Basically me and another GM have different opinion when you look at the "damage dealt".
Requirements Your last action was a successful Strike with the barrow’s edge Effect Your blade glows as it absorbs your foe’s vitality. You regain Hit Points equal to half the damage dealt.
He looks at what damage the target took, applying both resistance and weakness, block and also accounting fore hit-points left, so if the target only have 2hp you get only 1 healing.
While i would rule it as half of the total damage of the attack before resistance, weakness, and block.
Basically he checks hp lost at Step 4: Reduce Hit Points
And i argue its should be at Step 2: Damage Type: "Once you've calculated how much damage you deal, you'll need to determine the damage type."
How do you/Would you rule it? or do you have any other insight?
I'd check it at the HP lost step, and I would expect that to be pretty common. While you might be correct from how the damage rules are written, it results in draining life from a shield and recovering health from something immune to the damage type, while also requiring keeping track of a separate number from halfway through calculations.
However, your way does avoid giving the player additional information about exactly how much health was lost, and it does line up with the damage rules wording, so I don't think you're wrong.
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I think the other GM is definitely more right here.
You activate the ability after you've already concluded the attack, and it specifically says "damage dealt" not damage you would deal or damage roll.
I mean think about it from a plain language stance: Your damage roll is a 6 and the enemy has weakness 5. If someone asked how much damage you did, I think 11 is clearly the more correct number to offer.
Here's another edge case for yall, if the exemplar gets Swipe, or another "one swing, multiple hits" attack, how do you rule it?
Do you add the dmg of both targets hit together for the Drink healing?
Is that Swipe style multi-hit substantially different from the exemplar getting a power-attack style ability that increases the damage of a single strike?
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Here's another edge case for yall, if the exemplar gets Swipe, or another "one swing, multiple hits" attack, how do you rule it?
Do you add the dmg of both targets hit together for the Drink healing?
Is that Swipe style multi-hit substantially different from the exemplar getting a power-attack style ability that increases the damage of a single strike?
They can't use Drink of My Foes in that case. The last action has to be Strike, not Swipe.
I can see the ambiguity.
In the process for calculating damage, 'damage dealt' is not the same as 'damage taken by the target'. Resistance, Weakness, and Immunity can change the amount of damage. As can things like Shield Block. And temporary HP.
And in colloquial natural language, 'damage dealt' can also refer to the actual final amount of damage applied to the target's HP pool.
I think the important thing is to make a ruling at the table that is fun, balanced, consistent, and makes abilities feel impactful.
For consistency considerations, I would also bring up Share Life. Does the damage split happen based on the damage that the attacker rolls, or the final damage calculation result that the targeted and protected ally would take?
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My interpretation is "damage dealt" means how much HP did the GM or player remove from the character's sheet. That means adjustments due to resistance or weakness, etc all factor in. And if you would have dealt 20 points of damage, but the enemy only had 2 hp, well you only dealt 2 actual damage.
For me, "damage dealt" is always damage taken by the target. But the damage you rolled can be modified by many factor.
There are complications to think about, like shield block. The shield takes some of the damage, rather than the character. But the ability references damage dealt, you dealt damage to both the shield and the character. There's a small argument you should count it. But flavor wise, were talking about "stealing vitality from the target" and I would only count it for living things damaged.
In the case of Share Life, I would count the shared damage as damage dealt (as long as it was a living creature).
I also probably wouldn't let it work on Undead or Constructs, because they don't have vitality to steal, though the ability isn't explicitly written that way.
Requirements: Your last action was a successful Strike with the barrow’s edge
Activities contain actions, yes?
Any activities that ends with a Strike, would still meet the requirement,Sudden Charge: 2 Stride + Strike works fine?
Oh, wow, didn't expect this to be a nasty rule hairball. It's the subordinate actions catch, but from the other direction.
An action might allow you to use a simpler action—usually one of the Basic Actions—in a different circumstance or with different effects. This subordinate action still has its normal traits and effects, but it's modified in any ways listed in the larger action. For example, an activity that tells you to Stride up to half your Speed alters the normal distance you can move in a Stride. The Stride would still have the move trait, would still trigger reactions that occur based on movement, and so on. The subordinate action doesn't gain any of the traits of the larger action unless specified. The action that allows you to use a subordinate action doesn't require you to spend more actions or reactions to do so; that cost is already factored in.
Using an activity is not the same as using any of its subordinate actions. For example, the quickened condition you get from the haste spell lets you spend an extra action each turn to Stride or Strike, but you couldn't use the extra action for an activity that includes a Stride or Strike. As another example, if you used an action that specified, “If the next action you use is a Strike,” an activity that includes a Strike wouldn't count, because the next thing you are doing is starting an activity, not using the Strike basic action
Initializing the Sudden Charge is stated to not count for "next action is Stride" requirements, because the next thing you do is initialize the activity (Sudden Charge). But the reverse, "your previous action was ____" is left ambiguous.
The question becomes:
After you perform Sudden Charge, what is your "previous action?"
Is the action order: Sudden Charge --> Stride --> Stride --> Strike --> [next action] ?
Or are we supposed to inject an unmentioned "closer" action: Sudden Charge Start --> Stride --> Stride --> Strike --> Sudden Charge End --> [next action] ?
A most interesting topic of discussion!
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Hmmmm....not very clear how this should be run.
I would probably lean to the side of the subordinate actions do not fulfill the requirements of "previous action was X" unless there is an official clarification otherwise. Hard to see all the possible interactions of letting it work...so it's probably best to generally say no.
Gain 3A for turn --> Double Slice --> Strike --> Strike --> D.o.m.Foes
So if the 2nd hit whiffs, then D.o.m.Foes is invalid, as your last action was a whiffed Strike.
If both hit, I'd say you still only drink from that previous 1 Strike. Double Slice and it's cousins combine the damage for purposes of res/weakness. To possibly double the heal, the feat would need something more specific of an override, like "for all other purposes, treat these two attacks as a single Strike," and D.Slice does not have that text.
Which is why I used Swipe as my example, as it's a genuinely rare case where a single Strike could hit more than one target. To be self-consistent, I would rule that Swipe could improve the healing, as any Strike damage buff can also do.
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For calculating the Double Slice heal, you're now in uncharted edge case territory, and I'd cut the benefit/loss of weakness/res in half.
(though if only the 2nd strike hit, then that still uses the full amount)
(and don't forget you'd need the Twin Stars feat to split the blade for Double Slice to be eligible in the first place)
The problem being that, because it counts as a single hit for weaknesses and resistances, how do you divide the weakness/resistance between the two Strikes if both would trigger it?If both hit, I'd say you still only drink from that previous 1 Strike. Double Slice and it's cousins combine the damage for purposes of res/weakness. To possibly double the heal, the feat would need something more specific of an override, like "for all other purposes, treat these two attacks as a single Strike," and D.Slice does not have that text.
You trust yourself / GM to create a reasonable answer. Cut the res/weakness difference in half as you re-split the damage for the sake of calculating the heal.
The double swing gained 10 dmg from weakness? Only 5 of that contributes to the heal, etc.
So one minor correction, Double Slice doesn't use the "for the purposes of" language. It says "combine their damage" with no caveats. Twice-
This ability is written really weirdly. It tells you to combine their damage, then add effects from "both" weapons" ... then it says you only get precision damage once but get to pick which attack gets it... which doesn't mean anything because the damage has already been combined and you've already applied the effects of both weapons.
Then it tells you to combine the damage again for some reason?? And reminds you that resistance and weaknesses only get applied once which is entirely redundant because you've already combined the damage... two times!
The second section is so wordy and you could remove like a third of it without changing the meaning at all I do not understand what they were doing here
That said, we can replace Double Slice with Flurry of Blows and it's the same conundrum since Flurry does use "for the purposes of" ... not sure why they have two abilities do almost the same thing but worded in completely different ways.
wrt "last action" abilities... there's been a longstanding debate over whether an activity with subordinate actions should be treated like a container (double slice contains two strikes in it that are wholly removed from the rest of the game) or a string (you start a double slice then strike twice).
I have to agree that it feels broken and unintuitively complex to have the last thing you do be strike an enemy but then argue it doesn't actually count because it was initiated with an activity, the logic is never explicitly laid out and it has some weird knock on effects.
That said there are a handful of abilities that do want to look back like that. Flensing Slice requires your last action to be Double Slice.
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That said there are a handful of abilities that do want to look back like that. Flensing Slice requires your last action to be Double Slice.
Which doesn't necessarily preclude that the game might generally say: [You're last action was a strike, even when in a "container action"]
But it is good to note that at least some abilities treat container actions as the action taken, and not their subordinates.
It might even be that you can treat is as both.
Hard to know the intention, or if it can even be written succinctly.
It might be that generally it counts as whatever the last subordinate action is, but for certain actions (like Flensing Slice) it's looking for the container and obviously it isn't meant to not function at all so creates a kind of specific exception.
Yeah, I had to ninja my own post to avoid making an incorrect statement about Double Slice. The text does get to the same destination as it's better-written cousins, but... oof. When I re-read its text, I facepalmed at how poorly it's written. Annoying how it blatantly looks like a rough draft for the Flurry family that was never updated once the team got their wording down.
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For me, the main RaI reason I would allow "last activity action" to qualify for Drink, etc, is because it makes for better gameplay while not being a balance risk ( because other amp synergies already work).
Right now, you can juice the crap out of the Drink healing by stacking as many "next Strike" damage enhancements as you choose to obtain. Even effects like an Energy Mutagen's bonus dmg will improve Drink's healing. The ability itself clearly wants you to buff the Strike dmg as much as possible, there's no limit/restraint on Drink that would be loopholed around.
This "plz buff ur Strike" aspect of Drink makes countless options into nearly-false choices for such a PC; they are incredibly incentivized to avoid all incompatible enhancements, while selecting only the compatible ones.
For the "birds eye balance view":
If Activities like Sudden Charge selectively denied the contained Strike from applying its damage buffs, and/or the activity blocked things like Sneak Attack dmg procs, that would be my signal that such abilities were designed around only the base/raw form of Strike. That would do a lot to characterize compatibility with the "prev action was Strike" abilities as an unintended loophole to amp the activity.
This "boosting the contained Strike is valid" tells me that the system is fine with (and directly encourages) one to improve Activity-contained Strikes however they can.
Condemning Drink to only ever be compatible with raw-Strike would not be justified by "balance concerns" and would just be a pain in the ass that doesn't even nerf it. That ruling only artificially limits what boosts are compatible (to only passive and pre-Strike boosts).
And it would limit Drink in a way that would be suuuuper frustrating for a martial in actual play, who are all about Activities that modify Strikes.
I'd bet a whole lot that many tables have already been allowing things like Sudden Charge --> Drink without even pausing to think much about it, at most only needing a vague/quick thought of "well, the other ruling would be 'too bad to be true.'"
Oh, yeah. I never cared for any arguments that counted compound activities as Strikes, but seeing all this here - no. Only Strikes are 'Strikes'.
Maybe in some cases it can be reviewed, but generally - deal with it.Then Investigators and Rogues are boned and it is TBTBT.
Both of their precision damage class abilities (Strategic Strike and Sneak Attack, respectively) would only ever apply to the Strike basic action, not Strike subordinate actions. Double Slice offers some insight that, in fact, it does not work that way with the Specific overriding General by limiting ticks of precision damage to only one of the subordinate Strikes.
Under a "Only Strikes are 'Strikes'" convention -- note, I mentally translate that to: "Only basic action Strikes, not subordinate action Strikes, are 'Strikes'[/i] -- only Precision Rangers would be able to gain precision damage when performing a Double Slice since their Edge states (with added emphasis), "The first time you hit your hunted prey..."
Then there is Mug. It is a two-action activity with a Strike subordinate action, and it says (with added emphasis): "... Make a melee Strike against an adjacent enemy. If you hit and deal sneak attack damage, you can also attempt to Steal from the target, even if the target is in combat." The verbiage implies that the subordinate Strike, in general, will deal Sneak Attack damage if the target is off-guard.
The intent seems pretty clear that Strategic Strike and Sneak Attack apply to any Strike, basic or subordinate. Otherwise, Mug would have had different language creating a Specific override to the General; something like, "If your target is off-guard and you hit, deal sneak attack damage and you may also attempt to Steal..."
Since neither Strategic Strike nor Sneak Attack have any verbiage indicating that those abilities are creating a Specific vs. General override, I conclude that, in general, there is no distinction between simple Strikes and subordinate Strikes; they are all Strikes.
It does create some disconnect between "your next action is" and "your last action was". Any "your next action is" a Strike would not work with Double Slice, Flurry of Blows, Mug, Skirmish Strike, Sudden Charge, etcetera. The next action is the activity, not the subordinate actions. Conversely, "your last action was" a Strike does work with activities that end with a subordinate Strike.
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When your enemy can't properly defend itself, you take advantage to deal extra damage. If you Strike a creature that has the off-guard condition with an...
This does a good job of helping to iron out that, yes, activity-contained Strikes must be Strikes. They do not get some sub-label that renders them incompatible with abilities asking for "Strikes." Special, modified Strikes are still Strikes.
To block the "previous action was ___" abilities, there still remains the ~interpretation where you add in an extra, unwritten "closing action" to go between a contained-Strike and the end of activity.
[Skirmish Strike: Start] --> [Step] --> [Strike] --> [Skirmish Strike: End]
However, to do this would in my opinion be inventing new text that does not exist, with the goal to make such "previous action" abilities incompatible.
I do not see any reason to do so; I do not think this would improve gameplay, nor do I see any sign of that being the dev intent.
I really do not see how one can read an activity like Skirmish Strike and come to the conclusion that there is supposed to be some sort of "ghost action" at the end, which only exists to deny the rare "previous action was ___" abilities.
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TBH that's kind of my trouble making a definitive ruling here. The argument against spends a lot of time inventing concepts that aren't in the rules. Disentangling this. Isolating that. Toying with order of operations rules that don't exist. We're less in the realm of discussing concrete rules and more devising convenient inferences in order to reach a predetermined goal.
FWIW, metamagic already works like that - there's no case of a compound action involving Casting A Spell also benefitting from metamagic or catalysts, and items that Activate to cast instead of flat out having Cast a SPelldon't count either
I can't think of any metamagic feat that you use after casting a spell. Do you have an example of the interaction you're talking about?
The Guns & Gears Remaster Errata changed the wording on Clear a Path to allow it to benefit from Actions or Activities that include Strikes, rather than only a plain Strike. The fact that they felt the need to make this change tells me that things that say "Your previous action was a Strike" only work with basic Strikes.
Additionally, I think it's very intentional that every weapon Ikon ability is either 2 actions or a basic Strike + 1 action follow-up.
It's mostly to establish that there's a common case of actions requiring your 'next action to be X' only triggers if it's X and not a compound action involving X, so naturally anything that requires your 'previous action is X' should follow the same sense.
I can't think of any metamagic feat that you use after casting a spell. Do you have an example of the interaction you're talking about?
I mean, the argument in favor of the latter working is that you look at each individual act being performed in sequence, so no the logic wouldn't hold both ways because the abilities are asking for different things.
It also doesn't make a lot of sense to me that because a certain ability works in one way that another ability with a completely different requirement would have a similar outcome. There's no particular reason you should expect parity between them because they literally aren't even asking for the same thing.
That was the goal of Pixel Popper's look at Sneak Attack, etc.
For "you make a Strike / ___ action" abilities like Sneak Attack to work with activity-Strikes, that limits the possibilities more than you suggest.
The ~"the Activity is the only action" version is outright incompatible. Note how the brackets nest the sub actions into not being "real actions" anymore.
Next action strike?: NO, is Skirmish Strike |
[Skirmish Strike: (Step) -> (Strike)] -> Prev action Strike?: NO, was Skirmish Strike
To use that idea, it means that the *only* real "action" you are performing is the Activity. You otherwise cannot have the same Activity-as-action being both the "before" and the "previous" contained actions. That singular "thing" cannot occupy both the "next" and "previous" spot without removing the sub-actions from being real links in the chain.
But this is the possibility that *definitely* cannot work. Because that would break all abilities that key off "When you perform a ____ action" being activity-compatible.
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This leads to the "injected ghost action blocker" being the closest to a Raw-legit way to deny Sudden Charge --> Drink.
You still have the Action initialization to count as the first "action" in the chain, but need to add an extra closer action at the end. This is the only way to allow "___ action" abilities to trigger off sub-actions, while still preventing such a sub-action from being the last action in sequence.
[Skirmish Strike] -> [Step] -> [Strike] -> [Skirmish Strike: end]
Here's the text at issue without clipping:
An action might allow you to use a simpler action—usually one of the Basic Actions—in a different circumstance or with different effects. This subordinate action still has its normal traits and effects, but it's modified in any ways listed in the larger action. For example, an activity that tells you to Stride up to half your Speed alters the normal distance you can move in a Stride. The Stride would still have the move trait, would still trigger reactions that occur based on movement, and so on. The subordinate action doesn't gain any of the traits of the larger action unless specified. The action that allows you to use a subordinate action doesn't require you to spend more actions or reactions to do so; that cost is already factored in.
Using an activity is not the same as using any of its subordinate actions. For example, the quickened condition you get from the haste spell lets you spend an extra action each turn to Stride or Strike, but you couldn't use the extra action for an activity that includes a Stride or Strike. As another example, if you used an action that specified, “If the next action you use is a Strike,” an activity that includes a Strike wouldn't count, because the next thing you are doing is starting an activity, not using the Strike basic action
This text exists to block things like using Haste's 1A for a Skrimish Strike: Strike -> Step.
It instructs us to consider the initialization of an activity to itself be its own "action" or else you get mechanical problems where a player could attempt to get a free 0A Step via Hasted Skirmish Strike, etcetra.
This is needed because it is the activity step of the process where action costs are spent, so everything needs to be locked in and committed at that moment.
I really, really do not see any indication that we are supposed to denying the last action of an activity chain status as "your previous action"
nor do I see any mechanical need for that to be the case.
(Again, we are talking about Exemplar's character-defining super action. For the PC to select a self-heal that only works conditionally, and heals for 1/2 the dmg, is not a balance risk. That choice trades away options like Gleaming Blade, Aegis, Horn o Plenty, etc.)
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The text makes it clear that activity sub-actions still qualify for and trigger reactions and the like, then imo they also work to fulfill "Requirement" clauses.
Are you going to block a creature from using a revenge-style ability that keys off the PC's hitting w/ a Strike, because "activity sub actions don't count?"
I mean, I quoted the Spellstrike rules text - unless we think that 'previous action' and 'next action' work differently, ...
Yes, we do!
That's the whole point, lol. We only inject a "ghost action" when initializing an activity because the text instructs us to. This is because Quickened and other abilities allow for only specific actions, and that "ghost activity action" rather elegantly stops such action shenanigans.
There is no instruction to put another ghost "closer action" at the end of an activity sequence. It might be some human symmetry bias to assume that, but it's just not there.
Because it's not there, we cannot *prove* the rules intended to leave it blank.
We can point to the many abilities of Twist the Knife's ilk that seem designed to work with activity-Strikes, and would be quite "bad" if forced to work with raw-Strikes only.
I can say the Provocator Archetype has a Flourishing Finish feat that would be rendered incompatible with the archetype's own modded-Strikes.
But I cannot prove that this current RaW (which allows the "prev __" to work with modded-Strikes) is intentional.
Really? I thought 'If your next action' and 'Your last action was' would follow the same logic for compound actions
They follow the same logic but because the requirements are different so are the outcomes.
"Your next action is" doesn't work with spellstrike because the next thing you do is activate Spellstrike.
"Your last action was", at least under the sequence based framework, would be the strike.
Either way I think it's clear RAW that anything that looks at the 'next action' or 'previous action' only sees the combined action but anything that sees 'an action' sees the individual action.
I mean it's obviously not clear RAW because no one has been able to find a rule that actually says that.
It's possible that's Paizo's design intention, but there's absolutely no concrete rules guidance here.
but it's equally true to think of the combined action as a container and anything that checks specifically for the previous/next action to only see the container
Right, that's definitely the main other framework, but it we're still stuck with the problem that this concept is never defined in the rules... which is problematic if it's meant to be a fundamental way we're supposed to look at certain mechanics.
If an activity is not its subordinate actions, then it gains none of the traits or other properties of its subordinate actions, no?
Seems like quite the slippery slope as that logical process and line of reasoning would completely break the game when taken to its logical conclusion.
Ergo, it must be the case that Swipe can be used prior to Drink From My Foes.
