But the fringe is the problem. Baseline changes don't make a specific type of underperforming spell better.
"Sometimes people use hero points for big results" is a feature, not a bug. When our Fighter does it with an eldritch shot or our Inventor uses it on an unstable megaton strike, sometimes it ends up being really high impact when it turns a miss into a hit or a crit, but that's just how hero points work.
Sometimes people use Truestrike for big results too and I think that is a feature of the game too, not a bug. No one is using hero points to greatly increase the damage of a saving throw spell, so the saving throw spell is always going to be in a position of the less optimal option for trying to do as much damage as possible when you really need a game changing round. Spell attack roll spells already occupy that space.
I get wanting to add cool items and don't really think that this conversation about spell attack rolls is the best place for making magic affecting items that are really cool. We have some cool wands, I hope we get more. We have spell hearts which are pretty cool, I hope we get more. I hope we get more staves that add interesting little effects to the spells a player casts, like we have a couple of examples of now. A low value flat bonus to accuracy on spell attack roll spells isn't a cool item that adds something unique and interesting to the game. It is either a boring math fixer that has to deliberately invalidate other existing game options to work, or it is a math booster to subtly push casters more into single target blasting if the damage output is good enough, but why would you only want to do that one type of spell if you think that casters generally need boosting.
In the end, I am not really sure what the specific proposal here is. The reason why the OP proposals (separating spell attack roll proficiency from saving throw DCs, and giving item bonuses to spell attack rolls while removing truestrike) don't really accomplish the intended goal of the post, and are pretty unlikely to be Errata'd that way, have been pretty thoroughly discussed at this point. Good luck trying different options out for yourselves in homebrew, i hope you have at least taken some of these responses into consideration as you decide how you want to play your games.
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Sorry, but this is a maddening amount of circular logic.Backed up by math.
You have completely put aside the concept of opportunity cost that reduces the efficiency of True Strike on martials to a mere 5% extra damage.I've also provided graphs showing that a +2 to spell attack rolls imbalances the game in the other way, argument that you haven't even tried to disprove.
Sorry, but I don't find you're engaging in good faith.
My dude, this entire thread has yet to take into account the opportunity cost of spells in general.
Its one of the most frustrating parts of this discussion. As soon we hit one point of agreement, there is just a retreat to some other point.
Spells, especially spell attack rolls, have a high opportunity cost to them, and its factored in from several fronts. Be that the choice of preparation, the cost of being a spell known, spell slot allocation, etc etc. They have a series of implicit costs associated with them before you ever cast the spell. This is in addition and on top of all the costs paid by caster classes to even have access to those spells in the first place (bad saves, low hp, etc etc).
Then, once you go to cast, for all those costs, you are likely to fail and get nothing in return?
But True Strike is real cost on martials because it doesn't increase their damage enough on a longitudinal scale for your liking?! and I'm talking in bad faith?!
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I've also provided graphs showing that a +2 to spell attack rolls imbalances the game in the other way, argument that you haven't even tried to disprove.
This you?
Overall, not much. You won't imbalance the game by providing a bonus to a small number of spells.
What you meant to say is that you an apples to orange comparison where the apples sometimes come out on top of the oranges, even though the oranges have failure riders and the apples have nothing.
99 posts and a solution ain't one. :P
It's because everyone see a different problem or even no problem at all.
There are those who see that the problem is the hit rate that's isn't so good as martials with runes (yet SpellStrike/Eldritch Shot usually solves this but requires to be too much martial), others that see that the problem is that power of these spells are not high enough to compete with basic save spells, others don't see a problem at all, some saying that there are some good attack spells with high rewards to compensate, others like me don't see as a great problem and simply ignore these spells in most cases and use saves spells instead.
These multiple non-concordant analises makes difficult to find a unique "solution".
I already said my idea. Diminish attack spells actions by 1 like as you are using Fiery Body and the attack spells will make more sense (the MAP already prevents too many spams, you can use it to complete your DPR efficiency like summoners and spellcasters with weapons(bows) or Fiery Body do and you can use True Strike and keep an action to do other thing).
For myself, I don't see a problem with attack roll spells. There are more ways to gain an attack roll advantage with Legendary proficiency eventually that equates to a 1 point difference between attack roll spells and Master level martials with weapons.
Also attack roll spells are not that great besides a few situational spells good against specific target types. I don't use them much on my casters. When I do, I usually set them up to work effectively such as turning invisible, debuffing the target or using true strike, then attacking. So I feel I get the same relative attack roll as a martial.
I would like wands and staves to act like magic weapons for martials for aesthetic reasons versus balance or concerns with attack roll spells.
I've even house ruled wands and staves to give an item bonus to spell attack rolls, still hasn't increased spell attack roll use. Only way I see spell attack spells getting more use is if they improve attack roll spells to be on par with the best save spells. Why use them if you can find a better save spell more effective in more situations? It comes down to opportunity cost and so far attack roll spells don't have the best opportunity cost. If they did, more people would use them.
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In PF1 and 3.x Systems the problem with “spell casting is too powerful” wasn’t the inherent power level of spells, it was how easily character build specialization allowed casting certain spells to be the obviously best choice in almost every situation, not just for that character, but for the entire party. The game suffered because it stopped being a game played at the table and became a game played at home with character building software (because searching through options in books would take forever). PF2 set out to solve that problem at its root, by focusing casting around the advantages that are primarily determined in individual encounters. This is what I mean when I am talking about the tactical nature of spell casting, and the thing about tactical decision making is that means adding complexity that directly impacts the difficulty of the game.
Spells do lots of different damage types, this was made more impactful in PF2 by making sure that enemies have more impactful resistances and weaknesses and the ways to just bypass that with more powerful magical weapons was removed. We will come back to this point later, but it is a major point of tactical complexity in PF2 spell casting.
All of combat (for everyone, casters and martials) shifted most differences in bonuses between characters towards things that can be mitigated or manipulated in combat. Some players have interpreted this to mean that there is nothing more important that coming into an encounter with the highest accuracy bonuses possible, because starting off with the highest accuracy bonuses possible means having to do the least amount of work to stay ahead of the curve and benefiting more from doing the extra work than you did in PF1, because the plateau for extreme accuracy in PF2 is nearly out of reach of characters due to +10 = crit.
And while it is true that having higher numbers to start with helps characters succeed in PF2, player characters with slightly lower numbers to start with can easily surpass the accuracy of characters built with maximum starting numbers in PF2. So when comparing spells or action choices, you cannot just look at the baseline “best starting position” as the balance point for efficacy, you have to look at what impact tactical optimization can have, and this is where spell attack rolls have a lot more swing than saving throw spells.
Tactical optimization is a difficulty setting that is not easily estimated, and is something that is going to swing back and forth, up and down in every encounter, for every player. The same player might approach one encounter and be able to nail the context clues to guess damage types, enemy tactics, and power level to perfectly match their own character’s strengths to the enemy’s weaknesses and it will feel like a very easy encounter. But in the next encounter, misjudging one of those elements could possibly see the whole party wipe if lots of actions are spent trying to take advantage of a false weakness or miss a disguised strength. As a GM I see this pretty often. When your players misread an encounter, they are often in a whole lot of trouble. For example, when the party rogue wins initiative and spends 2 actions to rush 60ft ahead of the party into a group of enemies the party thinks want to be ranged attackers, but are more powerful up close, there is a high probability this fight turns into an ugly one.
I very strongly believe that this entire conversation around spell attack rolls is not about the mechanical balance of spell attack rolls, it is about player frustration with running into encounters that they have misread, or don’t know how to read. In these situations, for better or worse, martial characters are very likely just to do the thing that they character is always going to do, even if that turns out to be tactically disadvantageous. Generally speaking, it is just an expectation of many players that martial players tend not to try to analyze encounters beyond, Did my attack seem to do any damage? Then I will probably keep doing that same attack again unless someone else figures out that an easy option for me to switch too could do more damage than just attacking away with my primary weapon. Casters on the other hand, have tended to bear the burden of having to read the encounter and figure out the best way to approach it, and that is a labor expectation that can be frustrating to some players who want to play casters with the same gusto as the martial that just attacks away until someone else points out a better course of action.
In PF2’s defense, There are whole lot of martial class variants designed around reversing these roles and letting martials play more tactically and do more of the encounter planing. The developers want all players to approach combats more tactically, but they have pushed casters more squarely into that role than they have martials, because we don’t have the caster’s version of the fighter. I don’t know if we will ever get it. The psychic feels like it was the farthest the developers want to push into casters having one repeating attack routine that is difficult to deviate much from.I think a lot of players would have liked for that role to be taken up by sorcerers, but sorcerers went with increased build flexibility instead which really limited how much vertical accuracy and damage bonus power could be stacked on top of them with lots of spell slots and more good focus spells than bad ones.
So what do the consistently offered “solutions” to “How to fix spell attack roll spells” offer?
Just adding potency runes to the game means that spell attack roll spells still play exactly the same way they do now (where you need to tactically optimize them to make them better than saving throw spells), but it pushes them wildly past the damage output of saving throw spells. Remember, with no changes to the game at all, single target blasting, especially against higher level opposition, is already best done with spell attack roll spells. This suggestion is not about balancing spell attack roll spells and saving throw spells, it is about making casters better strikers and is about comparing their DPR output to martial classes. This is also going to be true of increasing the higher end of spell attack roll spells damage. They are already big time gamble spells. Individually, some of the spell attack roll spells work in wonky ways, but so too do some saving throw spells. So boosting the power of “spell attack roll spells” is really asking for an additional pass over of all spells and seeing if there are some spells that should just be boosted, or if it is better to let bad spells be bad spells and just come up with more new spells that fit the tactical situations that players want to use them in.
Making spell attack roll spells 1 action. We do already have this option in the fiery form spell. It is interesting. I haven’t seen a lot of players choose to play around with it much myself. It feels like it has a lot of potential, but being limited to one damage type probably scares a lot of players away from it. I would be interested in seeing a few more spell options that do similar things to this spell. I don’t think it is wise to just make all spell attack roll spells 1 action by default. Not all spell attack roll spells are the same. Maybe some more, lower level single action spell attack roll spells could be cool. I don’t think players complaining about spell attack roll spells missing will be happy with this solution unless the added spell is a cantrip.
The assertion that “spell attack roll spells are just bad” and need a universal boost, is, most generously, a highly contentious statement and not an easily recognized fact. Some of us even strongly feel like it is a deliberate misrepresentation of the situation, designed primarily just to push for power creep for spell casters generally, because we recognize that they are already the best spells to cast in some of the most important casting situations.
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If the devs thought there was something innately wrong with attack spells and that could be easily solved through a simple solution, they would have done it ages ago.
I mean, this thread is very far from the first one about this topic.
So, from my point of view, works as intended by the devs. Who happen to know a lot more about game design than random internet posters, self included.
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If the devs thought there was something innately wrong with attack spells and that could be easily solved through a simple solution, they would have done it ages ago.
I mean, this thread is very far from the first one about this topic.
So, from my point of view, works as intended by the devs. Who happen to know a lot more about game design than random internet posters, self included.
Devs are much more restricted in ways that can add changes on already finished product especially on things that affected all class progression.And they do add changes via items like shadow signet
If the devs thought there was something innately wrong with attack spells and that could be easily solved through a simple solution, they would have done it ages ago.
I mean, this thread is very far from the first one about this topic.
So, from my point of view, works as intended by the devs. Who happen to know a lot more about game design than random internet posters, self included.
Devs are much more restricted in ways that can add changes on already finished product especially on things that affected all class progression
This is definitely true Vasyazx, were you making your original suggestion as optional house rules? That really changes my personal response a lot.
When house ruling modifications that are specific to the play style of your party and how they handle encounters, you don't really have to be that concerned about overall balance concerns, just relative balance concerns between the players at your table and whether they are having fun. Do your players dislike Truestrike? If they don't like using it, it doesn't really matter if you remove it or not. If you give out a special item that gives an item bonus to spell attack roll spells because you see your players wanting to use them, but really disliking truestrike, then I think such an item is a fine homebrew item. As a GM, giving your players cool, unique, custom items that are not part of the game as a whole is usually really well received. This is why I early asked the context for "fixing spell attack roll spells" because getting things to work at your table is a lot easier than getting things to work for everyone else.
So if you are the GM with players having problems feeling good about using spell attack roll spells, custom build an item that feels really thematically coherent to your campaign and it will be very well received. I would recommend this over trying to "hack" the classes and separate out spell DC and spell attack proficiencies (as were your two original ideas).
If you are a player, and you are feeling frustrated when you use spell attack roll spells. I do highly recommend you talk to your GM about it. Acknowledge that you see ways to get more utility out of the spells via tactical choices, but that you really don't want to lean into that play style. Maybe they will agree to make, or let you craft, a magical item to boost your accuracy, with the understanding that you are not just going to use that and then suddenly start memorizing a bunch of true strike spells and going all in on optimizing around only using spell attack roll spells...or they will be fine with you doing so in that campaign and it won't really be a problem. Alternatively, they might feel very comfortable with where spells are in PF2 and want their players to approach combats more tactically. If that is what the GM wants and it is not what all the players at the table want, the issue isn't the system, it is player expectations clashing with GM expectations and is better resolved in a conversation than with one side brandishing shiny new Errata.
If the devs thought there was something innately wrong with attack spells and that could be easily solved through a simple solution, they would have done it ages ago.
I mean, this thread is very far from the first one about this topic.
So, from my point of view, works as intended by the devs. Who happen to know a lot more about game design than random internet posters, self included.
Devs are much more restricted in ways that can add changes on already finished product especially on things that affected all class progression
This is definitely true Vasyazx, were you making your original suggestion as optional house rules? That really changes my personal response a lot.
When house ruling modifications that are specific to the play style of your party and how they handle encounters, you don't really have to be that concerned about overall balance concerns, just relative balance concerns between the players at your table and whether they are having fun. Do your players dislike Truestrike? If they don't like using it, it doesn't really matter if you remove it or not. If you give out a special item that gives an item bonus to spell attack roll spells because you see your players wanting to use them, but really disliking truestrike, then I think such an item is a fine homebrew item. As a GM, giving your players cool, unique, custom items that are not part of the game as a whole is usually really well received. This is why I early asked the context for "fixing spell attack roll spells" because getting things to work at your table is a lot easier than getting things to work for everyone else.
So if you are the GM with players having problems feeling good about using spell attack roll spells, custom build an item that feels really thematically coherent to your campaign and it will be very well received. I would recommend this over trying to "hack" the classes and separate out spell DC and spell attack proficiencies (as were your two...
Well i like to make changes when i see the weak points of system(at least for me) and i see that some people see it way i am.So i decide to create a thread where people can offer their personal solution to problem so that can analyze and develop my own without breking game overall
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If that is the case, I think that it might be more productive for you, and your goals with this thread for it to go in homebrew, rather than general discussion. Because in general discussion the question becomes a point of debate around whether spell attack spells universally are a weak point of the system or not, whereas your interest is in creating ideas for players who already agree that this is a problem at their tables.
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Well i like to make changes when i see the weak points of system(at least for me) and i see that some people see it way i am well so i decide to create a thread where people can offer their personal solution to problem so that can analyze and develop my own without breking game overallI think here's where the objectors are: you're seeing a weak point in a straight-up, head-to-head attack bonus comparison casters to martials. But casters and martials have different peripheral capabilities. Many of them very powerful. Many of them very relevant to combat. So it's not *necessarily* a system weak point, any more than a head-to-head comparison of save proficiencies between monk and wizard points out a weak point in the system. Because monks and wizards get other different stuff...and if every class had every statistic head-to-head the same, that would be pretty bland.
But I'm also fully on board with Unicore's last point: your table, you have fun with house ruling it in a way that makes it more fun for you.
And I'm also partially on board with the many folk supporting your point, that it *could be* a weak point in the sense that letting casters have a head-to-head equality in this particular statistic might make it more fun for them while not unbalancing the game. Frankly, I'm ambilavent on that. But even in that case, I wouldn't change proficiencies. I'd create better item bonus parity.
The thread itself not about martial and caster balance it is about balance between spell attack and saves spells some people bring it as point but its a not main focus
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The fact that your 3.5/PF1 games deviated heavily from the meta does not make meta go away.
It actually seems like almost everyone agrees that if your specific table is having "feels-bad" moments around spell attack roll spells, and you don't think trying to get the players to look at tactical ways to improve their reliability and effectiveness would be a good use of table time, then house ruling an item bonus to spell attack rolls for those players is probably something that will address the feelings fairly well.
The reason I think this is fine as a house rule and not as a thing the game needs at a base level, is because homebrewed items are cool and make players feel like their characters are special in their world. When they are "fundamental" items (that are unnecessary for basic game math) then those items are just power creep.
For players playing PFS, remember that encounters are rarely tuned to the levels that people are talking about in these types of threads and the basic math does not need these items to make spell casters function very well. PFS starts from a position of assuming that players are not playing together with most optimal tactics and that GMs are not going to be tailoring the play experience to the party at the table. But that is the only situation where GMs are not actively encouraged to change their game for their specific players. "Make whatever changes are most fun for you and your players" is pretty basic in every TTRPG not centered around society or convention play, I don't know who is challenging that.
And again, approaching a conversation about the role of spell attack roll spells in comparison to saving throw spells (spells which the OP has no voiced issue with), from the perspective that shifting from character building optimization to tactical optimization was a huge mistake that has a vague reference point in this conversation seems like thread subversion to me. If you think spells having different damage types and that being tactically significant in PF2 is a problem in and of itself, your issue with PF2 spell casting is much bigger than the difference between spell attack roll spells and saving throw targeting spells.
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People have given a very consistent solution: give casters a +2 or +3 potency rune just like martials.
Some have said to increase the power of spell attack spells.
YuriP has said to make those spells 1 action, and I will follo with making spells variable actions.
I have said that you should do a combination of all of these because the spells are just that bad.
The fact some refuse these solutions because they don't see a problem does not mean no one has said any.
You don't necessarily have to increase their power, so much as make them on par with save spells. They could make more of them with similar use if people want to use them.
There seems to be this vocal minority not satisfied with current options for spells and want more effective attack roll spells.
I wouldn't mind better rolls for cantrip use. A lot of cantrips require an attack roll, you end up using electric arc over and over again because of MAP with a weapon. Electric arc has no MAP and you can use a weapon and electric arc with no penalty to the attack roll. Electric arc does the same damage as most attack roll cantrips. Very few things are resistant to electricity.
Which is why I wouldn't use an attack roll cantrip too often because I'd rather use electric arc then take a weapon attack at full bonus than cast an attack cantrip followed by a weapon attack at -5.
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The fact that your 3.5/PF1 games deviated heavily from the meta does not make meta go away.In my experience these so-called metas only actually exist on web forums of self-appointed experts. They have no real relation to actual plays (or reality) and are typically exercises in theorizing about potential practices.
EDIT: I almost forgot, metas are important to the hot-air bags that shill the meta via podcasts and youtube. Advice from such folks is always best taken with large salt tablets. /EDIT
YMMV
I've played in numerous 3.5/PF1 games where my Leap Attack/Shock Trooper (PF1) or Cavern Druid + Vital Strike (PF1) nonsense made people at my table cry because their lore-heavy dwarven Fighter with shield, axe, Toughness, Diehard and some silly +2 to trip Giants trait were obsolete the moment we designed our characters.
So, nope, meta is real, it's more aggressive in some places and less in others, but with the default "anything by Paizo is fine" setup most PF1 tables have, I've blown up any semblance of balance at such tables several times. Without even having to resort to actual Goz Mask + Eversmoking Bottle grade of cheese and with doing it all with one hand tied behind my back because the GM allowed Sacred Geometry and I mercifully didn't go that way.
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Weird, I would have thought that AoE attacks are still attacks but apparently not. I could fireball and then shoot a firearm at no penalty...not in love with the design implications, one of them being that the current state of affairs might exist because of this AoE+strike or strike+AoE. While most folks are going to look at the magus, this might actually be an important (if repetitive) action-sequence for all spell-casters. Better, design-wise, would have been if spellcasters were competent with their abilities and save-causing AoE's had the attack trait, reflecting the attacks that they are.
PF2 is a very different game from PF1. This board is full of threads where people decry all of PF2 band how terrible X part is or how difficult it’s encounters are, only to find out that the players are bringing in tactics from a different game and getting frustrated those tactics don’t work the same way anymore. Very many of the creators of these threads are still around and have transitioned into defenders of classes that they initially disparaged after getting advice and feedback about the things that were frustrating them in play.
Giving people feedback when they don’t want it doesn’t usually go well. I don’t tell players that they are wrong for feeling frustrated about X, I even have my own frustrations about PF2. But people coming to the message board are doing so because they want information from the community, and I try my best to figure out what they are really trying to learn about the game from their complaints, and why existing decisions were made/what the bigger consequences of those choices are. For example, many of the times this thread has come up, it has become clear that players are largely talking about low level play, and mostly talking about using cantrips as far as spell attack roll spells go. However the larger conversation has included a bunch of meta analysis about the shadow signet ring, and using true strike, when the initial player is probably really just struggling with the fact that there are some absolutely amazing cantrips and a large number of more situationally useful cantrips and using those Spells outside their optimal space is often difficult and unrewarding.
As superbidi pointed out, that is a spell selection issue with a more spells and better guidance for new players solution. Not “the mechanics of attack rolls and what can modify them” issue. PF1 was littered with terribly situational, and often oddly worded spells. Sometimes ti the point of uselessness and sometimes without understanding for their impact on the game to absurdly game breaking levels.
As good as electric arc is, there are still non-trivial situations and encounters where a spell like daze, or ray of frost, or divine lance are the much better spell to cast. At low levels it can feel like you are saddled with a lot of spell attack roll spells and no way of boosting them that isn’t more expensive than the spell you are casting. Item bonuses definitely don’t help at all here. Using lower levels to learn how valuable coordinating with your Allie’s can be in shifting your accuracy is useful and important. By higher levels, your spell attack roll spells are a small subset of blasting spells that a caster can cast. If anything, there are so few of them that many casters don’t continue keeping a couple available, and so they don’t ever get the opportunity to obliterate a demon with a searing light spell because they’ve written the whole category if spells away.
Right now folks are bailing on 5e not for reason of its maths.
I just wanted to push back and say that people are absolutely bailing on 5e because its balance is absolute garbage. Trying to pretend otherwise is impressively tone-deaf to what people have been constantly commenting as problems with it.
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instead my experience is that they just look at me and say "Jeez! This Electric Arc/Scatter Scree is more interesting and useful than Produce Flame/Ray of Frost right? I'll stick with it!".
A late reply but I wanted to reply to this specifically, as a new player who is going through this situation, I had the complete opposite experience and I couldn't just let it sit there as if "Haha lol that imbalance is just there I guess! I'll just swapperonies over" is the normal experience for everyone.
My reply to finding this out is, "Oh, that sucks massively. I really wanted to play into a fire theme for my character, so I wanted to choose what fit his concept. But you're telling me that this is just flat worse and I should've played on an electric or earth theme instead and not wasted a cantrip choice on Produce Flame? That feels really bad. I mean I guess I can just retrain out of Produce Flame but. :/"
It's kind of a bitter taste. And also why I'm so eager for Kineticist. For people that care only about the effectiveness yeah it's no problem to just switch to the simply stronger spells as I'm sure the folks you had experienced has as their playstyle. But for people that wanna play to a theme it feels awful to be basically nerfed if your choice of theme doesn't play into what's just strong (or if, say, you have the spell forced on you ala elemental bloodline sorc). If it was just a little weaker it's one thing but the spell attack thing has made me less and less enthused over time, I hope it can be fixed at some point but I suppose until then there's only bandaids like a level 10 item if people had the gall [I get to be dramatic too!] to want to not use a saving throw spell.
I won't repeat what everyone else has already said but I just wanted to get that out there, and that I do agree that the spell attack thing feels pretty bad and it's absolutely something I warn heavily to my friends about if I talk about PF2e to them. The system is flawed as much as I still like it, and this is one of those flaws.
I'll just hesitantly look at deleting Produce Flame off of my character, even if it makes no sense, because that's just how it's balanced I guess!
The fact that your 3.5/PF1 games deviated heavily from the meta does not make meta go away.In my experience these so-called metas only actually exist on web forums of self-appointed experts. They have no real relation to actual plays (or reality) and are typically exercises in theorizing about potential practices.
EDIT: I almost forgot, metas are important to the hot-air bags that shill the meta via podcasts and youtube. Advice from such folks is always best taken with large salt tablets. /EDIT
YMMV
My friends used metas or created very highly optimized and versatile characters a lot in 3.5/PF1 games. The DM constantly have to review all CR balance and sometimes when we had a mixed bag of experienced and newbie players this created many risky situations for newbies or even makes then as token participants to try to compensate the builds differences.
instead my experience is that they just look at me and say "Jeez! This Electric Arc/Scatter Scree is more interesting and useful than Produce Flame/Ray of Frost right? I'll stick with it!".A late reply but I wanted to reply to this specifically, as a new player who is going through this situation, I had the complete opposite experience and I couldn't just let it sit there as if "Haha lol that imbalance is just there I guess! I'll just swapperonies over" is the normal experience for everyone.
My reply to finding this out is, "Oh, that sucks massively. I really wanted to play into a fire theme for my character, so I wanted to choose what fit his concept. But you're telling me that this is just flat worse and I should've played on an electric or earth theme instead and not wasted a cantrip choice on Produce Flame? That feels really bad. I mean I guess I can just retrain out of Produce Flame but. :/"
It's kind of a bitter taste. And also why I'm so eager for Kineticist. For people that care only about the effectiveness yeah it's no problem to just switch to the simply stronger spells as I'm sure the folks you had experienced has as their playstyle. But for people that wanna play to a theme it feels awful to be basically nerfed if your choice of theme doesn't play into what's just strong (or if, say, you have the spell forced on you ala elemental bloodline sorc). If it was just a little weaker it's one thing but the spell attack thing has made me less and less enthused over time, I hope it can be fixed at some point but I suppose until then there's only bandaids like a level 10 item if people had the gall [I get to be dramatic too!] to want to not use a saving throw spell.
I won't repeat what everyone else has already said but I just wanted to get that out there, and that I do agree that the spell attack thing feels pretty bad and it's absolutely something I warn heavily to my friends about if I talk about PF2e to them. The system is flawed as much as I still like it, and this is...
Thematic casting is challenging in PF2 because flexibility is so prioritized. The ways that the kineticist playtest played with that are interesting and we’ll see how well the space fills the wants of a lot of players looking for elemental focus.
Produce flame is not a terrible spell. It’s ranged, but also usable in melee when you might have a flank and the crit effect is probably the most powerful of all cantrips. Again getting positive critical effects is a lot easier to make happen with spell attack roll spells than saving throw ones. I think a character with both electric arc and produce flame could pretty well fit a looser theme of fire starter. Static electricity and heat go together pretty well. Generally speaking in PF2 it is a good idea to try to make any theme at least 2 dimensional, rather than just focus on a single damage type. I think you will see that heavily in the kineticist as well.
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Thematic casting is challenging in PF2 because flexibility is so prioritized. The ways that the kineticist playtest played with that are interesting and we’ll see how well the space fills the wants of a lot of players looking for elemental focus.
Produce flame is not a terrible spell. It’s ranged, but also usable in melee when you might have a flank and the crit effect is probably the most powerful of all cantrips. Again getting positive critical effects is a lot easier to make happen with spell attack roll spells than saving throw ones. I think a character with both electric arc and produce flame could pretty well fit a looser theme of fire starter. Static electricity and heat go together pretty well. Generally speaking in PF2 it is a good idea to try to make any theme at least 2 dimensional, rather than just focus on a single damage type. I think you will see that heavily in the kineticist as well.
To clarify as I knew it would happen after I hit post, I don't make my characters a single dimensional theme, I do not limit myself *only* to that one item unless the class has explicit support for it. I just have a 'base' which is the base of what he does and then as casters do, have a spattering of other things on top. But the expectation is that I get to use what I believe his theme is as a focus and not feel gimped for it. He actually does have both Produce Flame and Electric Arc! At his core base he's a bit of a pyro, so, I wanted to use Produce Flame, because it made sense. But then the more I play and the more I look at it, the more it feels like a waste of a slot in anything outside of cute RP (hehe i can lob it at a fireplace to light it), and thus I regret my choice of theme. It just feels bad. :/ I feel like for the most entry level based items that shouldn't be happening where a new player just gets confronted with that. He's an elf sorc so flanking is terrifying.
Also an interview said they specifically tried to make Kineticist so that doing multiple elements isn't mandatory so I *will* be salty if that ends up not being the case.
My reply to finding this out is, "Oh, that sucks massively. I really wanted to play into a fire theme for my character, so I wanted to choose what fit his concept. But you're telling me that this is just flat worse and I should've played on an electric or earth theme instead and not wasted a cantrip choice on Produce Flame?As a former GM, I'm a big fan of reskinning identical mechanics. If this bothered you greatly, I'd say "call it fire arc, give it the [fire] tag instead of the [electric] tag, and be done with it."
But as a GM I'd also probably say 'try it as-is first.' Because board discussions about how d4+4 vs reflex save against 2 targets produces a higher DPR over d4+4 vs. AC against one target over all possible scenarios of use, may not change your enjoyment or the effectiveness of throwing fire in someone's face in table play. Take the free 'try the rules' adventure "Torment and Legacy" as an example. There'd be practically no difference in the encounters it presents. Produce flame is even, theoretically, the more optimal choice for that one because on a crit, it gives persistent damage. But since you'll only roll to attack maybe 3-10 times in that whole thing, probably no difference. And the point here is not to say the calculators are wrong. It's to say: beware falling into the Gambler's Fallacy.
I'm 3 levels in, I'm not talking in pure theoreticals, just my experience as a player so far. Maybe I'll ask my DM about just reskinning electric arc, that's a better idea, feels like I'm going back to 5e gameplay though lol just make the GM fix it :(
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instead my experience is that they just look at me and say "Jeez! This Electric Arc/Scatter Scree is more interesting and useful than Produce Flame/Ray of Frost right? I'll stick with it!".A late reply but I wanted to reply to this specifically, as a new player who is going through this situation, I had the complete opposite experience and I couldn't just let it sit there as if "Haha lol that imbalance is just there I guess! I'll just swapperonies over" is the normal experience for everyone.
My reply to finding this out is, "Oh, that sucks massively. I really wanted to play into a fire theme for my character, so I wanted to choose what fit his concept. But you're telling me that this is just flat worse and I should've played on an electric or earth theme instead and not wasted a cantrip choice on Produce Flame? That feels really bad. I mean I guess I can just retrain out of Produce Flame but. :/"
It's kind of a bitter taste. And also why I'm so eager for Kineticist. For people that care only about the effectiveness yeah it's no problem to just switch to the simply stronger spells as I'm sure the folks you had experienced has as their playstyle. But for people that wanna play to a theme it feels awful to be basically nerfed if your choice of theme doesn't play into what's just strong (or if, say, you have the spell forced on you ala elemental bloodline sorc). If it was just a little weaker it's one thing but the spell attack thing has made me less and less enthused over time, I hope it can be fixed at some point but I suppose until then there's only bandaids like a level 10 item if people had the gall [I get to be dramatic too!] to want to not use a saving throw spell.
I won't repeat what everyone else has already said but I just wanted to get that out there, and that I do agree that the spell attack thing feels pretty bad and it's absolutely something I warn heavily to my friends about if I talk about PF2e to them. The system is flawed as much as I still like it, and this is...
This is more a question of flavor and design choices than balance IMO.
You aren't wrong yet It's a thing that I abandoned this idea of "I want to do a character that works like this (like a firemancer) and that will be effective in all aspect I wanted that it will need to be" for classes based TTRPGs a long ago.This could appear sad to many people but when I play a class based games I work with what I have not that I exactly want.
For example you want a to play a fire based caster but the only good save cantrips available are Eletric (Eletric Arc), Earth (Scatter Scree) and Water (Spout), so you are forced to choose to use one of these save spells or being forced to switch to a Spell Attack that isn't so good when used in same way.
Instead due the design limitation of a class based game you have to seek the viable options available and see which ones suit you best.
In the are there are a lot of options with a lot of more options within that you can choose but none of them will guarantee that they will do exactly what you want to do efficiently. This is how a class based game works.
My friends used metas or created very highly optimized and versatile characters a lot in 3.5/PF1 games. The DM constantly have to review all CR balance and sometimes when we had a mixed bag of experienced and newbie players this created many risky situations for newbies or even makes then as token participants to try to compensate the builds differences.The fact that your 3.5/PF1 games deviated heavily from the meta does not make meta go away.In my experience these so-called metas only actually exist on web forums of self-appointed experts. They have no real relation to actual plays (or reality) and are typically exercises in theorizing about potential practices.
EDIT: I almost forgot, metas are important to the hot-air bags that shill the meta via podcasts and youtube. Advice from such folks is always best taken with large salt tablets. /EDIT
YMMV
The funny part is that newbies also follow metas and can make stronger than the more experienced that is just trying to make a specific concept work.
So it was not a "newbie" vs "experienced". It was a "person just making whatever" vs "person following a guide" vs "person trying to make a weird gimmick work".
Now you still have the guides and those do fine. But everyone else needs to actively fight the system or have a GM actively help them to not feel bad.
Not wanting to contradict you because I agree. But the newbies I'm referring to are newbies in the TTRPG genre that don't even know how much the game can be optimized and tend to just choose the class and race they think is coolest without understanding much how the game mechanics work. (something that curiously works well in PF2, but that easily throws you into a dangerous situation in other TTRPGs)
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This could appear sad to many people but when I play a class based games I work with what I have not that I exactly want...
...Instead due the design limitation of a class based game you have to seek the viable options available and see which ones suit you best.
It's not a problem of class-based games, it's really a problem of using canned adventures. With a GM who can tune encounters to PC capabilities, there are many many more 'viable options.'
This is not to denigrate the canned adventures. In fact, Paizo (and WotC for 5th Ed) seem to have been very successful in bringing people to (or back to) the table with them, so I give both the companies and those products a huge thumbs up. AFAICT, they've been very beneficial to the industry. But they have their limitations. And one of those limitations is that if a level 3 encounter is written for level 3 'built correctly' PCs, and your GM doesn't have the skill or time to change it, well then you'd better have a level 3 'built correctly' character or you're in trouble.
True in PF1 where the difference between two builds could have colossal effects on the game.
Far far less true in PF2 where one of the design goals was specifically to allow casual builds to have fun even when adventuring with optimal builds.
Without even having to resort to actual Goz Mask + Eversmoking Bottle grade of cheese...
Wait. Was that really all that common?
When my players obliterated Skull and Shackles with their fogcutting lenses, Goz masks, and various cloud spells, they felt quite special for having come up with it.
I dread to think that it was just something one of them found on the internet.
Without even having to resort to actual Goz Mask + Eversmoking Bottle grade of cheese...Wait. Was that really all that common?
When my players obliterated Skulls and Shackles with their fogcutting lenses, Goz masks, and various cloud spells, they felt quite special.
I dread to think that it was just something one of them found on the internet.
Depends where they go looking. I mean it is listed in my strategy guide which is post that adventure. It is ironic as in that same document I complain that everything is easy to find now on the web. You still have to put it together at the right time. Doing it well requires a bit of discipline. My players are typically headless chooks, everyone doing their own thing more often than not to the detriment of other tactics in the team. It is not till I put them on the ropes that they actually start to play smart.
Though I object to calling it cheese. In PF2 it is a balanced and valid tactic. In PF1 it was much stronger.
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Its also more severe in other cases (ex blaster casters).
I think this shows a significant misunderstanding of blasters in both pf1 and pf2. It can be hard to exclusively use blasting spells in PF2, but someone who regularly uses them (at least once a combat) and also uses other appropriate spells for combats when they come up are really effective combatants. Even if we're talking about only blasting, it's fairly absurd to say that a terribly optimised blaster is closer to a well-optimised one in pf1 than in pf2. Blasting could be highly effective in PF1, but the difference between someone stacking wayang spellhunter and metamagic lineage with spell foci feats, taking a dip into crossblooded sorc for +2 damage/dice, putting dazing metamagic on the spells, boosting CL dramatically, etc, and someone not doing that was huge. A PF1 blaster who did none of that, just maxed out their casting stat and picked up blasting spells, was incredibly ineffective in many, many ways. Trying to pretend that the gap between a well-built and badly built pf2 blaster is equivalent to the differences outlined above is really just comical.
Arcaian has the right of it. 'Out of the box' blasting in PF1 was supremely unsatisfying and bad, and with the way things scaled in PF1 probably a lot worse than what we have now (which tbh are more about reliability and longevity than anything else).
Blast scaling in PF1 was notoriously bad, and ironically it was a pretty common complaint that 3.5 (and PF by extension) neutered blasting from older editions of D&D.
PF1 build guides went out of their way to extoll the virtues of playing support and utility casters because focusing on damage was generally considered a waste of time and resources.
The really strong blasting builds in PF worked in spite of that, not because the underlying mechanics were strong. Spells that were obviously out of line with their counterparts and book diving to combine metamagic in ways that the writers never clearly thought through at all.
But nobody was writing home about someone throwing out a 40 damage fireball at the same level martials were drifting well past triple digits.
Without even having to resort to actual Goz Mask + Eversmoking Bottle grade of cheese...Wait. Was that really all that common?
When my players obliterated Skull and Shackles with their fogcutting lenses, Goz masks, and various cloud spells, they felt quite special for having come up with it.
I dread to think that it was just something one of them found on the internet.
At least for these forums, reddit, and a couple other d20 forums I used to visit, it was one of the most classic forms of weird PF cheese.
That's not to say your players didn't discover it on their own, it's not exactly the most esoteric combination, simply looking at the items basically gives you the underlying concept.
PF1 blasting didn't become good until you added in things like sorcerer bloodlines and metamagic. It's better out of the box in PF2 than PF1.
PF1 didn't have the four saving throws. You can get some real brutal damage and effects when monsters critically fail. That did not exist in PF1.