A Vision Obfuscated: RM Battle Oracle in the Post-Errata

[Tunu40]

Now that the dust has settled a bit following the Fall 2024 Errata (which is mostly, pretty good), I wanted to bring up the RM Battle Oracle as it suffered collateral damage in the Sure Strike errata. Considering the markedly improved forum activity (thanks to Maya!), I feel like it’s possible to have some solid discussion that’ll be helpful to both players and the dev team.

I do ask that we limit conversation to the REMASTERED Battle Oracle and try not to derail the conversation with Legacy Battle nostalgia or “Weapon Trance/Remaster BO sux, just play sorcerer/cleric/animist!” We’ve heard these complaints ad nauseum, and they’ve never added anything of value to the conversation other than trying to shut it down. If you feel the need to rag on the Battle Oracle, please make your own thread. Thanks!

The RM Battle Mystery seemed pretty clear on what Paizo intended:

•It works as a DEX/CHA or even a STR/DEX subclass (STR/DEX/CHA with the variety of 3 boost CHA ancestries).
•Weapon Trance was meant to encourage that “forced Strike”, but with a strategic opt-in. (Paizo clearly WANTED this Mystery there for those who want to be a “Gish Oracle”.)
•Sure Strike synergizes with Weapon Trance, to make those Strikes land. You give up an action and a spell slot, but you have a high chance to do something impactful while also “regaining” that action normally lost to sustain.
•Sure Strike synergizes with Bespell Strikes as it is one-action and highly increases Oracle’s accuracy to make Bespell Strikes matter.
•Sure Strike synergizes with Telekinetic Maneuver as it doesn’t work with regular Athletic skill checks, but does work the TK Maneuver being an Attack roll.
•Sure Strike also worked with spell attacks, like Needle Dart/Divine Lance so that the Oracle could still be impactful against distant enemies without swapping to a non-upgraded weapon.
•Weapon Storm comes online when your CHA catches up (in a STR/DEX build).
•Oracular’s Warning and Battlefield Persistence helped with lower initiative and countering the cursed saves.

I think you can see the problem: RM Battle Oracle’s functionality and identity is founded upon the 4-slot spontaneous Divine casting Battle Oracle using Sure Strike as much as possible. This isn’t really possible anymore and also severely damaged the uniqueness and mechanical identity.

I think this presents an opportunity to solve the main problem with Battle Oracle: Weapon Trance. Weapon Trance “works” because we have a way to hedge our turn in our favor while using the benefits the class affords. This doesn’t work out well now. And it’s hard to improve Weapon Trance as it is a poachable focus spell (and we saw the uproar over Exemplar Dedication granting easy free damage for martials). Some ideas:

•Make Weapon Trance sustain on ATTEMPTING a Strike.
•Make Weapon Trance a Free action when first cast.
•When you sustain Weapon Trance, you can Stride, Step, or Raise a shield as a free action.
•Or, when you sustain Weapon Trance, you gain a +1 circ to AC.
•When you cast Weapon Trance, you can shift a Simple weapon into a Martial weapon, as you would a shifting weapon. When you lose Weapon Trance, you shift the weapon back to its original Simple form.

Anything to make it feel like an incentive ti use Weapon Trance and not a punishment.

My big question for the dev team (If Maya might be able to see this):

•What IS the dev team’s vision for this subclass? It was clear before (Sure Strikes for Weapon Trance, spell attack cantrips, Bespell Strikes, and TK Maneuver), but unfortunately, it got gutted in the recent Errata.

•Is the current Weapon Trance still satisfactory design to the devs, or meeting their intentions? As of now, picking any other Oracle can be a better “Battle” Oracle (such as Bone Oracle grabbing Object Memory).

Meanwhile, if anyone wants to share on their experiences of weal and woe as an RM Battle Oracle, I’m sure that’ll be valuable! Overall, I find the subclass is fine in the 12+ range where many feats can resolve a lot of issues. I actually had to pivot into a new build that uses Dual Weapon Warrior as Double Slice is functionally the same as Sure Strike in accuracy (two actions, roll twice). But I don’t think it’s good if you need an archetype to fix a subclass.

And again. Thank you Maya for all the hard work you do. I’m 100% sure you’re really busy too. I hope this articulates some concerns and needs of dev communication.

[Tridus]

Based on the stated intent for the Sure Strike nerf, they don't want classes (or subclasses in this case) to be entirely reliant on it because spamming it is incredibly powerful in the right context. So I doubt they were thinking about Battle Oracle or Weapon Trance when they decided to do it.

That said, they've also said in the past that its existence in spammable form was constraining, and so with that problem fixed, you don't have a situation where Battle Oracle can rely on it like a crutch now (it wasn't a Divine spell in the first place so you had to do work to get it, but it's so important that Battle Oracles tended to want to do that).

Hopefully when they do the spring errata and PC2 gets more attention, they'll look at this without that crutch and see that it needs changing. IMO the simplest change is to let it last a minute and remove the sustain. It's already an action tax just to have basic competence in the thing the subclass is supposed to be good at, having a further tax on top of that is punitive and not adding anything.

Given that Weapon Trance effectively does the same thing as a level 1 general feat, why does it need to be sustained at all? Removing that fixes the problem pretty quickly.

[Lia Wynn]

The caveat here is that I have never played an Oracle, but wouldn't the simple solution here be to give Battle Oracle Martial Weapons proficiency as a sub-class feature that scaled whenever Oracles increased Simple Weapon Proficiency, and then rework Weapon Trance into some type of short-term personal buff?

It seems to me that all Weapon Trance does is give Martial Weapons, and while this is useful, it's also a little boring, so giving that as a baseline and making Weapon Trance do something fun seems to be the best solution to me, but I may very well be missing something due to my lack of experience with the Oracle class.

[Powers128]

Battle Oracles identity and functionality wasn't dependent on sure strike. It was handy for sure but as a 4 slot caster, spending 2 of your actions each round casting sure strike and then striking becomes a lot less useful as you start to gain more powerful spells. Casting a 2 action spell and then striking is a gish staple that's usually pretty useful.

I agree weapon trance should definitely be buffed. As it currently stands, the optimal thing to do is to just pick up weapon proficiency so you don't have to cast it. That's a terrible position for the spell to be in. I don't know exactly what it should do instead but it shouldn't be this

[Cellion]

Now that sure strike isn't propping up remastered battle oracle, I feel like there's definitely room to make weapon trance feel like a worthwhile action, rather than a very clunky general feat. Personally I would juice weapon trance to compensate as follows:

- Weapon Trance is sustained with any strike, whether or not it is successful.
- Weapon Trance grants a status bonus to damage with melee weapon strikes equal to the number of weapon damage dice.

This is modest enough that I don't think it'll rock any boats, but it does make weapon trance distinctly more appealing for the up close and personal gish.

[Squiggit]

I'm a little surprised by the premise of the thread. I've never seen a battle oracle centering their character around Sure Strike, and it seems like a huge pain economically to even attempt it. Far from a clear and obvious focal point of their identity, it seems like kind of a bad idea.

I also have to disagree here:

Quote:

Weapon Trance “works” because we have a way to hedge our turn in our favor while using the benefits the class affords.

Weapon Trance is not good. Both before and after the errata the best use case of the spell is pretending it doesn't exist. In this regard the Sure Strike change hasn't really altered anything.