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I'm of the same opinion, and I think it's one of those cases where flavor clashes with gameplay enjoyment: it makes intuitive sense that a formless blob would generally have no weak points, but it feels awful to play against when your class's entire damage mechanic is precision damage. Paizo and players have talked about premaster golems and their legacy design shutting down a lot of player tools, but oozes I think have a similar problem where the combination of precision immunity and mindlessness means a huge number of abilities won't work on them at all, and Swashbucklers in particular will be hard-pressed to make much use of their kit.
In general, I think precision damage would be much better off changed as precision resistance, as even a high resistance for a creature's level would be less punishing than immunity. I also think incorporeal creatures shouldn't have precision immunity at all; rather, that should just be a part of their normal resistances that vanish when you use the right damage: your rapier might not do much against a ghost, but if it's got a ghost touch rune, then you should have no trouble piercing their ghostly heart.
Although this is a broader topic to discuss, I'm also just generally not a fan of hard immunity: so long as immunities to large swathes of abilities like mental or poison exist, the game can't properly accommodate a mesmerist or poisoner class unless they have a built-in means of working around that immunity. Immunity to fire on creatures like devils also prevents single-element fire Kineticists from doing much at all in certain encounters and campaigns, and generally creatures built to shut down most means of dealing with them, like will-o'-wisps, I think tend to make for encounters that are more annoying than engaging. This is probably something that is only likely to change in a new edition, but I'd like that new edition to redo immunities and resistances so that there's more emphasis on soft counters, rather than hard counters, so that some strategies are more or less effective depending on the enemy but no build ever gets shut down completely.
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For balance purposes, it should be more like 50 percent less damage rather than immunity or a resistance like they did with golems and spells. When immunity ruins a classes entire stick, that's not great even though it may add a touch of realism.
For the rogue you kind of shrug because the overall class is so amazing. It really hurts the swashbuckler as that one big precision damage hit is most of what they do.
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It is very demoralizing.
Perhaps, for homebrew, replace precision immunity with like resistance 20.
I think it doesn't come up in a decent number of campaigns, but whenever it does come up it sucks to find an enemy immune to basically anything you would do.
I will say, this is part of why I like to play fighter with multiclass spellcaster dedication. To give me some options. Especially on like a two-handed weapon fighter, I feel it's easier to give up some class feats to get some spell casting options.
As a newbie, it was very surprising to see that precision immunity was ~common when things like flat elemental resistances were right there alongside them.
Very silly and unevenly crippling to select classes.
I fully support all precision immunity being swapped into resistance. In order for it to be serious, but not fully nullify damage, I think I'd default to something like 3 + (Lvl/2).
That would put L 1 monsters with 4 resistance, which is a lot, L10 with 8, seems appropriate, L15 @11 resistance, etc.
Honestly, even that value might need to be tuned down even more, to perhaps just Lvl/2 rounded up.
Rogues are only dealing 1d6 until L 5, so starting at 4 is too rough, imo.
As a one-off battle in an entire campaign, I don't see much problem with it. It isn't unique to precision damage either. Try playing a Fire Kineticist or even a Flames Oracle against a creature immune to Fire damage (one that isn't primarily made of fire or has the Fire trait).
It would be a problem if precision immune creatures feature prominently in a campaign and that was not mentioned at session zero when people are creating characters. Having your character shut down hard for the entire campaign would not be fun.
My memory might be failing me, but I believe in the playtest elementals had Precision Immunity. In one chapter, there were many elementals, and they tore up my players' PCs because of this immunity. Thankfully Paizo pulled back on that for oh-so-common elementals! And I did learn to question having 2+ PCs who rely on Precision Damage in the same party. I doubt PFS accounts for this though, so there could be quite lopsided fights depending on party composition (especially as I'd imagine Rogues being quite popular for all the skill challenges).
Much like many other Immunities were lessened to Resistances, maybe Paizo should've followed suit here w/ scaling based on level. But...if there's no weak spot, nowhere special to strike w/ precision, what does this represent in game? And a standard scaling of 5 at low level up to 20 at high level already neutralizes most Precision Damage, so how much would really be gained? (Outside of crits, which I believe most creatures immune to Precision Damage are also immune to.)
In 3.X/PF1 I'd always emphasized players to have a secondary trick for when their primary one meets an immunity, i.e. tripping snakes. Yet I'm unsure there's a smooth solution here for standard-trope builds despite having a few builds in mind. Do all Dex-Rogues & Swashbucklers need to carry abnormal amounts of alchemy? Maybe in the same way full plate martials need an answer to ranged battles.
And how much of a Rogue's awesomeness/damage output was balanced around them having hiccups like this?
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Oh, and as long as we are fixing that immunity issue, poison immunity is also waaaay too common, imo. Like, 3x or more than what it should be.
It's very similar to that question of elemental creatures being immune / not immune to precision damage. I get why it might make ~narrative sense to want to grant psn immunity broadly at first glance, but as soon as you take a look at what's actually immune...
Yes, I can see full psn immunity staying for undead and even constructs. That's reasonable enough.
But aberrations? Fiends? Random L4 unique Teifling NPCs? Plants? Even Fey?
Holy hell, poison immunity is thrown on waaaay too many creatures, and it should not be there. Plants are an especially aggravating one, as some writers think plants should be categorically weak to poison, while other say they are categorically immune. Have fun with that.
No, it's not reasonable to represent a little L3 cicada's affinity for psn by granting it full immunity, that's nuts.
If Paizo treated other types like poison, you'd have every fire-throwing creature become outright immune to fire, instead of that immunity being exclusive to the "made of fire" sorts of elemental-adjacent creatures.
Looks like 825 psn immune vs 267 precision immune vs 148 fire immune, btw.
Yeah I really dislike it. It comes up more often than I thought it would. The game I'm playing in (an ap) has had many constructs, swarms, undead, ghosts, and oozes. Precisions immunity, mindlessness, and general physical resistance has been a pain for many of the players (we have a gunslinger and a rogue, I'm a kineticist) and it feels pretty s@!#ty for them.
Personally I love the theme of swashbuckler but I hate how coming up against so many of the typical Pathfinder enemies shaves off so much of what a typical swash wants to do. Mental immunity and precision immunity. And not even a (super) late game feat to get around precision immunity. Swash, at least, should have a finisher that deals non precision damage as an option, imo.
Hold on, this search cannot be right.
I cannot get an AoN search to show more than one single creature in pf2 as weak to poison? Does that seem correct to yall? Is poison type really just outright not considered to be a valid/normal weakness?
Starting to make sense how the same developers ended up creating a system with Toxicologist as the worst of the very worst, lol.
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Oh, and as long as we are fixing that immunity issue, poison immunity is also waaaay too common, imo. Like, 3x or more than what it should be.
It's very similar to that question of elemental creatures being immune / not immune to precision damage. I get why it might make ~narrative sense to want to grant psn immunity broadly at first glance, but as soon as you take a look at what's actually immune...
Yes, I can see full psn immunity staying for undead and even constructs. That's reasonable enough.
But aberrations? Fiends? Random L4 unique Teifling NPCs? Plants? Even Fey?Holy hell, poison immunity is thrown on waaaay too many creatures, and it should not be there. Plants are an especially aggravating one, as some writers think plants should be categorically weak to poison, while other say they are categorically immune. Have fun with that.
No, it's not reasonable to represent a little L3 cicada's affinity for psn by granting it full immunity, that's nuts.
If Paizo treated other types like poison, you'd have every fire-throwing creature become outright immune to fire, instead of that immunity being exclusive to the "made of fire" sorts of elemental-adjacent creatures.
Looks like 825 psn immune vs 267 precision immune vs 148 fire immune, btw.
Yes! Heck poison immunity is so common they had to make the alchemist poison spec have a special carve out so they can effect immune targets.
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When used in moderation I like it. I like it when parties need to flex to deal with different threats and adopt different strategy and tactics. But I think too many creatures have precision immunity, especially when compared to say a "prone immunity", that I feel is often more thematic/less build impacting, but was basically removed in 2e compared to 1e. I also like the Critical Hit immunity and how it negates the extra damage, but still allows riders on the attack. I also think precision immunity should have more guidelines for decreasing total HP, or other changes to defenses to balance it, different from more vanilla IWR advice.
However I think any given "puzzle" fight shouldn't exceed about 5-10% of the encounters in a campaign. Characters should be able to use their skills and class kit. Ideally (and this is likely asking too much for a published encounter/adventure), if you've taken away a key bit of a class kit (precision immunity), you should ensure that the monster is still susceptible to something that that category of character can likely do. For instance, precision-based classes are often skill-classes as well, so if the creature has an exploited weakness from some skill (it is auto-fascinated by Performance/Acrobatics?), or is alongside a hazard of some kind to be disabled, I have less problems with the immunity taking the character out of the fight.
Precision immunity I find to be a bit worse than mindless -- most builds that run into the mindless trait causing problems tend to have a broader range of tools in thier arsenal and can come up with alternate ways to contribute. Precision immunity tends to be more core to the build and is harder to work around.
In general I think immunity feels bad from a player's perspective. I don't think it should be removed entirely because it makes sense for certain kinds of monsters to be immune to certain attacks, but there wouldn't be a problem if 1 or 2 monsters are immune to a specific type of damage or effect, with maybe the rest of monsters in the same familiy being resistant. For example, slimes or ghosts being immune to precision damage makes sense since they don't have organs, but it could be that low level slimes and ghosts are instead resistant while high level slimes and ghosts are immune.
Even if this didn't make sense in-universe, it also doesn't make sense when players become undead (with whatever method) and they just happens to have way less benefits than regular undead because it would be unbalanced. Players do interact with monsters too so the same logic should apply to them as well.
This is one of those things that has existed for a long time and every edition, fewer things have it. Which tells me it isn't very fun.
It needs to be really rare given how it acts as a fairly hard counter to a couple of classes. Immunities in general have that problem, though those one is broader than "fire immunity", which only really shuts down a single gate Fire Kineticist (even a Flames Oracle should have some other type of damage to use instead).
Like, I don't have a problem with hyperspecialists that are really good running into something that their specialty doesn't work on. That's why you should always build to be able to do more than one thing. Removing that wouldn't really be good for the game.
If someone really only takes Fire effects and they run into a Fire Elemental? There's a valuable lesson in that for them about the importance of versatility.
But in the case of "my class by design does precision damage and that's baked in no matter what I do about it", blocking that entirely is pretty rough on that class.
Hold on, this search cannot be right.
I cannot get an AoN search to show more than one single creature in pf2 as weak to poison? Does that seem correct to yall? Is poison type really just outright not considered to be a valid/normal weakness?
Starting to make sense how the same developers ended up creating a system with Toxicologist as the worst of the very worst, lol.
It sounds right. I can't recall ever seeing a creature with poison weakness in actual play.
Poison is just nonviable most of the time in PF2. Tons of things are immune, basically nothing is weak to it, and it's not so powerful that it makes up for that in any particular way.
It's useful to the GM far more often than it is for players.
In 3.X/PF1 I'd always emphasized players to have a secondary trick for when their primary one meets an immunity, i.e. tripping snakes. Yet I'm unsure there's a smooth solution here for standard-trope builds despite having a few builds in mind. Do all Dex-Rogues & Swashbucklers need to carry abnormal amounts of alchemy? Maybe in the same way full plate martials need an answer to ranged battles.
That was my thought as well - buy some alternative tools as a backup plan. Having to work around non-standard tactics might also encourage more Recall Knowledge checks to figure out a creature’s weakness before using different options. I’ve found that RK is used much less than PF 1e (for a number of reasons).
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In 3.X/PF1 I'd always emphasized players to have a secondary trick for when their primary one meets an immunity, i.e. tripping snakes. Yet I'm unsure there's a smooth solution here for standard-trope builds despite having a few builds in mind. Do all Dex-Rogues & Swashbucklers need to carry abnormal amounts of alchemy? Maybe in the same way full plate martials need an answer to ranged battles.That was my thought as well - buy some alternative tools as a backup plan. Having to work around non-standard tactics might also encourage more Recall Knowledge checks to figure out a creature’s weakness before using different options. I’ve found that RK is used much less than PF 1e (for a number of reasons).
Though I agree with the principle, having many enemies immune to the main source of a PC's damage is just wrong.
Can you imagine if there were monsters immune to a Barbarian's Rage damage or to a Fighter's increased attack proficiency?
It sounds pretty lame.
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If there were more feats that let precision heavy classes deal with precision immune foes (not level 18 feats, mind you) or something like a fire kineticist to deal with fire immunity, I think that would be the best option. Players should have the choice to have feats that expand on their versatility, or double down on what they already do well. And no I don't think someone who wants to play a fire kineticist having to expand to a different element to deal with fire immune foes is a good option, as the player likely wants the fire mage fantasy.
If there were more feats that let precision heavy classes deal with precision immune foes (not level 18 feats, mind you) or something like a fire kineticist to deal with fire immunity, I think that would be the best option. Players should have the choice to have feats that expand on their versatility, or double down on what they already do well. And no I don't think someone who wants to play a fire kineticist having to expand to a different element to deal with fire immune foes is a good option, as the player likely wants the fire mage fantasy.
I like this idea. My idea (that is mathematically "complicated" to implement) would be to have like a level 7 feat that treat precision immunity as a 75% reduction. The percentage is the complicated part, but I don't know how to better do it to let you keep some, but not all. And maybe even a higher level version of the feat to change the reduction to 50%.
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Can you imagine if there were monsters immune to a Barbarian's Rage damage [...]?It sounds pretty lame.
That in fact, is already an issue for certain barbarians.
For example:
While raging, you can increase the additional damage from Rage from 2 to 4 and change its damage type to match that of your instinct’s dragon breath instead of the damage type for your weapon or unarmed attack. If you do this, your Rage action gains the trait matching your dragon instinct’s tradition, as well as the trait matching the damage type where applicable
Although, with choices in damage like Force, it's pretty easy to avoid. But then you run into the issue that like the best choice of dragon is a meta choice on how to avoid damage resistance/immunity.
Elemental Instinct can also run into this issue. Decay instinct (poison) too.
Edit: Although, I guess in fairness they can choose not to increase the additional damage from rage and not have your attacks gain the elements that your enemy is immune to. So you do get a consolation prize, so to speak.
To the next posters point, maybe that is what swashbucklers and rogues need. Something that would let them convert from precision damage to something else, with a penalty.
A method of allowing siloed damage types to still be useful is to allow them to be converted into less-efficient alternatives. A swashbuckler or rogue could convert precision damage into a smaller amount of additional damage, and really you could do the same with elemental energy - have the fire kin bust out the sideaarm as they boost their speed or strength with elemental power.
Though I agree with the principle, having many enemies immune to the main source of a PC's damage is just wrong.
Can you imagine if there were monsters immune to a Barbarian's Rage damage or to a Fighter's increased attack proficiency?
It sounds pretty lame.
Spellcasters have entered the chat.
Aside from the years of Golems being "lolno", we have stuff like the Leydroth which while not immune to magic does get +2 to magic saves, a reaction counterspell that causes mental damage to the caster being countered, and multiple ways to dispel your buffs (with more mental damage if it succeeds).
An AP goes "here's 3 of them at the same time, have fun!" so if you're a lone caster in that fight, you're facing 3 separate reactions to counter you. Good luck!
And of course, there's our dear friend "mythic resilience on all 3 saves" courtesy of WoI, though Paizo learned not to do that in later books because it's so ridiculous.
I find the idea that it'd be a crisis if something was somehow resistant to rage damage to be somewhat exaggerated. The game has been doing that to casters for years and they deal with it.
It's definitely lame for a class heavily reliant on a damage type (like precision) when it doesn't work at all because they don't have a good alternative, but if it's a rare occurrence its not the end of the world as long as the creature is statted appropriately or it has another weakness that can be used to deal with it.
I find the idea that it'd be a crisis if something was somehow resistant to rage damage to be somewhat exaggerated. The game has been doing that to casters for years and they deal with it.
I think the key difference here is that casters are made to work with hard counters, unlike martials. Outside of the admittedly many egregious hard-counters to all magic like golems, will-o'-wisps, and the leydroth, most enemies with immunities can be approached in alternative ways with a diverse enough array of spells: if a Sorcerer's fireball doesn't work against a devil, for instance, that can be fine, because they could just cast lightning bolt instead, or one of several more spells in their repertoire. By contrast, enemies that are completely immune to Strike-based damage tend to leave martial classes with very little recourse. Martials can and should have backup weapons at the ready, but if your main weapon deals slashing damage, your backup weapon deals piercing damage, and you're up against a verdurous ooze, your Swashbuckler will be reduced to slapping the ooze with unbuffed unarmed attacks, and taking acid damage each time for the privilege.
With that said, I also agree that it sucks to get hard-countered, and even though casters have the means to deal with it, that still doesn't make it much fun. It's also in my opinion the single biggest obstacle to any kind of thematic caster with a specific theme, because it's very easy for that theme to get completely shut down. Any kind of mentalist class is obviously going to suffer against the game's large number of mindless enemies, and builds centered around a particular element or ailment, like fire or poison, will have very few options against enemies immune to those. In a gaming environment where increasingly more players want to commit to a particular theme or emulate a character that's similarly good at a specific niche, something that's easily achievable with martial characters but not with casters, it would be to the benefit of a future edition to let players do that without feeling completely out of options against some enemies.
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Something like - if your sneak attack/finisher would deal no precision damage due to an enemy's immunity, you can instead deal 2 additional damage per damage dice of your sneak attack/finisher.
For kineticist, I have wished for this before in the play test, but a generic damage aoe impulse any kineticist could take would really help. You can deal x damage in a cone/burst/line, chosen when you take this feat. The damage can be any damage type your elemental blast could deal, including damage types granted by versatile blasts. If you have the weapon infusion feat, the damage type can also be p/b/s. Reflex/attack roll/fortitude save, chosen when you take the feat.
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The most annoying immunity is non-mindless mental because it’s on way too many things at high level and usually doesn’t make any sense. Like is there any reason you shouldn’t be able to demoralize treerazor? My best guess at what’s going on is that the writers didn’t want big bad scary bosses subject to the effects of laughing fit.
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MY experience playing a rogue was that precision immunity existing was never a big deal. It came up sometimes, and I had bad matchups, but the rest of the party was there. If a whole campaign was crammed full of precision immune enemies, nonstop, it would feel bad, but as something that just came up occasionally, it wasn't an issue at all.
I've had more heartburn dealing with constructs as an occult witch than I ever did as a rogue fighting ghosts and oozes.
As a side issue (not really applicable to swashbucklers), I also think that a Fire Kineticist should be great at fighting fire elementals, not near-helpless against them. She is a master of fire, and they are literally made of the thing her whole class is all about! However, I seem to be the only one who thinks that.
You’re not alone, I feel the same way. A Kineticist encountering an elemental in the wild, let alone one of their element’s plane, ought to feel really good about it in my opinion. Right now, though, it’s more a case of “well, at least I have this action that helps me not be completely useless.”
I also think you highlight a good point that immunities tie into two aspects of the game that are in tension with each other here: there’s immunity as flavor, i.e. “this monster has X immunity because it makes sense for them to have it,” and then there’s immunity as a mechanic, i.e. “this monster has X immunity to force the player to use different tools at their disposal.” My impression is that Paizo takes a flavor-first approach to giving out immunities, and that could be fine if players always had enough tools to deal with the mechanical implications. The problem is that this isn’t a guarantee, as the above examples show, whether because the immunities are too broad on a monster or the characters being countered don’t have enough strong alternatives. I feel there’s also a degree of legacy design at play here, where certain monsters have certain immunities just because that’s what they had in editions past, even if the resulting gameplay doesn’t work super-well with the rest of 2e.
Personally, I’d be interested in seeing what the game would look like if immunities didn’t exist at all: striking an ooze’s weak point for precision damage, instilling fear in a mindless undead, or burning a fire elemental might all sound unlikely, but I also think adventurers in Pathfinder are just that good and can regularly achieve the unlikely. It may not be easy, and those monsters should probably be quite resistant to those things in particular, but it would never be totally impossible, and so no character would ever get completely shut down.
i think immunities when they are sparing push players to do different things than usual, change up tactics. But as another poster said earlier its not all that fun if everything is immune.
The most annoying immunity is non-mindless mental because it’s on way too many things at high level and usually doesn’t make any sense. Like is there any reason you shouldn’t be able to demoralize treerazor? My best guess at what’s going on is that the writers didn’t want big bad scary bosses subject to the effects of laughing fit.
This is a whole thing in Spore War. Aside from mental immune enemies (like Treerazer, I guess because demoralize is too good or something), some other enemies you fight multiple times have some kind of resistance to mental. That's either in the form of mental damage resist or bonuses to saves against it for reasons.
It comes up often enough to be really noticeable if you took something like Debilitating Dichotomy, which I did. Next time we have some downtime I should probably retrain that, now that I think about it. It was a lot better in Kingmaker than it is here.
(AFAIK tons of stuff is poison immune, but no one bothers attempting to use poison at this point so it doesn't come up.)
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I think the key difference here is that casters are made to work with hard counters, unlike martials. Outside of the admittedly many egregious hard-counters to all magic like golems, will-o'-wisps, and the leydroth, most enemies with immunities can be approached in alternative ways with a diverse enough array of spells: if a Sorcerer's fireball doesn't work against a devil, for instance, that can be fine, because they could just cast lightning bolt instead, or one of several more spells in their repertoire. By contrast, enemies that are completely immune to Strike-based damage tend to leave martial classes with very little recourse. Martials can and should have backup weapons at the ready, but if your main weapon deals slashing damage, your backup weapon deals piercing damage, and you're up against a verdurous ooze, your Swashbuckler will be reduced to slapping the ooze with unbuffed unarmed attacks, and taking acid damage each time for the privilege.
It's an interesting dichotomy, isn't it? Casters are expected to face immunities constantly and build around that, and will still face a pile of stuff that hard counters their entire method of combat.
That's why I took exception to the idea that it'd be some kind of huge problem if an enemy existed that was resistant or immune to rage damage. Heaven forbid that a Barbarian has to deal with a single enemy that is resistant to it's special thing.
It's not a fun thing when it happens, which is why it should be used sparingly: so it has an impact when it happens without just shutting a character down too often.
With that said, I also agree that it sucks to get hard-countered, and even though casters have the means to deal with it, that still doesn't make it much fun. It's also in my opinion the single biggest obstacle to any kind of thematic caster with a specific theme, because it's very easy for that theme to get completely shut down. Any kind of mentalist class is obviously going to suffer against the game's large number of mindless enemies, and builds centered around a particular element or ailment, like fire or poison, will have very few options against enemies immune to those. In a gaming environment where increasingly more players want to commit to a particular theme or emulate a character that's similarly good at a specific niche, something that's easily achievable with martial characters but not with casters, it would be to the benefit of a future edition to let players do that without feeling completely out of options against some enemies.
If they're going to enable that kind of gameplay, they need to commit to it. They're pretty clear when it comes to caster gameplay that you're expected to have a wide variety of options and specialization will bite you, though some specializations will bite you more often than others (mentalist being a particularly poor pick)... and even then sometimes they still go "nope, you're buffing the Fighter today and hopefully it doesn't get dispelled."
They're more wishy-washy on the martial gameplay side of it, because a lot of time you can get away with specializing on one thing and having it work. Like there was almost no enemy in Extinction Curse that my son's 2h Fighter couldn't deal with using the strategy of "hit really hard with sword". He had a great time with that.
Even precision immunity has some campaigns where it hardly ever comes up. So you do that for a while and it's working great, and then suddenly you run into a bunch of enemies that go "nope" and it feels really jarring because you don't have anything you can do about it.
So the game design needs to pick a lane, IMO: either hard immunities are a thing and every class should have some way to deal with it, or it should be limited to resistances and thus while your thing might not be as effective, you're never hard countered to the point of being shut down.
Immunity to each specific damage type should exist. Because everyone should have to deal with it now and then.
However precision immunity shows up in oozes, ghosts, spirits, swarms, other incorporeal creatures and a moderate number of special "puzzle" type monsters.
A GM just needs to bear in mind that running an adventure where a character's main shtick is useless a large portion of the time is not fun. Anything more than say 20% is probably too much. Looking specifically at the early levels of Abomination Vaults.
Personally I'd choose a different monster to challenge the party with or just remove from it incorporeal creatures as they tend to have a physical resistance anyway.
The other immunity that is over done is poison immunity. More classes should get access to the Toxicologist benefit of swapping aicd for poison.
Also even in those fights where there are oozes and the like its good to still have some of the enemies the precision martial can fully affect. i guess unless its a solo fight or a moderate or less encounter where the party can afford the rogue or whatever to not be at their best.
Has Paizo tried a Precision Resistance to have a lesser form to use when it feels thematic, without completely turning off a precision class's core feature?
It probably needs some tweaking, since I think the level appropriate minimum resistance would still be close to effectively immune. So it might feel as bad.
Has Paizo tried a Precision Resistance to have a lesser form to use when it feels thematic, without completely turning off a precision class's core feature?
It probably needs some tweaking, since I think the level appropriate minimum resistance would still be close to effectively immune. So it might feel as bad.
Proteans have precision resistance.
Yeah what if it scaled like:
1-4 @ Precision Resistance 5
5-8 @ Precision Resistance 10
9-12 @ Precision Resistance 15
13-16 @ Precision Resistance 20
17-20 @ Precision Resistance 25Instead of outright immunity?
For a Rogue or Investigator, that's basically the same as immunity (1d6 precision from 1-4, 2d6 from 5-10, 3d6 from 11-16, 4d6 17+, for the rogue scaling, investigators is slightly different)
For a swashbuckler doing a finisher, its roughly one die ahead of those two, so that might cut through. For their flat-non finisher precision it would never cut through.
Might need to be about 1/2 the values you listed in order for the resistance to feel distinct from the immunity. The Protean's have close to what you listed, and I've definitely seen them be effectively immune outside of finishers.
Proteans have precision resistance.Has Paizo tried a Precision Resistance to have a lesser form to use when it feels thematic, without completely turning off a precision class's core feature?
It probably needs some tweaking, since I think the level appropriate minimum resistance would still be close to effectively immune. So it might feel as bad.
Which just makes it even more important that they clean up their resistance / damage rules.
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Just checking: I think oozes are immune to the extra damage from crits, but can still suffer other effects triggered by it. Is that correct?At least critically hitting them is easy, and that can debuff the enemy with critical specialization and rune effects.
After looking at the progression/growth of precision dmg, I think a scaling for resistance that'll be very significant, without nullifying that dmg, should be L/2, or perhaps 1 + L/2.
It is *really* easy to underestimate how powerful resistance is, a small number goes a very long way to nullifying damage.
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I think there are probably some enemies where the immunity could be removed, like incorporeal, which are kinda double-dipping on resistance to all damage and immunity to precision.
But I don't think it's necessary to remove it entirely. I think we should look in the other direction: class design shouldn't be so monomaniacal that a single immunity completely blocks you. If you can't do fire damage, or precision damage, you shouldn't be completely useless.
Now I think this also isn't really the case as much as it's made out to be. A fire kineticist could just take Weapon Infusion at level 1 and have access to piercing/slashing/bludgeoning damage as well as long range, agile and reach options. It's maybe a poor design that this isn't built into the class as a standard feature but merely an "if you don't take this option, you're setting yourself up for a bad time" feat. But it's a pretty solid solution.
Likewise for the swashbuckler or rogue going up against oozes, a typical ooze trades all of those defenses (splitting instead of piercing/slashing, acid damage on touching, precision immunity, lots of HP) for abysmally low AC, pitifully low speed, and really low reflex saves. It should be easy to just kite them, crit them for special effects, or distract them while the spellcasters roast them. Spells like Ignition have a really easy time triggering the persistent damage on classic oozes.
Non-classic oozes are more problematic, when some of these trade-offs go out of the window because you have some kind of slick hyper-fast sentient mercury chasing you or something. At that point I think designers often forget to balance the trade-offs.
So, I think immunity should be in the game, but classes shouldn't be completely blocked because they can easily acquire a decent fallback plan, or because immunity comes at the price of the monster having significant weak spots that the character can exploit instead.
That doesn't mean there won't be some encounters were clearly one character struggles and the others have to carry them. We don't want perfectly even performance all the time, I'd rather have the spotlight rotating. But struggling shouldn't mean being completely useless. Although I think not being able to follow plan A isn't the same as being useless, you have to be willing to try plan B then.
Yeah what if it scaled like:
1-4 @ Precision Resistance 5
5-8 @ Precision Resistance 10
9-12 @ Precision Resistance 15
13-16 @ Precision Resistance 20
17-20 @ Precision Resistance 25Instead of outright immunity?
I think 50 percent damage would probably be best. It still works, but is less effective against precision resistant creatures. Then you don't completely shutdown precision damage characters.
Precision damage is about 3.5 points per die on average.
Rogue does 3.5 to 14 precision per hit.
Investigator: 3.5 to 17.5 for their single hit in a round.
Swashbuckler: 7 to 20.5 for their single hit plus other effects depending on finisher.
Any high resistance would mostly neuter the precision damage from classes that rely on it.
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I don't think precision resistance is the way to go, because any level-appropriate amount of it is similar to immunity, but might confuse people about it being better.
Halving precision damage would work better, but it's kinda abnormal to halve damage (except for basic saves I suppose); resistance with a specific numerical value is how things are done in PF2. So it could be done, but it would kinda be a stylistic sour note.
But yeah, making classes so heavily dependent on precision damage isn't great. I think the dependency is a bit exaggerated - these classes still get strength/dexterity to damage, and striking runes.
But it's interesting that the thaumaturge doesn't do precision damage. I'm not convinced that the investigator's bonus damage HAS to be precision type of we can get away with thautmaturge having untyped bonus damage on implement's empowerment.
That said, there ARE reasonable things you can do to be less dependent. Consider the three families of enemies that have precision immunity:
* oozes
* swarms
* incorporeal
A ghost touch rune on your backup weapon fixes incorporeals. Making sure your backup weapon is a different physical damage type than your main weapon helps a lot with the oozes and also with the swarms.
There's also other ways you can have backup plans: alchemist dedication fits both rogues and investigators nicely. Most days you'd be using the utility recipes but bombs work really well on slow, low-AC oozes (persistent damage; then kite) and swarms (splash weakness). An investigator with a wizard dedication to pick up non-attack offensive cantrips would also be able to electric arc low-reflex oozes or scatter scree swarms.
Swashbuckler is perhaps a bit worse off, but flying blade can help. If you have at least some strength, you can try tripping the oozes to give the rest of the party an easier time kiting them.
So yeah, it sucks, but it's also part of I believe a design philosophy of forcing you to have backup plans.
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The Astral Rune is almost essential on weapons.