| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
None of the martial classes in the playtest have the ability to gain full scaling with advanced melee weapons (none of them are agile so even melee operatives are out of luck), and the general weapon training feat only gives you expert proficiency, which makes the undesirable for those same classes, but capping at expert is okay for spellcasters.
So is the intent, as is the current design, that these weapons are exclusively meant to be used by melee Witchwarpers and Mystics?
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
During the playtest I don't think any class makes good use of advanced weapons. In the actual release, I imagine that some of those ancestral weapon familiarity feats will be more functional.
It's not really different from Pathfinder- if you want to use an advanced weapon your choices are: be a fighter (or gunslinger), take an ancestry feat that pegs your proficiency to martial, or take an archetype that pegs your proficiency to martial. Since there are not, to date, any weapons that are worth a -2 (or more) to hit for a die size increase or more traits.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I agree that advanced weapons are somewhat hard to use in Pathfinder too.
But the Starfinder playtest currently lacks any of the options you've described, and we're supposed to be playtesting the game as is, and the game as is has advanced weapons in them.
So I'm trying to figure out what we're supposed to be doing with them in the current playtest. And right now the only characters who can utilize them fully are Witchwarpers and Mystics that take weapon proficiency twice. Is that an intended design niche? Did Paizo put these weapons in the playtest with the expectation that nobody would use them?
Right now, they seem very niche. Plus, they require a feat (either the Weapon Proficiency general feat; or possibly the Unconventional Weaponry ancestry feat as a human or shirren)
The painglave is probably not going to see much use outside of mystics that worship Zon-Shelyn and take Martial Disciple, but might be used by a soldier with Whirling Swipe. Personally, I think the cryopike fine; however cold damage vs. slashing damage might be a consideration.
The skyfire sword does more damage than a plasma sword and has the Versatile P trait. It also should meet the "common in another culture" requirement (Skyfire Legion) for Unconventional Weaponry.
The thermal dynafan(s) have the Finesse trait, so they might be useful as a melee backup for a Dex-focused character (other than a striker operative). Probably more so for a PF2 class than a SF2 Playtest class, however.
| 4 people marked this as a favorite. |
This may sound unkind, but after going through this playtest material for about a month now, it feels like a lot of its contents capture the trappings of 2e without necessarily having the deepest grasp of 2e's design, assumptions, and philosophy beyond those. The above issue is one of several that I think stems from this, and Starfinder came with a whole spread of weapons, most of which were either outright unusable or had no real target demographic in the classes we were given. What is strange is that weapons like the aeon rifle have multiple traits found nowhere else, which raises the question: if this was meant to be playtested, why weren't we given the means to playtest these weapons more easily, and if there wasn't space to implement more feats to make these weapons more accessible, why add them in the first place?
The one saving grace is the Weapon Proficiency general feat, which lets the Envoy (and specifically just the Envoy out of the four martial classes) make decent use of advanced weapons at levels 1-4, most of the level range for the playtest scenarios. At level 5 the feat falls off, and it requires picking a human, the ancestry in least need of playtesting in Starfinder, but at least it's better than nothing.
I feel they are there for someone who wants to try them out as a Fighter/Gunslinger/Human. The Painglave was turned into a martial weapon but still that doesn't really say much about the weapon itself. If Professional was added to most of the Advanced Weapons then you can make a argument for their niche as those special weapons used by a selective few PCs.
But really one of the biggest thing is the Proficiency limit on the General Feat, honestly all of the General Feats which grant6 proficiency in weapons & armor should scale off of your proficiency or be improved to Expert at level 11 (or whatever level it is) only if that is better then your natural proficiency.
This is just a small part of weapons as a bigger whole.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Going back to how things were in SF1, Advanced Melee is analogous to what we call martial melee these days. It's just the step above basic melee. Soldiers and Solarians both came with advanced melee weapon proficiency. The equivalent of what we call Advanced these days was called Special, and those were pretty uncommon and quite niche in usage.
Best way to solve this? Make all Advanced Weapons Martial for both Systems and give up the Advanced Category. You either do that or make the Weapon Training General Feat scale with a character's natural proficiency scaling for Simple & Martial, that solve it so quickly, no one would complain and yes it would also do the same for Armor Proficiency which solves needing Sentinel but that's a different niche rant.
| 4 people marked this as a favorite. |
Advanced weapons are nothing more than a legacy design at this point. I don't see a world in which an hyphothetical PF3e doesn't remove advanced weapons because they bern consistently bad for like, 4 editions now? (I don't remember if 4e had an equivalent of advanced weapons, but exotic weapons in 3.5 and PF1e were certainly bad). One of the best design decisions made in 5e was to not have advanced / exotic weapons because for the most part they take space page for no real reason.
Unfortunately, SF2e is still PF2e so it sadly will carry the (arguably few) problems it has, advanced weapons being one of them. While I would love ElementalofCuteness's suggestion of removint them entirely and making them martial weapons instead, sadly there's very few advanced weapons that would be really overpowered if they were made martial. I guess those could be tweaked, but if the remaster didn't attempt to do that much less I would expect SF2e to do it.
I thought Advanced weapons were good in PF-1E actually, it allowed you to do some amazingly interesting stuff. It is mostly the lack of scaling proficiency which kills them. Yeah most of them are bad but that is because I think the mark was missed with them, they need to have more traits then their Martial Counterparts rather that is +1 trait or +2 traits but with similar die size or even +1 Dia Size over equivalent weapons.
Example is the Card Slinger, it's a D4, 20ft, Deadly D6, Breakdown, Professional (Deception). This is an example of a bad advanced weapon who has low damage output, adds up to 3d6 of bonus damage so you're basically swinging if you critically hit with 8d4+3d6 (3d12+1d8+1d6 if you want to make it easier to read) at level 19. While a Greatsword is 4d12 by default or 8d12 if you crit,
Sure this isn't a Melee Weapon but let's look at a Advanced Melee Weapon vs the Greatsword for an example. Skyfire sword? It's a 1 handed D10, Versatile P, Powered & Tech givening it nothing more useful then a Longsword but unlike the Longsword it deals D10 instead of D8 but the Powered & Tech traits can be seen as negatives, Glitching status is pretty brutal in my opoinion and seems like they only really fit in to a Fighter or very niche Archetype wen those come to Starfinder.
The Grindblade seems like it is entirely meant for Fighters and not any of the classes in Starfinder, it is extremely powerful in the hands of one but that is about it. While the Thermal Dybnafan feels like without Agile they miss the mark of being a Double Slice weapon.
TL/DR: Advanced Melee seems to be only for Fighter class from Pathfinder 2E or Humans.
|
Advanced weapons are nothing more than a legacy design at this point. I don't see a world in which an hyphothetical PF3e doesn't remove advanced weapons because they bern consistently bad for like, 4 editions now? (I don't remember if 4e had an equivalent of advanced weapons, but exotic weapons in 3.5 and PF1e were certainly bad). One of the best design decisions made in 5e was to not have advanced / exotic weapons because for the most part they take space page for no real reason.
Unfortunately, SF2e is still PF2e so it sadly will carry the (arguably few) problems it has, advanced weapons being one of them. While I would love ElementalofCuteness's suggestion of removint them entirely and making them martial weapons instead, sadly there's very few advanced weapons that would be really overpowered if they were made martial. I guess those could be tweaked, but if the remaster didn't attempt to do that much less I would expect SF2e to do it.
4e had advanced weapons (they were called superior weapons) and they suffered many of the same problems. Outside of one specific fighter subclass, no one got proficiency with them for free, you needed a feat and due to the way 4e damage scaling works your weapon stats beyond having a +3 proficiency bonus don’t really matter past the lowest levels.
The only superior weapons anyone spent the feat to get profiency in were those that had no +3 military equivalent (greatspear, superior crossbow) or those that had 2 weapon types (gouge and maybe sometimes double weapons) due to being able to benefit from weird weapon enchant/feat support combos.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
I agree that the simple/martial/advanced weapon split is a bit of legacy design that hasn't really worked out well in 2e, and we're seeing the problems in action now: ideally, all of the Starfinder weapons we've been given ought to be equally easy to playtest, but because advanced weapons are too difficult to access, and because simple weapons aren't really worth picking on anyone with access to martial weapons, most of the arsenal ends up being made up of weapons that just don't really see play, which feels like a waste. If there were no such categorization of weapons, we wouldn't run into this issue.