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It looks like most of the dragon disciple feats got moved to the heritage. That used to be a 4th level feat, that generally called for you to have some connection to dragons (dragon instinct, draconic bloodline, be a kobold).
Not as a prerequisite, though, just access. All being one of those things did was let you ignore the regular uncommon requirement to ask your GM. And IIRC dragon blooded is an uncommon heritage with no access entry.
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Second, all cloth casters become just as good as regular martials at avoiding hits.
Armor Proficiency gives the same bonus to all casters right at level 3 (or 1 for Humans). It's only a change for Monks.
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I had +4 Dex and Mage Armor - now named Mystic Armor - at level 1. Yes, I am reasonably effective at avoiding being hit. Especially after I gained Alchemist archetype and learned to make Drakeheart Mutagen.
Having an equivalent AC to a martial doesn't make me a tank though. Or even make me a martial.
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I get the feeling this feat is going to get errata'd for a few reasons:
So until this feat changes to be brought in line with other natural armor feats, we'd best get ready to see a lot of Dragonblood PCs all of a sudden, particularly with a handful of the same classes.
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I doubt it will get erratad, it's mostly a copy and paste feat. The main difference is they removed the resistance and dropped the level. This fest has already been around for years
... as a 4th-level archetype feat. I cannot stress enough how important this distinction is, because it makes all the difference when building your character:
All of which is to say that Scales of the Dragon is far more expensive and less accessible than Scaly Hide, and provides a much less impactful benefit due to being a higher-level feat, which is why the feat is relatively unproblematic in its current state. Making that benefit accessible at level 1 and at the cost of just an ancestry feat, rather than two class feats, makes a massive difference, and puts it significantly out of line with other ancestry feats and heritages that achieve the same purpose.
All of which is to say that Scales of the Dragon is far more expensive and less accessible than Scaly Hide, and provides a much less impactful benefit due to being a higher-level feat, which is why the feat is relatively unproblematic in its current state. Making that benefit accessible at level 1 and at the cost of just an ancestry feat, rather than two class feats, makes a massive difference,
I question the accuracy of this cost analysis.
The difference between level 1 and level 4 is not very large. And is during a time in the game where characters often do not have all of the components of their build completed. And is during a time in the game where enemies are not doing a lot of damage at once when they do hit.
Also, saying 'just an ancestry feat' is misleading. It also costs the heritage option. Which is a much more limited resource of build choice than class feats.
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The difference between level 1 and level 4 is not very large. And is during a time in the game where characters often do not have all of the components of their build completed. And is during a time in the game where enemies are not doing a lot of damage at once when they do hit.
Also, saying 'just an ancestry feat' is misleading. It also costs the heritage option. Which is a much more limited resource of build choice than class feats.
Every single element of the above response is either misleading or outright false:
So no, a 1st-level ancestry feat should not be anywhere near as powerful as a 4th-level archetype feat, and the former benefit is much cheaper and more accessible than the latter.
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You seem to be very emotionally invested in your opinions.
I will leave you to them.
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Aside from coming on line later, the big difference is that casters using armor proficiency have to invest in strength to avoid penalties since they'll need at least studded leather to hit the cap whereas the dragonblood feat lets them dump it and focus on other more useful stats.
There's no need to invest in Strength as the penalty is only an issue if you invest in Athletics or Dex-based skills. I have a few characters with Medium Armor and 10 Strength, one will certainly end up with heavy armor.
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Even before the remaster, the general feat to become proficient in light armor was great up to level 13, when you where only two levels away from potentially having dex 20 / +5 anyway.
This was accessible from level 1 for humans.
The remaster made it more convenient since it now scales and you can leave your dex at +3.
Casters likely will not care for the penalty to str and dex based skill actions, so since there is no speed penalty for light armor and the highest str requirement was only +1 anyway, this part never mattered much.
I think what we see here is just that the developers realized that the AC issue was already easily solved and thus did not need to be this penalizing.
Also, for the comparison with the medium armor ancestry feats:
Not only does medium armor come with benefits for strength builds which this does not offer, it also, I would say, make the effective comfort trait more valuable.
So, really, the only point where this really does make a significant difference is monks.
Dex monks get an effective +1, strength monks a +2.
I do not think either makes or breaks the class balance, but that is the one point where it actually differs from what characters could already do since the original core rulebook.
For me, I just wished there were some more ways to achieve this sort of natural armor, rather than seeing this as a problem needing to be fixed.
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You seem to be very emotionally invested in your opinions.
I will leave you to them.
In other words, you don't actually have anything to back up even a single claim you made, and chose to save face via an attempt at tone policing. I'm sure your little habit of repeatedly picking arguments with me (along with several other people) under a number of different aliases across various different threads is totally rational and not emotionally motivated at all, though.
Beyond this, it is worth noting that there are a crucial few differences between this feat and any feat giving access to light armor: for starters, Monks don't start out experts in light armor, so accessing it doesn't put them at a +2 to AC over nearly everyone else at level 1, and so before factoring in shields. Second, armor of any kind carries various disadvantages over unarmored AC, namely its Bulk, check penalties (which can affect Stealth checks outside of combat), and need to be taken off to rest properly (you will notice that no base light armor with a +2 to AC and a Dex cap of +3 has the comfort trait on top of this). Even when you pick the ancestry currently known for having the strongest 1st-level ancestry feats, and pick one of the stronger feats on offer at that level, you still don't get the same benefits. When looking at current examples of natural armor ancestry feats, which are available at the same level, they're all about offering regular armor you can have on all the time while still needing the right proficiency and attributes, rather than just giving the bonuses of a different armor type with none of the drawbacks.
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I think my only complaint with this feat is entirely that I would have expected it to be a level 2 or 4 monk class feat, rather than a feat tied to a specific heritage (even if it's one I personally really like and want to use). Even then, it... Doesn't really feel particularly like it's going to break anything?
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It's interesting that this feat is specifically compatible with unarmored proficiency whereas previous examples (like the Nagaji and Conrasu heritages) just made your body have armor which used the appropriate armor proficiency.
I think that buff to monk AC feels a little negligible. They already had a great AC. And casters can get light armor with a general feat, so humans can snag it at level 1.
For Str Monks it's +1 AC until level 5, and from 10-15. Since you explicitly can't train out of it, it might be an actively bad feat to take.
The Str-Monk's AC isn't optimized right out of the gate, but you're still at Level + 17 until you can bump dex for the last time at 5th level which is better than basically everybody who's not a Dex-Monk, or a heavy armor user who raises a shield.
Like there might be some reason to leave dex at +3 for some classes because they're pulled in a lot of directions statwise, but monks aren't really one of them. I guess this does save you from putting 2 stat increases into an off-stat to hit Dex +5, but it's not like you won't appreciate the +1 to Reflex, Stealth, etc.
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It would create more space for someone who wants to go for a second mental score instead of just dumping every increase into STR/DEX/CON/WIS every 5 levels, which is maybe less optimal in the long run, but is a nice build variety enabler IMO. I've played with at least one person who'd have absolutely loved to have that as an option, given they wanted to play a monk with Cha secondary.
For Str Monks it's +1 AC until level 5, and from 10-15. Since you explicitly can't train out of it, it might be an actively bad feat to take.
The Str-Monk's AC isn't optimized right out of the gate, but you're still at Level + 17 until you can bump dex for the last time at 5th level which is better than basically everybody who's not a Dex-Monk, or a heavy armor user who raises a shield.
Like there might be some reason to leave dex at +3 for some classes because they're pulled in a lot of directions statwise, but monks aren't really one of them. I guess this does save you from putting 2 stat increases into an off-stat to hit Dex +5, but it's not like you won't appreciate the +1 to Reflex, Stealth, etc.
It would be +2 for low-level strength monks and +1 for low-level dex monks. But I don't think the strength monk stances were actually than the finesse stances, like you'd see going from a strength weapon to a finesse weapon.
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While Mountain Stance is generally the default assumed stance for Strength Monks, I don’t think that holds true with this feat, which lets Strength Monks exceed the stance’s AC and makes it almost entirely obsolete until you add more feats through its chain (which goes up to 14th level). A Monk with this ancestry feat could pick Dragon Stance to deal more damage, gain a minor mobility benefit, and suffer none of Mountain Stance’s drawbacks. It is also worth noting that Mountain Stance is itself a pretty strong indicator that even a +1 to a Monk’s starting AC is considered powerful enough to be deemed a class feat with several tradeoffs and limitations attached.
I think you're in the wrong thread.
Right it cost a class feat of which you have 10 or a general feat of which you have of which you get 5 or ancestry feat which you can't retrain out of and of which you only get 5. It's on par. You just don't like it and that's fine. But it does less than it did as an archetype feat and comes from a more limited pool of feats while being permanently locked
I think at this point, it's becoming painfully obvious that there's a lot of wishful thinking going on in this thread, which is why a bunch of people are willing to argue desperately, suspending all logic and grasp of the facts along the way, to get what they want.
I could point out to you that ancestry feats are balanced to be weaker than class feats, that they can in fact be retrained by default (Scaly Hide being one of the rare exceptions, not that you'd want to retrain out of it anyway), and that Scaly Hide is a direct upgrade to Mountain Stance's AC with none of the latter's drawbacks and restrictions, but let's face it: you don't care. You know all of this already, it's simply that the name of the game here isn't to say anything that's true, but to desperately try to justify a feat that is clearly out of line and is likely to get adjusted further down the line.
And to that, the answer is simple: just have fun. Nobody here is trying to take this feat out of your hands, and very soon we'll all be able to armor up our cloth casters and Strength Monks to our heart's content. You don't need to get this defensive on an internet forum to justify your prospective decision to go for a broken feat, nor will any of this influence the designers' decision whether or not to errata this feat in the future. Even if this feat does get errata'd, you can just as easily keep on using its current version, as if nothing happened, so literally no aspect of this internet discussion is going to impact on your gameplay experience. If you want to sit down and talk about how this feat sits in a larger balance environment where literally every other natural armor option is much more restrictive, we can do that, but that implies a willingness to engage with basic facts.
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Not sure how to feel about it. I think I'd prefer if it fell more in line with other "naturally armored" ancestry feats.
For cloth casters, no, I really don't see the issue. There were a number of ways for them to shore up their AC within the first levels of a campaign already.
For Monks... This does feel a little centralizing at low levels, and it's one of those weird examples where it offers a significant advantage at low levels, but becomes a dead feat at high levels. I suspect Monks were not considered when the feat was designed. That being said, I also disliked how mandatory Mountain Stance felt for Strength monks, so I'm happy they get some diversity. But it also leaves Mountain Stance in an awkward place, and means we might see an awful lof of Dragonblood Monks now. I mean, this was exactly what my Dragonborn Beast Barbarian reflavored as monk from Adventurer's League needed to make the jump to PF2, so I can't deny I'm excited.
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I think at this point, it's becoming painfully obvious that there's a lot of wishful thinking going on in this thread, which is why a bunch of people are willing to argue desperately, suspending all logic and grasp of the facts along the way, to get what they want.
Or like, some people don't think the feat is as much of an issue as you do. Don't really get the intensity of the reaction here. Not caring if a wizard can hit the AC cap slightly earlier with an ancestry feat doesn't make someone delusional or desperate.
Like... come on.
Or like, some people don't think the feat is as much of an issue as you do. Don't really get the intensity of the reaction here. Not caring if a wizard can hit the AC cap slightly earlier with an ancestry feat doesn't make someone delusional or desperate.
Like... come on.
Not caring generally implies not caring to expend much effort on the matter, though. When someone spends time and energy making several increasingly breathless posts trying to justify this feat in every possible manner, that to me suggests they very much do care. Even the person above you decided this exchange was worth the effort to switch to their alias just to upvote your post. Not very slick, but also a surprising amount of personal investment.
As you can see, I posted on this thread with an initial comment that didn't address anyone in particular, and that was enough to generate a number of very defensive responses from a number of people all too desperate to try to invalidate what I had to say. The clincher is that these responses, despite hinging on a grand total of zero facts and reeking of insecurity, also frequently attempted to project emotionality upon the posts that did in fact bring up basic facts that anyone can easily verify for themselves. It is easy to compare this feat to the natural armor feats and heritages on offer, and see that this feat is head and shoulders above the rest. It is easy to note the differences between this feat and light armor proficiency that make this much stronger than the latter. It is easy to note the impact of this feat on the Monk class and the unprecedented things it lets them do. If you want to not care, feel free to not care on your own time. If you want to actually have an intelligent conversation and discuss the facts, then be expected to actually engage with the facts, and called out when you refuse to do so.
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"increasingly breathless posts" indeed.
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Except I'm not on the wrong thread, I was on topic. We're talking about scaly hide which is mostly scales of the dragon reprinted. It had the resistance removed and the level lowered, you also can't retrain out of it as an ancestry feat.I think you're in the wrong thread.Yep. Perils of posting on mobile.
No no, I posted to the wrong thread. I responded to the current Investigator thread here by mistake, but it was recent enough that I was able to delete the errant post.
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If I were playing a str monk I wouldn't even bother with the +5 dex. Then the feat would be useful all 20 levels
Ahh, so everyone else is defensive because they don't believe like you that the feat is broken somehow.
It's not a whole lot better than the light armor proficiency feat, which you could bump up one more to 4 helping your reflex saves and you can retrain out it if you want to get to +5 dex.
Well, for starters, you're not "everyone else", but secondly, you're continuing to prove my point by repeating yourself when a prior post already lays out the differences between this feat and light armor proficiency. Third, you are continuing to conspicuously avoid addressing the facts laid out, such as the comparison to other natural armor feats and heritages and so on. I would be very interested in hearing what you have to say about these other natural armor effects and how you think they compare to Scaly Hide.
As Dragorine points out, with this kind of feat you wouldn't even need to get to +5 Dex on affected classes, which with a non-Dex key attribute would only be achievable at 15th level, much later into the game and beyond the level range of most APs. You certainly wouldn't as a Monk, when you can get any save of your choice to legendary. As Tsubutai points out, being able to boost another attribute instead has quite a few benefits on classes like the Monk, where you might have to make Charisma checks. Again, this is not something achievable with the Armor Proficiency feat, because monks don't wear armor. Now that you have been informed of this fact, it would be disingenuous of you to keep repeating that there is no meaningful distinction in mechanics or power between Scaly Hide and light armor proficiency.
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I don't think the problem is so much this feat (which, to be fair, is very, very good) so much as the fact that Strength based monks are pigeonholed into Mountain Stance if they want to keep their AC on par with a full Dex monk.
To say nothing of anyone wanting to use a non-finnesse Monk weapon (like the bo staff, kusarigama, sansetsukon, etc), since they were basically just told "well enjoy being -1 AC compared to other monks forever".
I will say though that I find it weird people think you'd still go full +5 Dex with Scaly Hide. You probably wouldn't, and instead spread those increases elsewhere, since the biggest part of it (your AC) is covered.
It's a feat that opens a ton of build options that weren't there before, it's just sad it's tied to a particular heritage.
So in the end it is rather you want +5 DEX and thus +5 to Reflex saves and DEX skills vs +3 Reflex saves and only +3 to DEX Skills and +5 CON and +5 Hit Points per level and thus +5 to Fortitude Saves. Well in normal play you'd get +5 DEX and +4 CON if you wanted to optimize your Saves against stuff like a Fireball. Well +5 DEX, +4 CON and +4 WIS. Honestly this is just a preference at this point. Seeing how Scaly Hide actually makes you more likely to fail/Critically fail Reflex Saves by an extra 10% if you never increase it past +3 for +5 AC boost, which if a very fair trade off.
I mean, if you're going to boost an off-stat to +5 on a build, ideally it's one of the save-related ones that gives a bonus to skills you care about.
So for Dex-Monks I usually boost Wis to 20 (+5) but for a Str-Monk without this feat I would probably lean Dex being more important than Wis, since it seems like "stealth" and "acrobatics" seem more relevant to what I'm about than medicine/nature/religion/survival.
Page 46: Scaly Hide could give certain characters much higher AC at low levels than intended. Change the second sentence to “When you’re unarmored, the scales give you a +1 item bonus to AC with a Dexterity cap of +3. The item bonus to AC increases to +2 at 5th level.”
Called it.
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Page 46: Scaly Hide could give certain characters much higher AC at low levels than intended. Change the second sentence to “When you’re unarmored, the scales give you a +1 item bonus to AC with a Dexterity cap of +3. The item bonus to AC increases to +2 at 5th level.”Called it.
I honestly don't see the point in this much.
All it does is make it so that +4 DEX monks and +4 STR/+3 DEX Monks have a starting AC of 19. That's fine, but it doesn't address the primary problem: Scaly Hide is literally the best option if you want a full STR Monk because your other defensive option (Mountain Stance) is complete and utter trash.
As is, Scaly Hide is still the best option overall, by far, hands down for any build that wants to prioritise Strength. Arguably it still is for a full on DEX monk too, since it gives you better AC from levels 5-10, and it's equal at all other levels.
I guess -1 AC for levels 1-4 is significant enough, but in my eyes it's basically a nothingburger compared to the bigger picture.
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While I agree that the feat is probably still on the stronger side, the point is that it got errata'd, when a whole bunch of people on this thread tried to shout down the mere idea that it would, let alone needed any degree of downtuning. I invite the people who took part in the dogpiling, the gaslighting, and the tone policing to look back upon this thread and see that this hadn't happened all that long ago.
But also, I do think the impact is larger than stated: for starters, Monks can't exceed their usual AC breakpoints at level 1, because their unarmored cap is reduced with this feat to begin with. At 6th level, Strength Monks can pick Mountain Stronghold to add to Mountain Stance, matching the AC bonus from this feat at that stage and eventually exceeding it with Mountain Quake (and I disagree that this feat line is bad, as it enables Monks to get Champion-level AC on top of their saves). In addition, cloth casters who want to pick this would also not be able to exceed the AC they'd get from picking Armor Proficiency, equipping light armor, and not dumping their Strength (in fact, they'd reach the same breakpoints at level 5 too). It has, in my opinion, successfully brought the feat more in line with other AC-increasing options, even if it's probably still stronger than other "natural armor"-style ancestry feats.
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The problem with Mountain Stance is not that it's benefits are poor, but in "how the GM might interpret the requirement 'you are touching the ground'." Since sooner or later you're going to have to fight a flying opponent.