stuffJust the obvious stuff then. Oh well.
And tragically, you only lose your breath if you speak. Laughing or creative question answering methods won't trigger suffocation. It might seem stupid for these things to function this way, but this is pf2e and it does far more egregiously logic breaking things than this.
I don't run drowning that way anyhow. It's another one of those things I wouldn't much allow as I have no intention of allowing my game to become a joke of encounters using rule holes to end encounters.
That's why drowning doesn't interest me unless that is something I pre-planned as a way to beat an enemy. I certainly don't want it as some standard tactic that looks ridiculous in a fantasy story used over and over by PCs.
Thus another reason why I don't want rule decisions handed down from up on high with players trying to debate them when I don't plan to allow them for no other reason than how ridiculous it would look in a fantasy story as a common tactic from group to group, adventure to adventure.
I don't run drowning that way anyhow. [...]
Thus another reason why I don't want rule decisions handed down from up on high [...]
If you already have the sense to edit the existing game rules to better fit your table, then you already shouldn't be harmed by future rules that you (might) disagree with...
This is declaring that your way / preference should be canonized not only above your mutual peers, but over the devs of the game itself, lol.
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Starlit with IW is downright tame compared to disruptive stance with reach and tactical reflexes (and later boundless reprisals), or resentment witch, let alone something outright gamebreaking like instant minefield or anything to do with the drowning rules....Eh. Disruptive stance doesn't really do anything you couldn't already do with silence 4th + trip and minefield is just another thing to throw into the berms-shove shredder. That said, I am glad that strat keeps getting more tools to use.
Do tell me about drowning though. Not something I've given much thought to outside of the monk suffocation combo.
Because of how the drowning rules are set up anything that makes you lose your breath/speak results in instant unconsciousness underwater. Methods include laughing fit, mask of uncanny breath, and pointed question. Probably a couple other ways too, it’s a problem with the drowning rules not any specific method of invoking them.
Pretty much an instakill on anything that breathes so long as you have two casters in the party or they’re dumb enough to stay in the water for a round.
I think you're playing the RAI game instead of the RAW game if you believe laughing fit mechanically requires a creature to open their mouth. Laughing Fit doesn't even require the creature to be able to laugh in order to work. Honestly, it might be more accurate to say you're playing the flavor game and not the RAI game. I doubt the devs intended to make laughing fit force a creature to open their mouth, if they have one.
If you're playing in that more loose narrative space, I don't see why a creature forced to respond with pointed question can't choose to mime a response or something instead.
This isn’t described as as just a chuckle. This is “uncontrollable laughter” for rounds on end. If speaking knocks you unconscious this is even worse. It’s completely incoherent for saying some words to exhaust all your air but uncontrolled laughter not to, when that’s a much stronger effect.
It’s dumb, but the problem here is with the drowning rules making you fall unconscious instantly upon exhaling. I don’t know who came up with that, it’s like no one on the design team has gone swimming before. 90% of issues with drowning would be solvable by canning that and the other 10% (just keep wall of stoneing them in a pillar and the like) would be solved by increasing the hilariously short duration.
I agree that the drowning rules are a little too extreme. If I had players try to regular use them against enemies or did an underwater campaign (that somehow didn't provide easy access to water breathing) then I would probably greatly alter them to not be as severe as they are.
The thing is what ive found in this forum is that people here do not treat anything as a consequential statement if its not hyper specific.
So laughing to them isn't speaking and wont cause any air loss.
I had similar discussions with enthrall claiming you cant choose to take actions inconsistent with your giving your undivided attention to the caster. But they consider it all flavor text and not instructions.
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Why would shutting down concentrate actions matter? It is completely unnecessary in the majority of encounters.
You are exaggerating the effectiveness of these tactics. I've used all of them and nowhere near as strong as you are claiming. A bow is not as good as a caster with all the listed spells hammering from afar.
Some people hop on, claim something is really strong, then act like that would be strong in something I run. It would not. I'm not sure what you are playing in that makes these combos standout.
Disruptive Stance:
Because it hard counters an entire type of enemy. That’s (pardon my pun) disruptive to the game in a way that “peak magus damage sustained a bit longer” just isn’t. Even against enemies that don’t have any concentrate or manipulate actions at all you’re still a fighter sitting right next to them, with the ability to punish them anytime they try to get up from prone, which you can probably inflict yourself since why wouldn’t you build for that on a multi reaction fighter.You shut down an entire type of enemy by existing in their proximity, you turn off any parts of a monster’s kit that happen to be concentrate, you inhibit escape, and you’re still a multi reaction fighter with all the power that implies.
Stealth Tactics:
You really really underestimate high level sneak. Here’s a typical round for a stealth maxing character:
I start out the turn invisible, I popped dust of disappearance round one. Or a 4th rank invis scroll - take your pick. A scroll/wand of mind blank ensures that I almost always defeat truesight and see the unseen, there’s maybe 5 creatures with high enough rank truesight to reliably beat mind blank. I’m also flying or air walking, also cast round one or from a perma flight item.
I then shoot my bow once from hidden (twice if i used a quickness potion), dealing my damage for the round with flat footed. After that I sneak in a random direction using my full movement speed - if I’m using air walk that can be around 60ft from fleet + longstrider + moderate prey mutagen, if I’m flying probably more like 40ft. I then sneak again (just for more distance). Because of sneak savant, I only fail to sneak on a crit fail, and it’s pretty unlikely that happens. Even if I do I’m still hidden from their attacks, and only have to survive one round.
I am now in a fairly random position in 3d space somewhere within 120ft of my previous location - 80ft if I was flying instead of air walking. The enemies’s 15ft radius seek bubble has an extremely small chance of overlapping me when they pick an area to seek, their seek bubble being vastly smaller than the bubble of space I could possibly be in. I don’t care to do the math again but the odds were under 1/50. Perhaps you’re starting to see why all I call this “battleship invisibility”, it does quite mimic the popular board game. Our allies aren’t affected of course, they have a non-visual precise scent so if they’re in range to cast i.e. heal on us they can.
But let’s say I’m in a smaller space, and my invis isn’t working because the enemy has precise scent - I’m in the maximally bad encounter type. Well, I start my turn by shooting once (twice if quickened), then hide, then sneak to one of the four corners of the room. Assuming my hide check worked (good odds), the enemy has a 1/4 chance of guessing correctly for each seek (and then they still have to actually beat my stealth DC). I also have to be hidden to my allies by using foil senses vs precise scent - which is legitimately annoying, but the undetected goes away if the enemy downed me which is when I’d most need help.
And what do I pay for all this? Well, I took stealth on a rogue. Not much of a cost there. I took one class feat, sneak savant, medium small cost. And a decent chunk of my money went to invisibility items, partially counting mind blank since it’s mental bonus is helpful regardless of stealth and pwning scrying is nice to have. That’s really not that much. If my stealth abuse plan isn’t working out for a particular encounter, I’m just a normal ranged rogue. Or throwing rogue with shadow sheath. It didn’t really detract much from my fallback plan of being a normal rogue, and I get an I win button against most encounters in the game.
So yea, that’s why I think stealth is complete BS. It completely warps the game around it in a way that just doing peak damage a bit longer doesn’t. For most encounters the party is better off letting the sneak savant rogue play battleship with the enemy than engaging themselves, and god forbid you have a party of entirely stealth maxers - you don’t all have to be rogues, sneak savant is on an archetype.
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R.E. IW, some damage calcs
Assume a 19-20th level magus hitting a spellstrike:
10th rank amped IW: 90 average damage
9th polar ray: 54 average damage + 40 (drained 2 on level 20 enemy) = 94 damage
9th rank blood feast: 94.5 average damage, get half that in temphp
8th rank polar ray: 45 damage + 40 drained = 85 damage
8th rank blood feast: 87.5
Ah yes, the stunningly game breaking power of doing exactly what magus can already do, just a bit more often and without the good rider effects. Truly this shatters the game's balance over it's knee, the most powerful combo in the game.
How long can a magus sustain that though?
R.E. IW, some damage calcs
Assume a 19-20th level magus hitting a spellstrike:
10th rank amped IW: 90 average damage
9th polar ray: 54 average damage + 40 (drained 2 on level 20 enemy) = 94 damage
9th rank blood feast: 94.5 average damage, get half that in temphp
8th rank polar ray: 45 damage + 40 drained = 85 damage
8th rank blood feast: 87.5
Ah yes, the stunningly game breaking power of doing exactly what magus can already do, just a bit more often and without the good rider effects. Truly this shatters the game's balance over it's knee, the most powerful combo in the game.
And just like that you've wasted perfectly good 8th and 9th rank slots on something your focus points could be doing. You're also committing yourself to being useful 4 times per day instead of 3 times per refocus. You're also foregoing actually useful arcane spells to do...4-5 damage over your focus points with 9s and less damage period with the rank 8s.
You know what's better than any of those spells? Maze/quandry. True target. Disappearance. A dozen other spells I can't be bothered to list. If you have 1 real fight a day, sure. Come back and tell me how this strategy works out for you when you need to do 4-6.
R.E. IW, some damage calcs
Assume a 19-20th level magus hitting a spellstrike:
10th rank amped IW: 90 average damage
9th polar ray: 54 average damage + 40 (drained 2 on level 20 enemy) = 94 damage
9th rank blood feast: 94.5 average damage, get half that in temphp
8th rank polar ray: 45 damage + 40 drained = 85 damage
8th rank blood feast: 87.5
Ah yes, the stunningly game breaking power of doing exactly what magus can already do, just a bit more often and without the good rider effects. Truly this shatters the game's balance over it's knee, the most powerful combo in the game.
And just like that you've wasted perfectly good 8th and 9th rank slots on something your focus points could be doing. You're also committing yourself to being useful 4 times per day instead of 3 times per refocus. You're also foregoing actually useful arcane spells to do...4-5 damage over your focus points with 9s and less damage period with the rank 8s.
You know what's better than any of those spells? Maze/quandry. True target. Disappearance. A dozen other spells I can't be bothered to list. If you have 1 real fight a day, sure. Come back and tell me how this strategy works out for you when you need to do 4-6.
The point is that it isn't a huge power outlier with the capacities of the class. Casting those other spells is often taking off a turn of damage and doing the Magus thing in favor of pretending to be a dedicated spellcaster and still completes for actions with IW. Any place you want to use quandary is the same place you would be very happy to use your slots for great feast
But I do think that the Magus shouldn't be designed in such a way it has access to a spell like quandary and I really wish it had divine font for damage spells and only went up to like rank 5-6 for regular slots
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The point is that it isn't a huge power outlier with the capacities of the class. Casting those other spells is often taking off a turn of damage and doing the Magus thing in favor of pretending to be a dedicated spellcaster and still completes for actions with IW. Any place you want to use quandary is the same place you would be very happy to use your slots for great feast
But I do think that the Magus shouldn't be designed in such a way it has access to a spell like quandary and I really wish it had divine font for damage spells and only went up to like rank 5-6 for regular slots
It very much is though. There is a huge difference between a magus who can effectively spellstrike twice a day and one that can do so up to 3 times an encounter. And having access to those high power spells is part of the draw of being a gish. The ability to both be the best damage dealer in the system while also having access to a small toolbox of mook sweepers, saveless control, powerful buffs, etc is what makes the magus so appealing.
It's also why some people (not me) consider it broken. That they can have a useful toolbox of spells while getting their damage from a more numerous and renewable pool of resources elsewhere. The difference in damage damage an IW magus is putting out in, say, 4 discrete encounters over 8 - 12 focus points is immense compared to just trying to get by with a pair of top slots and something like gouging claw + that force missile focus spell. That's where the outlier is. Not 95 vs 90 but 95x2 vs 90x8.
But to bring it back to the main topic. This is a good showcase for arcane being a solid list. Plenty of decent or better options to round out a damage class that doesn't rely on the list itself to do its thing.
R.E. IW, some damage calcs
Assume a 19-20th level magus hitting a spellstrike:
10th rank amped IW: 90 average damage
9th polar ray: 54 average damage + 40 (drained 2 on level 20 enemy) = 94 damage
9th rank blood feast: 94.5 average damage, get half that in temphp
8th rank polar ray: 45 damage + 40 drained = 85 damage
8th rank blood feast: 87.5
Ah yes, the stunningly game breaking power of doing exactly what magus can already do, just a bit more often and without the good rider effects. Truly this shatters the game's balance over it's knee, the most powerful combo in the game.
And just like that you've wasted perfectly good 8th and 9th rank slots on something your focus points could be doing. You're also committing yourself to being useful 4 times per day instead of 3 times per refocus. You're also foregoing actually useful arcane spells to do...4-5 damage over your focus points with 9s and less damage period with the rank 8s.
You know what's better than any of those spells? Maze/quandry. True target. Disappearance. A dozen other spells I can't be bothered to list. If you have 1 real fight a day, sure. Come back and tell me how this strategy works out for you when you need to do 4-6.
Don't forget about the rider effects. They're pretty good. Polar ray's drained 2 is setting up my caster friends for a lot of spells and my martial friends for grapple. Blood feast is giving me like 40 temp hp, that's a lot of temp hp.
But anyways, I'm not saying IW isn't good, there's a reason it's popular. I myself consider grabbing a damage focusing spell to be of utmost importance for a magus. I am simply saying this isn't some unprecedented gamebreaking power. You can do exactly the same damn thing with slotted attack spells. It's great to be able to do it more often, and reserve those slots for other uses (I'm found of wall of stone, quandary is definitely a good one too), but calling this gamebreaking or the most powerful combo in the game just isn't true. You're doing what a monoclass magus is doing but better, you don't change the face of the game. If the GM is trying to set up some down to the wire tense bossfight or something barely anything changes from a monoclass magus who's good at resource conservation. Compare that to something like disruptive stance, where they almost may as well just not count that caster boss in the encounter balancing. Or resentment witch perma-slowing +4 bosses off a slow success and adding synesthesia's clumsy 3 to the mix next round.
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The thing is what ive found in this forum is that people here do not treat anything as a consequential statement if its not hyper specific.
So laughing to them isn't speaking and wont cause any air loss.
I had similar discussions with enthrall claiming you cant choose to take actions inconsistent with your giving your undivided attention to the caster. But they consider it all flavor text and not instructions.
To me, this read of uncontrollable laughter and pointed question is in the same category as physics-lawyering the temperature of a fireball to try to cheat in extra effects not listed in the spell. It is something I, as a DM, am going to shut down immediately without further argument.
Even if you think laughing fit should force a creature to open its mouth —which I again find questionable, because it works on creatures that don't have mouths at all, and the game's only restriction on what creatures it will and won't work on come from its trait tags—or you're happier playing a game where mechanics entail flavor that entails further mechanics in this way, which is your prerogative... I think any DM with half an eye for balance will still push back on you here. At the least, if I counterfactually had a table of players that -all- wanted to play this way, I'd be flavor-lawyering them back and telling them it's functioning as an incapacitation effect and will grant save upgrades. And that's assuming I didn't just ban the strategy outright, in the way I'd be playing whack-a-mole with silly strategies like this in 1E.
I don't run drowning that way anyhow. [...]
Thus another reason why I don't want rule decisions handed down from up on high [...]If you already have the sense to edit the existing game rules to better fit your table, then you already shouldn't be harmed by future rules that you (might) disagree with...
This is declaring that your way / preference should be canonized not only above your mutual peers, but over the devs of the game itself, lol.
In PF1/3E there was a rules lawyer movement that encouraged players to argue with the DM. Much of it was due to designers answering questions on forums and in sage type columns that created this environment where DMs were held to rulings from up on high. I don't like arguments created at my table where I DM a lot.
I would personally prefer that environment stay gone in PF2 and 5E. One thing I will give credit to 5E for and no PF2 is they removed the rules lawyer environment from the game. I was happy they did as it created a lot of headaches in PF1/3E.
The thing is what ive found in this forum is that people here do not treat anything as a consequential statement if its not hyper specific.
So laughing to them isn't speaking and wont cause any air loss.
I had similar discussions with enthrall claiming you cant choose to take actions inconsistent with your giving your undivided attention to the caster. But they consider it all flavor text and not instructions.
To me, this read of uncontrollable laughter and pointed question is in the same category as physics-lawyering the temperature of a fireball to try to cheat in extra effects not listed in the spell. It is something I, as a DM, am going to shut down immediately without further argument.
Even if you think laughing fit should force a creature to open its mouth —which I again find questionable, because it works on creatures that don't have mouths at all, and the game's only restriction on what creatures it will and won't work on come from its trait tags—or you're happier playing a game where mechanics entail flavor that entails further mechanics in this way, which is your prerogative... I think any DM with half an eye for balance will still push back on you here. At the least, if I counterfactually had a table of players that -all- wanted to play this way, I'd be flavor-lawyering them back and telling them it's functioning as an incapacitation effect and will grant save upgrades. And that's assuming I didn't just ban the strategy outright, in the way I'd be playing whack-a-mole with silly strategies like this in 1E.
I don't think there is anything wrong with your stance on it.
I just use everything the designers gave me to help adjuicate what happens in game.Like if I narrate a wall, I have to enforce a wall is there in all the ways that make sense. If I narrate the effects of laughing fit I also need to enforce what that typically means for the thing its used against. If the thing doesnt have a mouth it would act as that thing without a mouth would as far as I can imagine it.
Why would shutting down concentrate actions matter? It is completely unnecessary in the majority of encounters.
You are exaggerating the effectiveness of these tactics. I've used all of them and nowhere near as strong as you are claiming. A bow is not as good as a caster with all the listed spells hammering from afar.
Some people hop on, claim something is really strong, then act like that would be strong in something I run. It would not. I'm not sure what you are playing in that makes these combos standout.
Disruptive Stance:
Because it hard counters an entire type of enemy. That’s (pardon my pun) disruptive to the game in a way that “peak magus damage sustained a bit longer” just isn’t. Even against enemies that don’t have any concentrate or manipulate actions at all you’re still a fighter sitting right next to them, with the ability to punish them anytime they try to get up from prone, which you can probably inflict yourself since why wouldn’t you build for that on a multi reaction fighter.You shut down an entire type of enemy by existing in their proximity, you turn off any parts of a monster’s kit that happen to be concentrate, you inhibit escape, and you’re still a multi reaction fighter with all the power that implies.
Stealth Tactics:
You really really underestimate high level sneak. Here’s a typical round for a stealth maxing character:I start out the turn invisible, I popped dust of disappearance round one. Or a 4th rank invis scroll - take your pick. A scroll/wand of mind blank ensures that I almost always defeat truesight and see the unseen, there’s maybe 5 creatures with high enough rank truesight to reliably beat mind blank. I’m also flying or air walking, also cast round one or from a perma flight item.
I then shoot my bow once from hidden (twice if i used a quickness potion), dealing my damage for the round with flat footed. After that I sneak in a random direction using my full movement speed - if I’m using air walk that can be...
If your group is good, you don't need this. It wastes time.
We already had a fighter take Disruptive Stance with reach. It works well enough against casters in melee, but casters in melee die fast anyway. If a caster enemy ends up in melee, they don't last long. Disruptive Stance ends up being overkill.
You're wasting a bunch of actions and time that a well built group doesn't need to spend actions and time on.
Besides the drowning stuff which I wouldn't much allow anyway, we tried all the other stuff you listed. It a waste of time.
The IW Starlit span magus is hard to deal with because it is its standard attack rotation and works against everything. Even one crit pretty much ends the encounter.
If your group is good, you don't need this. It wastes time.
Not exactly an argument against something being gamebreaking that a skilled group would win most encounters without it, given that most encounters are won even by unskilled groups.
The IW Starlit span magus is hard to deal with because it is its standard attack rotation and works against everything. Even one crit pretty much ends the encounter.
That’s not even an IW thing. You could have a starlit span with investigator and do around as well, using your devises to save slots. Or just a regular mono class magus getting a bit lucky and/or being good with resource conservation.
And like I’ve said before magus gets knocked off its gameplan by a stiff breeze. Slowed? Spellstriking half as often. Stupefied? Significant chance of losing that spellstrike. Hit by an attack and have to battle medicine? Spellstrike gone.
Like sure you can get lucky and crit a +4 boss for a morbillion damage. But that requires a good bit of luck. You may as well say that wizard is OP because if you luck out and get a crit fail on a spell combo double disintegrate you can evaporate a spawn of rovagug (this has actually happened to me)
R.E. IW, some damage calcs
Assume a 19-20th level magus hitting a spellstrike:
10th rank amped IW: 90 average damage
9th polar ray: 54 average damage + 40 (drained 2 on level 20 enemy) = 94 damage
9th rank blood feast: 94.5 average damage, get half that in temphp
8th rank polar ray: 45 damage + 40 drained = 85 damage
8th rank blood feast: 87.5
Ah yes, the stunningly game breaking power of doing exactly what magus can already do, just a bit more often and without the good rider effects. Truly this shatters the game's balance over it's knee, the most powerful combo in the game.
My record crit strike for imaginary weapon 282 I believe.
It isn't the average damage that is a problem with IW. It's the crit damage that pretty much ends encounters. Fights all done.
So when the fighter has tripped the target. The occult caster has dropped a synesthesia. The magus uses a sure strike with a heroism or other status bonus buff, then spends the focus point to drop the damage hammer, the fight is over.
No other archer can do this except the eldritch archer archetype. They can't do it quite as well due to no sure strike because the spellshot or what not is three actions.
The starlit sapn magus is a brutal damage dealer far ahead of every other archer.
I've seen bloodfeast on a magus and an elditch archer. It can be nasty as well, but only a few times a day. IW is up to three times a fight and all day.
It's crit strike damage is nuts. 20d8 doubled on a crit. We were having contests to see who could get the higher crit and tracking our damage with it.
It reached a point where it was such an outlier for damage that players would get tired of it. It ended a lot of boss encounters after debuffing the boss and then magus boom arrow on it. Lucky crit. Fight over even if boss near full hit points.