Combo attacks are an area that PF2E does not currently tackle and would need a full ruleset to make work. Essentially any ideas would be in the realm of homebrew, which is perfectly fine! I love the ideas myself, since you could make combos with any types of attacks (Final fantasy vibes there)
P.S, Lots of chatter about Kineticist lately. Wish they would just make a class forum at this point.
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Yo! so i was checking out the kineticist and a cool idea came to my head where two or more kineticist could team up on an attack and do like super composite attacks. Just an idea i thought id toss out there and see what everyone thought about it.
It's an interesting idea yet I don't think that Paizo designers want to create a class that combos with itself this could made a indirect class unbalance with players felling "forced" to stay in a set of classes due optimization. It's currently the opposite Pathfinder 2e moved to a direction where most players can help each other (with Aid, Demoralize, with multiple ways to turn enemy off-guard or to apply an attack penalty and so on) but without depend from a balanced set of classes like a tradition set of tanker, healer, dpr, specialist that we had in other versions and systems.
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I think there's merit to the idea of team-up moves in more general form -- it'd be really neat for two or more party members in a specific situation to act together in a way that feels really flashy and emphasizes teamwork, and this'd be the perfect kind of action to introduce in an expansion that tries to deliver more of a superhero flavor. There's definitely plenty of potential team-ups to have between Kineticists of different elements, and that I think can be extrapolated even further: if you have a team-up move that's basically "fire and ice", that's a team-up that would work just as well between two Kineticists as it would between any two characters who can produce fire or cold magic, for instance, so you could potentially generalize that to two characters who can produce magic with those respective traits. By that same token, you could have a move where one particularly strong character swings around another character who makes Strikes to every enemy in a radius, which would work especially well between two martials and probably include a Strength requirement for whoever does the swinging. There's a ton of potential here, and Paizo already included the fastball special as a Barbarian feat, so there's lots of potential ways of going about this too.
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Teaming up like this would definitely involve some new rules that we do not currently have to this extent, but it does sound neat! I hope the devs see this post sooner rather than later! There's no guarantee that they'd be able to add any new rules like this, but it would still be nice for them to see and consider.
I could have sworn there was at least one kineticist class feat that had a team up element to it.
Off the top of my head, two kineticists with access to the Wood element could combine Jagged Berms with Sanguiviolent Roots to make it more difficult for enemies to escape the area as the Roots do damage each round.
I don't recall any way to directly combine damage from two impulses from different kineticists.
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I love this idea! I think I'd want to see it become a general thing. EG "You cast a spell with the cold trait, and an ally has a spell slot that can cast a spell with the fire trait" and then you can do a thing.
Though, giving special synergy within a class could be fun, and would offset any versatility problems of having two of the same class (though of all classes, kineticist has the least problems with that).
I could have sworn there was at least one kineticist class feat that had a team up element to it.
Possibly thinking of PF1's Interweave Composite Blast teamwork feat.
I could have sworn there was at least one kineticist class feat that had a team up element to it.Possibly thinking of PF1's Interweave Composite Blast teamwork feat.
Yeah, probably.
As much as it's fun imagining Kin's mixing, I'd love to see some melee combos too. Think of all those shows where the hulking bruiser swings hard and the enemy dodges, but they were acting as a faint for the arrow flying in from the archer behind them, or the rogue popping out of the literal shadows (Shadowdancer love woo). Would be fun to theory craft one, but that would need to be posted in the homebrew section of the forums.
Combo attacks are an area that PF2E does not currently tackle and would need a full ruleset to make work. Essentially any ideas would be in the realm of homebrew, which is perfectly fine! I love the ideas myself, since you could make combos with any types of attacks (Final fantasy vibes there)
P.S, Lots of chatter about Kineticist lately. Wish they would just make a class forum at this point.
Yeah, was kind of thinking that Genshin vibe of hyperbloom, vaporize, etc.
It would be interesting but would also probably become a go to where the GM would have to design encounters where the "wonder twins" couldn't get their attacks off in order to mess up their combo.
That's what I mean about needing a ruleset. We don't want to just have to leave it up to GMs to "wing it", but ways to rule it well.
For example, a hard rule that you can only do such combos to enemies who are debuffed in some manner, with some combos being possible only when specific debuffs are in place.
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I've joked before about turning this game more and more into Chrono Trigger over the years. Between PF2e and SF2e, I think a reasonable GM could cover all of the characters and technology needed, so I feel like the last piece of that puzzle would be combo actions like what we're describing here.
The question becomes, how to balance the action economy? Assume a situation where you have a cleric with fire ray that wants to enhance the attack of a fighter. Does the cleric hold their initiative to match the fighter's so they can act at the same time, is it a reaction on the cleric's part, or is it a reaction plus slowed 1 on their turn? I think any of the above could work, though it just being a reaction is perhaps a bit strong. How do they learn how to do this?
One solution I've been playing around with in homebrew is a 'party feat' track, which are gained at 1st and each even level after that, like class feats. These feats are used to perform combos and aid each other during battle and in exploration. One combo might be the fire ray/stike action I described above, another might be a nimble rogue dodging between a giant's legs, unbalancing him enough for his fighter friend to get a free or reaction trip.
Not sure how to balance it, but it does seem like the missing piece to encourage more teamwork. Of course, this is all strictly in the realm of homebrew now, but I keep hoping the powers that be will try something like this.
It'd be cool, but darn near impossible, to have actions X & Y be concurrent and stacking, all while maintaining balance not just w/ other team-up abilities & PC abilities, but with enemies. It'd require a new game system, and promote a peer pressure Paizo (and many players) would dislike. Ex. I'm playing a flame guy so you have to play a frosty one so we can get this effective buff via team-up abilities. Otherwise we're not operating at our best.
IMO one can change the narration to simulate this w/o changing the mechanics. Frost guy lands a critical hit/crit fail by enemy right after fire guy blasted them? Obviously it was the temperature variant distorting the enemy's chitin, causing it to crack & explode. And the same if the frost attack failed, it was because the residual heat nullified the cold effect, and fire & frost guy need to coordinate better. But not really, that's just story slapped on top of the mechanics afterward. Combat mechanics occur in weird six-second pockets of time, but in world those six-second packets overlap & blur together somehow, leaving much room for interpretation on how. Same w/ martial effects, especially when adding the teamwork already available (and mentioned by Easl above).
Also, PF2 encourages teamwork so much already that one has to factor in party & player synergy when determining a build's strength. And feats/abilities that help allies are already strong. There are those on this forum who swear by the crit-giving power of high-level Aid. One could suppose it's tactics like these that are granting those bonuses, thus the crits.
So yeah, I don't see any formal framework for this in the future, but maybe Paizo could give a sidebar or article for GMs to help promote this kind of retelling, up-flavoring of the action.