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While I don't agree that Slayer lacks identity, I do agree that trophies should do significantly more. If for no other reason than I think more powerful and varied effects on Trophies would just be more fun.
I personally also think tools could be heavily expanded and improved, but if no one gets to that thread before me, I'll make it.
I think you should at least have a trophy feat tree with some basic monster abilities baked in. Like a trophy with petrifying gaze from slaying a Medusa or Basilisk.
This could be overpowered but I'm just spitballing based on what I feel the class fantasy should offer.
Right now, the slayer feels like it lacks a real identity. It's in between ranger and thaumaturge, and doesn't feel as distinct as it should be. The trophies seem like they should be the slayers Big Thing, but right now they are just a way to change damage types.
The easiest way to make the trophies more thematically interesting is to make new feats with a new "Trophy" (or some other name) tag. Whenever you get a new trophy, you can instantly swap out a feat with the tag for a new feat with the tag. This way, when you slay a dragon, you can take its throat sack and use its breath weapon, but when you replace it with a gorgons eye, you get a slow effect. All of these feats would be appropriately balanced around their level, with most having no or very broad requirements (deals energy damage, has an immunity) with only a few having a specific requirement (can slow, can cast spells).
[Emphasis mine]. Yes, this would be awesome. Given the elegant balance of the PF2e ruleset with regard to monster “levels”, this should also be mostly achievable. Currently what we have us both unsatisfying and feels like a kludge.
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I want Trophies to offer access to specific abilities, blue mage style.
Like what Dr.Aspects suggests, I wanna use my Trophies to cast Monster abilities. I want to get specific.
We get teased with this concept with the Chymist’s Vials letting you steal "one special vision ability the creature the trophy was claimed from had".
And I kind of wish they went more in with that. Let all the Sig tools copy a specific type of ability from a defeated enemy.
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I want Trophies to offer access to specific abilities, blue mage style.Like what Dr.Aspects suggests, I wanna use my Trophies to cast Monster abilities. I want to get specific.We get teased with this concept with the Chymist’s Vials letting you steal "one special vision ability the creature the trophy was claimed from had".
And I kind of wish they went more in with that. Let all the Sig tools copy a specific type of ability from a defeated enemy.
I don't know what types of abilities you can safely allow copying.
Vision is a good one, so long as it's reasonably clear that it doesn't include gaze attacks. You do have a good stretch of levels where Slayer potentially demolishes any shapeshifters or illusionist plot if they hunt a mid-level outer planes creature, but that's at least a niche pairing. At best, you could extend it to other senses.
Movement speed needs to be limited until permanent flight is available, and it's probably giving too good of a burrow speed for PCs. I guess you can have a list of how much movement you get for each speed, and levels they work?
Resistance is already covered, and more generally accessible. Immunties are very high-level only, as we've seen from Kineticist.
Special attacks are obviously off the table, as are general "abilities". Giant boss attacks, Cyclops auto-success on anything, Bone Croupier once-a-minute fortune/misfortune...
I guess there are common unarmed strikes? You could have a standard set of claw, jaw, horn, slam, hoof, wing, etc. with standardized die sizes that you can get if the creature had one. Something akin to Bestial Mutagen with more normal damage dice and no drawbacks.
I don't really want the innate spell feats converted to require killing a caster/magical creature with the spells you want.
I guess I'm just not seeing a whole lot of situations where you could give the freedom of "get this category of thing from a monster" that wouldn't quickly be a top five cheese strat, require GM permission, or need to be "check against a predetermined list or formula for PC-balanced versions". Maybe I'm overlooking something, though.
Or maybe I'm overthinking it, and it's "gimme a giant list of ten-to-twenty options from the standard Monster Core glossary abilities, and let me have one of them once I meet a level pre-req".
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Honestly... If summon spells allow us to indirectly use the special abilities of common creatures, I don't see it as completely unreasonable for a specialized class to be allowed to do the same in a different way. Especially if the use of the special ability is limited in some way. Say by making it so you can use the special ability of a trophy once before you have to get a new trophy, and it costs one more action to activate than that creature would have spent.
Considering that you have to defeat the foe to get a trophy to use the ability, the GM has all the control in the world to keep shenanigans at bay (or enable them if they wish)
So... this idea would lead to this class essentially becoming another Kineticist. and a lot of abilities would be gated behind VERY specific campaigns or your DM choosing to add them into your setting.
Personally I don't see this as an issue. Plenty of monsters have really interesting and unique abilities. Kineticist is also among the most mechanically interesting clssses - if its not number one in that regard with its only major drawback being that its primary mechanics have not been supported by the content that's come out since due to its impulses not counting as either strike or spell.
The way I envision this potential trophy change, Slayers would still be a martial class with all that entails but with a grab bag of monster tricks. If we wanted to prevent cheese and force players to interact more often/carefully with the system, we could fo a thing where the trophies abilities wear off after a certain number of uses with maybe a high level or even capstone that lets you do it more often.
I'm in agreement with Cellion about it more or less being in line with summon spells. Letting you use a monster (or in this case a monsters ability) to do a thing. I think it's a neat concept, and would absolutely give the Slayer a unique identity to the Ranger, Gator, and Thaumaturge.
Honestly... If summon spells allow us to indirectly use the special abilities of common creatures, I don't see it as completely unreasonable for a specialized class to be allowed to do the same in a different way. Especially if the use of the special ability is limited in some way. Say by making it so you can use the special ability of a trophy once before you have to get a new trophy, and it costs one more action to activate than that creature would have spent.
Considering that you have to defeat the foe to get a trophy to use the ability, the GM has all the control in the world to keep shenanigans at bay (or enable them if they wish)
Summon spells are limited by the summon's statistics though. In the context of the slayer it really wouldn't make sense for you to use the monster's statistics for its special ability since its you who are using it. Unless trophies worked like wands that have an item level and allow you to use those abilities a certain number of times per day.
Movement speed needs to be limited until permanent flight is available, and it's probably giving too good of a burrow speed for PCs. I guess you can have a list of how much movement you get for each speed, and levels they work?
About speed, they can limit their effectiveness utility using the character level.
During the lowest levels it's limited to most chicken flight that are the most ancestry feats with flight speeds gives (you must end in a solid ground). So when reach level 7-9 you get a temporary flight (1/10 minutes) and at level 14-15 get fully flight.
Same for other movements like burrow. You need to end your movement at surface, then improves to be able to stay borrowed but unable to breath and them to become borrowed undefinitely.
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It doesn't need to be a pain if you explicitly list which abilities a slayer can poach from its trophies, allowing you to unlock stronger ones through feats.
I don't think people here expect Paizo to release a class that can freely poach everything from a monster, but if you could at least poach the generic monster abilities which are usually shared between monster families (which btw, are the vast majority of them) would be more than enough.
Also, small quibble, but it feels odd you can't get acid as a damage type from a trophy. Harvesting some kind of acidic gland sounds like exactly the kind of thing you'd want to harvest.
Can't you? A trophy gets damage types from any type of damage the creature could do that isn't from spells. Acid just isn't on the list of options for your generic free trophy.
I feel we already have a model for this on the Wild Mimic
(https://2e.aonprd.com/Archetypes.aspx?ID=226)
Could the slayer a curated set of abilities like this? Or would this reduce character uniqueness?
I hope it would be better than wild mimic.
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trophies should absolutely do more imo. The Slayer class currently feels too close to Ranger for my tastes and the trophy concept is an interesting one, but aside from Chymists Eye vial, is mostly just damage type variance or maybe a bonus to a tradition's saves, which, in my opinion, is not very interesting when they could get crazier with it.
Like others have said above, they dont all need to be baseline effects either, even just more unique ways to use them with feats would help (or having more variation like being able to gain a unique effect or action from a different creature types, like dragons granting a minor breath weapon or a plant creature giving you extra reach with vines or something for a short time)
To be honest I don't even necessarily want them to be able to steal specific monster abilities because that sounds like hell to balance, but I do think playing with creature types to grant bespoke effects or actions could be a fun compromise since those are more broadly applicable while not being SO broad that its just a damage type variance