...and 95% of monsters in this game have Good or higher Fortitude saves...
95%? Really? I'm sure there are quite a few, but I gotta' say, I'm a bit skeptical of that estimate.
...and 95% of monsters in this game have Good or higher Fortitude saves...95%? Really? I'm sure there are quite a few, but I gotta' say, I'm a bit skeptical of that estimate.
When players do Recall Knowledge at my table and ask for the weakest save, very rarely do I say that it is Fortitude. More often than not, it is either Will or Reflex. And the worst part is, with Will saves, if the creature is mindless, as is often the case with poor Will save creatures, it isn't helpful, since plenty of Will save effects are mind-affecting. Is 95% an exaggeration? Somewhat. But even if I were to give a more realistic percentile, it would still be 75% at the bare minimum, or even higher.
I really only know one creature off the top of my head that has middling or subpar Fortitude saves, and it also has a fair amount of immunities to effects that require Fortitude saves on top of it (i.e. poison and disease), with some other really powerful features to compensate for it having terrible Fortitude saves.
Disintegrate with a shadow signet against any one of the many undead with a low fort save is very effective. It would also be a very bad idea to make that damage nonlethal.
Undeads no more have low Fortitude like in PF1, I've been surprised by zombies for example.
Feys often have low Fortitude.
But overall, Fortitude is very rarely a low save. And it's commonly a high one, for roughly 50% of the enemies.
Reasonably certain the actual percentage is about 30%, as one would expect it to be.
I wouldn't mind seeing the actual statistics for this, but I understand that it is a lot of work and a large amount of cross-referencing.
However, I will say that a cursory glance of the creatures sampled in this table, you will more often times than not find that Fortitude is, at the very least, the highest saving throw they possess, if not between the Moderate to High (or even Extreme) values of this table here.
Also, I am speaking more from Player/GM experience than I am speaking from a data/statistical point of view, which I am aware will not match up 1 for 1.
Undeads no more have low Fortitude like in PF1, I've been surprised by zombies for example.
Feys often have low Fortitude.But overall, Fortitude is very rarely a low save. And it's commonly a high one, for roughly 50% of the enemies.
Even if most Undead had very low Fortitude saves, they are often immune to a lot of the negative effects from Fortitude saves (such as poison and disease), and if you are using abilities like Heal/Vitality Lash, a lot of the tougher Undead entities have resistance to those effects, even though they are a small subset of enemies that can actually be damaged by such effects. Vitality damage is often pretty bad compared to Void damage, since the number of living creatures far outweigh the number of non-living creatures (and of course, neither affect constructs/objects, with the only exception I know of being the Decay Domain spell).
I can certainly believe creature type plays a role into it, but this can be difficult as well when certain creatures have multiple types attached to them. Fey by themselves on average seem to have Fortitude as their lowest save, but some of them with other types attached (such as Beast) can instead make Fortitude their highest save, as exampled here and here.
I wouldn't mind seeing the actual statistics for this, but I understand that it is a lot of work and a large amount of cross-referencing.
Nearly 25% of the creatures have low fort. So that's rather high, even if lower than the other saves.
Some interesting anomalies there, and is a good gauge as to what save type spells, on average, work the best at those given monster CRs. The factor that Level 22 Monsters are the best to use Fortitude save spells against on average is surprising, but of course, the factor that Reflex save spells are the most effective save spells is not surprising, and while Will save spells can easily suffer the same issues as Fortitude save spells (i.e. used on mindless creatures who have trash Will saves), on average it seems like these situations are more likely to be identified (such as plant and ooze type creatures, or basic undead like skeletons and zombies), thus supporting my claim of Fortitude being the most unreliable save type in the game.
And the “things tend to be immune to fort targeting effects” is why disintegrate is so good against things like more powerful undead, most of which does have bad fort saves. But again, this is a thread about nonlethal damage, which really isn’t a good idea for the undead.
There's an elf wizard in my campaign who dumped Con. I think his Fort modifier is +3.
At level 2.