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After reading scallywag's post, I was going over my old damage data. I added up one of my sheets that was 20 random fights in Extinction Curse between 5th to 15th level.
This was prior to the implementation of my house rules.
It was a five person group:
Evil Eye Witch: 504 damage over 20 fights
Witch used occult spell list and was engaged in debuffing. Overall, this was one of the reason I implemented my caster house rules. Prepared casters with bad weapon choices really can be outdamaged by quite a large margin, especially when they can't use top level spells when needed.
Storm Druid with Archer Archetype: 1533 damage over 20 fights
This is the campaign that made me go, "Damn. Druids are powerful in this edition."
The druid was built with a bow, tempest surge, wild shape order explorer, primal blasting, and doing this much damage while healing and being the primary medic with occasional debuffs like slow.
Druid's damage was a combination of bow weapon damage, wild shape martial damage, blasting, and use of focus spells.
Precision Archer Ranger with Wolf Animal Companion: 1192
Ranged damage is usually less than martial and less than magic. Ranger has scaling issues with Hunt Prey and the majority of damage done at higher level is multitarget fighting lots of high hit point equal to lower CR creatures.
Wit Swashbuckler with Rapier: 1383
Swashbuckler did better than I thought. He really started to improve his damage at higher level with Perfect Finisher. This led to almost a crit every fight for huge damage. He really closed the gap in the last few battles. If you can get to level 14 as a Swash and pick up Perfect Finisher, you will go from feeling pedestrian to really powerful.
Giant Instinct Barbrian with a Heavy Pick: 1586
They hit things for a lot of damage. Crits were pretty insane.
After looking this over, I agree more with Scallywag to some degree:
1. Some casters, specifically 6 hit point prepared casters can fall really far behind martials for damage even using AoE damage.
The occult witch dealt about 1/3 of the martials and druid's damage in this party. Given the druid was the main healer, that's pretty sad.
They were using synesthesia which helped the other classes, but still that is sad.
2. Druid is really a beast of a class in PF2. I'm surprised it's not more popular with optimizers for making a damage caster.
3. Crits are king for damage. Either critical hits or critical save fails. I noticed whoever did the most damage had big spikes which came from big crits or crit fail saves.
4. AoE damage really skews things in the favor of blaster casters. Lot of targets leads to more failed saves and more chances for critical fails which can lead to some insane rounds for blasters.
5. This is total damage, so the numbers included blow through damage from things that likely died with overkill damage.
I should do some tracking again in my next campaign to see if things have improved since my players know how to maximize damage even more now. I'd love to see a fighter versus a starlit span magus versus a rogue with a wizard or sorcerer blaster caster.
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Sorry to be elitist (this time, it's the case) but the main issue with casters is between the chair and the character sheet. I play a lot of PFS and I generally expect other casters to have half of my casters' efficiency. And I'm sometimes disappointed even with such low expectations.
The biggest mistake most caster players do is to hoard their spell slots like a dragon its treasure. Even with Sorcerers, which have enough spell slots to vitrify everything without much concerns, I see some players opening fights with cantrips and other weak moves. And when it comes to prepared casters it's even worse with rarely more than a couple of strong spells cast during the day.
Now, I think TTRPGs are not necessarily for tactically minded players. So I think the game difficulty should be set lower to allow more players to have fun with casters. Now, there are classes like the Kineticist for those who want to play a caster without the complexity of casters. When I see the Kineticist popularity around me, I feel it was very necessary.
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Sorry to be elitist (this time, it's the case) but the main issue with casters is between the chair and the character sheet. I play a lot of PFS and I generally expect other casters to have half of my casters' efficiency. And I'm sometimes disappointed even with such low expectations.
The biggest mistake most caster players do is to hoard their spell slots like a dragon its treasure. Even with Sorcerers, which have enough spell slots to vitrify everything without much concerns, I see some players opening fights with cantrips and other weak moves. And when it comes to prepared casters it's even worse with rarely more than a couple of strong spells cast during the day.
Now, I think TTRPGs are not necessarily for tactically minded players. So I think the game difficulty should be set lower to allow more players to have fun with casters. Now, there are classes like the Kineticist for those who want to play a caster without the complexity of casters. When I see the Kineticist popularity around me, I feel it was very necessary.
I agree on the sorc.
But prepared casters have a rough time with the lower number of slots and having to prepare them in advance. If they wanted to do damage, you would load a ton of AoE or damage spells in the same slots and unload them early. The one thing I found with casters is you want to unload the AoE damage as an opener before the martials are fully engaged and the monsters spread out or your allies are amongst them.
A lot of prepared casters load out a variety of spells thinking to cover a variety of situations when you really need a hammer over and over and over again.
When I was recalling my druid above, I used to open the fight with tempest surge quite a bit followed by a bow shot. A fail on a tempest surge with a bow shot was some nice damage, a crit fail was pretty nutty damage. I didn't mind blowing off a tempest surge to open up almost every fight because I knew I was likely getting it back quick.
I do agree. You really have to learn how to do damage as a caster. You can't be holding back all the time if you want to do good damage. If you see a whole bunch of targets bunched up, launch that AoE. If you're going single target, have a good single target focus spell or spell and use a weapon. You'll add up the damage.
The biggest difference in damage casters between PF1 and PF2 is that PF2 casters can’t just memorize the exact same spell across all levels of play and specialize in casting modified versions of just that one spell and expect to be able to over power any enemy. PF2 casters have to use the right spell for the encounter they are facing, wether that is to do damage, debuff, or often even to usefully buff their Allie’sThis is my personal biggest bugbear with pf2e honestly, though its more a "me problem" than the issue I've seen from my players that I mentioned above; Every caster has to play like a toolbox wizard with a big box of magic bullets, you cannot specialize or build thematic spell lists or casting styles. you need to have spells for multiple saves, ideally, of multiple damage types, they need some spells that have good effects on a save and ally-facing spells for when foes have saves too high, they should ideally have some utility spells as well. that's great for anyone who wants to play a toolbox but for anyone who has a specialized character concept, the master illusionist, the wind druid, the flame mage, the necromancer witch, the system doesn't really offer anything because the only way such characters can be effective is by bastardizing their spell selection to the point that it no longer has anything to do with your character concept
But I think you can, what happens is that you have to adapt the character using archetypes in many cases. Some examples:
- Illusionist: this is a nice school, with the feat convincing illusion, so other classes should archetype with Wizard. Can focus mostly on illusion (so specializing too on Deception), and just combine with some direct (Magic Missile), attack or some other non-Will ST spells, but a few are enough. Phantom Prison spell with convincing illusion is so nice, have one extra attempt to hold the effect with your reaction. And can use many illusions to confuse foes.
- Evocation: just get Dangerous Sorcery, so in this case should archetype with Sorcerer. It is nice if many weak minions to cast Magic Missile at 5th level as 3-actions to cast 9 missiles each one dealing 5 extra damage (if each missile targets a different foe) for a total of 45 extra damage. Repeat until those foes are dead. Or a fireball always dealing extra damage to all targets. If you are a Sorcerer or Wizard you could combine the previous with Widen spell so a fireball or cone of cold with extra damage and extra area is not bad at all.
- Enchantment: much used out of combat so getting conceal and silent spell works nicely, so archetype with Wizard. Good for debuffing so if you like that you will like it. Just complement again with some direct or attack spell. But the own enchantment concept is not dealing direct raw damage by itself.
So probably for many character concepts you can find it but have to include archetyping in the formula.
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level -2 enemies are plenty dangerous. You just have to use enough of them and put them in an encounter site where those numbers can be leveraged effectively. A great way to do this as a GM is to have stuff in the room to do other than try to move and attack PCs. Suddenly that action economy advantage is huge when enemies are looting the treasure in the room and making a break for it while the boss is fighting the party and getting angry her goons aren't doing what they are supposed to. This is a fun way to combine a level +2 or 3 monster (depending upon party level) and a handful of 4 or 6 level -2 creatures. As a fight it could easily get out of hand if all the enemies worked together, but you as the GM you have a lever now you can switch to change things up in a way that can keep tension high and get everyone moving all over the dungeon instead of standing around with murder faces on.You can always improve any system with good GMing, where does this type of encounter design show up in APs and PFS scenarios?
It's not exactly the same, but the climax of the AP volume I am currently prepping involves a fight against a level+1 creature, 2 level-2 creatures, and 2 level-4 creatures. Fighting larger groups of weaker enemies in the hard fights happens more frequently in this AP than fighting level+3 monsters. Solo boss monsters are by no means the only hard fights in PF2, very much including published content.
A lot of prepared casters load out a variety of spells thinking to cover a variety of situations when you really need a hammer over and over and over again.
Prepared casters are specialists and most players don't accept that. The second you start loading the same kind of spells in bunches and focus on combat the issue with prepared casters disappear entirely. But as long as you try to cover more ground than you can, you end up mostly useless during combat.
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The truth is most caster issues are because optimal caster play is restricted to only a handful of spells, since most spells are trash. I had necromancer wizard ally that only wanted to cast necromancy themed spells, he ended up doing less damage, being a slightly better buffer and less of a debuffer than my bard archetype dual flickmace fighter in almost all fights. He mostly cast animate dead (pretty bad) and grim tendrils (awful) and rouse skeletons (terrible), sometimes he cast haste and enlarge. I casted bless and mirror image and debuffed foes with prone (and clumsy and enfeebled with crushing rune) with double slice crits and fear from intimidate. With the +1 status bonus to coerce from bullhorn cantrip and +1 (+2 later) circumstance bonus from intimidating prowess my coerce check was better (and intimidate on par) with that of a charisma caster. His character had almost universally worse proficiencies, worse hp, worse AC, was worse at charisma based skill checks, athletics skill checks and was on par or slightly stronger with wisdom-based checks. He was better stealth and acrobatics, but that didn't really play much of a role in the campaign.
This is fundamentally two different style of players, one is playing tightly to a theme, the other is about squeezing every ounce of efficiency out of the game. It is not really a caster/martial issue.
Of course the technician is able to achieve 50% more effective character after a few levels. At least it is playable. It is not the 500% difference that could have achieved in PF1 or D&D5.That is Ok and reasonable. Because there are a lot of very technical players out there they need options that make a bit of a difference. Plus different ways of playing the game.
Please understand that you should be optimising as a group not as individual players. Further that any particular optimised character is making assumptions about the game.
Some suggestions:
Stealth is good for Avoid Notice which will be his best initiative roll - and important.
Make sure the Necromancer has seen Reanimator Dedication as it is probably his best option for his theme. Also suggest that he tries grappling with some of his minions.
Oh and he was better at recall knowledge of course and the GM was generous with information, so I guess he had that going for him.
That is correct now with the remaster- the information has to be useful or the GM is not playing it right.
A lot of prepared casters load out a variety of spells thinking to cover a variety of situations when you really need a hammer over and over and over again.Prepared casters are specialists and most players don't accept that. The second you start loading the same kind of spells in bunches and focus on combat the issue with prepared casters disappear entirely. But as long as you try to cover more ground than you can, you end up mostly useless during combat.
That is an option for prepared casters to boost their damage as the same spells often do the most damage most of the time.
I know with scouting a prepared caster can load out more effective attack spells based on saves in theory. They can only do this in a reasonable time frame with Spell Substitution thesis. With any other thesis, they really have to accept heavy specialization loading slots with high value spells all the time with little time to adjust spell lists.
Paizo designed PF2 to be really fast and furious. That's what I notice in each of the 20 fights I tracked. Besides the witch debuffing, almost every class was going all out to smash. Classes like the barbarian can smash while doing trip crowd control. Everyone else was focused on hitting hard and fast with the resources available to them.
Occult is also not the best blasting spell list. That is why when I play an occult sorcerer, I always take a blasting spell with cross-blooded. Occult is great for almost everything but AoE or single target blasting.
Primal is very, very good at blasting and doing spell damage of many kinds and adding in martial damage. It is really amazing to me that a class can do so much blasting damage while being the main healer. I don't recall that being too possible in PF1. The druid was an ok healer in PF1 with some blasting and martial ability. They didn't have great feats for building it up. The PF2 druid stacks so many good abilities onto that chassis, I'm surprised it doesn't get more love on these forums. Then again I never see threads complaining about the druid. So I guess that means something.
Before I changed my house rules, I loaded the druid with blasting and heals with maybe a wall spell and a few slows. I didn't need much else.
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I think it's worth pointing out that the best force multiplier in all of PF2E - and I think this was pointed out by the devs at some point - is the Champion, and it has nothing to do with damage, but how much the Champion can negate enemy tactics.
I honestly think an overfocus on 'damage' around here does a disservice to a lot of conversations.
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A well positioned redeemer can be a gamechanger without doing any damage, combined with wrestler archetype and goinfg for a shield plus free hand you lock down enemies, and when your allies do get hit, you give a pretty hefty debuff on the enemy, and resistance to your allies(or nullify the enemies' action, which is also very valuable).
A well positioned redeemer can be a gamechanger without doing any damage, combined with wrestler archetype and goinfg for a shield plus free hand you lock down enemies, and when your allies do get hit, you give a pretty hefty debuff on the enemy, and resistance to your allies(or nullify the enemies' action, which is also very valuable).
Yeah, in my current campaign we have a Redeemer + Marshal that is scary good.
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The issue with the Champion is range. It's abilities are extremely short range and the class lacks mobility (and is very often build with no Dexterity so no ranged attacks). The second an enemy decides to fight from a distance, the Champion is entirely negated. I dislike characters that can be entirely negated, especially if it's common (and at high level, it's definitely common).
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After reading scallywag's post, I was going over my old damage data. I added up one of my sheets that was 20 random fights in Extinction Curse between 5th to 15th level.
This was prior to the implementation of my house rules.
It was a five person group:
Evil Eye Witch: 504 damage over 20 fightsWitch used occult spell list and was engaged in debuffing. Overall, this was one of the reason I implemented my caster house rules. Prepared casters with bad weapon choices really can be outdamaged by quite a large margin, especially when they can't use top level spells when needed.
Storm Druid with Archer Archetype: 1533 damage over 20 fights
This is the campaign that made me go, "Damn. Druids are powerful in this edition."
The druid was built with a bow, tempest surge, wild shape order explorer, primal blasting, and doing this much damage while healing and being the primary medic with occasional debuffs like slow.
Druid's damage was a combination of bow weapon damage, wild shape martial damage, blasting, and use of focus spells.
Precision Archer Ranger with Wolf Animal Companion: 1192
Ranged damage is usually less than martial and less than magic. Ranger has scaling issues with Hunt Prey and the majority of damage done at higher level is multitarget fighting lots of high hit point equal to lower CR creatures.
Wit Swashbuckler with Rapier: 1383
Swashbuckler did better than I thought. He really started to improve his damage at higher level with Perfect Finisher. This led to almost a crit every fight for huge damage. He really closed the gap in the last few battles. If you can get to level 14 as a Swash and pick up Perfect Finisher, you will go from feeling pedestrian to really powerful.
Giant Instinct Barbrian with a Heavy Pick: 1586
They hit things for a lot of damage. Crits were pretty insane.
After looking this over, I agree more with Scallywag to some degree:
1. Some casters, specifically 6 hit point prepared casters can fall really far behind martials for damage...
This is interesting.
I'd be curious to find out if anybody keeps track of damage made possible by Buff/Debuff actions.Any bonus/penalty that turned a miss into a hit, a hit into a crit, a crit success into a success etc. Obviously, this kind of data is much harder to gather in game, but I do know that 3 or 4 times a game, my Bard's Inspire courage makes misses into hits.
I don't really see those as 'issues' of the Champion so much as design constraints, which is why you strategize with your party to say, lock down an enemy so they can't move out of the Champion's range, thus enabling other party members to take advantage of the Champion's impact.
It's all a synergetic circle, and what many point out as 'issues' are to me just design constraints - and with a system that is so tightly designed elsewhere, as a fellow designer myself, I can't see it as anything other than intentional.
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I'd make a note about AoE vs single target damage. I see very often raised the fact that AoE damage is much worse than single target damage because it's not focused on one target. It's only partially true and leads to the discredit of AoE damage.
The real distinction is not between AoE and single target damage but between focused and unfocused damage.
Abilities like Paladin's Retributive Strike are single target but unfocused damage: You don't choose who you target when you use Retributive Strike. So it's as efficient as AoE damage and should be considered equivalent. Most Reactions generate unfocused damage.
Similarly, I see very often martials dealing unfocused damage despite dealing single target damage. It can sometimes come from the combat configuration: Not every fight happens in an empty room. When you don't have much space to position your character you sometimes end up having to fight a target which is not the focus of the party as there's no space around the one you should attack.
Other situations happen when multiple enemies are attacking from different fronts. PCs will tend to spread to contain the enemies instead of focusing on a single enemy.
It can also come from enemies' debuffs: When you are Grappled or somehow Immobilized, you don't choose your target.
And obviously some enemies are elusive by nature and force the party to attack whoever is accessible.
I must admit I sometimes also see PCs who are not properly focusing on a single target despite having the opportunity: Not every action is optimized.
In my opinion, damage is mostly unfocused. I rarely see parties who are so coordinated that they manage to properly focus fire. Most of the time, when the first monster goes down, the other monsters are around 75% of their hp pool.
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I see some players opening fights with cantrips and other weak moves.
Not at all sure this is a bad idea. Most fights take a round or so for the group to realize the approximate threat level they're facing, which opponents do what kind of things, who is likely to have what strengths and weaknesses.
While a cantrip might very well be underkill (depending on level), starting off with your highest level AoE spell is also likely a bad idea in most campaigns. They're a precious resource to be spent wisely.
That said, I DO tend to err on the side of conserving spells too much. One reason I like to play druids who can wild shape or use decent focus spells :-)
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Not at all sure this is a bad idea. Most fights take a round or so for the group to realize the approximate threat level they're facing, which opponents do what kind of things, who is likely to have what strengths and weaknesses.
While a cantrip might very well be underkill (depending on level), starting off with your highest level AoE spell is also likely a bad idea in most campaigns. They're a precious resource to be spent wisely.
That said, I DO tend to err on the side of conserving spells too much. One reason I like to play druids who can wild shape or use decent focus spells :-)
The first round is the one where you can be the most impactful as a caster, it's nearly 50% of your combat contribution. Unless you don't have any spell available to handle the threat, you should start with your top spells (2 higher spell slots) and aim at ending the fight quickly. Cantrips are for later rounds (outside lower levels of play).
Going to sleep with uncast highest level spells is worse than casting such a spell in the "wrong" situation (and I don't think there are many such situations anyway).
This damage comparison is false and unsupportable. Casters do not deal less damage than martials over the course of battle. If you came to this conclusion after 3 years of play, you have some of the worst players I've ever heard of. If they are getting out damaged by that percentage, your players are so awful I can't even imagine what they're doing to fall so far behind in damage dealing.
The fact you don't even include how badly casters out damage martials with AoE damage indicates to me you revived this thread to start more trolling on the matter.
Casters absolutely wreck martials in AoE blasting damage and it's not even close. At the end of the fights, they don't even stay in the same ballpark.
This seems like an ambiguous attempt to troll us all and start the usual infighting.
Holy hell dude, calm down.
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The first round is the one where you can be the most impactful as a caster, it's nearly 50% of your combat contribution.
I admit that I have absolutely no clue why you would think that.
Oh, in the case where there are bunches of enemies on the board and you can fireball or chain lightning a whole bunch then sure, I agree.
But you're facing 2 or 3 unknown enemies spread out and you think you should use one of your top 2 level spells AND that spell is nearly 50% of your combat contribution? I don't understand that. Heck, at that point you don't even know how tough the encounter is going to be.
Not even if you only play sorcerers so you have to worry about preserving spells less than other casters
The issue with the Champion is range. It's abilities are extremely short range and the class lacks mobility (and is very often build with no Dexterity so no ranged attacks). The second an enemy decides to fight from a distance, the Champion is entirely negated. I dislike characters that can be entirely negated, especially if it's common (and at high level, it's definitely common).
We had this happen more in Age of Ashes. Champion was very powerful when in melee combat and useless in ranged combat. Pretty big weakness. Wish it did not have that 15 foot range for the enemy as well as the ally protected. Pretty easy for the DM to render the champion completely useless with both the ally and enemy having to be within 15 feet. If the champion closes, then the ally is usually out of range and vice versa.
It was a five person group:
Evil Eye Witch: 504 damage over 20 fightsWitch used occult spell list and was engaged in debuffing. Overall, this was one of the reason I implemented my caster house rules. Prepared casters with bad weapon choices really can be outdamaged by quite a large margin, especially when they can't use top level spells when needed.
Frankly I think the hidden premise here ("this character should be doing about the same amount of damage as the others") is what's wrong here. Occult is arguably the least damage-focused spell type. You even admit this in a later post. So it seems perfectly reasonable to me that someone who chooses to play an occult caster is choosing to play a character whose dpr is not going to be it's primary contribution to combat scenes. And that's okay. Not every build or every concept must focus on dpr. The upside is that this allows players of many different stripes (not just damage-dealers) to find a concept that fits them. The downside is that folks who do want to play DDs will find that there are some builds/concepts which don't let them realize that vision. Such as an occult caster who focuses on exploring the Occult spell list for it's own unique contributions to encounters. "Direct damage" ain't it's main one.
Like Aristophanes, I wonder if you tried to compute other contributions, if the results would be as lopsided. If you started reallocating 5% of everyone else's damage to the caster for every -1 AC they imposed or if you counted a different yet still important combat metric such as "enemy actions lost/removed," or healing equivalent to damage dealt, the resulting order of best to worst might be different. Damage dealt is easy to count, which makes it in some ways a good proxy metric for 'contribution.' But it is also a very incomplete proxy metric for 'contribution.'
This caster was built to be an offensive caster. This was in our second AP. The caster wanted to play a witch that could do highly effective things.
My problem with this class was the following:
1. DPR 1/3rd of other classes. As you stated, not a real problem if the other things they do were highly effective. But they were not.
2. But Evil Eye, the main witch hex cantrip was barely better than the Demoralize action and a far cry from the bard Dirge of Doom. If you play this evil eye witch that can't do much damage, then your evil eye and debuff powers should be quite potent but were not.
3. Synesthesia was still very good, but it is for every occult caster.
4. The player also tried to build up their familiar and spent the feats to obtain a special familiar and he found the use of it offensively useless. Tried the breath weapon a few times which did nothing memorable. Then forgot the familiar existed and I let him change out his feats.
5. This player's bad experience with the witch made him not touch another witch except for the Fervor witch in the healer role.
I don't know. I feel like an evil eye witch should be a more powerful debuffer and controllers if they are going to do 1/3rd of the damage of other classes including other caster classes.
I do include other contributions which I mention in notes. The evil eye witch should be a powerful debuffer.
What amazed me more is as I stated with the druid which gets ignored in these discussion for reasons I'm not sure about. The druid was the main healer of that group. They had maxed out Medicine skill and a heal spell prepared nearly every level and they were doing truck tons of damage to compete with martials. I've had this same experience with every single druid I've played. They are by far and away the best healer class in the game now by virtue of their combination of damage healing and damage dealing. It's really astounding to me this class isn't touted more on these forums for their combined capability.
I would not be surprised if a group of druids could wreck an AP with just four druids.
Holy hell dude, calm down.This damage comparison is false and unsupportable. Casters do not deal less damage than martials over the course of battle. If you came to this conclusion after 3 years of play, you have some of the worst players I've ever heard of. If they are getting out damaged by that percentage, your players are so awful I can't even imagine what they're doing to fall so far behind in damage dealing.
The fact you don't even include how badly casters out damage martials with AoE damage indicates to me you revived this thread to start more trolling on the matter.
Casters absolutely wreck martials in AoE blasting damage and it's not even close. At the end of the fights, they don't even stay in the same ballpark.
This seems like an ambiguous attempt to troll us all and start the usual infighting.
I adjusted my viewpoint in another post. We can't change these posts once in. I still believe you should include further data when discussing a broad topic like Martial vs. Caster disparity. It's not particularly cut and dry like the title suggests.
...After reading scallywag's post, I was going over my old damage data. I added up one of my sheets that was 20 random fights in Extinction Curse between 5th to 15th level.
This was prior to the implementation of my house rules.
It was a five person group:
Evil Eye Witch: 504 damage over 20 fightsWitch used occult spell list and was engaged in debuffing. Overall, this was one of the reason I implemented my caster house rules. Prepared casters with bad weapon choices really can be outdamaged by quite a large margin, especially when they can't use top level spells when needed.
Storm Druid with Archer Archetype: 1533 damage over 20 fights
This is the campaign that made me go, "Damn. Druids are powerful in this edition."
The druid was built with a bow, tempest surge, wild shape order explorer, primal blasting, and doing this much damage while healing and being the primary medic with occasional debuffs like slow.
Druid's damage was a combination of bow weapon damage, wild shape martial damage, blasting, and use of focus spells.
Precision Archer Ranger with Wolf Animal Companion: 1192
Ranged damage is usually less than martial and less than magic. Ranger has scaling issues with Hunt Prey and the majority of damage done at higher level is multitarget fighting lots of high hit point equal to lower CR creatures.
Wit Swashbuckler with Rapier: 1383
Swashbuckler did better than I thought. He really started to improve his damage at higher level with Perfect Finisher. This led to almost a crit every fight for huge damage. He really closed the gap in the last few battles. If you can get to level 14 as a Swash and pick up Perfect Finisher, you will go from feeling pedestrian to really powerful.
Giant Instinct Barbrian with a Heavy Pick: 1586
They hit things for a lot of damage. Crits were pretty insane.
After looking this over, I agree more with Scallywag to some degree:
1. Some casters, specifically 6 hit point prepared casters can fall
This would be easier for someone with a program to do. I recording the damage in an excel spreadsheet. It's really dependent on die rolls. Sometimes the debuff really matters, sometimes the martial rolls so high it's irrelevant.
The biggest debuff martials usually rely on is flanking.
But synesthesia and phantasmal killer are fantastic debuffers when they work. Tempest Surge is also a great debuff. People feel those contributions.
Not sure it accounts for doing 1/3rd of the damage of martials, but the players love them.
Witch is not a greatly constructed class. It's not worth the time investment until hopefully the remaster fixes their issues with ineffective or low vlaue feats, ineffective familiars, and not so great hex cantrips. Witch is not the greatest class to measure damage, but 33% of the damage of others when trying to be an effective damage dealer isn't a great showing.
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Fights are very different for casters. I know my casters depending on the fight use different tactics which martials cannot use as well or as often, though they have more tricks than before.
Against many enemies, I like to hit a strong AoE spell to soften the creatures or when really high level an AoE slow which is an almost surefire combat destroyer.
Against single target creatures like bosses, I like to try to hand slow. A fail or critical fail on a slow spell can turn tough fights into cake walks. A caster who lands a slow can usually use cantrips the rest of the battle and claim ownership for the easy victory. Not fun for most casters, but I know when my casters land a slow spell I imagine they become very bored like they're reading a book and drinking some tea until the fight is done.
If you're trying to do damage, you should be unloading your big dog AOE spells early if you have a group of targets ready to hit.
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Casting good offensive spells is both easier and more impactful when done at the beginning of the fight.
Cast AoEs before the martials spoil your aim.
Cast debuffs early for max effects.
Greatly wound or even kill opponents so that the fight gets easier quickly.
Even buffs are easier to cast when the martials are still in Touch range.
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I admit that I have absolutely no clue why you would think that.
The first round is the one where you can be the most impactful as a caster, it's nearly 50% of your combat contribution.
Calliope covered the notion of momentum, but I can't stress enough how fights are won during the very first rounds. As soon as you start having an edge against the enemies, the fight then snowballs to an easy victory. Early kills/debuffs are a big key to victory. For resource constrained characters, it means that the first round is the ideal one to unleash big abilities.
On top of that, in the case of spells you have even more incentive in using them during round 1:
- AoE spells are much easier to land, as do control spells.
- Spells with a duration (buffs/debuffs) last in general longer than the fight and as such the earlier you land them the longer they last.
- The shorter the fight lasts the lower the resources you use. So you will save a bit on the remaining of the fight.
- Knowing right away who critically fails at their save allows your martials to organize themselves accordingly (ignoring the Slowed 2 enemy or focusing on the enemy who took truck load of damage). After round 1, it's harder to switch target as you may not be properly positioned to do so.
- You attract a lot of attention, which is fine as martials are supposed to be the MVPs after the very first round. So every action enemies use toward you is not optimally used.
- And the most important one: If the fight happens to be a tough one, you started high and as such have more chances to avoid a PC death.
- And the upmost important one: It feels good to mop the floor at round 1. Restraining oneself is not funny, unleashing your big spells without a second thought is so much more blissful.
Starting with a cantrip at round 1 is losing a third of your efficiency, roughly. It's definitely a bad move unless you know for sure the fight is trivial.
Edit: Ninjaed by Raven Black, who adds a few interesting points I've missed.
Mentioned multiple times but I repeat that what I like less of these modern methods is delegating all the spell power into the slot level.
At the end no matter your level you always have the same amount of attack spells (the higher slots) as you are not going to prepare level 3rd fireball preventing if a group of very weak foes appears, you just use your higher slots and use the 3rd level i.e. to fill with Slow for spamming it to the boss.
Then your ability is taken few into account is just like to be at level of the encounter, so the target does not critical succeed.
I'd like to be more damage based on character level (like in old games), and other things for heighten, i.e. able to increase (or reduce, grant control with a value) the fireball radius, lightning bolt line to 10', or with scorching ray damage increasing more by level and extra rays when heightened.
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If I break down the arguments and my own experience, I think the essence is that casters are simply much harder to play well than most martials. Or at least the skill floor for being a decent martial is much, much higher. A caster's contribution is also often much less direct, so it can easily feel lesser.
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If I break down the arguments and my own experience, I think the essence is that casters are simply much harder to play well than most martials. Or at least the skill floor for being a decent martial is much, much higher. A caster's contribution is also often much less direct, so it can easily feel lesser.
Yes. It is very much the caster's toolbox vs the martial's Strike.
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If I break down the arguments and my own experience, I think the essence is that casters are simply much harder to play well than most martials. Or at least the skill floor for being a decent martial is much, much higher. A caster's contribution is also often much less direct, so it can easily feel lesser.
The floor of martials is not all the same. I do agree with Deriven here that people tend to pitch their favorite martials and their least favorite casters when making these comparisons. Which has the lower floor, fighter or witch? Is not the same question as bard vs outwit ranger?
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The floor of martials is not all the same. I do agree with Deriven here that people tend to pitch their favorite martials and their least favorite casters when making these comparisons. Which has the lower floor, fighter or witch? Is not the same question as bard vs outwit ranger?If I break down the arguments and my own experience, I think the essence is that casters are simply much harder to play well than most martials. Or at least the skill floor for being a decent martial is much, much higher. A caster's contribution is also often much less direct, so it can easily feel lesser.
Witch vs Investigator
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I'd like to be more damage based on character level (like in old games), and other things for heighten, i.e. able to increase (or reduce, grant control with a value) the fireball radius, lightning bolt line to 10', or with scorching ray damage increasing more by level and extra rays when heightened.
Hard disagree, the caster level based automatic scaling is well down the way of the dodo.
As a single example (Level Appropriate Damage), in PF1 mid to high levels,
...when the martials (especially) were struggling with the RAW full attack rules forcing them to choose between appropriate scaling damage (mostly via iterative attacks, which are automatically gimped already with descending accuracy penalties which sadly stayed in PF2) OR their full movement unless they painfully go around somehow to get a pounce equivalent,
...the casters were enjoying free lunch damage scaling via the RAW spellcasting rules on even their weakest spell slots among other scaling things you mentioned, actually doing the martials' niche (damage) better by that alone (plus, the low DCs can be managed by save half damage by default, too).
It, was, ...infuriating, to say the least. Like if somehow somebody in the original SRD's writers had a grudge against weapon users or the like and did some amoral compensation by sabotaging the very combat system.
I don't think the balance question wrt PF1 has much to do with the balance question wrt PF2, which is pretty much a different game.
I agree that using PF1 balance to compare to PF2 balance is the wrong way to approach the caster scaling of lower level spells, there is something to draw from the previous edition. Which is that with the many avenues that spells could grow (through spell level, caster level, duration, range, and - to lesser extents - feats, metamagic, and items), we have the problem of "quadratic casters." That is to say, a martial gained power and damage linearly, often gaining an extra attack, a new ability through a feat, or a new magic item. This is still that same in PF2.
However, casters when gaining a level would gain an increase in damage to everything (with some level caps in place that still kept low-level damage spells competitive for a few levels). The trade-off was lowered DCs for the weaker spells, though they could be massaged upwards with a few feats here and there. But it still gave spellcasters a huge arsenal of spells that could do... well, pretty much everything. High-level slots could have those fight ending spells while still relying on low-level slots for damage. Or vice versa with lower level spell slots providing a lot of utility.
Now while the balance definitely got out of control, PF1 was also built around these assumptions while PF2 is not. I feel like a retooling to have caster level scale up the damage of all spells across the board would require another look at most, if not all, of the encounter math. I personally enjoy the PF2 spellcasting system, but I suppose if someone wanted to play around with things, I'd start small and say something like "add half your caster level to spell damage" or something like that. I think that would allow you to give you a few more lower level spell slots to use for damage in that way and likely wouldn't be horribly unbalancing.
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I don't think the balance question wrt PF1 has much to do with the balance question wrt PF2, which is pretty much a different game.
Well, DS post mentioned "old games" and a mechanic straight out of 3.5/PF1 that PF2 got rid of.
And, as many other things in PF2, it was changed because it was a root cause of frequent issues in PF1.
Not eager to see it come back.
Not to mention the whole design of the game was built on lower rank slots not being as good as higher rank slots.
Can be perfectly balance, i.e. Fireball 3rd level spell 4d6 + caster level, heightened +1d6 per level. At level 3 it is aprox the same amount, but it scales with level. That + X caster level has been lost and can be adjusted around that.
In other games like Rolemaster I could have low level shock bolt for a low limited damage and mid level fire bolt for greater damage, but at the same time I had a bonus attack for each one with its corresponding skill so the same spell with higher level was much more effective including more powerful creatures, my ability was taken into account. Then were greater versions of the same spells with increased range, firing multiple bolts, that could corner or even “homing” (could ignore some covers, but using the skill bonus for attack with some penalty for each turn). In the case of balls the higher level version were for increased radius.
So the spell level was for features and my skill for damage. If I had no need of those features, why casting the higher level version only for being at par on damage?
The problem is that you not only
you simply "add" another 4*8d6
Is that you must use those added to be at par, leaving behind the previous slots. So is like if you always have 4 fireballs because have to use your higher, forcing you to chose another maybe not desired by you but by convenience for those lower slots, and preventing to use those higher level slots in other interesting different things.
The spell formulae can be adjusted for that linear incrementing using only your level, then use the heighten for features or simply use the higher slots for others.
No much problem being able to cast more daily, martials can do their damage all day long. I'd be OK if they weaken the cantrips or even remove them as trade-off, and maybe changing the 4-slot caster by 3-slot. I am full caster player from the beginning of role-playing (for about 30 years) and have to say that at least in my case what I enjoy more is managing my limited resource for doing things that matters. So while I have it let me use and if I run out of it well I'll be a nullity compared to others in combat (not out of combat with the skills), well can use some weapons as have some training.
That would be a deep change probably for PF3, I'd have more suggestions but that would be for another thread though.
At the end all this maths stuff is putting aside the RPG thing, which should be the character feeling like you expect to be and be happy with it. On each iteration more tighter maths with each one comparing against all the other ones.
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The problem is that you not only
you simply "add" another 4*8d6Is that you must use those added to be at par, leaving behind the previous slots. So is like if you always have 4 fireballs because have to use your higher, forcing you to chose another maybe not desired by you but by convenience for those lower slots, and preventing to use those higher level slots in other interesting different things.
The spell formulae can be adjusted for that linear incrementing using only your level, then use the heighten for features or simply use the higher slots for others.
No much problem being able to cast more daily, martials can do their damage all day long. I'd be OK if they weaken the cantrips or even remove them as trade-off, and maybe changing the 4-slot caster by 3-slot. I am full caster player from the beginning of role-playing (for about 30 years) and have to say that at least in my case what I enjoy more is managing my limited resource for doing things that matters. So while I have it let me use and if I run out of it well I'll be a nullity compared to others in combat (not out of combat with the skills), well can use some weapons as have some training.
That would be a deep change probably for PF3, I'd have more suggestions but that would be for another thread though.
At the end all this maths stuff is putting aside the RPG thing, which should be the character feeling like you expect to be and be happy with it. On each iteration more tighter maths with each one comparing against all the other ones.
Tight math / balance is a blessing to be able to play the character you want and not feel like you're a burden to the rest of the party.
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Can be perfectly balance, i.e. Fireball 3rd level spell 4d6 + caster level, heightened +1d6 per level. At level 3 it is aprox the same amount, but it scales with level. That + X caster level has been lost and can be adjusted around that.
In other games like Rolemaster I could have low level shock bolt for a low limited damage and mid level fire bolt for greater damage, but at the same time I had a bonus attack for each one with its corresponding skill so the same spell with higher level was much more effective including more powerful creatures, my ability was taken into account. Then were greater versions of the same spells with increased range, firing multiple bolts, that could corner or even “homing” (could ignore some covers, but using the skill bonus for attack with some penalty for each turn). In the case of balls the higher level version were for increased radius.
So the spell level was for features and my skill for damage. If I had no need of those features, why casting the higher level version only for being at par on damage?I maintain that the caster scales exactly as well as in PF 1E, it's just that they scale DC instead of damage.
A 1st level spell at level 20 could not hit the broad side of a barn. Your save DC was nonexistent. Moreover, the SCALING itself scaled with higher level spells.
To illustrate: a high level spell, fire storm, and a low level spell, burning hands.
Fire storm capped at 20d6, scaling by 1d6 every level.
Burning hands capped at 5d4, scaling by 1d4 every level.
There's just no comparison there. Especially because burning hands as a 1st level spell would ricochet off a level 20 Reflex save pretty trivially and thereby deal half of its already-irrelevant damage.
Likewise, trying to cast a 1st level debuff spell was utter lunacy given enemy save bonuses. This isn't an issue in PF 2E.
So casters have traded the ability to deal irrelevant amounts of damage that don't matter (in PF 1E) for the...
TBT I feel they want to have all of it : increased damage like in PF1, high DCs for saves like in PF2, and also a boost to spell attacks BTW.
Don’t want to compare with PF1.
And not, is just about being able to use the corresponding spells for their level. At the end you always have to use the higher for damaging, relegating the lower to utility or useless. Not always you need that so much utility, as while the higher the level, the more lower slots you have.
And I’d want to use the higher for utility, as there are many interesting, not reserving for damage ones for not wasting turns being subpar. Is not so great that you get your 7th level slots which have a spell you like so much, but no you cannot as you have to reserve them for your <put your damage spell> as you are in hostile area.
Remember that creatures increase both their DC and HP, while casters only auto-increase DC, falling behind in damage. Martials increases both, the damage by items or using ABP for the thing they can use each round all day long.
So increasing only DC is for being at par BUT ONLY FOR DC, so you can hold your success/failure rate.
Again taking Rolemaster as example, at lower level I’d was at par on damage (attack skill) for the level, and could cast fire bolt X times. At higher level I continued being at par (increased attack skill) but could cast fire bolt many more times. In this case the increase was the same for casters and martials (there was only attack bonus and the damage was read in a table) but I were able to cast it more times, and with variants (mentioned earlier). And if wanted I could just cast another utility spells, not reserving all my higher ones for the same.
Here we have the casters only improves chance, while martials both chance and damage, in the case of casters the damage delegates in the slot level. So at the end, I repeat, is always the same, you have to reserve you higher for the same and are forced to use the lower for things that maybe you don’t want but have to do, not feeling nice.