Potential Changes to Core 1 Classes

[Rysky]

Temperans wrote:

But when its asking to nerf the options that are clearly too much its bad?

Yes because that's so few it's not really a thing, thinking of certain feats for archetypes and items from Aps.

Bard is not OP/broken, the other classes may be lackluster but nerf Bard and guess what? Those classes will still be lackluster. It solves nothing. You don't fix bad by punishing those doing good.

"Congrats Billy, you got the highest average out of the class on the test so you have in-school suspension for the week and can't go on the field trip tomorrow".

Buff the lacklusters. Rather than trying to drag others down out of pettiness and spite.

[Gortle]

People feel loses more keenly than gains. Yes Bard and Fighter are a bit overtuned. But I'd rather respond by giving Barbarian and Witch more...

[Old_Man_Robot]

So a cross the onboard increase in skills for all casters, and everyone starts with expert perception, which scales to master?

[Sanityfaerie]

So... I'm taking a look at the stuff they've recently revealed about ancestry changes, and I'm noticing that this is the stuff that they *didn't* call out specifically as areas of focus. Like, the stuff they're describing there is adjustments that they'll be making to all of the ancestries in the book... including rebalancing feats to improve/replace some that are weaker than intended, and adding some new feats on top of that.

If they're doing that for ancestries, I feel like we have every reason to believe that classes are getting that kind of treatment, too. Even for those classes that we don't expect to see many large overarching changes to, I suspect that we'll see particularly weak feats fixed/improved, and new feats added.

We may well get some love over on the general feats and skill feats, too.

I don't really expect any of this to be huge, but I could easily see a fair number of potential builds climb up from "technically viable" to "actually pretty solid".

[Aristophanes]

Bards are fine. Leave them alone.

[Sanityfaerie]

Aristophanes wrote:

Bards are fine. Leave them alone.

Counterpoint: Bards are a bit OP... but trying to carve that back in any meaningful way would be far more damaging than it could possibly be worth. Leave them alone.

[Old_Man_Robot]

Personally I'm not that invested in doing anything to bards, it just strikes me as odd that this forum will have 100+ page threads arguing over even the smallest possible buffs to a caster, but the notion of a nerf is off the table automatically.

Balance comes in many forms, and it can't always be additive. Sometimes pruning an outlier is better solution than raising everyone else up to the same level.

Does a bard having more skills and better perception than other casters make them OP? No. It does show the notion of "class budgets" is largely fictional on behalf of the community however.

[PossibleCabbage]

In every edition of a game like this, some class or classes are going to be stronger than the rest. If we look at the most "overpowered" classes in previous games in this family, having the bard and fighter stand out above the pack is actually a welcome change.

Since the fighter is just better at hitting people with weapons than anybody else, and the bard is just super helpful for buffing your friends and debuffing your enemies. These things *don't* warp party dynamics (usually.)

[Jacob Jett]

Old_Man_Robot wrote:

Personally I'm not that invested in doing anything to bards, it just strikes me as odd that this forum will have 100+ page threads arguing over even the smallest possible buffs to a caster, but the notion of a nerf is off the table automatically.

Balance comes in many forms, and it can't always be additive. Sometimes pruning an outlier is better solution than raising everyone else up to the same level.

Does a bard having more skills and better perception than other casters make them OP? No. It does show the notion of "class budgets" is largely fictional on behalf of the community however.

IMO the notion of "design budgets" of any kind is a vacuous one that doesn't exist in practice. It is extremely difficult to valuate radically differing class features that aren't directly analogous. Which is why I'm always saying that PF2 is robust against the kinds of house rule tweaks veteran game masters throw at it. E.g., tweaking or even rewriting classes from the ground up, altering feats, spells, even replacing whole sub-systems like weapons. These are well within the realm of activities that are not prima facie unbalancing to the game overall.

I think nerfing Bard perception down to Trained is fine. Why do they need expert perception? (And here I might note that Perception as a character feature likely does entirely too much, since it is at the same time all of: situational awareness, emotional awareness, social awareness, etc., etc.. These could easily be separate skills, much as they were back in older editions of this and other D&D games.)

I also think nothing of having weapons like long swords, short swords, etc. as simple weapons. It is not as though the size of the melee damage die is the benchmark for a caster's combat effectiveness. Having a longsword as the weapon of last resort when all other options have been exhausted is fine.

Personally, I'm becoming less and less enamored with how weapons are done in PF2. Fortunately subsystems are quite modular. I've already implemented a set of house rules rewriting PF2's weapons (mostly to try out different dice that are available on the market) but I may revisit to entirely jettison the simple-martial-advanced system which increasingly seems overwrought, arbitrary, and janky to me.

And there are other changes I might try out. For instance what's the harm in exchanging the critical specialization effects for brawling weapons and firearm weapons--it's a switch that feels more appropriate given what I know from my grandfather's first hand account of getting shot. It does tend to stop you cold.

Others will disagree, as is their prerogative, but as always, this is what good house rules are for. It isn't like I didn't completely revise both classes and weapons for 3.5 back in the 2000s. It's really not so hard to make adjustments to these sub-systems, even in "tight math" systems.

That said, I would not expect the devs to make any changes to Bard in the revision work. (Why makework for them?) I am a proponent of GMs trying out their own tweaks to suit.

[Temperans]

PossibleCabbage wrote:

In every edition of a game like this, some class or classes are going to be stronger than the rest. If we look at the most "overpowered" classes in previous games in this family, having the bard and fighter stand out above the pack is actually a welcome change.

Since the fighter is just better at hitting people with weapons than anybody else, and the bard is just super helpful for buffing your friends and debuffing your enemies. These things *don't* warp party dynamics (usually.)

The most hated casters were the super buffers and super debuffers because they trivialized the encounters. That was always bard and diviner wizards. They buffed bards and nerfed wizards, and here you are saying "the balance is good because it was Bard that they buffed". See the issue there?

As for the martials, fighter was buffed from "build-a-warrior" to "you can make a better wizard by playing a fighter with wizard dedication". Right now you can make an entire team of just fighters with archetypes and it will be a better party than most other combinations.

[Golurkcanfly]

Temperans wrote:

PossibleCabbage wrote:

In every edition of a game like this, some class or classes are going to be stronger than the rest. If we look at the most "overpowered" classes in previous games in this family, having the bard and fighter stand out above the pack is actually a welcome change.

Since the fighter is just better at hitting people with weapons than anybody else, and the bard is just super helpful for buffing your friends and debuffing your enemies. These things *don't* warp party dynamics (usually.)

The most hated casters were the super buffers and super debuffers because they trivialized the encounters. That was always bard and diviner wizards. They buffed bards and nerfed wizards, and here you are saying "the balance is good because it was Bard that they buffed". See the issue there?

As for the martials, fighter was buffed from "build-a-warrior" to "you can make a better wizard by playing a fighter with wizard dedication". Right now you can make an entire team of just fighters with archetypes and it will be a better party than most other combinations.

These examples just read like your primary experience is D&D 5e.

Bards have a long history of being annoying, awful, or just solid before then.

Similarly, Diviner Wizards have a history of being rather lackluster relative to other school specialists.

[Jacob Jett]

I feel like it's not often I actually agree with Temperans. But yup. That's essentially the size of it (and all because of math as it were...).

Edit: But again, this is where house rules are helpful.

[Squiggit]

Old_Man_Robot wrote:

Does a bard having more skills and better perception than other casters make them OP? No. It does show the notion of "class budgets" is largely fictional on behalf of the community however.

On the other hand, does taking away a couple trained skills do anything to address the overbearing spells, powerful options, or stale-yet-brutlaly-efficient gameplay loop bards have?

The changes suggested don't seem to do much except potentially annoy people who were playing bards by making them slightly worse in ways that don't meaningfully matter.

[Temperans]

Golurkcanfly wrote:

Temperans wrote:

PossibleCabbage wrote:

In every edition of a game like this, some class or classes are going to be stronger than the rest. If we look at the most "overpowered" classes in previous games in this family, having the bard and fighter stand out above the pack is actually a welcome change.

Since the fighter is just better at hitting people with weapons than anybody else, and the bard is just super helpful for buffing your friends and debuffing your enemies. These things *don't* warp party dynamics (usually.)

The most hated casters were the super buffers and super debuffers because they trivialized the encounters. That was always bard and diviner wizards. They buffed bards and nerfed wizards, and here you are saying "the balance is good because it was Bard that they buffed". See the issue there?

As for the martials, fighter was buffed from "build-a-warrior" to "you can make a better wizard by playing a fighter with wizard dedication". Right now you can make an entire team of just fighters with archetypes and it will be a better party than most other combinations.

These examples just read like your primary experience is D&D 5e.

Bards have a long history of being annoying, awful, or just solid before then.

Similarly, Diviner Wizards have a history of being rather lackluster relative to other school specialists.

I am talking about Pathfinder 1e.

Also lol no, Diviner Wizard was not "lackluster" they are what made the term "god wizard" actually be a thing. Its why all the classic divination effects, and the effects that combo with those are uncommon.

[Jacob Jett]

Temperans wrote:

Golurkcanfly wrote:

These examples just read like your primary experience is D&D 5e.

Bards have a long history of being annoying, awful, or just solid before then.

Similarly, Diviner Wizards have a history of being rather lackluster relative to other school specialists.

I am talking about Pathfinder 1e.

Also lol no, Diviner Wizard was not "lackluster" they are what made the term "god wizard" actually be a thing. Its why all the classic divination effects, and the effects that combo with those are uncommon.

Golurkcanfly might be referring to early editions of (A)D&D, where Diviners most certainly were lackluster (true strike wasn't even an idea someone had had). Frankly in (A)D&D1 and (A)D&D2, diviners were the picture of "teh suck" (as the Monarch would say).

[Jedi Maester]

Sanityfaerie wrote:

So... I'm taking a look at the stuff they've recently revealed about ancestry changes, and I'm noticing that this is the stuff that they *didn't* call out specifically as areas of focus. Like, the stuff they're describing there is adjustments that they'll be making to all of the ancestries in the book... including rebalancing feats to improve/replace some that are weaker than intended, and adding some new feats on top of that.

If they're doing that for ancestries, I feel like we have every reason to believe that classes are getting that kind of treatment, too. Even for those classes that we don't expect to see many large overarching changes to, I suspect that we'll see particularly weak feats fixed/improved, and new feats added.

We may well get some love over on the general feats and skill feats, too.

I don't really expect any of this to be huge, but I could easily see a fair number of potential builds climb up from "technically viable" to "actually pretty solid".

That was my big take-away as well. I'd love to see more classes get options that work with reload weapons for instance.

[Corwin Icewolf]

Temperans wrote:

The most hated casters were the super buffers and super debuffers because they trivialized the encounters. That was always bard and diviner wizards. They buffed bards and nerfed wizards, and here you are saying "the balance is good because it was Bard that they buffed". See the issue there?

I think that was because you could pile on 30 buff spells before a combat and stomp enemies 8 levels higher and probably about half of said buffs would still be active all day. As that's no longer a thing you can do, people don't have as big an issue with buffers.

Quote:

As for the martials, fighter was buffed from "build-a-warrior" to "you can make a better wizard by playing a fighter with wizard dedication". Right now you can make an entire team of just fighters with archetypes and it will be a better party than most other combinations.

Yeah, no, I really disagree with this. Even if you take wizard dedication as a fighter, you're still a fighter. Your spells are likely relegated to buff spells because you don't have the int to make your save spells worth casting. And you might throw a cantrip at an enemy that's at range since it means not having to drop your sword and draw a bow. A fighter with wizard dedication plays very differently from a wizard.

[PossibleCabbage]

The "All Fighter Party is viable with planning" thing is a feature, not a bug. In Pathfinder 1e Fighter was probably the worst class to do an entire party of.

[Themetricsystem]

I don't agree with those saying it's unfair to nerf the Bard.

I think it is unfair to put it on Paizo to rebalance EVERY other Spellcaster to bring them up to par with the Bard. The reason is simply that doing so is less time intensive, costly, and heavy on time investment, word count, and overall "damage" to the existing classes as it is. It is FAR easier to nerf the one thing that stands head and shoulders over everything else, as the Bard does, in terms of what it DOES, by rewriting perhaps one or two paragraphs on the Bard Class than it would be to rewrite at LEAST one or two paragraphs for EVERY other Spellcaster in the whole freaking system.

[Unicore]

The action economy of the bard limits itself pretty well. If anything at all needed dialing in, it is the power of lingering composition and the the success effect of synesthesia. If success only did one of the 3 things it would be much less of the boss killer spell that it currently is, but would still be very useful.

Bards struggle to do all their buffing and cast spells at the same time, especially in a dynamic encounter where the party has to do any moving. A lot if their proficiency advantages don’t even come up in play that often because they don’t have the actions to use them.

I feel like dropping tiger perception to trained is probably only punishing the whole party. Nobody really wants to go after the bard.

[The Raven Black]

I have trouble imagining how to tune the Bard down without nerfing it significantly, likely to the current Witch level.

[nicholas storm]

I don't believe that every class has to be on par. If paizo tried to do that you end up with a game like dnd 4th edition.

What is wanted is to take the worst classes and make them better. Try being in a party with a swashbuckler attacking once per round like it was designed to do and see that it's doing 0.40 of damage of the fighter.

[PossibleCabbage]

The Raven Black wrote:

I have trouble imagining how to tune the Bard down without nerfing it significantly, likely to the current Witch level.

Like it seems to me "give the wizard better focus spells" is a much easier task than "figuring out what the right power level for the Bard should be."

[Squiggit]

Themetricsystem wrote:

I don't agree with those saying it's unfair to nerf the Bard.

I think it is unfair to put it on Paizo to rebalance EVERY other Spellcaster to bring them up to par with the Bard. The reason is simply that doing so is less time intensive, costly, and heavy on time investment, word count, and overall "damage" to the existing classes as it is. It is FAR easier to nerf the one thing that stands head and shoulders over everything else, as the Bard does, in terms of what it DOES, by rewriting perhaps one or two paragraphs on the Bard Class than it would be to rewrite at LEAST one or two paragraphs for EVERY other Spellcaster in the whole freaking system.

On the other hand...

If, hypothetically, we give Wizards more interesting focus spells and Witches better Hex mechanics, both classes would feel more valuable, dynamic, and fun.

If we nerf the bard, we've made a class that's good and reasonably popular less so, while Wizards and Witches still have s#@&ty mechanics that frustrate a lot of people.

The second is definitely easier but I'm not actually sure who's supposed to be the beneficiary there.

[PossibleCabbage]

The other thing is that you can't really do nerfs since the Core isn't supposed to invalidate pre-existing rules for people who want to use those. So if you nerfed the Bard instead of making the Witch, Wizard, etc. more fun and interesting people are just going to choose to play the CRB Bard whenever they can, so you've basically accomplished nothing outside of organized play scenarios with a mandate that you play the most current version.

It's better to make the Core Wizard, Witch, etc. more attractive than the CRB Wizard and the APG Witch than to make the Core Bard less attractive than the CRB bard since all of these versions of these classes will be valid and you would prefer people care about the new books.

[Deriven Firelion]

The bard doesn't need a nerf. The sorcerer and druid are fine.

Witch and wizard casting is fine. It's their feats and class abilities that could use some work. It's not just to make them more powerful, but also more interesting and appropriate to what they do.

If the wizard schools of magic and feats were improved, that class would be fine. The witch mainly needs feat and a rebalance of hex cantrips and they would be fine.

Wizard and witch are an easy fix as I see it. Just some touch up balance work on their class abilities, focus spells, and feats.

As someone that has played a bard, they are not too powerful. I played one bard. It was effective at doing a few things: buffing an debuffing. I was bored to tears doing it. It was so boring that I remember my rounds: Inspire Courage or Inspire Defense/Harmonize/Dirge of Doom. Over and over and over and over again. Occasionally work in a synesthesia and true target. It was effective, but so boring.

When I didn't do this to break up the monotony, the other players would ask, "Why didn't you buff us?" Never played a bard again. Not getting stuck being the party support servant. Screw that.

[The Raven Black]

To each their own. I like boosting my party (and my own attacks too) and using key spells at key moments in addition to the boosting.

[Deriven Firelion]

The Raven Black wrote:

To each their own. I like boosting my party (and my own attacks too) and using key spells at key moments in addition to the boosting.

You can't attack when all three of your actions are taken every round using Harmonize with two composition cantrips. Optimizing a bard is building it to support others. The ultimate support class.

I never much was able to attack as a bard. My attack was weak. Bards are not built for dealing damage.

[PossibleCabbage]

One reason I really don't want to nerf the bard, is that the monk who takes the bard archetype for a 1-action composition cantrip is a really fun character to play.

[whew]

The PFS bards that I have seen tend to have Lingering Composition but not Harmonize. No-one has ever complained.

Next level, I will see if anyone is upset that my bard doesn't have Inspire Heroics. It's beloved on these forums, but it looks like a trap to me: I don't want to be perma-slowed by not using my focus points for Lingering Composition.

I do understand that optimized-for-PFS is not always the same as optimized-for-APs-with-lots-of-combats-in-the-same-day.

[ottdmk]

I seem to recall that one of the focuses for the Remaster is to add things, not take things away. Given that, I feel a nerfed Bard is rather unlikely.

[Rysky]

Old_Man_Robot wrote:

but the notion of a nerf is off the table automatically.

Precisely.

Because it accomplishes absolutely nothing. It's "fast and easy" but it's also fast and easy for me to walk over and kick a wall. Guess what, that also accomplishes nothing.

Bard is not broken, it doesn't ruin the game or mess up encounters, It's good. People are complaining about something being decent.

It's crab mentality.

Nerfing Bard or Fighter accomplishes nothing other than please people who hate those classes, it does absolutely nothing beneficial for any other class.

[YuriP]

Agree is a notion of "because my favorite class isn't so good as them so they deserve to be nerfed".

Nerf is a tool to be used vs OP things that's can be exploited or that's risks to break the game.
Boost is a tool to be used to improve useless or near to useless or even subpar things to become more useful.

Don't ask to nerf things that simply works well because other things don't works too well. Asks that these things to be used as reference to other things that doesn't works well to be boosted.

[PossibleCabbage]

Like the only real nerf we've seen in errata that wasn't "this thing wasn't working as intended" was when they knocked the Flickmace down a damage die (but it still gained the sweep trait which isn't nothing).

[Gortle]

Can we take this Bard discussion to another thread please?

[Unicore]

I generally agree that little in PF2 needs to be nerfed, including any class as a whole.

Synesthesia’s success effect is a bit much for targeting solo monsters. It singularly makes the occult list a little too over the top. Debuffing AC by 3 when a creature succeeds, as well as giving everyone concealment, potentially action stealing and inflicting a -10 speed penalty is unnecessary and doing just one of those things would not ruin the spell. If your players need proof of it, have them fight multiple enemies who can cast it when they are level 13 or 14.

Lingering composition could use just a touch of dialing in as well. I think just making it eat your reaction during the rounds it is active would be enough to keep it very good, but create occasions where firing it off in the first round of every combat may not be the best idea and make it a little less of a mandatory feat that makes other muses more difficult to chose (especially if you are MCing into something with a reaction you want).

Sometimes the absolute best options are a little too automatic and discourage any tactical thought or engagement. Even then massive changes are not a good idea but making those choices more into choices is what many very good game developers do in errata. Lifting everything else up around those choices can be an option, but not a great idea for things that were intended to be base line power ceilings for the game.

[Unicore]

For example, boosting the success effect of every single 5th level spell to anywhere near synesthesia’s level would be a pretty massive balance shift in the game.

[Old_Man_Robot]

PossibleCabbage wrote:

The "All Fighter Party is viable with planning" thing is a feature, not a bug. In Pathfinder 1e Fighter was probably the worst class to do an entire party of.

It should neither be a bug or a feature, because this is obviously not part of the games design at any level.

Asking the question can be a useful one to ask when you are trying to understand the overall balance of the game, but the idea that its a feature isn't going to be right.

The "Problem" with the Fighter (and I don't overly believe there is one), is that its strengths are largely agnostic of player-choice. You have to go out of your way to make an ineffectual Fighter while playing its primary role. Its core features are based in its chassis, which is generally unchanged by feat and archetype choices.

Most classes aren't like this.

Most classes need to make good use of their feat and archetype choices to be fully effectual in their role.

So when we say things like "A Fighter can fill any role" because they don't need to value their class feat choices to be effective, this is different when we say "Druids can fill any role", because to do that a Druid still needs to value their feat choices when doing so.

So yeah, it is a "bug" in that respect.

Is it a problem over all? Not really. But its important to understand this difference.

[Old_Man_Robot]

Rysky wrote:

Bard is not broken, it doesn't ruin the game or mess up encounters, It's good. People are complaining about something being decent.

The reason I even bring it up is the because people fight tooth and nail to even recognise the "feels bad" elements in the game and highlight those areas for buffs.

If its okay for things to be large positive outliers, then we should not be so fervently against eliminating the negative outliers.

Like you said, its a bucket of crabs. People just seem to have a tribal attitude around their respective buckets.

[Helmic]

Unicore wrote:

For example, boosting the success effect of every single 5th level spell to anywhere near synesthesia’s level would be a pretty massive balance shift in the game.

Yeah, it's just not feasible to always buff literally everything else to be as good as the best option. Some choice nerfs are perfectly acceptable, just as the nerf to gnome flickmace was ultimately far more practical than the many, many buffs that would've been necessary to accomplish relative parity otherwise. "Buff everything else" is sometimes decent advice if the rest of the game isn't fun and everything else needs changing anyways for being boring, but if that isn't the problem then nerfing a strong option is going to be less disruptive overall.

Which, for Bard, yeah I can see an argument to why Inspire Courage can feel like an action tax that you're compelled to pay by the raw overwhelming math of it. There's not really any strategic element to it, it's very straightforward and easy to use, and so it can end up feeling like that character only effectively has two actions because there's just not many good reasons to ever stop Inspiring Courage other than emergencies like fleeing combat or stabilizing an ally.

That simplicity might be desirable for some players, buffbot is often a favorite of people who don't or can't really engage with combat, but I struggle to think of a cantrip that could compare that rewards a more engaging playstyle.

[Rysky]

Old_Man_Robot wrote:

PossibleCabbage wrote:

The "All Fighter Party is viable with planning" thing is a feature, not a bug. In Pathfinder 1e Fighter was probably the worst class to do an entire party of.

It should neither be a bug or a feature, because this is obviously not part of the games design at any level.

Uh, that EXPLICITLY was part of the game design, that you could use Skills and Multiclassing to shore up what a party needs rather than having required classes.

[Rysky]

Old_Man_Robot wrote:

Rysky wrote:

Bard is not broken, it doesn't ruin the game or mess up encounters, It's good. People are complaining about something being decent.

The reason I even bring it up is the because people fight tooth and nail to even recognise the "feels bad" elements in the game and highlight those areas for buffs.

This I can say is mostly a you thing.

People are all too ready, for weal and woe, to point out the pain points and lacking in the game. There's no shortage of that of those observations.

[Old_Man_Robot]

Rysky wrote:

this I can say is mostly a you thing.

You've been on this forum longer than I have, and you've been in many threads about caster balance over the years. I know that you know, that it is most definitely not a "me" thing.

Rysky wrote:

Uh, that EXPLICITLY was part of the game design, that you could use Skills and Multiclassing to shore up what a party needs rather than having required classes.

This is clearly not what was I talking about, as evidenced by the rest of the post.

[Rysky]

1) uh yeah it is, if you’re gonna sit there and state people DON’T point out issues. They do. Very much so.

2) what you were talking about was kinda irreverent, I was responding to that line in particular.

[Temperans]

People point out issues and then get bombarded with a range of counters for why its okay that it is bad. People will continue to point out the bad points because they are bad points.

People will also actively defend Paizo against all criticism because "if you don't like it play an different game" or "you just need to learn how to play" or "you are just a power gamer" or some other nonsense.

Both of you (Old_Man_Robot and Rysky) are talking about the same thing and going "nuh-uh, its different".

[Temperans]

Rysky wrote:

Old_Man_Robot wrote:

PossibleCabbage wrote:

The "All Fighter Party is viable with planning" thing is a feature, not a bug. In Pathfinder 1e Fighter was probably the worst class to do an entire party of.

It should neither be a bug or a feature, because this is obviously not part of the games design at any level.

Uh, that EXPLICITLY was part of the game design, that you could use Skills and Multiclassing to shore up what a party needs rather than having required classes.

That's wrong. The purpose of skills and multiclassing is not to shore up what a party needs or eliminating a required class. Its purely to expand the possible actions that a player can do in a way the play finds fun. Shoring up what a party can do is a tangental benefit to it. While not having a required class is just basic design philosophy that is not tied to skills or archetypes.

Also it is a bug and bad design when you can make a party of Wizards that multiclass into martial archetypes be straight up worse than a fighter multiclassing into caster archetypes. If the game really were balanced properly then it wouldn't matter what your initial class was you could still make a good character. But in PF2 that is not the case.

Your statement is why people have to fight just to make people acknowledge that yes Alchemist is a horribly designed class. Even as the fact it has had 4(?) rewrites now is well known.

[Old_Man_Robot]

Rysky wrote:

1) uh yeah it is, if you’re gonna sit there and state people DON’T point out issues. They do. Very much so.

That's not even remotely what I said!

Rysky wrote:

what you were talking about was kinda irreverent, I was responding to that line in particular.

This feels like a reading comprehension issue more than anything.

My apologies if I wasn't as clear as I could have been, I'll try to be more direct, but English isn't my first language and that shows sometimes.

[YuriP]

Unicore wrote:

I generally agree that little in PF2 needs to be nerfed, including any class as a whole.

Synesthesia’s success effect is a bit much for targeting solo monsters. It singularly makes the occult list a little too over the top. Debuffing AC by 3 when a creature succeeds, as well as giving everyone concealment, potentially action stealing and inflicting a -10 speed penalty is unnecessary and doing just one of those things would not ruin the spell. If your players need proof of it, have them fight multiple enemies who can cast it when they are level 13 or 14.

If we stop to analyze the effects of synesthesia more carefully, it is basically a "grab" at a distance (30 feet) against will where you flat check against concentration instead of manipulate, it gives you -10 feet of movement panelity to the instead of preventing you from using move actions, but in return it also gives you clumsy 3 (-3 to almost everything dexterity-based, including AC) and leaves all creatures and objects concealed from you.

So as much as the -3 to AC is a big advantage, I don't think it's too much for a successful save effect from a 5th level spell. At this level creatures and players have been AoE fear for a long time!

Unicore wrote:

Lingering composition could use just a touch of dialing in as well. I think just making it eat your reaction during the rounds it is active would be enough to keep it very good, but create occasions where firing it off in the first round of every combat may not be the best idea and make it a little less of a mandatory feat that makes other muses more difficult to chose (especially if you are MCing into something with a reaction you want).

I don't think the Lingering composition action economy is the real OP here. Instead, the thing that makes bard focus metemagic really OP is the fact that they don't have risks.

Imagine the synesthesia situation above, where instead of the effect success would affect the target for 1 round it would be "does nothing, but you also don't spend your spell slot". This, along with the fact that the spell doesn't consume actions, is what makes these bard composition spells that use focus so powerful.

[Rysky]

Temperans wrote:

Rysky wrote:

Old_Man_Robot wrote:

PossibleCabbage wrote:

The "All Fighter Party is viable with planning" thing is a feature, not a bug. In Pathfinder 1e Fighter was probably the worst class to do an entire party of.

It should neither be a bug or a feature, because this is obviously not part of the games design at any level.

Uh, that EXPLICITLY was part of the game design, that you could use Skills and Multiclassing to shore up what a party needs rather than having required classes.

That's wrong. The purpose of skills and multiclassing is not to shore up what a party needs.

It is indeed, go read the older blogs. This was stated when they talked about character they ran in their own playtesting, namely without a designated Healer. Mark Seifter’s character was multiclassed into Cleric.

Plyaying a mono-class group and using Multiclassing to form a coherent party is 100% intentional design.

[Rysky]

Quote:

That's not even remotely what I said!

Quote:

The reason I even bring it up is the because people fight tooth and nail to even recognise the "feels bad" elements in the game and highlight those areas for buffs.

Then what does this mean other than “people don’t see/point out issues”?

Quote:

My apologies if I wasn't as clear as I could have been, I'll try to be more direct, but English isn't my first language and that shows sometimes.

No worries, but back to the comment I originally quoted “ because this is obviously not part of the games design at any level.” is false, because the Designers specifically stated otherwise and even had blogs about it.

It is entirely possible and intentional to play a mono-class group, so “not part of the game design” is not true.