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Noticed something yesterday, and thought I'd pose the question. With Auto Fire and Area Fire, does weapon proficiency matter?
Starting at the beginning. I have a Witchwarper character who fancies himself a performer. He's trained in performance and carries a singing coil, an area (line) weapon with professional (performance). Per professional, I get to treat this martial weapon as a simple weapon for proficiency. Witchwarper is trained in simple weapons. No problem.
I've been reading through Guilt of the Graveworlds. The Replica Zo! Microphone looks cool. But it's an advanced weapon with the professional (performance) trait. Per professional, we treat the advanced weapon as martial if trained in performance. Witchwarper isn't proficient in martial weapons.
That said, it's an area (cone) weapon. When I read area attack (or auto attack for that matter), the DC of the attack is based on your class DC -- not your weapon proficiency. The witchwarper is trained in class DC. So that goes back to the topic question. Does the weapon proficiency matter? Am I missing an effect of being untrained in this weapon?
I was wondering about that, too. An easy fix would be to make Area Fire a trained-only activity; for a performance weapon, you'd need the listed level to properly do it at all.
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You are absolutely right, weapon proficiency doesn't affect directly Area Fire or Auto Fire. This is intended (shown here [back from playtest]), as those weapons are less about the accuracy and more about how to make those AoEs more deadly, which classes with high class DC usually understand.
Yet features like Weapon Expertise will still affect the damage of those weapons, and therefore your weapon proficiency has an indirect effect. Or primary strike, when you are a soldier and you are actually making strikes while doing AoE.
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You are absolutely right, weapon proficiency doesn't affect directly Area Fire or Auto Fire. This is intended (shown here [back from playtest]), ...
I appreciate the call back. Thanks for pointing that out.
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You weapon proficiency is not used.
You do use your class proficiency. That does make a difference.
Weapon proficiency doesn't matter at all for Area Fire or Auto-Fire, so even if you're untrained in an area weapon, you can use it equally well or better than someone who's legendary in that weapon. Whether or not this is ideal design is up for debate, but that is the way it's designed on purpose, and this means your Witchwarper should be able to use a replica Zo! microphone without any problems.
It feels unintended because they give them mechanics that at a glance only make sense for if they work like normal weapons. There is very little reason for them to be advanced when they don't use normal proficiency to begin with (I imagine the only thing would be for mechanics that can pick weapons to start with like investor) and something like Professional trait is non functional 90% of the time on them because that trait only affects attack rolls so only comes up with the soldier specific way of making attack rolls with area weapons.
It isn't particularly intuitive.
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It just feels REALLY strange that if you want to spray a whole bunch of bullets it doesn't matter at all if you've ever seen the weapon, know how to use it, are good with it, etc.
In practice it really isn't a huge deal. Soldiers are the only characters who seem to regularly use AoE weapons other than grenades. And if you're planning on using AoE weapons as a non soldier there is lots of incentive to take the soldier Archetype anyway (especially at higher levels).
I personally agree that it certainly can feel unintended for some weapons to not rely on weapon proficiency, as I do think it's really janky for an entire subset of weapons to not work at all with weapon proficiency. I also think trying to make AoE damage sit inside the realm of primarily single-target weapons really was a case of trying to make a square peg fit into a round hole, and that's come with a whole slew of knock-on effects. At the same time, I still agree with Justnobodyfqwl that regardless of how one feels things should be, that's how AoE weapons work by current design, so RAW it's absolutely fine for a Witchwarper to wield a weaponized microphone despite having no proficiency in it. If nothing else as well, the silver lining to AoE weapons being so undesirable to most characters is that the weirdness of using one's class DC for a weapon one is untrained in doesn't come up all that often in practice.
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It just feels REALLY strange that if you want to spray a whole bunch of bullets it doesn't matter at all if you've ever seen the weapon, know how to use it, are good with it, etc.
In practice it really isn't a huge deal. Soldiers are the only characters who seem to regularly use AoE weapons other than grenades. And if you're planning on using AoE weapons as a non soldier there is lots of incentive to take the soldier Archetype anyway (especially at higher levels).
It doesn't matter. Even in IRL, you rarely aim something like an M-60. The machine gunner is suppressing the enemy and likely hitting some. Riflemen aim and make direct fire kills.
Anyone can jump behind a machine gun and just hold down the trigger and move it left and right. Now, they might suck at reloading it without training, or clearing a jam, so having area fire work off of a DC makes a lot more sense than it would to have it be tied to anything else.
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It just feels REALLY strange that if you want to spray a whole bunch of bullets it doesn't matter at all if you've ever seen the weapon, know how to use it, are good with it, etc.
In practice it really isn't a huge deal. Soldiers are the only characters who seem to regularly use AoE weapons other than grenades. And if you're planning on using AoE weapons as a non soldier there is lots of incentive to take the soldier Archetype anyway (especially at higher levels).
It doesn't matter. Even in IRL, you rarely aim something like an M-60. The machine gunner is suppressing the enemy and likely hitting some. Riflemen aim and make direct fire kills.
Anyone can jump behind a machine gun and just hold down the trigger and move it left and right. Now, they might suck at reloading it without training, or clearing a jam, so having area fire work off of a DC makes a lot more sense than it would to have it be tied to anything else.
That is not how I was trained many years ago in the Canadian Army with automatic rifles and sub machine guns and it was definitely the case that some people regularly scored better than others.
Note automatic rifle is NOT the same as a tripod mounted machine gun. What you're describing is pretty accurate for tripod mounted machine guns.
My big thing is yeah it is silly a Kineticist is better at Area Fire then most but as a Dev pointed out. Kineticist specialize is area style attacks so a Area Fire/Auto-Fire weapon is no different then firing a exploding fire impulse which I Think is cool but also seems silly that a Kineticist with a gun can out perform the Fighter class, The KING of Weaponry. This is not including multiclassing into Soldier just for Primary Target at level 10. Which trades off +2 Area/Auto-Fire DC for I believe +4 to Primary Target.
Slightly off topic but nothing is stopping you from Archetyping Soldier as a Fighter which may actually be stronger then the Soldier as a whole... If you make it to level 10 to steal Primary Target. However that is like pointing out Magus is better with Psychic Dedication.
It just feels REALLY strange that if you want to spray a whole bunch of bullets it doesn't matter at all if you've ever seen the weapon, know how to use it, are good with it, etc.
In practice it really isn't a huge deal. Soldiers are the only characters who seem to regularly use AoE weapons other than grenades. And if you're planning on using AoE weapons as a non soldier there is lots of incentive to take the soldier Archetype anyway (especially at higher levels).
It doesn't matter. Even in IRL, you rarely aim something like an M-60. The machine gunner is suppressing the enemy and likely hitting some. Riflemen aim and make direct fire kills.
Anyone can jump behind a machine gun and just hold down the trigger and move it left and right. Now, they might suck at reloading it without training, or clearing a jam, so having area fire work off of a DC makes a lot more sense than it would to have it be tied to anything else.
That is not how I was trained many years ago in the Canadian Army with automatic rifles and sub machine guns and it was definitely the case that some people regularly scored better than others.
Note automatic rifle is NOT the same as a tripod mounted machine gun. What you're describing is pretty accurate for tripod mounted machine guns.
To add to this with my own military experience, firing to suppress and firing to kill are so drastically different if we are using that as a metric for how it makes sense in SF2e then it would also make sense that Auto-Fire (to be specific to the kind of weapon talked about above) should give your enemies a +4 to their reflex save, though apply Suppressed to all but the Crit Success. Spraying and Praying doesn't get you the results that we see in SF2e. It also isn't 2x number of targets for ammo expended either.
I think Paizo is wrong to not factor in training to Area/Auto weapons, but as was mentioned above they are committed to it, so get used to it.
I will say, I do think it says quite a bit about some discussions on these forums when the most popular comment is the one making an erroneous appeal to realism, rather than the comments mutually corroborating each other with the posters' actual real experiences.
Personally, I do think there's room for a compromise here where using Area Fire or Auto-Fire with a weapon you're untrained with has you use an untrained DC rather than your normal class DC. Although this would still have characters with legendary DCs outperforming Fighters and Gunslingers with AoE guns, it would at least help align the fiction a bit better, such that the Kineticist firing a rotolaser wouldn't be good at it unless they actually trained with it. This is something I remember Thursty mentioning as a prospective fix when this topic was brought up at the start of the field tests, but that never materialized in the final product.