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Hello, my name is Cherry. I GMed a bit of Starfinder 1e and some of Pathfinder 2e, this Saturday I ran a one shot playing the Field Test 5 combat scenarios and I'm here to share how it went as my feedback.
The party was 1 Envoy, 1 soldier, 1 guardian (played by my friends) and 1 mysthic (played by me as a GMPC). I will separate my feedback by class and combat. The session was done on FoundryVTT with all its automation. I also ran the second combat with elite enemies. I will try to be as critical as possible but ultimately we had a great time (we only have 1 serious complaint about each part so I'll leave those for the last item of each section).
First, my personal experience with the mysthic as a GMPC.
-My first note was that we played with motivating ringtone wrong, I thought it gave temporary HP instead of healing because that is how most mechanics of that type work and it just made sense too, when we noticed it healed instead it felt a bit awkward in flavor and utility. The amount of healing wasn't bad and even though the movement speed boost was so minor it helped our vesk soldier that had only 20ft of movement.
-Utilizing the vitality network on the first combat was fine, our envoy took 7 damage and I healed her back to full immediately and didn't need it after. On the second combat it didn't go so great, I used all of it after the first attack of the glass serpent and then healing for only 4 for 1 action felt like a waste of an action but I did use one action to heal 8 later on (twice) and so our guardian survived one blow with 4hp.
-I didn't get the opportunity to use wild bond despite picking it, it always felt like I had better things to do.
-I ran out of vitality network points in the first round so they were never available for soul surge.
-I enjoyed my experience with mysthic specially the flavor of being in tune with my companions. My only real complaint was with song of the spheres, it felt terrible to use on the second combat. I have GMed for a bard before and this is pretty much a standard bard turn but bards get more options with higher levels as people get more abilities while you are stuck with song of the spheres and it does not scale. I understand if the bonus to hit can not go up to not overshadow bards, the damage at least needs to scale up. It could be an aoe version of gravity weapon, adding +1 damage per weapon damage die. It isn't great scaling but it is something.
Second, notes on the envoy's experience.
-She loved it! The player plays a bard in our other campaign and really enjoyed the envoy, she roleplayed "get'em" differently every time (and she used it a lot, once per turn every turn of course)
-I allowed her to have one of the aeon guards on the second combat as her asset.
-She got good use of watch out, she turned hits into missed 3 times in these two combats and I could hear how satisfied she was every time.
-She got hasted on the second combat since she was the only one making a strike consistently every turn.
-Get in there helped us... well get in there. But it had some problems due to the low mobility of the vesk soldier and one time he used it to try to get into cover (after being downed and brough back up) but because of his low movement he left the range of his weapon (I'll talk about this later) but also could not reach cover which made him have to waste an action to get back to where he had left with get in there.
-Not in the face was great! She got to turn a hit that would certainly have downed her into a miss with it and got a turn right after and crit to kill the aeon guard and the flavor of making puppy eyes at them, them averting their eyes and shooting at the sky instead and then getting readshoted right after was super fun.
-Not all is amazing though as using get them started to feel very repetitive after a while, some times hunt prey/exploit vulnerability can feel like they make your turns much harder since they need reaplying every time an enemy dies but this feels even worse since it needs to be reaplied every single turn. By the end of the second combat she was starting to be "urg I need to apply get'em again". The only reason she was having a good time in that combat was that she was hasted so she could use 2 actions for directives and then one action and one hasted action to lead by example, otherwise this would have gone very very poor for her. I also feel like having to drag the effect into our sheets/tokens in foundry every turn didn't help. I think at least get'em could last longer when you level up? This way the directives are not just a list of buffs that once applied stay so you are not just going through the list every combat but since get'em is the main one you do not need to use 2 out of 3 actions every turn on it (or 1 if you don't want to lead) making your turns very repetitive.
Third, the soldier vesk.
-The player had an ok time with it. The low mobility was a constant problem, and to me personally I feel like if vesk love their doshkos it'd make sense they can get into melee.
-The other problem was that the range of weapons still felt very low. We very much leaned into the ranged meta on purpose and no one had melee weapons other than the guardian and allies and enemies both had -2 for range constantly and the soldier suffered the most since on the mall he had a hard time trying to be in range and just being completely unable to use the weapon beyond its first range increment was really penalizing.
-The suppressed condition also felt like it needed higher numbers, to either be scalable like suppressed 1, suppressed 2, etc or to have higher numbers. My personal suggestion would be to make the movement speed penalty -10 like is the default with most debbuffs of that kind and have the penalty to attack be scalable.
-On the good side, the way the stellar cannon worked really helped since I ran enemies using their third actions to take cover a lot and aiming a blast right behind them and ignoring their cover was really satisfying (before he realized what I'll mention in the next point).
-The player made special mention how happy they were to have choosen the stellar cannon instead of the rotolaser (which they still carried) because of how much more useful the burst was.
-I don't think any of the other minor issues would have been a problem if not for the major problem my player was facing. The save DC was super easy to pass. These combats really showed me how awful it feels to be a spellcaster in PF2e. The even the low enemy saves still make them much more likely to succeed than someone trying to hit their AC (and that is not even considering how spellcasters at some levels have lower proficiencies), and you can buff your bonus to attack but can not buff your ability save DCs, you can also reduce enemies' AC much more easily than you can reduce their saves. Enemies in the first combat succeeded all their saves. All enemies had to roll either an 8, 9 or 10 to succeed (that is not even considering the elite templates on the second combat). After a while he noticed this and had to use primary target every time because he was letting his team down (and only managed to apply suppressed once). It was quite sad seeing him giving up on his main mechanic and unique way his weapons worked after realizing that getting through the cover and greater cover was mechanically better than ignoring cover but asking for a save. My suggestion would be to maybe take a note from team+ new summoner's plus and make the save DC be 10+their bonus to hit.
-And to end this part on a good note, menacing snarl was fantastic. He managed to crit succeed in an intimidation check against the glass serpent and use menacing snarl and it was the best moment in the session for him. It made the glass serpent frightened 3 and really felt great and saved our asses (it was already almost dead buy still really helped).
Fourth, I don't know if this is the place so I will keep this very short. The guardian player had no complaints, absolute 0. He loved every second of it. Had a blast on the first combat despite not being able to use intercepting strike because of the big space and he decided to start far from the other players. He had a shield and a pistol. On the second combat taunt was great because of how the aeon guard's abilities worked, they each made 1 strike against each player that was not the guardian, since the guardian was fighting the glass serpent. They got a lot of use of the +2 making them the main target on the first combat while getting use of the -1 and -2 on the second for debuffing enemies when they were not going to be the target. The armor specialization helped and they really enjoyed having it at lv1 and shielding taunt was also very helpful.
Sixth, the first combat. How did it actually go?
At the start the corpse fleet soldiers use their reactions to move together into cover on the opposite side than that the zombie came in and from then on shoot 2 and took cover to raise their cover from standard to greater, every turn. They are lower level enemies so I understand them not being super complex. I was sad that I didn't have time to do my plan of having my players lv up to lv2 and fight the officer + 3 weak infantry.
The zombie was slow and took its time getting to the computer (something it could afford due to its high HP) striding once or twice and making shoots at people. They discovered its name and started calling him by name instead of zombie. He died inside of the hologram dealing damage to our mysthic but far enough from the computer to not damage it.
The combat ended with a fun roleplay moment when the last infantry was hiding behind the pillar alone and the guardian taunted them and I used this as a roleplay moment to have them stride twice towards the computer to finish their mission while taking one shoot at the guardian. They got shoot down before reaching the computer.
Seventh, the second combat. How did it actually go?
The enemies were elite but even then the glass serpent was only a level +1 enemy while the guards were -1 enemies. I gave them their hero points again for this combat. The soldier approached first since he was higher on the initiative and got crit but the ambush of the glass serpent. The mysthic used all of her healing (26) to get him back up. At this moment our guardian had a shout of glee and this is my moment "I am built for this" he shouted and went to stand alone against this massive dangerous beast and really felt like a hero to us.
Using the aeon guards was fun with how they are incentivized to each shoot at an enemy once to apply their effects (+2 and suppressed if hi) to each. They felt very coordinated and made sure everyone had to organize and think about their positions and cover not just front liners.Though they did a lot less damage than the glass serpent so they at first focused their attention on that but after the third hit turned into a miss because of the hidden condition they changed to the aeon guards.
The mysthic wanted to haste the soldier but the haste action could not be used for their attacks so she hasted the envoy instead. I really hope there is a way to use quickened actions with the area fire, specially with the unwieldy trait existing.
Both our androids made good use of their nanite clouds for concealment and the guardian used their heritage to not get wounded once which helped them some too (but did not save them in the end).
The glass serpent managed to swallow the soldier before I remembered the negatives it had from taunt. Then the glass serpent managed to swallow the guardian and this time it worked and players could finally see how it looked like and hit it, the guardian managed to escape with a nat 20 on their first attempt. The numbers on the snake felt really good (even though its successes were mostly due to high rolls not numbers) ever since the new grab rules I feel like monsters do not have the skills to roll for grab and since the remaster no monster I had run has succeeded at a grab or trip but the glass serpent finally did.
Then the snake failed once and succeeded the last attempt as it swallowed the guardian again but the swallow damage knocked him down and he could not attempt to escape, the glass serpent then had less than 10 HP and choose to run away carrying our guardian unconscious inside of it with its 45ft speed.
Great write-up! I was able to get a really good idea of class feel from reading this, and look forward to testing them out myself.
Thanks for the write up, very nice.
Glad to hear you pushed into the range meta as the focus. Curious on the damage output from the range weapons compared to the melee character. Don't think you mentioned the Soldier Fighting Style, but if he took "BOMBARD". Where even on a success to the DC, targets would still have been suppressed or where the targets getting "critical success"? Think that might have made a difference.
On a side note, noticed in the blog update on Field Test #1, Paizo is going to increase the speed penalty to -10 feet.
https://paizo.com/threads/rzs43v1y?Field-Test-1-FollowUp-Changes
Also plan on running the Field Test #5 on Friday with a focus on range and look forward to seeing how it goes.
I'm with the others - thanks for sharing ^^
Some notes:
- to easily apply effects in Foundry, drag them into the "action bar" at the bottom, now you can do it with a single press of a button
- this is why I recommend people be very sparing with applying the elite template (it is incredibly frustrating for anything using DCs)
- I don't know if I already told you this on Discord (if so, sorry for repeating myself ^^) but the Soldier's Primary Target roll is now a free, additional attack on top of your two-action aoe, so the player doesn't have to choose ^^
What a great writeup, really interesting and detailed, thank you!