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Same thing but level 3, before a bunch of errata
Party B (yes there's a reason they have so many credits spare, it's because I felt like testing Fabricator).
A lot of things changed relative to level 3 and 8 this time. Plenty of things came online, and I'm not sure many of them were for the better.
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Core System Mechanics and general stuff
1) At this point, every single light armor character (which is everyone except Soldier) can have 40 or 60 feet of fly speed through Ultralight Wings, alongside a massive range from laser rifles. Enemies do not seem to have been built to account for this with many of them still boasting a rather short 30 foot range, with a speed of 20-30 and a similar fly speed.
This, of course, meant that I had to make a lot of maps boxed indoors, otherwise the party would easily win by kiting the enemies infinitely with their superior range and far superior speed, while the enemies can barely land a scratch on them. This made Area Fire feel a lot better, combined with the fact that a 16 stack of level-4 enemies with save-for-halfs is a threatening encounter at this level, the soldiers' Area Fires were feasting.
2) It was already tenuous before, but Cover really no longer matters at this point. Many enemies are too large to effectively make use of it, and PCs just have better things to do.
3) Area weapons and hordes of enemies. Something needs to be done to cut down on the dice rolling here, because each crit fail prompts crit effects, which tend to involve saves. When fighting a stack of lower level enemies, having 4 of them crit fail, prompting 2 more saves each (projectile crit spec, frost module) as well as a check for shock module was really tedious in play.
4) Ammo counting. Seriously the most annoying thing ever. When you have people with 50 shot before reload weapons (i.e. never going to reload), comparing to your 20 shot that needs 2 bullets per person in the cone weapon, or your 8 shot but you need 2 shots to area fire and also 1 shot for your reaction attack weapon... it's really easy to lose track of how many bullets you have left after 3 or 4 rounds. Do you need to reload? Don't really know. This mechanic really needs a cleanup, if Ammo is supposed to matter make it matter don't give guns 50 shots before reloading. If it's not supposed to matter, don't have reloading. Don't make me count how many individual bullets out of my 20 clip I've used where each person in a cone costs 2 bullets.
5) Cloaking Skin, Advanced is a broken item. 3/day 4th rank invisibility for 1 action. Very, very few enemies have an answer to invisibility, and invisibility 4 is a silly powerful offensive (everything is off-guard) and defensive buff. Combined with the ruling that you don't need to do a flat check to target yourself (we asked in numerous places and this was the almost universally agreed upon consensus) made it virtually impossible to actually get anyone to 0. The entire party having easy access to Off-Guard by this made Get 'Em a lot worse than it already was.
6) Opening Roar might be one of the most broken feats ever printed. Combined with Terrified Retreat, especially on multiple characters, you can have a fair amount of the enemy team fleeing on initiative roll. This happened on multiple occasions. It's also unclear if it's supposed to demoralize 2, 3 or 4 enemies. We ruled 2, so we were playing it at its weakest.
7) You probably already knew, but Fabricator is broken. You probably shouldn't be making 180,000 credits per month (it's crafting so you need an equivalent amount of credits to earn that money but still) at level 13 when regular Earn Income makes 4500.
8) Dermal Plating, even in the context of Starfinder, might be too efficient for the price. A good chunk of enemies still do physical damage.
9) Despite the above tight, sealed off maps... grenades and missiles were still useless. That's despite me giving above-levelled (ultimate) grenades and missiles at level 13. They just didn't do enough for the action cost.
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Envoy
Due to the aforementioned "Cloaking Skin, Advanced" on everyone, alongside a lot of encounters which featured many lower level enemies, Get 'Em! was hardly used over just doing another Strike. Fortunately, the Envoy picked up "That'll Show Em!" at this level, which gave them an easily triggerable reaction attack. They are strongly considering taking Ready For Anything for the 16th level playtests and just not using any of their directives at all, because an extra trigger of That'll Show 'Em is better than their directives.
Show Em What You Got! Was okay. Needing to choose your role at the start of the day rather than when its used makes it incredibly inflexible, so everyone just picked Striker except for the Mystic who picked spellcaster. Also Defender being specifically on the "Next time you're attacked", rather than you getting to choose, means it's easily wasted. It really does just feel like a 2 action, worse, True Target though.
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Mystic
Pretty much the same, except now with everyone being invisible their healing is effectively twice as good. We ruled that, for functionality purposes, Extended Vitality meant transfer vitality did not need to check concealment/invisibility.
Didn't use any of their higher level focus spells, just Anthem and Infusion.
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Operative
Striker operative is practically the same as before. Added Overwhelming Strike so they can suppress things (off guard didn't matter due to the Cloaking Skins).
Ghost Operative, however, got one broken tool: Line 'Em Up. As far as I can tell, if you're undetected to each enemy in the line (because you sneaked) and crit, it will stun all of them. This is so incredibly overpowered that 3 of the encounters just ended to nearly the entire opfor being chain stunned by a line attack. Of course, it's still pretty binary, you can fail the sneak, or you can only hit the attack after the sneak, but against encounters with multiple lower level enemies - combined with the offguard from undetected, and Aid from an ally, with the fact that you only roll once, you can very reliably crit the entire line.
Also combined with Anchoring Impacts and Twisted Dark Zone very well, as most enemies simply couldn't move very far if at all, keeping them in a line.
I expect this to get even more degenerate at level 16 when Clustered Shots is picked up, makes critting single enemies more consistent. Fish in a Barrel would do the same, but getting an enemy immobilized or prone is a bit more difficult.
If you are playing with PF2e material, do not let the Ghost Operative take Supreme Sneak.
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Solarian
The smaller rooms helped them a lot with Supernovas, but their damage just wasn't there. Everyone else has 3 damage modules, the Solarian has 1, making their damage just on par with the Envoy. None of their feats have given them any meaningful power growth since level 8, and the player does not think that level 16 will change this either.
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Soldier
A class that's gotten a huge glow-up since its humble beginnings at level 3.
Anchoring Impacts doubles down on Suppressed's already existing issues to make it even more binary. 20 or 25 speed enemies can basically not move at all when suppressed, whereas those 180 speed dragons? Still basically unaffected. The stunned 1 on CF is nice when it shows up.
It's also a feedback loop of sorts. You Anchoring Impacts the entire enemy team. They can't move, so they're stuck in place for the next Area Fire, which makes them unable to move...
I am unsure why this class gets master weapons at level 15 instead of 13 like a normal martial, while they get expert weapons at level 5 (on time). The reduction of to-hit was noticeable.
Spatial Drift made a lot of the area weapons a lot better, simply extending their range by 10 feet made the Flamethrower have a decent sized AoE. The Action Hero had pretty enormous AoEs with it. Sadly I didn't end up using a Magnetar, as I needed my general feats for other things, and we ruled it couldn't be gotten with unconventional weaponry.
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Witchwarper
Another class that's gotten a huge glow up but not in ways I think is intentional.
For starters, Twisted Dark Zone. Hooray, my Quantum Field finally matters because I can put a decent effect on it. You become acutely aware of just how many SF enemies are weirdly lacking in Darkvision when you use this, and your team is immune because of the 24 hour immunity making you able to just throw it on them at the start of the day, making them immune to it for the rest of the day.
The Confusion effect is very solid as well. For some reason nothing about this ability is [Mental], so all of those mindless low will enemies can still get confused by this. With many starfinder enemies having ranged attacks, this means they'll stand in place making ranged attacks... which means they were also standing in place to get hit by more Area/Auto-Fire and Line 'Em Up. The blinded (from darkness with no darkvision) stacked with Anchoring Impacts to make all of those 25 speed enemies unable to move, because 5 foot speed + everything is difficult terrain.
Focus spells, they were okay. Time Loop is reasonable for the same reason Twisted Dark Zone is - it's not mental. The range is also good because its anywhere in your Quantum Field. Warp Time was by far the most used focus spell just because it's 1 action for 25 temporary HP.
Still found it difficult to use their "real" spells due to difficulty using them and sustaining the quantum field. Outside of Soothe to heal themself, and Contingency for Invisibility 4 on themself, not many spells were used.
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Encounters
For all encounters to prevent indefinite stalling due to game mechanics, the emergency rule "If the party is not turtling, they automatically win at the end of round 10" is in play.
- 1) 2 Comet Wasp Swarms and 8 Heliacal Maw Ferocitums (160XP)
- Party A gets 3 crit Opening Roars and a Wall of Stone, making this encounter a joke as the enemies simply cannot output damage through that.
- Party B drops down a Twisted Dark Zone (Ferocitums don't have Darkvision), and combined with Anchoring Impacts the Ferocitums can't move at all. Once the swarms are dealt with, the encounter is over.
- 2) 6 Swarm Dissolvers and 7 Fangs of the Devourer (160 XP)
- Party A crits some opening roars and mostly enters cleanup from there. Mystic throws out Chain Lightning for the heck of it but didn't really need to.
- Party B drops down a Twisted Dark Zone and shreds this encounter with Area/Auto Fires and Line 'Em Up. Some unlucky natural 1s on Devourer's Teeth stopped some momentum as the Soldiers couldn't do anything while slowed 2, but overall not threatening.
- 3) 16 Kehtarian Mulch Munchers (160 XP)
- Party A actually has some issues with this. Wall of Stone stems the bleeding a bit, but repeated instances of 8d8 sonic save-for-half does wear them down, with the Mulch Munchers recharging each others' Sonic Breaths. Eventually the Incendiary Grenades are brought out to end the fight a bit faster. It was an ideal situation for the Incendiary Grenade - tiny room with packed, fire weak enemies and even then it was just... okay.
- Party B drops down a Twisted Dark Zone, making the Munchers unable to sonic breath round #1, while cleaning everything up with area fire flamethrowers, auto fire rotolasers and line em up.
- 4) Weak Ancient Mirage Dragon (160 XP).
- Everyone has 5th rank See the Unseen spell chips because everyone is invisible from Cloaking Skin and they want to be able to heal each other with only a DC5 flat check in the event the worst happens. That makes this fight doable.
- Realistically this is a massive problem enemy without See the Unseen. It goes invisible with invisibility 4 and then Sneaks. It succeeds on a natural 2, and moves 90ft flying, you are never finding it.
- However it also lacks damage. Something very common with high level level+4 enemies. See the Unseen disables its sneak attack, so past the initial breath it can't do nearly enough damage (especially because it cannot get by Invisibility 4 itself) to threaten anyone.
- Party A wins with some lucky natural 1 saves on the Mirage's part, but would have won without it.
- Party B just wins through Readied Strikes, invisibility from cloaking skin and healing off any damage the Mirage can actually do. Despite bad initial saves vs the breath attack, the Mirage just can't output enough damage.
- 5) 4x Elite Armed Defrex and 1x Elite Ancient Horned Dragon (160XP)
- Party A kinda gets lucky (or rather, the enemies get unlucky). Yes, nothing here can bypass invisibility, but the enemies also win initiative this time due to a bad series of initiative rolls. Despite that, and despite the Defrexes critting on a 16+ on their MAP free attack, they get only 1 crit across the entire fight. Party A does take a beating, though, from the initial bad tempo.
- Party B has to do this twice, the first time the enemies get very lucky. The defrexes do not have darkvision, so Twisted Dark Zone makes them blind, but they roll a lot of crits through blindness and the Witchwarper eventually dies to this. Not helped by the Operative rolling quite poorly on their attacks, managing no stuns.
- On the second attempt, they roll good initiative, Opening Roar terrified Retreat the 4 defrexes and it's easy cleanup from there with Twisted Dark Zone blinding the defrexes.
- 6) 16x Stone Mauler (160XP)
- Probably not an encounter you should ever do.
- 16 Maulers doing Burrow, Strike, Burrow every round. Incredible gameplay. Of course, 13th-level SF2e characters have no ability to answer Burrow so they're stuck doing readied Strikes. The targets of which the Maulers have total control over.
- Party A doesn't manage to kill even a single mauler by the end of round 10, and wins by timer. Dermal Plating and Invisibility means the Mystic (The target of all 16 attacks, every round) never hits 0, but they did have to burn a few slots on Heal. Solarian just uses a Laser Rifle this combat.
- Party B has the advantage of the Ghost Operative's crit stun, meaning their readied Strike stuns a Mauler as it pops out of the ground, letting the rest of the party clean them up. They still win by timer as they can only kill 1 mauler a round, but there's only 6 maulers left. Witchwarper does not go down and does not need to spend many slots on Soothe (they do use all 4 of their FP on Warp Time though).
- Twisted Dark Zone does not prompt the confusion on entry, only on start of turn, so its useless here.
- 7) 3x Elite Immolsivix and 4x Elite Azlanti Dissident (160XP)
- If the Immolsivixes were not elite, this encounter would be over to Terrified Retreat on initiative.
- Still, it's a reasonably threatening enemy. Who knew all you had to do to make Area Fire worthwhile was... have it do literally more than double the damage that every other Area Fire does? Bomb barrage is basically that. Gets around invisibility too.
- The Dissidents are basically just here to Haste the Immolsivixes (it's an enemy with a good 3 action attack routine of Strike + Bomb Barrage, but it needs to move to do this consistently). Nerfs to the Seeker Rifle make them basically inadequate at dealing damage.
- Party A is lucky that they picked up spell gems of Energy Aegis as part of a reward from an earlier VP challenge, which severely cuts down on Bomb Barrage's damage. Despite that the Solarian still almost dies. This enemy is no joke.
- Party B... well, Immolsivixes have 25 speed, so Anchoring Impacts essentially locks them in place. Past there, the operative rolls a critical Line 'Em Up 3 rounds straight after Sneaking, keeping the Immolsivixes chain-stunned and unabl to do anything until they die. Party B did not take any damage past the first round.
- 8) 5x Elemental Hurricane and 2x Heliacal Maw Stellar Hulk (160XP)
- Party A gets 5 Terrified Retreats off on all 5 hurricanes on initiative. The Solarian is dead useless after the Stellar Hulks are down, they cannot catch the Hurricanes to deal damage to them, so they opt to simply switch to a Laser Rifle. Still, the Hurricanes can't really deal with invisibility so its mostly a painless win.
- Party B forces the Hurricanes to land under threat of the operative stunning them in midair (where they'd fall and take a bunch of fall damage at the end of their turn as they can't Arrest while stunned). From there, time loop stuns them to prevent Disperse, Line 'Em Up stuns some more. I'm fairly certain the opfor spent most of the encounter stunned. Pretty easy victory for them too.
Okay, so prime takeaway seems to be that enemies aren't keeping up with players in regards to detection and mobility. Also Edna's riding the struggle bus with the solarian, but he's been posting about that elsewhere already.
I feel like I might wind up banning unlimited flight/invisibility in my own games, because they seem primed to create a really unhealthy relationship between the players and the GM. Like with any other cheese strat, either the GM puts up with it and watches game balance simply collapse, or counters it and makes all that player investment useless. Might be better to just pretend those options don't exist.
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Okay, so prime takeaway seems to be that enemies aren't keeping up with players in regards to detection and mobility. Also Edna's riding the struggle bus with the solarian, but he's been posting about that elsewhere already.
I feel like I might wind up banning unlimited flight/invisibility in my own games, because they seem primed to create a really unhealthy relationship between the players and the GM. Like with any other cheese strat, either the GM puts up with it and watches game balance simply collapse, or counters it and makes all that player investment useless. Might be better to just pretend those options don't exist.
The commercial and tactical ultralights at 20/30 speed are fine, as is the Jetpack. Advanced at 40 is pushing it and Superior at 60 is far too much.
And yeah, Invisibility 4 is mathematically pretty insane relative to anything else of a comparable level.
It’s:
- +2 to hit
- ~+100% HP (all attacks against you have a 50% miss chance)
- An effectively massive save bonus against anything targeted (A spell that misses due to concealment is effectively you crit succeeded)
- An enabler for any Sneak based shenanigans
Compared to Heroism 3 a level prior, or even Heroism 6 2 levels later, it’s obviously very out of line. Yes enemies can counter it with precise senses or truesight, but it’s rare, and if you’re constantly having to field enemies with one of those two just to negate Invisibility, it’s a problem.
Would definitely suggest banning the advanced cloaking skin (not sure that putting it to 2a would put it in line).
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Okay, so prime takeaway seems to be that enemies aren't keeping up with players in regards to detection and mobility. Also Edna's riding the struggle bus with the solarian, but he's been posting about that elsewhere already.
I feel like I might wind up banning unlimited flight/invisibility in my own games, because they seem primed to create a really unhealthy relationship between the players and the GM. Like with any other cheese strat, either the GM puts up with it and watches game balance simply collapse, or counters it and makes all that player investment useless. Might be better to just pretend those options don't exist.
I really hope that the playtest feedback allows for more consideration about range and flight. The Starfriends were very vocal about wanting unlimited flight at level 1 to be a huge draw of the system. Unfortunately, it kind of feels like an afterthought? Only one ancestry has access to it before level 5, no feat has alternative movement clauses, and then with some level 3/5 items basically everyone becomes vertical.
Id rather they work harder to make it an important core to the game rather than just give it up entirely.
Flight has issues with Pathfinder 2e whose rules generally assume the battlefield is 2D. Drawing cover and AoE templates in 3D is awkward, and all terrain becomes meaningless in 3D because you just fly around it. Every battlefield is a flat, featureless plain.
It would need some work if they wanted it to be an important core to the game.
Really interesting write up that highlights some feats and options that might be above the intended power curve. Can I ask why you had so many fights with 6+ enemies? I find from both games I run (in PF2E) and prewritten modules that this is exceedingly rare. Usually you get at most a half dozen foes, and most typically it's 1-4.
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Really interesting write up that highlights some feats and options that might be above the intended power curve. Can I ask why you had so many fights with 6+ enemies? I find from both games I run (in PF2E) and prewritten modules that this is exceedingly rare. Usually you get at most a half dozen foes, and most typically it's 1-4.
Stress testing mostly. We started with moderate and severe encounters in the level 3 test (and even some less than 160XPs in the level 8 area) but they were just too easy, practically zero threat or resource expenditure required unless the monster in of itself was broken (e.g. the Crest Eaters or Glass Serpent).
There's almost no point, therefore, in us testing encounters at the XP range you'd typically see in a prewritten adventure, which tend to be moderates or even lower than moderates at this point. What would we really find out? No class is pressured into using any of their resources, or using their actions the most effectively, because there's such a massive margin for error before anyone is at risk of dying. Essentially, the question we're asking is: When push comes to shove, you're in the hardest possible encounter in an adventure, does this option perform well?
There are adventures where a whole stack of low level enemies is fielded. Extinction Curse, from memory, does this a lot - one encounter features 18 Xul'Gath Thoughtmaws (a level-5 creature!) at level 20. It's also acceptable under the budget to have a swarm of low level enemies as your main threat - it, at the very least, makes area fire and AoE spells feel a bit more impactful than they ordinarily are.
These encounters can actually be threatening if the enemy is loaded up with save-for-half effects that your character does not have the relevant juggernaut/evasion/resolve for. There are some other creatures that are still threatening at this range - for instance, 6 Zecuis, combined with 6 Chorals and 4 Jungle Drakes made a very difficult extreme encounter for the level 10 Battlecry playtest, and showed an area where the Guardian might have been preferrable over the Paladin.
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Thanks for the insight. So is one of the takeaways here that Starfinder characters are overall stronger than their Pf2e counterparts? Or is it really just outlying options being too good? I haven't been able to pull a group together to test at anything other than 1st level, but these write ups suggest that even a somewhat less optimized group will comfortably be punching well above their weight...
Looking through the things you tested, it also seems like higher level enemies need more flexible tools at their disposal so you don't have quite so many binary encounters. This was a problem in Sf1E as well, as higher level characters had broad spectrum capabilities and defenses (thanks to augmentations and armor upgrades mostly) that tended to outclass the things they were fighting from one angle or another.
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Thanks for the insight. So is one of the takeaways here that Starfinder characters are overall stronger than their Pf2e counterparts? Or is it really just outlying options being too good?
Operative is definitely way better than any PF2e base class.
Soldier is pretty up there as well, it has issues but even single target the raw mathematical power it has is undeniable. Probably equivalent to the best PF2e martials.
Mystic is about equivalent to heal font cleric, might be be better, which puts it pretty firmly in S tier.
Witchwarper… aside from Twisted Dark Zone I’m pretty sure it’s just a tankier occult sorcerer that struggles to cast its slotted spells due to range issues. It’s better than an occult sorc due to stats, but the surrounding context of the game it’s in makes it worse.
Solarian and Envoy are definitely worse than any PF2e equivalent class.
Once you get past the level 1-3 hell of single dice no mod damage for soldier and operative their damage is incredibly good. 1-3 is suffering though.
A number of surrounding options are also overpowered, however. Even in the context of SF.
I haven't been able to pull a group together to test at anything other than 1st level, but these write ups suggest that even a somewhat less optimized group will comfortably be punching well above their weight...
Looking through the things you tested, it also seems like higher level enemies need more flexible tools at their disposal so you don't have quite so many binary encounters. This was a problem in Sf1E as well, as higher level characters had broad spectrum capabilities and defenses (thanks to augmentations and armor upgrades mostly) that tended to outclass the things they were fighting from one angle or another.
Yeah doesn’t look like things have changed much then. The enemies still fundamentally feel like they were designed for the close quarter melee centric metagame of Pathfinder and maybe a 20-25ft fly speed was slapped on.
Generally some combination of being too slow (when characters in SF especially at this level can easily be rocking a 45-50ft land speed and a 40 or 60ft fly speed), range being too short, being reliant on area fire/AoE when SF characters have almost no reason to group up, and just generally lacking damage because they’re using PF2e ranged damage.
Some of the SF unique enemies are threatening but not in ways I think is necessarily intended. Like I don’t think the devs intended for the Immolsivix to just continually spam Bomb Barrage on one person.
Map design certainly doesn’t help make these enemies out much either.