...I think you misunderstood what I have said form the begining.
I started from the position that the new version is a downgrade from the original. That force damage changes its lane. And that the the change made IW damage more comparable to other options rather than higher.
If you saw my earlier posts I said maybe they over corrected but that I also saw forcedamage as opening a lane for them. And that part I stand by. Constructs? bypassed. Undead? dont need to worry about what type. Devils? no problem. Adamantine dragon? ah damn not going near that thing. But you get the point.
Enmeis are immune to mental effects and resist physical? and your known spells are full of them? you still can contribute.
In my games I use devils and constructs and undead of many kinds and APs use them alot too. In fact when they are used they typically are the PL+ fights, they often have adds that can be hit by the amped version along with them. So i am not sure why we are looking at the full scope of creatures and saying physical resistance is rare when the frequency of their use pretty common or at least impactful when encountered.because the whole point of IW was the risk vs reward.
you give the squishiest character in the game a melee option that requires him to be adjacent to TWO enemies and use an action that provoke Reactions and may be interupted as well by said reactions.
The reward was the higher damage.
now there is no reward, plain and simple.
giving a ribbon ability that triggers on a tiny subsection of creatures does not justify the risk any longer.
you still provoke from all enemies, not only the physical resistant ones.
you still need to be in the middle of the fray of all enemies.
but tyou are only rewarded a tiny fraction of the time.OK lets take your claim that the old version's purpose was risk vs reward.
Clearly now that isn't its role right?
Its doing something different its mitigating situations
basically. I mean the framing there is pretty harsh but yeah. IWe were not miles apart in how we saw the mechanical change but we are pretty far apart in how we view its value afterward. Its a slower car that doesn't get slower f=when speed bumps show up. Now other cars the psychic could drive do have to slow for the speedbumps.
Heck even the old version if used side by side with the new one against those kinds of things will have to slow down.How much it matters is level dependent and creature dependant entirely.
What creatures show up in a campaign are completely dependent on its design.
If I am to use my current campaign. The next arc my players are heading to is fairly linear in design.
They will face Orcs -no resistances or weakneses.
Lots of undead and yes some of these have physical resistances and are immune to mental tagged effects.
And the boss of the arc is a resurrection dragon but its adds which it will control with sustains are undead with physical resistances.
So force will do something quite a bit in many of this particular arc. In another it might do less. I wouldnt say with any certainty how often a player will run into the relevant resistances without a specific campaign to reference.
OK lets take your claim that the old version's purpose was risk vs reward.
Clearly now that isn't its role right?
Its doing something different its mitigating situations where damage could be lost rather than pushing higher numbers and its keeping all the risk of the old version. (That is true of the design we have even if you don't think those situations happen often)
That is a lane change. Your point is basically that its a car with the ability to enter the carpool lane but the freeway barely ever has one.
I do not agree with that as a universal statement(the carpool not being there).It's literally doing less damage when amped now even when the resistance is in play. aka: It's worse at the thing you're claiming it was lane changed to do than it was before it was changed. So it's only actually better at this thing if a squishy caster class wanders into melee against two of a specific creature type and then chooses not to use their class ability to do more damage.
That means this argument makes no sense whatsoever even if it was true, and we've provided multiple examples to show that it's false. Some hypothetical scenario isn't convincing against actual published adventures demonstrating it's false.
Missing my argument then. I agree it is doing less than the old version.
Did anyone actually do the math with actual creatures that do have resist physical at different level threasholds for IW old and new?
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Did anyone actually do the math with actual creatures that do have resist physical at different level threasholds for IW old and new?
I did a bit of that in this comment. The TL;DR is that in order for the switch to force damage to be worth it, the creature needs to have resistance at least equal to their level. This is rarely the case, because resistance to physical damage tends to be low. In the vast majority of cases, amped IW premaster still outdamages the remaster amped IW even when it hits resistance.
Ah, fair enough. There are a few that come in as singles, which I would think still counts. I stopped counting at least 10 encounters with relevant resistances before it got late. Neither of them were incorporeal, though. But all of them were in the overworld, which was to say, easily missible, and they were all either a single enemy, or a group of the same kind of enemy, so there wasn't exactly an option to switch enemies. But I can give it another look. For the sake of sanity, I'll keep to overworld.
** spoiler omitted **...
If I'm remembering right, you're looking at all of these from the perspective of a magus that can no longer amp the spell yeah? Because a Psychic amping the spell immediately tilts most, if not all, of these back in favor of old IW even if you hit the resistance (which you didn't anyway on all the incorporeal encounters you included like the dread wraith or the banshee).
Bonus points for not also considering that any crits also immediately make old IW better regardless of which class is casting it thanks to the better scaling, and amp crits make any comparison a joke.
But if this is from a magus perspective, what is your actual point? D8 unamped IW might have been acceptable paired with force fang, but at d6 nobody's going to go out of their way to get it, unlike the cleric cantrips. Though I guess including those incorporeal encounters would actually matter if the comparison were new IW vs the better of fire ray and gouging claw.
That does make me wonder if the d6 nerf on top of the amp change was to make sure magus players didn't even entertain that idea.
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The bottom line is that the developers clearly feel that 2d8 per rank heightening is not acceptable for a rank 1 focus spell, especially one that can hit multiple enemies. That exceeds spell slot spells, and is even with Thunderstrike, which is the single target damage spell. Of course Magi wanted it and wanted to cast it instead of spell slot spells.
If they did anything to fix it, probably the best would be to let the unamped version target 2 creatures, and maybe let the amped version target 3. Being melee only isn’t enough of a trade to do more damage than amped Ignition when Amped IW can hit two targets.
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The bottom line is that the developers clearly feel that 2d8 per rank heightening is not acceptable for a rank 1 focus spell, especially one that can hit multiple enemies.
So we're back to "the spell needed a nerf obviously" after several pages of pretending it was secretly a buff all along?
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The bottom line is that the developers clearly feel that 2d8 per rank heightening is not acceptable for a rank 1 focus spell, especially one that can hit multiple enemies. That exceeds spell slot spells, and is even with Thunderstrike, which is the single target damage spell. Of course Magi wanted it and wanted to cast it instead of spell slot spells.
If they did anything to fix it, probably the best would be to let the unamped version target 2 creatures, and maybe let the amped version target 3. Being melee only isn’t enough of a trade to do more damage than amped Ignition when Amped IW can hit two targets.
It genuinely feels like you're just trying to look for a reason why this change must be justified rather than you coming to the conclusion naturally.
Thunderstrike has a 120ft range and does half damage on a successful saving throw. Do I need to say more than that?
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Shocking grasp was a rank 1 spell attack roll spell that targeted one enemy in melee. It had slightly better base damage but didn’t heighten as well and was outpaced by imaginary weapon by rank 3.
Thunderstrike replaced shocking grasp in the remaster. The lowered base damage and increased heightening as well as making it a saving throw targeting spell and gave it range. It didn’t lose damage to gain those things. 2d8 heightening is too high for a focus spell, period. It was especially too much for a spell that can have two targets.
Making the base cantrip target 2 enemies, even at 1d6 and melee, would be plenty to make it stand out. It doesn’t need to do more than 2d6 heightening as a focus spell.
Did anyone actually do the math with actual creatures that do have resist physical at different level threasholds for IW old and new?I did a bit of that in this comment. The TL;DR is that in order for the switch to force damage to be worth it, the creature needs to have resistance at least equal to their level. This is rarely the case, because resistance to physical damage tends to be low. In the vast majority of cases, amped IW premaster still outdamages the remaster amped IW even when it hits resistance.
Ok so i get the same 2 per rank of the spell to break even. but I think you just needed more creature data to look at.
Here is what I am seeing in the monster cores 1 and 2. This is going to be a better way to measure if we are looking at how the new IW is going to perform in the remaster.
In these books the human devil is the outlier that doesn't have a physical resistance. Hellbound Attorney 4 0 physical (fire only)
Devil Resistance Progression(monster core 1&2):
Devil Level Physical Resistance
Ort - 0 - 3
Zebub - 3 - 5
Vordine - 5 - 5
Coarti - 7 - 5
Levaloch - 7 - 5
Sarglagon - 8 - 5
Phistophilus - 10 - 10
Ferrugon - 12 - 10
Ayngavhaul - 13 - 10
Gylou - 14 - 10
Deimavigga - 17 - 15
Nessari - 20 - 15
The thresholds are very close to the 2 per rank of the spell for when the new resistance value shows up but there are some gaps where Old IW is ahead against specific resist values but the damage difference is not that significant for damage at all of those levels. It seems the pattern would have a level 15 remaster devil come with resist physical(except silver) 15. which would eliminate some of the gap below.
Spell Rank 3(1damage), 4(3damage), 5(5damage), and 6(7damage) spells against resistance 5.
Spell Rank 6(2damage), 7(4damage), 8(6damage), and 9(8damage) spells against resistance 10.
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Shocking grasp was a rank 1 spell attack roll spell that targeted one enemy in melee. It had slightly better base damage but didn’t heighten as well and was outpaced by imaginary weapon by rank 3.
Thunderstrike replaced shocking grasp in the remaster. The lowered base damage and increased heightening as well as making it a saving throw targeting spell and gave it range. It didn’t lose damage to gain those things. 2d8 heightening is too high for a focus spell, period. It was especially too much for a spell that can have two targets.
Making the base cantrip target 2 enemies, even at 1d6 and melee, would be plenty to make it stand out. It doesn’t need to do more than 2d6 heightening as a focus spell.
These are focus spells designed for a class with limited spell slots, though. They need to carry more weight. They are the compensation package for getting bad casting.
If they were going to bonk it, I'm shocked they didn't do something like chop off a d8 off the amp at rank 1. That would've put it in line damagewise with that one necromancer focus spell from the playtest, with the downside of needing to be in melee (compared to the necromancer's downside of needing to sac a thrall).
Shocking grasp was a rank 1 spell attack roll spell that targeted one enemy in melee. It had slightly better base damage but didn’t heighten as well and was outpaced by imaginary weapon by rank 3.
Thunderstrike replaced shocking grasp in the remaster. The lowered base damage and increased heightening as well as making it a saving throw targeting spell and gave it range. It didn’t lose damage to gain those things. 2d8 heightening is too high for a focus spell, period. It was especially too much for a spell that can have two targets.
Making the base cantrip target 2 enemies, even at 1d6 and melee, would be plenty to make it stand out. It doesn’t need to do more than 2d6 heightening as a focus spell.
These are focus spells designed for a class with limited spell slots, though. They need to carry more weight. They are the compensation package for getting bad casting.
If they were going to bonk it, I'm shocked they didn't do something like chop off a d8 off the amp at rank 1. That would've put it in line damagewise with that one necromancer focus spell from the playtest, with the downside of needing to be in melee (compared to the necromancer's downside of needing to sac a thrall).
It will be interesting to see if bonespear makes it through to release with a +2d8 heightening. I would be pretty surprised and confused if it does after they clearly decided that was too much for a rank 1 focus spell.
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Shocking grasp was a rank 1 spell attack roll spell that targeted one enemy in melee. It had slightly better base damage but didn’t heighten as well and was outpaced by imaginary weapon by rank 3.
Thunderstrike replaced shocking grasp in the remaster. The lowered base damage and increased heightening as well as making it a saving throw targeting spell and gave it range. It didn’t lose damage to gain those things. 2d8 heightening is too high for a focus spell, period. It was especially too much for a spell that can have two targets.
Making the base cantrip target 2 enemies, even at 1d6 and melee, would be plenty to make it stand out. It doesn’t need to do more than 2d6 heightening as a focus spell.
It's goalpost after goalpost. This is getting ridiculous. Why did you even use Thunderstrike as an example if you were just going to pivot to a worse spell? Shocking Grasp was not a very good spell past low levels where it's damage was high, there is a reason they made the spell much better after the remaster.
Fire Ray does 2d6 and creates a 1d6 damage zone. If the enemy stays, the damage is higher than Imaginary Weapon at 60ft range, if the enemy does not, they spend an action. This actually seems fairly comparable to IW.
Two targets is nice, but with the melee range you aren't going to guarantee that. The Psychic is also a 6hp caster with no armour proficiency and 2 spellslots. I'm not gonna buy that Psychic focus spells must be on the same level as other focus spells, especially when the archetype now limits how easy it is to access these focus spells. You're also vastly underestimating how bad melee range is.
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Ok so i get the same 2 per rank of the spell to break even. but I think you just needed more creature data to look at.
Here is what I am seeing in the monster cores 1 and 2. This is going to be a better way to measure if we are looking at how the new IW is going to perform in the remaster.
In these books the human devil is the outlier that doesn't have a physical resistance.
As already mentioned in the comment I provided you, I specifically went through the entire list of devils; only 6 have resistance matching or exceeding their level out of the listed 22. In most cases, it's not even "very close", and "very close" would still not be good enough. Even against enemies who resist physical damage, this change is a nerf the vast majority of the time.
As already mentioned in the comment I provided you, I specifically went through the entire list of devils; only 6 have resistance matching or exceeding their level out of the listed 22. In most cases, it's not even "very close", and "very close" would still not be good enough. Even against enemies who resist physical damage, this change is a nerf the vast majority of the time.Ok so i get the same 2 per rank of the spell to break even. but I think you just needed more creature data to look at.
Here is what I am seeing in the monster cores 1 and 2. This is going to be a better way to measure if we are looking at how the new IW is going to perform in the remaster.
In these books the human devil is the outlier that doesn't have a physical resistance.
Yep and by not looking at the ones where they do not exceed you didnt show exactly how much damage we are talking about at each spell rank to that resistance value that would still be seen on creatures you might encounter.
Its not much. So we see a small loss in at those gap levels. We can really talk about the full scope of the downgrade. where its worst and were its not really much, and where its not a downgrade rather than talk in absolutes.| 12 people marked this as a favorite. |
Yep and by not looking at the ones where they do not exceed you didnt show exactly how much damage we are talking about at each spell rank to that resistance value that would still be seen on creatures you might encounter.
Its not much. So we see a small loss in at those gap levels. We can really talk about the full scope of the downgrade. where its worst and were its not really much, and where its not a downgrade rather than talk in absolutes.
You know what? Let's do this. Let's actually run the math on every devil, in alphabetical order:
So just to summarize the facts:
And, to be absolutely clear, I am being generous here: if we factor in crits on IW, this ends up looking even worse. The switch to force damage is only a benefit on a handful of occasions, and the benefits are outweighed by often larger downsides even when the cantrip would normally hit resistance. Even when looking at a family of creatures known for resisting physical damage, this change is a nerf, and a significant one at that.
It is at this stage that I should probably point out that your approach to this argument is insidious: rather than do your own homework and research your claims before making them, you've just been spouting complete nonsense and putting the onus on others to disprove what you're saying. You have made no effort to listen to what others have been telling you, forcing me and other people on this thread to repeat ourselves, and you have continually shifted the goalposts whenever an argument has proven inconvenient for you, continually altering the very fundamentals of your stance around the same predetermined conclusion. You are not the only person doing this in this discussion, but it makes for exhausting, frustrating, and needlessly repetitive conversation, if it can even be called that. I can understand playing devil's advocate to try to add nuance to a discussion, but that requires having valid counterpoints to make. I don't think you've said anything in this exchange so far that is true.
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60 posts since I left yesterday lol. It seems the psychic posts are going to become the new "Do really casters suck this much" of PF2e.
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Yeah, 10% is still somewhat small, though enough to at least say that it is uncommon, rather than rare, but there are still a lot of encounters where it does not matter. I counted 48 encounters, but there are probably hundreds of encounters in the whole adventure path. A number I'd really rather not tally, so I think you'd understand that I keep that a vague statement.
10% is in line with how many of those creatures are in the bestiary. So that number makes sense. No one has been able to present any AP book where the number is significantly above that, let alone high enough for this to actually break even. Even Abomination Vaults which is ghost themed heavy still has majority non-resistant fights.
... and ultimately none of it matters because as you soon as you amp IW, a bunch of the cases where the new one is better suddenly aren't anymore because the damage loss on the amp version is bigger than the resistance bypass. A crit has the same problem. The number of cases where it helps in actual play is miniscule and dwarfed by the number of cases where it's worse, because that's the overwhelming majority of actual published encounters.
You'd need a creature with the maximum resistance in the creature building rules for this to add up, and on physical resistance that almost never happens (because it harms martials so much). And you'd need it to be happening so often that it makes up for every other fight where it's a straight damage loss.
I encourage anyone who can find any such example in any AP to provide it. No one has. I'm happy to go grab another AP I have to show why it's false, though.
To me, it comes down to a personal decision. To some players, it's not worth it, and to some, it might be worth it. Not needing to bother with an action to Recall Knowledge, or to use RP opportunities to gather such data, might make it worth it to some, but not worth it for others. But I'm the type of guy who plays Monster Hunter using just raw physical damage to the complete ignorance of elements, and when the monster dies, it dies, lol.
I mean, the math doesn't lie. If people are okay with the nerf that's a personal choice, but that doesn't mean its not a nerf.
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Did anyone actually do the math with actual creatures that do have resist physical at different level threasholds for IW old and new?
I did it in my SoT book 3 analysis. New IW was worse in 35 out of 36 encounters. 34 had no resistence. One had resistence but it was less than the damage nerf to IW. It helped in one case... unless you amp IW or it crits, in which case it's worse again.
Since a Psychic being in melee is probably going to amp it, that means the new one is better in zero encounters across that entire book. And that's common problem: some people just overvalue force damage based on vibes instead of data. That's why every time data gets presented in this thread, the goalposts shift.
I can't find any case where the new one is better when you amp it. Given that the Psychic has to be in harms way to use this an amping cantrips is their big thing, they're probably going to want to amp it frequently. So to summarize:
1. It's worse against 90% of the non-unique creatures in the bestiary
2. It's better against 10%, but by a smaller number than the deficit in #1 and far less frequent.
3. #2 stops being true when you amp it because the raw damage loss is so much higher that resistance bypass doesn't make it up.
4. This is a dangerous spell for the Psychic to use vs their other amp options that can be cast at range and there is no real payoff for that anymore.
How anyone can look at that and go "it's not a nerf" is beyond me. It's 100% a nerf. It's a weak ability now considering you can get similar damage out of range options without taking a 6HP no armor caster into point blank range.
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I don’t think anyone is arguing that it is not a small nerf to a niche psychic cantrip anymore. The argument is that the cantrip was always an outlier that was too powerful, but so niche anywhere but on the magus that it wasn’t previously harmful to game balance…except where people were looking to it as a base line of what focus spell damage could be.
The extra damage from fire ray is a pretty bad effect. The damage only triggers if the creature ends their turn there and there is almost no encounter where a creature probably shouldn’t spend one action moving. It will occasionally happen, but it is extremely rare in my experience, and it is not enough damage for a party to plan around keeping a creature in place unless that was already going to be advantageous to them. Hitting a second target with the remastered Imaginary Weapon is probably twice as good of a rider ability than the extra damage at the end of a creature’s turn from fire ray.
Most of what I have seen in this thread is people saying “it’s the melee limit” that justifies the extra damage, but at the same time, everyone already agrees that, even at 2d8 heightening, actively running a Imaginary Weapon psychic up into melee was not a viable enough strategy to see imaginary weapon as a primary play style for a Tangible Dream Psychic. Imaginary weapon was, and still is, a contingency plan for when enemies come to you.
As far as what does Imaginary Weapon offer a psychic?
Unamped:
1. A melee cantrip. The occult list doesn’t have one. No ignition or gouging claw for psychics from their base list. Melee means in can benefit from flanking, which can be a pretty big deal for boosting damage, but generally speaking, you should almost always have something better to do with your actions as a psychic than cast unamped IW. Even with old IW, Telekinetic Projectile or needle darts and staying at range are the better default actions to take. That stays true post remaster.
2. A force damage type cantrip. I still think there is something weird about the dark archive’s (and only the dark archive’s use of “force trait, physical damage” spells. On the surface, if the force trait alone is enough to bypass incorporeal, than changing the damage type to force is actually another nerf. Force damage from a source that already counts as force is less versatile than having 2 physical damage types that come from a force source. I think there is something weird going on with that force trait, physical damage, and would not be surprised if the other spells in the book get errata for it eventually. I am guessing Imaginary weapon got a lot of scrutiny in remastering and those other spells didn’t. Either way though, new or old, a force damage cantrip is unique feature of both versions.
Amped:
The big adds here, for both versions are a second target, and a heightening affect that makes casting this at higher levels worth the action cost.
The drop from 2d8 to 2d6 is noticeable. That is a nerf. But 2d8 heightening per rank exceeds spell slot spell heightening, especially anywhere near a rank 1 spell that can target multiple enemies (which they can only do at extremely close range). That change isn’t about nerfing the Tangile Dream Psychic, it’s about making sure there isn’t massive outliers hiding in niche corners of the game that players will bend heaven and earth to exploit and future developers might misread as game baseline.
There are much worse examples in PF2 of niche options that underperform than the remastered Imaginary Weapon cantrip. Being near enough to on par with one of the best regular cantrips in the game, gouging claw, (because it can still hit incorporeal creatures where gouging claw cannot), is not nerfing it into uselessness. It is still better than several other conscious mind’s unique cantrips.
I still strongly suspect that the base resistance to these changes is not coming from concern about the psychic class, it is coming from players afraid that lowering the ceiling on focus spell damage potential is an attack on the very possibility of resource-light blaster casting, and I think we will have to wait and see what happens with both the Runesmith and the bone spear focus spell of the necromancer, but I think that fear is going to be coming true, and you will see less blasting potential in either of those new classes.
Edit: if Bonespear keeps the 2d8 heightening, then Imaginary Weapon should too.
The extra damage from fire ray is a pretty bad effect. The damage only triggers if the creature ends their turn there and there is almost no encounter where a creature probably shouldn’t spend one action moving. It will occasionally happen, but it is extremely rare in my experience, and it is not enough damage for a party to plan around keeping a creature in place unless that was already going to be advantageous to them. Hitting a second target with the remastered Imaginary Weapon is probably twice as good of a rider ability than the extra damage at the end of a creature’s turn from fire ray.Lots of encounters the enemy may not want to move. Or it may be tripped, or grabbed, etc.
But besides that, the issue is fire ray has 60 feet of range vs the touch range of IW. That is a rather massive advantage, particularly on a squishy caster.
But it can never affect 2 enemies. That boost in damage potential is so much better than what fire ray offers.
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I would argue that catching an enemy with fire ray's attack damage and terrain damage is not only a generally more interesting prospect, as you are taking one enemy out of a fight much quicker, I think it is also a far more reliable one, not only because of the range but also because you are always guaranteed at least one enemy in a combat encounter, but not always two. If the enemy moves out of the fire patch to avoid the damage, then the fire patch has worked as area denial, and because the fire patch spawns even on a non-critical miss, it is far more reliable than anything IW does, especially its push on a crit. If IW is to remain a melee-exclusive cantrip on a 6 HP/level cloth caster, then it should by all rights have significantly higher damage to justify itself. Not being straight-up weaker than gouging claw, a regular cantrip, would be a start.
Fire ray is also not a free resource for any class. You have to go out and buy it or trade other class resources for it. Imaginary weapon, even remastered is still better than Thermal Lens or Distortion Lens. In its remastered state, it is in no way an outlier of a “bad focus spell.” I don’t even think it changes its place in the tier list of other unique psychic cantrips. It just dips a touch compared to itself.
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Fire ray is also not a free resource for any class.
Yes it is, the Cloistered Cleric gets a domain spell for free. If you want to count picking a subclass as "trading other class resources," then by that same virtue picking Tangible Dream instead of another conscious mind constitutes trading other class resources for the cantrip. Fire ray is as free as imaginary weapon, and much more easily accessible too.
Imaginary weapon, even remastered is still better than Thermal Lens or Distortion Lens. In its remastered state, it is in no way an outlier of a “bad focus spell.”
Its unamped version is worse than gouging claw, and its amp is worse than a 1st-rank domain spell. It is, at best, certainly not better in either case under the vast majority of circumstances. It is not a terribly good cantrip or focus spell, and the fact that other psi cantrips are even worse is more a damning indictment of the Psychic's current balance than any kind of valid defense.
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But it can never affect 2 enemies. That boost in damage potential is so much better than what fire ray offers.The extra damage from fire ray is a pretty bad effect. The damage only triggers if the creature ends their turn there and there is almost no encounter where a creature probably shouldn’t spend one action moving. It will occasionally happen, but it is extremely rare in my experience, and it is not enough damage for a party to plan around keeping a creature in place unless that was already going to be advantageous to them. Hitting a second target with the remastered Imaginary Weapon is probably twice as good of a rider ability than the extra damage at the end of a creature’s turn from fire ray.Lots of encounters the enemy may not want to move. Or it may be tripped, or grabbed, etc.
But besides that, the issue is fire ray has 60 feet of range vs the touch range of IW. That is a rather massive advantage, particularly on a squishy caster.
You only get the additional IW target if there are two targets withing 5ft of each other, and you're willing to walk right up to them. That's much rarer than fire ray's rider. Enemies are unable to move or would take punishment for moving fairly often, and the only time the rider is useless is if the enemy planned on moving out of the square anyways so it didn't cost them anything - if they move to avoid the damage that's a W, action removed.
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I don’t think anyone is arguing that it is not a small nerf to a niche psychic cantrip anymore. The argument is that the cantrip was always an outlier that was too powerful, but so niche anywhere but on the magus that it wasn’t previously harmful to game balance…except where people were looking to it as a base line of what focus spell damage could be.
The extra damage from fire ray is a pretty bad effect. The damage only triggers if the creature ends their turn there and there is almost no encounter where a creature probably shouldn’t spend one action moving. It will occasionally happen, but it is extremely rare in my experience, and it is not enough damage for a party to plan around keeping a creature in place unless that was already going to be advantageous to them. Hitting a second target with the remastered Imaginary Weapon is probably twice as good of a rider ability than the extra damage at the end of a creature’s turn from fire ray.
You just keep throwing stuff at a wall trying to see what sticks. Like are we seriously going to pretend that forcing an enemy to spend one action to move is bad?
I hope that a melee spell has a better rider than a ranged one. Especially on a 6hp no armour prof class whose identity lies in their focus spells.
Most of what I have seen in this thread is people saying “it’s the melee limit” that justifies the extra damage, but at the same time, everyone already agrees that, even at 2d8 heightening, actively running a Imaginary Weapon psychic up into melee was not a viable enough strategy to see imaginary weapon as a primary play style for a Tangible Dream Psychic.
Is this supposed to be contradictory? This supports the argument of 2d8 not being overpowered more than anything.
Gouging claw is useless against incorporeal creatures. The difference between IW doing physical damage with the force tag and just doing force damage is weird and maybe not a very big deal, but gouging claw has a much larger chunk of creatures that it is useless against. It is also not on the occult list, nor is Ignition. Psychics don’t get any melee cantrips by default so Imaginary weapon being one is useful to the psychic even if it is slightly behind a different tradition’s melee option for pure damage.
Unique psychic cantrips (especially the rank 1 one) are not the defining feature of the conscious mind class feature. They are one third of the starting amps you get, so they really don’t need to be build defining, and I am not sure if there is any conscious mind where they are that central to the build. I think the fact that Imaginary weapon is the only one anyone has ever really talked about at all on the boards is actually a pretty strong indicator that it is not in a good place with the others and the fact that Imaginary weapon using psychics are never presented as peak class builds is further proof that the resistance to this change isn’t about psychics at all, it is about focus spell damage output and low resource-using blasting. The fact that the magus was the only build centered around spamming a spell whose damage numbers were overtuned for the rest of the game is very telling about what is really at issue here.
Some people want to know what the most damage a single target focus spell can possibly do. Imaginary weapon was not the right spell to set that standard from the beginning because it is not a single target spell and building a psychic to use it a lot is very difficult and a bit of a trap option. If it being slighly behind fire ray means people will just stop talking about it/being so obsessed with it, than the nerf is probably a good thing.
In the situations where old imaginary weapon is useful to a tangible dream psychic, the new one is still about 88% as effective as it was before (which was about 108% as effective as an average damage focused Rank 1 Spell Slot Spell), which is still in the range of being fine to use, about where multi targeting focus spells should be capping out, and not a terrible trap option.
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Most games don't have any measurable degree of bias from the spread they are allegedly following "to a certain degree". Not because there is no bias, but because there is nothing but bias. The entire method of creature selection for a campaign is bias-driven, even when the bias involved happens to be the GM intentionally trying to make sure they are choosing in a way that lines up with the overall spread of abilities - a thing most GMs are not even aware of because it requires analyzing every creature rather than just picking what looks cool or fits their theme.
Most APs and most homebrew games tend to try and throw a variety of enemy types at you, while maybe gravitating towards one or two themes. Often these themes are a broad enemy type like Humanoids or Undead which tend to follow the trends of the overall monsters in the game with some commonalities or some bias toward certain things.
Like take Undead, which basically has all the incorporeal enemies in the game. It also has a higher proportion of enemies that are weak to slashing or bludgeoning. There are many APs that centre around undead, but they will not only use undead.
Like in Spore War you are fighting Fungal enemies that range from a T-Rex to a spellcaster on a chair.
Many categories are fairly broad or they don't really have many restrictions around them so they tend to follow the statistics of how most monsters are designed. That's why it's not entirely inaccurate to make arguments based on representation in the monster catalogue.
This is also, for better or worse, how Paizo balances options.
Which is absurd if true. Balancing IW around a campaign where you are primarily fighting (likely above 40% of foes) enemies with resistance to both bludgeoning and slashing that aren't incorporeal is not going to be representative of 99.99% of games. Especially when the change is not cleanly an advantage against these enemies.
You don't know the numbers that would be required for the declarations of "rare"and "<0.1%" to be accurate. Paizo also knows they don't, and can't feasibly, know that... which is why they balance the game the way they do.
You can make a pretty accurate guess that pretty much no game is going be favourable to the new IW without data. Some things are just highly unlikely. You would literally need the majority of enemies you face by a large margin to be resistant to bludgeoning and slashing, and those enemies would also need resistance high enough that the damage nerf isn't actually higher than the resistance you're up against.
You assume that I am making some precise mathematic truth that needs all the data and all the precise math. In reality, I am making a fairly simple claim that does not need this precise math because it is so obviously a nerf that you don't need to be precise to make the claim.
Even in the situation that favour the damage type, the increase is only marginal or can even be negative, the amount of enemies even in the categories where this kind of physical resistance is common is not high enough to be a net benefit.
You would need a GM to be intentionally picking enemies that have this physical resistance and putting it against the party over and over again. How likely do you think this is going to be? Or is it impossible to make any statement of likelihood about that either because you can't precisely know how accurate the numbers will be.
I don't need to do a mathematical calculation to know that it is highly unlikely for me to trip over when walking across my room. Dare I say it is less than 0.01% likely to happen?
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If it being slighly behind fire ray means people will just stop talking about it/being so obsessed with it, than the nerf is probably a good thing.
So now the standard for how good a spell is, is how often people talk about it?
I don't even know what point you're trying to make in this comment.
If it being slighly behind fire ray means people will just stop talking about it/being so obsessed with it, than the nerf is probably a good thing.So now the standard for how good a spell is, is how often people talk about it?
I don't even know what point you're trying to make in this comment.
My point is that the psychic class does not need to have the best damaging cantrip/focus spell in the game, especially not as a melee only option. That is not a good spell to build a Psychic character around.
Now, personally, I think a decent melee cantrip/focus spell option is nice to have for the psychic, as it works pretty great as a back up option for when you get forced into melee, but the remastered version is fine for that. It is still in the top 10% of damaging rank 1 focus spells, and probably in the top 5% of multi-targeting focus spells.
The obsession around it has always been "its a focus spell that heightens at 2d8, that is what the ceiling of PF2 should be for focus spells." The developers appear to be saying, "No, that is too high of a ceiling for focus spells." That is why I believe people are reacting so intensely about it. It has nothing to do with the psychic.
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If it being slighly behind fire ray means people will just stop talking about it/being so obsessed with it, than the nerf is probably a good thing.So now the standard for how good a spell is, is how often people talk about it?
I don't even know what point you're trying to make in this comment.
My point is that the psychic class does not need to have the best damaging cantrip/focus spell in the game, especially not as a melee only option. That is not a good spell to build a Psychic character around.
Now, personally, I think a decent melee cantrip/focus spell option is nice to have for the psychic, as it works pretty great as a back up option for when you get forced into melee, but the remastered version is fine for that. It is still in the top 10% of damaging rank 1 focus spells, and probably in the top 5% of multi-targeting focus spells.
The obsession around it has always been "its a focus spell that heightens at 2d8, that is what the ceiling of PF2 should be for focus spells." The developers appear to be saying, "No, that is too high of a ceiling for focus spells." That is why I believe people are reacting so intensely about it. It has nothing to do with the psychic.
Unicore, could you step back and state exactly why you feel this change is positive and what you hope to gain by continuing this conversation?
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My point is that the psychic class does not need to have the best damaging cantrip/focus spell in the game, especially not as a melee only option. That is not a good spell to build a Psychic character around.
They don't 'need' it, but Fire Ray doesn't 'need' a 60ft range, so I guess it should be reduced?
Now, personally, I think a decent melee cantrip/focus spell option is nice to have for the psychic, as it works pretty great as a back up option for when you get forced into melee, but the remastered version is fine for that. It is still in the top 10% of damaging rank 1 focus spells, and probably in the top 5% of multi-targeting focus spells.
Maybe before the nerf it was in the top 10% of damaging rank 1 focus spells, now it almost certainly is not. It deals average damage in melee, with an unreliable method of multi-targeting.
It is almost certainly not in the top 5% of multi-targeting focus spells. Dealing average damage to two targets at most in melee.
The obsession around it has always been "its a focus spell that heightens at 2d8, that is what the ceiling of PF2 should be for focus spells." The developers appear to be saying, "No, that is too high of a ceiling for focus spells." That is why I believe people are reacting so intensely about it. It has nothing to do with the psychic.
Love to see the mind reading of intentions again.
Yep and by not looking at the ones where they do not exceed you didnt show exactly how much damage we are talking about at each spell rank to that resistance value that would still be seen on creatures you might encounter.
Its not much. So we see a small loss in at those gap levels. We can really talk about the full scope of the downgrade. where its worst and were its not really much, and where its not a downgrade rather than talk in absolutes.You know what? Let's do this. Let's actually run the math on every devil, in alphabetical order:
Agadaz: Level 4, resistance 5. Net +1 damage on the new IW.
Coarti: Level 7, resistance 5. Net -2 damage on the new IW.
Cornugon: Level 16, resistance 15. Net -1 damage on the new IW.
Deimavigga: Level 17, resistance 15. Net -2 damage on the new IW.
Erinys: Level 8, resistance 5. Net -3 damage on the new IW.
Ferrugon: Level 12, resistance 10. Net -2 damage on the new IW.
Gelugon: Level 13, resistance 10. Net -3 damage on the new IW.
Gylou: Level 14, resistance 10. Net -4 damage on the new IW.
Hamatula: Level 11, resistance 10. Net -1 damage on the new IW.
Hellbound Attorney: Level 4, no resistance. Net -4 damage on the new IW.
Imp: Level 1, no resistance. Net -1 damage on the new IW.
Levaloch: Level 7, resistance 5. Net -2 damage on the new IW.
Munagola: Level 11, resistance 10. Net -1 damage on the new IW.
Nessari: Level 20, resistance 15. Net -5 damage on the new IW.
Ort: Level 0, resistance 3. Net +3 damage on the new IW.
Osyluth: Level 9, resistance 10. Net +1 damage on the new IW.
Phistophilus: Level 10, resistance 10. Net 0 damage on the new IW.
Sarglagon: Level 8, resistance 5. Net -3 damage on the...
The personal attacks are not warranted. I independently verified your conclusions and agreed with the 2-per-rank breakeven formula—that's validation, not bad faith. Where we differ is interpretation and what data set is most relevant for analyzing a remaster spell.
I disagreed that including premaster creatures helps the analysis of a spell meant to work in the remaster where Devil resistances show a specific pattern. Where monster that do have resistances in remaster in general show a bigger pattern.What we can see happening is this.
Creatures that do have these kinds of resistances in the Monster cores 1 and 2 generally have 5 up till level 9. At 10 its 10 up till level 15 where it is typically 15. Creatures like the adamantine dragon purposefully break that norm to create a past the curve threat by having 10 at level 9, 15 at level 13, and 20 at level 18.
When you get ranks of spells coincides with when you face resistance values. Thats why I showed the gaps from earlier. When you face a PL+ force is actually pulling more weight since the resistance present would have eaten up more of your lower rank spell damage.
When the creature is close to your level which coincides with the spell rank break even point you described the damage loss or gain is negligible.
Its only when you start to exceed the level of the creatures you are facing and the mook is below one of the level thresholds I described above that we see large damage differences. At which point its a mook.
That is the relationship in more detail between force spell ranks and resistance by creature level.
Now here is what your point about crit damage exposes. I think that is the most important factor actually to all of this. What happens on crit damage is likely the reason the spell had to be brought down from 2d8 scaling to 2d6. And the relationship we can see happening from what i described above shows that the new lane gives the equivalent of the old damage under specific circumstances instead of all the time while curtailing the crit explosion you pointed out from ever happening.
Adding: Also moving away from just comparing the New IW from the old since it is force comparing it to anything that would be resisted in a fight is also a fight where it is pulling weight as if it was the old IW just not in crits, which was likely a big part of the reason behind the change.
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You only get the additional IW target if there are two targets withing 5ft of each other, and you're willing to walk right up to them. That's much rarer than fire ray's rider. Enemies are unable to move or would take punishment for moving fairly often, and the only time the rider is useless is if the enemy planned on moving out of the square anyways so it didn't cost them anything - if they move to avoid the damage that's a W, action removed.But it can never affect 2 enemies. That boost in damage potential is so much better than what fire ray offers.The extra damage from fire ray is a pretty bad effect. The damage only triggers if the creature ends their turn there and there is almost no encounter where a creature probably shouldn’t spend one action moving. It will occasionally happen, but it is extremely rare in my experience, and it is not enough damage for a party to plan around keeping a creature in place unless that was already going to be advantageous to them. Hitting a second target with the remastered Imaginary Weapon is probably twice as good of a rider ability than the extra damage at the end of a creature’s turn from fire ray.Lots of encounters the enemy may not want to move. Or it may be tripped, or grabbed, etc.
But besides that, the issue is fire ray has 60 feet of range vs the touch range of IW. That is a rather massive advantage, particularly on a squishy caster.
Just having a Fighter with Reach weapon (or anyone with a reach weapon and a Reactive Strike like reaction) makes any creature on the square affected by Fire Ray be on a lose lose situation. It's ridiculously easy to pull it off, so idk what "dificulty" could be talked about.
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Gouging claw is useless against incorporeal creatures. The difference between IW doing physical damage with the force tag and just doing force damage is weird and maybe not a very big deal, but gouging claw has a much larger chunk of creatures that it is useless against. It is also not on the occult list, nor is Ignition. Psychics don’t get any melee cantrips by default so Imaginary weapon being one is useful to the psychic even if it is slightly behind a different tradition’s melee option for pure damage.
This is a whole lot of deflection just to avoid addressing the fact that if I as a player wanted a class with good cantrips and focus attack spells, I would in no way go for the Psychic, a class whose design revolves around upgraded cantrips and amps, much less a Tangible Dream Psychic when I could get better returns from any arcane or primal caster or just a Cleric, a class ostensibly not meant to rely all that heavily on focus spells. I am not going to pick a Psychic on the basis that they get a cantrip that will be worse than gouging claw or fire ray in the vast majority of circumstances, and will still have them eating Reactive Strikes in melee; that gouging claw is not normally on the list is not a selling point here.
And that's really what it boils down to: you're not selling the Psychic here, you're not even doing a good job of defending them. All you're doing is trying to score points at any cost. I mentioned earlier on that there were other people constantly shifting the goalposts to suit a predetermined conclusion: you are that other person. It's not even that you have anything particularly good to say about the Psychic, all you're doing is trying to downplay and dismiss everyone else's assessment of what ultimately boils down to a really obvious nerf. Worse yet, you're putting yourself in the designer's seat and making grand statements about how this is all following some heretofore secret standard of design in complete absence of evidence, and expecting us all here to buy it. As mentioned in a prior comment, you are making nonsense claims that you are then expecting others to disprove, when it should normally be up to you to do the basic due diligence of verifying your claims before making them. That is one of the fundamentals of arguing in good faith.
So, just so that we're clear on the facts: imaginary weapon was nerfed. It deals less damage now than it used to in the vast majority of circumstances, including in instances where the base cantrip would hit resistance. It deals less damage than gouging claw, another cantrip that exists, whereas previously its unamped damage was the same, thereby disproving your claim that a d8 of damage is too high for a cantrip. It now deals the same damage as fire ray, an easily-obtainable domain spell, only fire ray has the immense benefit of range, which is especially relevant when discussing a class with the worst HP and AC in the game. It does not matter which spell is on which list or which class: the Psychic's psi cantrips aren't the best cantrips around, and with perhaps one exception their amps aren't the best use of Focus Points around. Tell me then: what mechanical benefit is the remastered Psychic meant to offer over other casters? What is their unique selling point?
If you want to build and talk about a blasting psychic, and focus exclusively on damage output, we should be talking about the oscillating wave psychic, or even the distant grasp psychic. Instead there are several pages here in a thread talking about remastered psychics just talking about Imaginary Weapon spell, and insisting that this one nerf (I have been agreeing it is a nerf for multiple days now) represents a complete disrespect for the psychic and an overall nerf to the class.
I honestly believe that just the change to unleash psyche is going to more than offset the nerf to imaginary weapon for the Tangible Dream Psychic, because Astral Rain is going to be a lot more fun to play with now, where it was a spell I would rarely ever cast because it was a waste when you had unleash psyche going or while you were stupified. I want to know what else has changed in the class, because the nerf to imaginary weapon is a minor change to the play of the class as a whole, not only because it was only one of many conscious minds, but because it was not a cantrip to build a psychic character around even if you were a Tangible Dream Psychic.
That is why it doesn't matter if it is slightly worse than gouging claw as a base cantrip...because gouging claw is not a psychic cantrip and psychics don't get any melee cantrips by default. Having one as a back up option is nice even if it isn't the "best" one in the game, and amped it is still very good, especially in the situation where you can hit too creatures with it.
Can anyone name 5 rank 1 focus spells that do better damage than remastered imaginary weapon? Tempest surge is seen as a very good rank 1 damage oriented focus spell. Its damage is 1d12 per rank. It is a reflex save spell so some people will try to argue that will more than offset the .5 less average damage it does than Imaginary weapon...but it is single target. Cry of Destruction can do that damage and affects a 15ft cone, but you have to damage all the targets first to get that d12 damage die, so it can't really stand out as squarely better than the remastered 2d6 imaginary weapon either. I am not seeing any that are just flatly better potential damage than the new Imaginary Weapon, and not more than 4 that will be more consistent immediate blast damage in even single target situations in a list of 186 total focus spells. The entire argument seems to come down to "but melee should mean more!" and I think a second potential target is a very soild "more!"
Also, don't forget about the ghostly carrier spell, or the multitude of other ways to get a pretty decent reach for delivering touch spells as part of the reason why "touch" as range is not as big a limit for spells as it might first seem.
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It has nothing to do with the psychic.
The change to the psychic class feature has nothing to do with the psychic.
... At least I guess people can stop pretending you're arguing in good faith here.
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selling the Psychic?
defending them?
That kind of framing is missing the point of the discussion and polluting it.
Understanding what it is actually doing is the point.
And we can see that the new version after comparing it to creatures with actual resistances is operating like the old one against on level resistances minus the old IW crit potential that was out of line with the rest of the system. And when it is perfomring like the old version it is out performing anything else that is suffering against on level resistance.
It overperforms against higher resistances for the level.
So yeah that is what imaginary weapon has to offer.
But its not everything a psychic has to offer, its a tiny fraction of the class and only one subclass.
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So yeah that is what imaginary weapon has to offer.
But its not everything a psychic has to offer, its a tiny fraction of the class and only one subclass.
So what?
"You can just not use it" is not an argument of good balance or design.
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Its also important to note that, balance issues aside, imaginary weapon is conceptually a really cool spell that ultimately fails to achieve its purpose. Conjuring a weapon using magic and attacking with it its really cool but the class just doesn't support this playstyle in a fun and engaging way.
A player that wants to play a tangible dream psychic wants to play a caster version of the D&D soulknife, but you are actually harming yourself by doing that. Both pre-nerf and post-nerf, imaginary weapon just doesn't fulfill its class fantasy.
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I honestly believe that just the change to unleash psyche is going to more than offset the nerf to imaginary weapon for the Tangible Dream Psychic, because Astral Rain is going to be a lot more fun to play with now, where it was a spell I would rarely ever cast because it was a waste when you had unleash psyche going or while you were stupified.
If people prefer to cast imaginary weapon over astral rain then it means that astral rain should be buffed, not that imaginary weapon should be nerfed.