That preview was from the last fireside chat stream (link to the youtube vod, the spell statblock itself is at just before 19 minutes in)
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Interesting, most people I see discussing this kind of thing put Druid as one of the stronger casters between their good proficiencies, strong list, and solid focus spells (you say they're no different but they're clearly a lot more important than most cleric or wizard offerings).Very fair! And hey, other people may have had different experiences! Having played one each of storm, fire, and animal order druid, though...gotta say I had more fun with evoker and conjurer wizards, magic domain cleric, and fey and elementalist sorcerers. The spell slots just are really tight, whereas sorcerer has room to breathe. And still gets the primal list! Primal list is great.
Not only but spellcasters and specially sorcerers are a bit complicated to understand and easily to be underestimated.
Druids are famous because their chassis looks stronger (due armor, shield, animal companions, metamorphosis feats an so on) and their gameplay is pretty solid. While many sorcerer builds requires a better understanding of traditions, available spells, bloodline interactions, effectiveness in different range of levels and so on.These "complications" are usually unseen what makes Bards and Druids more flashy to many players.
As much as people say "wait for Player Core 1", that just spells out how s~#!ty of a preview this is. I was planning to try preorder the special cover versions of the Remaster books, but with how this preview is, I won't be getting the new books (even new non-Remastered books) at all unless they show off more that makes this not as bad as it looks.
When someone would ask "should I get books now, or wait for the remaster?", I previously would've said to wait, but now I'd tell people to buy the originals and avoid the Remaster books.
This isn't a good preview. If there is things that account for these very blatantl nerfs, then they better preview that too.
This is pretty precipitated and look like ignores things like the new alignment damage, focus spell rules, metal armored druids, the kineticist...
I still don't see reason to condem the entire revision just because one aspect don't becomes good.
Howdy! I have a friend that happens to be a Magus (it's me) and he asked me if Thunderstrike is replacing Shocking Grasp? Any confirmation about that?
No but the description have some closer parts and due Shocking Grasp is also used in D&D we suspect that this is the new Shocking Grasp.
Regarding the melee boost to damage for Ignition, I’d have say this is still an overall nerf.
Being in melee as a wizard is almost always a very bad place to be.
TBH a few of the psychic non-amped but enhanced cantrips just feel like things Paizo realized would have good to build into the spell to make it functional in the first place. (Looking at you, Message without line of sight.)
Regarding the melee boost to damage for Ignition, I’d have say this is still an overall nerf.
Being in melee as a wizard is almost always a very bad place to be.
While true, it isn't solely available to wizards.
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Okay, genuine question re: wizard flexibility. Does this feature ever actually come up in play? I'm being serious here - I don't think I've ever really seen it be an actual thing at the table. Every prepared caster I've ever played and every prepared caster I've ever played alongside used basically the same prepared spell list every day, with very occasional swap outs of one or maybe two spells on extremely specific occasions, like needing a given specific-use spell (stone to flesh, for example) that they had to wait until a new set of preparations to cast - but then they just went right back to what they had before. Even that is less common the more your group invests in scrolls, in my experience. I mean, as a theoretical white-room construct, sure, the loss of the potential spells for your school slot is a nerf, but as a practical matter? I highly doubt it's going to prove to be at my tables, at least.
In fairness, being in melee isn't great for psychics, druids, witches, or sorcerers either. Which I think are the only classes that get it besides magus (no deities give it, so it's not an issue for clerics natively). I guess you could grab it off a background or ancestry, but, let's be honest here: if you're bothering to cast it, you're a caster. If you're a caster that isn't a magus, you don't want to be in melee.
While true, it isn't solely available to wizards.
Druids have d8 HP, now unrestricted medium armor, shield block, native healing, and a potential damage sponge with an animal companion. They can be in melee just fine, at least as well as the inventor, vanguard gunslinger, or most Thaumaturges. Other casters have an uphill battle, but with spells like Mirror Image or 4th rank Invisibility you can lower the odds of even being targeted, much less hit.
Having options that give higher damage in exchange for being in melee is good for the game and mirrors how it works for martials already. If folks want to compare caster damage to melee martials, this is a logical option to have.
It's also an option that you can always not take if you don't see yourself ever in melee. We already have our remaster staple damage cantrip with Needle Darts, and it isn't like you should be playing a caster if you want a pure fire theme now that the kineticist is out.
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People tend to massively overestimate how many monsters have ̶A̶o̶O̶s̶ Reactive Strike. It's like 15% of the bestiary, tops. You'll go whole sessions of adventuring without seeing one of them.
It's not generally surprising when a creature does have it, since it's almost always something that looks like it has martial training. "Having to fight differently against different monsters" is not really a bad thing.
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Every class I named there triggers AoO with their signature ability. It sucks when it happens, but it doesn't happen often enough to make them unplayable.
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My tangible dream psychic is surprisingly tanky, and pretty brutal in melee. I also played a necromancer who could take a lot of hits and have a lot of bounce back. There are very few characters that can stay up close all day while the rest of the party hangs back. Having one heavy hitting melee option as a caster is a good base to cover. Ignition is nice because it is also still useable at range when fire damage is valuable. Getting 1 good damage melee cantrip and one ok damage short range cantrip out of 1 slot is pretty useful.
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They did say that the Wizard class had the biggest set of changes, and what we saw in the remastered preview was basically "the rules you need to make RoE work."
So I assume there's a lot of other stuff that changed about the Wizard that we don't know about yet. Some of it is likely even good.
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Hypothetically, all of the pre-remaster rules are still valid for use barring errata. Produce Flame still exists and you can prepare it *and* Ignition. If it gets confusing to have some spells that you add your spellcasting modifier to and some you don't, just remember that this is a thing you did to yourself.
A lot of the spells that are going away/changing are ones that were pretty clearly OGL (e.g. "Magic Missile" and "Cone of Cold".) People's home games aren't expected to respect anybody's intellectual property though.
People tend to massively overestimate how many monsters have ̶A̶o̶O̶s̶ Reactive Strike. It's like 15% of the bestiary, tops. You'll go whole sessions of adventuring without seeing one of them.
It's not generally surprising when a creature does have it, since it's almost always something that looks like it has martial training. "Having to fight differently against different monsters" is not really a bad thing.
Yup, I know. I did a survey of this when I first started playing, it's somewhere around 1 in 8 or 1 in 9. But it does indeed suck when it happens.
Even so, wizard, witches, and co simply do not have the hp to survive in melee, especially since their AC is also lower so the flat-footed penalty from flanking and grapples is more likely to result in monsters critting. Druids potentially do, but the vast majority of leveled spells are (and I highly doubt this is going to change with the remaster, given the shocking grasp -> thunderstrike transition plus the cone of cold -> howling blizzard shift giving the option for big range) not melee-based. Meaning it's pretty much cantrips or bust.
(and yes, I know mirror image and invis exist. But those are actions and spell slots you could be using to blow up the monsters rather than improve your melee survivability when you don't even need to do that)
Encounters are not all the same. No character can survive long in melee against some enemies in PF2. Any character that is totally unprepared for a round or two of being stuck close up is often forcing the rest of the party to absorb a lot more damage. I am not saying all casters, or even any caster needs to rush into melee, but treating it like a situation to avoid at all costs, rather than having a plan for when it happens is limiting yourself out of a lot of good options.
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Huh. Just realized. Secrets of Magic is unlikely to get remastered anytime soon. Meaning that all of its stuff is fully on the table, yes?
There are several blast spells that really exceed the fireball/howling blizzard damage curve. Such as the 7th level spell frigid flurry (18d6 ~ 63 ~ 10d12, more damaging than chain lightning at that level) or the 8th level spell boil blood (10d10 ~ 55 plus drained 2 is at least 75 damage, plus save half on the fire damage making it much more impressive than polar ray).
So even if blasting does get nerfed, as long as SoM is allowed it's not too bad.
Blasting, the aspect which got nerfed the most, gets nerfed even more and "it's not so bad"?
One thing worth pointing out is we keep saying "Blasting got nerfed" but it's... one specific spell that lost 7 damage in exchange for a rider effect, and a cantrip we weren't using anyways getting a redesign.
IDK it's a little hard to get worked up about that.
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At the moment, I don't see what most of the problems are. The fact that curricula can be expanded goes a long way towards fixing the limited spell issue. Some of the spells have gotten a nerf, or at least seem to have, but doom and gloom seems premature. Shouldn't we at least see the whole class before complaining?
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Huh. Just realized. Secrets of Magic is unlikely to get remastered anytime soon. Meaning that all of its stuff is fully on the table, yes?
There are several blast spells that really exceed the fireball/howling blizzard damage curve. Such as the 7th level spell frigid flurry (18d6 ~ 63 ~ 10d12, more damaging than chain lightning at that level) or the 8th level spell boil blood (10d10 ~ 55 plus drained 2 is at least 75 damage, plus save half on the fire damage making it much more impressive than polar ray).
So even if blasting does get nerfed, as long as SoM is allowed it's not too bad.
Blasting, the aspect which got nerfed the most, gets nerfed even more and "it's not so bad"?
One thing worth pointing out is we keep saying "Blasting got nerfed" but it's... one specific spell that lost 7 damage in exchange for a rider effect, and a cantrip we weren't using anyways getting a redesign.
IDK it's a little hard to get worked up about that.
Especially since the actual classes themselves haven't been released.
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This is pretty precipitated and look like ignores things like the new alignment damage, focus spell rules, metal armored druids, the kineticist...
I still don't see reason to condem the entire revision just because one aspect don't becomes good.
The Alignment damage change dropped Law and Chaos, the Focus Point change is fairly minor in the function of the game (as in it already worked before. Plus we don't know what the classes that previously had it baked in are getting in return), metal armored druids can be trivially house ruled, and I haven't even seen Kineticist yet.
Meanwhile the changes to Wizard/Spell Schools/Spells in general, are so far pretty big. I'd gladly sacrifice the entire Kineticist class to have Remastered Wizard be hit with the un-nerf bat. This is again assuming that there's nothing to compensate for the nerfs.
I'm not writing off the Remaster because "one aspect don't becomes good", I'm writing it off because they've made something actively worse. This would be like them revealing that they dropped Barbarian to 10hp per level and increased the AC penalty when Raging to -2.
The onus is now on Paizo to convince me that these changes are good, because if the remaster contains more changes like this then why would I buy it let alone play it?
Even with the alignment change no longer having order and chaos the point I want to show is that now can the damage part affect everyone not only some specific aligned target. This ends being specially useful for non-good deity followers that currently simply is unable to use some spells (when the deity is fully neutral) or only have the option to do lawful or chaotic damage creating a roulette with 1/3 to get an opponent with an alignment opposed to your deity.
Now as we can see describe in remaster preview divine casters don't need to worry if your deity is neutral nor with the opponent alignment these offensive divine spells will simply work with everyone now.This is was a great boost for divine casters in general. Also this probably fixes the strange interaction of spells that requires a deity with oracles and sorcerers.
About new focus points rules these aren't so minor. Now is far easier to improve your focus points and focus casters don't need to worry into save some focus point that you are unable to recover via refocus anymore. This changes how effective druids, oracles (ok this one needs to worry with the curse effects too), clerics and even sorcerers are in lower levels. When well used improves many casters effectives at lower and mid levels a lot.
I agree that metal armored druids can be house-ruled but also affect how you can do you druid build. Now druids can dump dex and use Sentinel dedication to get heavy armors, also aren't anymore restricted to wooden shield being able to use sturdy ones. This a good improvement in direction to druid's SADness allowing then to boost other attributes like Str once the don't really needs to care with dex too much.
And in the end, when you have time, read the kineticist class. If you like casters and specially DPR and utility ones but thinks that the currently casters are too weak/limited/complicated you will probably will like the kineticist.
About wizards schools. Yes they was nerfed but they probably aren't the only one change in Wizards. Probably they may get other changes and improvements. I don't know if is enought to compensate but the true is that we still don't know we still need more info to see how it will be. Probably we will get a lot more info in Gen Con but we have to wait to take any conclusion.
About spells changes. IMO they are more changes in how many speels will work than nerfs and its normal the have people that will like and dislike many of the. Personally I like de the changes in Cone of Cold, It becomes a little weaker but not bellow the fireball basis "2d6 per spell rank" so still pretty good and now we can get many options into a single prepared/reportoire spell.
They did say that the Wizard class had the biggest set of changes, and what we saw in the remastered preview was basically "the rules you need to make RoE work."
Sorry - what does RoE stand for?
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Sorry - what does RoE stand for?They did say that the Wizard class had the biggest set of changes, and what we saw in the remastered preview was basically "the rules you need to make RoE work."
Rage of Elements, the new rulebook
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Okay, genuine question re: wizard flexibility. Does this feature ever actually come up in play? I'm being serious here - I don't think I've ever really seen it be an actual thing at the table. Every prepared caster I've ever played and every prepared caster I've ever played alongside used basically the same prepared spell list every day, with very occasional swap outs of one or maybe two spells on extremely specific occasions, like needing a given specific-use spell (stone to flesh, for example) that they had to wait until a new set of preparations to cast - but then they just went right back to what they had before. Even that is less common the more your group invests in scrolls, in my experience. I mean, as a theoretical white-room construct, sure, the loss of the potential spells for your school slot is a nerf, but as a practical matter? I highly doubt it's going to prove to be at my tables, at least.
I've played a Wizard from 1 to 20, and I've changed my prepared spell loadout extensively over the course of my adventuring career. These changes can happen from knowing upcoming encounters, acquiring new spells from level-up, scrolls, enemy spellbooks, new content, etc. It's also happened after doing some research over what spells are good at what points in the game, experimenting with some spells that turn out aren't as useful as they could have been (or are more useful than at first glance), and finding combinations to play around with that are pretty constant to load with. And having learned a good amount of spells from 1 to 20, including access to some uncommon and rare spells, I've had spells that I haven't even used yet (and never will, since the character is retired), some spells I used from 1 to 20 (or at least, from the level I acquired them, all the way to the end), and some spells that I used for only a few levels because they get either outpaced/relegated to utility, or have significant unforeseen drawbacks that make them not as viable as they should be for regular play. And it isn't just the Wizard of that party who changed out spell loadouts throughout their adventuring career, the Warpriest Cleric and Bard have also gone through spell loadout changes for similar reasons, and since the Cleric still has access to basically every spell in the game, and the Bard is a Spontaneous Caster (who had to spend downtime to learn different spells in place of other ones), this isn't merely a Wizard issue, either.
In my experience, a prepared caster having a general loadout is done both out of ease of play and of not having to constantly maintain their spell list, which I can understand is a chore, especially for a GM who may want to have an NPC spellcaster face the party. But a really skilled Wizard or other caster, prepared or otherwise, will constantly toil over what spells they should take with or what spells they would rather relegate to scrolls for each adventuring day, because not having the right spell (or amount of spells in the case of prepared casters) picked easily results in a useless character for either that adventuring day, or until they level/retrain.
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People tend to massively overestimate how many monsters have ̶A̶o̶O̶s̶ Reactive Strike. It's like 15% of the bestiary, tops. You'll go whole sessions of adventuring without seeing one of them.
It's not generally surprising when a creature does have it, since it's almost always something that looks like it has martial training. "Having to fight differently against different monsters" is not really a bad thing.
It's maybe 15% towards the mid-game, and probably less towards the early game, but more like 30%+ when you reach levels 18 or higher, and such enemies can be extremely devastating in terms of disruption based on their modifiers alone, especially if they are a higher level creature.
There isn't an issue of "fighting differently," but the problem is that there isn't much support for doing so, or if there is, it's relegated to certain classes or ancestries. Rogues having Mobility, Fighters having Shielded Stride, Elves having Elf Step, these are basically some of the few "good" options of fighting against AoO enemies. Then you have worse ones where you can roll a flat check to not be disrupted, which does nothing against taking damage that could very easily make you vulnerable to a coup de grace (figuratively, anyway), or Monks where they get a +4 AC, which really only serves to avoid being critically hit most of the time.
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50% seems generous to me. Probably more like 20-30% in practice. (At least from my experience.)
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I've played a Wizard from 1 to 20, and I've changed my prepared spell loadout extensively over the course of my adventuring career. These changes can happen from knowing upcoming encounters, acquiring new spells from level-up, scrolls, enemy spellbooks, new content, etc. It's also happened after doing some research over what spells are good at what points in the game, experimenting with some spells that turn out aren't as useful as they could have been (or are more useful than at first glance), and finding combinations to play around with that are pretty constant to load with.
Many of your examples are not relevant: Everyone changes spells when acquiring new ones, when content is released, when gaining levels or realising some spells are better/worse than they seem at first. That's not a specificity of prepared casting, spontaneous casters do it also.
abit late but still.
15% of the creatures. But of those 15% most are either used as bosses or humanoids that work in groups. Then the fact that a full 1/3 of the creatures don't get used because of environment (ex: aquatic, space, etc). And then a large chunk of the remainder aren't used because they just don't fit the story. So yeah only 15% might have, but that becomes closer to 50% or more of the creatures that most players actually fight.
Experience varies a lot from players to players.
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Hence my point that you cannot say "15% of creatures have that" when you have no idea what other players encounter.
15% of creatures have it is a valid piece of data.
I experienced 50% of creatures with it is also a valid piece of data but a much more limited one. You'd need a lot of people to experience the same values to start considering it seriously. Also, you have to take bias into account, which is hard. Hence why I say that experience varies: it has to be used cautiously as experience can't be generalised.For example, the worst fight I have GMed where AoOs have been a thing was against aquatic creatures.
I've played a Wizard from 1 to 20, and I've changed my prepared spell loadout extensively over the course of my adventuring career. These changes can happen from knowing upcoming encounters, acquiring new spells from level-up, scrolls, enemy spellbooks, new content, etc. It's also happened after doing some research over what spells are good at what points in the game, experimenting with some spells that turn out aren't as useful as they could have been (or are more useful than at first glance), and finding combinations to play around with that are pretty constant to load with.Many of your examples are not relevant: Everyone changes spells when acquiring new ones, when content is released, when gaining levels or realising some spells are better/worse than they seem at first. That's not a specificity of prepared casting, spontaneous casters do it also.
This wasn't a stipulation: What was asked was if Wizard flexibility is really all it's cracked up to be. And I stated that in my experience, based on all those factors, the flexibility of a Wizard class is important to both its identity and its strength as a class compared to other types of casters. Just because it can apply to both doesn't mean it won't apply to a Wizard more than it would a Sorcerer, especially since a Wizard has far, far more spells to choose from/learn compared to a Sorcerer, who doesn't cap out at more than 50 of them without dedications, with only a dozen or so of them able to be heightened at any one time.
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At least as far as that old easytool spreadsheet goes, AoO appears on (approximately) 7% of creatures from -1 to 5, 16% from 6 to 10, 20% from 11-16 and 32% of creatures in the 16+ range.
When any unknown creature has that much of a chance of having it once you hit the double digits, it's probably best to just assume it has it until proven otherwise considering how badly it can be punished.
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The problem with looking at how common a certain ability is as a percentage of the bestiary is that monster use is not evenly distributed across the population. One single enemy in the game could have AOO and it would still be a frequent problem if that enemy served as a standard antagonist in most published material.
... A real world example here might be Magic Immunity and AV. It's an exceedingly rare ability that only a handful of monsters in the bestiary have, but if you play abomination vaults, you will encounter dozens upon dozens of magic immune enemies simply because of the way Paizo constructed the dungeon.
Many of your examples are not relevant: Everyone changes spells when acquiring new ones, when content is released, when gaining levels or realising some spells are better/worse than they seem at first. That's not a specificity of prepared casting, spontaneous casters do it also.This wasn't a stipulation: What was asked was if Wizard flexibility is really all it's cracked up to be...
I believe the original question wrt flexibility was asking about the utility of spell substitution...
I believe the original question wrt flexibility was asking about the utility of spell substitution...Many of your examples are not relevant: Everyone changes spells when acquiring new ones, when content is released, when gaining levels or realising some spells are better/worse than they seem at first. That's not a specificity of prepared casting, spontaneous casters do it also.This wasn't a stipulation: What was asked was if Wizard flexibility is really all it's cracked up to be...
I mean, the Wizard in our group has used it to great effect to get the most out of their slots between combats. The thesis is obviously better the more spells you have learned in your spellbook.
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I'm willing to bet wizards will have less schools than before too.
If so, the limited spells is even worse.
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I believe in that too.
The old school system requires less book space than the new one, this means that is pretty probably the we will get less schools too.