|
| 4 people marked this as a favorite. |
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.)
| 8 people marked this as a favorite. |
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.
|
| 7 people marked this as a favorite. |
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.
|
| 5 people marked this as a favorite. |
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.
---
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.
|
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
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.
-----
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.
-----
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.
|
|
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.
| 5 people marked this as a favorite. |
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.
|
|
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? :)
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
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.
|
|
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.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
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.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Paiso if you see this include abit more information and scenarios in the example. maybe something like this.
--------------------------------------------------------------
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.
--------------------------------------------------
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
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
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.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
The instance errata is perfect, no notes, no changes.