I (Wizard) had Fireball and Slow one day and Wall of Water and Heightened Thunderstrike the next day. The daily fine tuning of spells is where Prepared casters shine.
You are speaking of one of your characters, so I'll avoid to push too hard as I don't want to piss you.
I find (and know I'm not the only one) that the daily fine tuning of spells is very campaign dependent. Many combat oriented adventures happen in a time frame that doesn't allow such fine tuning, forcing the party to chain encounters without much time to prepare for them.I find that the day-to-day flexibility is especially an asset if the campaign focuses a lot on out of combat situations, as these situations tend to give much more time to adapt (a social encounter often lasts hours giving a lot of time to adapt one's spell list).
Overall, I've never "fine tuned" my prepared spells with my Witch (my sole Prepared caster). I never find situations where I want to change something. Or it happens during an encounter and as such it's too late.
All the while having super swingy damage results and even when all stars align, they are only allowed to keep up with a martial but never surpass him even for a single round.
That's factually wrong: My casters are the main damage dealers of the party I play in once they reach mid levels. Once level 7, I don't see a martial keeping up with blaster damage, it's just too high.
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The wall they hit is that they will search for options for thematic casters and won't find any. Forcing them to rethink their caster. Not that they will somehow make up a Fire based caster by artificially limiting themselves to Fire spells and never think it'd be a bad idea.
But that's the thing: it's not an inherently bad idea to want a caster who exclusively takes spells of a specific theme. There's plenty of examples of magic-users in fiction who do exactly that, and a great deal many players who'd like to emulate that playstyle. While I certainly agree that casters in 2e don't work that way and shouldn't be expected to, sneering at players for wanting a perfectly thematically valid playstyle does not invalidate the fact that it's easy to build a caster in a way that won't work well.
You are the one not being serious. Yes, casters can be affected by these conditions as I've actually stated. It's just that martials are the ones affected most of the time. Casters are taking less attacks than martials, luckily, so martials are in general the ones with awful long duration debuffs.
You seem to be confusing "martial classes tend to put themselves in more dangerous ranges than the average caster" with "the caster will never take afflictions because only the martials will ever get targeted". Read what I've said again: casters can certainly position in a way that makes it more difficult for melee enemies to reach them, but enemies have plenty of ways to affect casters as well, particularly at the levels where they start getting better at dealing afflictions. This also ignores how traps and other environmental factors can also apply afflictions of their own, so your idea that martials somehow are disproportionately more affected by afflictions than casters has no solid grounding.
I think you misunderstood me: My Witch hasn't learned a single spell, not because the GM has somehow said so but because I never needed it. Having all the spells in the database in my spellbook won't change the fact that the only spells I can cast are the ones I've prepared. Outside Spell Sub Wizard, the number of spells in your spellbook are rather irrelevant to your efficiency once you have covered the spells you prepare every day (and they are not that many).
No, I understood you perfectly fine the first time, you just don't seem to understand that the versatility of being able to prepare from a much larger range of spells translates to more power overall, as you will be able to prepare more spells and thus cover an even larger range of circumstances even better. Once again, if your Witch knew every single spell in their tradition, they would be a lot more powerful.
Well, it looks like you have a tendency to hyperbole then.
You have this tendency to use expressions whose meaning appears to escape you. If you believe that I am being hyperbolic, then by all means, please tell me which class has the fuzziest balance in the game and why.
You're not everyone. I agree with most people here. But your take on casters is extreme (or at least your hyperboles make it look like it).
You are presently embroiled in arguments with multiple people in this very thread, routinely dismiss every opinion you disagree with, and even in just your own responses to my posts, you also made a point of dismissing the experience of newer players, as well as caster players who don't share your opinion of their classes. Even if it were just my own opinion, your attitude would be wrong, but as it stands it's clearly not an isolated case. Were you to perhaps not try to reflexively shout down people whose opinions you disagree with, you'd save yourself a lot of time and effort.
Well, you have a weird way to state your opinion. If, instead of bringing truth from beyond you were just saying "I think", or "in my opinion", I would not react so negatively to your contribution.
Speaking of fuzzy, it appears you have an uneven grasp of what constitutes opinion, and what constitutes fact. Let's go over this together: when expressing an opinion, which may have objective grounding but is still largely subjective, you are correct that one should use I-statements, as in my post:
Overall, I would say casters are balanced, but the ideal range of conditions that allow that are harder to describe than for martial classes, who are altogether much more consistent.
"I think casters are balanced" is an opinion. This is separate from facts, which are cold, hard, objective truths that are independently verifiable, such as "a 20th-level Wizard in PF2e can have anything between 54 and 685 spells in their spellbook, a difference in extremes that's a factor greater than twelve". I do not need to use I-statements to express this fact, because it is not an opinion. Because it is also an established fact that factors such as breadth of versatility, daily attrition relative to per-day resources, and diversity of spells learned or prepared all affect a character's performance, it is therefore an objective fact that all of these factors add to a character's variance in performance, or fuzziness in this context. Whether this variance is good or bad, worth addressing or not, are all (valid) opinions, but that this variance exists at all is a fact.
Now that we've established when I-statements are appropriate, let's look at your track record, shall we?
The wall they hit is that they will search for options for thematic casters and won't find any. Forcing them to rethink their caster. Not that they will somehow make up a Fire based caster by artificially limiting themselves to Fire spells and never think it'd be a bad idea.
You have no evidence for this conjecture, making it an opinion, yet still try to impose it as fact. Note the lack of I-statements in your paragraph.
The only grievance players have is that some (types of) spells are bad when others are working fine. But otherwise, most players know the good spells and choose accordingly (depending on what they want to achieve).
Similarly, this is you trying to suppress experiences that contradict your feelings by imposing your own unsupported opinion as fact. No I-statements either.
Overall, you are yelling at small issues.
Again, no I-statements to this opinionated accusation. You have implicitly reserved for yourself the right to decide which issues are big or small, without providing any justification, and which opinions to acknowledge or dismiss based on a bit of made-up tone policing. Clearly, you seem to be having a hard time dissociating facts from your feelings, a sentiment you seem to at least partially acknowledge:
But it looks like I've hard time telling between hyperboles and small issues :)
To be clear, just because you feel that something is hyperbole or a small issue does not make it objectively so. There are many valid criticisms to be made of casters in Pathfinder, and while those criticisms need not be addressed by Paizo, they can still at least be acknowledged and discussed for the sake of a more enriching discussion. By aggressively trying to shut down these criticisms, you only make discussion poorer, and trying to invalidate basic facts about the game's design and balance simply because they disagree with your opinions similarly bogs discussion down.
EDIT: As an added bonus:
That's factually wrong: My casters are the main damage dealers of the party I play in once they reach mid levels.
This is not a fact, this is an anecdote. Even if it were true that your casters regularly topped damage in your party, you have nothing to show for it, so the only thing the reader has left is to take you up on your word, which you've given no reason to do. Somehow, something tells me you haven't actually measured your damage output and run the math, and so I suspect this claim of yours is hyperbolic at best.
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Cam your or anyone else taking this position provide real ideas for fixing casters that doesn't include making them overpowered again?
Do you even know what each caster does? Can you even discuss how they interact with the game and provide Paizo real reasons than just "feeling" from some nameless minority discussing actual casters in play?
These nebulous threads are about as helpful to a designer anyone saying they don't like how something feel is.
Provide actionable criticism for each caster based on what they they can do using real game experience to show you have seen them played, measured their metrics against martials, and know what you're talking about.
Every time I see these threads, almost no one but me provides any real evidence either because they haven't actually played "casters" in this game and mean "their favorite caster that didn't work, usually the wizard" with a complete absence of actionable criticism.
There are plenty of things that can be changed to make spellcasters better without breaking the system. Proficiency scaling could be changed to function more along the lines of the Martial paradigm, wherein being Legendary is truly a noteworthy feature, and not just "the standard." Metamagic feats could be more useful and significantly less situational so that spellcasters are incentivized to take them as feats, instead of picking something else that's better, or branching off into something entirely because it's just objectively better than anything else available to your class. Focus spells could be balanced around class chassis instead of spell traditions (since it's class abilities that grant said focus spells, not spellcasting traditions themselves), so that classes with 'meh' spell lists likewise aren't also stuck with 'meh' focus spells, making it a 'meh' experience overall. Base chassis for certain classes can be revised to be less static and boring and having better parity amongst themselves, instead of relying on spell preparation for class variation (which has relatively proven to be subject to "One True Build"ism, since picking staple spells is important for constant relevance in encounters). The problem is that Paizo has made their bed and now they have to lie in it, and this is doubly true after they've essentially finished publishing the Remaster content.
I don't know the absolute fine details of every caster in the game, but I have a general idea behind most of them, and I imagine the amount of people that do have all, and I mean ALL of those fine details, are either constant players of the game (that is, they play far more frequently than once a week, the standard of which most players play), or are the creators of the game, which is an extremely finite amount, even when PF2 has been out for half a decade, and even then, I imagine they haven't played every spellcaster from 1 to 20 and organically built them, comparing options and going "I like this option, but this other option is pretty bad," or having played the same class twice, but going different routes to compare where they shine and don't shine at.
I disagree; often times, posters will go into detail as to why it feels bad, and this helps to differentiate between whether it's just a poor playstyle choice based on the probability rates (that is, targeting an enemy's good save instead of a bad one), or it's a glaring issue of the system that probably should be re-tuned, or if it's just the GM's dice having a field day with the players. As an example, the amount of times I've seen players attempt to utilize Fortitude Save-based spells, and I as a GM end up going "This creature has an extreme Fortitude save," is astronomically high, and is doubly true for "boss" enemies. Like, even the specialized Grapple Monk in one of my groups still struggles to grab enemies more than half the time with full bonus, simply because 90% of monsters are tuned to have a high or extreme Fortitude save. I can really only remember a couple monsters that have average or less Fortitude saves, and that's only because they are generally significant creatures to face. Compared to Reflex save-based effects, where creatures are either middling or terrible at, and it's quite clear that the game intends for players to regularly pitch Reflex-based effects at enemies based on the likelihood of success/failure from the monsters. I would like to include Will save-based effects, but most of the creatures with a terrible Will Save are likely mindless in some capacity and therefore can't reasonably be affected by 99% of Will Save effects anyway, which actually significantly hurts player options by essentially "negating" 1/3 of their toolset.
The thing is that you will have multiple players play the same class organically and come to completely different conclusions based on either the needs of the party or the experiences of the player in a given adventure, often which will be counter to your conclusions, either because they simply have a different playstyle or preference from you, or because they have had completely different outcomes for the same actions you've taken. With the amount of variables in place here, attempting to deny somebody simply because it's different from yours comes off as gatekeeping shenanigans. "Only my playstyle is valid because I experienced it," isn't the high ground you're expressing it as.
I (Wizard) had Fireball and Slow one day and Wall of Water and Heightened Thunderstrike the next day. The daily fine tuning of spells is where Prepared casters shine.You are speaking of one of your characters, so I'll avoid to push too hard as I don't want to piss you.
All good. You’ve been respectfully disagreeing on something that is, ultimately, variable and playstyle dependent.
I find (and know I'm not the only one) that the daily fine tuning of spells is very campaign dependent. Many combat oriented adventures happen in a time frame that doesn't allow such fine tuning, forcing the party to chain encounters without much time to prepare for them.I find that the day-to-day flexibility is especially an asset if the campaign focuses a lot on out of combat situations, as these situations tend to give much more time to adapt (a social encounter often lasts hours giving a lot of time to adapt one's spell list).
It is definitely campaign dependent to some extent, and if you don’t get chances to fine tune a lot, a Prepared caster will eventually get outshined (especially at higher levels once the Spontaneous caster has a million signature spells). If all you get a chance to do is prepare the generically good spells, you’re objectively gonna feel worse than a Spontaneous caster because they use those generically good spells better than you do.
My experience has been that any time I have even a slight idea of what’s coming up in a coming day, my performance as a Prepared caster is boosted, because I suddenly swap my spells into a configuration that Spontaneous caster wouldn’t really think of bringing. When I don’t expect to fight single targets today I remove Slow from my spell list and bring more AoEs. When I know I’m dungeon delving I bring more spells that work well with choke points. When I know I’m devil hunting the fire spells from my list disappear entirely.
It’s basically like if a Spontaneous caster with generically good spells is usually swinging between 90-110% performance, then a Prepared caster is more like 85-95% performance on a day where you didn’t get to fine tune (say, 80% of days) and then 120-150% performance when you did get to fine tune (say, 20% of days).
All the while having super swingy damage results and even when all stars align, they are only allowed to keep up with a martial but never surpass him even for a single round.That's factually wrong: My casters are the main damage dealers of the party I play in once they reach mid levels. Once level 7, I don't see a martial keeping up with blaster damage, it's just too high.
Same. It’s very hard to take that post seriously when more than half of it is just a bunch of very angry misrepresentations of everything that’s been said and I’ve been a Wizard and GMed for a Psychic who can choose to be top damage dealer for a combat anytime they want.
I dunno if I’d say a martial can’t keep up with blaster damage, in my experience they are both are very, very close.
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The first fundamental flaw in the “I just want to blast, why does OF2 make that so difficult?” Mindset is that “pure blaster” is just no more viable a role in a party than “pure smasher.”
“My sole role in this party is to do damage” is only even close to viable in a pure arena combat simulator, otherwise, every character is expected to have pools of resources that get spent on multiple modes of play and needs to be good at several things to be a contributing party member, or the whole party suffers in the vast majority of campaigns. The common subtext of “why can’t I just blast” is, “why can’t I play a caster who’s entire set of spell casting features is dedicated to their combat performance in the same way a fighter’s weapon is?”
But a fighter’s weapon is one item out of their entire character build, that can actually be changed out with relative ease and fighters that refuse to consider the possibility that they will ever need to have a back up or a weapon that works at range or has a different set of traits is actually playing their fighter suboptimally. These fighters tend to get even angrier than casters do when their strength is frequently neutralized by circumstance, or will insist the difficulty of an entire adventure is too high if it is just the case that they brought the wrong combat style to the campaign.
But casters spells have another great difference than weapons, and that is that each spell, discretely is a weapon in itself that doesn’t require feats or items or class features to shine. For some players this is a huge strength of PF2 spell casting, and a major way PF2 deviates from PF1. Other players find this frustrating, because it means a spell is either a good fit for the scenario it is cast…or it is the wrong spell to cast, and if it is the only spell you have to cast, your spell casting feature is negated. I think this is what drives a lot of prepared/wizard hate.
But PF2 wizards and other prepared casters that are finding themselves often in situations where the only spell they have to cast is the wrong one is not a systemic issue with game design, it is a table issue that can, 100% of the time, be fixed with no house rules or need for the GM to take it “easy on the caster.” All it takes is all the players talking about their expectations for game pacing, combat focus, level of enjoyment from downtime activities and desire to have it present in game, and amount of time the party wants to dedicate to gathering information in advance of entering a dungeon vs thinking quickly in encounters that come as a total surprise. All of these are very reasonable things to talk about in session 0/ as players build characters and to keep coming back to as you level up and keep playing together.
People who think the game “works just fine for martials” without these conversations are making a lot of assumptions about how the GM is going to take things easy on martials by giving them lots of time between encounters to heal and is never going to have encounters cascade by having enemies run to get reinforcements, or fall back to more defensible positions against opponents capable of overwhelming melee superiority. PF2 is not a video game with enemies on immutable scripts. It is a collaborative game of imagination. Players are, by the rules of the game, encouraged to communicate with each other to improve the experience of everyone playing. That is rarely accomplished by telling someone to play differently, but it is also rarely accomplished well by getting excessively esoteric in trying to change the rules of the game to try to allow players with conflicting expectations for play experience to each have their own cake and not work together to make a cake they will both enjoy sharing.
So you've played with everyone and know what everyone likes? Maybe don't make broad statements of fact when trying to state your opinion. I've played in several groups who love crushing fight after fight. Large areas to explore with plenty of fights are exactly what some like. The group I did AV with did two floors or more between each rest.Nothing in AV forces you to go 2 floors at a time.
I've only found very big dungeons with no obvious rest in Extinction Curse. They are overall extremely rare.Now, your group can have its own way of playing that screws spellcasters. But it doesn't make spellcasters bad, it's really your group that is not following the (mostly implied) guidelines when it comes to average number of fights per adventuring days.
Overall, the 10-fight adventuring day is a unicorn. I haven't played a single one in 300 sessions but I've seen it being raised a lot.
I have not seen the 10 fight adventuring day too often unless the group is just clearing rooms with lots of easy fights, which there are plenty of in these modules. Fights that don't even require casters to cast more than cantrips unless they just want to blast things for their personal enjoyment. I don't get anything from doing that myself as I like to wait to apply magic in hard fights or when it will be maximal impact. A couple of oozes in a room or a few guards, not wasting my time. I let the martials swing their weapons and clear the room quick and easy.
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I (Wizard) had Fireball and Slow one day and Wall of Water and Heightened Thunderstrike the next day. The daily fine tuning of spells is where Prepared casters shine.You are speaking of one of your characters, so I'll avoid to push too hard as I don't want to piss you.
All good. You’ve been respectfully disagreeing on something that is, ultimately, variable and playstyle dependent.
I find (and know I'm not the only one) that the daily fine tuning of spells is very campaign dependent. Many combat oriented adventures happen in a time frame that doesn't allow such fine tuning, forcing the party to chain encounters without much time to prepare for them.I find that the day-to-day flexibility is especially an asset if the campaign focuses a lot on out of combat situations, as these situations tend to give much more time to adapt (a social encounter often lasts hours giving a lot of time to adapt one's spell list).
It is definitely campaign dependent to some extent, and if you don’t get chances to fine tune a lot, a Prepared caster will eventually get outshined (especially at higher levels once the Spontaneous caster has a million signature spells). If all you get a chance to do is prepare the generically good spells, you’re objectively gonna feel worse than a Spontaneous caster because they use those generically good spells better than you do.
My experience has been that any time I have even a slight idea of what’s coming up in a coming day, my performance as a Prepared caster is boosted, because I suddenly swap my spells into a configuration that Spontaneous caster wouldn’t really think of bringing. When I don’t expect to fight single targets today I remove Slow from my spell list and bring more AoEs. When I know I’m dungeon delving I bring more spells that work well with choke points. When I know I’m devil hunting the fire spells from my list disappear entirely.
It’s basically like if a Spontaneous caster with...
Multitarget a martial cannot keep up save in very few circumstances using something like Whirlwind Strike. A whirlwind strike barbarian or fighter versus mooks can do a lot of damage.
If the targets are spread out, a martial can't keep up with some of the crazy blasting spells.
But really, that's not the power of a caster. Hitting a group with a slow spell is far more effective at winning than just blasting. Or banishing some mooks. Or using walls to seal off fights and make it easier for everyone. Or even the power of healing erasing damage. Blasting is one of many tools for a caster.
There are a bunch of things casters can do that martials can't even do if they wanted to, which is why these discussions end up where they do. If makes those of us that have played casters across the edition go, "What are you expecting? You want to do amazing single target damage and banish and put up walls of force and teleport and have mirror image and magic missile and chain lightning and change form and summon creatures and charm and disguise yourself and turn invisible...etc, etc, while doing what? Equal single target damage to the martial?"
Martials aren't doing half or a quarter what casters are doing, but somehow there is a "casters feel weak" while you're doing all the stuff listed on your spell list. Sorry, you don't get to do it all this edition alone.
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I have yet to meet anyone who knew of Vance's books before finding out that's where D&D casting came from and I've been playing since early 90's. So I wouldn't say popular.
Me. My father owned a copy of The Dying Earth by Jack Vance, which is now in my collection. My local library had some of Jack Vance's science fiction books. I am 62 years old.
Note that Vancian casting was important only in one single story in The Dying Earth. Most of the stories were about dealing with demons through finding greater magics or solving ancient mysteries.
No, if things were balanced then all classes could go all day. The encounter design is based on being at your best, attrition is not part of PF2 encounter design, much for the better.
Some ancestry or skill feats, such as gnomes' First World Adept and Medicine's Battle Medicine, have daily limits.
The developers of Pathfinder 2nd Edition had one of their goals to be eliminating the 15-minute workday caused by wizards expending their most powerful spells in the first two encounters. Treat Wounds was invented during the 2018 public playtest of PF2, it was not in the original playtest rules, but the developer took advantage of the design space it opened up to lengthen the adventuring day and better balance encounters.
Nevertheless, the developers did not abandon the adventuring day. They intended for the party to rest and recuperate, often for a full night, after difficult encounters.
This is a major advantage Clerics and Druids have over Wizards in that this problem simply does not exist for them for common spells, and it's one of the things I find that makes them more popular in the circles I'm in: the extra layer of spellbook management doesn't really get you anything except work to get back to a point that other classes start at.I feel this is another instance of fuzzy design where, in theory, it could go really hard into either extreme, and I think that's becoming apparent is that casters have the fuzziest balance out of all classes in Pathfinder: whereas martial classes are extremely consistent in what they can do, and how often they can do it, casters will vary wildly in effectiveness based on the spells they equip, the length and intensity of the adventuring day, and in the case of spellbook-type casters the amount of spells they get to learn.
I am amused that my Strength of Thousands campaign is at the other extreme, many spells in the spellbook. The wizard Idris is interested in learning lots of spells, so Idris's player asked me about learning additional spells at the Magaambya Academy. I told her that Idris can go to the Archhorn Library, check out a book on common spells, and follow the Learn a Spell activity. The player asked about the cost for access to the spells, and I replied that it was free because access and paper and ink came with paying tuition to the Magaambya Academy. The adventure path did not spell this out, but it seemed like common sense. Idris's only limit was time, because he was busy with classes and service projects.
On the other hand, learning uncommon spells would require enrolling in a class that teaches uncommon spells. I am planning such a class for next semester, Spells of Lastwall, because another player had expressed interest in Purifying Icicle.
Idris later took Magical Shorthand to take full advantage of these free spells. But rolling for dozens of spells would be inconvenient, so the player asked for a set number of spells instead. I did a back-of-the envelope calculation and responded in Discord:
Erin S. (GM) — 06/25/2024 6:45 PM
Idris with magical shorthand can learn 50 new common spells of her choice, no more than 20 at 2nd level. Those without magical shorthand can learn 12 new common spells of their choice, no more than 5 2nd-level spells.
A Wizard who knows every single arcane spell on the list is going to be far more versatile, and thus far more powerful than a Wizard who only knows the bare minimum they get from levelling, but whereas casters are generally balanced around making full use of the spells available to them, Wizards I don't think are balanced around knowing every arcane spell, so much as knowing enough diverse arcane spells to cover all of their bases. Whereas getting spells from levelling is guaranteed, however, learning spells during exploration or downtime is not, and puts pressure on the GM to cater to the Wizard (or Witch, or Magus).
In the future Idris will be known as a Magaambya wizard. His magic ought to look impressive. In the present I am amused that when forewarned about an encounter, Idris carefully selects the most useful spells from a student's point of view rather than an adventurer's point of view. The player loves roleplaying in character.
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How does a bonus to spell attack rolls affect Fireball???Spellcasting bonuses are added to your Spell DC too.
If you honestly think bonuses to attack rolls affect spell/class DCs, then you should delete all your comments on this topic, re-read the rules, and then do a tour of mea culpa.
Because your "improvement" now makes vs AC spells so much stronger than Save spells that nobody would use Save spells.
And right now nobody uses AC spells because they're so much weaker. They'd finally be en par with save spells and thus useful instead of being useless filler space in the rule books. They are also affected by MAP and being single-target spells. (The latter is also why they deal more damage than AoE spells.)
Furthermore, I don't appreciate your constant exaggeration with things like "nobody would". That's non-constructive garbage. Plenty of people are perfectly fine with the way casters are -- you might even have seen some of them in this very thread! -- because they enjoy playing supporters, buffers, debuffers, controllers, or other non-blaster casters. These types naturally prefer the save spells, because they don't intend to deal damage primarily. None of those players would change anything about their casters just because AC spells are getting a buff. The only players who would change something are those who want to blast with single-target damage-dealing spells. So this silly "nobody would" and other nonsense is really annoying.
I also think you're constructing straw-men by claiming that my suggestion to give a bonus to spell attack rolls would increase spell save DCs. And that's my benevolent interpretation, as you might even just malevolently lie about that. It cannot be mere nescience.
If you hate blaster casters or think everything is hunky dory for blasters, then just ignore this thread and enjoy the weekend. This stuff here is all meant to be constructive, not a place for you to enjoy some free drama.
But kineticists pay for their 'all day casting' by having their damage lowered;
Kineticists also have more hit points, far better CON, better armor proficiencies & saves, and they can dump INT & CHA. They also have infinite impulses, i.e. no resource management hassle.
If you want to equalize them to blaster casters in a calculation, then don't just look at the damage. Give them a Wizard's save progression, turn their class ability from CON to INT, lower their hit points by 2 per level, and remove their armor proficiency. Only after you made all these adjustments would it be permissive to simply compare damage numbers.
Besides, my suggestions weren't some absolute statements, chiseled in stone, that have to be religiously followed, but:
A) a reference to what was discussed at the time, i.e. the difference in damage between melee & ranged martials; and
B) a starting point for what can be changed without creating imbalances or affecting cross-class power levels; and
C) an answer to the plea of putting forth suggestions.
Whether a spell attack bonus should be +1 or +4, or something in between, and at which level, can be calculated once there is some consensus of it being a functional suggestion. I might simply be oblivious to some mechanics atm, that would make this a bad suggestion, and in those cases I would love to hear pointers/explanations as to why it is bad. Not some "NOBODY WOULD EVER USE SAVE SPELLS ANYMORE" doomsday babble.
So far however, I really don't think there are huge problems with giving a blaster caster a bonus to spell attack rolls (similar to Automatic Bonus Progression maybe); after all, there is a reason why everyone advises against using AC-targeting spells and favors save-targeting spells, least of which is that a miss on an AC-spell deals 0 damage, while a fail on a save-spell deals ½ damage (or has a smaller effect).
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I am amused that my Strength of Thousands campaign is at the other extreme, many spells in the spellbook. The wizard Idris is interested in learning lots of spells, so Idris's player asked me about learning additional spells at the Magaambya Academy. I told her that Idris can go to the Archhorn Library, check out a book on common spells, and follow the Learn a Spell activity. The player asked about the cost for access to the spells, and I replied that it was free because access and paper and ink came with paying tuition to the Magaambya Academy. The adventure path did not spell this out, but it seemed like common sense. Idris's only limit was time, because he was busy with classes and service projects.
On the other hand, learning uncommon spells would require enrolling in a class that teaches uncommon spells. I am planning such a class for next semester, Spells of Lastwall, because another player had expressed interest in Purifying Icicle.
I'm running Strength of Thousands right now as well! My party has no full Wizards (Cleric, Kineticist, Monk, Investigator), but some of them have Wizard Dedication. So I expect to see some of the same thing at some point, as SoT is really the ideal Wizard playground with its significant downtime and easy access to a huge spell library.
Didn't the remaster largely do away with spell-attack rolls? Like there's a real issue adapting a Magus or an Eldritch Archer to the remaster rules since there are so few spell-attacks to choose from.
IIRC there are only four spell attack spells in Player Core 1 (there are presumably more in PC2) as Shocking Grasp, Polar Ray, and Acid Arrow all got remastered into spells that target saves, not AC. Given their rarity now, it's plausible that the purpose of "spell attack" spells is for Magi and Eldritch Archers and people who get item bonuses to them, just not Wizards et al.
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I can see some tempers are beginning to flare. If you are going to disagree, please do so respectfully.
Hm.
I do get the ‘feels bad’. I’m in Abomination Vaults with a wizard. I’m generally trying to be support, and to my annoyance I keep remembering all the times that monsters save against Grease.
And then remember when it worked as intended. Or when Illusory Creature was great. I almost want to not have Fireball taking up a slot, especially as I’ve cast it twice. On one enemy each. You know, optimal.
Of course I worry about both running out of Grease and not pulling my weight in DPS …
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I quit reading this thread about halfway through because I got tired and frustrated, so I apologize if anything I say here is redundant. I also apologize for the harsh tone, but again: tired, frustrated, need to get it out of my system.
I am deeply, deeply disappointed in this community. This game has been out for five years, and yet the needle has not budged at all. The majority of caster discourse is still one side saying "casters bad," and the other side going "nuh-uh." Worse, there's still this weird expectation that complaining loudly enough will somehow make Paizo fix the problem (they won't; we're several splatbooks, multiple errata passes, and a total system overhaul deep into PF2 now, so any warts are here to stay), while the other side can't seem to offer much other than a handful of (occasionally helpful) git guddisms. The fact that we've had five years to experiment with homebrew solutions and have come up with next to nothing is shameful. We can do better than this.
So I'm gonna do my best to push the needle in the right direction, because I'd like us all to get back to having fun with the game, please.
Anyway, the problem with casters ultimately comes down to one mechanical element: spell slots. They feel weak because, despite having much higher peaks in power than martials, they can't hit those peaks very often, and if they shoot for the peak and miss... well, tough luck, I guess. Slot's lost either way. This feelsbad hurdle's just too tall for lots of players, even though plenty of others can hop right over it, no problem.
So how do we get over the hurdle? There are probably multiple ways--SuperBidi's scroll meta being one of them--but they all have their strengths and weaknesses. Some players just hate consumables, for example, and I don't think forcing someone to adapt a playstyle they dislike is the ideal path forward. But I think Bidi's on the right track: additional slots translate to less cautious casting, meaning casters get to hit their peak more often. They aren't punished as hard for misplays or bad luck because the cost is no longer as steep, so the overall feelsbad is reduced.
So... why not just give casters more slots? I think this one's tricky, too, as messing around with the game's core mechanical assumptions can have surprise consequences that most GMs don't have time to hunt down via playtesting. However, like scroll shopping, it probably works fine under the right circumstances, and a few GMs even include extra slots as an optional side rule to pair with ABP in order to run a near-lootless game.
But again, messing with the math feels weird enough that it, too, presents a hurdle. Ideally, we want something that doesn't change any core rules assumptions or require players to give up on their class fantasy. We want cheap, easy, and preferably on-the-fly so it can be applied as-needed in order to fit the pace of the adventure.
Which brings us to my proposed solution: just refund the dang slots when it feels right. Treat slot refreshment the same way a videogame treats health pack drops, or the way stories treat miraculous second winds or sudden bursts of inspiration. Boss coming up? Refresh. In an especially soothing/magical location? Refresh. Player proposes a cool, yet risky maneuver involving channeling energy through a mysterious interdimensional portal? Refresh gated behind a skill check. Slot refreshment is a great pacing tool that more people should use, and basically the easiest way to reward hardworking players by letting them go sicko mode. And the narrative justifications for it are endless! You can just do whatever! It's fine! You can also pointedly not do it when you want players to really feel the attrition, much like how you can turn other resource tracking on and off depending on your campaign's needs.
TL;DR: Just giving people their dang slots back when it feels right is much easier than expecting everyone to play according to Paizo's mysterious and arcane intentions (or for Paizo to suddenly change what those intentions even are). I'm not bold enough to say this is the only/ideal solution, but it is the easiest to experiment with and adjust on the fly. I'd love to see more people try their hand at problem-solving, too, and again apologize if someone's already brought this up because I got too cranky to read the whole thread.
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…, while the other side can't seem to offer much other than a handful of (occasionally helpful) git guddisms.
I just started a thread in the Advice section about Wizard "git guddisms." You're right, the rules aren't going to change, so I want to see if something better can be done.
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Lol that refresh idea's not so bad and the GM is deciding when it is appropriate.
If you want to put it in the hands of players maybe let 1 hero point be used to refresh 1 spell slot. Could have some conditions to it if the straight out trade is too good. This might make up for spells going against saves not getting the same benefit out of hero points as strikes.
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One thing I feel about PF2 is that hero points are sort of underutilized as a game mechanic. I would consider letting players spend a hero point to buy back a spell slot as a reasonable extension for them, if we're talking about house rules.
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I quit reading this thread about halfway through because I got tired and frustrated, so I apologize if anything I say here is redundant. I also apologize for the harsh tone, but again: tired, frustrated, need to get it out of my system.
I am deeply, deeply disappointed in this community. This game has been out for five years, and yet the needle has not budged at all. The majority of caster discourse is still one side saying "casters bad," and the other side going "nuh-uh." Worse, there's still this weird expectation that complaining loudly enough will somehow make Paizo fix the problem (they won't; we're several splatbooks, multiple errata passes, and a total system overhaul deep into PF2 now, so any warts are here to stay), while the other side can't seem to offer much other than a handful of (occasionally helpful) git guddisms. The fact that we've had five years to experiment with homebrew solutions and have come up with next to nothing is shameful. We can do better than this.
I wouldn't say the needle has not budged at all.
I only joined the community (as a whole, not this specific forum) a year and a half ago, and in that time I have seen caster discourse slowly move away from gloom and doom towards more people just understanding the functionality and roles of casters more and more.
I mean not even a year ago, if you went to Reddit and said you think blaster casters can function, you'd just get blasted for it, yet right now that's no longer the case.
And people for whom the caster design paradigm does not work, we're getting more and more options like the Psychic, Kineticist, Elementalist Archetype, etc to fulfill their specific fantasies. Hopefully there are more in the pipeline too, since it's not perfect but it is constantly getting better.
Which brings us to my proposed solution: just refund the dang slots when it feels right. Treat slot refreshment the same way a videogame treats health pack drops, or the way stories treat miraculous second winds or sudden bursts of inspiration. Boss coming up? Refresh. In an especially soothing/magical location? Refresh. Player proposes a cool, yet risky maneuver involving channeling energy through a mysterious interdimensional portal? Refresh gated behind a skill check. Slot refreshment is a great pacing tool that more people should use, and basically the easiest way to reward hardworking players by letting them go sicko mode. And the narrative justifications for it are endless! You can just do whatever! It's fine! You can also pointedly not do it when you want players to really feel the attrition, much like how you can turn other resource tracking on and off depending on your campaign's needs.
I will be honest, if I played a table like this, I would simply never bring a martial to the table. The fact is, a well-played caster performs about as well as a martial throughout the day. Removing the resource consumption from their spells will completely change this dynamic for them, and make them quite overpowered, and every odd rank of spells would make this a bigger and bigger problem.
Of course, every table should choose to modify the rules as they see fit for the best game possible, but... I don't think this suggestion is quite as wide-rangingly good as you are implying it is.
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Lord Fyre, I think that thread is a great idea. I'm not actually opposed to games requiring skill and having learning curves, and do wish more people were willing to meet the system where it's at rather than get mad about having to (gasp!) strategize sometimes. I just don't think people who are having a really bad time are necessarily helped by being told they're doing it wrong, and feel for those players whose idea of having fun as a wizard is different from Paizo's.
AAAetios, you have correctly identified that "casters bad" is a vibes-based problem: a well-played caster is just as helpful to the team as a well-played martial. Hence why I have suggested a vibes-based solution that focuses on pacing, player behavior, and feel more than hard mathematical fixes. Like, if your wizard is doing fine, they don't need a refund, right? But if it's a really long adventuring day, the wizard is being detrimentally conservative with their spells, or a pivotal encounter would just feel bad with an empty tank? You can just... patch some slots in. The entire point is to meet the table where it's at in the moment rather than make any permanent changes.
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Lord Fyre, I think that thread is a great idea. I'm not actually opposed to games requiring skill and having learning curves, and do wish more people were willing to meet the system where it's at rather than get mad about having to (gasp!) strategize sometimes. I just don't think people who are having a really bad time are necessarily helped by being told they're doing it wrong, and feel for those players whose idea of having fun as a wizard is different from Paizo's.
True. Being told they're "doing it wrong" is not enough. That's why I was asking for help finding better approaches.
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Here's what I think it should be done, although this is for a far in the future 3rd Edition:
*Kill the Vancian System. For good. No neo-vancian. No work around. Just dead.
*Take a page out of Gygax and borrow ideas from famous magic systems from fantasy novels. There are a myriad of great options. We're basically living in a "Hard Magic System" age, not only with Brando Sando, but a lot of other writers.
*I think the core design philosophy of players having many spells to chose and being able to learn/change them is interesting. However, each individual choice needs to do more. This means less Spells and more versatility with each one, maybe even deciding how much it does based on the character's magical capabilities (you spend more juice and get stronger effects, as if you're "heightening" the spell)
*Keep wands, scrolls, staves and other similar items in the game, they're great aggregates to a magic system (even if their functionality changes a bit).
*To avoid annoying threads about class names and their familiar implementations (like it was with Paladin->Champion), change up the name of the classes. Golarion has a lot of interesting cultures, they could offer great sources for names.
That's pretty much it. The whole issue of this thread and the complaints Casters (and the Martial/Caster disparity) stem from the same source: Vestigial issues of the Vancian Spellcasting System inherited from DnD3.0/3.5/PF1e.
Given Paizo's remarkable success with changing up major elements from PF1e, I wouldn't be surprised if they could pull off a major magic overhaul in the next edition.
That's my take at least, from someone who only plays prepared casters and has no trouble fiddling with the Vancian system and taking advantage of it (ever since PF1e).
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Now, if you're expecting to be able to duplicate and exceed a single-target martial with them, then well, no. Because then you have the problem that previous editions had.
Why?
Why is that expectation "bad" or "forbidden"? What is so wrong about a blaster dealing as much single-target damage as a martial? This doesn't sound fair or balanced at all. Is this some kind of "MUAHAHAHA, now the Wizard players get the short end of the stick!"-revenge tour?
Why should it be absolutely impossible to build a blaster caster in a way that puts them en par with (for example) a ranged Fighter in terms of damage? The ranged Fighter has far better survivability (hp, armor, shield, saves) than the blaster caster, why does the ranged Fighter also need to be better in damage as well?
Honestly, that sounds a lot more like an old grudge about previous editions, rather than an actual understanding of what made casters problematic in those editions.
For example, in Pathfinder 1e the absolute best blaster caster was a Magic Trick Fireball Crossblooded Sorcerer, not the Evocation Wizards, yet the Wizards & Clerics & Druids were considered Tier 1 classes, while the Sorcerer was just a Tier 2 class. And there were also absolute damage beasts of martials out there, from pouncing Barbarians to super scary natural attack builds.
Pathfinder 1e combat is sometimes called "Rocket Tag", because most builds, casters & martials, were capable of dishing out so much damage that it was often initiative which determined who won & who lost: dead enemies don't retaliate after all. Encounters didn't last long, and usually the 1st round already decided the entire encounter, with the winning side moving to "mop up" duty in round 2.
So no, it was not the ability to deal damage that made casters op compared to martials. It was their incredible versatility: Just pull out a spell to solve the problem, often better than the martial classes ever could, even if they specialized in that area, e.g. a divination/scrying spell beats the party Rogue in scouting - "Or just use your Imp familiar. What, you have no permanently invisible little servant???"
Others have pointed this out as well, like Squiggit:
Single target blasting was absolutely not the problem previous editions had. Even back then it was generally a bad idea (outside some gimmick options).
and Matthew Downie:
In Pathfinder 1e, when people were discussing martial-caster disparity, it was common for knowledgeable players to say things like, "Mundane combat isn't the main issue. Of course martials are great at taking attacks and dealing damage. (Though you often need casters to deal with specialist invisible/flying/arrow-repelling enemies.) It's everything else that's the real problem. Out of combat, a Fighter is no better than a commoner, while casters can solve every problem with flight, scrying, teleportation, divining the future, mind control, protection from energy, neutralising poison, raising the dead, triggering traps with summoned monsters, breathing underwater, dispelling magic, creating walls, turning invisible, turning into animals, etc."
and YuriP:
What really makes casters "overpowered" in PF1 was their ability to basically solve anything with magic in a way that surpassed the non-casters in many ways.
This stops to happen in PF2 specially because the changes in the system helped the martials to not depend or being surpassed by casters any more. For example: You no more need strong buffs long duration buffs to keep relevant in mid to high level fights anymore, fundamental runes had take this job, same for different damage types vs physical resistant but elemental weak creatures, usually you property runes can take advantage from this, the number of skills is way lesser and way more powerful due the skill feats allowing to solve problems in fantastic mundane way where you usually are solved with spells, there's many ways to heal without need magic and so on.
PF1 was a system where as you progress more and more you depends from magic to solve your problems and the casters are usually able to perfectly solve any problem and do any job. That's the real reason why the casters was supervalue in PF1. While PF2 casters are super welcome but they are no more a needed to do the things works. This made they look more weaker because they are no more a super panacea to solve all the problems in the best way just an another way of many to solve the party problems.
and Tridus.
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I'm 30 years old, know nothing about the Dying Earth series beyond its impact on DND mechanics, and missed the train on DND4E bc I wasn't playing ttrpgs yet. As far as I'm concerned, spell slots can burn on the pyre with other outmoded sacred cows.
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I'm 30 years old, know nothing about the Dying Earth series beyond its impact on DND mechanics, and missed the train on DND4E bc I wasn't playing ttrpgs yet. As far as I'm concerned, spell slots can burn on the pyre with other outmoded sacred cows.
I'm particularly partial to The Dresden Files' magic system. It's an Urban Fantasy series with an well designed and rich magic system, that would fit like a glove on an RPG with a few tweaks and more constraints.
There's already an RPG for the system (FATE system), but I think it's one that is closest to in flavor to what we already have on Pathfinder, with actual spells, staves, wands, blasting, utility spells, rituals and magical items. Unlike system from Brandon Sanderson, for example, which are definitely magic systems, but they are very narrow in scope, even though he has many types with varying degrees of versatility.
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What is so wrong about a blaster dealing as much single-target damage as a martial?Gestures vaguely at everything else casters can do that martials can't.
That's too vague. What exactly can a Wizard who prepares only blasting spells do better than martials? Swing a staff? Ride a unicorn? Recite poems? Maths?
And what about all the things that martials do better than blasters? Like swim, climb, grapple, escape, and, you know, survive (hit points, shields, armors, saves, reactions)?
That's factually wrong: My casters are the main damage dealers of the party I play in once they reach mid levels.This is not a fact, this is an anecdote. Even if it were true that your casters regularly topped damage in your party, you have nothing to show for it, so the only thing the reader has left is to take you up on your word, which you've given no reason to do. Somehow, something tells me you haven't actually measured your damage output and run the math, and so I suspect this claim of yours is hyperbolic at best.
I agree with Teridax.
SuperBidi, I am familiar with your Guide to Blasting, and I have been recommending it to other players a lot in the past, especially over on Reddit (example from last month). It's a great guide, it improves blasting a bit, I like it, and I thank you again for writing it! Thank you!
But while this might work for you, I don't like having to squeeze the system to the max just to get a passable blaster caster out of it. The Wizard (& Sorcerer, Oracle, ...) should be a class that can be build into a great damage dealer when focusing on that aspect (to the exclusivity of other things). Yet this is not what I have experienced. I like support, control, and buff/debuff casters as well, and I have fun playing them, but the blasters feel very lackluster.
In general (not just SuperBidi), what I have said in my earlier "rant" is still my position:
Please accept that a lot of people feel about casters as I do (about blasters). This doesn't mean that these people are right, nor that you're wrong. It only means that there are a lot of discontent people out there, and telling them that "everything's fine, folks!" does nothing to help them.
And yes, there are newbies/people who aren't good at the system (yet), who make mistakes and suboptimal decisions and that diminish their fun. Yes, but that's not the main problem. If that were the main problem, then this issue wouldn't be perennial, wouldn't raise its head time and time again.
This is not a "let's agree to disagree"-type situation. It's a "there's an issue for some people"-type situation. Not for you, but for some others. These people want help. They don't want to be told that their complaints are invalid. So please no more "I think casters are fine" posts or "At my table casters are the MVPs" or so; because that feels like dogpiling.
Is it possible to just... listen? No judging them wrong, no disagreeing, just listening?
And then asking questions about what felt bad/unsatisfactory. No recommendations on how to improve their play. Just trying to pinpoint the issues. Then brainstorm suggestions to solve the issues. Then evaluate the suggestions. And those that hold up to scrutiny... well, maybe nail them to the doors of the Catholic Church Paizo headquarters?
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The thing with blaster casters is that they don't deal single target damage, they deal area damage, so it kinda makes sense for their damage to be lower because it doesn't affect a single person, it affects multiple. However, in regards to single target damage, I totally agree there's no reason why casters can't be the same as martials. Arguably this was the case even in PF1e (a well built martial that is), but since both classes were pushed into the middle in regards to balance (martials upper, casters slowly lower) I wouldn't mind the lesser aspects of casters to also be upgraded, because to be totally fair, casters were never good at doing damage even in PF1e. Sorcerers had a pass because you could do some ridiculous damage with certain builds, but that was more a thing with sorcerers in particular rather than casters as a whole.
The first fundamental flaw in the “I just want to blast, why does OF2 make that so difficult?” Mindset is that “pure blaster” is just no more viable a role in a party than “pure smasher.”
Then make it viable.
There are a bunch of things casters can do that martials can't even do if they wanted to, which is why these discussions end up where they do. If makes those of us that have played casters across the edition go, "What are you expecting? You want to do amazing single target damage and banish and put up walls of force and teleport and have mirror image and magic missile and chain lightning and change form and summon creatures and charm and disguise yourself and turn invisible...etc, etc, while doing what? Equal single target damage to the martial?"
Martials aren't doing half or a quarter what casters are doing, but somehow there is a "casters feel weak" while you're doing all the stuff listed on your spell list. Sorry, you don't get to do it all this edition alone.
That's the kind of dismissive and passive-aggressive comment that is absolutely uncalled for.
Nobody asks for casters to be turned into omnipotent gods. Yet this is what you plainly insinuate as the intention of everyone who disagrees with you. Please stay out of this conversation, if you are unwilling to engage in good faith. Cool down, enjoy a beer/movie/walk and try to understand the other side without assuming you know everyone's inner thought process.
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Martials having generally unassailable sovereignty over single target dpr is one of the things that made me jump ship from 5e to PF2e. I wouldn't want to see that change. Casters can have a spell lists worth of feat like abilities, martials can have around 10. Let the martials have damage, casters have access to so much more. Letting the martials bonk things better seems like such a tiny, pitiful concession in the grand scheme of things...
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…, while the other side can't seem to offer much other than a handful of (occasionally helpful) git guddisms.I just started a thread in the Advice section about Wizard "git guddisms." You're right, the rules aren't going to change, so I want to see if something better can be done.
I’m not sure if you meant to…or perhaps…Gah.
*HERE* is a super helpful link to Lord Fyre’s “helpful advice for playing a wizard” thread.
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Thing is, you absolutely can build a competitive single-target damage dealer blaster caster in this game. Staff Thesis Wizards, Spell Blending Battle Wizards, Elemental Sorcerers, Storm/Stone Druids, and Oscillating Wave Psychics can all be excellent, dedicated damage dealing options in the game. You throw a properly built one of these into any well-balanced party and they’ll keep right up with the Gunslingers and the Flurry Rangers and all the other ranged martials in the game.
The biggest difference between these casters and other casters is that… they trade away a huge chunk of the versatility of being a spellcaster to keep up with martials as a single target blaster. The Psychic’s tradeoff is obvious but even the others usually end up needing to dedicate most/all of their spell slots and Action economy to damage to keep up with martials whose main features/Feats and Action economy are dedicated to damage. This is an entirely fair tradeoff, and in fact the caster comes built in with the advantage that against a short adventuring day that’s only 1-2 Severe/Extreme encounters the caster can frontload all of their damage and quite massively exceed a ranged martial (in contrast they’ll feel strained against 6+ Trivial/Low encounters).
So when someone looks at the myriad of good blaster builds available and says blasters aren’t good enough, it comes across as “I want a blaster that’s good and don’t want to have to give anything else up for”, which is why so many of the responses are talking about all the other things casters can do.
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Tensions seem high for some folks. I get it. I really, really like wizards and would hate to see the best, most balanced version of the class to date turned into a one trick pony, or have all of their versatility dulled down into being balanced for using every round of every encounter. Other folks feel the exact opposite.
A couple of things though:
There has never been a version of the D&D Wizard or the PF one either that could only blast. So any future laser gun class absolutely doesn’t need to replace or invalidate the Wizard.
2nd, any future blaster only class, that is some how also definitely not the kineticist, isn’t going to do top spell slot damage with their blasts, nor out damage the kineticist, since there are builds of that class that can be built to do little more than blast.
3rdly, wizards (and casters generally) can very easily be all but one point away from being as good at swimming or climbing or grabbing, or escaping or stealth or any other skill as most martials, and can situationally be much better at all those things with spells, even without having the attributes for it. Wizards can even effectively tank as well as a front liner kineticist, as I know from personal experience. It just takes a fair bit of character resource dedication and proactive countering to save targeting effects.
4thly, it is good for a game to have classes different enough from each other that some folks like one class for certain fantasies than others and other folks disagree. Paizo has resources for tracking this and is doing a better job of it than any of us outside the company are doing.
5thly, this thread isn’t convincing Paizo of anything. It exists for folks to share their ideas and experiences. If you are voicing questions or concerns, remember you are not getting official answers here. You are getting responses from sincere human beings sharing their own thoughts. If that gets frustrating or stressful, you can stop reading or commenting and lose absolutely nothing. Paizo will not make some massive change to their game based off a message board thread without doing a lot of research and development on whatever they decide to do.
I personally think casters are fine. I seen a ton of casters winning encounters by themselves because the enemy failed one save which imposed a nasty condition in them
What about casters who don't want to impose conditions or just cast support spells?
Thing is, you absolutely can build a competitive single-target damage dealer blaster caster in this game. Staff Thesis Wizards, Spell Blending Battle Wizards, Elemental Sorcerers, Storm/Stone Druids, and Oscillating Wave Psychics can all be excellent, ...
↓
So please no more "I think casters are fine" posts or "At my table casters are the MVPs" or so. No recommendations on how to improve their play; because that feels like dogpiling.
Is it possible to just... listen? No judging them wrong, no disagreeing, just listening?
And then asking questions about what felt bad/unsatisfactory. Just trying to pinpoint the issues. Then brainstorm suggestions to solve the issues. Then evaluate the suggestions.
----
You can stop with the terrible analogies. When you take your car in, you definitely tell the mechanic what's wrong. The tire is flat. The starter isn't working. The engine has a noise in it. You don't take your car and in say, "It feels broken" without providing some information to the mechanic to make the fix and the mechanics tests it and it runs perfectly fine.
Not liking an analogy doesn't make it less true.
It's not a customer's/player's job to figure out what's wrong with the car/game. It might sound equally inane to you, but this silly old adage was born from incredibly profound wisdom: The customer is always right.
Once again define what you mean by caster, state what you're comparing it too, and provide actionable examples in the game so Paizo has something to work off of than you taking your car in and telling them it "feels" broken when it appears to be running fine.
I've been saying it for a while now, please listen: Blasters.
Whether that's a Wizard, Sorcerer, Cleric, or Oracle chassis matters little. Sure, there are some differences, as Elemental Sorcerers or Tempest Oracles have an easier way of grabbing a coveted "+1 damage to die"-ability, but fundamentally it's the play-style of b l a s t i n g, that feels dysfunctional.
The other stuff around casters works well. Support, buff/debuff, control, you name it. For example, no complaints about the Bards at all; why? The class excels at those things, and nobody who wants to play a blaster picks a Bard.
Similar with Druids, there's hardly any long-term complaint. Again, because there are many reasons that people play Druids for, but none of those is "blasting".
You hear the complaints mainly from Wizard players, because that's the class most often picked by people who want to play a blaster. Personally, I think Druids & Clerics suck at blasting just as much as Wizards, Clerics even more so (divine spell-list, except for an undead campaign). However, very few "I wanna blast"-players pick these classes.
Or to put it in an analogy, if your company builds cars and (due to an unknown bug) all of those cars have a built-in speed-limit of 100 mph (160 km/h), then you will hear a lot more complaints from customers who bought sports cars than from customers who bought family vans. Both cars have the same issue, but one group is far less likely to notice it than the other.
So that's what they're telling you here all the time: The car isn't going fast enough. Please fix it.
Like even the kineticist is not a pure blaster class, since you can get solid defense, really good flight you can share, ranged grappling, area control, healing, etc.
The reason you don't want to make "pure blaster" or "pure smasher" a good thing to have in the party is that those characters are inherently boring whenever the task at hand does not involve blasting or smashing. A good reason why PF2 makes so much of the optimization happen at the tactics level and not the chargen level is that "changing up your approach for the circumstances you find yourself in" is a good way to keep the game from getting stale. We give people tools other than hammers because not everything is a nail, or rather that a story where you just go around hammering in nails gets old.
Like I played a lot of PF1 characters that ended up with a really optimized thing they could do and doing that thing over and over again does eventually get boring. Like that Blood Arcanist build that lets you cast Empowered Intensified Maximized Fireballs with admixture in 6th, 7th, 8th, and 9th level spells slots was more as a fun character building exercise than as "a thing to play."
Thing is, you absolutely can build a competitive single-target damage dealer blaster caster in this game. Staff Thesis Wizards, Spell Blending Battle Wizards, Elemental Sorcerers, Storm/Stone Druids, and Oscillating Wave Psychics can all be excellent, ...↓
So please no more "I think casters are fine" posts or "At my table casters are the MVPs" or so. No recommendations on how to improve their play; because that feels like dogpiling.
Is it possible to just... listen? No judging them wrong, no disagreeing, just listening?
And then asking questions about what felt bad/unsatisfactory. Just trying to pinpoint the issues. Then brainstorm suggestions to solve the issues. Then evaluate the suggestions.
All you’ve given us is “blaster bad” and several walls of text about how anyone who thinks blasters aren’t bad should just stay quiet and listen to you say blaster bad, lol.
There’s nothing I can say to respond to that except… “nope, blaster good” because I’ve seen dedicated blasters be good.
If you have something more substantial to say… say it? What about the many, many good blaster builds I mentioned is so fundamentally bad according to you?
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Also, hijacking a thread in the general discussion forum and insisting people can only participate in the conversation if they want to homebrew solutions for the issue posted here for general discussion is not especially helpful. There are other threads for homebrewing alternative casting systems.
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Even without discussing actual balance or playfeel, I think the wizard class fails to click with most versions of the wizard fantasy—even the fantasies implied by the class text. There is a fundamental disconnect between (IME) the most common way players will think about building and roleplaying wizards and how the class optimally plays. Most people I've seen want to build their wizards as academics—i.e., as studied specialists who are often significantly more knowledgeable about one topic than others, and often have a trademark spell or set of spells they are especially effective with as a result. Meanwhile, the effective PF2E wizard is a generalist that's stocked with a staff and consumables that shore up the shortcomings of their daily spell choices. The fantasy I've seen players want to play and the fantasy the game balance often asks you to play are completely different.
This is a direct result of PF2E's design principles. They dictated that if Wizard were to keep the mechanics of older editions, it would have to have its power budget and design based around the old optimal strategy of playing a a decently well-prepared generalist. Specialist wizard concepts were thus shot dead. After all, as someone noted earlier, a """specialized wizard build""" that doesn't pay any price for specialization (be it reduced spell access, worse DCs in unspecialized spells, anything at all) is still just a generalist mechanically, right? It doesn't matter how you roleplay it. So it can't be given any power, since it'd also give power to a generalist.
The result is that there is no power allocated for people who would want to play a specialized wizard. Yet there is also no good alternative with the correct flavor or its power budgeted in the right places. Again, in my experience, a lot of people played wizards (and casters generally) as thematic specialists in 1E. It worked then—and it worked precisely because wizard and its spells were so strong that a suboptimal wizard was still quite good. That wiggle room is now largely gone. Whether that's a worthy sacrifice is its own discussion, but there's no question it made John Burning Fireball Ray ("What's a grease, and does it catch fire?" -JBFR) a lot worse.
I disagree with a lot of the dev team's comments and choices, but Sayre's (?) comment about class fantasies really did strike true here, at least in one way. As long as PF2E is dedicated to its design principles, you can't give a class a high general power level and trust that the powerlevel of the class itself will enable people to make whatever they want out of the class and have it function. If balance is paramount, people will need to learn to be comfortable with giving up some things (like 10th tier spell slot casting with huge spell lists) on their characters in order to play out their character concept. They will need to get accustomed to the idea of playing new, and possibly very different classes—ones that can ultimately better cater to their fantasy within the confines and restraints of a system with such clear power ceilings.
Anyways, I do think Wizard has a lot of other genuine balance failures and playfeel failures—so many that if I were to list them all I'd just make a new topic. But to me, this is the class's cardinal sin: the class just doesn't mechanically enable the character fantasy people want to use it to play out. This is why you see people so confused you can't make an ice mage or a blaster or something else in that vein that feels powerful, and why that complaint will probably never go away for the entirety of the edition's lifespan. The wizard class just doesn't enable what most people think it will.
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What is so wrong about a blaster dealing as much single-target damage as a martial?Gestures vaguely at everything else casters can do that martials can't.That's too vague. What exactly can a Wizard who prepares only blasting spells do better than martials? Swing a staff? Ride a unicorn? Recite poems? Maths?
And what about all the things that martials do better than blasters? Like swim, climb, grapple, escape, and, you know, survive (hit points, shields, armors, saves, reactions)?
That's factually wrong: My casters are the main damage dealers of the party I play in once they reach mid levels.This is not a fact, this is an anecdote. Even if it were true that your casters regularly topped damage in your party, you have nothing to show for it, so the only thing the reader has left is to take you up on your word, which you've given no reason to do. Somehow, something tells me you haven't actually measured your damage output and run the math, and so I suspect this claim of yours is hyperbolic at best.I agree with Teridax.
SuperBidi, I am familiar with your Guide to Blasting, and I have been recommending it to other players a lot in the past, especially over on Reddit (example from last month). It's a great guide, it improves blasting a bit, I like it, and I thank you again for writing it! Thank you!
But while this might work for you, I don't like having to squeeze the system to the max just to get a passable blaster caster out of it. The Wizard (& Sorcerer, Oracle, ...) should be a class that can be build into a great damage dealer when focusing on that aspect (to the exclusivity of other things). Yet this is not what I have experienced. I like support, control, and buff/debuff casters as well, and I have fun playing them, but the blasters feel very lackluster.
In general...
Listen to what? Some nebulous idea of "casters bad' with nothing to show they are bad or who is bad or any examples?
Provide actionable evidence with real comparative gameplay like Paizo did to balance these classes and ensure they operate within a certain range.
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Even without discussing actual balance or playfeel, I think the wizard class fails to click with most versions of the wizard fantasy—even the fantasies implied by the class text. There is a fundamental disconnect between (IME) the most common way players will think about building and roleplaying wizards and how the class optimally plays. Most people I've seen want to build their wizards as academics—i.e., as studied specialists who are often significantly more knowledgeable about one topic than others, and often have a trademark spell or set of spells they are especially effective with as a result. Meanwhile, the effective PF2E wizard is a generalist that's stocked with a staff and consumables that shore up the shortcomings of their daily spell choices. The fantasy I've seen players want to play and the fantasy the game balance often asks you to play are completely different.My question is, why is the academic a specialist? I don't think any of the wizards in fiction or games, the ones that focus on academical spellcasting, have been tightly themed. Warcraft's iconic Mage knows ice, slow and polymorph spells, hardly a theme! The specialised caster has always been the 'from birth' kind which, well, sorcerer. Or else kineticist, frankly.
Like, specifically, you can't play an ice mage because your best choice, Snow Witch, has an irritating gap of on theme spells or a lightning mage because Tempest Oracle lies in its resume but in general if you want to be throwing out spells from a single aesthetic category Wizard wasn't even pretending to be the right choice. OK, abjurer, summoner, illusionist. But those actually do fine. Except Summoner but goodness there's a class named that I wonder what it does.
Academia and specialization just go hand in hand; academia pushes you to specialize in your interests and field. It's also even a part of the class description: "You either specialize in one of the eight schools of magic, gaining deeper understanding of the nuances of those spells above all others, or favor a broader approach that emphasizes the way all magic comes together at the expense of depth." Likewise, it's supported by flavor within the Arcane Thesis description.
I'm unsure why you would think wizard flavor is unsuitable for someone particularly good at a single aesthetic category. (I would also note that I said "is better at," not "can only do," which are somewhat distinct.) The main thing wizard concepts share is that the power is attained through study. If that's what you feel is right for the character, there are only so many other options.
Seems like we've just had different table experiences on what people like and gravitate to, as well as what kinds of concepts or media they base things on, which isn't unexpected.
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So how do we get over the hurdle? There are probably multiple ways--SuperBidi's scroll meta being one of them--but they all have their strengths and weaknesses. Some players just hate consumables, for example, and I don't think forcing someone to adapt a playstyle they dislike is the ideal path forward. But I think Bidi's on the right track: additional slots translate to less cautious casting, meaning casters get to hit their peak more often. They aren't punished as hard for misplays or bad luck because the cost is no longer as steep, so the overall feelsbad is reduced.
I both agree and disagree with you. I agree that by giving more spell slots, more players will switch to my less cautious casting and have a more satisfying experience.
But... they will also discover that casters are broken (because of the extra spell slots).
It happened in a lot of games I've played: An option is hard to play and people struggle to get anything out of it. Some players manage to get something really brutal out of it and start teaching the general player population about it. The general population realizing that the option is broken takes the time to learn it and now everyone uses the broken option and screams about it.
When an option is tough to play, it's nearly impossible to balance it. If it's just right then most players will dismiss it as it's hard to play and you don't gain anything more out of it. If it's better then players will learn to play it and soon everyone screams about it being broken.
That's why I wrote a guide about blasting and I always answer these discussions even if, to be honest, I don't really get anything out of them. I want to explain to the general player population how to play a blaster and get a satisfying experience. But I'm not sure I'll ever succeed.
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But while this might work for you, I don't like having to squeeze the system to the max just to get a passable blaster caster out of it. The Wizard (& Sorcerer, Oracle, ...) should be a class that can be build into a great damage dealer when focusing on that aspect (to the exclusivity of other things). Yet this is not what I have experienced. I like support, control, and buff/debuff casters as well, and I have fun playing them, but the blasters feel very lackluster.
I would not have written my guide if the end result was a "passable blaster caster" experience. The result, once you get to level 5-7 (depending on your character) is really satisfying. Also, I don't squeeze the system to the max. I play mostly Divine casters which are not the optimal choice when you choose blasting.
Just to get you an example of the last sessions I've played with my 3 level 6+ casters:
- 2 sessions ago, my group ended up in a really tough encounter: enemies were scattered with terrain advantage. When my Oracle took its second turn (I needed a round to prebuff) the enemies were still untouched. In 2 turns I killed nearly single-handedly 3 out of 5 enemies, completely saving a fight that would have been, at least, a slog.
- The last session with my PFS Angelic Sorcerer, I dealt nearly half the party damage during the final fight of the adventure. The big boss was repeatedly tripped by the Barbarian inside my Wall of Fire and he critically failed a save against one of my Divine Wrath ended up Sickened 2 for the whole fight.
- 3 sessions ago with my Sorcerer, in the final fight, we faced a choke point with a tank blocking it. The fight ended up as a slog as the martials needed forever to get through the enemy tank. I dealt 50% of the party damage thanks to my Fireballs, as choke points don't block Fireballs and tanks have notoriously bad Reflex saves.
- 2 sessions ago with my Wild Witch, we face a big bunch of morlocks... who met my Fireball and got mopped quickly thanks to it.
As you can see, I have a significant amount of experiences where I'm doing much better than "passable". It's not just one fight every year that is satisfying, it's 20% of the fights where I'm the MVP.
Now, I don't say that all you should do with a caster is blasting. As a matter of fact, my casters are also very often the main healers of the parties I'm in. And I sometimes shine through other means (I love to Dispel the really annoying effect that prevent the martials to get to the enemies). What I just say is that blasting really works if you learn it.
Another thing about blasting is that it shines more during tough fights. Because tough fights are tough either because the enemies are many (increasing the effectiveness of blasting), because there are annoying effects preventing the party from having it's top efficiency (and blasting ignores Concealment, Cover, Difficult Terrain, etc...) or because enemies are of a higher level (and due to half damage on successful save and the lower progression of saves, you lose significantly less damage than martials when you face a higher level opponent).
I personally prefer to shine during tough fights than during trivial encounters, but I can see someone prefering otherwise.
What exactly can a Wizard who prepares only blasting spells do better than martials?They can still prepare every other type of spell.
So instead of answering the question, you just change the premise.
They can use staves to round themselves out. They can absolutely demolish with area of effect spells. They can do damage and inflict a larger variety of status effects.
Again, the context was about a blaster caster who is not interested in "inflicting a larger variety of status effects".
You know, martials can also inflict a large variety of status effects (e.g. wrestler), or can be awesome healers (e.g. medic, lay on hands), without ever touching a weapon. Yet many martial players prefer "bonking" instead. Should we thus similarly remove all advanced & martial weapons from the game, so that no martial can ever again inflict good damage on enemies, you know, in light of all the other things they potentially might do?
Your comments always seem to be build like this: You pick a single sentence out of context, pretend that this context doesn't exist, and then make some statement about this sentence. That's not how you build a conversation. That's how you build a straw-man.
Not coincidentally it's the same straw-man that Deriven Firelion built: This idea that people who want to play a great blaster caster, just want to turn casters into omnipotent gods.
However, this is about adding the option to specialize a caster into a non-generalist, in my case a blaster. I frequently made suggestions for a trade-off to this specialization as well (e.g. here and here), like giving up hit points or armor proficiencies, or restricting the spell-list (similar to how the Elementalist archetype does or the previous editions that had prohibited wizard schools). You know, all the context that was provided by me, yet so conveniently ignored by the straw-man-fandom.
I must also say that it leaves an incredibly bad taste in my mouth, as your "conversation" tactics, Guntermench, feel outright disingenuous & malevolent. But I might be simply wrong on this and misunderstood your intentions. So please tell me what you actually intended to convey when this happened:
I wrote this lengthy post on what makes casters problematic, namely their incredible versatility that often overshadows other classes even in their specialties. Within this lengthy post I cited several other posters from this very thread, trying to provide support for what I wrote about caster's problematic versatility. That was a lot of effort. To this post you replied with this post of yours.
How am I to understand this reply of yours?
And can you see why such a reply could be seen as disingenuous, as intentionally removing context, and as building straw-men?