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I agree with pretty much every change into remaster and I follow the errata usually right to the tee etc. I just feel like changing fundamentals like weakness regardless of the discussion of math or balance 6, 7, 8 years changing down the line a fundamental thing that affects a lot is concerning. I thought this was behind us and that was the point of remaster and etc. Mostly because it's a wide sweeping change via an example that needs further clarification.
Nobody at Paizo on any let's play I can find has ever played it that way. And the creators have said that damage = per type. The errata example felt like an error or something out of nowhere. I don't think it/Paizo is "wrong" I assumed it was a mistake. Because there's a history of making them and things getting past edit/jobs being given off to writers and things just happening. Like the dreaded topic/history that shall not be named. "Sources" and various other things. I can't condense all that history down and it spans a lot of years but that's more why I am somewhat eyebrow raised.
This came out on Friday and we're waiting till at least Monday for answers. Having people spin around all weekend is entertaining but it also sorta sucks.
I downright can believe that somebody posted this before it was ready as they were leaving or finishing their work for the week considering it references the resistances but doesn't include them. (But that's just a theory... a game theory!) It's not that I dislike these changes either. I'm just concerned and hopeful that if we do this that there's clarifications. In the encounters where this works. (any weakness, looking at you undead majority games. And stacking abilities that give weakness and die types but this is somewhat unclear.) If the history was better, I wouldn't have concern or think that. (But this is also just me.)
It's possibly creating a divide between the knowers and the not knowers in a way that feels anathema to the closing of that efficiency gap (which I thought was a design direction for 2e, but this is telling me maybe for 6,7 entire years that wasn't the truth which is fine also but after this long?) I am concerned about organized play/pickup situations and IRL calculations/parsing.
We already have a system where some of the QOL features/rulings people look for are behind knowing the PFS guide/PFS rules (items of differing sizes/consumables, decreasing state of success willingly to ally effects, etc.) and a lot of people don't interact with that and usually think some of the features of PFS are their own invented idea. There's a division of information/assumed possibility that requires a bigger picture view/system knowledge to gain that information.
I'm more than willing to try this weakness change. But I don't like the idea that I'm showing up spell striking and confusing some poor new gm trying to learn at their PFS game and calculating each die and weakness if it does come up/people will stack dies when they can just buy the scrolls in-between. There's enough things to think about to be adding this into the stew pot. They already spent all the time and effort to look up the guide despite it being not the most user friendly or onboarding friendly process learning about warhorn online or etc. They're here trying to learn. I did not know we wanted to complicate math like this IRL?
These effects are set rather low level effects that you don't need to use heightened to get the stacking going because it's just per instance, making it cheaper to do with progress and devaluing the heightened effects of extra damage because it's better in some encounters (for me, basically all of my encounters and for most any effect that can impart one on any encounter.) to now stack multiple lower level sourced dies. (potentially because there isn't further clarification and it's an example only.)
Later at high-level play, this is a "how encyclopedic is your Pokémon knowledge?" "Bob just knows the different effects (abilities) at the different levels (evolve when) so his strikes (cause he knew the max stat array for his capture before continuing.) will simply be doing an extra two to three digit number." What I don't prefer is "Bob is more prepared before sessions so it makes sense." or something like that.
Now we can say it's always been a bit like that or the gap was never that small to begin with, but this is the difference between multi-digits per action in a totally different way between knowing and not which feels disproportional.
You have people who know and that's around people who are just enjoying their experience who never swap their Pokémon out mid-battle or just have one team of Pokémon they go from start to finish with regardless of type. To me, this can indeed bring out negative behaviors in people. Including me. Totally unrelated to balance or math. That's my concern. It's not the damage, it's all the other factors.
There's nothing wrong with questioning these things. Partly why we're here playing 2e is these kinds of sweeping changes that happened in 1e. We went a really really long time where it seemed like this similar kind of fundamental change wouldn't likely happen, that was what many felt was a point of the remaster. It's more about my perception of the history that has me concerned. I've seen enough of this to not necessarily trust it.
I totally agree/see though that for a lot of people and the negative discourse is a hatred of change and there are more rational, healthy responses than just "I don't like that." We need to discuss the history. Discuss why and when push comes to shove, make up our own opinions and cooperate with those we play with. (Lest history will repeat itself.)
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There was no right answer for how to handle 'instance of damage'. The term was undefined. And worse, it behaved inconsistently. Different people had different definitions for it. Sometimes the same people would have different definitions for it in different circumstances.
Fire damage from one attack, for example:
* A sword created via Blazing Armory.
* Augmented with a Flaming rune from Runic Impression.
* Cast Flame Wisp
* Drink an Energy Mutagen (fire)
Before the errata, how much of that is one instance of damage? Most of it is magical fire damage. The mutagen is alchemical and therefore not magical fire damage. Is it still part of the one instance of damage when the damage instances are grouped by damage type? Is the Flame Wisp spell still part of the grouped instance of damage since its narrative description has it happening after the strike hits?
Different tables will have different interpretations that they all feel are the 'one right way' to run the game. There is no way of writing the rule for instance of damage that is going to make all people happy because it matches the way that they were playing the game before.
At least with the errata, we are all starting from the same point. I can now determine that the example has four separate instances of damage. There is no question about this. Whether you are happy with that or not is less important. If you and your table don't like that ruling result, you can certainly houserule it to be run in a different way. Nothing wrong with that.
The benefit is that all of the developers and contributors that are creating monsters or equipment or spells or feats, and all of the people writing adventures and APs, and all of the people running or playing PFS are all on the same baseline expectations for how instance of damage is defined and how that interacts with weaknesses and resistances.
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What Finoan said.
That it took more than 7 years (I include the playtest) to get this key clarification is the root cause of the problem.
Because every person had to independently make up their own mind about it and these opinions then had years to become entrenched as a key part of each person and table's gamestyle.
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Nobody at Paizo on any let's play I can find has ever played it that way. And the creators have said that damage = per type.
Let's Play broadcasts have a bit of a reputation for the GMs just "deciding something" if an unclear rule comes up, or allowing things that aren't strictly correct but are cool in the moment. Which of course is fine, that's what you should be doing as a GM running a fun game. But it does mean it's not a great source from which to infer "what the rule really is".
Creators have said things unofficially, and really not even all that often, everyone keeps bringing up the same couple of instances from years back. And then other people complain that it doesn't count because it's unofficial or doesn't answer all the questions.
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I personally think the approach they ended up taking makes sense. It basically boils down to "can you clearly identify this part of where the damage is coming from? Then it's a separate instance".
Like, if you have a D8 cold iron slashing weapon with a flaming rune. You can't point to part of the D8 and say "that part is slashing and that other part is cold iron". But you can say "that D6 is fire damage and that D8 is the cold iron slashing damage". So you can tell apart the instances.
It does have consequences - being able to stack a whole lot of the same damage type against an enemy weak to it. I think that's generally not a problem, if there's enough variation in enemy weaknesses and resistances. It becomes a problem if you have a campaign where most of the enemies have the same weakness. Or if the party can actually cause enemies to gain a substantial weakness.
If this clarification had dropped earlier, maybe that would have caused writers to be a lot more cautious about abilities that cause weaknesses. So better late than never, but better early than late.
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There was no right answer for how to handle 'instance of damage'. The term was undefined. And worse, it behaved inconsistently. Different people had different definitions for it. Sometimes the same people would have different definitions for it in different circumstances.
Before the errata, how much of that is one instance of damage? Most of it is magical fire damage. The mutagen is alchemical and therefore not magical fire damage. Is it still part of the one instance of damage when the damage instances are grouped by damage type? Is the Flame Wisp spell still part of the grouped instance of damage since its narrative description has it happening after the strike hits?
Whether you are happy with that or not is less important. If you and your table don't like that ruling result, you can certainly houserule it to be run in a different way. Nothing wrong with that.
The benefit is that all of the developers and contributors that are creating monsters or equipment or spells or feats, and all of the people writing adventures and APs, and all of the people running or playing PFS are all on the same baseline expectations for how instance of damage is defined and how that interacts with weaknesses and resistances.
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I get what you mean by instances. I believe that's all energy damage personally but again, clarifications needed. So I actually agree with you. But I just want to share my anecdotes. You are right it's an interpretation and it was left up in the air for 6, 7 years. Personally, this no multi trigger weakness thing has been how every single person I have ever met interpreted it though. That's what mark and bonner said. I have never seen somebody do infinite per instance triggers.I've seen folks homebrew multi triggers but with a limit. But I've never seen any content in all of pf2e that I have played front to back where this seemed like the designer was making material directly intended to be used with that interpretation of multi weakness, I have no evidence, I have no reference for that, and I don't know where to look.
If I had an example, and I've looked for HOURS. It would abate my concern and make me go "Well maybe this wasn't as concrete as I thought." But I'm talking every youtuber, every player I've ever played with, IRL, Online, PFS whatever. VO's. Coordinators, every product I've played felt very much like overtime they found out what worked. You can watch creators also do it that way. I have no example of them not. Please help me find some.
What happens to this older content that seemed to have a relatively agreed upon basis who in my own eyes created an agreed upon direction? Is this a PFS variant toggle? I'm all for doing what is fun at a table and all of that. But we are "starting" again just like you say. That's all I meant by I want to try this but would want clarifications.
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That it took more than 7 years (I include the playtest) to get this key clarification is the root cause of the problem.
Because every person had to independently make up their own mind about it and these opinions then had years to become entrenched as a key part of each person and table's gamestyle.
I think this is SPOT ON. I think this is where even my own bit of bias comes from. It was left for SO LONG it created a norm that I have never met somebody not do in 4 years. I agree it's a interpretation. I WANT clarifications. MORE clarifications. I WANT a new start so long as we address the old content that maybe didn't anticipate this.
I personally think the approach they ended up taking makes sense. It basically boils down to "can you clearly identify this part of where the damage is coming from? Then it's a separate instance".It does have consequences - being able to stack a whole lot of the same damage type against an enemy weak to it. I think that's generally not a problem, if there's enough variation in enemy weaknesses and resistances. It becomes a problem if you have a campaign where most of the enemies have the same weakness. Or if the party can actually cause enemies to gain a substantial weakness.
If this clarification had dropped earlier, maybe that would have caused writers to be a lot more cautious about abilities that cause weaknesses. So better late than never, but better early than late.
Spot on. I do agree it is clear and is setting a definite rather than a interpretation.
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So based on what you guys said, I agree with yall on a lot of points. So let me play 100% devils advocate here.
So I explained my concerns and why this might be possibly disruptive. But, I also started thinking about how this might be OK and there are some positives.
- We haven't seen the whole picture and if/how weaknesses work here maybe there's clauses.
- I find a majority of groups (not me) don't like longer combats. This could be something that groups like with the swing ending opposition faster due to pc's not having a lot of weaknesses.
- Focuses the tactics from the usually environment that in official maps usually lack overlapping uneven ground, inclines, obstacles or doodads onto inter-turn buffs making it more group orientated and the game moves forward faster. Lots of rules and options but we never see them stacked up a lot.
- Just because it widens the gap of known and not, it could actually just be hype over big numbers and getting forward to other content.
- Happier more general customers, more completed products, more sold products.
- if they're willing to clarify this 6 years later maybe we can clarify things we never though they would before? Like this isn't a one-off. This is intended clarifications after getting remaster off the plate.
- Makes the tactics more about inter party buffing and sharing in the huge numbers that feel shared.
- Might be viewed as an experienced person moving the pace forward if they do stack in a lot of ways helping the less experienced because many of the effects are multi-target.
- the extra 75 damage on that dragon is about cutting the 1 - 2 rounds of it doing actions but the actual "challenge" and general results are over so we get on with the rest of the other bits of the game.
(Don't roll dice unless there's a consequence/don't roll dice if there is no question left and similar mantra's.)
it raises only a few questions...
- Clarifications and more clarifications please. I want to see the categories and steps outlined beyond a example.
- What happens if this "new start" is not the original agree upon norm that designers used? How do we approach older content? Pre-spring content.
- I really hope the new beginner box product the Secrets of the Unlit Star includes these new rules if we go down this path. If it does not include them I'de be really sad.
Maybe this was always the intended way, I do still doubt that when I perceive the designers/creators to of been in some agreeance but you know what... Maybe this is a good response to more common, general customer desires in the modern age of 2026 just like remaster tried to be, even if it's wild, even if I don't want that, I can actually see now some possible positives to this.
I still believe in my concerns. But I do see how this does make more sense than maybe I initially thought. Maybe it's not what I want. But maybe it's something other people do and maybe. maybe, I should be receptive to that.
And that comes from testing it. Waiting for the official responses and clarifications. And making up an opinion. I thank you guys for these comments. Please discuss further, I really do want to try this.
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The big problem I have with this is that it acts as a substantial buff in power if you have enough system mastery to take advantage of it. For someone running around with a fairly standard astral flaming weapon, not much really changes. But once you know to stack multiple different sources of damage and then get a weakness up so that applies multiple times? You've got a significant damage multiplier.
That can make fights faster, but it's only going to make fights faster with characters/groups that are set up specifically to exploit it. In a game without that (either with new players are players that just don't dig into the rules like this), combat hasn't really spread up significantly. Some of the scenarios I'm seeing posted by more optimization minded folks are DRAMATICALLY stronger.
Generally speaking, boosting the power of system mastery like this makes it harder to plan combats and makes the encounter building rules less reliable. Do I need to buff combats for a group using this? Or have enemies also start taking advantage of it? Or do I just accept that one group will melt enemies quickly and another won't?
I don't really have good answers to that at this point.
Unquestionably, the good news is that we actually have an answer that we can all work from now in terms of understanding how things are intended to work. And if I want to house rule that, I can. That's better than the situation we had where there wasn't really a common understanding of how this actually worked, with large table variance and the closest thing to a consensus we had was "do what Foundry does even if it's not actually correct just because people understand it."
I'm just not confident that this direction is the right one. I haven't had a lot of time this weekend to really understand what it means so I'm still kind of processing it.
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The big problem I have with this is that it acts as a substantial buff in power if you have enough system mastery to take advantage of it. For someone running around with a fairly standard astral flaming weapon, not much really changes. But once you know to stack multiple different sources of damage and then get a weakness up so that applies multiple times? You've got a significant damage multiplier.
That can make fights faster, but it's only going to make fights faster with characters/groups that are set up specifically to exploit it. In a game without that (either with new players are players that just don't dig into the rules like this), combat hasn't really spread up significantly. Some of the scenarios I'm seeing posted by more optimization minded folks are DRAMATICALLY stronger.
Generally speaking, boosting the power of system mastery like this makes it harder to plan combats and makes the encounter building rules less reliable. Do I need to buff combats for a group using this? Or have enemies also start taking advantage of it? Or do I just accept that one group will melt enemies quickly and another won't?
I don't really have good answers to that at this point.
Unquestionably, the good news is that we actually have an answer that we can all work from now in terms of understanding how things are intended to work. And if I want to house rule that, I can. That's better than the situation we had where there wasn't really a common understanding of how this actually worked, with large table variance and the closest thing to a consensus we had was "do what Foundry does even if it's not actually correct just because people understand it."
I'm just not confident that this direction is the right one. I haven't had a lot of time this weekend to really understand what it means so I'm still kind of processing it.
I share those concerns. I just never really seen any table variance on this one in my own experience. More clarification is just really needed, I've been thinking about this too much. The negatives. The pros. The possibilities. What is this doing at my home game. What is this doing to me as a player. What do I do to spice things up. How is this going to be at PFS.
I don't have any good answers either. If I look at it critically, I think it's messy and needs just some more clarification. If I look at it from real far back, I can see how this might be enjoyed. Do I think this makes for a better story for a majority as a blanket basis though? No. No I don't.
I'm reminded of a post here when mythic was new. Someone's group ran some test fights to try it out. In one of them, they landed Decree of Execution on Treerazor, giving Weakness All 20.
So anyone with a +3 weapon with 3 damage runes on it (a reasonable expectation at level 20) was getting +80 damage every strike. It was easily more than doubling the total damage output, and they melted Treerazor.
That required a specific mythic ability to land to pull off. Now you just need an enemy with a weakness or a way to create a weakness, and the ability to stack sources of damage to exploit it. It's going to be more common.
I like weaknesses and resistances and I think they make combat more interesting. But I don't think being able to proc the same fire resistance 4 times every strike is good for the game because it has such a warping effect on total damage output.
The flipside, of course, is it makes spells like Blazing Armory better, and I do like buff spells feeling good.
It's also possible that the setup cost to do this will be so much work that most players just won't bother, in which case it won't actually make that much of a difference in overall play. Sometimes we stress about this stuff and then it just isn't a problem in practice, you know? :)
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Foundry had per damage type coded in for a while, and it worked pretty well. You could trigger different weaknesses but you didn’t have the kinda of degenerate 5 sources of fire damage stacking we have now. That was the de facto community standard, at least online, and it was a decent one. It did it’s job, and even had some unofficial dev backing.
I just don’t think anyone thought this change out at all. Did anyone intend to hand martials an additional 30-40 damage on every strike, if and only if they’re skilled enough to know what to take? Did anyone intend an effective nerf to double slice, flury, and anything else that combines weaknesses?
I don’t think anyone sat down and thought about what this would do to the meta. Nobody thought through the implications. If they had it would be madness, so it must be accidental. At least that’s what I hope.
I think they just didn’t realize how powerful weakness were and how easy it is to manufacture and proc them. They thought they were a nice thing you’d sometimes trigger, not something you could set up and exploit. The new rules would work fine if that was the case. But it’s not, so they need to fix this.
Only spells buffs are clearly singled out as separate weakness trigger in the FAQ clarification
We dont realy get any information about all the other sources of added damage such as feats, rage and so on.
they did not add any extra info on the flaming rune, it did not get any extra text just treated as damage from the strike, so why would something like rage or other feats be different?
they did tho several time single out the spells in their text and how they worked, and was specific they both triggered weakness.
So in my mind, Foundry's interpretation is 90% there, they just need to fix how they treat Holy/unholy and add a special case for spell buffs to be separate.
I dont think the clarification say or their intent is that all separate sources of damage should trigger a separate weakness.
Spells like Flame Dancer use language like "... Strikes deal an additional 2d6 fire damage ..."
So it follows that similar "additional damage" wording elsewhere also counts as separate instances. There's no weird gotcha on the errata wording that would limit it to spells only. And tbh it's kinda cope to bark up that particular tree.
Weapon Siphon mods, energy mutagen puffs, flaming runes, etc, are all separate instances. Which is already 3 sources of fire damage, lol.
And because you only need 1 dmg to trigger weakness, you can buy the lowest grade version of those via gp and avoid any need for alch feat investment.
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Spells like Flame Dancer use language like "... Strikes deal an additional 2d6 fire damage ..."
So it follows that similar "additional damage" wording elsewhere also counts as separate instances. There's no weird gotcha on the errata wording that would limit it to spells only. And tbh it's kinda cope to bark up that particular tree.
Weapon Siphon mods, energy mutagen puffs, flaming runes, etc, are all separate instances. Which is already 3 sources of fire damage, lol.
And because you only need 1 dmg to trigger weakness, you can buy the lowest grade version of those via gp and avoid any need for alch feat investment.
I wouldn't say it's cope. But I totally get how everybody right now is gonna have different feelings from this. Like I believe it totally is in the wording singling out spells. I think that's absolutely incorrect, but it is what the words point a mind to which is a symptom of a bad example without further reference. I'm of the mind that we don't actually know and posting this on friday on the way out of the office has left us all to speculation. (That's not cool.)
I want clarification of all of these things. Written. Said. If we're going to do this, I want to hear the philosophy behind it and I want not an example but some defining of instance and a simple bullet list going:
- Full weapon strike trait like Holy only trigger once.
- weapon + property = one instance
- Spell effects = one instance
- Runes = one instance.
Or simply just defining this as the DX() calculation part and then the two clauses of holy-likes once, take highest of material/weapon dice.
Anything! I'll accept/run ANY result even if it's a terrible one at PFS alright? But it just needs to be explained for it to be easier understood and the side questions answered if we're going to "clarify" and not view this as "change". So we don't need to speculate or have this clashing of minds in the community. It leads to arguments and divides us. If the idea is to clarify this many years later, please for the love of Aroden actually define it. Don't just give us an example and leave it at that. (I doubt they will, but that's what they did this weekend.) They left this in the air for YEARS and even the people who made it didn't seem to see this. Clarification would be so helpful.
I get nobody except pharasma knows how aroden died, but how this all works cannot just be based on this example alone or be a divine mystery with multiple parables. I feel like an ant in an ant farm being shaken even if I do or don't do this or if I do or don't like it.
FYI, energy mutagen and weapon siphon don’t apply any energy traits, so they don’t work with Elemental Betrayal (they do with the ash oracle and genie sorcerer focus spells). All the fire spells modifying or adding to strikes and the flaming rune do have the trait. Brilliant rune does not.
FYI, energy mutagen and weapon siphon don’t apply any energy traits, so they don’t work with Elemental Betrayal (they do with the ash oracle and genie sorcerer focus spells). All the fire spells modifying or adding to strikes and the flaming rune do have the trait. Brilliant rune does not.by that logic you are doing Fire damage with your fire mutagen while underwater since "your attacks don't have the fire trait".
which is opposite of the spirit of the rules.
It’s exactly how the rules work, though.
Pathfinder and Starfinder are full of damaging effects that lack the related elemental damage type trait. All of the energy weapons in SF2, torch and fire poi in PF2, etc. The trait and the damage appear to
be distinct things sharing a name (and much but far from universal overlap). It’s like how metal trait things do slashing or piercing (or rarely bludgeoning) damage, but zero B/P/S metal weapons have the metal trait.
I welcome Paizo issuing errata for the several dozen to a couple of hundred things that (don’t) work this way if it’s not intended. There’s certainly no coherent pattern to justify house ruling things on an individual basis. Individual vibes based fiat is always in style, though.
I don't think it's possible to deal elemental damage without the trait.
Pf2 does have some annoying "fill in the gaps" situations, and this is def one of them.
Weakness to a trait instead of the damage type is supposed to be more generic, and allow non-damaging things to proc weakness. That's why it allows water, wood, etc. Elemental Betrayal can get damage out of spells like Helpful Wood Spirits that way. If you use a water spell to make the whole fight aquatic, they are taking a lot of water weakness dmg.
After searching AoN for a bit, this does seem to be a gap. After a few min at least, I'm not seeing any default rule that provides the traits to elemental damage.
Even weapons like the Fire Poi would kinda break things via doing fire dmg without the fire trait.
I started using Pillar of Water right after foe turns to put them under aquatic combat rules, and yeah, "non trait fire dmg" somehow working is too nonsense to let slide.
The aquatic rules also prove resistance 5 to "acid" and "fire" without a 2nd word. I'm guessing that wording for resistance (or weakness) is elsewhere too.
If "fire trait" and "fire type damage" are separate instead of unified, you couldn't say "resistance to fire" like that.
... how often do yall trigger trait style "when touched or affected by it." weakness?
In that [water] example, a foe gets put inside a Pillar of Water during a PC's turn. On the foe's turn, they Step along the bottom 3x, end their turn inside the pillar.
How many procs of weakness did they take? Would you run it like each [trait] square becomes hazardous terrain that they make individual contact with?
That might be the only sane way...
if you don't make it per square, then that opens up checker-boarding in-out-in-out alternating square shenanigans.
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It is really unfortunate that the example given in the errata had to give generic "spell effect" for the cold damage instead of actual spells that did that, because I think the context of the actual spells might really help me at least see how they are different things, I am not really even sure what spells could be combo'd like that. Spells like claws of the otter and Mantle of the Frozen Heart can both give you attacks that add cold damage, but they would be mutually exclusive because they are different kinds of claws attacks.
Overall, I don't think the problem is going to manifest itself too often in actual play. The action cost to benefit for doing things like forcing weaknesses on multiple creatures, as happens in most combats, is pretty taxing. Against powerful solo creatures, it has the potential to be more useful, but there will still be a lot of missing or spending actions doing things that don't help in any immediate sense. Players will likely decide fire is the way to go as a default, but there are a lot of resistances to fire and the given weaknesses are going to have to be higher than the resistances by a significant margin or the actions spent doing all this to benefit are going to be pretty low.
Overall, I think it will be worth paying attention to how much this changes anything, and I do think it will make feats like the level 12 wizard feat "Forcible Energy" a lot better, but that is because those feats can be flexible about the damage type, rather than what I think a lot of tables will try to do, where players try to turn everything into a problem fire can fix and then will be in a fair bit of trouble when fire does nothing because of an immunity, or the resistance is high enough to counter the additional damage from weaknesses and having to split the effects that do damage out, will make them very weak if they manage to do any damage at all.
Like a rank 7 elemental betrayal gives a weakness of 5. If a level 14 creature has resistance to fire, the lowest that is going to be is a 9, with an average probably closer to 12 or 15. A party built to just exploit fire weakness, with flaming and brilliant runes on every weapon, is a party that is probably in a whole world of hurt as soon as the fire resistant enemies come into play.
I think there is probably more opportunity for spirit damage to be a problem than anything else, but I personally would not mind if this change made the developers go back and look at whether the shiny newness of remastered spirit damage got a little out of hand in how it was given out, especially in the War of the Immortals book and the divine mysteries book, and some of that was dialed back a little in future errata.
Overall, I am glad things are clearer and am looking forward to seeing how it all plays out at people's tables.
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Paiso if you see this include abit more information and scenarios in the example. maybe something like this.
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Elemental Instinct(Fire) Barbarian, with +3 striking holy Conducting flaming cold iron battleaxe, with Sun's Fury and Flame Wisp cast on it/him. it also used Rage(Fire) and following up that with Conduct Energy(free action) before striking
A Terotricus Effected by Wish-Twisted Form Giving it Resistances fire 10; Weaknesses fire 5, cold 15, cold iron 15, holy 15, slashing 10
Lets say the damage roll results in
4 fire damage from the flaming rune,
7 fire damage from conductive,
7 spirit damage from the holy rune,
16 slashing damage from the cold iron battle axe,
12 fire damage from rage,
1 spirit damage from Sun's Fury spell,
4 fire damage from Sun's Fury spell,
and 3 fire damage from Flame Wisp spell. So we’re starting with a total of 54 damage.
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this tests both 2 types of spells that add damage to strikes, multiple different sources that adds the same damage type to a strike and resistance + weakness to the same type that also have multiple sources, while still keeping the holy and material weakness.
tried to find a better monster but could not find one that fit and decided i did not want to make a custom one so i slapped on Wish-Twisted Form instead
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Flame Wisp is an excellent example of a spell that clearly “should” be an extra instance of damage from its description.
It really seems like this errata is causing the community to come around to the idea that an "instance" really does *need* to be the entire impact / swing with all the 'additional dmg' chunks grouped up.
And if we want the old behavior back, we ought to edit the "only the highest" weakness rule to something like:
"each individual weakness can only trigger once per instance of damage"
That would mean you can pop every weakness a foe has each swing/ spell, as how Foundry behaves right now, but it prevents the multi-poping that's unavoidable when you define each different type chunk as a separate instance.
(again, right now in Foundry you can multipop weakness and resistances because each instance has to carry things like [water] traits; that's required to make "only the highest" checks. The more type dmg chunks you add, the more pops of that same [water] weak/res, etc.)
Due to other parts of the imm/weak/res rules specifically relying on per touch contact, it's kinda required to make "instance of damage" match that per contact event to avoid logic breakage.
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The instance errata is perfect, no notes, no changes.
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After a weekend of deep thought and testing, my concerns are PFS especially with the cut down scenario times and IRL parsing. But I'm able to accept it and I have some new perspectives. There is a certain hype to a party working around this, figuring out the pokemon type and more quickly ending the engagement with some more teamwork. I still don't know though how some of the shorter themed adventure products will do with this where many of them have so many things weak to certain damage types. In a longer AP with some variation, it doesn't seem like it'd be that bad.
I think it's gonna be fine either way so long as the resistances are just inverse (opposite) of the weakness, but if there's special clauses there also soon to be errata, I might have more concern. I didn't really understand the exclusion of the resistance section before really taking inverse as literally as possible. I get the difference between instance and trait quite a bit better after the weekend. I do believe it's pretty clear. But it's clear in a way that might take some people a lot of effort to see without further help.
I am still extremely disappointed that we would do this so late, but I guess it's better than never. I just think this can really rile up people initially hearing this. But it's the way it is, it has happened before and it's gonna happen again and we can all just decide for ourselves at the end of the day I guess because that's the only thing we can do. PF3e will probably have something like this many years into it too just given the process and history.
There's "do what tells a better story" and clarifying "this was always how it was meant to be." It can feel like a different message just on time in the wild/perception. When the foundation gets clarified like this so far forward, it does raise questions. I think it could use some notes/more examples though just to help people in transition. I fear some of my friends quitting/lessening their 2e time over this just based on perception. It feels disingenuous to go "good riddance" or "they could just ignore it." I look at the disparagement of PFS GM's vs Players and it just makes me a little sad to think people might have a bigger than usual negative reaction. Even if I think that's a little sillier now than I did before this weekend.
Sunken cost, bias, wanting to feel secure in our hobbyist identities in a world where we look to find ourselves through tribes. I think this change can be ok. But I do believe we should support each other and be as nice as we can to everybody interested in sharing fantasies with us. It's probably gonna be alright, but also people need to feel supported, so I'm opting to support anybody in whatever decision they want to make here from now on personally.
It's not just spell effects. Area isn't a damage type. There's a difference between fire trait and fire damage even if a thing has both going on. But it's easy to infer other things and I just hope people come together. I don't want to be right. I want us all to be happy. 😥
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It really seems like this errata is causing the community to come around to the idea that an "instance" really does *need* to be the entire impact / swing with all the 'additional dmg' chunks grouped up.Just this once: whatever made you to get this impression? I've never seen anyone here even close to agree to your system of mixing up all damage types. Looks like wishful thinking.
For the logic to fit together, traits have to be at the same "level" or "layer" as the instance of damage.
The current "everything pops another weakness" errata is the genuine logical result of splitting instances by additional damage; it's what happens if you take that dev post seriously.
The dev's post from ages ago was pretending there were limiter rules that did not exist. There was never any rule to say the double cold would only pop once, as he said. If adding bonus damage created a new instance, those instances were independent, and would both pop. There was no communication between instances for one to tell the other not to proc.
There was no RaW procedure for checking the type of the new instance against the other existing types, then merging them, etc. The dev was completely off book.
As new as pf2 was, a player or two even called the dev out for that at the time.
TBH, it's honestly still wild that people just rolled with that dev post. Maybe its the computer programmer in me, but reading the RaW, then the post, just kinda triggers a big "Dude, you're just wrong" stopper for me. Paizo tag doesn't change that. Maybe he was thinking from a different beta ruleset that was never published, idk.
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While the errata handles type weaknesses correctly in that "+dmg --> +instance" version, the part that the errata author seems to have overlooked is how traits and custom weaknesses work.
... If more than one weakness would apply to the same instance of damage, use only the highest applicable weakness value. This usually only happens when a creature is weak to both a type of damage and a material or trait, such as a cold iron axe cutting a monster that has weakness to cold iron and slashing.
The "only the highest" rule is there specifically for when a chunk of damage triggers more than one weakness at a time, and even calls out type + trait.
It has been 100% textual since day one that traits have to be at the same level as the damage type, and there has never been some bonus bucket off to the side for something like holy. This is why the errata's claim of holy being off to the side is just flat wrong. If you rule each dmg chunk is it's own instance, that means there no "entire attack" bucket. Instances are isolated and independent. You cannot have both.
If you follow through with the many instances version, the "uh oh" is the consequence of every instance needing to carry the traits and customs; a multi-type dmg spell will trigger an area weakness for each damage type, etc.
And yes, the errata's claim about holy popping once, outside of any typed damage chunk, is complete fabrication that's no where in the rules. That's how Foundry was (trying) to cheat holy weakness so foes would not insta-melt from multi-popping holy weakness. That invented cheat/asspull was their own invention after the remaster made that a multi-holy a common occurrence. Every holy runed sword would otherwise just make fiends explode.
Even though there's plenty textual reason to rule otherwise, if you do rule "each +dmg --> +instance" then it's fine for types, but you'll get crazy multi-popping for traits & customs that apply to the whole attack.
Again, you can just buy a spellheart and gain resistance to attacks by demons, or to nonlethal damage. That will mean multi-proccing your resistance based on the number of +dmg sources inside oncoming attacks.
"Only the highest" doesn't kick in, because there's no text saying "each weak/res only pops once per attack"
It's imo super obvious that the RaW never intended for single spells, Strikes, to generate many "instances of damage" like that.
It's basically turning every weakness into "pseudo weakness all" and that is it's own special weakness for a reason.
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If we pretend the dev post never happened, and check what happens if "instance of damage" is the single impact, spell, etc, it does result in weak/res having a lower impact on combat, but there is no unexpected behavior. There are no bad edge cases.
You bundle up all the different +dmg sources into the single insance, check for immunities, then find the one highest weakness per the Strike, then resistance, apply them, and you're done.
Because damage types have now been bundled in to the same layer as traits and customs, there are no more unexpected behaviors like triggering the same area weakness 6x in a turn because Elemental Confluence does 2 types each sustain, and they forgot to put a "first time you sustain per turn" limiter in there.
And yeah, considering how high they wrote the weakness damage procs, I really do think it was balanced around at most getting 1 proc per offensive action.
I'd argue it even explains why the main example spell that would pop a new instance, Flame Wisp, is so horribly low damage otherwise. It's kinda impossible to compare it to Flame Dancer and pick the Wisp. If Wisp had a niche of popping weakness separately, that at least gives it a possible edge over Flame Dancer.
So having sat with this for a while and talking to my GM, we're considering just not using this errata at all. "Nope, it doesn't exist, we're going to keep handling it the way we were before and pretend it never happened."
This is such a game-warping change if people take advantage of it that it would really disrupt the vibe of our tables, and it'll be pretty hard to put the genie back into the bottle if someone does show up to start doing it. Especially with some of the really busted combos involving multiple characters working together to stack weaknesses and instances of damage.
Triggering the same weakness 3+ times per attack is just too much and is bad for the health of the game.
So it feels like the best answer for us is just to stop it before it happens. I dunno what we'll do if Foundry switches its implementation over except "do it manually", but that's where we are.
I guess we should have been more careful what we wished for, lol.
Why would the holy trait apply to the whole Strike? I thought it was just the holy rune that had the holy trait.
Has Paizo ever walked back Errata?
This just seems like the worst interpretation that is now supposed to be RAW.
It also makes me question the quality control of Errata at Paizo.
Not only does this seem really open to abuse by players who have a high degree of system mastery, but it makes calculating damage even more of a slog.
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Why would the holy trait apply to the whole Strike? I thought it was just the holy rune that had the holy trait.
I can only guess why they decided to go from a damage type of good to this remaster "strike is holy," probably for Sanctification, but they went out of their way to make the Holy rune do 2 different things.
1: adds spirit damage
2: gives the Strikes the holy trait
A holy weapon commands powerful celestial energy. Strikes made with it gain the holy trait and deal an extra 1d4 spirit damage, or an extra 2d4 against an unholy target. If you are unholy, you are enfeebled 2 while carrying or wielding this weapon.
If you subscribe to the "holy is special on the side" idea, then that spirit damage is not even holy, rofl. If you think the trait needs to be at the same level as the instances, then not only is the rune adding [holy][spirit] damage, but all other chunks become [holy], lol.
There is no good outcome to that, holy has become it's own hell of an edge case.___________________
Trip, that wasn't what I was asking about at all. I asked why do you think community is starting to think like you. Because I don't see it.
Because the errata is pretty much taking the ancient dev post at its word, and following through with the consequences of each +dmg source becoming a separate instance. Now that folk have to stare that outcome in the face, more and more are coming around to that not being viable.
It was a complete 0-text asspull to say that you combined multiple fire type chunks to only trigger once, but the errata writer didn't have the play experience to know how load-bearing that fantasy/invention of a rule was.
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Why would the holy trait apply to the whole Strike? I thought it was just the holy rune that had the holy trait.
Champions that are sanctified (both class and archetype) add the relevant trait to all their strikes. A Sanctified Holy Champion swinging a weapon makes that weapon Holy.
Also, Holy doesn't do damage itself. It's a rider on the strike. Like, the Holy rune doesn't do "Holy" damage. It does Spirit damage and adds Holy to it.
Has Paizo ever walked back Errata?
This just seems like the worst interpretation that is now supposed to be RAW.
It also makes me question the quality control of Errata at Paizo.
Not only does this seem really open to abuse by players who have a high degree of system mastery, but it makes calculating damage even more of a slog.
I don't know if you consider the dying rule change in Player Core 1 errata or not, but that was a major change that was not well liked and they reversed it pretty fast. That's the only case I think of, but that's also the only case where a change to an existing rule got this volume of negative reaction.
Has Paizo ever walked back Errata?
This just seems like the worst interpretation that is now supposed to be RAW.
It also makes me question the quality control of Errata at Paizo.
Not only does this seem really open to abuse by players who have a high degree of system mastery, but it makes calculating damage even more of a slog.
They ghost-edited the Firework Tech again to try to prevent it from giving VVial recharge generically. Paizo is being so badly communicative about this, people are relying upon internet archive snapshot to try to spot these later ghost errata edits.
But, uh, while we have dev notes saying that was the intent, they kinda screwed up the actual text, and it doesn't actually prevent "pyro" versatile vials from being used for other alch purposes.
Paizo: "the new change is that you can only regenerate pyro vials"
Alchs: "did you stop folk from using Quick Alch on those vials?"
Paizo: "no."
Alchs: "so, getting more alch archetypes still expands the Quick Alch options for those pyro vials?"
Paizo: "yes."
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Ah, I didn't notice the rune also says it gives Strike holy.
I saw some post on Reddit saying that premaster alignment damage would trigger weaknesses separate from material weaknesses, and that the clarification is trying to restore that by separating the holy trait from each instance of damage in the Strike.
Yeah, not going to lie, it's equally sad and frustrating that Paizo could publish that errata without even napkin-playing the rules to see how they just do not work.
With that new BS of holy being special on the side, it means that a single swing of a holy silver sword pops both the holy and silver weakness. No runes required, just a Sanctified PC swinging a silver sword.
Like, the errata is so far removed from the actual rules text, it's not funny anymore. The rule of
If more than one weakness would apply to the same instance of damage, use only the highest applicable weakness value. This usually only happens when a creature is weak to both a type of damage and a material or trait, ...
might as well not exist anymore.
Like, I've seen one or two folks using the errata's holy example to claim that a fire AoE spell gets to double pop fire & area weakness. That is exactly a repaint of the cold iron slashing example, where the fire typed dmg is carrying a custom attribute of area damage.
Who tf wants to play a game where the developers are contradicting their own ruleset, and you've got to deal with the downstream muckball of table argumentation?
I am good with a sanctified champion swinging a silver sword being an awesome devil killer. I am more disappointed that holy runes/weapons are still useless on characters that would be most likely to use them in fiction.
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With that new BS of holy being special on the side, it means that a single swing of a holy silver sword pops both the holy and silver weakness.
Before the remaster, that holy silver sword would be doing both silver slashing damage and good damage, so it was already triggering both good weakness and silver weakness. Powerwise, that doesn't sound too different from this clarification on holy weakness.
Perhaps when the weakness rules refer to "or trait", they are referring to traits more closely tied to damage, like fire or force. Meaning fireball doesn't trigger fire weakness once with fire damage and again with the fire trait. The holy trait isn't tied to any damage, so maybe it's meant to fall under "weakness to thing that doesn't do damage."
But a Strike triggering the same cold weakness multiple times is just ridiculous.
A touch-proc of weakness damage is still a part of an instance of damage, rofl.
Getting hit by a water cold spell can *trigger* both water touch and cold type weakness. You do not run through the whole damage procedure once for the touch-damage, then a second time for the cold damage.
You look at the incoming damage, see a trait of that damage that matches a weakness.
If you have a weakness to something that doesn't normally deal damage, such as water, you take damage equal to the weakness value when touched or affected by it. If more than one weakness would apply to the same instance of damage, use only the highest applicable weakness value. This usually only happens when a creature is weak to both a type of damage and a material or trait, such as a cold iron axe cutting a monster that has weakness to cold iron and slashing.
For that text to mention both type & trait like that, that means the trait is at the same level as the damage type, not off to the side in some secret-special bucket.
When adjudicating the spell, you notice the cold dmg has the water trait, then check to see if the cold or water weakness is higher, and only add that weakness to the damage total.
The level of nit-pick special pleading that completely inverts the "does | does not pop another weakness" being bargained for is insane.
There is no way the RaW nor RaI was for this "actually, holy slash/silver both popping is fine" (but cold iron slashing totally just pops once) take to make any sense.
But a Strike triggering the same cold weakness multiple times is just ridiculous.
No, that's literally what it means to be a separate instance of damage. They are disconnected, and do not communicate nor interact with each other in any way.
To group up all the different bits of +cold damage together, that act is literally putting them all into the same instance of damage. Like, that's what the words mean guys.
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People forgot that Mark's 2018 post was always BS, and the errata-writer is just taking the "additional damage adds a new instance" literally.
Instead of coming to terms with Mark's post just not at all being compatible with the RaW, the community invented a completely fantasy rule that didn't exist to stop the multi popping via stacking additional damage. I personally even forgot that Mark never mentioned a same type + type case, and no one forced him to handle that example. It really was pulled out of the community's collective [removed] to prevent multi popping.
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I'm happy with the ruling. The potential abuse is a little overblown imo. Spending actions and effort on traditional buffing and debuffing strategies is in most cases going to net better results than trying to stack a whole bunch of weakness procs. It's nice when it happens but I wouldn't count on it.
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So we're all fretting about how out of hand the damage will get if we set up multiple ways to exploit the same weakness. But how many actions does this take to set up? If it's too many, it might not be worth exploiting.
In many cases the answer is "none" or "just the ones you do anyway as this class" to get up to double or triple triggering, with more being optional. The reason so many people are so confused by this decision is that it doesn't take weird whiteroom setups for this to have a big impact.
The big problem I have with this is that it acts as a substantial buff in power if you have enough system mastery to take advantage of it. For someone running around with a fairly standard astral flaming weapon, not much really changes. But once you know to stack multiple different sources of damage and then get a weakness up so that applies multiple times? You've got a significant damage multiplier.
That can make fights faster, but it's only going to make fights faster with characters/groups that are set up specifically to exploit it. In a game without that (either with new players are players that just don't dig into the rules like this), combat hasn't really spread up significantly. Some of the scenarios I'm seeing posted by more optimization minded folks are DRAMATICALLY stronger.
Generally speaking, boosting the power of system mastery like this makes it harder to plan combats and makes the encounter building rules less reliable. Do I need to buff combats for a group using this? Or have enemies also start taking advantage of it? Or do I just accept that one group will melt enemies quickly and another won't?
I don't really have good answers to that at this point.
Unquestionably, the good news is that we actually have an answer that we can all work from now in terms of understanding how things are intended to work. And if I want to house rule that, I can. That's better than the situation we had where there wasn't really a common understanding of how this actually worked, with large table variance and the closest thing to a consensus we had was "do what Foundry does even if it's not actually correct just because people understand it."
I'm just not confident that this direction is the right one. I haven't had a lot of time this weekend to really understand what it means so I'm still kind of processing it.
It's also gonna suck for some people like certain barbarians when they run into physical resistance and it double applies because they get a boost of the same damage type as their weapon attack.
I'm guessing stuff like Sorcerous Potency will also count toward this, so that's an easy way for double stacking either way.
In many cases the answer is "none" or "just the ones you do anyway as this class" to get up to double or triple triggering, with more being optional. The reason so many people are so confused by this decision is that it doesn't take weird whiteroom setups for this to have a big impact.
Can you provide any examples of a party already decked out and ready to abuse this? Even the clarification's explanation just refers to two unspecified spells that add cold damage to your Strikes.
I am also skeptical that the action economy to damage boost on any of the synergies weakness granting parties is going to outshine what an otherwise optimized party can do, with the one exception of the shinning symbol and spirit damage party, but that once a day limit means a party doing it is really going to go heavy into cheese. In my opinion, changing the weakness to holy/unholy or significantly lowering it will fix that issue.
Fire resistance and immunity are just too common in my opinion to over specialize into ultimate fire damage party. I have seen that happen previously and even multi activating weaknesses isn’t going to make a difference if the resistance is higher.