Mark Quarry is awkward and situational.

[Lamp Flower]

This ability was one of my two main mechanical concerns about the class before the playtest document dropped. I think this deserves its own thread since the quarry mechanic is such a big part of the class.

Mark Quarry relies on three conditions:

1. You must be facing at least one enemy whose level is equal to or higher than yours.
2. You must find signs of the enemy in advance.
3. You must be in a situation where you can take 10 minutes to use Mark Quarry.

This works just fine for monster hunting quests, which makes sense for a monster hunter class. In other situations though, these conditions might not always get fulfilled. This makes it such that the slayer can't reliably use all of its features in all campaigns.

The first condition will probably be met fairly frequently. However, combats where every enemy is lower level than the party can still be serious threats and such will be encountered decently often. Even if the reason there are no enemies of at least PL is that the fight is supposed to be a cake walk (e.g. to show how far the party has come or for environmental storytelling), that just means that the slayer doesn't get to use all of its fun toys in that encounter.

Conditions 2 and 3 are an issue more consistently. In my experience, it is very common to be ambushed or otherwise have very little information going into a quest. A pretty common quest premise in all of our campaigns has been that we have to go to a place and fetch something. We know that there is likely to be danger but don't know the exact nature of it. In this case, it's really a coin flip whether or not it's realistic to find the necessary information before something attacks. If you either find out about the enemy when you're already too near to take 10 minutes to mark it or it finds you before you find it, you might have to enter a fight without having a quarry. You might even be tracking a quarry only to run into a different enemy eligible for Mark Quarry before you see your actual quarry.

If I had to guess, I'd say that one reason why 2 and 3 exist is to reward preparation. This is a good idea in principle, but it's not necessary in practice. This is because that is something the reinforcing mechanic is already doing. If you're able to prepare in advance, you can, for example, get a bonus to saves against certain enemies, proc a weakness, or resist a key damage type. The reward for preparation should not be the freedom to use abilities tied to Mark Quarry, it should be a chance to benefit from carefully choosing which trophies to use.

There's also currently the awkward case where you know you will eventually want to track and possibly RK about a specific creature that has plot relevance, but have more pressing matters to attend to first. If the creature is the same level as you, you could become worse at both of these things by leveling up, since the +2 from Mark Quarry is replaced by a +1 to proficiency from the level up. This is kind of an edge case, but I do think leveling up should make you better at things, not worse.

I'm sure that in some campaigns Mark Quarry would work just fine as it is, but I think reducing the effect of table variance on an ability that so many feats and all of the primary tools rely on would be a good idea. I'm just spitballing here, but here are some ideas:

1. Remove the level requirement from Mark Quarry. This would allow a slayer to operate normally no matter what kind of enemies the GM throws at the party. A reasonable compromise would be to limit trophies to only creatures of your level or higher. This would keep the trophy acquisition process as it is, while making the slayer's abilities less situational. Then again, you can already use a trophy gained from a level 1 enemy at level 20, provided that you claimed it at level 1. Because of that, I think it would be fine to allow trohies to be claimed from lower level enemies.

2. Make Instant + Endless Enmity a part of the chassis. This would allow you to still gain a quarry if you get ambushed. You would still have to spend your reaction, so no going On the Hunt, and you have to delay to go after the enemy or only get the benefits starting on your second turn. I know that Endless Enmity is currently a mid-level feat, but it honestly doesn't seem too strong. (These should be available at level 1. I can imagine paizo deciding to give these at like level 3, for some reason.)

These solutions might not be the correct ones, but I think something needs to be done. Also worth noting that there are already feats to address these issues. I just don't think they do enough, and chassis issues should not be solved with feats.

[exequiel759]

Yeah, Mark Quarry is in a rough spot and I hope it gets revised on release.

I was thinking what if Mark Quarry was instead a free action that triggers when rolling initiative allowing you to know the levels of all foes in the encounter, marking the highest level foe as your quarry. I was also toying with the idea of, rather than having Monster Lore, Assurance, and Automatic Knowledge, allowing the slayer to ask one question about their quarry every turn as a free action with the same restrictions as Recall Knowledge.

Mostly because I think yet another class with a universal lore is kinda boring. The slayer already borrows enough from the thaumaturge I think.

[Dragonchess Player]

IMO, Mark Quarry is something you do 1) before traveling to the adventure location (as part of the time spent Gathering Information/research/etc.), 2) during exploration, or 3) [with Instant Enmity] when meeting an unexpected monster. It's not just another version of Hunt Prey, because the slayer also needs to customize their arsenal for the arsenal bonuses (which are generally better than the ranger's Hunter's Edge).

[Tridus]

I was thinking back to some of my past AP campaigns while reading this. In some of them it would work pretty well. Like in SoT, a lot of the time you're deliberately going somewhere to do a specific thing and you can actively prepare to do the thing. Mark Quarry will work really well here.

Then I thought about book 1 of Spore War where there's a lot of reacting to stuff happening and you actively don't know what you're going to be up against for various reasons. It'll feel crappy here and the feats to do it faster are effectively taxes for that class mechanic to function at all. Like "I want to mark the boss in this place, that I know nothing about at all and am not even sure exists, and that we can't scout due to the danger" is pretty lame.

Adventures do this a lot. Ambushes happen. Random encounters happen. Being on the defensive happens. Delving into a dungeon with no idea what you're going to find because no one has been in there for 700 years happens.

There's a lot of extra setup GMs are going to have to incorporate to make this work in cases where you simply can't know what is coming next or the player will have to pay the feat tax.

Investigator kind of already has this problem in some scenarios but since they're investigating a mystery, they can at least ask a broader question without needing to know the target.

This just feels like a worse version of the same problem.

[Dubious Scholar]

Honestly, maybe the solution is just to be able to take trophies at least without having to quarry first at all? Like, if the big game hunter gets jumped by a dragon he's taking a tooth home as a trophy even if he didn't set out to hunt a dragon, right?

Or at least, it's part of a solution, and then the level 2 feat handles the rest of ambushes.

[Perpdepog]

I also think that Mark Quarrey should perhaps let you know the level, or at least viability, of your quarry before you start it. As it stands the ability reads that you take ten minutes and then get told whether those minutes you spent actually matter because that's when you discover the level of your quarry. That doesn't feel great and leads to spending extra time that would be tedious at best and lead to the party falling behind in a time-sensitive situation at worst.

Also, as a suggestion for hunting creatures below your level but trying to retain the "worthy prey" aspect of Mark Quarry, what if you need to use Mark Quarry against an enemy/enemies who are collectively 40 ExP? It's more of an abstraction than level, but it makes the ability more flexible; a single enemy the same level as the party is 40 ExP.

Edit: And just realized what I'm proposing is basically Pack Slayer, but with fewer restrictions, oopse.

[Dr. Frank Funkelstein]

Investigator has the Person of Interest feat, it costs an action but allows Devise a Strategem as a free action which makes it basically cost neutral.
Once every 10min feels much more reasonable than 1/day like the slayer feat, and as the investigation is a lot broader and can apply to multiple creatures it should be a baseline feature for slayer, not a feat.

[Kitusser]

Lamp Flower wrote:

This ability was one of my two main mechanical concerns about the class before the playtest document dropped. I think this deserves its own thread since the quarry mechanic is such a big part of the class.

Mark Quarry relies on three conditions:

1. You must be facing at least one enemy whose level is equal to or higher than yours.
2. You must find signs of the enemy in advance.
3. You must be in a situation where you can take 10 minutes to use Mark Quarry.

This works just fine for monster hunting quests, which makes sense for a monster hunter class. In other situations though, these conditions might not always get fulfilled. This makes it such that the slayer can't reliably use all of its features in all campaigns.

The first condition will probably be met fairly frequently. However, combats where every enemy is lower level than the party can still be serious threats and such will be encountered decently often. Even if the reason there are no enemies of at least PL is that the fight is supposed to be a cake walk (e.g. to show how far the party has come or for environmental storytelling), that just means that the slayer doesn't get to use all of its fun toys in that encounter.

Conditions 2 and 3 are an issue more consistently. In my experience, it is very common to be ambushed or otherwise have very little information going into a quest. A pretty common quest premise in all of our campaigns has been that we have to go to a place and fetch something. We know that there is likely to be danger but don't know the exact nature of it. In this case, it's really a coin flip whether or not it's realistic to find the necessary information before something attacks. If you either find out about the enemy when you're already too near to take 10 minutes to mark it or it finds you before you find it, you might have to enter a fight without having a quarry. You might even be tracking a quarry only to run into a different enemy eligible for Mark Quarry before you see your actual quarry.

If I had to guess, I'd...

Yeah it's going to lead to campaigns where you cant use your main stuff for a portion of encounters that is just way too high. In the type of game I play in, it would be like 40% of encounters at least that I wouldn't be able to use this.

It also just encourages DMs to throw boss encounters at players constantly, which I think is bad.

[Tridus]

Dubious Scholar wrote:

Honestly, maybe the solution is just to be able to take trophies at least without having to quarry first at all? Like, if the big game hunter gets jumped by a dragon he's taking a tooth home as a trophy even if he didn't set out to hunt a dragon, right?

Or at least, it's part of a solution, and then the level 2 feat handles the rest of ambushes.

Yeah this definitely makes sense. Plus, only being able to take a trophy from a quarry makes no narrative sense at all. The dragon's fang is a dragon's fang either way, isn't it?

I guess the idea is to make it so that trophies only count if they're from something you specifically hunted, but if you win a severe encounter ambush, I don't know how as a GM I'm supposed to explain why you can't take a trophy from that. If anything, isn't this MORE impressive since you beat the dragon without any chance to prepare for the encounter?

It feels overly gamest to me and I'd just house rule it away.

[ElementalofCuteness]

Mark Quarry is just watered down Hunt Prey and I don't want to say this but Paizo should hear it. Why does Paizo always seem to make classes with similar mechanics which are never on par with each other? Slayer specialize in hunting one big monster...What's the point of the Out Wit Ranger then? Isn't this what the Ranger was suppose to do....?

Am I missing something from these classes or could they both just be Class-Archetypes of Swashbuckler & Ranger?

[YuriP]

Lamp Flower wrote:

1. You must be facing at least one enemy whose level is equal to or higher than yours.

2. You must find signs of the enemy in advance.
3. You must be in a situation where you can take 10 minutes to use Mark Quarry.

4. Doesn't have humanoid trait.

--

IMO the Mark Querry should be a 1-action and work against any creature.

This proposed Slayer so high specialty to fight only monsters that he have already got some info taking 10 minutes of preparation restrict it way too much. Even wild focused adventures, you don't got such information nor such frequency of monsters to justify to play the class. Even most boss in most adventures that I played are 90% humanoids!

Also, I don't see a very good thematic reason to restrict the Slayer to hunt only monsters.

Instead, the only thing that should be restricted are the trophies, that should be limited to get from only enemies that don't carry nor use items and have a level equal or higher (you won't need to know the level when you use Mark Querry, just when you take the trophy) and the 10 minutes activity should be only the process to take these trophies.

[Dubious Scholar]

YuriP wrote:

Lamp Flower wrote:

1. You must be facing at least one enemy whose level is equal to or higher than yours.

2. You must find signs of the enemy in advance.
3. You must be in a situation where you can take 10 minutes to use Mark Quarry.

4. Doesn't have humanoid trait.

No, that's just Monster Lore.

[YuriP]

Oh, sorry my mistake.

Anyway I still think that Mark Querry should be a 1-action anyway.

[John R.]

I think Mark Quarry should be 1 action but have a 10 minute cooldown and they can keep the flavor of "you've spent at least 10 minutes researching this creature" but in the background, just like Prescient Planner.

[Roadlocator]

Maybe they could do something with a shorter version as the base, and get bonuses if you can dedicate more time to studying the target?

[exequiel759]

The slayer gets Assurance and Automatic Knowledge at 5th level, right?. Well, what if to differentiate it from the thaumaturge, Mark Quarry allowed the slayer to ask questions about his quarry as if they made a succesful (or critically succesful) a RK check?

I feel this would be a more elegant way to get the same idea across without directly borrowing a worse version of Esoteric Lore from the thaumaturge.

[Tridus]

Roadlocator wrote:

Maybe they could do something with a shorter version as the base, and get bonuses if you can dedicate more time to studying the target?

This sounds a lot better to me. If I'm being attacked by a dragon that suddenly appeared out of nowhere, I probably want that as my quarry.

But if I have preparation time, maybe I can get some extra benefit for having a chance to plan ahead.

[OrochiFuror]

Could it also be interesting to have a monster journal, many hunter/slayer type stories also include writing down what you know about monsters. So after meeting a certain required amount of lore in your book you can one action or for free when rolling initiative mark quarry on something you know well. So you have a list of creatures that you know well enough to always be ready for them.

[Perpdepog]

Kitusser wrote:

It also just encourages DMs to throw boss encounters at players constantly, which I think is bad.

Not really. You only need a single on-level enemy, which isn't a big deal on its own.