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From what I’ve seen and heard from people who got their Player Core 2 PDFs early, the Tengu and Dragonblood ancestries can now gain a permanent fly speed upon taking a level 5 feat for a pseudo-flight and then a 9th level feat for a the real thing. Which is perfectly fair and reasonable to me given how powerful flight is in the system along with the fact that, for Tengu anyways, they’re straight up crow people with giant wings and so it’s already a bit weird that they can’t fly out of the gate. I’m also aware that for the Tengu these used to be at 9 and 13, and so this is a buff to them from how things worked premaster.
Awakened animals also have those feats, but their level 5 one requires a level 1 feat tax on top of that. This means that for Awakened Animals, for whom their feat choices are their primary way of mechanically demonstrating/matching what kind of animal they are, of the Flying Heritage need to use 3 of their 5 feats(!) on a simple fly speed that others can now do with 2 if they want to be an awakened eagle or bat or something that quintessentially flies as much as a crow (or dragon I guess) would.
Does anyone know why Awakened Animal works this way, and is there any hope of future errata to make it so that Strong of Wing (5) doesn’t require Take Flight (1) as a prerequisite so it’s but more flexible and closer to how the PC2 winged ancestries work? Usually I wouldn’t care much but given that reliant Awakened Animals are on their feats for their animal fantasy it’s now even sadder that you can’t really play as (for example) an awakened owl ‘properly’ until you’re level 9, and to do so you’ve given up getting the low-light vision they should have until even later because that’s a feat too. And then they have one last feat left for anything else on top of now being an owl.
But then again maybe this kind of concern/disappointment about how Flying Heritage pans out in retrospect after seeing Tengu is just me or maybe I’m missing something big in terms of balance considerations, so I’d be interested to see what the rest of you ah e to say on the topic.
I was going to speculate that the Tengu flight at least requires a particular heritage, but on the other hand, the AA flight feats quite obviously so does Take Flight so it definitely doesn't have that over Tengu.
It's kind of a trifle, but also a bit annoying. I like that they can both access flight at a consistent level, but not that it costs the animal more for something that will become obsolete once it gets the higher benefit.
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So that flying tengu & dragonbloods are more common than flying awakened animals?
I have no idea what you mean by that. Awakened Animals are Rare and the Heritage in question that enables this long feat chain is literally called Flying Animal and has the same rarity as the other Heritages next to it. Tengu of all kinds are already more common since they’re just Uncommon, and why would you/they want there to be less flying Flying Awakened Animals at level 9? If your GM doesn’t want you to play an awakened owl or bat they can just veto the selection in the first place with full raw support on their side.
Plus, in practice how things work now doesn’t make them any less common than if they errataed them as I’ve suggested - my change would just allow the people who want to play them have the ability to make their animal [have aspects of] their animal apart from “I don’t know, but it can fly!”. The only thing the status quo on the other hand makes less common is a Flying Awakened Animal who can do anything else (have a sense like low-light vision, act cute, have a second basic unarmed attack, scurry along if Tiny, etc) besides fly via Ancestry feats.
The balancing point is essentially flight from Level 1. That's about the gist of it.
In addition to this, tengu and dragonblood also only get 20 feet fly speed from what I've seen from previews, in comparison to awakened animals/strix/pixies that have 25 feet as their level 9 fly speed.
I don’t think 5ft is worth losing a level 1 feat in Awakened Animal’s context though. If that’s really the explanation I’d gladly take the 20ft and be able to actually flesh out what kind of animal they were beyond “has wings”.
The chief reasons there is a level 1 feat for Awakened Animals are (1) because if there wasn't some form of flight at level 1 for awakened birds, then Awakened Animal fans would have rioted, and (2) so that we can have non-flying animal concepts like chickens, flying squirrels, or leap frogs.
Yeah, I think "you gain a flight speed because you are an eagle" is outside of the bounds of "what is appropriate to give a heritage". So there has to be a level 1 feat to enable some kind of flight. I think the way you flavor this for Awakened Animals is that your awakened eagle can absolutely do normal raptor stuff but there is a difference between "swooping down to snatch a mouse in the field to eat" and "participating in combat."
Like probably even without take flight the way your awakened eagle character is getting around involves "using their wings to get from one place or another" but you need the fly speed in order to stay airborne and do stuff.
Yeah, I think "you gain a flight speed because you are an eagle" is outside of the bounds of "what is appropriate to give a heritage". So there has to be a level 1 feat to enable some kind of flight. I think the way you flavor this for Awakened Animals is that your awakened eagle can absolutely do normal raptor stuff but there is a difference between "swooping down to snatch a mouse in the field to eat" and "participating in combat."
Like probably even without take flight the way your awakened eagle character is getting around involves "using their wings to get from one place or another" but you need the fly speed in order to stay airborne and do stuff.
Oh no, at no point was I saying you should have a fly speed from just the heritage. I'm saying the level 5 feat should be the start of the flying chain, not that it should start at character creation.
As for flavouring, you could flavour your eagle having just enough flight to get things to eat but not to partake in combat or do much in exploration without any feats at all. The feats are primarily for combat and flight having a role in combat is for well well past level 1. Even if you take the level 1 feat as it is now and try to use it in combat I think you'll find it pretty pointless given movement upwards is difficult terrain and so 15ft of temp-fly speed isn't even enough to really do anything you couldn't do with Leap. In fact Leap when you're an Elf or Centaur or have Fleet will take you just as far iirc.
The chief reasons there is a level 1 feat for Awakened Animals are (1) because if there wasn't some form of flight at level 1 for awakened birds, then Awakened Animal fans would have rioted, and (2) so that we can have non-flying animal concepts like chickens, flying squirrels, or leap frogs.
I was super looking forwards to the ancestry and I wouldn't have rioted anymore than I did before when I saw Sprites didn't have a level 1 flying feat [until recently when they had a useful feat for interactions turn into a filler level 1 tax on pseudo-flying before the actual tax on flying at 5]. And while I can't really speak to the counterfactual 'what if they didn't' for anyone else, I do know I'm far from the first person to complain online about how shafted Flying Animals are in terms of freedom for feats compared to all their other heritages.
And if you wanted to be a chicken you could just... wait for the level 5 feat that makes you sorta fly, just like you have to do already, and stop there. As it is most of the 'this is what kind of animal you are' feats are all level 1 anyways so you could get their Senses (for example) all in order for your chicken in the meantime and still be making progress on 'I'm a chicken'.
I don't know, those don't seem like super compelling arguments to me.
Honestly flying needs a fix anyways. You should not have varies amounts to fly in the end. I think this was a general oversight by Paizo about Awakened Animals.
Would gaining both a 25 fly speed and permanency at Level 9 have been too much for a single feat? At best, you can talk to your GM to retrain that Level 1 feat. I mean, it doesn't say that you cannot :p
I also see a problem: for 99% of the flying awakened animals, their wings are also their arms. Good luck trying to fly if you're holding a weapon ^^;
Only awakened insects should get that many flying feats, because most of them have wings attached to their back, leaving their arms, and hands, free.
Speaking of insects, I'm surprised we didn't get feats to have more arms. Those usually have 6 legs, so having 4 arms would make sense, or at least those with more than 4 limbs (2 arms, 2 legs) could be able to use their vestigial legs more approriately.
Would gaining both a 25 fly speed and permanency at Level 9 have been too much for a single feat? At best, you can talk to your GM to retrain that Level 1 feat. I mean, it doesn't say that you cannot :p
I also see a problem: for 99% of the flying awakened animals, their wings are also their arms. Good luck trying to fly if you're holding a weapon ^^;
Only awakened insects should get that many flying feats, because most of them have wings attached to their back, leaving their arms, and hands, free.
Speaking of insects, I'm surprised we didn't get feats to have more arms. Those usually have 6 legs, so having 4 arms would make sense, or at least those with more than 4 limbs (2 arms, 2 legs) could be able to use their vestigial legs more approriately.
It doesn't say you can't retrain out of the level 1 feat because the retraining rules do. If you get rid of a prerequisite feat then every feat that required it turns off and becomes useless.
As for more arms, it's just a general thing in PF2 that you can have as many arms and limbs as you want - but only two of them count as arms for doing anything mechanical. SF2 is gonna let you rotate out your pairs of arms if you have multiple, but even there it's only one in use for taking actions at a time.
Most of the time, yeah, arms are taken up. But, there is room for biological changes of convenience. Say Pom the badger being Medium sized instead of Tiny, or the example awakened deer having feet instead of hooves. Would not be unreasonable to let an avian have backwings and functional forearms. While some GMs might want to get nitpicky about it, the fact is there is precedent of QoL mods like that in the art itself, accumulated with the fact that no where does it say you can't use a weapon while flying. And really the only justification you need to give for it is "the ritual made me so" Purely player opt-in if you wanna go anatomically correct animal with minor disney logic or full on anthropomorph. GM fiat can limit it, but the the ancestry is surprisingly free-form that the GM would have to personally impose rules for their own games of what they don't want to let fly (could not resist).
Huh... ok... I wasn't aware of this. Even in P1E, that wasn't even touched upon, as monsters could flap their arms and still whack you from mid-air.
BTW, your animal's size... could reflect its original form, like Tiny for a cub and Huge for a Dire version.
Clearly, your awakened owl has very dexterous feet and is capable of using weapons that way.
Well, in a little game called The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, the newly-recruited Rito warrior Tulin shoots arrows with his talons, not his wings.
So... the wings are the legs and the talons are the arms? Yeah... that's why it can be confusing XD
It doesn't say you can't retrain out of the level 1 feat because the retraining rules do. If you get rid of a prerequisite feat then every feat that required it turns off and becomes useless.
Oh... I just saw this...
As for more arms, it's just a general thing in PF2 that you can have as many arms and limbs as you want - but only two of them count as arms for doing anything mechanical. SF2 is gonna let you rotate out your pairs of arms if you have multiple, but even there it's only one in use for taking actions at a time.
I'm aware that P2E removed the ability to wield, and attack with, one weapon per arm. However, weren't there actual benefits/rules of having more limbs than a standard humanoid? I recall "firing all 4 pistols to create a cone effect" in Starfinder, for instance.
The "Moray Eel Mount" feat is an example of a feat that conditionally allows you to retrain previous feats that are invalidated.
After checking on the other "flying ancestries" (sprites and strix), they also have the same "15 feet once per round for level 1, take a feat to increase to 25 on level 5, take a feat for full flight on level 9". So it seems like tengu and dragonblood getting it on level 5 & 9 is a departure from the "traditional" flying ancestry feet tree.
So either Paizo revised their view on flight, and consider it too powerfull to give it access on level 1-4, but only worthy of two ancestry feat afterwards, or it's because those are merely "uncommon" while those with access to flight from level 1 are rare (and thus Paizo deem 15 feet flight on level 1-4 too gameplay warping to put it on anything other than rare).
I can see while they would be carefull and do the latter, but still, "taxing" the rare ancestries one more feat is kinda bad, they have the advantage of being able to fly from level 1-4, but from level 5 forward they have the same benefits but are 1 feat down. I think it would be better if instead the 1st level feat said something like : "[...] you gain a flight speed of 15 feets [...] once at 5th level, increase that speed to 25 feet.".
Do Tengus and Dragonblooded characters HAVE wings to begin with? Almost all of Tengus' artworks don't show them with wings, and for Dragonblood, it seems you just... grow them.
That's different than Strixes, Sprites and Awakened Animals, all of which have VISIBLE wings... no?
Yeah, I'm not sure how the tengu/dragonblood wings are supposed to "sprout", wether they are supposed to have them but them being nonfunctonnal from the start, or wether it grow with adventuring.
For dragonblooded, I'm guessing it "grow", kinda like how in 1e, classes that could take a "dragon bloodlines" had wing that sprouted once you were high enough level, linked with their dragonic power growing (just like it also worked for angelic/demonic bloodlines). Since Dragonblooded seems "magical" more than biological (akin to the planner scions), I can see them having tiny wings that grow very quickly as their inner dragon magic grow.
For tengu however I have no idea, it seems like they should have biological wings from the start, yet they lack them in almost every artwork, it's weird.
A small number of tengus have vestigial wings incapable of true flight.
Their flight is also magical in nature, not biological.
Even D&D's kenkus don't have wings.
Premaster, tengu had a feat to grow a pair of wings as a magical effect for 5 minutes, and then a higher level feat gave them permanent flight. Tengu by default don't normally have wings but sometimes might.
Also a quick addition that only the skyborn tengu heritage is even capable of grabbing the flight feats in the first place. For both dragonborn (a versatile heritage) and tengu, this means that your heritage is spoken for.
This is not the case for pixies or strix.
But is very much the case for Flying Animals.
I don't rly have a problem with retraining feats that are overshadowed by "the same thing but stronger" at high level, Canny Acumen is literally that.
And, AA requires the most investement (Heritage + 3 Feats) between the three, while the Dragonblood the least (2 Feats). A Snapleaf substitutes both the AA and Tengu entire heritage, buy it for your Dragonblood, it can save lives and is superr cheap!
Dragonblood is a heritage, so you are giving up your heritage slot for it, too. Arguably the same investment as tengu, but dragonblood get a whole new list of feats at the same time as their normal ancestry feats so there's a give and take there.
Honestly, if your fantasy was going to be "I want to be a crane flying around on the battlefield" or something similar I don't think you're really going to miss the one extra ancestry feat as long as, at the end of the day (level 9) you get to be flying around on the battlefield. It's not like the other AA heritages match the idea of a crane, so you were always going to pick flying.
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Remember that unlike all those other ancestries you start with basically nothing that defines your ancestry outside of speed and size. A Crane would have low-light vision, but not yours because you don't get any ancestry feats for the first 2/3rds of the game outside of flight. Your bat? It also has no echolocation. Your moth? No Darkvision or Scent.
These are just the senses alone, and what it'd take to match its animal counterpart in the bestiary. Aside from those there are lots of interesting animal feats that every other Awakened Animal would have a shot at and likely take besides a sense or two, but yours can't take any until you'd be at a high level in a 1-20/11-20 game.
Saying 'you must really want flight if you pick a flying animal!' is missing the point of the OP. Yes, I do in fact miss not having more than [effectively] 3 ancestry feats by the time I'm level 20 - 1(!) for most players who end at level 10 - when they are what mechanically defines my animal on top of giving it the goodies ancestry feats typically get.
All I'm asking for is Flying Animals to actually get a choice of feat at level 1 instead of being obligated to always get a feat tax on top of the feat tax others like them have to pay for Flight - two feats.
Does Ancestral Paragon suit your needs.
Or is the price of a general feat too high?
If you want to emphasize your special senses as a bat and then also fly, you would probably care more to spend your 1st level feat on Natural Senses, then. If you absolutely needed to have full flight by level 9, then you can always take Ancestral Paragon to nab Take Flight at 3.
The issue with moving any sort of representation of flight to level 5 is the fact that now you just don't have ANY representation of flight until level 5 other than the innate feather fall. To many folk, flying is what they chose a flying animal heritage for, and not having any way to present that for a quarter of their career (half(!) for those most players who end at level 10) would arguably be just as bad. "Wow, I have to wait until level 5 and then I only get 25 feet before falling?" Or, if you axe the level 5 feat and only have the level 1 feat and the level 9 feat, you now have 8 levels of not really upgrading your flight ever.
It's a concession of Awakened Animal needing to attempt to represent literally any animal you can think of and then also the fact that those animals have been permanently altered by magic. Creatures that can fly, have non-vision senses, have multiple natural attacks, and are adorable enough to charm people exist, but all of those things are attributes that Pf2e values as around level 1 ancestry feats, and you only get so many.
It's also a repercussion of Ancestry feats being so limited in number throughout your career and being in a separate stratum to other feats. All ancestries suffer to a degree from this, because there are always aspects that are classic to the mythology of many of these ancestries that you cannot realize on one character because of the limited amount of them.
One way I could see them changing it is making Take Flight auto-upgrade from 15 to 25 feet at level 5 and then make Full Flight simply require Take Flight.
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I’m not saying to just delete the level 1 feat and leave it at that. I’d suggest that it should just be part of the heritage. It’s not even a strong ability - it’s a very short jump because to even go up 5ft you’ve already used 10 of the 15.
Though I’m not opposed to your suggestion either.
Dragonblood is a heritage, so you are giving up your heritage slot for it, too. Arguably the same investment as tengu, but dragonblood get a whole new list of feats at the same time as their normal ancestry feats so there's a give and take there.
Honestly, if your fantasy was going to be "I want to be a crane flying around on the battlefield" or something similar I don't think you're really going to miss the one extra ancestry feat as long as, at the end of the day (level 9) you get to be flying around on the battlefield. It's not like the other AA heritages match the idea of a crane, so you were always going to pick flying.
Dragonblood evades being a tax as the AA and tengu heritage in my view cuz it does give you something good (sucess = critical sucess against fear) on top of the diverse new options for feats, whilist the other heritages are just Snapleaf...
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You say "just Snapleaf" as if having the Legendary Acrobatics upgrade of Cat Fall (usually a level 15 boon) always on at level 1 is pretty much nothing.
Snapleaf is an extraordinarily good item, yes, but it does have its shortcomings, and having a passive version of it is definitely as good as a niche trait success>crit success modifier imo.
You say "just Snapleaf" as if having the Legendary Acrobatics upgrade of Cat Fall (usually a level 15 boon) always on at level 1 is pretty much nothing.
Snapleaf is an extraordinarily good item, yes, but it does have its shortcomings, and having a passive version of it is definitely as good as a niche trait success>crit success modifier imo.
It's not that i view it as nothing, it's quite the opposite, is that i view it as overkill, like, when does lightning strike the same place twice? Snapleaf turns something that maybe lethal into a warning, and since you than know something is off, you normaly can evade it just by being carefull. And so, Snapleaf does sufficient job at it, and i would prefer something that comes up more often (say, the difference between 20 feet and 30 feet of movement or needing 20 climb speed, as an AA).
And... from lv 9 onward since your fly speed is permanent, you can use Arrest Fall (Reaction, 15 DC Acrobatics check), and that kinda overlaps with the Heritage.
One way I could see them changing it is making Take Flight auto-upgrade from 15 to 25 feet at level 5 and then make Full Flight simply require Take Flight.
Or just ditch Strong of Wing altogether, make Take Flight the requirement for Full Flight, and you'd get a permanent 25-foot Fly speed at Level 9. In Fact, Wild Stride does basically the same thing as Strong of Wing...
On a sidenote, swimming animals don't receive the equivalent feats, such as better swim or land speeds... or even being able to breathe longer out of their element. Climbing animals don't receive much either.
Tooth and Claw could use upgrades as well, such as Multiattack and an increased die.
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One way I could see them changing it is making Take Flight auto-upgrade from 15 to 25 feet at level 5 and then make Full Flight simply require Take Flight.Or just ditch Strong of Wing altogether, make Take Flight the requirement for Full Flight, and you'd get a permanent 25-foot Fly speed at Level 9. In Fact, Wild Stride does basically the same thing as Strong of Wing...
On a sidenote, swimming animals don't receive the equivalent feats, such as better swim or land speeds... or even being able to breathe longer out of their element. Climbing animals don't receive much either.
Tooth and Claw could use upgrades as well, such as Multiattack and an increased die.
I think its almost a base assumption that natural attack focused awakened animals are going to be taking the claw dancer archetype, there is just so much synergy there (partly mechanically but mostly thematically)
I also see a problem: for 99% of the flying awakened animals, their wings are also their arms. Good luck trying to fly if you're holding a weapon ^^;
Only awakened insects should get that many flying feats, because most of them have wings attached to their back, leaving their arms, and hands, free.
Most creatures that fly with their arms also grasp things with their feet.
So all it really means is their arms are relabeled as wings and their feet as arms.
This is not something that PF2 models well, and given all the limitations there are on flying I don't see that we need to strive for further realism in this area. But over to you.