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At this stage and after giving it some thought, it is my opinion that the Risks and Rewards playtest is the worst playtest we've received thus far for PF2e. Although some prior playtests also had major issues, like Battlecry!'s awful playtest Guardian, this to me is the first instance where both featured classes are duds. I think there are many reasons for this, including fairly uninteresting core themes, largely unoriginal features, and weak balance, but at the core of it I think is that you can often end up not being able to play your class.
Some of us have experienced what it's like to fight an ooze as a Swashbuckler: you can't deal precision damage to the thing because it's immune, but you also can't use most Charisma skill actions because oozes are mindless, so your bravado actions and finishers, the things that make you a Swashbuckler, don't work. In that encounter, you don't get to play your class. This is a deeply unpleasant experience that I don't wish upon anyone else, and one that I wish didn't exist at all in Pathfinder. It is also, in my opinion, unfortunately the defining experience of both the Daredevil and Slayer classes.
To summarize: the Daredevil is a class that makes use of props and maneuvers to move around, reposition enemies, and damage them by slamming them into said props. The Slayer, meanwhile, is a class that marks a quarry, adapts their toolset to them, and hunts them with exceptional speed. All else held equal, the core of these playstyles already presents interesting tradeoffs: the Daredevil is limited by the availability of props, the positioning of enemies, and their own positioning, so the core formula of "enemy + prop = success" is ever-changing based on a number of dynamic variables, and isn't always easy or even possible to achieve every round. The Slayer, meanwhile, has similar core limitations to the Ranger class in that they care especially about one particular target. If that was all that limited these classes, they would already be more restricted in what they can do than, say, a Fighter or a Rogue, and that would be fine.
Unfortunately, both classes are saddled with not just a few, but an almost comically large amount of added restrictions: the Daredevil's props are limited by relative size, for instance, the class can't use many of their features in terrain that doesn't let them Stride, and to top it all off they're action-taxed every round before they can even start using most of their feats. It is not rare to fight in an encounter where you have no props to work with, nor even enemies of a suitable size to maneuver around. The Slayer, meanwhile, needs to know which quarry they're marking ahead of time, has no inherent means of finding out which enemies are around or identifying said quarry (Monster Lore doesn't let you identify creatures), can only mark quarry of a certain level, and can't properly adapt to their quarry due to Reinforce Arsenal not being freely usable in exploration. It is not rare to fight in an encounter where you have no quarry to fight, which means you can't get quickened from On the Hunt. Even if you mark an ally as your quarry just to have access to On the Hunt's quickening, this means you don't benefit from the many quarry-specific effects of your tools. In those encounters, you don't get to play your class, and unlike the Swashbuckler fighting an ooze, this in my experience was not a rare occurrence.
And to be clear: my issue here isn't that the rewards didn't match the risks. Neither class felt very rewarding to play, and that ought to change, but I don't think any amount of reward would justify frequently ending up not being able to do the one thing your class is meant to be good at. To also be clear: my issue here isn't that you can have low moments as either class; I actually quite enjoyed the critical failure effects of many of the Daredevil's feats and how that added to their chaotic playstyle. My issue here is that there should never be a moment in Pathfinder where the player feels like they'd have been better off not playing at all. This is the kind of feeling that happens when your class gets completely shut down in an encounter with no real recourse, and I have never experienced this feeling as often as I did when I played the Daredevil and Slayer. Not getting to play your class isn't "high-risk", it's not a suitable tradeoff for a high potential reward, it is in my opinion simply bad design. If there is anything at all that I think the developers ought to fix when adjusting these classes towards their final release, it is this.
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And to be clear: my issue here isn't that the rewards didn't match the risks. Neither class felt very rewarding to play, and that ought to change, but I don't think any amount of reward would justify frequently ending up not being able to do the one thing your class is meant to be good at.
This is the most important issue that needs to be fixed before release.
I feel that Paizo tends to overcompensate the downsides when designing abilities meant to put you above the power curve, regardless of how far above that curve those abilities actually push you. The kineticist's fire impulse junction is an example of this, with fire impulses often being a bit weaker than impulses of the same level, or ruffian rogues being arbritrarily limited to simple d8 or martial/advanced d6 weapons when there's weaker weapons that you can't choose somehow.
There are already classes in the system that present better risk-like mechanics; the swashbuckler and the magus. A swashbuckler who fails a finisher not only loses panache, but also cannot make additional attacks that turn. A magus who fails a spellstrike effectively loses three actions, since spellstrike still needs to be recharged, in addition to the focus point or spell slot spent to use it in the first place. After the recent errata to weaknesses, I also think the thaumaturge has a better reward-like system than the slayer. The new weakness rules encourage builds that can trigger as many weaknesses as possible on their own, because if you face a foe that is already weak to one of your damage types, you can instead apply a personal antithesis and benefit from both weaknesses as part of the same.
Prepared casters, despite their own issues, also engage with a form of reward system by preparing for the battles ahead.
The daredevil's and slayer's risk is not having a class in certain situations, and there's no reward good enough to compensate for that.
Much less in the current state of these classes.
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I am not sure I would say that props and especially the damage from slamming enemies into them really is at the heart of the Daredevil class.
For one thing, They don't really do it that often.
Daring Stunt, the default free action of the class, doesn't give any special shove or way to use props. The bonus to speed from starting an action next to a prop is nice, but it is not necessarily a great way to stay next to a prop or get enemies closer to a prop to push them into. Many of the risky press feat option they have access to at level 1 don't move enemies (or can't move them into a prop) and thus don't set up prop damage very well at all.
EDIT: with Caroming Charge, you don't even need props necessarily to use your stunt damage feature.
Kind of going along with that, there are other ways to build a daredevil that will never interact with props.
For example, there is a lot of feat support for being a high-risk crit fisher that doesn't really interact with moving around a lot (past maybe an early first action daring stunt or later rushing stride) or props.
Also, there is a (fairly common) play test weirdness to the class about how your character is supposed to be equiped. In theory, it is open-ended, and that leaves open options like carrying a reach polearm and MCing into fighter to get some interesting reposition and shoving feats, as well as unarmed styles and even potentially an archetype-heavy, small, open hand shield DD who stays close to allies to protect them and use them as props.
In other words, the class is a little too open-ended to really guess how it is intended to be played.
I wonder if there is somewhere else on the internet where people are talking a lot more about their play test experience because it doesn't feel like there are more than 10 people talking about their play test experiences here. Paizo tends to heavily weight the feedback they get on their surveys over conversations that happen online (these spaces are usually more for players to connect and share ideas with each other than to provide the kind of feedback that shapes play test revisions). I hope there are a lot more people filling out surveys though because I am not sure I know what ideas the developers are really holding onto as core for either class (I never have time to look deeply at 2 classes during a play test), nor what "out there" ideas are being tested or what alternatives they might be considering.
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Props are rather obviously core to the Daredevil class when so many of their feats make use of them, and Daring Stunt very much does let you Reposition or Shove enemies to try to deal stunt damage. Just because you can avoid props at all costs and exploit a broken feat does not mean the Daredevil isn't designed to focus on maneuvering enemies into and around props. This is, by the way, a focus that is clear and present in the survey questionnaire for the Daredevil, so if you've playtested the class in any amount I recommend you complete that form and see for yourself.
Props are rather obviously core to the Daredevil class when so many of their feats make use of them, and Daring Stunt very much does let you Reposition or Shove enemies to try to deal stunt damage. Just because you can avoid props at all costs and exploit a broken feat does not mean the Daredevil isn't designed to focus on maneuvering enemies into and around props. This is, by the way, a focus that is clear and present in the survey questionnaire for the Daredevil, so if you've playtested the class in any amount I recommend you complete that form and see for yourself.
It is like one or two feats per level at most (some levels none) that require or even benefit from using props. That is a good number. Enough to be one possible subclass/way to play the class, but not enough to be "obviously core" to the class's design.
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It is like one or two feats per level at most (some levels none) that require or even benefit from using props. That is a good number. Enough to be one possible subclass/way to play the class, but not enough to be "obviously core" to the class's design.
That's interesting, I ended up counting things very differently:
So that's 20 feats that interact with props or build upon actions that do, out of the 45 listed in the playtest for the class, and so on top of the basic actions you can do that will interact with props in addition to all this, with props being a central element of two of the class's features at level 1. Sounds an awful lot to me like the class is made to interact with props as a core part of their gameplay.
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Fittingly I think this whole thing just kind of highlights that Paizo's historically been kind of bad at judging risk/reward. Options with narrow utility or that encourage you to make objectively bad decisions rarely give enough benefit for them to actually make sense (see: every spellcaster with a feat that gives them melee combat benefits).
So you get two classes that want fairly specific things but don't even get to punch that far above their weight class when those things are true.
Not much else to add but the OP is spot on here.
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Props are rather obviously core to the Daredevil class when so many of their feats make use of them, and Daring Stunt very much does let you Reposition or Shove enemies to try to deal stunt damage. Just because you can avoid props at all costs and exploit a broken feat does not mean the Daredevil isn't designed to focus on maneuvering enemies into and around props. This is, by the way, a focus that is clear and present in the survey questionnaire for the Daredevil, so if you've playtested the class in any amount I recommend you complete that form and see for yourself.It is like one or two feats per level at most (some levels none) that require or even benefit from using props. That is a good number. Enough to be one possible subclass/way to play the class, but not enough to be "obviously core" to the class's design.
How is a feat at every level not "core to the class"? That's a huge amount of feats.
Daredevil also has a lot of feats that are size dependent and can also easily get completely shut off. I assume they'll fix that after the playtest, but right now I have no idea how this class is even supposed to work when you're fighting a dragon in an open area (or god forbid, while flying) because so much of its stuff ceases to function in that situation.
It makes Daredevil feel GM constrained: there's entirely normal types of encounters and terrain that hinder this class so massively that using them regularly is going to feel like you're targeting a player and the class effectively requires the GM to set up encounters specifically to help the class get to do its thing.
This is something that can happen with a lot of classes in rare situations (like Swashbucklers and oozes) but it's a LOT more common with Daredevil.
(Which was also a problem Necromancer's playtest had: once fights take to the air/water, thralls just ceased to work correctly.)
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My opinion regarding these classes is that they suffer from thematic and mechanical identity problems.
This becomes clear if we make a joke. Leonidas from 300 turns to a adventurers' party and asks:
— You, what is your profession?
Fighter: I am a fighter.
Rogue: I am a rogue.
Cleric: I am a cleric.
Wizard: I am a wizard.
Daredevil: I am a daredevil.
— What? Daredevil is not a profession!
It's a joke; a class isn't exactly a profession. But this helps to point out, for me, the root problem of the class: the fact that it doesn't define itself.
And this lack of definition creates precisely the situation that Teridax and Unicore point out. Teridax says "the DD was supposed to be a class specializing in using Props, the rest doesn't make sense" while Unicore argues "but the class has a lot of mechanics that don't care about Props, or at best treat them as optional," which is the case with Daring Stunt, Caroming Charge, and Pressing Pummel. OK, Daring Stunt can cause damage if you use Shove and Relocate, but in practice this requires another Prop to throw the target against, and it will still be inferior to a Strike. 99% of the times I used Daring Stunt it was to Trip or Grab because honestly, the damage isn't worth it. The other benefit that Teridax also mentioned affecting Caroming Charge is the additional speed, which isn't bad, but if your character is already fast or the enemies aren't very far away, you don't depend on it in most situations. And Pressing Pummel, which in my opinion is the main way to benefit from Adrenaline at low levels, doesn't care about Props.
Personally, I only use Props for speed gain since I saw that Stunt Damage required a lot of effort for little benefit, and I focused mainly on using Daring Stunt as an excellent way to compress actions to use Trip or Grab while providing adrenaline to use Caroming Charge or Pressing Pummel. This has already put me in a position where the class works even without Props. Did this make it competitive with others? In my opinion, no, but at least it made it playable and gave it a role, which is basically using Trip and Grab to primarily benefit the rest of the party while getting some extra adrenaline.
For me, the most important thing would be for the class designer to first define the class's true role, and then develop mechanics that fulfill that role. In the current situation, people don't even know what it does properly. Especially since it doesn't currently do anything that well.
The slayer, on the other hand, faces another identity problem. It was created as a kind of ranger variant class, focused on dynamically choosing prey instead of having fixed favorite enemies. A concept that made so much sense that 5e basically copied it for the ranger, and the second edition Pathfinder ranger copied this concept, improved by D&D.
Now, Paizo's designers want to reintroduce the slayer, but its main characteristic has already been given to the ranger. So, in order not to seem like a simple ranger variant and at the same time not to remove what comes from its origin, they implemented this current quarry concept, which is simply terrible. It's trying to be the Ranger who needs to mark its prey, but because it would rather not do the same, it marks poorly.
Honestly, for me, the Slayer should simply abandon the concept of the quarry as a target completely and focus fully on the concept of trophies. This makes him, in effect, a monster/bounty hunter who benefits from the rewards obtained by defeating his enemies, regardless of who they are, rather than a ranger variant.
It is interesting to see different people’s reading of these classes and abilities.
Re: Daredevil
The idea that 10 extra feet of movement is enough of an incentive to consider movement feats to be prop dependent is not one that comes to my mind when looking at this class, especially when you have to start each action next to a prop to get that. For me it’s much more of a “this is a little benefit worth picking up occasionally when you can do something cool with it, or you would have moved to that space anyway.”
Also note that movement abilities like flying hurdle stunt require you to move enemies into your space, so unless you were inside a prop, you are not using those abilities and getting stunt damage.
Like Yuri, I am much less interested in the feats that were printed that require props to function or do more than benefit more than 10 extra feet of movement from them. At most, I would maybe have one of those feats in a flexible feat spot with a high level character.
To me, the much more interesting mechanics of the class are the way it tries to interact with press actions, which is still underbaked significantly in this play test, but so is everything else the class is trying to do.
They are playing with a lot of different levers with this DD playtest.
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I haven't had a probably won't get a chance to playtest this one.
That being said, I love the general idea behind slayer and its mechanics but the actual implementation and the feedback I've already read makes me think this might be the first playtest that could use a complete rewrite and second playtest. Not sure if it would delay the book but...it might be worth it. Kinda how some video games need enough time to develop properly before being rushed out and end up failing. I'm not sure the team can get enough positive feedback from this first draft playtest and ensure the released version is a quality product. There might be too much that needs to be thrown out or changed that whatever comes out of it could deviate enough that it warrants a completely new review. I know this is an extreme opinion and I could definitely be wrong but I'd hate to see a class I want to play end up no better or possibly worse than the inventor.
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I'm of the same opinion, though as much as I'd like to see a v2 of this playtest, Paizo is unfortunately known for keeping to a (sometimes excessively) tight schedule, so it is unlikely that the Risks and Rewards expansion will get delayed due to poor initial reception. On the flipside, they did manage to take the Guardian, one of the worst playtest classes we ever received, and make them a genuinely amazing class in the final release, so I'm hopeful that the developers will take the feedback that's been given and use it to give us two solid classes.
The idea that 10 extra feet of movement is enough of an incentive to consider movement feats to be prop dependent is not one that comes to my mind when looking at this class, especially when you have to start each action next to a prop to get that. For me it’s much more of a “this is a little benefit worth picking up occasionally when you can do something cool with it, or you would have moved to that space anyway.”
If this were the only mechanic that interacted with props, then sure, this'd be a nice little side benefit, but it also comes packaged with another core class feature that interacts with props, stunt damage, along with a huge number of feats that interact with props, plus other core features that interact with props via those two benefits. Acting like the Daredevil isn't reliant on props in view of this evidence isn't some great act of insight, it's just sticking one's head in the sand and being obstinate on the internet.
To inject a touch of perspective into this conversation: the Fighter has plenty of feats that don't involve Strikes. Reactive Shield, Aggressive Block, Blade Brake, Devoted Guardian, Dueling Parry, and Lightning Swap are all but a few examples of such feats you'll find in your first couple of levels, so you can very easily go for a Strike-less feat build. In fact, not even all of the Fighter's core features revolve around Strikes, as Shield Block doesn't have the Fighter Strike or boost their Striking power. Using this cherry-picked evidence to claim that the Fighter isn't really a class about Striking would, however, be blatantly wrong. Similarly, just because the Daredevil has a feat line for improvised weapons and a couple of bad press Strikes doesn't prevent them from having a huge amount of prop interaction in both their core features and feats.
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I'm of the same opinion, though as much as I'd like to see a v2 of this playtest, Paizo is unfortunately known for keeping to a (sometimes excessively) tight schedule, so it is unlikely that the Risks and Rewards expansion will get delayed due to poor initial reception. On the flipside, they did manage to take the Guardian, one of the worst playtest classes we ever received, and make them a genuinely amazing class in the final release, so I'm hopeful that the developers will take the feedback that's been given and use it to give us two solid classes
I don't know if a second pass is needed here, but to argue in favor of it I'd say there's a difference between the slayer and the guardian, in that even while the guardian playtest version was certainly bad, the core idea of what Paizo wanted to do with the guardian and what people wanted out of it was the same; a non-divine tank that's fun to play. With the slayer that's a bit more tricky, since there's some people that have a problem even with the concept of the class itself because it would be the 3rd hunter class in this edition, and there's other people (or people on both ends) that also don't like the mechanical approach to that concept either.
I can't really say what people overall think about it, but the comments I seen online seem to heavily lean towards the removal of Mark Quarry and, while most people aren't really sold into trophies and tools either, the suggestions to "fix" or change that are a bit all over the place right now. Some suggest to remove tools, others suggest to remove trophies, and others want to keep the mechanics of one of them and somehow put them into the other.
Also, while this is probably the playtest I engaged into the most (even though I still couldn't actually playtest either class for schedule reasons. I hope I can before the playtest ends), I have the feeling that Paizo's decision to show the classes first on stream backfired and people jumped off the boat early and didn't mind the playtest at all. Not because the idea to show classes before a playtest was bad, but because the first impression these classes give is certainly rough. I don't think I need to point out the "another ranger?" and "another swashbuckler?" criticisms that were common since their reveal.
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We're not getting a second pass. People need to not get their hopes up for that. There is basically zero chance of it happening with how their schedule operates.
I feel like we may be at the point of diminishing returns with new classes. The game has a LOT of classes now. Coming up with something that feels unique with how much stuff is already in the game is going to get more difficult.
In this case, I understand how you're supposed to play Slayer but it doesn't interest me a lot because it feels like it could have been an archetype with the trophy mechanic and the whole quarry thing is just extraneous and won't work in a lot of very standard game situations.
Daredevil... I just don't understand how its intended to be played. It has a lot of stuff that either just doesn't work in bog standard situations or requires the GM to actively alter encounters and scenes to enable the class to function. Adrenaline feels clunky, and the base defenses of the class are not good enough for how the class is seemingly intended to be played from its description.
I despised the Necromancer playtest, but at least I understood what that was trying to add to the game and who it was for (and other people were enthusiastic about it). This time, though? I'm just not really sure what the point is or who these are for. It feels like classes for the sake of classes, you know?
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Oh, I don't get my hopes up for much of anything out of my control but I still believe the slayer warrants such a heavy revision that it would necessitate another playtest. It seems the time between playtests and release have gotten about 6 months longer in the last couple years that a 2nd go could maybe be feasible. But you're right, expectations can't meet with the realities of Paizo's limitations. All I can hope for is that the slayer (and daredevil for others) turns out to be enjoyable from 1-20.
I still can't believe we don't have a shifter class coming at this point. I would have never thought they'd pass that up, something mechanically fresh, for something like the daredevil and slayer, two classes that feel like heavy revisions of old material. They definitely seem like they're running low on inspiration fuel when it comes to classes.
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Although I would've much preferred a Shifter class in the playtest or some other concept more distinct from the classes we already have (and in my opinion there's still a large number of properly original concepts yet to be realized, despite 2e's crowded roster), I do think the Daredevil and Slayer each have a kernel of original gameplay that's worth bringing into Pathfinder: when it works, the Daredevil's interaction with props makes for some genuinely fresh gameplay and tactical considerations that no other class really has, in my opinion. As much as I despise the Slayer's signature tools, I love the tools they get from their feats and the feeling of fine-tuned customization that can come from Reinforcing those.
This is also why, as critical as I am of this playtest, I'm also hopeful that a good expansion can still come out of it: while I find the gameplay for both classes to be poorly-implemented right now, I don't think their core gameplay is irredeemable. The core idea of interacting more with creatures and the environment in the Daredevil I think is sound, and goodness knows we have plenty of functional hunter classes already. This is pure conjecture on my part, but something also tells me that the overly situational nature of these classes was an experiment on Paizo's part to see just how much they could push the "high-risk" part of this upcoming expansion: one of the reasons I wrote this thread to begin with is to express as clearly as I could that this kind of "risk" is not one I personally find acceptable. As several people have mentioned, the "high-reward" part is also not really present, and that is something I wish the developers had experimented more with in this playtest, especially as PF2e has a reputation for being too conservative when it comes to letting characters punch above their weight.
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To be fair, the Advanced Player's Guide classes released in a fairly poor state, though a lot of that was due to changes in staff mid-development from what I remember. I think all 4 of those classes weren't fully realized until the remaster....then again oracle is still a mess for its own unique reasons.
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And you know what? I ate crow every time! I was incredibly skeptical every time, and every time I eventually went "oh Paizo, you got me again!"
I definitely agree that Paizo has frequently turned a bad playtest around, though I think it's also worth mentioning that they did so because the playerbase complained. Players were right to criticize the playtest Guardian in particular, not just because that class started off terrible, but because Paizo clearly took those heaps of critical feedback seriously and gave the class the glow-up they sorely needed. This is my hope for the Risks and Rewards classes: time will tell how the Daredevil and Slayer will turn out in their final release, but ideally the criticism that gets given now will have been taken into account and used to deliver solid, fun classes that will be the versions we'll remember best. Criticism at its core is meant to help, not put down, and as a playerbase we can genuinely help Paizo by giving constructive criticism, especially during a playtest where such feedback is expressly invited.
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To be fair, the Advanced Player's Guide classes released in a fairly poor state, though a lot of that was due to changes in staff mid-development from what I remember. I think all 4 of those classes weren't fully realized until the remaster....then again oracle is still a mess for its own unique reasons.
I mean the G&G classes are divisive as well (well, the gunslinger is, the inventor is kinda agreed upon to be really weak) and while the psychic was certainly stronger pre-Remaster, it was still a weak caster overall. I'd say that post-Kineticist is when Paizo truly mastered the art of making classes and that they truly haven't disappointed since (though I hope we get an errata to make the kineticist work with the rest of the system soon, that's the only major post-RoE problem I'd say).
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Just to kinda get things back on discussion a little bit, this is a rare case where pretty much everything Teridax has said I agree with - at least, from a purely theoretical aspect. My next game is going to be as a GM, and none of my players want to playtest the new classes, so I'll unfortunately not have any data, circumstantial or otherwise. So all of my perspective comes from a pure theory-based understanding of the game.
Daredevil, in my eyes, actually has the most potential to be fixed while maintaining a lot of the base components of this current playtest - as long as a solid direction is picked for the class and refined. In my personal reading, it REALLY seems as though the class wants to be a class that focuses on maneuver-based enemy control with heavy emphasis on positioning and fluidity in movement, with minor damage capabilities to make sure fights are moving along while they do it. But the current way "props" are defined and the way that many features and feats are simply turned off depending on size (yes, even if they implement baseline Titan Wrestler) really restrict the ability for this to function, alongside the fact that Adrenaline is yet another resource they need to keep track of that can suddenly turn off if things become unfavorable.
There's just too many factors that "turn off" if conditions are wrong, and the conditions are too easy to BE wrong. Props needto be basic, easily adjudicated, and not be so inconsistent between different Daredevil PCs. They should be incentivized for doing their thing, not just penalized less than others - i.e. Press MAP reduction is great, but we need better and flashier things to be doing with those Press actions in the first place. Give us AoE trips, let us crack two skulls together to Stupefy targets, give us a REASON to forgo just dealing lots of damage, and give us the capability to interact with the battlemap in ways other martials don't! Adrenaline needs... to go, I think, and be replaced with a mechanic that rewards being risky rather than punishing you for not being risky.
Slayer is a lot more complicated, because the core conceit of the class is something that people compare with Ranger, but is actually closer to Investigator in execution. Sure, there's an enemy you target, but you're doing so as a preamble to actual fights rather than in the heat of combat. If you pin combat features on the assumption of pre-planning, there is ALWAYS going to be a non-zero amount of tables that just can't meaningfully interact with those features. It's just the truth.
But even assuming we take the Investigator route and just sweep that away as just part of the class, there's still lots of things that can go wrong.
If you have no idea when you'll be fighting on any given day, you'll never have a Quarry. If you know when you'll be fighting but have no way of ludonarratively scouting or researching that beforehand, you'll never have a Quarry. Even IF you manage to know when you're fighting AND get enough time to actually Mark your Quarry... you might not be fighting that Quarry immediately! You might fight several things before or afterwards, meaning for a majority of encounters per day, you don't have a feature. Sure, there are a couple feats that help mitigate this... but at that point, why are they missable feats instead of just being level 3 upgrades baked into the kit?
Trophies are really cool idea in their current form, and I hope they don't turn into a Thaumaturge-style "hand-wave it away all-encompassing esoterica" solution and stay as tangible, unique signifiers of your achievements. But the tools they attach to could use some work. If you don't have a Quarry, half of their text is missing. Even if you do, most of their reinforced benefits don't care about the Quarry anyways and are just better than the non-reinforced Quarry-specific ones most of the time? So do we care about the Quarry or not? Why should we go through the rigmarole of trying to scout trophies when (generously) 70% of the time we won't get a Quarry (without specific feats) to use some of our features on, and even when we do that 20% of the time the benefits are minor? When you can just reinforce Bloodseeking Blade with your starting trophy and do Sniper's Aim once per turn and pretend like you don't have to get other trophies then why are there even non-reinforced benefits at all?
These are things that I hope can be looked at and re-evaluated, because, as Teridax stated, there's just no real compensation that can be given to a class that reasonably makes up for "your class is nullified in these not-very-uncommon situations" other than really unhealthy ones.
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To be fair, the Advanced Player's Guide classes released in a fairly poor state, though a lot of that was due to changes in staff mid-development from what I remember. I think all 4 of those classes weren't fully realized until the remaster....then again oracle is still a mess for its own unique reasons.I mean the G&G classes are divisive as well (well, the gunslinger is, the inventor is kinda agreed upon to be really weak) and while the psychic was certainly stronger pre-Remaster, it was still a weak caster overall. I'd say that post-Kineticist is when Paizo truly mastered the art of making classes and that they truly haven't disappointed since (though I hope we get an errata to make the kineticist work with the rest of the system soon, that's the only major post-RoE problem I'd say).
Yeah there hasn't been a bad new class since RoE... but we also got mythic during that time period and there's all kinds of problems in that. And Remaster Wizard didn't exactly wow folks, while Remaster Rogue had some head scratching buffs (and Remaster Oracle happened for good and ill).
So it's still kind of hit or miss unless you use a pretty narrow criteria that is effectively only 5 classes.
Their overall class record is pretty good though, since for every Psychic there is also a Thaumaturge which is a great class.
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Daredevil, in my eyes, actually has the most potential to be fixed while maintaining a lot of the base components of this current playtest - as long as a solid direction is picked for the class and refined. In my personal reading, it REALLY seems as though the class wants to be a class that focuses on maneuver-based enemy control with heavy emphasis on positioning and fluidity in movement, with minor damage capabilities to make sure fights are moving along while they do it. But the current way "props" are defined and the way that many features and feats are simply turned off depending on size (yes, even if they implement baseline Titan Wrestler) really restrict the ability for this to function, alongside the fact that Adrenaline is yet another resource they need to keep track of that can suddenly turn off if things become unfavorable.
There's just too many factors that "turn off" if conditions are wrong, and the conditions are too easy to BE wrong. Props needto be basic, easily adjudicated, and not be so inconsistent between different Daredevil PCs. They should be incentivized for doing their thing, not just penalized less than others - i.e. Press MAP reduction is great, but we need better and flashier things to be doing with those Press actions in the first place. Give us AoE trips, let us crack two skulls together to Stupefy targets, give us a REASON to forgo just dealing lots of damage, and give us the capability to interact with the battlemap in ways other martials don't! Adrenaline needs... to go, I think, and be replaced with a mechanic that rewards being risky rather than punishing you for not being risky.
100%. I don't have much to add, you really nailed it. The class has a cool concept but it feels like its trying to do too many fiddly things at once instead of doing fewer things much more reliably.
If you told me the Daredevil class is one where a Halfling Daredevil can leap up into the air dodging reactions to try to suplex a gargantuan demon into a huge demon? I'm all over that.
But I don't like it when a bunch of my class just shuts off or doesn't function because reasons, and for this class in particular, "the enemy is too big" is a terrible reason. That's exactly when a "Daredevil" should shine brightest by being able to do this stuff when no one else can!
If you have no idea when you'll be fighting on any given day, you'll never have a Quarry. If you know when you'll be fighting but have no way of ludonarratively scouting or researching that beforehand, you'll never have a Quarry. Even IF you manage to know when you're fighting AND get enough time to actually Mark your Quarry... you might not be fighting that Quarry immediately! You might fight several things before or afterwards, meaning for a majority of encounters per day, you don't have a feature. Sure, there are a couple feats that help mitigate this... but at that point, why are they missable feats instead of just being level 3 upgrades baked into the kit?
Speaking of class features being turned off... Yeah. In the Spore War game I'm in we're chasing after a big bad that we found out about through some work we did in advance.
This sounds like the perfect situation for Quarry, right? We discovered the enemy, we researched the enemy, we prepared for the enemy, and we're now assaulting that enemy... except that enemy is at the end of a pretty significant "dungeon" (in the generic use of the term). We don't know most of what is in there ahead of time, especially in terms of other potential Quarry targets, and we're talking several game nights for this dungeon assault.
That's a long time to go without a core class mechanic being operational. It's the old Investigator situation except worse. And this is hardly some edge case scenario: "major enemy target at the end of a dungeon" is a pretty core PF2 experience and one that I think players generally enjoy. Dungeon crashing is fun! A class with a core mechanic that doesn't work in that kind of play is a really awkward fit for a game that wants to have that style of play.
This should be a situation where a Slayer can absolutely shine but instead it feels frustrating because you're waiting for so long for Quarry to actually work. (Meanwhile our party of Fighter/Alchemist/Thamuaturge/Oracle is rolling along and every one of them is getting to use their cool stuff on a very frequent basis.)
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I know its not gonna happen but I truly wish paizo would slow down on new classes. While I loved Runesmith and Necromancer, this game has SO many classes currently and some of them get no love at all. Psychic was released 3 years and hasn't received a single piece of new content post release, and classes like Kineticist still dont work with mythic or other similiar systems. We also haven't seen any new swashbuckler content after APG/PC2 unless you count the feats that a few shared martials got from Firebrands
Point is, theres a lot of amazing classes that already exist, instead of making Ranger 2.0 why not make expansions to that class and possibly even others too. Howl of the Wild is by far my favorite core book by a country mile and doesnt include a single class. Its genuinely a breath of fresh air to have ancestries, subclasses, new spells, items, etc and it really rounds out a lot of nature/primal characters with new options. I would love to see more of that please
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I haven't actually gotten around to reading Daredevil yet, I've been analyzing Slayer.
I'm generally of the opinion that Slayer has a really interesting undercarriage that is undercut heavily by the Quarry mechanic.
Requiring you to know about something in advance and spend 10 minutes designating the quarry means that you can never collect a Trophy from a surprise encounter, which feels really odd to me. If your GM decides that some big dragon got the drop on you, you can no longer collect a trophy from it because you didn't know it was coming?
A lot of APs will essentially make the Slayer class non-functional, because of how often you don't actually know what you're going to fight before you go in, or (as someone earlier in this thread mentioned) you often only know the "Boss" encounter with no knowledge of what will be between you and them. So even if you run into multiple "Quarry Worthy" enemies in the adventure, you'll only collect one trophy for the whole run, and that's assuming the enemy wasn't a humanoid. A lot of APs that I can recall off the top of my head often have Humanoid big-bads, so you can't even Quarry them.
SO much of Slayer is reliant on Quarry that there are two separate feats meant to help alleviate this, letting you target packs of lower level creatures or ONCE A DAY designate a single target as your Quarry... but you still can't collect a trophy from it.
Honestly while I understand it would undercut the ludonarrative a bit, I almost feel like a good portion of the mechanics would benefit from making Mark Quarry work much like a "failed" Instant Enmity. Let them designate a Quarry once per 10 minutes as an action, like a sort of "Hunt Prey" situation. Lets them use their core mechanic as a guarantee, they'd still have to dedicate a feat to use it on lower level enemies, and it means that they'd rarely if ever be in a situation where a good chunk of their class is nonfunctional.
EDIT: I made a false assertion here regarding humanoid enemies not being "Quarry-able" and was mistaken. I got Monster Lore and the Mark Quarry actions confused. Leaving my error in for posterity.
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I think the Daredevil who want to do stunts with props will do pretty well in large open environments if they vehicles. I think that the play test teases at this with its driver feat, but I think there are going to be enough rules and additional vehicles in the risk reward book that it was difficult to show us as players how much the class is going to synergize with vehicles.
I am guessing that a lot of the vehicle playtesting stuff has really been going on with SF2 and so the developers don't feel like PF2 needs as intensive a play test for it to backtrack it.
I think even the slayer will be vehicle adjacent/benefiting when hunting very large prey.
That also makes me wonder if some of the big prey hunting feats I would like to see are going to be tied to having a vehicle, and are just difficult to show case in a play test.
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Regarding the playtest, I honestly can't be very optimistic. Sure, Paizo's designers have surprised me many times, but this situation with these two classes reminds me a lot of the investigator and swashbuckler situation, which also struggled to differentiate themselves from the rogue. In their final versions, they didn't fare very well either.
The swashbuckler only really started working well in the remaster when Paizo made panache a reliable mechanic. The investigator, in my opinion, still hasn't found its footing even with the remaster. It gained a workaround that allows the player to choose a mental skill if they roll a bad Divise Stratagem, but ultimately it's still far from a pleasant solution for this mechanic. I still see games where players and GMs, either because they don't understand the mechanic well or because they simply consider the class too subpar, allow the use of the Divise Stratagem die to be completely optional. This allows the player to abandon a bad roll and attack the same target with a normal Strike, which honestly is really the simplest solution to the problem of this mechanic.
My fear is that the DD and the Slayer will become the new Investigator and Swashbuckler, with the designers not fully understanding or accepting the criticism and delivering a solution that most players will reject as not sufficiently balanced.
But that's just me being pessimistic; I hope the Paizo designers surprise me once again.
Regarding the excess of classes, it's a topic already widely debated in these forums, and I believe we even have a majority of opinions (at least among those who voice their opinions) that Paizo creates too many classes. I understand that classes sell rulebooks, but since RoE, this has become clear to me. It's much better for Paizo to limit itself to delivering one class per rulebook than two. This not only gives more space and time to work better on the class but also gives more room for options for the existing classes.
The Kineticist has already proven that a single, well-designed class with a wide range of gameplay options is far more interesting than two classes that divide everyone's attention.
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Tbh, most of the problems of both classes come from the "risk & reward" flavor of the book. Otherwise, I'd feel they would have been much better even in their playtest iteration. If the daredevil was instead "brawler" and was all focused about doing Athletics maneuver actions it likely would be fine, but everything in regards to press actions, props, and likely the low HP and light armor exists because they attached a flashy swashbuckler-y flavor of putting yourself in danger to the concept for some reason. If the daredevil is the "risks" class then the slayer must be the "rewards" class, right? Well, how can we achieve that mechanically? Eh, trophies I guess? It feels like the concept of the book came first, and they made classes that could somehow fit that criteria.
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I have examined only the Daredevil class in this playtest. I strongly agree with BigHatMarisa in comment #23 about the daredevil. But I love playtests because of the mathematics of game design, so my views are more abstract.
The playtest document talks of the daredevil taking risks that keep adrenaline pumping. But it also says, "heedless of any dangers," and the word "heedless" means not paying attention. That contradiction exemplifies the class. The class is built out of parts that don't work together.
The design has some great parts. Daring Stunt is a great opener, letting the daredevil dash in and finish that movement with a standard combat maneuver, not too strong like a Strike but more than just stopping. Props give a reason to dart to other areas of the battlefield. The Press stunts emphasize the risk because critical failure will happen on more than a natural 1. The feats provide alternative combat maneuvers. Stunt damage serves as supplementary damage like a barbarian's rage damage and rogue's sneak attack but plays around with the Props. Adrenaline rewards risky actions.
But parts have to work together. They don't. That creates wealnesses, so more parts, such as Daredevil's Endurance, shore up weak areas. That leads to more ways the mechanics could contradict each other.
Adrenaline can serve as a bad example. It is supposed to operate like swashbuckler's panache, giving an excuse to enact non-tactical Risky actions. But Daring Stunt and Breakaway Attack easily provide adrenaline and are worth doing on their own. The end result is that gaining adrenaline is too easy. The reward for adrenaline is small to balance the ease. And outside of Daring Stunt and Breakaway Attack, the mechanism for gaining adrenaline does not play well with Press, so the daredevil is locked into Daring Stunt or Breakaway Attack or pushed to avoid Press feats.
And since the daring actions have tactical purpose, the daredevil does not need adrenaline as an excuse. Drop the adrenaline mechanic to give the other mechanics to room to work together.
In contrast, the Risky trait has merit independent of the adrenaline mechanic. It has flavor and can serve as a warning label to the player that the action has more risk than a Stride or Strike. Daring Stunt has a tiny risk that upon rolling a natural 1 Grapple could leave the daredevil grabbed or prone, Reposition could reposition the daredevil, and Shove and Trip could knock the daredevil prone. That is risk, though boringly minimal. Breakaway Attack has no risk, so I do not understand its Risky trait. The Press Risky stunts offer more risk, since the MAP increases the chance of critical failure. I talk of this more in my own playtest thread, comment #36.
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Slayer is sorta weird in that the risk half of the class (everything about Quarry) and the reward half of the class (Tools and trophies) are almost totally separate. I can see how on paper they look like they meet, but in practice they don't, and I don't think many people are particularly attached to Quarry at all. Should just go full Thaum/Exemplar and put everything into the tools and trophies. Make the tools a bit more niche and give more ability to swap them out would be enough of a reason to want to study your 'quarry'.
I agree with this; part of the reason why the quarry mechanic is so restrictive is likely because it nets you a reward by the end of it, so presumably the developers didn't want you marking rats from a bag to get infinite trophies. Tying trophies to the Slayer's quarry, however, means that if they're not fighting their quarry, not only do they miss out on a huge part of their class features, they also don't get the resource that lets them Reinforce their arsenal later on. I feel if trophies were decoupled from the Slayer's quarry, so that the Slayer could always claim a trophy from a non-trivial encounter and could mark any creature specifically for the combat bonuses against them, then their core intended loop would flow a lot better, if marking is to stay at all.