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Investigator was bad in PF1. It's bad in PF2. It's a niche class meant for specific campaigns.
In PF2 the Investigator class is full of non combat feats that are largely only useful in specific types of games. However it is still a good combat class in PF2, it just requires some thought about options.
Investigator was bad in PF1. It's bad in PF2. It's a niche class meant for specific campaigns.Just as an aside, the Investigator (with one level of Inspired Blade Swashbuckler and Urban Bloodrager) is by far the most powerful character of the 1E CotCT campaign I am running and has been for its entirety, now going well into 15th level. It's not a bad class in combat by any means.
I guarantee you that class combination would have done nothing in the campaigns I run. Investigator was a weak class.
I'm not sure what you're running, but if your wizard or other casters aren't more powerful, then they build their character poorly. I could run off the type of my head a ton of characters more powerful than an investigator and several PF1 combinations that were encounter ending brutal if you were running any regular encounters and allowing any available options.
If you weren't a caster in PF1, you weren't going to be "by far the most powerful" character in any group unless that player didn't know how to build a caster.
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A lot of people defend PF1 with, "once you house rule it right and curate the right content, it works". It can for experienced players and an experienced GM, yeah, and that's a valid way to play. It works fine.
As long as you're willing to do all the system's math for it.
My 3.5/PF1 games me and my party had an agreement that all players help the other to build power characters to all players in order to entire party have a similar power level to help the DM to manage the game difficulty. We used to take 1-3 sessions only to build the chars and test then to prevent that no ones will be behind in terms o power level then the DM could adapt the encounters to ours power levels (usually increasing the CR) to keep the game challenging without TPK or constantly kill a party member due the balance difference.
You don't know how happy my players was when they noticed that the no more need to do this to play PF2. They can build almost freely without afraid to be weak or too strong over other party members.
The only complain some of my players have currently about PF2 is the spellcasters being weak as a resource limited characters. In the beggining they basically try to solve this trying to sleep after every encounter (kkkk), they don't care too much about complete the quests in normal speedy way instead if they need to stop or retreath to increase their survival they do and then they try to workaround the quest in some other way.
To diminish this recently I houseruled a MP system based in wizard staff charges rules, D&D 5e alternative MP system and tormentaRPG/20. This basically endend the casters complains about low high spellslot limit compared to martials.
One of the claims I find most ludicrous is that casters were better martials at fighting in PF1. They weren't. One high level dispel, goodbye martial ability.Dispels were relatively rare, still needed a check to succeed, and could easily be undone with a simple recasting.
I myself played a 15th-level wizard with a base attack bonus of +26. Casters being better martials in 1st Edition, at least at higher levels, was not ludicrous, but emphatically, undeniably true.
Summoning is far worse. But it was too good in PF1. It is now too bad in PF2. Summoning needs some fixing.Summoning in 2e is much reduced than 1e, but is not as bad as people make it out to be. I see it used very successfully more often than not. When I do see it fail, it's usually due to bad teamwork or strategy than it is the fact that a summoning spell was used.
As far as dead options go, there were so many dead options in PF1 that it far exceeds PF2. Book after book of dead options in PF1. My group used to buy a book and hope to find one or two things to use.Ugh. Us too.
The math is bad in PF2? That's laughable. The math was far, far, far worse in PF1. Many times worse. When players can build characters with a 0 failure rate other than roll a 1 and do enough damage to obliterate dragons in a single round, the math is far more broken than PF2 could ever be.2e's math isn't just better than 1e's math, it's a damned masterpiece all on its own.
I specifically designed encounters to strip buffs, thus it wasn't an issue in my games. Every single major boss style encounter I designed like I would a player character with an enemy aimed at challenging the PCs and what would be necessary to stay alive in a world like the PF1 world. That meant the powerful ability to dispel and strip buffs.
It means that the entire ability of a caster to fight was magically based, they could not challenge at all a powerful enemy absent the buffs. So I stripped them or Disjunction to make it even easier.
I DMed a lot. I had to deal with PF1 PCs. So I became very, very good at encountering almost every attempt to trivialize the game.
I was doing PF2 style of design before PF2 existed meaning I made sure it was going to be a super rare event to end encounters easily.
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I guarantee you that class combination would have done nothing in the campaigns I run. Investigator was a weak class.
I'm not sure what you're running, but if your wizard or other casters aren't more powerful, then they build their character poorly. I could run off the type of my head a ton of characters more powerful than an investigator and several PF1 combinations that were encounter ending brutal if you were running any regular encounters and allowing any available options.
If you weren't a caster in PF1, you weren't going to be "by far the most powerful" character in any group unless that player didn't know how to build a caster.
First off, the Investigator is a six-level caster and one with access to some of the best buff spells in the game.
Secondly, this "ZOMG, casters dominate EVERYTHING!!!!111oneoneeleven!" attitude has absolutely never been borne out in practical play in my many, many campaigns I've been running. Yeah, we got powerful casters, but in my experience it has always been the melee/ranged characters who have been the ones wrecking faces at all levels of play, except maybe before level five (because many of these classes then really start rocking their stuff). Casters have their moments to shine, but the "My powergaming Wizard solo's the campaign" horror stories one hears so often about 1E never happened with me (I'll discount Wrath of the Righteous, but even there it was the martials one-shotting demon lords), and I got a group of people with some optimizers. I got some very powerful casters in my time as GM, but just as good martials, if not better. It surely wasn't because of the casters that I had to upgrade all the last module enemies in Shattered Star with mythic templates and rebuild some of them to absurd levels.
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I want to love PF2E. But I just can't.
We're way past anyone caring about whether they love or hate PF2 or what not. You want to play a current version of PF that Paizo is publishing, you play PF2.
You want to play PF1, you have ten years of published materials.
There are books for every version of D&D/PF ever made. You can play whatever edition you enjoy. A ton of material has been printed and likely in some digital format somewhere as well.
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Freehold DM was just sharing their opinion, and I personally value hearing it.
Anyways, I'm in several games with an investigator. They aren't useless. It's a very versatile class.
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Freehold DM was just sharing their opinion, and I personally value hearing it.
Anyways, I'm in several games with an investigator. They aren't useless. It's a very versatile class.
They are absurdly good on skills and their combat capability starts okay then grows incredible, when they get a mutagen and buffs like Heroism or even the polymorph spells. If you go with a dexterity damage build (and why wouldn't you?), they can have really, really good area control.
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I guarantee you that class combination would have done nothing in the campaigns I run. Investigator was a weak class.
I'm not sure what you're running, but if your wizard or other casters aren't more powerful, then they build their character poorly. I could run off the type of my head a ton of characters more powerful than an investigator and several PF1 combinations that were encounter ending brutal if you were running any regular encounters and allowing any available options.
If you weren't a caster in PF1, you weren't going to be "by far the most powerful" character in any group unless that player didn't know how to build a caster.
First off, the Investigator is a six-level caster and one with access to some of the best buff spells in the game.
Secondly, this "ZOMG, casters dominate EVERYTHING!!!!111oneoneeleven!" attitude has absolutely never been borne out in practical play in my many, many campaigns I've been running. Yeah, we got powerful casters, but in my experience it has always been the melee/ranged characters who have been the ones wrecking faces at all levels of play, except maybe before level five (because many of these classes then really start rocking their stuff). Casters have their moments to shine, but the "My powergaming Wizard solo's the campaign" horror stories one hears so often about 1E never happened with me (I'll discount Wrath of the Righteous, but even there it was the martials one-shotting demon lords), and I got a group of people with some optimizers. I got some very powerful casters in my time as GM, but just as good martials, if not better. It surely wasn't because of the casters that I had to upgrade all the last module enemies in Shattered Star with mythic templates and rebuild some of them to absurd levels.
I mean, it isn't about that martials can't be broken in 1e, its that casters can break game easier. (my players usually down play things unless they do oneshot modules in which case they test out wacky things. After one of those players swore to never again use magic jar)
1e is in general extremely easy to break and gm trying to fix it is kind of exhausting. (I spent multiple times hours to homebrewing enemies that died without getting chance to act <_<)
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I want to love PF2E. But I just can't.We're way past anyone caring about whether they love or hate PF2 or what not. You want to play a current version of PF that Paizo is publishing, you play PF2.
You want to play PF1, you have ten years of published materials.
There are books for every version of D&D/PF ever made. You can play whatever edition you enjoy. A ton of material has been printed and likely in some digital format somewhere as well.
Freehold DM was just sharing their opinion, and I personally value hearing it.
I guarantee you that class combination would have done nothing in the campaigns I run. Investigator was a weak class.
I'm not sure what you're running, but if your wizard or other casters aren't more powerful, then they build their character poorly. I could run off the type of my head a ton of characters more powerful than an investigator and several PF1 combinations that were encounter ending brutal if you were running any regular encounters and allowing any available options.
If you weren't a caster in PF1, you weren't going to be "by far the most powerful" character in any group unless that player didn't know how to build a caster.
First off, the Investigator is a six-level caster and one with access to some of the best buff spells in the game.
Secondly, this "ZOMG, casters dominate EVERYTHING!!!!111oneoneeleven!" attitude has absolutely never been borne out in practical play in my many, many campaigns I've been running. Yeah, we got powerful casters, but in my experience it has always been the melee/ranged characters who have been the ones wrecking faces at all levels of play, except maybe before level five (because many of these classes then really start rocking their stuff). Casters have their moments to shine, but the "My powergaming Wizard solo's the campaign" horror stories one hears so often about 1E never happened with me (I'll discount Wrath of the Righteous, but even there it was the martials one-shotting demon lords), and I got a group of people with some optimizers. I got some very powerful casters in my time as GM, but just as good martials, if not better. It surely wasn't because of the casters that I had to upgrade all the last module enemies in Shattered Star with mythic templates and rebuild some of them to absurd levels.
Then your casters don't build very well. I've seen this in action myself. They could build DCs so high in PF1 that casters didn't have a great need of martials around.
Not that the martials weren't brutal as well. I had a nice pounce barbarian or a ridiculous AC swashbuckler.
But they couldn't much compete with a mind blanked divination wizard whose initiative was so insane that going first against them was nigh impossible. If they attacked a weak save, game was over before it started.
If you have a group with some optimizers, then they would know how to set up a caster to handle nearly everything without the need of a martial character in sight at higher level. They need martials at lower level, but it reaches a point where they don't need martials. They are wasting their time or acting as weapons for the casters.
I rarely played martials in PF1. Of the 6 level classes I played the Magus and the Summoner. Magus was brutal. Not as brutal as a wizard, but brutal for straight damage and some utility. I did like the summoner. Summoner was a brutal class in PF1, very weak comparatively in PF2.
I played a lot of wizards, clerics, and sorcerers. You tough out the low levels until you rule the game.
Your anecdotal evidence isn't convincing. Plenty of my players played martials and the martials were strong too. But if the wizard wanted to kill them all, they would have been dead. If your investigator is your toughest character, you don't have many well built casters in your group.
Investigator can't touch a magus or a summoner in PF1 of the 6 level classes. It has zero chance of outdoing a wizard that knows how to build one well, likely not a cleric or druid either. Witch is also super potent in PF1.
Casters dominate everything has borne out in my many games. Every new book that came out I had to wait to see if one of the players found a new broken spell to wreck the game further on top of the ones that already existed.
I had to design encounters so martials would get to do something otherwise the casters would wreck everything. Even when I did design encounters to give martials something to do, I still had casters wrecking things.
What kind of wizards do you play? They don't make scrolls? They don't know what spells to get to wreck encounters? They don't bother wrecking the encounters themselves on purpose to make the martials feel better? Or are you playing in the 7 to 12 level sweet spot the majority of your time before it really starts to get nutty for casters.
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I would also say that PF1E(and to an extent 3.x) was unique in that this was the first time that the disposable income wars involved the internet and pirated materials. I had to deal with players wanting to use feats from books I had never heard of that I could find for review only if I went to a dodgy website. I also had at least one player edit a site that was being used for the game so that a feat worked the way he wanted it to do.
I'm not a 1E apologist, but this sounds more like a player issue than a system issue TBH.
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Freehold DM was just sharing their opinion, and I personally value hearing it.
Anyways, I'm in several games with an investigator. They aren't useless. It's a very versatile class.
Can you tell me what they're honestly expecting? Paizo knows everyone won't love the game. Paizo knows it's a big change. Paizo has been publishing PF2 for what? 2 years? Going on 3?
Is there a point to lamenting PF1 being gone now? It's not coming back. It's not what they're making any more.
People can enjoy playing an investigator. I'm talking from a pure combat power perspective as I usually do.
I played 3E/PF1 for ten years or however long it was out. I know it extremely well. I DMed the majority of the time. When someone stats falsehoods about the game, I know they're falsehoods.
The rules are set up for caster domination in PF1 as they were in 3E. It was even worse before they nerfed haste from allowing two spells per round casting and someone designed the Forgotten Realms Archmage.
PF1 reined it in some, but caster domination was still how the game ran. They were too many great spells allowing casters to dominate with incredibly high DCs.
PF1 was a fun game with huge balance problems that grew nutty at high level for martials and casters. Casters dominated mainly because their options were nuttier than the martial options and changed with the change of a spell.
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Then your casters don't build very well.
Or maybe the players want to play the campaign, instead of wrecking it for everyone. Even the guy who doesn't seem to understand that everybody is rolling their eyes at his third "old Aasimar character going on venerable with the Lesser Age Resistance alternative race ability" min-maxing. People still wreck with their characters without making the game un-fun for everybody else.
Your anecdotal evidence isn't convincing. Plenty of my players played martials and the martials were strong too. But if the wizard wanted to kill them all, they would have been dead. If your investigator is your toughest character, you don't have many well built casters in your group.
Yeah, well. Maybe you as a GM should have told them "Don't wreck the campaign and the fun of everybody". Also, your evidence is also just as "anecdotal" as my 20 years of GM'ing.
What kind of wizards do you play? They don't make scrolls? They don't know what spells to get to wreck encounters? They don't bother wrecking the encounters themselves on purpose to make the martials feel better? Or are you playing in the 7 to 12 level sweet spot the majority of your time before it really starts to get nutty for casters.
All the way up to level 17/18, i.e. to the end of adventure paths. Maybe I just got players who understand that the game needs to be fun for everyone. Even then it got pretty insane, but again, not from the casters.
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The caster-martial disparity debate has been thoroughly done to death. We have had literal hundreds of threads about it. I made an index for it somewhere a while back just to track the threads people had started about it. We don't need to derail this thread into becoming another tiresome entry.
Yeah, sorry. Let's continue with people bashing each other over whether they like 2E or not. :p
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The caster-martial disparity debate has been thoroughly done to death.
Has anyone seen my horse?
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Can you tell me what they're honestly expecting? Paizo knows everyone won't love the game. Paizo knows it's a big change. Paizo has been publishing PF2 for what? 2 years? Going on 3?Freehold DM was just sharing their opinion, and I personally value hearing it.
Anyways, I'm in several games with an investigator. They aren't useless. It's a very versatile class.
3 1/2 years, going onto 4.
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PF2 is the definition of if everybody is Superman nobody is. Its balance comes only from painting everybody into a box; hyper-focusing on combat balance while ignoring exploration, crafting, and social encounters; and removing the ability and desire of a GM to say, "Sure, roll for it." because such off-script moments ruin the balance. Your character is more mechanical than PF1 because the game expects optimization and you'd better not RP in combat or you could lead to a TPK.
Oh, and half the modules are unbalanced and present themselves as time-sensitive dungeon crawls while the game rules want lots of rest between fights and downtime for retraining.
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Regardless, the reason why PF1 math is "broken" is because its designed so anyone can play regardless of system mastery. The whole rocket tag and "broken math" thing is based solely on people hyper optimizing things beyond what the game is balanced around. Yeah the math will be broken if your group decided that the only way to play is that everyone has to play superman.
I think PF1's extremely high skill floor is a way bigger problem than the overpowered diviner builds, but agree to disagree.
I do think it's weird that in two back-to-back posts, I'm seeing a "PF2 makes everyone too samey, nobody's special if everyone's special" take and a "PF2 is balanced around everyone minmaxing, it's way too easy to make an underpowered character" take. Like, it's weird that two critics of PF2 could have seemingly totally opposite complaints about it, right? Those two criticisms don't go together.
One of PF2's big priorities is ensuring that there's a low skill floor. It's very hard to make a useless character, and very hard to make an OP character, because the game is based on simple consistent math and they're very careful to watch which abilities and bonuses show up when. Someone could easily criticize that saying, "Well, that makes things feel too samey," and that's fair, I guess? It's a valid feeling to have even if it's definitely not one I share. But it's a consistent idea.
If you're also going to say that PF2 demands optimization, though... well, you can't have both. Either PF2 gives everyone a Participation Trophy or it's Too Unforgiving. You have to pick one.
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removing the ability and desire of a GM to say, "Sure, roll for it." because such off-script moments ruin the balance.
It's interesting to me how "the game has no room for improv" has become a new complaint about PF2, when when the system was new it was common to hear people complaining about the exact opposite and the system wasn't nearly strict and explicit enough.
I feel like ultimately how much your GM lets you "roll for it" really comes down to their own preferences as a GM more than the system, though.
Your character is more mechanical than PF1 because the game expects optimization and you'd better not RP in combat or you could lead to a TPK.
I feel like this one is only half true. PF2 does, for better or for worse, expect a minimum degree of optimization, but hitting those notes is also relatively easy, significantly moreso than in PF1, since it really comes down to making sure you have a high stat in the thing you're good at and use your class features.
Not sure why RPing would lead to a TPK, that seems like another weird GM quirk, though.
Yeah the math will be broken if your group decided that the only way to play is that everyone has to play superman.
I mean, isn't that sort of just restating the problem? Having to carefully curate your character so you don't build yourself into a nonfunctional trap, or unexpectedly break the game's math by just playing is not really indicative of quality system design. Yeah, you can have a well balanced and measured experience, but you're fighting against the game to make that happen.
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It is so easy to accidentally make a weak PF1 character even if you know what you're doing. There are so many testimonies on this thread alone about players having a bad time, either because they were new and didn't know there were mandatory feats or they took a bad archetype like Sandman.
I don't think I can maintain my presence in this thread, because I just... gosh, edition warring drains me. I like third edition and its variations, and I respect people who've assembled their own little list of house rules and allowed content and have gotten PF1 to a place they really enjoy, but I see PF2 as a third edition that checked its numbers.
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It's interesting to me how "the game has no room for improv" has become a new complaint about PF2, when when the system was new it was common to hear people complaining about the exact opposite and the system wasn't nearly strict and explicit enough.
PF2 doesn't define enough out of combat but is overly prescriptive in combat and in exactly how class features work. Look at the debate about familiars for the former and the entire melee Magus action economy for the latter.
I feel like this one is only half true. PF2 does, for better or for worse, expect a minimum degree of optimization, but hitting those notes is also relatively easy
It also leads to characters feeling the same as the vast majority of characters will increase exactly, primary stat + saves, every fighter will have the exact same proficiencies, there's no granularity to skills (and little enough use for having low ranks in lots of skills even if you could), no room for proper multiclassing.
It makes building a good enough character easy but remove the ability to ever build anything more personalized.
Not sure why RPing would lead to a TPK, that seems like another weird GM quirk, though.
Picture a level 3 party facing off against a severe threat. The tanky character drops, perhaps for the first time, and the cowardly rogue decides to cut his losses and flee. The rogue isn't strong enough to fight off even a fairly easy encounter if they run into a wandering patrol and probably isn't sneaky enough to avoid that patrol either. The party isn't strong enough to win the fight now being two characters down and everybody dies.
In a less extreme case building a pure evoker, an elemental sorcerer, or an offense-focused melee Warpriest are all options that are likely to weaken a party such that published modules become an issue if you have one or two players in a party who want to play this way but who also object to the DM making the game easier for them. The game doesn't leave a lot of room to deviate from its core assumptions.
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I mean a central problem in PF1 was that it was impossible to make an obstacle that was a challenge for someone who specialized in a thing while not being literally impossible for someone who dabbled, or to make a challenge being accessible to a dabbler but not trivial for a specialist. This is a problem with addressing.
Like I remember book 6 of Hell's Rebels featured a series of negotiations with the Chellish ambasadors where the DCs were something fully half the party could not fail at even if they rolled a 1, and the rest of the party could not succeed at even if they rolled a 20. If nothing else that this could happen organically because people figured out "this is a social AP" and decided to roll up characters who were socially adept makes it the adventure designer's job significantly more difficult.
It's also a good idea to make "the rules for skills, saves, armor class, difficulty class, and combat are all basically different applications of the same rules."
I'm confused of whats up with poster who has multiple Aliases that are variants of statements of "not Gortle" …
it’s an homage to Gortle
but yeah, I know a lotta peeps ain’t into homages
The math is broken in the game.I am curious what levels you've played through before reaching this conclusion. Or is this all white room theorizing?
current is an L1 - L19 run, which will include (barring another TPK, which will cause part of the crew to cache this out) L20 sometime this quarter
which is champion though over the past three years, the mix has included a varietywizard, witch, swashbuckler, rogue, ranger, monk, fighter cleric, bard, alchemist
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I think this is a misrepresentation of what happened. Pf1e sales dropped. The players were the ones who put 3.5 back in the trash. Paizo had to do something to avoid going out of business.Because the system was becoming bloated. Another revision more in the style of 3.5 -> PF1E would have been welcomed by people like me, who are now not buying PF2E products.
tru dat, continuing the 3e flame would have been welcomed by many
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It's also a good idea to make "the rules for skills, saves, armor class, difficulty class, and combat are all basically different applications of the same rules."
PF2 doesn't really do that though. If it did you'd have a classless skill-based d% system where you can earn points used to bump skills or buy feats for skills that meet a specified threshold. As is, there's a big difference in how the rules treat attacking or casting a spell and how they treat using Recall Knowledge.
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Picture a level 3 party facing off against a severe threat. The tanky character drops, perhaps for the first time, and the cowardly rogue decides to cut his losses and flee. The rogue isn't strong enough to fight off even a fairly easy encounter if they run into a wandering patrol and probably isn't sneaky enough to avoid that patrol either. The party isn't strong enough to win the fight now being two characters down and everybody dies.
That seems less like merely RPing in combat and more like one player actively refusing to participate and then the GM engineering a scenario to sabotage the rest of the group for it.
The notion of half the party not having great odds of handling a boss designed for the whole group isn't really a PF2 specific phenomena either (especially with the added layer of an extra ambush on top of that).
In a less extreme case building a pure evoker, an elemental sorcerer, or an offense-focused melee Warpriest are all options that are likely to weaken a party
Not really. Warpriest has some mechanical issues, but the former two are fine. Which turns this less into a systemic issue and more "this particular option wasn't balanced well", which is a fair complaint and one I've raised before, but a far cry from "If you RP you will suffer a TPK"
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I mean a central problem in PF1 was that it was impossible to make an obstacle that was a challenge for someone who specialized in a thing while not being literally impossible for someone who dabbled, or to make a challenge being accessible to a dabbler but not trivial for a specialist. This is a problem with addressing.
Like I remember book 6 of Hell's Rebels featured a series of negotiations with the Chellish ambasadors where the DCs were something fully half the party could not fail at even if they rolled a 1, and the rest of the party could not succeed at even if they rolled a 20. If nothing else that this could happen organically because people figured out "this is a social AP" and decided to roll up characters who were socially adept makes it the adventure designer's job significantly more difficult.
It's also a good idea to make "the rules for skills, saves, armor class, difficulty class, and combat are all basically different applications of the same rules."
And tightening the numbers so that gap is smaller is great. No complaints about tightening the gap. The issue comes in which gaps are tightened, by how much, and what the final balance point ends up being.
I much prefer it when the untrained has little chance, the expert has a decent chance, and the legendary has a great chance. But in PF2 the untrained have it impossible, the expert have a low chance, and the legendary have a decent chance. PF1 by comparison had 0 ranks = no chance, half ranks = decent chance, full ranks = extremely high chance.
Yeah, I think the treadmill of PF2 proficiency is a bit too tight. It makes it a game about specialists, which means you're not really "pretty good" at something, you're either competitive or you're not.
Part of that is design, PF2 suggests using static DCs that players can easily overcome from time to time, but often adventures don't do that.
And in combat I think it would generally feel better if success was more frequent but outcomes were more managed. Unreliability feels uniquely bad and I think the developers may have underestimated that a bit, because the result is a lot of times that if something is secondary or tertiary to you you struggle because challenges are often balanced for the best character in the party.
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That seems less like merely RPing in combat and more like one player actively refusing to participate and then the GM engineering a scenario to sabotage the rest of the group for it.
Is the cowardly rogue not a common enough character trope for running away to be a valid way to RP?
The notion of half the party not having great odds of handling a boss designed for the whole group isn't really a PF2 specific phenomena either (especially with the added layer of an extra ambush on top of that).
I'd argue that in PF1 a party, even at level 3, has better odds of avoiding that TPK than the same party in PF2 would.
Not really. Warpriest has some mechanical issues, but the former two are fine. Which turns this less into a systemic issue and more "this particular option wasn't balanced well", which is a fair complaint and one I've raised before, but a far cry from "If you RP you will suffer a TPK"
I consider how you build a character as an extension of your RP. Mechanics should be a part of how you express your character and that means. I would like it if a pure blaster wizard actually got to function and feel good rather than relying on the failure effects of their best spell slots when the going gets tough. Or for the single element focused, bender, sorcerer to feel like there's a path for them to be viable.
PF1 had a lot of bad content to be sure, but the content that was good was often good enough to allow even the most niche build to function and pull off their gimmick. In PF2 if there isn't a class or archetype for it (or if you just got one of the undercooked classes or archetypes) then you're SoL.
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Ooh, I love a good edition war thread.
I think pf2 is great for all those who liked to complain about balance issues of pf1, and for those who played D&D and are looking for something a little more in depth. I think it's also great for new players, who aren't weighed down by preconceived notions from past editions of the game. For those who liked the ability to have different characters with different strengths, it's really hard to give up the variety of pf1 for the more constrained pf2 experience.
It's also a jarring transition as though they appear the same on the surface, pf1 is a superhero game, while pf2 is more akin to something like the Die Hard movies. This is entirely due to the math differences between the systems. So if you come from pf1, pf2 can feel awful because you fail (dice rolls) so often (compared to the previous edition).
I definitely understand the op's frustration. In a system with low success rates, it's natural to look for every bonus you can. Pf2 is not laid out in a way that all the bonuses are obvious, and there are many options that work at level 1, but don't scale well, and these aren't obvious either. Not that pf1 didn't have those same issues, but success rate was high so you didn't feel the need to hunt for all the extra bonuses, and bonuses were easy to come by so that even mediocre choices could usually be boosted up to acceptable levels of success if you realized they were falling behind. So coming from that pf1 experience, pf2 definitely has its disappointing moments.
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I was too busy and tired yesterday to respond to this thread, and now I had to read through over 100 entries just to catch up. I see a lot of good answers and want to highlight them. But let me start with my opinion on the math, because I like math.
Pathfinder 1st Edition was built to be mostly backwards compatible with Dungeons & Dragons 3.5. It used the same engine for the rules, such as one standard action and one move action per turn that could be combined into a full-round action, plus assorted other actions to fit in. Thus, the Paizo developers knew of the mathematical flaws that already existed in the rules engine and could fine-tune the math. For example, they invented the combat maneuver bonus to improve the unworkable Grappling rules.
Pathfinder 2nd Edition had a new rules engine built around the three-action system and the four degrees of success. It unified the saving throws, base attack bonuses, and skill ranks into a single proficiency system. Because this was new, the developers did not know all the ramifications of the rules. They could not fine-tune PF2 like they had fine-tuned PF1.
On the other hand, when Paizo expanded PF1 with the Advanced Players Guide and other supplements, they built on the small foundation provided by D&D 3.5. And that foundation was too small for 10 years of development. New classes contradicted the old rules and needed their individual abilities shoehorned in. For example, in the 5th module of Iron Gods, I statted out masked vigilante Mockery, described as (CG male human ranger 7/rogue 5) with no stat block, and replaced rogue levels with vigilante levels. But PF1 Vigilante class used special Vigilante Talents that mimicked Combat Feats rather than using the feats directly, so Mockery's vigilante talents meshed poorly with the feats from ranger levels. (By the way, Still Not Gortle's avatar is a picture of Mockery.)
Paizo needed a more solid foundation for Pathfinder to expand further. Hence, they needed to start from the ground up with a new rules engine.
And I will say that the more I've learned about Pathfinder 2nd Edtion, the more I like Pathfinder 1st Edition.
Hello, Lord Fyre, glad to see you here. I enjoyed our conversations in the Iron Gods subforum. You might be interested that I am overlapping the aftermath of my Iron Gods campaign with my current PF2-converted Ironfang Invasion campaign: Any other fans of Pathfinder’s sci-fi elements? #67.
I handle Pathfinder 2nd Edition by viewing it as a work in progress. It is not polished yet, so I polish the rules myself with homebrew if the crude, unpolished rules would interfere with how my players want to play the game.
(from hidden behind a Bonus spoiler in comment #75)
Personally, my biggest issue is how many things are actively made to prevent what the devs see as "abuse". If it were a one-off event it could be easily excused, but its a consistent pattern. Its one thing to be balanced (balance is great) and give everyone options that are equally good (give or take). Its a completely different thing to make a maximum, then make everyone worse than said maximum, and then offer abilities that are worse still. That is not balance, it called favoritism.EX: A barbarian can cast Earthquake every 10 minutes. But how manhy loops for all casters to get an extra spell slot?
I agree about going overboard in preventing anticipated abuse. My most frequent houserules are removing the anti-abuse obstacles in the rules, because my players don't abuse the rules. And I will steal feats from other classes and offer them as custom feats for my players, though the Pathbuilder 2e program one player uses has trouble with that.
Though to make sure that I am rewriting unnecessary rules rather than necessary rules requires an enormous amount of game design theory and mathematical analysis. Fortunately, I love mathematical analysis. And the deep math in PF2 is solid, so I can tell the developer's intent.
.....but the math is the absolute LAST thing in the game that would be broken. It was made with the help of a computer science major.Apparently not one that understood variability or probability in general.
The underlying math is foundationally flawed.
For example, the discrete probability distribution is off - badly.
Off as in [yes, the following is anecdotal, yet I dare you to to the full math or run a simulator hundreds of thousands of times and then you’ll know] more character death and TPKs in the past three years than in the decades before that.
All but all via the RNG, not poor player choices or the like.
This is a problem which I doubt will ever be addressed (because it’s so inherent and, well, foundational - it requires not some ‘remodeling’ but a complete removal of the structure, in its entirety, so there is nothing left, then rebuilt starting with pouring concrete; ok, that was some hyperbole yet only a modicum exaggerated).
Oh, we had gigantic discussions about this three years ago, when some players found they were frequently having PCs knocked unconscious by Moderate-threat encounters. We can view lots of players reporting on their experience as simulation data, though the data is biased by only people who write here reporting their data.
I myself was confused, because my players had no trouble. Which was my first clue. They had a combat style that relied on teamwork rather than on optimized builds. If they optimized a characrer, their goal would be to make a better team player.
Pathfinder 2nd Edition had a paradigm shift in combat. Power builds were all nerfed, both martial and caster. If a PC relied on being more powerful than an equal-level foe, then that PC was going down. My players did not do that. They used teamwork to create tactical advantage. That still works in PF2.
The underlying math is not foundationally flawed. The underlying math is balanced for a different, non-powergaming strategy, one that is very fun for my players.
PF2 is the definition of if everybody is Superman nobody is. Its balance comes only from painting everybody into a box; hyper-focusing on combat balance while ignoring exploration, crafting, and social encounters; and removing the ability and desire of a GM to say, "Sure, roll for it." because such off-script moments ruin the balance. Your character is more mechanical than PF1 because the game expects optimization and you'd better not RP in combat or you could lead to a TPK.
Oh, and half the modules are unbalanced and present themselves as time-sensitive dungeon crawls while the game rules want lots of rest between fights and downtime for retraining.
This is a solid opinion. Optimizing PF2 characters to be better than average for their level is so difficult that it requires great expertise and focus to achieve minor success. If everyone has to fit the mold of Superman, then everyone is the same.
In contrast, superhero teams like the X-Men or the Legion of Super-Heroes have individual specialties that they combine to neutralize enemies stronger than them. They don't have to all be Superman when one is Phantom Girl, one is Lightning Lad, one is Cosmic Boy, and one is Saturn Girl. That is how my players defeat difficult PF2 encounters. And they love non-combat skills, too.
My players built characters that could scout the Ironfang armies in my PF2-converted Ironfang Invasion campaign. That's exploration. And they learned to ambush Ironfang patrols via scouting for easy victories. They had to gather allies and organize towns to defend themselves. That's social encounters. The module Fangs of War is named after the adult black dragon who is a final boss. My players changed the encounter into a social encounter and persuaded the dragon to break away from his deal with the Ironfang Legion. Crafting is minimized in Ironfang Invasion due to the time pressure from the invasion, so I don't have any great crafting stories. Nor do they retrain.
As for rest between encounters, their tactics minimize damage, so a ten-minute Treat Wounds from the Ward Medic sorcerer with a Lay on Hands from the champion between every three encounters is enough. If necessary, a little deception in a social encounter will buy them time to heal.
I am worried about the Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition players who are trying out Pathfinder 2nd Edition this spring. The D&D 5 tactics won't work in PF2 any better than the PF1 tactics did.
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That seems less like merely RPing in combat and more like one player actively refusing to participate and then the GM engineering a scenario to sabotage the rest of the group for it.Is the cowardly rogue not a common enough character trope for running away to be a valid way to RP?
Pathfinder is a team game, so no.
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This is a solid opinion. Optimizing PF2 characters to be better than average for their level is so difficult that it requires great expertise and focus to achieve minor success. If everyone has to fit the mold of Superman, then everyone is the same.
In contrast, superhero teams like the X-Men or the Legion of Super-Heroes have individual specialties that they combine to neutralize enemies stronger than them. They don't have to all be Superman when one is Phantom Girl, one is Lightning Lad, one is Cosmic Boy, and one is Saturn Girl. That is how my players defeat difficult PF2 encounters. And they love non-combat skills, too.
I feel like my issue with PF2 is that the divide between classes is too sharp and artificial and that too much of it gates things a skilled warrior should just be able to do behind feats or other hoops. It doesn't make sense to me that, for example, a high-level fighter can never figure out the ranger's knack for hunting prey or that only a thief rogue can use dexterity as a damage modifier when the more combat-focused swashbuckler cannot. The niches seem like invisible walls in a video game, a frustrating design choice that should be avoided when possible.
Plus, it doesn't help that aside from a single stat, Phantom Girl, Lightning Lad, et al. will all rank up Dex, Con, and Wis at every opportunity while being likely to have the same general feats. There's little room for expressive character building with PF2 because often a concept can only be done with a single class and if you don't like how that class was built, that's too bad.
In 3.x/PF1 a new player could describe what they wanted or name a character from fiction and there's a good chance you could build it for them with little compromise. That's just not the case in PF2 and I feel the system is less for this lack.
Pathfinder is a team game, so no.That seems less like merely RPing in combat and more like one player actively refusing to participate and then the GM engineering a scenario to sabotage the rest of the group for it.Is the cowardly rogue not a common enough character trope for running away to be a valid way to RP?
So is Cyberpunk, but that game encourages cutting your losses and cutting the group's dead weight out of the reward. I don't understand why this most balanced possible game* can't support a thing that happens in the genre fiction surrounding it.
*According to its fans.
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Pathfinder is a team game, so no.That seems less like merely RPing in combat and more like one player actively refusing to participate and then the GM engineering a scenario to sabotage the rest of the group for it.Is the cowardly rogue not a common enough character trope for running away to be a valid way to RP?
Think about the roleplaying afterwards, "You ran away and left us to die when the tank went down. You are out of the party!"
For the cowardly rogue character to be effective in a team, the rogue needs to gain a reputation for disappearing (and thus avoiding damage) and then suddenly reappearing with a timely sneak attack. The gnome rogue archer in my party does that. Everyone tries to keep the enemies away from her hiding place, because her arrows shot from hiding make the boss enemy flat-footed to the entire party, which is great. The players don't mind that her third action is always a Hide check to disappear again.
Then how is PF2 not a step back from PF1 which could tell a far vaster number of stories?A game being "balanced" does not mean you can tell every genre and story perfectly with it. In fact balance has nothing to do with it, your rebuttal is nonsense.
Pathfinder is a co-op game. "I'm going to intentionally screw over my party members" is not balanced or taken into consideration at all.
Because those vaster numbers of stories are about a teammate being a jerk to the team. The other players hate those stories.
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PF2 is the definition of if everybody is Superman nobody is.
Pf1 is a superhero game, while pf2 is more akin to something like the Die Hard movies.
PF2 is very much a high-fantasy, superheroic game. If a creature is just 3 or 4 levels higher than another, the lower level creature might as well be fighting Superman. In 2E. level determines power.
In 1E, character creation and system mastery determined power. It was fun figuring out how to beat the system and break the game, but that was only possible if the underlying system math was weak to begin with.
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Honestly, the thing I miss the most from pathfinder 1e as a GM is monsters with player level. Taking a troll, who's scary at low level but a chump at higher level, and giving him some fighter level was a great way to have "exceptionnal" foes from all kind of sentient species that get outclassed quickly. It was especially good to make them "unique", in a way a simple advanced template just can't do.
I've only been a player in 2e so far, but from what I've learn there is no way of customizing monsters like that, appart from building a new one altogether.
Familiarity with the system will allow you to do that pretty easily. You wouldn't believe how much can change by adding a class ability to a monster. Giving an attack of opportunity to a creature that the party "knows" doesn't have it can be a shock, and implies a whole lot going on behind the scenes. Where did this guy get the martial training? Why is it a cut above the others?
The "easy" way to do this sort of thing is to give the Elite adjustment and something along the lines of AoO, spells, sneak attack, devise a stratagem, or inspire courage.
The "hard" way is to start with a PC build and add the most important species features on top.
I've done both, with more confidence than I had in PF1, due to the math being more transparent.
This issue should be in a thread of its own, but let me give a few pointers. I have porting dozens of monsters with class levels from the PF1 Ironfang Invasion adventure path.
Creatures are built differently from player characters in PF2. The basic rules are in Build Creatures in the Gamemastery Guide. The creatures have excellent numbers for AC, attack bonus, saves, hit points, etc., slightly better than those of a well-armored fighter unless the creature is a primary spellcaster. The good numbers are balanced by giving them very few skills and feats. The creatures are designed for one or two tactics to be used in a single encounter, so they need only two to five feat-like abilities.
Incidentally, my players figured this out. Their teamwork tactics are to figure out the enemy's favorite abilities and then design their tactic so that it nullifies the favorite abilities. The enemy can't shift to compensate, because they don't have enough other feats. For example, at 12th level they fought the 15th-level Ironfang commander Scabvistin. He was an absolute master of melee combat, able to slice, double slice, and disarm with his pair of +2 greater striking tri-blade katars. So they did not engage in melee combat with him. They attacked him from the air, with the rogue archer riding on the back of the sorcerer in Dragon Form and repeatedly lowering his AC with her Precise Debilitation feat. Scabvisitin had a shortbow but it dealt much less damage than his katars. Creatures are weak if forced into backup tactics.
One interesting piece of advice is to avoid "invisible abilities, which does not mean invisibility. It means that everything the creature does has to look like an action to the players. Even a Recall Knowledge action should be narrated, "The monster seems to recognize what your sword and armor mean, and alters its path to avoid your Attack of Opportunity." An example is the Hobgoblin Archer. They are clearly 4th-level crossbow rangers with Precision Edge. But they don't have a Hunt Prey ability like PC rangers, because it is an invisible ability. They don't have Precision Edge because that requires Hunt Prey. Instead, they have Crossbow Precision, which mimics it more simply.
For giving a monster class levels, start with the monster from the Bestiary and raise its total level to the Bestiary's level plus the class levels. Consult the tables in Build Creatures to give it numbers appropriate for its levels. The tables have columns High, Moderate, and Low (ignore Extreme and Terrible). Select the column approprate for the class. Then search the class for the features and feats you want, but only about two of them. Add them. If necessary, simplify them or mixing them in with the monster's natural abilities to make them easier to use.
For example, imagine a minotaur, creature 4, with four levels of gunslinger. That makes our Minotaur Gunslinger 8th level. A 4th-level minotaur has "Fort +13, Ref +8, Will +10," which means High fortitude, Low reflex, and Moderate will on Table 2–6: Saving Throws, but a 4th-level gunslinger is expert in all saves, so bump up Reflex to Moderate. The 8th-level row on Table 2-6 gives Fort +19, Ref +16, Will +16. The 4th-level Moderate AC 20 becomes an 8th-level Moderate AC 26 in Table 2–5: Armor Class. And so on for all the numbers.
A minotaur attacks with greataxe and horns. I swap out the greataxe for an Axe Musket, because a gunslinger needs a gun. The melee damage from the axe musket is 1d8 S, less than the greataxe's 1d12 S. So the minotaur's axe musket melee damage will come from the Moderate column of Table 2–10: Strike Damage: only 2d8+9 slashing. That is still better than the 4th-level minotaur's 1d12+8 slashing. The minotaur's horn damage, 1d8+8 piercing, average 12.5, is moderate for 4th level, so it grows to 2d8+9, too, at 8th level.
The minotaur also gains 20 rounds of firearm ammunition.
A minotaur's special abilitiesa are Natural Cunning, Axe Swipe, Hunted Fear, and Powerful Charge. I read the Gunslinger's Ways to see if any fit the Minotaur Gunslinger. They do not necessarily receive a way. Way of the Triggerbrand fits well with an axe musket, so the Minotaur Gunslinger does get Touch and Go slinger's reload. But the initial deed does not seem worth adding to the Minotaur Gunslinger, so we skip that initial deed. And the advanced and greater deeds are beyond the gunslinger level.
Next, I look through the gunslinger feats. I don't find any that fit a minotaur with an axe musket. For example, even if it is making its own ammunition, it does not need Munitions Crafter, because the 20 rounds of firearm ammunition it carries is all the players are going to see. Then I spot Triggerbrand Salvo feat 6. That seems appropriate, Don't worry that 4 levels of gunslinger don't qualify for a feat 6, because the Minotaur Gunslinger is 8th level. However, Triggerbrand Salvo is too similar to Axe Swipe, so I drop the Axe Swipe. Thus, the Minotaur Gunslinger has five special abilities: Natural Cunning, Hunted Fear, Powerful Charge, Touch and Go, and Triggerbrand Salvo. It is mostly a minotaur with better abilities, but it has enough gunslinger abilities to be recognized as a gunslinger.