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It seems Paizo is giving another try at a STR+Light Armor playstyle, but does it solve anything?
For starts, it's not the first time. We've had the Monk, but the Monk specifically had Mountain Stance and 10HP.
They tried again with Exemplar Playtest, but in the end relented to making it a Medium armor class, and the Exemplar is a 10HP class anyway.
The Daredevil is a fragile martial. It's only 8HP and it only accesses Light Armor. Going with a STR Daredevil is going to place you as durable as a Cloistered Cleric with Mystic Armor (AC-wise) from lvl. 1-4.
It seems the Daredevil is drawing on the Monk's hit-and-run playstyle (Stride+Flurry+Stride) and anyone choosing to do something like a Greatsword Daredevil is going to be looking at either using Flying Hurdles Stunt (Acrobatics check, but you get to Leap away on a Failure) or Scrambling Retreat to gain "Plate" armor against the attack (+4 item and +2 circumstance is a +6 total), while also running away. Or using a Reach weapon (like Guisarme).
From the looks of it, the enemy's free action Stride can be a trap if you have a Fighter or Witness Animist (Vessel spell active) as you can run near them and they'll get the Reactive Strike. Or run close to a Guardian and if the enemy pursues, they'll have to contend with an Intercept Attack. Maybe having Snares.
Or possibly relying on Maneuvers to tax enemy actions. A Gill Hook with Daring Stunt to close in and grapple, then Pressing Pummel for a big hit with an "agile" 2H weapon is definitely new, as the enemy will have to break free, Stride, and then Strike at you.
I've been hoping for a lighter armor/big weapon playstyle, and it seems it might be trying to address it by accentuating mobility as the key defensive ability for light armor through action economy.
Intriguing, but I'll see how well it actually plays.
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The Daredevil is a fragile martial. It's only 8HP and it only accesses Light Armor. Going with a STR Daredevil is going to place you as durable as a Cloistered Cleric with Mystic Armor (AC-wise) from lvl. 1-4.
Your math is off on this one, I think? Mystic Armor gives +1 AC, and light armor gives +2. So you'll have +1 better AC than any cloth-caster who's got the same secondary Dex, even after they self-buff.
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My guess, or expectation is that you don't build a strength focused daredevil. Or rather than you're going build like a strength/dex equal-ish build. So at level 1 you might wear like chain shirt, needing only +3 dex which is achievable, and also have like +4 strength.
The real drawback is having only like +1 to con and having 8 hp from class.
The class to me does read like it might be a skirmisher, but I don't think the abilities/feats it has actually supports that very well compared to a monk. Move, flurry (two attacks), move away works okay. But the daredevils abilities are harder to use.
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Perpdepog: when you reference damage steroid, are you talking about stunt damage? the very conditional and harder to pull of thing where you actually have to move an enemy into a solid surface to get it?
That is so situational, I would not count it. don't get me wrong, I love it as a bread-and-butter ability, and in most cases you can pull it off, but in the most necessary cases (boss fights against big monsters) it will be the hardest to get.
Perpdepog: when you reference damage steroid, are you talking about stunt damage? the very conditional and harder to pull of thing where you actually have to move an enemy into a solid surface to get it?
Remember it also "includes a creature that is larger than you." This means the smaller you are, the easier it is to get stunt damage. So a halfling with titan wrestler could toss a ogre into your human fighter for stunt damage.
That is so situational, I would not count it. don't get me wrong, I love it as a bread-and-butter ability, and in most cases you can pull it off, but in the most necessary cases (boss fights against big monsters) it will be the hardest to get.
This does lead into the second issue, increasing enemy sizes. With the class revolving around athletic checks, it's going to need a reliable source of size growth to stay within titan wrestlers size difference to use those maneuvers.
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It needs something like the Envoy which grants you as class features, chances to auto upgrade it's charisma abilities. So yeah, there should be a couple baked in chances to upgrade Athletics and Acrobatics since SO MUCH of your class abilities revolve around them.
Maybe the book will finally come with support for this extremely basic fantasy trope/aesthetic. Hopefully in a class agnostic way.
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Maybe the book will finally come with support for this extremely basic fantasy trope/aesthetic. Hopefully in a class agnostic way.
Of course it's class agnostic. Every class will be able to take the Daredevil Archetype.
I think a lot of class locked abilities should be more easily accessible because the fantasy doesn't fit them being sequestered to a single class.
Pretty much sums up my feelings about Daredevil, entirely, tbh.
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Oof, I did make a mistake not remembering the literal +2(+3 DEX) armor even my characters wear. Ya, I am wrong about the "low" armor.
But it did bring remind me of the discussions over the Exemplar being more STR-oriented with some of the eikons and Light Armor just not cutting it. And from that, Paizo changed the Exemplar to a Medium class.
Outside that, the more I mull it over and look at the feats it seems like a "Fighting Character" to me, relying on combo strings and having a a mitigation for those combo strings (Audacious Combatant).
But I'm seeing some stat contentions. One, Bold Bluffs doesn't seem good. You'll need to focus STR for Athletics (Daring Stunt), DEX for AC (max out armor), CON for melee combat (despite maneuverability), and WIS for saves/initiative. Fitting in CHA for Deception Feint checks doesn't seem very tenable. And Daring Stunt only focusing on Athletics maneuvers makes it seem less incentivized to pick DEX.
Also, aren't maneuvers agile if they're using an agile weapon, like your Fists? So, is it more ideal to go with an open-hand or agile type weapon playstyle for Audacious Combatant to work with Press feat maneuvers for that -3/-6 MAP?
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I found Daredevil’s Endurance really weird as a class feature. Like, they could have given the class 10 + Con HP, medium armor, and/or powerful fist (since the class borrows heavily from the wrestler and the 1e brawler) but they decided to give it a general feat that you were going to take anyways and a circumstance bonus to healing from Medicine checks? I agree that even after applying the buffs I mentioned, I think adrenaline should grant temp HP.
I also think propelling strides should grant a baseline +5 ft. movement to speend that increases to +10 ft. movement if you pass next to a prop on a move action, not only if you begin the the move action next to one. I think it would be really cool if, to get in reach of someone 10 ft. away from you, as a daredevil you could move 5 ft away from the enemy to get next to wall and propel yourself from it and end up in the other side of the room next to the foe.
I am, yeah. I'm not imagining it being super hard to pull off, though I'm also looking at it through the lens of a GM who both largely runs theater of the mind, and who likes to be generous with players who ask if their class can do the conditional thing because that's why they picked that class. I wouldn't be at all upset if they explicitly made stunt damage easier to achieve, though, for those who are more grid-minded than I am.Perpdepog: when you reference damage steroid, are you talking about stunt damage? the very conditional and harder to pull of thing where you actually have to move an enemy into a solid surface to get it?
That is so situational, I would not count it. don't get me wrong, I love it as a bread-and-butter ability, and in most cases you can pull it off, but in the most necessary cases (boss fights against big monsters) it will be the hardest to get.
As someone who is very grind minded, but wouldn't consider myself as purposefully stingy, when I started reading the description of the Stunt damage thing I read it and went...huh that's a very situational and unreliable source of bonus damage. So y'all are on to something there.
It's not intentional, but I start looking at the map and the grid and baring things actually shown on the official map, you're not going to have me describing a bunch of large items to launch yourself off of.
On that merit alone, I think that class feature needs a rework. And again it's not like an intentional thing, but I'm not going to think about. And I don't really want to decide when there is or isn't something there. If they want the class to have access to this most of the time, they need to write it differently so there are ways to use it without it depending completely on scenery or a larger character. I don't know what that looks like, but as it is I would avoid the class just because of this.
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But if part of the design is to create something that engages more with the environment, making it work better without scenery would be kind of antithetical to the function.
Maybe it's okay to start saying that empty squares with a bunch of enemies on one side are not good map design.
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But if part of the design is to create something that engages more with the environment, making it work better without scenery would be kind of antithetical to the function.
Maybe it's okay to start saying that empty squares with a bunch of enemies on one side are not good map design.
The thing is that the GMs and AP designers aren't really going to change how they design maps just for the sake of a single class from splatbook that is going to come out 8 years after the release of the system. If anything that's going to cause people to ignore the class.
And the fix to avoid this is simple; make stunt damage less reliant on pushing someone against a prop and allow it to proc when throwing someone to the floor in a suplex-like maneuver (trip), bear-hugging (grapple), or move someone's hand away with a quick swing (disarm).
But if part of the design is to create something that engages more with the environment, making it work better without scenery would be kind of antithetical to the function.
Maybe it's okay to start saying that empty squares with a bunch of enemies on one side are not good map design.
Strong agree. Even worse, if the ground got to count as a prop then there is never a reason not to just use trip all the time.
I get the feeling props are intended to make general shove and reposition maneuvers something worth doing on that first action you have to use on a maneuver to get your adrenaline going.
EDIT: Plus you already get extra damage on a trip with a critical hit, so it really doesn't need to be the only maneuver worth using.
I noticed this along side some friends on discord that since a prop is defined as "-anything large and sturdy enough for you to push yourself off of. This includes a creature that is larger than you or a wall, column, or other durable terrain feature." it allows small creatures to use most of their fellow allies and animal companions (and thralls!) as props for Stunt Damage!
The trade off being that small ancestries are a little worse at maneuvers because of their size locking them out of moving gargantuan creatures even with Titan Wrestler. Don't know if its intentional but small PCs seem like they'll be able to use this system exceptionally well.
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Not only. Get a small size ancestry will also look many class feats that doesn't work if the target is more than one size than you (so if you are small you can only target up to medium creatures, if you are medium you can only target up to large, if you large you can only target up to huge).
So if you play has small you are able to Stunt Damage easily using other creatures (no matter if they are ally, enemy or neutral) but you cannot use feats with “The target can’t be more than one size larger than you” vs larger creatures or higher (that are pretty common enemies).
Just remembering that Titan Wrestler doesn't work with the class feats.
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That's a really good point actually, the class does lose a lot of feats for smaller characters that want to take 'em. Should size based ancestry decisions be a factor at character creation?
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The class REALLY needs a way to be able to increase the size that can use their feats on. Hard locking it to 1 size bigger just sucks.
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The class REALLY needs a way to be able to increase the size that can use their feats on. Hard locking it to 1 size bigger just sucks.
I think this needs to be baseline for the Daredevil. Kinda like how they just made Guardian's Resistance baseline without relying on the armor type. Daredevil just needs this aseline
Don't know why, I find myself weirdly attracted to the Daredevil class when the read and theorycrafting of it is problematically interesting.
Like, I think the class needs some hard-coding that they can default Stunt against Large (minimim) and that Medium creatures can (somehow) use other Medium creatures as props.
But I guess we've resolved the main topic that STR+Light Armor may potentially not be a problem considering the lvl. 1 reaction Scrambling Retreat and lvl. 1 stunt Forceful Kickoff (especially if you succeed to Trip with Daring Stunt). The enemy will have to Stand, then Stride to you, reducing them to a single Strike.
But I do think that the rules are pushing the Daredevil to Free-Hand and possibly Medic for some self-sustain.
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But if part of the design is to create something that engages more with the environment, making it work better without scenery would be kind of antithetical to the function.
Maybe it's okay to start saying that empty squares with a bunch of enemies on one side are not good map design.
Maybe, but it also puts a lot more burden on a GM, especially for GMs writing their own campaign and not using pre-made maps.
I understand your argument, and I don't disagree in theory.
But I think the reality is going to be that it doesn't work out well.