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So it is not a big "technically the truth" as the entire argument is focusing on one part of the game: attack rolls.
I mean yeah, that's the subject that was being talked about in that chain of posts. Moving goalposts when someone points out a problem with it doesn't really change that.
These threads seem to be started by players that miss PF1 casting power and like to focus on niche areas martials are better: single target damage.
I mean, yeah. Someone who's interested in doing single target damage is going to focus on single target damage. They're not going to talk about other stuff because that's not really what their area of interest is.
The wizard who's focusing on single target blasting isn't casting Wall of Force either, so who cares? It's not relevant.
I don't know what the success rate is myself. Based on rough experience, Reflex is usually lower than Fort on most creatures so I usually target Reflex before Fort.
It seems very few creatures have low Fort saves. Usually High to Moderate Fort with Will or Reflex being their weak save. Luckily a few Fort save spells don't have incapacitate and have an effect even on a success like slow.
AC is usually the highest defense. So you're best bet out of the gate is target Reflex, see what happens, go from there.
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I mean, classes moving up and down in power between editions is not exactly a new thing. If you're going to mess with power tiers it makes the most sense to nerf the most powerful thing and buff the least powerful thing. This is how, for example, fighters, monks, and rogues are good now.
The Kineticist wasn't the best blaster in PF1, that title probably went to specific wizard, arcanist, or sorcerer builds. What the Kineticist had in PF1, and is likely to have in PF2, is an ability to blast all day without resource attrition at a damage level that, while not the best, never stopped being meaningful.
The goal the kineticist is trying to fulfill is "I just want to specialize in an element and throw it around all day without having to plan a bunch of contingencies or manage resources." Nobody is saying it's going to be the best at single target or AoE damage, in fact it shouldn't be. The best single target damage characters should be martials, and the best AoE damage characters should be casters limited by slots. The Kineticist gets to be the best at some things, but it's limited to things specific to their element (e.g. the aerokineticist gets to be the best at flying, the geokineticist gets to be the best at walls, etc.)
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I don't believe .........Wow that's wrong in so many ways:
Wizards used to be the best blasters outside of Sorcerer's bonus damage arcanas. Way before Kineticists were a thing.
You could literally focus entirely on evocation and conjuration damage spells and never take a single utility spell and still be good.
A kineticist is a blaster, but its not the only way to be a blaster. I HATE all the "you can replicate a Kineticist by playing a Sorcerer with blast spells". I also HATE the opposite saying, "you can play a Blasting caster by playing a Kineticist". The three (Kineticist, Sorcerer, and Wizard) have entirely different playstyles you cannot say that only one of them can be a blaster. That straight up reductionist.
You are saying how people are mad that they can't play OP wizard. I played Wizard once (a shadowcaster illusionist gnome), my complaint has nothing to do with not being able to play "god tier" stop saying that's the case because its not. The complaint has been and continues to be that they went too far and made only Treantmonk's god wizard a good choice. The fact you can kind of maybe sort of play it is not fun.
It was not fun for martials to not have much options out of combat, so they gave those classes a ton more optione and nerfed the casters ability to do it. It is not fun that casters are now shut out of combat unless they do three backflips and a little dance like a joker. Is it so hard to want a game that sells itself on how balanced it is to offer comparable options for all classes? No, so why are you angry (it reads like you are angry) that people are asking for comparable options?
No. Wizards were not the best at blasting. They were just ok in PF1. If you were playing a wizard to blast in PF1, you weren't building very well.
The prime blaster in PF1 was sorcerer, usually cross-blooded taking two bloodlines that boosted damage. Then building up to Spell Specialization and Spell Perfection to quicken and empower with ease with a ton of stacked damage.
The wizard had the same problem in PF1 as they do in PF2: lack of spontaneous casting. This limited their capacity to be effective blasters. So if you wanted a blaster, it was a sorcerer or arcanist. I believe 3E had a battle mage type of blaster that could do well, but I haven't played 3E since I took up PF1, so even longer ago than when I last played PF1.
Now I quit playing PF1 before the kineticist came out, so I know very little about that class. The warlock in 5E was one of the first blasters designed as a sort of martial blaster with highly limited casting. A lot of people liked that class, but it was a relatively new addition to D&D for someone like me that has been playing since the little red book.
Very few people built evokers in PF1. They were too far behind sorcerers for blasting. You could get a little more casting power dipping a level of sorcerer since the extra damage was based on die roll of the spell, but you slowed your casting progression. The stacking could make for an ok blaster given evocation spells were half wizard level damage. But a lot of the best blasting spells were conjuration based because they bypass spell resistance and the wizard evoker bonus did not add to conjuration based blasting spells.
I made many a blaster sorcerer in PF1. I know them well. I tried a few evocation wizards, but they were so far behind sorcerers I'd rather not waste the time when a wizard could be built more effectively to do other things.
Even having played blasters in PF1, PF2 blasting is better out of the box. There was never critical fail double damage blasting spells in PF1 while I played it. You could get some brutal damage built up and roll lucky or use quicken easily, but none of this critical fail double blasting damage you see in PF2 even from cantrips or focus spells.
Now some of the PF1 attack roll spells were sick. One of my favorite combos in PF1 was enervate followed up with disintegrate as a wizard, which I imagine could be viewed as blasting. That combination generally was better on a wizard and it annihilated enemies, especially with weak Touch ACs.
Lack of Touch AC definitely weakened attack spells in PF2, but once again that was a needed changed because I can't count the number of times I ripped stuff apart with enervate against weak touch AC creatures. You stacked up those negative levels and it was brutal. Quickened enervate against non-undead and you were winning all day.
I'm not angry in the slightest. What I don't enjoy is falsehoods, basically either due to lack of experience or deceptive arguments that leave out information from the discussion to try to show some area where something is better but completely disregards that area is not the entirety of what a class can do.
Cherry picking attack roll spells compared to martials is just such an argument. Part of balance is balancing what various classes can do. If you have a casting class that can change their abilities as they change their spells, you have to limit them in some areas.
In all these scenarios, so much gets ignored that it looks like willful deception in some weak attempt to get casters powered back up.
No discussion of martials having all their power tied to a single magical weapon they must have to do their damage and get their attack bonus.
No discussion of martials having to be in melee range to deal damage which puts them in constant danger.
No discussion of martials attacking only AC and having to deal with DR that is often hard to bypass while a caster can go, "Immune to fire, I'll switch to cold."
No discussion of the ability to buff and debuff or focus spells or other capabilities of casters.
Just a big thread making a claim of "Caster vs. Martial" disparity that you can't even prove exists because casters and martials vary in power in PF2. How can you group them all together?
Threads like this aren't focused enough. Don't show quality knowledge of the PF2 game. They want to make old PF1 arguments that don't exist in PF2 because you can't group things nicely into caster vs. martial disparity like you could in PF1. It doesn't work that way in PF2.
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So it is not a big "technically the truth" as the entire argument is focusing on one part of the game: attack rolls.I mean yeah, that's the subject that was being talked about in that chain of posts. Moving goalposts when someone points out a problem with it doesn't really change that.
These threads seem to be started by players that miss PF1 casting power and like to focus on niche areas martials are better: single target damage.I mean, yeah. Someone who's interested in doing single target damage is going to focus on single target damage. They're not going to talk about other stuff because that's not really what their area of interest is.
The wizard who's focusing on single target blasting isn't casting Wall of Force either, so who cares? It's not relevant.
It is relevant because the entirety of what a class can do is involved in balancing the class.
If they are truly interested in doing single target damage, they a play a class that does high single target damage as their specialty like a fighter.
They don't ask for a class that has massive variability in capability to do another thing very well that steps on the feet of that class. Or Paizo suddenly has to what? Give the fighter every capability of the wizard so they remain balanced?
The entirety of what a class can do should be part of the discussion or you've already made it so Paizo can't action any of your wanted changes.
If all you're saying is, "I want a caster to do high single target damage when I feel like doing high single target damage on top of everything else I can do" then how can Paizo action that without severely misbalancing the game?
The Kineticist wasn't the best blaster in PF1, that title probably went to specific wizard, arcanist, or sorcerer builds.
Emphasis on specific. It's worth remembering in all that noise that conventional blasting was considered a waste of spell slots in 3.5 and PF1 too. It was largely a set of fairly contrived builds and specific spell options that defied that norm, rather than defined it. The whole god/batman analogy largely sprung up from the idea of ridiculing players who wanted to focus on hurting things with magic.
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]If all you're saying is, "I want a caster to do high single target damage when I feel like doing high single target damage on top of everything else I can do" then how can Paizo action that without severely misbalancing the game?
So that's the thing you're getting wrong in this conversation. It's not "on top of everything else" at all. It can't be.
The wizard who uses their actions and spell slots to cast acid arrow, polar ray, or shocking grasp isn't casting wall of force or slow, because they're casting polar ray and shocking grasp instead. After you cast Polar Ray, you can't spend that spell slot to later cast Wall of Force. After you cast Shocking Grasp, you do not have enough actions left in your turn to cast Slow, because you just cast shocking grasp.
Do you see the issue here? My wizard buddy casts shocking grasp, and now has one action left in their turn. Wall of Force takes 3 actions to cast and also costs a spell slot. Because he just used that spell slot for something else, and only has a single action left in his turn, he can't cast wall of force! In fact, looking at his sheet, he didn't even prepare Wall of Force. So bullet dodged there.
So in a sense I agree with you: A wizard with infinite action economy, infinite spell slots, who has every spell prepared simultaneously an infinite number of times would be pretty overpowered.
But in practice, our wizard just chose to cast Shocking Grasp instead, which means they've already used those actions and spell slots on something else.
Or Paizo suddenly has to what? Give the fighter every capability of the wizard so they remain balanced?
I mean maybe, we established earlier in this thread that Fighters are poorly designed and hold the whole game back because they're so homongenous. It sounds like it might be better for the game if players were allowed to play martials who could do AoE damage or provide good support.
The Kineticist wasn't the best blaster in PF1, that title probably went to specific wizard, arcanist, or sorcerer builds.Emphasis on specific. It's worth remembering in all that noise that conventional blasting was considered a waste of spell slots in 3.5 and PF1 too. It was largely a set of fairly contrived builds and specific spell options that defied that norm, rather than defined it. The whole god/batman analogy largely sprung up from the idea of ridiculing players who wanted to focus on hurting things with magic.
Yeah, the Peri-Blooded Blood Arcanist with Spell Perfection (Fireball) was eventually a truly disgusting build (you can put Empowered Intensified Maximized Fireballs in 6th, 7th, 8th, and 9th level spell slots even before you got into Wayang Spellhunter and Magical Lineage), but things like this stood out because normally this sort of thing was a bad idea.
Now the thing that I miss from PF1 is not "you can specifically do this kind of build" it's just the game of character building where you could combine enough pieces to make even a normally poor strategy fairly effective. But I'm not sure you could make that sort of thing work in this game anyway.
]If all you're saying is, "I want a caster to do high single target damage when I feel like doing high single target damage on top of everything else I can do" then how can Paizo action that without severely misbalancing the game?So that's the thing you're getting wrong in this conversation. It's not "on top of everything else" at all. It can't be.
The wizard who uses their actions and spell slots to cast acid arrow, polar ray, or shocking grasp isn't casting wall of force or slow, because they're casting polar ray and shocking grasp instead. After you cast Polar Ray, you can't spend that spell slot to later cast Wall of Force. After you cast Shocking Grasp, you do not have enough actions left in your turn to cast Slow, because you just cast shocking grasp.
Do you see the issue here? My wizard buddy casts shocking grasp, and now has one action left in their turn. Wall of Force takes 3 actions to cast and also costs a spell slot. Because he just used that spell slot for something else, and only has a single action left in his turn, he can't cast wall of force! In fact, looking at his sheet, he didn't even prepare Wall of Force. So bullet dodged there.
So in a sense I agree with you: A wizard with infinite action economy, infinite spell slots, who has every spell prepared simultaneously an infinite number of times would be pretty overpowered.
But in practice, our wizard just chose to cast Shocking Grasp instead, which means they've already used those actions and spell slots on something else.
Or Paizo suddenly has to what? Give the fighter every capability of the wizard so they remain balanced?I mean maybe, we established earlier in this thread that Fighters are poorly designed and hold the whole game back because they're so homongenous. It sounds like it might be better for the game if players were allowed to play martials who could do AoE damage or provide good support.
It also comes down to switching about abilities. The wizard can change midfight, whereas the martial cannot. You have to take this into account.
You cannot balance a class by saying, "The wizard chooses to cast shocking grasp with his actions and slots and thus should do as good a single target damage when he chooses to do that" but he can also choose to "cast wall of force when that is needed as well or slow or haste" whereas the martial cannot.
When you balance a class, you have to incorporate the overall abilities of what a class can do whether or not it chooses to use its actions abilities for a single activity like direct damage.
I am still unconvinced that you cannot do damage to equal a martial if a caster tries even on single target bosses, not all the time, but back and forth depending on die roll luck.
I recently looked up my druid's damage logs just to make sure, there were many times the druid was the top damage dealer in the group over the Giant Instinct Barbarian, the Swashbuckler, and the Ranger archer. It seemed to change per battle. I would imagine this was highly dependent on critical hits and dice variance as well as number of enemies.
If it was an AoE opportunity, damage was off the charts for the druid.
Single target incorporated a large degree of variance.
I wonder how many caster players are tracking their damage to see where they stand. Once I started tracking damage, it showed a different idea of what casters were capable of doing as they leveled up.
I certainly hope those that want blaster casters do not expect to do more damage than the martials as that would be pretty ridiculous.
What are the damage metrics indicating in fights?
My basic experience is low level casters not incorporating weapon attacks do less damage than martials.
Mid level it starts to shift a bit, especially in AoE fights.
At higher level it starts to shift to casters being able to really hammer depending on focus spells and feats. Once you get Effortless Concentration at 16, it becomes pretty easy to cast a sustain spell for extra damage every round on top of casting which can allow you to leverage a spell slot for quite a bit of damage on top of using slots for direct damage and focus spells.
So I'm not even sure that casters lack the capability to do equivalent single target damage on boss mobs.
My personal experience is I often have to spend too much time keeping martials alive in high level boss encounters because all they can do is damage and the boss does more damage than them, often to multiple targets in melee range on top of weird reactions, Auras, gazes, AoE attacks, poisons, diseases, and the the like. That prevents me from focusing on damage because letting the martial die isn't very fun for them.
So are you certain that a caster focusing on using damaging spells can't keep up with martial damage?
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Okay I'll bite, this is what I personally expected from a blaster...I appreciate you taking the time.
A few things caught my eye.
2)"Both should be viable"
For attack rolls, I assume the answer to 4 is clarifying. But, how would one analyze DC viability?4) Attack numbers should be about the same, got it. What do you mean by specialist wizard? All wizards? Just Evocation specialist?
6) Is there anything other than a return of concentration checks to address this?
5/8) If the higher level spells are supposed to be better than lower level spells, and 1st level spells are supposed to be better than cantrips, then do we just remove the scaling of cantrips? Also, as it relates to 5, should there be a cap on the damage a spell can do per level?
9) Should all spells have a 1-3 action possibility? Also, if this correlates with 8, should DC spells suffer from an equivalent MAP?
Those are my clarifying questions, if you are willing.
To be honest, aside from a few differences, it sounds like your desire for spellcasting is to be nearly the same as PF1. Is that accurate?
2) I don't understand the question? I assume you are asking "how do you know if saves are good?". To that I say that if the chance if failure/success is roughly the same its okay; But if the chance of success is higher that would feel bad.
4) A wizard should be able to focus on their school of magic and be rewarded for it, not punished. That is not to say they cannot fail or target the wrong enemy, but that the mere act of choosing a theme should not feel like a punishment.
6) Concentration check is how PF1e and DnD3.5e handled it. PF2 can handle it in different way but I do think it should be an option.
5/8) Removing scaling from cantrips is one way to handle the floor side of things. But you can just as easily just lower the scaling (4d4 per action when martials get 4dX per strike sounds about right). As far as the cealing, a 10th...
They did a bad job on the wizard this edition, especially the evocation wizard. Even I freely admit this. Sure, they can still shine in moments just because casting can be good. But wizard abilities are pretty terrible. Evocation wizard is even more terrible.
You can buy a wand that is better than their focus spell force missile ability. You spend a focus point to use a wand of manifold missiles ability once when the wand of manifold missiles is launching missiles for 10 rounds? And their advanced spell where you hit all targets in a 10 foot emanation? Really? I'm a wizard with 6 hit points and lousy AC progress and I plan to stand in melee range and position where I won't hit my martial allies keeping the monsters off me? Really?
I read those abilities and shook my head. All the schools need a rework. Only the Universalist is good comparatively.
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Again, thank you for taking the time.
2) Roughly the same chance of success/failure against what? A boss? A mook? Level +3? Level -1? The same against all of them?
4) As a passionate wizard enthusiast, I honestly don't understand why one would feel punished by school selection.
6) Right, but how would you have it handled? A free check? Would it cost an action? Cost a focus point?
5/8) But even at 4d4 per action (8d4 for 2 actions) that is greater than a level 1 spell, which you wanted cantrips to be weaker than.
9b) You have no concern about save spells being cast using all 3 actions?
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At least we agree on something.They did a bad job on the wizard this edition, especially the evocation wizard. Even I freely admit this......Okay I'll bite, this is what I personally expected from a blaster......
I would posit that wizards have hidden strengths. That said, I will concede that such strengths do not come close to making up for their tragic proficiencies.
This tells me the type of tables you were in that the only way to play a blaster was a sorcerer.
Sorcerer or Arcanist.
Wizard blasters were just as viable as Sorcerers even without the spontaneous spells. Specially with the fact Wizard had the ability to spontaneously convert a handful of spells. Not to mention all the metamagic feats that were much better on a Wizard than a Sorcerer.
Metamagic feats were not better on a wizard. Feats made it so you did not have to spend the full round action on specific spells. Even if you didn't spend the full round action, doing it spontaneously as needed was better.
Spells could crit just as well in PF1 and in fact getting a nat 1 on an evocation spell meant destroying an item, which could be crippling.
We did not like to destroy items because we sold them for cash. Item destruction is not desirable.
You talk about how martials needing to be in melee gets ignored. But the point of comparison is ranged martials, which are still better.
They are not better. So not sure why you're claiming this.
The only ranged martial I've seen that is better at doing damage is the Starlit Span Magus or an Eldritch Archer. Otherwise, ranged martials do fairly weak damage unless they crit. Have you even bothered to do the math on this and seen this in fights?
You talk about how martials not targeting multiple saves. But that is outright false due to the existence of maneuvers and the various skill feats.
Maneuvers do not do much damage and attacks that combine maneuvers require additional actions so they cannot be spent on attacks. The maneuvers do not have the same riders as those a spell has while doing more damage.
And even a successful maneuver usually leaves a creature flat-footed which can be done with flanking anyway. The trip maneuver is the best maneuver if you can take advantage of it with AoOs, otherwise it's just a different way to knock a creature down by exchanging a damaging attack for a trip.
You talk about how martials are tied to a single weapon. Meanwhile, they have actively introduced multiple ways to not only have multiple weapons at the cost of only 1, but a bunch of ways to make weapons better that casters just don't have any access to.
No. I have no done this. Not sure why you think I have.
I have shown a bunch of ways for a caster to obtain a weapon proficiency and use it as a third option attack that adds martial damage to the other types of damage they do, so they can cast a powerful two action spell while against a save while also using a weapon.
I often use a bow on my druids with full runes as a third action option that I use while sustaining a damage spell and firing a weapon or blasting with a cantrip and firing a weapon or using a 2 action AoE spell while using a weapon.
So no, I did not tell you how ways for martials to do much with weapons. I told you how to use a weapon as a caster to which you're usual reply is "Casters shouldn't have to use a weapon."
You talked about how martiald can't buff/debuff as well. Meanwhile, buff and debuff are the easist spells for martials to poach. Not to mention all the non-spellcasting archetypes that get constantly made that makes martials better at it at no significant cost. Marshal gives an unlimited duration buffing aura for crying out loud.
No. Buffs are easy to poach, debuffs are not easy to poach. Not sure why you think that.
You have been told multiple times that a martial cannot equal a caster Spell attack roll or DC.
You keep hopping on these arguments about attack rolls, but how about you check what a maximum martial archetype caster can do.
Just to get a maximum of Master casting while not being able to focus on their main casting stat a martial would have to do the following:
1. Spend four of their feats, five if they want the Breadth feat for more than 1 slot.
2. Max out at 8th level spells, a single one.
3. Max out at a 20 maximum casting stat unless they make their main martial stat weak with no item ability boost.
4. Use their skill ups to obtain Legendary...yes one of their three skill slots must have Legendary in the appropriate casting skill.
5. This leaves them with a Max Spell DC of 41 with a +31 attack roll if they really spend hard to get maximum archetype casting versus a dedicated caster having a DC 45 and a +35 spell attack roll.
Whereas a caster obtaining a weapon and tricking it out or building up a physical skill like Athletics which is highly useful even to a caster can do the following:
1. Spend an Ancestry feat to get a decent weapon or a single archetype feat for Archery.
2. Build up a stat that will be useful for a save or damage like Str or Dex to 20.
3. Then pick a nice magic weapon found while adventuring.
4. Then end with +20 +5 stat +4 proficiency +3 weapon = +32 attack roll versus a Master level martials +20 +7 stat +6 proficiency + 3 weapon = +36.
Who gets the better deal? A caster who can spend a single action to do some extra damage with their weapon with a better chance than a martial second attack while also dropping 2 action spells and possibly three sustains with full spell slots or the martial taking some archetype casting to not be very good at landing attack roll spells and have saves so slow that they are easily made by the enemies? Even lower level enemies?
Another thing not discussed is that it is a bigger bonus for a caster to dip into martial than vice versa. A caster can dip into a decent ranged weapon for a third action option super easy whereas the feat investment for archetype casting is pretty intensive even if you don't pick any archetype class feats.
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I don't believe novice casters are talking about this at all.
The mere fact that since the launch of PF2 we've had recurring threads about spellcasters seem weak, especially when compared to martial ones, is self-contradictory to that.
Obviously not all players question this, at least for the reason that not all players are interested in playing with spellcasters. But yes, it is quite common, especially for players from other systems and versions, to question the effectiveness of spellcasters, and especially to compare them with their ability to deal and sustain damage.
I don't know why you're trying to sell me on something that did not exist in previous versions of the game for years. You could not make a dedicated blaster in PF1 or earlier versions of D&D. The Kineticist had not been added when I played last and this type of blaster did not exist, so how could they be complaining about it?
You are asking for something that did not exist in previous versions of the game until the Kineticist and warlock were added which was very recent in D&D history.
How not? In 3.5/PF1 even the wizard (which I agree that most players didn't like because he, in addition to needing to prepare spells, had a smaller number of spellslots per level) managed to use all his spell slots to cast damage spells without the minor pity.
But let's go to the sorcerer himself (because almost nobody liked the wizard anyway), at level 6 he already shot 7/8 magic missiles that were automatically raised to half the caster's level and didn't miss, 6 Scorching Rays that are ranged touch attacks, therefore they didn't rely on magic DC to hit and ignored any AC bonus other than dexterity or dodge and ultimately cast +4 fireballs/lightning using their max magic DC. And you still say you couldn't make blasters in the old versions?
You keep bringing up damage when I have already informed you that I can sustain blasting damage through a combination of cantrips, sustain spells, and occasional spell slot blasts throughout an adventuring day.
What exactly do you think an electric arc or a produce flame look like? Or a sustained invoke spirits? They look like blasting.
EA's main benefit is hitting 2 targets at the same time. The damage itself is very low. Invoke Spirits helps to complement the damage of other spells well, but it is also another top level spell to compete with other blasts that also require your top level. It's more sustainable than simply using Cone of Cold every round, but it barely deals half damage this round using all 3 actions and still uses up a top spell slot. An arrow from a bow fully equipped with runes deals 80% of this damage in a single action.
Producing flame is even worse, it doesn't even compare to EA because above all it depends on a magic attack move that is all or nothing. The only situation I can see it being really useful is when cast after using Fiery Body, when it reduces to 1-action, but still uses scarce spell slots with Fiery Body to barely get close to a martial.
I don't know if you are a young player or relatively new, but there is no point being missed. There is just you claiming something can't be done that is done by many of us all the time: using spells that look like blasts to sustain high damage, as high or higher than martials across adventuring days.
I'm not a new player, nor a young player, I've been playing RPG on multiple systems and D20 systems for at least 20 years. The PF2 since launch. But none of that matters, none of that adds anything to the discussion and talking about people takes the point out of the matter, as well as risking toxicity in the discussions, let's please refrain from talking about each other.
The majority of what I see posted on these forums has nothing to do with blasting. It is players that played a PF1 wizard and came over to PF2 to find out the PF2 wizard is a bottom tier terrible class. That is what I see.
That is probably one of the biggest paradigm shifts from PF1 to PF2 is the terribleness of the wizard. The wizard was very powerful in PF1, God Tier in PF1. The PF2 wizard is now sitting on the lowest tier available challenging for the award for one of the weakest classes in PF2 from the point of view of an optimizer.
That is what is painful for so many people transitioning from PF1 to PF2 who used to play wizards.
This blasting specialization is a relatively new addition and something you in particular are focused on.
Please reread the thread, the focus was never on the wizard, it was referenced a few times in the thread, but the issue raised by the OP was precisely players complaining that casters in general in the game were useless except as buffers and usefulness (thing which I completely disagree) and in this discussion it was raised that the spellcasters are indeed efficient but there are some roles that really don't work well with them, among them I and some others highlighted blasting, which is something natural from the pop imaginary about mages and that in PF2 a dedicated blaster was not efficient and sustainable.
I never agreed that the problem is the proficiency/DC of the caster, for me it just progresses worse than the martial one, but in the end it ends up very close, in addition to being quite common for spells to have an effect even if the opponents manage to resist and that unlike conventional martial attacks, the caster has more DCs to try to exploit than just AC.I think spellcasters are quite efficient for other things, like being all-rounders, or even dedicating themselves to things like debuffs, healing, utility and buff (bards), but that as a dedicated blaster he lacks support and on another topic that how to summon spellcasters they just work really badly.
The mere fact that since the launch of PF2 we've had recurring threads about spellcasters seem weak, especially when compared to martial ones, is self-contradictory to that.
You are the one focused on blasting. I doubt you could prove with real data that a caster could not sustain a lot of damage blasting over an adventuring day at high level. Would they always be the best at damage? Nope, But neither would the martials. I've literally played multiple blasting casters and had plenty of fights where they were the top damage dealer. I find blasting enjoyable in PF2 and have built blasters. They aren't as good as PF1, but then nothing is.
The same people keep making the same threads and commenting on them and likely favoriting each other's posts. I've had this debate with the same people in multiple threads. The math has proven them wrong again and again and again, yet the same threads with the same debates get made. I had the same feeling when I first played PF2 moving from PF1. I was wrong and have seen the numbers myself over the course of play.
Spellcasters are not weak. They are in fact very strong. They are in fact stronger at low level than they were in past editions, but this is forgotten because most people focus on what they could do after 5th level or so.
The wizard is weak. When saying casters, I see primarily players of PF1 wizards and arcane casters accustomed to be the top dog complaining.
They don't really use math or come out and say it directly, but they want to be the top dog again. And it's not going to happen in a game balanced like PF2.
I have explained how to compete with martials or exceed their damage using spell slots across an adventuring day. I have tracked the damage. I know casters can and often do equal the damage of martials if not exceed them when given AoE opportunities.
Not sure what else I can do when the arguments for casters being weaker than martials is nebulous, not mathematically backed up, and not even even backed up anecdotally other than new players coming over and complaining when they find out the monsters make their saves a lot.
I don't know what to tell you. Martials don't have an easy time in PF2 either. The entire game is harder. It's harder to hit with weapons. Harder to land spells. Casters and martials are more balanced in line with each other, which is why when I take damage metrics it will vary from fight to fight as to how much damage they do.
So when someone is basing their opinion on these threads coming up again and again it's the ad nauseam fallacy. Just because the same people make the same argument with a few new players does not make something true.
That's why you don't see Paizo actioning the complaints. They are not mathematically provable. They are based on feelings and disappointment that the power level of casters is now balanced in PF2.
I do believe if we were to take a tally in a fashion that did not allow biases to come into play, I think we would find it is primarily wizard and arcane casters unhappy that PF2 has severely reduced their power to just in line with other classes.
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2) I'm trying to iron this out though. So, 50/50 against at-level? Against level +1?
4) I really don't see how focusing on a school punishes. But, my point of contention hinges on 'punishes'. I suspect it is rooted in how one feels. As such, I do not find discussions on feelings something worth discussing. They are merely statements of a subjective nature that don't necessarily lead to any objective truths. They are unreliable.
5/8) I wasn't comparing the 4d4 to a weapon attack. I was saying that 4d4 is stronger than most if not all 1st level spells. As you want 1st level spells to be stronger than cantrips, how do you resolve that?
9) I was referring to casting 3 save based spells, not 1 for 3 actions. My apologies for the lack of clarity.
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I find it really strange that in one breath someone can state that a fighter is badly designed and too homogenized.
Then turn around and say that solution is to homogenize all the classes.
So every fighter can have virtually infinite utility, or support, or AOE damage, or single target, or ooc capabilities... If only they built for it
Same for a wizard, they should be able to swing a sword just as hard
Personally I hope all this doesn't come to pass
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I have been wracking my brain trying to understand what people mean when they say "blaster", because it has been inconsistent. So I figured, maybe answering some questions can actually make clear what you want when you say "blaster".
I encourage you to answer each of these questions without considering the answers you gave to the others (except 2-4).
1) Is your "blasting" AoE or single target?
2) Is your "blasting" attack roll based or save based?
3) If save, which one?
4) If attack roll, what proficiency progression? Martial? Fighter? Spellcaster?
5) What range are you expecting?
6) Does your "blasting" provoke AoO's?
7) How often are you expecting to be able to do your "blasting" thing?
8) How much damage should this "blasting" do?
9) How many actions is the "blasting" going to cost?
10) What kind of weapon proficiency does this "blaster" have?
11) How many HP per level?
12) What are its defensive proficiencies?
1) Single Target (for me)
2) Attack Roll hopefully but Fireball and such ARE AoE and ARE Reflex. I like Polar Ray, Scorching Ray, etc..3) Reflex because explosions, maybe Fort
4) Equal to a Ranger/Rogue/Barbarian on Attack Rolls
5) 30 to 60 like a Shortbow or so
6) Yes, it would be the "cast a spell" activity
7) As consistently as a Martial swings their sword. I don't mind using Cantrips, it's the same as a Martial using a Dagger or Wakizashi. Damage is Damage I don't need the biggest die in the game.
8) For me, I'm fine with being equivalent to an Archer with Shortbow
9) 2 actions, because it would be spells. All spells are 2 actions more often than not.
10) Trained, at best, like a Sorcerer.
11) I'd like it to come out of a Sorcerer or something similar, but basic spell caster HP progression.
12) Same as a Sorcerer, Witch, Wizard, Oracle, whatever. Spellcaster.
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Thank you for taking the time.
I don't really have a lot of follow up questions.
1/2) You said single target, but brought up fireball. To be fair 1 and 2 were similar questions, so my bad. Do you want to be able to fireball or is scorching ray sufficient?
It sounds as if you just want to play an archer reflavored as a caster, would that be accurate? (I mean no offense, I'm just trying to summarize your view)
Judging by the kineticist playtest, I highly suspect that it will be, mechanically, right up your alley.
I find it really strange that in one breath someone can state that a fighter is badly designed and too homogenized.
Then turn around and say that solution is to homogenize all the classes.
So every fighter can have virtually infinite utility, or support, or AOE damage, or single target, or ooc capabilities... If only they built for it
Same for a wizard, they should be able to swing a sword just as hard
Personally I hope all this doesn't come to pass
The entire reason Paizo doesn't action these threads is because Paizo has access to the math of the game and know that there is no caster vs. martial disparity like there truly was in PF1.
Casters do plenty of damage when they focus on damage. If posters were more specific in what they wanted, backing their arguments with non-cherry picked arguments like "attack roll spells" Paizo might be able to action some of this.
They seem to have hard that people want a single target blaster caster similar to a warlock and are going to release the kineticist soon, which I guess must have been like a warlock in PF1.
I had a Kineticist in my Kingmaker video game. They had some interesting abilities, but mostly did somewhat weak blasting, not terrible, but not amazing. Makes me wonder what they were like in the PF1 game.
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I had a Kineticist in my Kingmaker video game. They had some interesting abilities, but mostly did somewhat weak blasting, not terrible, but not amazing. Makes me wonder what they were like in the PF1 game.
They could be very powerful. High range, high damage, melee, AoE, utility, incredible durability. I built an early entry mystic theurge, a suli super monk, and a min maxed mind control caster; the earth kineticist that I also built was more powerful than any of the others (all things considered).
I can see a Con Focus leading to superior durability. I used to build up crazy Con on my sorcerers in PF1, made them very durable. Con is a great ability to get to focus on.
Save-based spells like Electric Arc are also a nice way to check a creature's lowest save before going for a Spell Attack Roll spell.Won't work though. Most (all?) GMs I play with don't show their rolls, only the result against your PCs DC. And I suppose that's how most GMs do it in general.
Well, you could still get that info .. if you had several dozens of tries =)
One Electric Arc is not enough unless the monster has exceptional saves and roll either low or high to show these exceptional saves.
But as soon as you have 2 of them, if you're lucky enough for them to be spread across the board (a high and a low roll), you get a good idea of the creature's save, a small bracket of values.And natural 1s and 20s can also sometimes show the value (on VTTs, they appear with a specific color but they show you the value nonetheless, giving you the actual save bonus).
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The entire reason Paizo doesn't action these threads is because Paizo has access to the math of the game and know that there is no caster vs. martial disparity like there truly was in PF1.
Its a P&P game. There is no secret backend code. We have all the math they do because they publish all the material that the game "runs" on by necessity.
If people keep arriving at the same issues with the numbers, and saying "hey there is a problem here", then that is what there is. All the math happens at the table level, and if it doesn't work there, it doesn't matter what paizo intended it to work like.
Casters do plenty of damage when they focus on damage. If posters were more specific in what they wanted, backing their arguments with non-cherry picked arguments like "attack roll spells" Paizo might be able to action some of this.
Come on man. This comes off pretty condescending.
There should not be "just bad options" and you should not dismiss peoples problems with them as "cherry picking". The game as a scaling issue for casters in general, the cases where the scaling issue are most apparent are not cherry picking, they are the examples of the issue at hand.
People have been consistently clear about these issues since the edition launched. Go back and read the threads, you are in 90% of them. Just because you disagree personally, and just because people don't present their arguments in whatever game-dev speak you personally find most appealing means precisely zero to the conversation.
Take yourself out of it.
People have, in various forms, for years now, been saying some version of "This doesn't feel good."
The why of it is clearly up for discussion, but, if after years of consistent feedback on player experience, your take on it "everyone is doing it wrong", then that is a failure on Paizo's part to design the game in a transparent enough way as to let players understand the intended flow of the game.
There is literally no version of this conversion where we can honestly walk away with the opinion of "no smoke, no fire".
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...Thank you for taking the time.
I don't really have a lot of follow up questions.
1/2) You said single target, but brought up fireball. To be fair 1 and 2 were similar questions, so my bad. Do you want to be able to fireball or is scorching ray sufficient?
It sounds as if you just want to play an archer reflavored as a caster, would that be accurate? (I mean no offense, I'm just trying to summarize your view)
Judging by the kineticist playtest, I highly suspect that it will be, mechanically, right up your alley.
I'd like to amend my answers slightly. I think AOE damage and Single Target would be the goal, and for me, it would be at the cost of utility. I guess I'd call the class "Battlemage" and you'd never see me pick Fly, or Air Walk, or Invisibility or any of those things, right? I'm not going to picking Knock, Alarm, Set up Camp, Trick Rope or any of that stuff. All spell slots are packed with: Burning Hands, Chilling Spray, Scorching Ray, Ray of Enfeeblement (does it do dmg? If not I don't want it), Fireball, Lightning Bolt, Cone of Cold, Chain Lightning!!, Polar Ray, Sunburst, Eclipse Burst, etc..
There will be no Air Walk for me. I guess like the Elementalist spell list or something, and while they tried, they failed and also didn't really boost anything else.
So, I suppose, for all intents and purposes, it WOULD be like an Archer, but magical, in that Archer's can't give themselves Fly, or Haste, or Invisibility, or Water Walking or anything, all they can do every round is shoot arrows. So like that, but magic.
Also yeah, sounds like upcoming Kineticist is my bag.
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No I don't consider a caster burning 3 slots in one round to Nova as balanced even if they run out of gas faster
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Control spells can be amazing, but they can also be just ok. Slow 1 for one round on a higher level enemy already in combat can just mean one less attack at -10 or -8, which isn't nothing, but it isn't a show stopper.
This is far from my experience GMing creatures. Many creature's most powerful abilities require three actions, so taking one action away denies the creature its best attack in these instances. And if that creature needs to spend an action to sustain a spell or maintain flight, it likely only has a single action left to do something else, so possibly loses access to even more of its (two action) abilities. There have been many times in my games where I wanted to have a creature use its cool special ability against the party but it didn't have the actions to do so.
Denying your opponent actions is an extremely beneficial thing your party do to make combats easier. I daresay it might be the best thing a party can do.
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The goal the kineticist is trying to fulfill is "I just want to specialize in an element and throw it around all day without having to plan a bunch of contingencies or manage resources." Nobody is saying it's going to be the best at single target or AoE damage, in fact it shouldn't be. The best single target damage characters should be martials, and the best AoE damage characters should be casters limited by slots. The Kineticist gets to be the best at some things, but it's limited to things specific to their element (e.g. the aerokineticist gets to be the best at flying, the geokineticist gets to be the best at walls, etc.)
This is honestly exactly what I am looking for in a Blaster. Can't wait til this class comes out.
5/8) I was saying that cantrips are literally the weakest form of spells. 1st level spells should be stronger than the weakest spells of your level.
At first level, maybe. At third level you should be comparing your (now second level) cantrips to second level spells, and similarly at higher levels.
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The entire reason Paizo doesn't action these threads is because Paizo has access to the math of the game and know that there is no caster vs. martial disparity like there truly was in PF1.
Its a P&P game. There is no secret backend code. We have all the math they do because they publish all the material that the game "runs" on by necessity.
If people keep arriving at the same issues with the numbers, and saying "hey there is a problem here", then that is what there is. All the math happens at the table level, and if it doesn't work there, it doesn't matter what paizo intended it to work like.
Casters do plenty of damage when they focus on damage. If posters were more specific in what they wanted, backing their arguments with non-cherry picked arguments like "attack roll spells" Paizo might be able to action some of this.
Come on man. This comes off pretty condescending.
There should not be "just bad options" and you should not dismiss peoples problems with them as "cherry picking". The game as a scaling issue for casters in general, the cases where the scaling issue are most apparent are not cherry picking, they are the examples of the issue at hand.
People have been consistently clear about these issues since the edition launched. Go back and read the threads, you are in 90% of them. Just because you disagree personally, and just because people don't present their arguments in whatever game-dev speak you personally find most appealing means precisely zero to the conversation.
Take yourself out of it.
People have, in various forms, for years now, been saying some version of "This doesn't feel good."
The why of it is clearly up for discussion, but, if after years of consistent feedback on player experience, your take on it "everyone is doing it wrong", then that is a failure on Paizo's part to design the game in a transparent enough way as to let players understand the intended flow of the game....
PF2 is selling very well. People are playing casters and having fun. Some might be hitting points of frustration, but it doesn’t seem anywhere close to a majority. Yes some arguments keep popping up here, but it is 90% the same people saying the same thing with maybe 1 new voice every couple of months compared to all the new players playing it and having fun. The scope of this”problem” seems rather small.
It is ok not to like design decisions. There are probably 10 to 20% of design decisions I would not have made the same way in PF2 if I had decision making power over this game. There are aspects of its game design that still feel unfinished and down right confusing. We are years in and I still don’t know how the acid splash spell is supposed to work, and have different GMs run it very differently. I would like more clarity there but I know that it is a spell I have to ask about at every table I play at and that it is thus a spell I pass on frequently just not to have to have that conversation in PFS, for example, when I used to have time to play PFS.
PF2 is a very easy game to house rule or hack the things you don’t like. I think items that give bonuses to spell attack roles are a terrible idea. I am glad that true strike exists and item bonuses don’t. But I don’t think the game will significantly break for tables that all agree that they want to get rid of true strike and use item bonuses. I wouldn’t want to play at that table, at least not as a caster, because I recognize that true strike comes on line as a way to help casters stick the landing on clutch spells at level 1 and item bonuses barely move the needle for anything until fairly far into the game and only really on cantrips because casting high level spell slots without the abundant resource of true strike or a hero point was just not that common of a situation, and certainly not worth spending the gold necessary to keep up with the runes for something rarely used. But if some folks wanted to design a bunch of blasty spells and play wizards duel it would be easy to do.
It does get frustrating to hear the same people tell me that my continuingly fun experience playing casters, and the fun I see at table after table of people playing casters, even people doing stuff like casting hydraulic push without true strike, is all bad/wrong fun if we do it knowing we needed to roll an 11 against a difficult enemy instead of a 9 or a 10. I play at tables where we have characters die every couple of levels of play and tables that experience maybe 1 to 3 character deaths a whole campaign.
As a player, I don’t usually get upset when a character dies. It is part of the story and I get bored reading stories where it never feels like death is a real threat to anyone.
As a GM, I talk about these expectations at session 0 though because some players want an entire campaign about their level 1 characters seeing things through to the end, and we can talk about how to accomplish that without reducing the challenge of encounters, by having more enemies take prisoners and ransom back captives. And we will revisit that conversation if it seems like players are getting frustrated or bored later in the campaign.
Yeah, my players love playing casters. Like 3/4 characters usually end up with a fair bit of casting to them with almost always 50% full casters. Funny enough, this probably happens the most because I have a reputation for collapse encounters in on each other even when running APs, having very difficult hours long encounters that can go 12 to 20 rounds. The boss never sits in their room alone doing nothing. They come out in the middle of a “useless mook” fight and suddenly making sure they don’t have flanking partners and allies to boss around becomes very , very important. I accomplish this without murdering the party by having these encounters happen spread out over a large map. I have minions flee often and almost never want to fight to the death, but regain their fighting spirit when the tables look like they could be turning. The party is always trying to evaluate whether to press a head, or pull back, and the enemy is too. These fights often end or get broken up in the middle with an attempted negotiation, sometimes while one or both sides stalks for time trying to get the other side to let down their guard. Without spells and items, these longer encounters would be next to impossible. When 4 to 6 encounters happen at once, I am fine letting my players have one encounter a day.
The more I think about it, the more non magical healing seems like the bigger problem in this “caster/martial balance issue” if only because it encourages reckless martial attacking as quickly as possible with the assumption the GM will let you heal to full before throwing the next encounter at you, even if you burned through way more HP than you needed to in that encounter because HO just feels like it is a limitless resource until it suddenly is not.
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Talking about AOE, one thing I don't see mentionned much but which people should keep in mind is the fact that in this game, AOE damage is inherently less valuable than single target one. Dealing 20 damage to one target is better than dealing 5 damage to four foes at once, even if the total amount of damage dealt is the same. This as to do with the action economy : ten foes at half life still have 30 actions. five at full life and five death have 15. even eight at full life and two death makes for a easier fight, because you cut their actions by 20%.
AOE damage also need a certain situation to be good (for there to be many foes) and decrease in efficiency the less for they are, while single target damage is always reliable, as long as there are foes, there will be targets. In a fight against ten foes at once, AOE is ten time as effective as it is in a fight against only one, but in both case, single target damage stay consistent. The only moment single target damage lose it's power is when you're dealing with numerous foes whose life are bellow the damage you deal per hit (making the excendent damage "wasted"). A situation that may arrise on some occasion, but far from a typical fight in PF2.
Not to say that AOE damage is worthless, or that it need a tremendous buff, but it is less effective in 90% of the situation you'll encounter, and far more unreliable. IMO, a "blaster" that rely only on AOE can't be balanced, even if it lost access to every buff, debuff and utility spells, for a simple reason : either the AOE is good when fighting against multiple foes, mediocre otherwise (in which case the AOE blaster will spend most of the time being mediocre), or it's great when fighting against multiple foes, but still decent otherwise (in which case you are just a single target DPR that have the added bonus of being able to deal with crowd easily, and thus are overpowered).
Because of this, casters need strong single target option at every level if a blaster caster option is to work. Saying that caster shouldn't be good at single target because they get AOE option isn't a good argument IMO.
I still don’t know how the acid splash spell is supposed to work, and have different GMs run it very differently.
I don't understand this. The spell description seems very straightforward to me. What are these different ways to interpret the spell?
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PF2 is selling very well. People are playing casters and having fun. Some might be hitting points of frustration, but it doesn’t seem anywhere close to a majority. Yes some arguments keep popping up here, but it is 90% the same people saying the same thing with maybe 1 new voice every couple of months compared to all the new players playing it and having fun. The scope of this”problem” seems rather small.
No, sorry, but no. Don't try to make a "Silent Majority" style argument when you have zero data to back that up. Also you can't dismiss the problem just because this forum has a small userbase.
These threads come up on here by new users, like this very thread, it comes up on Reddit, on discord, etc. On literally every place I've seen where people gather to discuss the game, some variant of this conversation comes up. And it has been coming up consistently since the beginning.
I'm not trying to say its the majority of players, but I'm also not making a case that it needs to be a majority issue before its looked at.
Something in the player experience for casters is consistently feeling wrong to new people approaching the game, and the game itself seems to consistently fail to help them understand why they feel that way.
That, in and of itself, is a problem that Paizo should address.
I'm not even touching on the "why" and how to fix it right now. I'm just saying that there is evidently a problem, and trying to minimise it is a bad idea for the long term health of the game.
I wouldn't scale cantrips by spell level as that has the exact issue you are showing. Cantrips somehow being higher level and still the worse.
Instead, keeping them the same level and just scaling the damage based on your character level.
Seems to me scaling the damage is just what heightening does for damage cantrips. How would you scale say acid splash differently to what RAW says?
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Something in the player experience for casters is consistently feeling wrong to new people approaching the game, and the game itself seems to consistently fail to help them understand why they feel that way.
I'm not saying you're wrong (actually, I think you are right to some extent). But it's also important to dissociate new players with a lack of D&D-like experience and veterans from D&D and PF1. Due to the massive reduction of caster power in PF2, those coming from older versions of D&D should obviously complain if they keep the same expectations for caster power.
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I still don’t know how the acid splash spell is supposed to work, and have different GMs run it very differently.I don't understand this. The spell description seems very straightforward to me. What are these different ways to interpret the spell?
Originally Acid Splash had a target line that read "1 creature or object". There are certain issues with targeting objects with spells, and so it was unclear how exactly this was meant to work.
It has since been changed and Unicore just looks to have missed that it has been fixed.
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Something in the player experience for casters is consistently feeling wrong to new people approaching the game, and the game itself seems to consistently fail to help them understand why they feel that way.I'm not saying you're wrong (actually, I think you are right to some extent). But it's also important to dissociate new players with a lack of D&D-like experience and veterans from D&D and PF1. Due to the massive reduction of caster power in PF2, those coming from older versions of D&D should obviously complain if they keep the same expectations for caster power.
That is something to be aware of, but we were all in that state at some point.
I'm talking about discussions where players are talking about the games internal structures and experience. While there is going to be a decent amount of edition discussion generally, its the ones that are looking at the game as it stands on its own mostly.
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What is splash damage? The spell does not have the splash trait, not that that trait works for spells anyway, but all we get is that “if you hit, you do 1d6 acid damage and 1 splash damage.” To whom? Just the target? Does splash inherently mean all adjacent creatures? Or is it just a type of damage that some creatures (swarms) have a weakness to?