I know Paizo generally already knows what alternative ideas they might use to shore up play test class pain points and frustrations, and so I am hoping this is more of a “we’ve already thought of this and are on it situation than something new, but in thinking about the issue of maximizing two attributes to be good at the fun and thematic press maneuvers, it dawned on me that there already is some synergy with the class’ reaction feats and mitigating the critical failure results, but it is kind of something that is difficult to spot or build around. Right now, the class’ 2 reactions are AC bonus and move away, and redirect forced movement. If galvanized mobility stacked better with scrambling retreat, than critical failure results on press action maneuvers with critical failure results that provoke a reactive strike would not be so dangerous, and could even be built upon to do something like “an enemy that misses you with a reaction strike is off guard to all enemies until the end of their next turn.” This would make it not such a big deal to be risky with one press action a turn, and turning certain disaster into something cool and unexpected feels like it would be a slam dunk to the class theme.
Wall sweep would be another cool one if many of the maneuver feats have critical failure results that let the target move you, as you could mitigate those into something good by taking control of the move. I think one more reaction for when you fall prone could be cool too and then falling prone could be another common critical failure result.
If the maneuvers were fairly consistent about whether athletics feats had one critical failure result and acrobatics had the other, then having a slightly worse athletics or acrobatics wouldn’t be that terrible when you knew you had a way to mitigate it once a turn.
If you went this route, it would be ok to dial up how bad those critical failure results to be really bad when you don’t have a mitigating reaction, and then you could increase the critical success results to be even better, and maybe have room to give more of them interesting and not terrible failure effects, as is common on press feats generally. I think this would really be a unique and interesting approach that would make the daredevil feel very different to other classes and play more satisfying into the risk and reward theme.
I'd first thought the DD's crit results would be amplified, and would appreciate if that were a (semi-optional) part of their package. One way to prevent poaching would be your idea of mitigation, where the risk is too great for non-Daredevils to accept the full punishment (though I know a few players who'd embrace major risks, maybe even dip DD with a different concept just to get them).
I'm unsure how the math works out though, and I see that as an issue with the whole concept of risk & rewards, in that the rewards kinda have to exceed the current power curve to truly be rewarding (otherwise one could play a top-tier class w/o such risk), but players will work their darndest to mitigate risk already, eliminating the cost, but reaping the reward.
Might have to tag more abilities as Fortune effects. And another way to reward might be to excel in more areas, not outshining any class in their strongest focus, but being competitive in more areas then any of them are (again, with a risk that could only be mitigated so much, even if the DD's best at such mitigation).
Your framework for consistent Acrobatics & Athletics results mirror an idea I haven't yet shared where the DD adds "Risky" to their action, gaining a specific bonus & penalty to their crit success/crit failures respectively. One might even increase the bonus when using a Press attack or vs. higher level opponents.
Reactions does seem a somewhat unused niche where DD's could take such mitigating responses to their flubs. That feels a bit on brand, at least with Jackie Chan types, flubbing into a vulnerable spot then recovering before the enemy can punish them.
ETA: As the DD levels up, the options for what adding Risky does also expand. Maybe the lower level abilities become less risky (or more easily mitigated), but the DD would want to grab for the higher level effects with their harder to mitigate penalties.
Also considering expanding this to regular Successes & Failures, not just the fluky rolls.
I feel limiting the Daredevil's risk-taking to crit successes and failures is going about things in a bit too rigid a way, and doesn't necessarily correspond to how several of their components work. Specifically, a lot of the Daredevil's risk comes from their MAP increasing the risk of critical failure on their attack actions: you can make the crit success effects of those same actions really good, but those actions are already worth taking (in theory, at least) because of what you get to do if you don't critically fail. Similarly, the mitigation already exists for this in the form of audacious combatant, which reduces your MAP. We don't need to go about tacking crit-exclusive riders onto everything to encourage the Daredevil to take risks: so long as the baseline actions are desirable enough, have a meaningful downside when you fail (or critically fail), and have an increased chance of failure the more of those actions you take (i.e. MAP), then you already get to have a class that will want to opt into more risk, and mitigation comes down to the player's choice to keep using more of those actions on their turn.
I don’t know if I explained myself well enough in my initial post so I will try to flesh out an example.
Let’s say there is either one baked in reaction to the class, or a a reaction each subclass gets. Either way, for this example let’s say the gifted reaction is something like scrambling retreat, but it stacks with Galvinized Mobility and it has one additional rider that if you use it against a creature making a reaction based attack, and they miss, they are so off balance they fall prone.
Then a feat like forceful kickoff stunt might work mostly the same, but with the following tiers of success:
Critical success - The target is pushed 15 feet away from you and fall prone.
You Leap away from the target, you do not provoke reactions on this movement.
Success - The target is pushed 5 feet away from you. You Leap away from the target, provoking reactions normally.
Failure - you leap away from the target, provoking reactions normally.
Critical failure - Your stunt backfires! Your target can choose to make a reactive strike against you.
Now, do you need maxed out acrobatics to still use this feat? Like crit success is really good, but even the success and failure results might get you where you need to be and even the crit failure result might work out to let you snatch a win from the jaws of of defeat. It is still risk taking, but in a way that could end up rewarding you on potentially any result.
I think I see what you mean, yeah. While I do think Scrambling Retreat acts as a way to potentially mitigate certain crit failures, I would rather not have that be its primary function for two reasons: the first is that I'm personally not a fan of internal reactions, or reactions that you use on your own turn as a part of your class's own engine, because that to me doesn't really feel reactive. The second is that while I do think the Daredevil should have some way to control their risk, I don't think mitigating the consequences of their failure ought to be a big part of the class -- rather, I'd personally want them to deal with those consequences and improvise accordingly. Otherwise, there's a risk that this class may end up not feeling all that risky.
What I also wanted to try to bring to the table here was that I think there's this conception of the Daredevil's abilities and its risk-reward gameplay as a game of roulette or slot machines, where you do the thing and either win or lose big through either kind of crit. In my opinion, however, their risk-reward gameplay is more like a game of blackjack: you get to keep doing things that are advantageous to you, but each hit increases the odds of disaster. This is gameplay that I think hasn't really been done yet in Pathfinder, whereas we already have the ultimate slot machine class in the form of the Magus.
So to be more specific: when it comes to the Daredevil's attack actions, I don't think crit successes are the most important part. It's great to have a nice crit success effect, but the more important bit I think is getting to do something really good as a baseline, ideally in a way that involves compressing different actions together. More important here is the critical failure effect, which will loom ever larger as you rack up your MAP. Effectively, while the risk part of the Daredevil I think definitely comes from their crit failures, the rewards I think ought to come just from using their actions, even when they don't crit succeed, so there doesn't need to be full symmetry here.
I see what you are saying and agree that both success and even failure on a press maneuver should be decent. My issue is that maneuver crits tend to be pretty underwhelming, with the exception of grab. That can make rolling natural 20s on things like shove, where you are doing it because you need to move the enemy 5 feet and more than that is often meaningless, or trip, where an extra d6 becomes meaningless and should at least scale with athletics proficiency, becomes underwhelming, while critting with a strike always feels good.
I think if you are giving maneuvers meaningful and significant critical failure results, the critical success should at least feel good and be better than having rolled a success, which is not really the case with many of the press maneuver feats.
I think the secret sauce to reactions that mitigate those crit failures is that there should still be chance involved or incredible planning. Hence why my suggestion was that you trigger a reactive strike which could still go very badly for you.
Maneuvers not being that amazing on crit successes I think is one of the reasons why I don't think there needs to be a huge focus on those. You could certainly have feats that could make those effects more powerful, but feats aren't meant to be fixes. What I think does make a difference is getting to compress lots of actions together: for instance, Wheeling Pull Stunt has you do more or less the equivalent of a Grapple, Step, and Reposition action all in one. Individually, some of these actions would probably not be all that interesting, but getting to do all of those in one go means you get to do a lot, especially if you deal stunt damage on top. For me, the main problem with that feat is that these actions aren't implemented as the actual maneuvers being emulated here, which would not only enable potentially greater successes (as you could restrain the target on a crit success to Grapple), but also introduce more opportunities for critical failures to happen through multiple rolls, especially if each maneuver increased your MAP for the next one.
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So to be more specific: when it comes to the Daredevil's attack actions, I don't think crit successes are the most important part. It's great to have a nice crit success effect, but the more important bit I think is getting to do something really good as a baseline, ideally in a way that involves compressing different actions together.
I think this is the clearest description/synthesis I’ve seen yet, thanks Teridax.
Without increasing the critical effects of the daredevil’s maneuvers, at high level, there will just be very little reason to ever do more than one maneuvering activity a turn, so the whole “do a lot of these” is not going to materialize in play.
Eventually, I could see a DD who wants to strike with their first action and then maybe do a press agile maneuver to grab or trip, but there are exceedingly few high level maneuver abilities (most of which are as much about a strike as doing anything with a maneuver), and thus doing low level maneuvers with your press actions is going to be competing against making strikes that crit automatically if they hit or Hit or Miss or the like.
I'm not sure I follow: why do high levels disincentivize using maneuvers? When do Strikes automatically crit on a success or failure with the Daredevil?
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Look at the level 10 feats and up. Even when they include maneuvers, the maneuvers are very subservient to the strikes attached to them. Some even prevent you from using the maneuver to do stunt damage. Meanwhile you have feats like hit or miss, risky over extension, and daring critical that really make strikes vastly superior action usage than maneuvers.
Look at the level 10 feats and up. Even when they include maneuvers, the maneuvers are very subservient to the strikes attached to them. Some even prevent you from using the maneuver to do stunt damage. Meanwhile you have feats like hit or miss, risky over extension, and daring critical that really make strikes vastly superior action usage than maneuvers.
Ah, that confirms some of the concerns I had in mind, the first being that the claim of "strikes that crit automatically if they hit or Hit or Miss or the like" is a gross exaggeration at best. Risky Overextension, the only feat that converts your Strike hits into criticals, is both extremely costly and debuffs you quite significantly (it also operates with reduced accuracy as a press action), so it's not a staple, whereas Hit or Miss doesn't automatically crit on a success, nor does anything special on a success at all; it is effectively the Daredevil's version of Certain Strike, only with the press trait added.
The second is that the claim that "there will just be very little reason to ever do more than one maneuvering activity a turn" is false, as focusing exclusively on high-level feats ignores the larger body of Daredevil feats and actions (including Daring Stunt) that continue to be used at higher level. As someone who has actually playtested the Daredevil at both low and high level and used actions like Daring Stunt and Wheeling Pull Stunt all throughout, I did not think that claim made much sense.
What doesn't help is that even if we restrict ourselves to 10th-level and above feats, the above isn't particularly true:
These are the only feats at those levels that feature maneuvers, and all of them encourage the use of multiple maneuvers, so the claim that the Daredevil is discouraged from using multiple maneuvers at higher level is a complete fabrication. What's becoming a bit more apparent here is that there appears to be an over-focus on big singular damage numbers over often much more impactful factors such as action economy, reliability, and the utility of these maneuvers, including just their baseline success effect, which to me just doesn't seem like a terribly useful prism through which to view the class.
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It is clear we have different approaches to this class.
Topple dominos was DOA to me on taking 3 actions. Maybe if I was in a party with a commander and a bunch of ranged characters I’d see value in being able to trip 3 enemies and move with my turn, but not getting any attacks in or usage out of audacious combat makes it a pretty bad feat in my eyes.
I guess maybe if you archetypes a bunch to get more out of shove then there might be value in 3 full attack bonus shoves but I am not going to build that to playtest with.
Combat Grab is a level 2 fighter feat is superior in many ways to knee to the nethers, which is coming in at way too late of a level to be worth taking. Sickened 1 is a cool add on,but not 10 levels later awesome, and 2 dice rolls is worse than one (you can hero point or otherwise fortune 1 attack that grabs as well. Lastly, being limited to an unarmed strike in a class with no support for it is rough. Level 12 feats are bad for the DD all around but 8 and 10 have multiple feats that are better.
I am not down on opportunistic maneuver stunt, but rushing stride is better than daring stunt to set it up. If you grab or trip the enemy, then moving them into a flanks position made your daring stunt maneuver redundant, compared to getting a 0 map strike in and then setting up your ally to get a 0 map strike in. Critting on either the daring stunt or the opportunistic maneuver is unlikely to have done much of anything for you with your set up, while critting on the rushing stride could have been massive damage (and you have feats to make that even uglier. My one knock on opportunistic maneuver is you really need an ally who does good single attack damage, but either doesn’t have reactive strike, or has it and follow up feats to be able to use it and another reaction in their turn. Many fighters will check that box, while some barbs/other big hit martials will hit the other, so it can be really good, but it takes coordination to make it better than free wheeling strike which can be another way to exploit the classes synergy with nasty critical strikes. That one probably requires vehicles or the ability to run up on walls to really be all that useful all that often though.
My experience with high level play generally is that one combat maneuver per turn is usually plenty for any one character, while being able to strike effectively is pretty much essential for any martial. At the later point that you crit on a natural 19, agile press strikes with fatal and deadly weapons get really strong with the DD and ignoring a feat like hit or miss, your only press strikes that doesn’t require complicated circumstances to set up, will hurt your ability to be an effective martial character with a class that essentially lacks a damage boosting mechanic beyond their striking feats.
Different as our experiences may be, those differences have no bearing on what ultimately boils down to statements of fact. The claim that high-level feats discourage the use of multiple maneuvers is factually wrong; they do not do this. Trying to dismiss the feats cited individually does not work, not just because these feats again factually do not do what you say they do, but because discounting the 10th-level or higher feats that have any relevance to the claims you made means you've made those claims based on no evidence that you are counting. While I personally have many criticisms of the Daredevil, it is no surprise that you'd struggle to get anything useful out of them if your turns boil down to spamming Rushing Stride + Risky Overextension each turn just to try to deal damage like a far worse Fighter.
The Combat Grab analogy also really doesn't work: Combat Grab requires a Strike against an opponent's AC, whereas an Athletics check against an opponent's Fort save is generally going to be far more accurate, so once again, the latter move is far more accurate before even factoring in audacious combatant or the sickened condition from the Strike you can then inflict. Strangely, you don't seem to be factoring in the immense benefit that can come from restraining a creature over grabbing them, which can happen with Knee to the Nethers but not Combat Grab, despite this being ostensibly the chief stated concern of your thread OP here.
The breakdown of Opportunistic Maneuver Stunt is also, with all due respect, nonsense: Grappling an enemy means they remain grabbed after the maneuver and stay in place; this is not a benefit of the feat even though it mentions you "grab an foe". Acting like an ally oughtn't have Reactive Strike misses the entire point of this feat, which is that it force-triggers a Reactive Strike out of any ally, including on enemies who'd otherwise be extremely unlikely to trigger the reaction. When I used this feat in tandem with a Barbarian or Fighter in my party in the exact manner I described, it was lethal, and it put the enemy in a very difficult situation that they had trouble escaping from. This is also ignoring the action's Stride, which can let you disable multiple enemies at a time in ways that are far more immediately advantageous than dealing damage. Again, we can have "very different experiences" all we like, but I don't think intentionally avoiding a huge portion of the Daredevil's actions or refusing to engage with their mechanics are really going to paint the most accurate picture of the class.
Let's calm down with the judgements on each other's experiences and perceptions of the play test class. I am glad you found a playstyle that you enjoyed.
I don't advocate spamming only rushing stride and risky over extension. I generally dislike any class that does the same thing over and over again. Having tactical choices to make is great and something this class offers in abundance. I do think those are two strong options and are good "what else am I going to do?" options to have as a baseline. Sometimes you are going to miss with your rushing stride, but if you have Accompanying Strike, then that is going to make for a pretty good one, two, and then maybe you throw in something with your third action that is a maneuver and movement to get a little distance for protection or you can even just move away if the being off guard to a lot of enemies is going to be a problem. They might choose to move and then attack you, but that can atleast waste some enemy actions.
Overall, I do think that the class has a lot more to do than try to strike as often as possible, but it also has a lot of built in support for taking your shots with strikes and far exceeding the damage you can get out of stunt damage. I love the mobility of the class and how many of the feats try to utilize that. I am personally not very satisfied with the high level maneuver feats. They look very bad to me and not worth taking over other options that can build up into making you a pretty decent striker.
Edit: And in defense of the idea of this entire thread, Opportunistic Maneuver Stunt is a prime example of a feat that can use one of the classes reactions to massively mitigate the critical failure result.
Let's calm down with the judgements on each other's experiences and perceptions of the play test class. I am glad you found a playstyle that you enjoyed.
Let's not with the passive-aggressive accusations, this time. The entire point I am making is that experience has no relevance to some of the most basic facts being for whichever reason disputed here. Your claims are not substantiated by the actual playtest class or its feats, which very much do allow for multiple maneuvers per turn at all levels of play. The class has only one, not multiple feats that convert a Strike hit into a crit, and that feat is bound by a heap of caveats that do not make it the silver bullet you made it out to be. However, what the feats I cited show is that the Daredevil very much operates by compressing a lot of actions, including maneuvers.
My experience with high level play generally is that one combat maneuver per turn is usually plenty for any one character, while being able to strike effectively is pretty much essential for any martial.
Speaking of judgments, this is one my own experience does not corroborate at all, especially not with the Daredevil. In general, a lot of this thread appears to be operating under the assumption that maneuvers aren't that strong, which I disagree with, but also that Strike damage trumps all else for martial classes, which I think is actively contradicted by the popularity of classes like the Champion, the Commander, and the Guardian, none of whom specialize in high Strike damage. Even on classes that do specialize in high Strike damage, like the Barbarian and the Fighter, I've found it far more useful in high-level play than even at lower levels to try to lock down enemies with Athletics maneuvers, and that in my experience has consistently been one of the biggest contributions of my martial characters. I really don't think the solution to the Daredevil's problems is to make them more like the platonic ideal of a generic martial class, when I think there are much more interesting things that could be achieved by leaning into what makes them unique.
Edit: And in defense of the idea of this entire thread, Opportunistic Maneuver Stunt is a prime example of a feat that can use one of the classes reactions to massively mitigate the critical failure result.
Why do we need to make the risk-taking class immune to their own risk? Again, there is an inherent judgment call behind this, which is specifically to lean away from what has been established as a defining element of this class, in fact this very playtest. Say what you like, but this very much does not come across as trying to engage with the class's design.
Opportunistic Maneuver Stunt is a prime example of a feat that can use one of the classes reactions to massively mitigate the critical failure result.Why do we need to make the risk-taking class immune to their own risk? Again, there is an inherent judgment call behind this, which is specifically to lean away from what has been established as a defining element of this class, in fact this very playtest. Say what you like, but this very much does not come across as trying to engage with the class's design.
Maybe my point is being missed here.
The way the class works exactly as written for the feats Opportunistic Maneuver Stunt and Wall Sweep is doing what I am talking about with this thread. If the Daredevil is prepared and knows their feats, they can already mitigate serious critical failure results on some of their feats (like this one). I think that is cool, but it would make more sense to not hide that feature down in the reeds, but make it clearer and more intentional throughout the class feats that you can do this.
Maybe my point is being missed here.
The way the class works exactly as written for the feats Opportunistic Maneuver Stunt and Wall Sweep is doing what I am talking about with this thread. If the Daredevil is prepared and knows their feats, they can already mitigate serious critical failure results on some of their feats (like this one). I think that is cool, but it would make more sense to not hide that feature down in the reeds, but make it clearer and more intentional throughout the class feats that you can do this.
If you're next to a prop when doing the check for that stunt, then sure, Wall Sweep can at least let you control where you're moved under this circumstance, but its condition already makes it less of a mitigator, and you are still having your turn disrupted by being forcibly moved around. The feat is not purpose-made to mitigate the Daredevil's own critical failures, nor does it need to be.
I also think you're missing the larger point here, which is that the Daredevil's feats in general don't really do what you say they do. The majority of their maneuvers are about chaining smaller actions together, and the critical success effect is often less important than the fact that you're compressing lots of actions together. The Daredevil lacks any inbuilt way of mitigating their own crit failures, and they're certainly not built to crit-fish either. They're not the roulette class you want them to be, nor do they have inbuilt mitigators you want them to have. I don't think the class needs to be pigeonholed into that kind of gameplay either, because we already have a roulette class, it's called the Magus. Let's let the Daredevil be their own thing.
I would argue that wall sweep is a particularly difficult reaction to use unless you are setting yourself up to use it, possibly by triggering it yourself, to begin with. Its synergy with opportunistic maneuver stunt is not a random accident. The critical failure result of this ability is one of the more devastating results on any of these feats. End up prone in a square of your enemy’s choosing, quite possibly with no actions left on your turn, is really bad. But with Kip up and Wall Sweep, you can use start using Opportunistic Maneuver stunt from a place of much better security, because critical failure probably means “move yourself 20 ft” instead.
That is very clever game design that this class can strive towards. The limits on requiring props and such are what creates the tactical decision points that are really cool.
I think the discussion about whether the DD class is about compression of maneuvers or swingy use of all 4 tiers of success has probably run its course for this thread and is distracting from the purpose of this thread. It is probably worth talking about in a dinnerent thread about the intention of the class, but is distracting to the conversation about how and whether the reactions the class has access to should be better integrated into the abilities the class has. Personally, I thing Galvanized Mobility needs to be fixed to not be redundant to scrambling retreat, and then many of the feats that directly provoke reaction strikes will have the same kind of cool synergy that wall sweep and opportunistic maneuver have. I also think more feats should feature letting the enemy reposition the daredevil on a critical failure as that really makes an otherwise underwhelming feat (wall sweep) be really cool for this class.
It's a pretty serious reach to start with "this reaction feat happens to have some degree of synergy with one of the class's feats twelve levels later on" and dress it up as "this reaction feat was purposefully made as a mitigator for this other feat, the class must be intentionally designed to mitigate its own failures." I also think Opportunistic Maneuver Stunt generally makes it harder to pull off that reaction, because you're having to find an enemy to maneuver and an ally whose reach you're maneuvering that enemy into, on top of a prop to use in case you critically fail, so something tells me that that really wasn't the primary intended use case for Wall Sweep.
So no, I don't think a class using its own reactions internally as a part of its own action sequence is "clever design," nor do I think it has much presence on the current Daredevil. I don't think the class needs to be oriented towards that direction, nor would I enjoy any class being made to use their reaction effectively as an extra action on their turn, which is one of the reasons why I also dislike the Slayer's current implementation of On the Hunt. Rather, I think the Daredevil would be much better off instead assuming the consequences of their critical failures while being rewarded more for pushing their luck. If there is one mitigator I can agree to having on the Daredevil, it's a class feature to stop them from dropping to 0 HP a certain number of times per encounter, so that their poor durability isn't such a liability to their team. I am surprised this isn't something you've considered, to be honest, given how your favored playstyle on paper at least seems to be to keep using actions that render the class off-guard.
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Scrambling retreat is a mitigator for being left off guard to certain enemies. If your speed is good enough, the first time you are attacked you can get far enough away for enemies to have to waste actions to take advantage of it and you can get to places that set up your allies reactive strikes or AoE abilities.
Scrambling Retreat doesn't mitigate the off-guard condition at all; if you're targeted by an attack you'd be better off using that reaction while not being off-guard. The feat can certainly be used to mitigate the risk of triggering reactions from your movement, as well as generally make yourself more survivable, but if you use it on your own turn you're still disrupting your own sequence of actions. I would argue that this feat is probably the closest to a mitigator that there is on the class, and I still don't particularly believe it's intended to be a core aspect of their gameplay as is being insisted upon in this thread, if only for the simple reason that it's a feat and not a feature.
I agree that the playtest daredevil leaves the “mitigate the critical fail results of your activities” as an opt in thing right now. I have mixed feelings about that and started this thread to talk about that. I could be convinced either way to leave it that way or build it into the class more.
The class is incredibly fragile without taking some of the defensive feats. It could be that leaving all the defensive abilities as feats was a deliberate play test experiment. Which feats will people take? Do the people who take no defensive feats also complain about how squishy the class is? Do the people who choose the denesive feats have the same issues? Which defensive feats are play testers actually picking? Etc. there is another thread in the daredevil playtest category where we all have been talking about the overall defensive side of things.
Personally, I think the lack of stacking of scrambling retreat and galvanized mobility is a mistake. I’m be of the main reasons I think that is because intentionally provoking some nasty reactive strikes is something a class this mobile is going to do fairly often and only a +2 to AC to deal with that is just contributing to making this class a party wide liability. I could very easily see scrambling retreat built in to the class as a defensive feature because as a feat, it isn’t that great and it pushes players that are looking for more defense out of the class to do the thing better. But I am on the fence about that one. With the later feats around it, it becomes incredibly good at limiting the damage a daredevil will take and so many of the critical failure and failure results of the class’ feats do provoke reactions or give away free strikes that it is almost must take. Right now, one of the most useful uses I have found for scrambling retreat is to be very intentional about who I rushing stride at, and where they fall in the turn order. If I rushing stride at the enemy going next and I don’t kill them, they are still likely to attack me and then I scrambling retreat against that attack and make myself harder for the targets I am off guard against to exploit that without wasting actions. Maybe two or more depending on my speed. The ability to make myself a juicier target to predictable enemies has made scrambling retreat feel much better in play than it did at early levels.
Wall sweep is plainly a terrible feat…except where it specifically synergizes with feats like opportunistic maneuver stunt. So is it a better candidate to cut out out the class entirely? Or to make sure that by the time you might pick it, it is doing something very practical for the builds that might choose it? I think the class is going to need more activity feats for both maneuvers and strikes, I’d like to see more of them feature critical failure results that move the daredevil, spread across levels, because I think this kind of synergy is really cool to strive for in a class like this. I think a reaction related to getting grabbed could be very thematic and synergistic to this class. I think one for falling prone that isn’t dependent on acrobatics and going the kip up route would be welcome and synergistic as well.
I certainly agree that the Daredevil as implemented right now is too fragile. Rather than undermine the element of risk that is fundamental to the class and many of their actions, however, I would be more inclined to boost their survivability, ideally in a manner that doesn't involve giving them more Hit Points. Giving them a reaction like Orc Ferocity would go a long way towards achieving that, without needing to mitigate the consequences of their failures besides getting immediately dropped to recovery checks.
I also don't think it's a good idea to design one feat on the expectation that it will be used to synergize with another feat that is only accessible twelve levels later: rather, I think the more sensible solution to Wall Sweep being too situational right now is to make the feat more usable in its own right. Forced movement is not exclusive to the Daredevil's critical failures, and so I would rather the feat be made useful at dealing with forced movement in general. If this synergizes with some of the Daredevil's feats, great, but it's the ability for the feat to shine on its own terms here that I think is more important.