Gymnast Swashbucklers and ghosts

[siegfriedliner]

So the last time I played a shashbucker I played it for about 3 levels and I loved the the thematics of it.

But what made me decide to basically give up on the class was when our gm put us in a whole dungeon full of ghosts which lasted several weak and nearly all of my class features where entirely useless no cofident strike, finisher, no grapples, trips (which were my bread and butter).

Even my tumbling routine felt stupid given I could just walk through them.

So I was wondering has the new version improved on this I'm any way or is the class/ subclass just as frustrating to play against incoporal enemies?

[lemeres]

Don't think of the tumbling as some kind of feint maneuver.

Think of them as a gymnastic performance. You are doing sick backflips around that ghost.

The ghosts are so amazed that they are flat footed.

Anyway, a more serious response: Would grappling weapons with ghost touch help? You have martial weapons, so you could get a combat graplnel or something.

[Finoan]

Ghost will always be a bad matchup for several classes because they are immune to precision damage. So not just Swashbuckler and their finishers and precise strike, but also Rogue and Sneak Attack, Precision Ranger, and probably still Investigator.

You also still can't actually grapple a ghost or other incorporeal creature.

So the minor improvement is that you can use athletics Grapple/Trip/Shove to gain panache even if the ghosts are immune to the normal effects of those actions.

But honestly any class is going to look pretty weak when put up against a bad matchup for an entire several week long dungeon.

[Easl]

Finoan wrote:

Ghost will always be a bad matchup for several classes because they are immune to precision damage. So not just Swashbuckler and their finishers and precise strike, but also Rogue and Sneak Attack, Precision Ranger, and probably still Investigator.

Yes. I feel like this is more of a 'table fail' than a class fail. Did the GM not give an overview of the AP? Illustrative example only: "Season of Ghosts will have a lot of ghosts." Did the GM do that...and the player ignored the hint? Did the GM instead come up with this dungeon on their own, after the players had built their characters? If so, what was the logic behind filling it with monsters that were largely immune to one of the PCs? Etc. Or maybe the GM did that, but dropped ghost touch runes as loot regularly in the lead up to the dungeon, and the players didn't take them? Lots of questions here, few of them about the design of the swash.