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I think that if I was going to play a psychic, I would want to avoid Tangible Dream since my initial amps available are Shield, Figment (for flanking), and Imaginary Weapon (for melee damage). This might be worth it eventually, but playing a character one crit away from dying with that set of tools seems rough.
Like people regularly avoid the Sorcerer bloodlines that have focus spells that require touch, right? I've seen people avoid the Demonic Bloodline because of Glutton's Jaws, after all. I see no reason that's not going to happen with the Psychic.
Tangible Dream Psychic does not look like they should be in melee. Their version of Figment and Shield feel like they should be used to support other PCs who fight in melee. IW is definitely odd there, though amping it with Warp Space sounds good.
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Nothing else about the spell is relevant
I think this sums up your position nicely.
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You are conflating what you feel to be true with having actual measurements.
This is preposterous. Do I need to know the exact percentage change there is for a lion to kill me to know that there is less than a 0.1% chance I will win if I try to fight one with no weapons?
Some things are so extreme that you don't need mathematical precision to make an accurate claim.
Take a step back and think for a second. You are basically saying it's impossible to make any claim even to say a 51% certainty without having the exact data and mathematical analysis to back you up.
You don't need to be 100% certain to make accurate claims.
This example is so extreme that it's genuinely bad faith to pretend you can't easily provide an answer.
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Accusing others of invoking abuser tactics over a class discussion? Mods don't get paid enough for this s!$&.Especially when the accusation of gaslighting is accompanied by text that implies it's not the people framing someone's statements as made up nonsense that are gaslighting, but rather me for daring to introduce the fact that someone citing "most campaigns" as proof of their argument doesn't actually have the data set necessary to make that kind of statement.
So it's the good ol' poison the well by insisting different opinion must be inappropriate behavior and not legitimate.
Maybe it's because you are pretending like it's impossible to make any claim without a scientific study behind it.
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I said it isn't outside of Paizo's intended balance after being nerfed because they don't balance the game the way you think they do because unlike you they acknowledge they know what is possible with their game materials, but not what is probable because there is not actually any universal factor that makes any given creature on the books any different in probability to get used than any other creature on the books.
Basically anything is possible, this is a ridiculous way to balance options. You need to balance this based on if they are plausible, not merely possible.
Edit:
Essentially by your logic, a spell that grants a +1 status bonus to Will saves is just as good as a spell that grants a +1 status bonus to all saving throws because technically there is a non-zero chance that you will only have to roll will saving throws in a campaign, and we of course, have no way to answer how likely that would be because that would be akin to rolling a dice for what you next campaign is going to be like.
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It's unfortunate that a class with good creative design work has such poor mechanical design. I had a player try a psychic once. It played so poorly that no one ever tried it again. It is especially bad in high level play where you see how weak the class focus spells are even with amps compared to spells. Given high level casters don't really run out of spells, it made the focus spells look even worse even up to three per encounter. They fell way behind other casters and looked like they were firing short range pea shooters compared to casters unleashing massive, varied AOE effects.
Just an aside, but I actually did just about run out of spells recently. After a difficult encounter, we had another encounter that went 19 rounds and was effectively 3 fights chained together (or maybe one fight and one really difficult fight, I don't know the actual math, but it was a group of enemies, then another group of enemies immediately after, then a boss enemy shortly after the second group showed up and was very much still alive).
And that's on a 15th level Oracle, which has a LOT of spells. I have no idea how a Psychic is even supposed to function in that situation with the lack of slots and it being dangerous to use Unleash when enemies are throwing Will save effects at you in a long fight since you'll be eating the Stupefy.
This is not at all an optimized group or anything, so a strong group would have had a shorter fight. But Oracle at least has the resources to deal with something crazy like that and Psychic just... doesn't. The Psi cantrips really need to be strong to make up for that and I just don't seem the delivering in the same way that having extra 8th rank spell slots does when crap hits the fan. (Reach Moment of Renewal on the entire party swung the fight and that was the third 8th rank spell I cast.)
If you ran out of spells with far more available with no 10 minute rest, a psychic would really be feeling terrible.
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To my group the psychic was unplayable mechanics prior to any rework. A rework that doesn't address how bad Unleashed Psyche is and Psyche abilities continues to make it unplayable. I had a player try and try and try to make use of Psyche abilities and they just could not pull it off with any consistency. Even when they could occasionally pull it off, the Psyche abilities themselves were not worth the effort. The entire Unleased Psyche and Psyche abilities are not well designed for normal PF2 play.
The rather boring and underpowered psychic cantrips further cement the psychic as one of those classes only those that want a rather painful experience playing a particular class fantasy will endeavor to attempt.
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The average damage for 2d8 + 1d8/rank is as follows
1(9)/2(13.5)/3(18)/4(22.5)/5(27)/6(31.5)/7(36)/8(40.5)/9(45)/10(49.5)The average damage for 2d6 + 1d6/rank is as follows
1(7)/2(10.5)/3(14)/4(17.5)/5(21)/6(24.5)/7(28)/8(31.5)/9(35)/10(38.5)Average Spell differential
1(2)/2(3)/3(4)/4(5)/5(6)/6(7)/7(8)/8(9)/9(10)/10(11)
I would encourage you to do all the math you just did... but actually use the amped versions this time. That's what I did, and I'm surprised that that wasn't your first port of call, especially as you did seem to notice that there was a discrepancy. I am struggling to think of a situation where a Psychic, faced with a PL+0 monster getting into melee range, would spend most of their turn using an unamped cantrip.
To resume: the difference in damage between the new and old unamped versions is 1 + spell rank, but this difference in damage increases to 2 x spell rank with the amped versions. An amped rank 4 IW would thus have a difference of 8 damage between the old and new versions, and fighting a Levaloch at 7th level would therefore represent a loss in 3 damage compared to the old version, despite hitting resistance. I simplified the math to have resistance match the devil's level in part to not have to deal with the stepwise progression of spells, but also because not factoring in that increased bump every odd level plays against the comparison I drew, which should hopefully help reinforce it if it can hold up still under those conditions.
To my group the psychic was unplayable mechanics prior to any rework. A rework that doesn't address how bad Unleashed Psyche is and Psyche abilities continues to make it unplayable. I had a player try and try and try to make use of Psyche abilities and they just could not pull it off with any consistency. Even when they could occasionally pull it off, the Psyche abilities themselves were not worth the effort. The entire Unleased Psyche and Psyche abilities are not well designed for normal PF2 play.
The rather boring and underpowered psychic cantrips further cement the psychic as one of those classes only those that want a rather painful experience playing a particular class fantasy will endeavor to attempt.
Unleash is quite useable with sturdy helmets (at lower levels) and paragon battle medicine (at higher levels when investment slots start mattering) to remove the stupified. And it genuinely goes pretty hard with manifold missile wands, the consistent baseline damage is nothing to sneeze at - it’s a solid justification for playing psychic over sorcerer.
Now, this isn’t to say unleash is well designed. You shouldn’t need to both pass an out of character skill check and cram battle medicine as a mandatory feature onto every psychic just to make your main damage feature not suck so bad, and less experienced players will struggle with the class. But it can be a decent feature if you know how to use it.
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To my group the psychic was unplayable mechanics prior to any rework. A rework that doesn't address how bad Unleashed Psyche is and Psyche abilities continues to make it unplayable. I had a player try and try and try to make use of Psyche abilities and they just could not pull it off with any consistency. Even when they could occasionally pull it off, the Psyche abilities themselves were not worth the effort. The entire Unleased Psyche and Psyche abilities are not well designed for normal PF2 play.
The rather boring and underpowered psychic cantrips further cement the psychic as one of those classes only those that want a rather painful experience playing a particular class fantasy will endeavor to attempt.
Unleash is quite useable with sturdy helmets (at lower levels) and paragon battle medicine (at higher levels when investment slots start mattering) to remove the stupified. And it genuinely goes pretty hard with manifold missile wands, the consistent baseline damage is nothing to sneeze at - it’s a solid justification for playing psychic over sorcerer.
Now, this isn’t to say unleash is well designed. You shouldn’t need to both pass an out of character skill check and cram battle medicine as a mandatory feature onto every psychic just to make your main damage feature not suck so bad, and less experienced players will struggle with the class. But it can be a decent feature if you know how to use it.
Unleashed Psyche is bad mechanical design. The psyche abilities designed to be used with it are not interesting or useful enough to put work into making it work. Not sure why you would spend your time on it with so many superior options.
Maybe it's because you are pretending like it's impossible to make any claim without a scientific study behind it.Nope, that's still just you insisting I'm wrong by default by framing the very disagreement as impossible instead of actually engaging with the idea I presented.
You claim I'm asking for a "scientific study" when all I am asking for is a singular self-selected check where you actually show the work to arrive at your "99.9% of campaigns" claims instead of pretending like it is controversial for me to say "any given pair of GMs and/or authors have no particular reason pushing them toward particular creature choices, so they are probably going to pick different stuff"
So what mix of creatures would it take to make the new IW equal to the old one? Then, once you have your list of creatures, of all the combinations possible from all 1st party sources, what percentage of combinations work out to the new IW being equal to or better than the old one?
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Yeah, it's useful to go back to the heart of the matter. Old IW dealt 9 bludgeoning/slashing damage with the force trait per rank, new IW deals 7 force damage per rank. That means that the new IW is only better when you face a monster that has a physical resistance greater than 2*your spell rank (and not bypassed by the force trait, like most incorporeal creatures are, though the rules are murky here). The overall percentage of such creatures is vanishingly small, as was exhaustively proved by Teridax in the posts above. For the new IW to be on average better, creatures like this must constitute at least 51% of the enemy roster.
thenobledrake's argument is that it's impossible to know with any certainty what a given campaign will look like in advance; everyone else's argument is that while it's impossible to know with complete certainty, there can be made reasonable predictions.
These reasonable predictions are that it's really f&$!ing unlikely that a given GM will fill their campaign with enemies that have resistance greater than the players' level to bludgeoning/slashing damage (just physical resistance, reasonably), mainly because there's really not a lot of them, because it'll be absolutely miserable for the martials, and a lot of other reasons. Have you ever heard of a campaign like that? I never did. Have you heard of a campaign where most enemies didn't have blanket physical resistance not bypassed by the force trait? Yeah, that's pretty much every one of them. Thus the argument that it's impossible to know how the enemy make up of a given campaign, while technically correct, is of little use in practice. Every reasonable prediction is that it happens so exceedingly rarely, we might as well discount the possibility. The remaining possibility is that the new IW is a nerf.
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Which is why my statement in the thread is not that the new version isn't worse than the old one; it's that none of us actually know with any certainty what "most campaigns" look like so that isn't a useful thing to try and use as proof that Paizo needs to change the new version again.
Except we do, because we still have literally every first party published adventure as evidence.
If you're claiming most campaigns look literally nothing like the distribution of creatures in every AP and also nothing like the distribution of creatures in the bestiary, you're gonna need to bring more to the table then "well it might be true somewhere at some point so all the actual evidence doesn't count."
And if that isn't enough, we also have the creature building rules. New IW is only better if the resist is more than double spell rank, which means it has to be greater than the creature level. That puts it around the maximum resist per the building creature rules, which itself doesn't happen in the majority of cases that this resist gets used given how broad it is. When you use the average resistance in the creature building rules, it's always a nerf.
I really don't know what is so hard for you to understand about the idea that your theoretical anecdote about some mystery campaign where this is a buff is at not all equivalent to it being a nerf in literally every published AP and the entire bestiary and the creature building rules themselves. And of course, all of PFS, where the made up scenario doesn't apply because that is entirely published content.
This is not a good faith discussion at this point.
It does not matter whether or not there is a point to talking about unamped. The point is, folks are looking at unamped, and unamped's math checks out, so you need to stress that it's where amped is concerned that the nerf is too far. If you keep leaving that out, people will not get the full message. You cannot explain yourself if the other person lacks the context you do, until you give them that context. If you are frustrated wondering why people don't seem to take to your points, that is why.
Also, bare in mind, some players actually will use the unamped versions of spells because they are at will, not 2-3 times per encounter strings seperated by 10-minute rests, or they might be using other amps, like warp space, or because they simply are out of focus points, and haven't had a chance to rest. You can question whether they are tactically sound for using such amps, but different players play differently.
The math and conversation about scaling only makes sense if we're talking about the amped version.
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I find it interesting that for some people, calling out manipulative and destructive behavior by a name they may not agree with appears to be a far worse offense than the harmful behavior itself. This isn't just poor argumentation being called out, it's a consistent and deliberate pattern of rewriting the narrative, denying and omitting facts that have been laid out prior, dismissing the feelings of others, and pinning the blame for their actions on others. No matter what you want to call it, that kind of behavior isn't okay, and should have no place on these forums. It absolutely should be called out, as it has done significant damage to this conversation.
Which it sounds to me like the nerf was done without fully paying attention to the scope on Paizo's part. It sounds like a buff to amps damage would do more to close this gap.
I agree that if we were to assume Paizo were going for a power-neutral damage switch, then the heightening you propose would make the new IW a comparatively more attractive prospect. I also agree that the unamped new IW deals better than the unamped old IW against resistance, for whatever that's worth on a melee cantrip given to a 6 HP/level cloth caster.
My conjecture, and I have no concrete statement from the developers to support this, is that there seems to have been an intent to address common criticisms players made of the Psychic MC combo with the Magus. Rather than go about it with proper care, though, whoever applied the changes instead turned amping into a free action to prevent interaction with spellshapes (by itself, a good move if it didn't also disable reaction amps), but then also nerfed IW despite the synergy with the Magus getting cut, and then also nerfed the MC archetype far more than was necessary for good measure. Just the first of these changes would have nixed the Magus combo, and nerfing the MC archetype I think had some justification up to a point, but all of these at once and to the extent that happened I think was too much, especially when the class received far too little in return.
What signals to me that these changes were done carelessly isn't even the nerf, but the fact that several of these changes break certain basic mechanics: because the listed free action on amping has no trigger, it can't be used out of turn RAW, so GMs now have to houserule in order to fix the interaction with reaction amps that this change breaks. Because amps aren't focus spells and Psi Development only gives you a Focus Point if you don't have a focus pool, picking the feat won't give you a Focus Point if you have a focus pool already, making it one of the very few ways of having a different number of Focus Points than options to use them. It also means that the order of feat selection makes a difference, as picking Psi Development and then a focus spell will give you more Focus Points than if you do the opposite, which to me doesn't sound at all right.
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I think many of us are assuming unamped though, Tridus. Which is something I don't see pointed out as often as it should be. That was the big barrier to my understanding of all of your points.
That makes sense. :) Although earlier on in this thread I was also talking unamped. Like when I say that it's worse in 35/36 encounters in SoT book 3? That's unamped. The problem here is that while it is better in certain cases, it's worse in an overwhelming majority of cases because ~90% of the non-unique bestiary doesn't have the resist in question. As soon as you fight that stuff, its a loss across the board, and there is no AP I can find where enough things have the resist to actually make up for that. Two creatures in this whole book have it, and one of those is smaller than the damage loss so it's actually a nerf there too (just a smaller one).
ie: at level 11, losing 20% damage against 90% of the bestiary to gain less than that against 10% is a bad trade. That's a nerf. IIRC it was an average 7 damage per attack loss against almost everything, for a 3 damage gain in that one fight (because the base damage is lower).
Amped, it's worse in 36/36 encounters and there is a vanishingly small number of cases in the entire bestiary that it's actually better. That'd be things like Adamantine Dragons where their entire thing is "big physical resist except adamantine". But amped stops including a majority of the incorporeal creatures too outside low level, because the resist doesn't tend to scale that fast. Like the level 10 ghosts tend to have resist 10, so that's not actually better Level 12 ghosts also have resist 10 and now it's worse against the thing it's supposed to be better at.
When we looked at amped, yeah, amped is better, and you can be much lower level than the creature and still do more damage with amped
When we look at unamped, there is a distinct advantage where the force shoots ahead of physical, and you need to be higher level than the creature for the old physical version to pull ahead.
It's better against a minority of creatures, yes. But it's worse against a majority of creatures. The net balance of that is that it's worse, both because the majority case is vastly more common, but also because the damage loss in that case is greater than the damage gain in the minority case.
You'd need a campaign where the majority of creatures have a lot of physical resist for it to come out ahead, even unamped.
And if a campaign is majority ghosts, Alchemists and any martial without Ghost Touch are going to have a miserable time. Which is why it never happens.
(And of course, once you amp it, then it's not true even then.)
Which it sounds to me like the nerf was done without fully paying attention to the scope on Paizo's part. In a vacuum, unamped has distinct advantages, but they are lost when you factor in the amped version. It sounds like a buff to amps damage would do more to close this gap.
It feels like they were just trying to nerf it. And they succeeded at that. It's more consistent at the new, lower damage value. If you said "they wanted to rein Magus using it in and didn't think about how it'd impact Psychic", I'd consider it likely.
Perhaps a +2d6 + 1 per additional rank, instead of +2d6 on the amped version of the spell could be a way to bring us closer to a more satisfying version of the spell/
The average damage for 2d8 + 2d8/rank is as follows
1(9)/2(18)/3(27)/4(36)/5(45)/6(54)/7(63)/8(72)/9(81)/10(90)The average damage for 2d6 + (2d6 + 1)/rank is as follows
1(7)/2(15)/3(23)/4(31)/5(39)/6(47)/7(55)/8(63)/9(71)/10(79)Average Spell differential
1(2)/2(3)/3(4)/4(5)/5(6)/6(7)/7(8)/8(9)/9(10)/10(11)This would close the gap to where there is still an advantage where force matters, incentivizing the force, but increasing the damage for a midway between the original damage and the new damage. You can probably even reward the focus expenditure even more by being slightly more generous with a (2d6 + 1) + (2d6 + 1)/rank instead. Which would reduce the spell differential to 1(1)/2(2)/3(3)/4(4)/5(5)/6(6)/7(7)/8(8)/9(9)/10(10)
I mean, it'd help.
They also could have just left it alone and relied on the archetype nerfs to rein in Magus using it. It's not like people were worried that Psychic was overpowered.
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*Yawns*
Guess I'm not needed here. ;P
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At my tables, we never played that the force trait was enough to bypass incorporeal because incorporeal explicitly calls out force damage, so that is a big part of why the change looked like side grade instead of a straight nerf. In retrospect, I agree that it feels like anything made out of force should hit a ghost, so even though I am not sure I buy that the rules as written work for the force trait itself to be enough, they probably should.
Honestly, if the intention is not to move all [physical] damage type with the force trait to just be force damage, than the damage type change feels like a nerf to me by itself, without dropping the damage type. I personally suspect that, since the only other spells that do this are also in the Dark Archives, and that you never see people talking about this or this interaction on the forums, that changing [physical] with the force trait to force damage was not done to mitigate the nerf to imaginary weapon, but is an errata change that will happen to the other abilities with out reducing their damage once those abilities get attention. We will have to wait and see if that ever happens though as it probably isn’t an issue that is causing noticeable issues at tables compared to other errata issues.
Having listened to people on this thread and looked at the bigger picture, I still do strongly believe the issue that lead to the damage nerf is solely “focus spells can’t do +2d8 heightening instant damage” is a game rule that was maybe just a suggestion at first but is getting firmed up in the final remaster changes. Attention on the issue was certainly increased by the magus and anyone asking “why is the magus so drawn to this one specific spell?” And the answer being, “It’s a focus spell that hits as hard as a spell slot 3 times an encounter and there is nothing else in the game at that level.”
So I hear why some people feel like the nerf is a hard pill to swallow for the psychic who only seems to have gotten boosted thus far in unleash working on durational damage spells (typically the worst kind of damage spells for winning encounters quickly). And yes, for the record, I think the new IW is a down grade. However, from personal experience as a player and a GM, Imaginary weapon was always a bad spell to build a psychic character around. It lured you in with damage heightening that broke the design intention of the game, and there still are times where hitting 2 enemies with it will result in very impressive hits (and getting reach with it is possible in multiple different ways, but that only increases the situations where it can get those good hits, they still happen occasionally without them). Thus I can see why it might be worth adding something back to the spell that is not just an increase in damage to help make the spell more usable by the psychic, but I also understand why leaving the damage at 2d8 heightening wasn’t an option, and that had nothing to do with any balance concerns for the psychic class itself. “Don’t break design rules of the game for options that are going to be secondary or worse options for the class that gets them, that are also still going to be poachable in the future,” is really strong design advice. If you are going to break design intentions for a class, do it boldly in a way that is locked to that class and clearly very intentional. Imaginary weapon by itself was not that it was a weird outlier that became the “figure out how to exploit this” focus spell of the entire game, not the psychic class, because it is hard to build effectively around in class.
Unleash Psyche is twice as powerful as potent sorcery. That feels like it is supposed to be a big deal for the remastered psychic, especially with the fact it sticks to durational spells now and potency doesn’t. If they didn’t fix the feats that work with that, that is the real problem with the remastering, but maybe one that could still be salvaged with errata. Every psychic really needs “this unique ability I have is improved by unleash” if unleash is really the only unique thing about the class anymore because “uses focus points differently than other classes” is just not true anymore and would be impossible to make true without giving the psychic ways of regenerating focus points in an encounter, like maybe gaining one back any time you become stupefied by unleash.
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You are misapplying evidence.
Each AP is only accurate as far as "whatever the author picked", and even then only as far as that is not made inaccurate by "or the GM changed it to." Which are functionally identical to "whatever the GM picks" being the only thing we actually have to tell us - in a fashion that isn't explicitly limited to only a specific campaign, AP or otherwise - what creatures are in any given campaign and how frequent they are within it.
Percentage of creatures having a particular ability is not percentage chance that ability shows up in a campaign. Percentage of AP encounters that include a particular creature is not the percentage chance that creature shows up in a campaign.
They are not even directly related to the chance of things coming up in a campaign because GM bias exists (and authors have it too).
And this is why the creature selection within, to grab some examples, Age of Ashes and Blood Lords are fairly dissimilar. And since any GM out there in the world could easily have never read either, it's intellectually bankrupt to think either would have any measurable effect upon what creatures that GM chooses to use in their campaign.
Which is why it's not useful to use "this new version would suck in these old APs" to try and convince Paizo there is a problem because their balance strategy only cares about performance in a niche when the niche does come up even if said niche isn't in one of their APs (which are, again, and it's exhausting to have to say this, not necessarily even being played at most tables because home-spun campaigns have historically always been more affordable.)
And then there is the also-related fact that AP writing isn't actually intended to be the end-all and be-all of campaign plans and styles. The format inherently takes on limitations that don't exist within the didn't-pay-extra-to-get-this-part game.
No, you're just ignoring evidence that doesn't suit you. That happens to be all of it, so you're reaching to an astronomical degree for some hypothetical scenario where a GM picks majority physical resistant creatures.
Since the fact that it's literally never happened in a published adventure doesn't suit you, you're ignoring all of them. Since just picking any normal distribution from the bestiary doesn't suit you, you're also ignoring all of that.
It's an absolute farce to claim someone is 'misapplying evidence' when you haven't got a shred of evidence yourself and are simply making up a scenario that you can't even name.
"Some GM somewhere might have done it at some point" is not a justification for claiming it's not a nerf. It's absolute BS.
As I said: you are not discussing this in good faith anymore. You're clinging to some scenario that may have happened at some point to dismiss all the evidence because all of the evidence is against what you want to claim.
Because you have closed your mind to the very possibility that you could be mistaken.
You think I'm talking about some vague mysterious concept when what I'm actually saying is, to phrase it differently one final time before leaving you to sit in your unassailable fortress of false consensus effect, which AP you are going to play next doesn't have any affect on what someone else's group is going to play next so maybe what has been true of monster selection in your personal experience has nothing to do with anyone else's personal experience.
You're too busy trying to win an argument you haven't given yourself time to actually think about what I've been saying. You keep framing it as if I'm trying to say "the nerf is fine" or even "there is no nerf" when what I'm saying is "you're not going to convince Paizo this is a bad change by pretending you have data you don't." I'm trying to help you make a better argument, not prove you wrong (about the nerf being bad for the game, at least... you're unquestionably wrong about APs having any use as proof of what most games will be like).
I mean, if you think its a nerf, what are you even arguing at this point except to try to claim I'm wrong about something that you apparently don't even believe I'm wrong about?
But yes, Paizo should be taking their own published content into account as to if something will be a nerf or not. They literally have the data on what PFS scenarios are getting played, how APs are selling, and which APs get reported for PFS credit. So they know something about at least what of their stuff is getting played and they thus can figure out how often this would be a buff in that. They can't possibly know whats going on in someone's home game, but no one can. That doesn't mean the data they do have doesn't count, because there's no reason to assume that a massive quantity of home games are deviating drastically enough to actually change the outcome here. And given how drastically they have to deviate to justify this... yeah. The math on this is so lopsided that it defies reason to believe it could actually be happening in numbers that large.
I can't convince Paizo that their actual busted mess around remaster Oracle repertoires needs fixing, so I'm under no illusion they're going to listen to any of this. They do what they do, and at this point it seems to have little connection to how the game is actually played. That's just how it is.
It doesn't mean this is a good change, and it doesn't mean we should pretend it's a good change. The Psychic changes in general were a flop because they did stuff like this instead of fixing what actually needed fixing to bring the class up to par.
So if we agree this isn't a good change, then the rest isn't worth arguing about and I'm going to move on.
Unleashed Psyche is bad mechanical design. The psyche abilities designed to be used with it are not interesting or useful enough to put work into making it work. Not sure why you would spend your time on it with so many superior options.To my group the psychic was unplayable mechanics prior to any rework. A rework that doesn't address how bad Unleashed Psyche is and Psyche abilities continues to make it unplayable. I had a player try and try and try to make use of Psyche abilities and they just could not pull it off with any consistency. Even when they could occasionally pull it off, the Psyche abilities themselves were not worth the effort. The entire Unleased Psyche and Psyche abilities are not well designed for normal PF2 play.
The rather boring and underpowered psychic cantrips further cement the psychic as one of those classes only those that want a rather painful experience playing a particular class fantasy will endeavor to attempt.
Unleash is quite useable with sturdy helmets (at lower levels) and paragon battle medicine (at higher levels when investment slots start mattering) to remove the stupified. And it genuinely goes pretty hard with manifold missile wands, the consistent baseline damage is nothing to sneeze at - it’s a solid justification for playing psychic over sorcerer.
Now, this isn’t to say unleash is well designed. You shouldn’t need to both pass an out of character skill check and cram battle medicine as a mandatory feature onto every psychic just to make your main damage feature not suck so bad, and less experienced players will struggle with the class. But it can be a decent feature if you know how to use it.
Because if you know how to minimize the downside (remove stupified) and put the upside to good use (consistent manifold missile damage) it’s actually pretty decent. In that case it genuinely does a decent bit of damage without screwing you over *too* much. I’m not gonna say it’s great but it does have its niche!
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Though not against any of our guidelines directly, this argument definitely seems to have a lot of underlying smoldering tension and pain when reading it back. I'm going to lock it so everyone can come down from these pretty intense emotions because sometimes the best answer when things get difficult and keep going back and forth is just time.
You are free to make another thread to discuss the issues you all have with with class, since the feedback is helpful to us in the end, but I'm not sure further discussion would result in anything besides hurt feelings :/ If you have anything productive to discuss though, feel free!
I also want to note that yes, people totally do use manipulative tactics in arguments about a TTRPG class on the internet. People use manipulative tactics in arguments about... literally anything on the internet. Nothing is safe tbf. Anyway, Happy Monday!