really common pickup on them (albeit not entirely optimal).
And I feel like that combo of giant weapon + not a lot of armor is both kind of hard to pull off in PF2 and not super rewarding. Str + Unarmored is a thing for one type of Barbarian and one type of Monk and while anyone could max both Dex and Str that's kind of build expensive and still leaves you behind the basic AC curve for most of the game (and always worse off than just equipping plate).
It's a cool aesthetic combo and I'd like to see more support for it although to be honest I almost wish they just abstracted armor even further in PF2 since AC is standardized to the point of almost making it irrelevant anyways
A bit more general in scope, but better rules for creature creation, and the "blending" of sentient creatures into playable races.
| 5 people marked this as a favorite. |
Oh, it's a small thing, but a Fleshwarp-like Versatile Heritage would be a big help. I'd love the idea to inject just a little aberrant or mutant flavor into any other Ancestry.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Oh, it's a small thing, but a Fleshwarp-like Versatile Heritage would be a big help. I'd love the idea to inject just a little aberrant or mutant flavor into any other Ancestry.
As much as we like the choice to make fleshwarp an ancestry.(let me play my fleshwarp tiefling who was transformed by the waters of lamashtu). I do think a versatile heritage that lets you take fleshwarp feats or ones with similar fluff/mechanics would be wonderful and open up some more concepts.
Oh, it's a small thing, but a Fleshwarp-like Versatile Heritage would be a big help. I'd love the idea to inject just a little aberrant or mutant flavor into any other Ancestry.As much as we like the choice to make fleshwarp an ancestry.(let me play my fleshwarp tiefling who was transformed by the waters of lamashtu). I do think a versatile heritage that lets you take fleshwarp feats or ones with similar fluff/mechanics would be wonderful and open up some more concepts.
Adopted ancestry?
Not exactly common, though.
Drawn from a handful of video games, I've had this mental image of a combat alchemist who can do things like apply selective oils or concoctions to their weapon to exploit weaknesses. Similar to the alchemist, in terms of having a bag of tricks, but more martially inclined. Similar to the Thaumaturge, in terms of exploiting an enemy's weakness, but not abstracted entirely.
From trying to play one, an energy mutagen alchemist scratches the itch of shifting elemental types to exploit weaknesses (mostly), but feels kind of bad in combat when there's no big weakness to exploit and only really feels barely competent when it does. A bestial mutagen alchemist actually feels a lot scarier (especially when feral comes online) but is incompatible with energy and... sometimes I just want to wield a weapon.
Some feat options, a class archetype, or even specialization that improves weapon ability would be neat.
Or like, something that lets you like, power up a strike with a bomb (like the gunslinger's alchemical shot) ... because I realize bombs tap into a lot of this energy but again sometimes I just wanna hit someone with a weapon.
Just this sense that I've seen a few ideas that want a short sword or a hand crossbow instead of claws or bombs and... it's not great rn.
| 5 people marked this as a favorite. |
I’m definitely hurting for the body horror Alchemist of 1e. The one I ran for waaay back in the day focused on that, and there’s really no parallel in 2e at present. I can only reflavor a Beast Barbarian so many times!
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
Inquisitor and Shaman feel essential to me, and I'd be heartbroken if the curtains closed on PF2 before the Broken Lands, Golden Road, and Arcadia each got their moments in the spotlight. So long as those get crossed off in the years to come, my every expectation will have been exceeded, and I'll be giddy.
There's some other things that would be awfully nice - LN Champions are on the brink of edging into being in the category above, while I'd quite like Lashunta, Minotaurs, and Sekmin to all get the official Ancestry treatment - but they're not quite on the same tier. Southern Garund would be an absolute delight, but I don't need it the way I'm fiending for Fallen Razatlan.
I'm still blown away that PF2 is a game where I can make a Gnoll Magus, an Android Psychic, or a Nagaji Kineticist... check off "Wyrwood Shaman" and "Maftet Inquisitor," then I'm essentially sated.
|
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Ah here is one thing I remembered:
More gonzo! 1e and starfinder is really good at letting PCs feel like absolute weirdos, 2e flavor of abilities for most part is rather down to earth. Its part of balance I suppose, but it means there aren't as many crazy things PCs can do
| 6 people marked this as a favorite. |
I'd waive a wand and have a review/hard look at why everything needs to be on a sliding scale of success.
Our last session someone cast a fireball as the opening volley. Three people failed, and of those, two people critfailed.
Max 12d6 damage would've killed the entire party at level 4; and had the two people that critfailed not been a champion and a monk, they would've been burn iron stains on the ground. I understand fireball is supposed to be a nuke, but at this level, the druid (8 hp/lvl) that cast it would need to drop three boosts into con to be able to save *average* damage.
I'd have the entire counteract system be revamped to where you don't need a table (there wasn't anything wrong with d20 + CL [or for 2e, d20 + casting proficiency bonus or something]).
I'd remove the wounded category--I've heard it's supposed to solve "rocket tag" issues with 1e. Which it doesn't really when you just spend 10 minutes in the middle of an enemy base having a quick rest to remove it all.
Those are the large ones at the moment. I came into the system excited, but honestly, every game just feels like "how exactly am I going to die/get screwed over by the system this session?"
Sounds like a rough session, but what are the odds, right?
The sliding levels of success was one of the most popular and integral changes, subject to much playtesting and review. So don't expect it to be "fixed" except by yourself which you can totally do if your table prefers that. Go ahead, Paizo wants you to make any changes that make the game more enjoyable for y'all.
And under that system, yes, crit fails are bad, so bad they might drop PCs which is why there are Hero Points. Sounds pretty cool and dramatic IMO that those two weathered the fireball despite deep burns. Yet note if you change the math there it alters the math throughout the system for PC casters, which in turn strengthens martial roles unless you take crits away from them, which sort of imbalances the whole. And steals away dramatic moments.
The counteract system reflects the new paradigm of spell power in PF2, so don't expect it to regress to DnD/PF1 style. That is that in PF2 spell power comes from the spell's level, not the caster's, and save DCs come from the caster's level, not the spell's. The PF2 counteract system reflects this as it pits level X spell vs. level Y condition, something the d20+CL does not factor in. A high-level spell is a power investment, so IMO shouldn't be thwarted by a low-level counter. This goes for monsters that can spam counters at will too. Don't want some lucky minion (or sub-minion who shouldn't even be on the board, but would be because they can do such spamming) taking down a party's much higher level spells.
The Wounded condition is what's saving your life against those fireball crit fails. :-) Much better than the negative hit points IMO. It has nothing to do with PF1 rocket tag issues where investment in offense (and initiative) paid off so well that defense could be ignored (to a degree and depending on table). That's rocket tag, where whoever goes first can tag their enemy with a metaphorical rocket and win.
What Wounded does address is (among other things) is the yo-yo effect in DnD 4th (and perhaps DnD 3.X, PF1, and 5th though that came later). People could fall unconscious and pop up fresh with zero repercussions multiple times in a brief battle. It kinda undermined the dramatic and mechanical weight of downing an enemy.
Resting for 10 minutes has nothing to do with that time frame and ties into different issues like pacing and CLW wands.
If having a hard time so regularly, maybe the GM should dial back the difficulty level. The system makes that easy enough with passing out extra Hero Points being the simplest way.
| 4 people marked this as a favorite. |
Did you somehow miss the part of 3.5 or pf1 where you could just fail a save or suck/lose/die and just roll over? Losing to bad rolls isn't exactly new. Or did your GMs just never throw that sort of thing at you before?
I love the degrees of success mostly... But I'm not convinced that we need to have crit fail effects on so many skill actions, like trip. I get it, trip isn't strike, I'll stop using it.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Let's review:
GM builds sidequest adventure.
Players struggle due to tough encounters and long odds against those GM's encounters.
Player blames Paizo and system.
Player wants Paizo to "add" not-being-PF2 to PF2. In fact, player wants PF2 to mirror an earlier system where "long odds"/insta-lose were much more common, albeit less tied to direct damage. And it was harder for GMs to gauge encounter strength. And combats were often decided by buffs & builds before tactics came into play so you'd better have system mastery.
Sounds regressive and silly.
And as for that 5% failure vs. direct damage, back in earlier versions a "nat 1" meant damage to an item too, perhaps a pivotal one. Not to mention AoEs wiping out the inventory of downed allies, even if just a dropped weapon from being unconscious (and soon to be dead because you'd go so negative, while if Dying just advanced one stage you could recover (depending), albeit Wounded).
Anyway, was just about to sign off and hide the complaint thread when I realized how major a derail this has become from an uncomplaining thread. PF2 is as it is, with this thread about continuing its development, not altering its rules. Maybe start another thread if you want to pursue this; the Homebrew section awaits.
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
Which is different than trying to game the system to bank as many hero points as possible for inevitable degrees of failure how? Cya.And combats were often decided by buffs & builds before tactics came into play so you'd better have system mastery.
Yeah, real shame that the system has a built in way to try and avoid bad RNG instead of just killing you. Are you sure you played pf1? Because AoE save or lose/die starts at level 1 long before prismatic spells come into play. And no matter how high you manage to boost your saves, that 5% is always there, waiting to kill you.
If bad RNG is too much for you, consider games without RNG.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Oh, it's a small thing, but a Fleshwarp-like Versatile Heritage would be a big help. I'd love the idea to inject just a little aberrant or mutant flavor into any other Ancestry.As much as we like the choice to make fleshwarp an ancestry.(let me play my fleshwarp tiefling who was transformed by the waters of lamashtu). I do think a versatile heritage that lets you take fleshwarp feats or ones with similar fluff/mechanics would be wonderful and open up some more concepts.
On this, I would like a sort of "biomod" system as well, possibly in some kind of "Ultimate Alchemy" book or something.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
On this, I would like a sort of "biomod" system as well, possibly in some kind of "Ultimate Alchemy" book or something.Oh, it's a small thing, but a Fleshwarp-like Versatile Heritage would be a big help. I'd love the idea to inject just a little aberrant or mutant flavor into any other Ancestry.As much as we like the choice to make fleshwarp an ancestry.(let me play my fleshwarp tiefling who was transformed by the waters of lamashtu). I do think a versatile heritage that lets you take fleshwarp feats or ones with similar fluff/mechanics would be wonderful and open up some more concepts.
Absolutely! Let me play a weirdo with all sorts of gnarly implants - it's one of the big reasons I want "Book of the Dead, but for aberrations."
Back in ye olde 3.5, Magic of Eberron had a number of supernatural supernatural "grafts" player characters could acquire; I remember options for magical plants, "deathless" (positive-energy undead) flesh, and pieces of elementals all being in. Stuff like that, plus more general alchemical body horror, would be a nice complement to the clockwork prosthetics we've seen.
To say nothing, of course, of Numerian cybernetics, or whatever wild magic/skymetal tech Arcadians have surely found a way to fit into their bodies.
|
| 5 people marked this as a favorite. |
Hell, PF1 had the undead flesh-based necrografts, which you can acquire in Starfinder even (in quite a few varieties too, since any regular biotech augmentation can be acquired as a necrograft, on top of bespoke necrografts).
There's gotta be those in Geb and such, right?
| 9 people marked this as a favorite. |
I want... some really powerful skill feats for Perform.
Right now Perform feels kind of vestigial. It has two natural skill actions: Earn Income and Perform.
Earn Income is whatever, potentially useful, but also something often tied to a lore-equivalent skill. Perform, meanwhile is explicitly called out as doing almost nothing on its own. There's a carveout for GM fiat, but even that's discouraged by the insistence on saying that Perform "rarely has an impact."
And yet this is a 'full' skill. In terms of character investment, Paizo deems it equivalent to Athletics, Diplomacy, Intimidation, and Medicine.
But would anyone actually argue that Perform as written is as useful as Athletics or Medicine?
In terms of practical utility, it's unclear what Perform offers that couldn't be replicated almost identically by a similar Lore skill. The one obvious standout is that Perform is generic (so acting, singing, dancing, etc. all in one skill) but I'm still not sure that's enough to elevate it to the same level as these other skills.
... I've had a couple of players express interest in playing characters who are good at performing, but find that the cost of investing in Performance to be too high considering its actual value.
On top of that, Performance in general has very few skill feats. So I think there's some room to make the skill more interesting by adding some powerful skill actions to its repertoire.
I was going to say that there was a swashbuckler style that used performance, but... it's actually kind of terrible, isn't it? Like, if you *do* use fascinating performance, and then use the resulting panache to stab someone, you've just broken fascination. There are ways to leverage it so that it's not completely nothing(stab, then fascinate), but that's kind of damning with faint praise for a class path...
I guess it's useful if you're appropriately high level and you want a psuedotaunt that will draw the attention of the entire room but only actually works on spellcasters?
Maybe if you're playing a buff-heavy cleric (so that you can still contribute without making hostile actions and also have other reasons to take charisma), then it might be useful? Sort of?
| 5 people marked this as a favorite. |
It’s not a major need, but it would be nice to get Skalds back. I don’t want a ton of spellcasting, but buffing my team while I’m in the fray sounds like a lot of fun.
Inquisitor and Shaman are must-haves, but this is in a lower tier of “yeah, that’d be fun” alongside Bloodrager and Medium.